his cheeks, and the tears ran across the lines and dribbled in the stubble. She did not know him, assumed he would have come the day before on the bus.
She did not know him, and so she did not know his story, but she could anticipate it, because she had heard the story too often. When she sat in her office with a delegation from the Swedish Red Cross or the Austrian Red Cross or the German Red Cross, when she blinked into the lights behind the television cameras of RAI or ZDF or the BBC, when she wrote her letters home she always said it was worst for the old men who were brought out from behind the lines. He cried. She took his hands, frail and thin and gnarled from work in the fields, and she felt the bones hard in her fingers. She thought, from his hands, that he had worked all of his life in fields, that he would have gone into the woods with a bow saw in the autumn for the winter's fuel, that he would have struggled down a ladder each morning of each winter with the fodder for his few cattle, that he would have been a man of pride. She held tight to his hands, tried to no give the old man strength. His home, his father's home, would have been flattened by an explosive charge. His barn would have been burned. His cattle would have been stolen, and his pigs. He might know that his son, the favourite, had been killed. It was worst for the old men who had lost everything, and hope. The children always searched for Ulrike in the Transit Centre, and they had discovered her now. The children stood in the corridor and they watched her as she squatted beside the old man who cried. She could not begin to say how the children would be affected by the sight of their flattened homes and their burning barns and their family's livestock being driven away, and by the fighting. She could see it in the old man, feel the wet of his tears on her face.
She understood the dialect of the village in Prijedor Municipality. His voice was a croak of anguish. It hurt her that the children watched. The children should not have seen an old man who had lost hope, forsaken pride.
'Our neighbours, our friends, who we worked with. How could they do it to us? Our neighbours, our friends, all of our lives, their lives, how could they destroy us? Is there no punishment for what they have done…?'
When she had found him she had been going from a top-floor sleeping room, where she believed, maybe, that marijuana was smoked, down to the kitchens. She was behind her schedule. She could not sit any longer with the old man and hold his hand while he cried. She could offer him sedation tablets. Very good, magnificent, brilliant, a bottle of sedation tablets. Pride, no. Respect, no. Sedation tablets, of course.
'.. Is there no one who will punish them?'
She could not answer. She took his name. The chief guards of the camps of the Neuengamme Ring had been punished, with the noose, for what they had done. The chief guards had been the defeated, the victors were never punished. She took his name so that she could leave a message at the dispensary, on her way down to the kitchens, for sedation tablets for the old man. Later, the young American would be at the Transit Centre. Perhaps the quiet and earnest young man from Alaska would find time to talk to the old man of punishment. She would push him towards in the American, therapy to go with sedation. She kissed his forehead. She patted the arm of his overcoat that smelled of his body and his animals' bodies.
He walked with Jovic, following.
Jane would have liked the city. He tried to turn again in his mind each word that the Professor had told him, but Jane usurped. As if she were with him, as if she tugged him back to look into the bright shop fronts, as if she pulled him towards the cafes in the sunshine, as if she demanded of him that he should buy her flowers to hold as they meandered in the squares and along the ochre-walled streets. Jane would not have listened to the words, the evidence, of the Professor but she would have danced to the band with Jovic and Jovic's friends. Loving Jane for her prettiness, loathing her because now she found him boring, slow, played out… Jane coming down to the tied cottage to meet his parents… Jane wearing a brief skirt and a gossamer blouse
… Jane not helping his mother with the dishes in the sink after the tense lunch, because she had spent an hour on her nails… Jane not walking with her father in the fields after lunch because it was raining… He hadn't warned her, hadn't told her, it wasn't her fault. Jane had reckoned them dirty, they had reckoned her tacky. Two camps at the wedding…
All his own bloody fault.
'Where are we going?'
'You wanted to see people who were in Rosenovici, did you not?'
The cable fault between sound and camera delayed Marty.
He worked methodically in the freight container to locate the fault, step by step, then repair it.
He could not do the work outside, he needed the desk surface, and the sweat ran on his body and across his fingers.
The freight container, he reckoned, had been parked as far across the parade square of the Ilica barracks from the administration block as was possible. From the open door of his freight container he could see across the parade square, past the drilling Swedish troops, past the bank of big satellite dishes, to the administration block. He was treated as if he had the plague, as if those in contact with him, up alongside him, risked contamination. He had been told to his face on his first day that the preparation of prosecutions was an 'irrelevance'. It had been given him straight in the first week, 'All you achieve, winding people up in your naivete, is to further reduce UNPROFOR's credibility.' What they said, those who thought he had the plague, was, 'Of course there can never be trials, because the biggest criminals are those we need to sort out the mess', and they said it often. Those who thought he had contamination spat it at him, 'What you're doing, Jones, it's just a cosmetic gesture to massage a few bruised consciences away across the borders.' Alone in his converted freight container, hot as a cook in a kitchen, he ignored what they said in the big offices of the administration block. He could cope.. . He was reared in Anchorage. He knew what it was to be thrown down, have the optimism belted out of him. Anchorage was 'false springs' when the depression of the snow hanging on until late April had to be hacked. Anchorage was the collapse of oil prices and the good men, his father's friends, heaved out of work. Anchorage was where they bred the philosophy of goddamn-minded obstinacy, pig stubbornness. And, to back his obstinacy, he had a degree in International Law from the University of Alaska, and a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His mind, methodical when repairing the sound cable from the camera, was well suited to the work of gathering evidence. What they thought of him in the administration block caused no loss of sleep. It never had mattered to him, an Anchorage boy, what the men in suits thought. They were from his past, the men who came in by helicopter, the men who rode in the limousines to their oil company offices, the men who went out in the private jets when they had sorted the balance sheets and screwed up a few lives, like they'd screwed up his father's life. Marty Jones hated money and privilege and arrogance, and the hate was deep from his childhood. He reckoned, had reckoned from the first day he showed up on campus, that the due process of law was the one, the only, weapon that could cut down the money, privilege, arrogance of men in suits. The hate had translated to the power and the cruelty of the butchers. The hate made him a good investigator.
He would not take her anything, too demonstrative, not his way, but he looked forward to driving down the highway to Karlovac, and meeting the woman who administered the Transit Centre. He thought the German woman in the Transit Centre to be the finest human being he knew… But he would not tell her, did not know how to express that feeling.
Marty wiped the sweat again from his forehead and there was mist on the heavy lenses of his spectacles. The camera worked, the audio level light fluttered… But there was no smile of achievement; Marty seldom risked a smile.
'She called herself Dorrie. I would not forget her…'
Jovic said that it had been the camp for officer cadets.
Still taciturn, the artist had explained nothing. Penn did not ask, he assumed that Jovic had gone back to the ministry office, and perhaps he had apologized for Penn's rudeness, and maybe he had made a joke about Penn's ignorance, and it could have been that he had just said that the Englishman was a crap fool.
Jovic translated, flat, no emotion nor expression.
'Yes, I remember her. She had come to Rosenovici about one month before the attack from the Partizans. I remember her…'
They had taken the tram to the camp for officer cadets. Out to the west of the city, in what would have been the quarter for skilled industry, but drab and smoke-grimed. The officer cadets had been well provided for. Jovic went forward and talked quickly to the guards. There was an unmarked van parked up beside the small guardhouse and the guards had come from the van where they had been talking to the driver. Looking over the barrier blocking the entrance into the camp, Penn had seen the driver of the van. The face of the van driver was rounder, fuller, than what Penn had learned to see around him, and there was a tattoo at the neck of the van driver, couldn't place the
