with him. He looked past the soldiers, and the woman was running with flapping legs, towards him. She came across the road from where she had been standing beside a car. He saw in the lights of the crossing point her concern, and Ham had broken clear of the group of soldiers and was ambling towards him. There was shouting back up the hill, and he heard Benny's voice, loud. They all danced for Dorrie… He danced for her, and Ulrike Schmidt who gazed into his face, and Ham who walked towards him with a wide smile, and Benny Stein who was yelling hard about the failure of his brakes… She had touched them and they danced for her. 'You're a fucking mess, squire. How was it?' And if Ulrike had not had hold of his arm, and if Ham had not taken him under the armpit, he would have gone down. Evica said, 'So, he could be this side of the line, or he could have gone…?' Milan lay fully dressed, still in his suit, on the top blanket of the bed. Evica pressed, '… So, he could have been in the lorry that crashed the checkpoint?' The dirt of his suit, and his shoes, would be on the top blanket. Milan said, empty, 'I don't know.' Evica held his hand, and on the hand was the mud of Petar's garden and Dragon's garden. 'What will happen to us, if he went through the line?' All that he had, all that he leaned on, was the wife beside him and the child sleeping in the next room. Milan said, 'What I was told was that one day they will come for me… In a month, in a year, when I am old, one day. Perhaps their children will come for our child, one day… We have to wait, for the day they come.' 'Because we cannot run…?' 'Cannot run anywhere. Because of what has happened, of course I have known there will be revenge one day. But it was vague, just in my head. But it was said to me direct, at the liaison meeting, and you know his wife, and he said that one day, direct, if it were not him that came for me then it would be his son that would come for our Marko. It would go on for ever, as long as the memory lives of what was done. Like a curse on us, and on Marko. Maybe I did not believe him, and then the Englishman came, and I was named. It had been a safe world before the Englishman came. We on our side of the line, they on theirs. They could not come across the line and reach us. They could sit in Karlovac town, they could say what the shit they wanted, but they could not touch me, and then the Englishman came to us, to me… I believe him, the Liaison. I believe now that they will come for me one day, or that his son will come for our Marko. If I had known I would not have…' 'Not have killed her, but then you thought you were safe.' 'Not have killed the girl.' Evica said, 'He made me remember her. Two afternoons and I remember them, when she came to our shop for food because their own shop had nothing. It was three weeks before the fight… It was after the children had gone home…' 'You told me.' '… And she sat in my room at the school, and we talked in English. I told her there would be no fighting between our village and her village, I told her there was no quarrel between us. She spoke of her home, and her mother, what her home was like and what her mother did…' 'We cannot run and we cannot hide.' Through the gap of the curtains, Evica saw the first light of the new day. She said, sad, 'We have to live. We have to wait, as she waited in the field, but we have to live…' Soft, gentle fingers moving on the wounds… A woman's fingers, and tender… He was in the cellar, and there was only the light of a small tallow candle… He was the wounded, and the face of the young woman was above him, and her fingers dabbed, sweet, at the wounds with sharp iodine and salted water… She touched him and she had no fear
… He loved her, the young woman who cared for the wounded in the cellar… Penn stirred, his eyes flickered. The fingers with the cotton wool were close to his eyes… God, and his face hurt. It was a woman's room, bright and alive, and the candle in the cellar was gone, and there were flowers on a table across the room from the bed. Ham sat on the floor, his back against a neat chest, and he held the long-barrelled rifle across his knees. Ulrike flashed her smile, nervous and short, embarrassed, and she was pushing up from beside the bed, as if she had been kneeling close to him as she had cleaned his face wounds and sterilized them. Ham said, 'You cut it fine, squire.. . You got through before they'd organized. Their communications are piss-awful, you wouldn't have got through half an hour later… That driver did you well, there's not another fucker other than me and the lady knows you were up aboard… How much did you drop the driver, squire?' Penn said, 'I told him why I'd gone.' He said that he wanted to go back to Zagreb, make his report, and buy the biggest bottle of Scotch in the city, and they said that they'd share it. It was morning. They helped him to dress, Ulrike carefully and Ham roughly, and the pain of the kicks and the punches had stiffened to each corner of his body. He thought he would always remember, long after he had written the report and drunk the Scotch, the image of a cellar and wounded men, and a young woman without fear. He went hunting trouble first thing. Marty had talked it through with the doctor from Vukovar, his landlord, and the doctor had steeled him to it. He had talked it through because the long-distance telephone call had woken them both in the apartment, and half the night they had sat over coffee, and the doctor had toughened him to it. It was raining soft, like it did in the spring in Anchorage when the snow melted, as Marty strode across the central grass towards the steps and doors of A block. He had gone hunting trouble before opening up the converted freight container. There would need to have been a GI provost on the door of the suite of the Director of Civilian Affairs to have stopped him. The goddamn phone call, in the bad half of the night, hadn't been from Geneva, but goddamn New York. Marty went past the secretaries to the door and didn't knock, he went on in. They were round the Director's desk. Marty saw on the sleeves of their uniforms the insignia of Canada and Jordan and Argentina. They had a big map over the desk, and the Director was with them and looking at the map's detail through a magnifying glass, and a cigarette hung from his lips. And they turned, the soldiers and the Director, in annoyed surprise. He hammered, 'I just wanted to say that I am not prepared to be treated like crap any more. And I just wanted to say that I find it incredible that one United Nations agency is active in blocking the work of another United Nations programme. I find it shameful that you have gone behind my back to sabotage my work…' 'What the fuck are you talking about?' 'I am talking about getting pitched out of my cot in the goddamn middle of the night by New York, to tell me that my work is causing offence, my work is a nuisance. I will not tolerate that goddamn crap … I will not tolerate you crawling behind my back to get New York to order me to cool it. Are you with me?' 'If you go now you can go down the stairs on your feet… If you wait one minute, you'll go down the stairs on your face.' 'Because I am inconvenient…?' 'Because … listen to me, you silly young man, listen hard… There were refugees supposed to be coming through Turanj crossing point today, but the crossing point is closed. There was an aid convoy supposed to be going through Turanj today, but its passage has been cancelled.. .' 'That's not my problem. My work is to prepare war crimes…' 'Listen… I'll tell you my problem. They have a maximum alert along their line, they are leaping about like they've pokers up their arses. Our movement is quite restricted. Why…? There is some garbled story about a war crimes investigator, captured and escaped…'
'I know nothing…'
'Too fucking right… I doubt you know the length of your dick. My job is to' keep our access into Sector North. And all this is after I suggested to New York that I could do without a wet-behind-the-ears puppy giving me shit from the high moral ground.'
'Where?'
'Glina Municipality…'
Marty looked at the map, where the magnifying glass rested. 'Where?'
'The rumour is he was picked up in Rosenovici…'
He swayed. He felt the cold on him. He remembered what he had seen, the man in the Transit Centre, the man with Ulrike. He remembered the lecture he had given, goddamn patronizing, and the answer, 'I've just a report to write, then I'm gone.' He remembered the Bosnian Muslim woman that the man had talked to, and she had been in Rosenovici. He rocked.
'It's just a rumour… I am a busy man. Do you wish to leave on your feet or on your face?'
Marty had no more anger. He let himself out, quietly.
It was the irregulars, from Glina town, who interrogated the Headmaster.
They were the men of Arkan, who was Zeljko Raznjatovic, and they called themselves the Tigers, and they were men freed from gaol cells in Belgrade. They had come at first light from Glina, and they had taken control of the headquarters building in Salika. They had come to the village because he was known to them, because Milan had once posed for a photograph in front of the War Memorial with their leader, Arkan
… it was as if his only function that morning was to make them coffee. They had taken his room and his radio and his desk, and they stubbed out their cigarettes against the bared stomach of the Headmaster. The screaming rang in Milan's ears. It was the agonized screaming of the man who had taught him at school, of the man who had been Evica's friend. With the cigarettes, crushed and stubbed out,
Milan heard of the Englishman's journey of discovery, and of Katica Dubelj who was the journey's guide. After the screaming and the telling, the irregulars of Arkan took the Headmaster from the cell of the headquarters and out into the road that cut the village. They wore plain belted one-piece uniforms of grey-green, and when they came out into the road they had put black hoods over their faces so that only their mouths and their eyes were visible. Out in the road they did not need Milan to bring them coffee, so they sent him from house to house in the village to
