‘A bit of a nobody who had his moment. Regarded me as God. Damn memory, I’d almost forgotten Harvey Gillot.’
‘Harvey Gillot – he betrayed us,’ Maria said.
‘Betrayed us and stole from us,’ the Widow said.
‘His word was worthless,’ the school-bus driver said.
‘We could have held back the tanks if we’d had the Little Baby that Harvey Gillot promised he would deliver to us, the 9K11 Malyutka. We had paid for it,’ said the man who had only one lung. He had lost the other to shrapnel and the surgeons had marvelled at his survival.
Andrija leaned against the inner door jamb. They were in his kitchen and only a single bulb, hanging from the ceiling, lit the table in the centre of the concrete floor. There was no linoleum or carpeting and no shade over the bulb. Some stood, some lounged against the kitchen units, but his wife and the Widow had taken the hard-backed chairs at the table. In front of them lay the slip of paper brought from the hospital. He had a pain in his abdomen from the kick she had given him. He offered them no alcohol, no coffee, but there was a filled water jug on the table and plastic glasses. She had been raped on the kitchen floor. Seven years later when they had returned, he had knelt on his one knee and she had gone to the far side of the kitchen. Together they had ripped up the flooring on which she had lain, dragged it outside and burned it. The scum had been drunk: she would not have alcohol in her home.
‘Now we can find him,’ Maria said.
‘It is owed to those who died, to those who suffered and survived, defeated, to search for him,’ the Widow said.
‘As one looks for a rat in a grain store.’ Maria again. Andrija thought he saw faint light in her eyes. She had not touched him when he had lain in the bed, after the amputation, and she had come to the hospital in the centre of Zagreb from the camp, nor when he had been discharged and she had brought him back to the camp, or years later, when they had returned to the village. Their front door had been ajar, and they had realised that a Serb family had left within the last twenty-four hours. For eighty days Andrija had been a key fighter in the village’s defence, creating terror in the enemy trenches, but she frightened him, and showed him no affection.
‘And one stamps on the rat and stamps again,’ the man who drove the cesspit tanker said.
‘It is owed to those who were in the corn, to those who were wounded, tortured and violated because the village fell.’ Simun, Mladen’s son, had been two weeks old when the defence of the village was broken.
‘I think Harvey Gillot will have forgotten about us, but he will remember,’ Maria spat.
The widow said, almost with a smile of pleasure: ‘He will remember my husband, to whom he gave a promise.’
Mladen, the village leader who had been an electrician and now drove a Mercedes saloon, said, ‘Everything we had, except our lives, was taken by Harvey Gillot. It was an act of treachery.’
Andrija made no contribution. He had taken no part on that long-ago evening of decision-taking. He had not been there to speak for or against the purchase of wire-guided anti-tank missiles. He had been in a culvert drain that ran under a track that went into the corn. There had been a bare, open strip, perhaps because the seed had been diseased when that batch was planted, to which he could slide on his stomach from the culvert to gain a clear view of the enemy lines some two hundred metres away. He had dropped an officer, a medical orderly and a stretcher-bearer. Such was the fear he caused in the enemy that the bodies were left to the elements… On his way back into the village he had used a sharp flint to scratch three more lines on the wooden butt of the rifle.
His wife had organised the collection of valuables that the teacher had demanded. Andrija’s opinion had not been required then either. In the darkness, men and women had come to his back door. He had seen the little items of jewellery and heard the clatter of rings as they were pulled from fingers and dropped on to the table. There had been envelopes that contained house deeds. His wife, Maria, had not thanked those who gave what they had – all that was precious to them – just tipped it into a shopping bag, which the teacher had taken, the next day, along the Cornfield Road.
Would the delivery of forty or fifty 9K11 Malyutka – the Little Baby – have made any difference to the outcome of the battle? Would the anti-tank weapons have held up the enemy’s advance on the village indefinitely? Would they have kept the Kukuruzni Put open for another two weeks, or a month? Andrija’s eyes roved the room. He noted who spoke and who did not: Petar and Tomislav had said nothing, and they had lost sons; neither had Josip.
‘We will find Harvey Gillot. When we search for him, he cannot hide,’ Maria said.
It was a small-wattage bulb, and shadows riddled his kitchen. Andrija knew what would be decided.
‘He should know of our agony and be punished for it.’ The Widow sniffed. She was the judge who passed sentence on a man, condemned him.
‘He will be found, will suffer, and be killed – and he will know why.’ Maria was panting a little, as she once had when she touched him and he her.
The chorus chimed agreement, thirty men and five women. All except Josip had fought for the village; all had suffered loss, as Andrija had. He could not picture the man, Harvey Gillot, could not have guessed at his features.
Mladen returned them to reality: ‘How? We are here. Where do we go? I think he is British, but I have never been to Britain. We have to consider if-’
Andrija’s wife, Maria, slapped her hand on the table. ‘We will pay for a man.’
The Widow ran her tongue over dried, cracked lips, withered by the summer sun. ‘We will buy a man.’
Andrija watched their leader’s face, saw hesitation. It was, of course, inevitable that this course would be chosen and that none would speak against it. Since the start of the siege, the women had been most ferocious in their hatred of the enemy, the first to denounce traitors and accuse others of betrayal. They were merciless. Not one wounded man from the enemy’s ranks had survived a night abandoned by his colleagues in no man’s land in front of the village’s guns. The women had gone out with knives and ended the whimpering of conscript casualties. Who would deny them? At that moment, he almost sympathised with the leader’s dilemma: who do you pay? Where do you buy?
Josip spoke. ‘I know who you should pay.’
Harvey Gillot came home late. It was a tedious journey from Heathrow but the location suited him. The Isle of Portland, on the coast of Dorset, ticked his boxes. As usual, he had done the return leg in a devious and roundabout way: Tbilisi to Frankfurt, a change of aircraft and carrier to LHR, the shuttle bus to Reading, then the train to Weymouth and the long-stay car park at the station. He drove an Audi A6 saloon.
The ticked boxes did not include proximity to the cliff deposits of the Jurassic age, in which giant ammonites and even dinosaur bones were preserved as fossils, the wild beauty of the promontory that jutted out into the English Channel, or the extraordinary and unique Chesil Beach, constructed by nature from a hundred million tones of shingle, past which he now drove. Neither was he excited by the prospect of the yachting programme in the 2012 Olympiad, which would take place in the wide artificial bay to his left. The island lay in front of him, pocked with lights. The wedge of valued stone, the best quarried in the country, suitable for the solemnity of military graveyards, did not interest him.
He felt the warmth of coming home – not at returning to Josie, to whom he had been married for eighteen years, and his daughter, Fiona, who was now fifteen. He couldn’t remember whether it was school holidays still or half-term yet, whether she would be at home or not. There was the dog, incredibly, or stupidly, loyal to him. He didn’t know how long it would be before pretences were locked into a cupboard and the key chucked. The warmth he felt was not for his wife, daughter or dog but for the place itself.
The boxes were ticked more boldly when darkness blanketed the causeway. He had his privacy here. Isolation. Protection. Anonymity. There was only one road, along the causeway, linking the island to the mainland. Gillot liked that. The island was a place where strangers were noticed if they stepped off the few tourist paths and were away from the Bill on the southern tip where the lighthouse was. In the trade he practised, close to the edge of whatever goddamn legislation had most recently been enacted, he assumed he was under variable degrees of surveillance by the plodding HMRC Alpha team. And there were other risks – it was inevitable in the trade that toes would be trodden on and noses disjointed.
His security, and his family’s, had dictated the move to the island. He had not explained it frankly to Josie, had not told her of two warnings coming within a month. In Tel Aviv, an Israeli had told him, ‘You sell to the Jews. If the Arabs you deal with knew of your link to us it would go bad for you, as it would if you sold them items we had not first sanctioned. We, too, have a long arm.’ Four weeks later he had been walking across Martyrs Square in the
