throughout Queensland for after-dinner speaking. But… anonymity could not be guaranteed… a trail existed, around his well-protected person. He could be found by a diligent searcher.
The non-governmental organisation known as Planet Protection, funded by a Swiss billionaire and public donation, supposedly independent of all state agencies, had made a list of the ten primary weapons brokers in the United Kingdom. It was included in a long-released folder, and with it a quote from Megs Behan, researcher and overseas co-ordinator: ‘These men are evil and should be hounded out of existence. They shame us.’ A telephone number for those requiring additional information was provided.
It was necessary, in Josip’s view, to keep all possible lines of communication open: a man never knew where to seek the best advantage.
He sat beside the river where the bank was protected by a steeply sloping stone wall. Above him a track ran alongside the Danube, then a cliff face of sandstone and the symbol of the town: the Vukovar water tower. The sun was sinking. The water glistened and made soft pools of gold that rippled, and every item of the remaining brickwork on the bowl of the tower was caught and highlighted. The river did not excite Josip. It had changed little in the last half-millennium – different boats and new stonework on the banks but the great meandering flow was the same. It might have been over many more than five centuries that nothing had changed: it might have remained the same since a tribe had settled a few kilometres to the west, at Vu edol, around six thousand years ago. Sometimes when he came to Vukovar he looked at the tower and witnessed again the devastation caused by tank and artillery shells. He saw the great gaps in the brick facing, and felt ashamed that he had fled the fighting with his family to the safety of the capital. But as evening approached and the light faded, he saw neither the glory of the river nor the pride of the water tower.
He waited.
The man would come as the shadows grew. He could justify what he prepared to do. He had, now, few loyalties. Below him a parapet ledge was half a metre above the water-line. Anglers were there, spaced out, giving each other at least fifty metres of bank. They would be hoping for catfish or perch, carp or pike, and at dusk the man would come on a scooter, choose a place close to where Josip sat and set up his tackle. Josip owed no allegiance, neither to a community nor an individual. When they could not be recognised or observed, the man would join him.
That morning, he had asked Mladen to gather together the principals of the village, then had told them what had been fed back to him. They had heard him out in silence. Then, there had been a frantic round of applause. They had pumped his hand and slapped his shoulders, and the women had kissed his cheek. And none would have believed that Josip had no loyalties and owed no allegiance.
After his release from gaol – after hardened criminals had hugged him, thanked him, wished him well and alliances had been confirmed – Josip had walked to the bus station and taken a slow stopping ride to Vinkovci. Then he had trekked for three hours until he had reached the village. His home was among the better preserved. It had a roof, it had some of the furniture that he and his wife had abandoned, and the dog was there, old and arthritic but well fed – cared for first by Serbs, then by Croat neighbours. He had slept there that night on the bare mattress. The dog had warmed to him, seeming to forget or forgive its abandonment of seven years, and had slept beside him.
In the morning Josip had walked the length of the village, seen the wreckage of the battle, and had found Mladen. He had recognised a new authority, and had pledged that whatever skills he had were now at the village’s service. He wrote scores, literally, of letters to the telephone, electricity and water companies, requiring immediate reconnections. He bombarded the Zagreb and Osijek authorities with ferocious demands for every kuna of resettlement funding available. He became expert in extracting the most generous pension terms for those men who could justify entitlement as veterans, and understood the small print on the disability claim forms.
Many in the village had despised him initially but had reluctantly changed their minds. Man for man, woman for woman, child for child, the village did better than its neighbours in Bogdanovci and Marinci, better even than the martyr city of Vukovar. Josip was a man of importance in the village, but he had learned in his cell block that he should not push himself forward. He had become an almost indispensable part of the village. He lived alone now, had not replaced the dog after its death, and he had never brought the mistress he kept in Vinkovci to the village. He lived off a percentage of the pensions and grants he had negotiated.
If he had described himself, and not sold himself short, Josip would have said he was good-looking. He had a mane of thick grey hair that he wore long, a nose that seemed hawkish and good skin. He did not have the paunch of many in the village. He was not, as many were, a manic depressive, addicted to temperament-calming drugs or an alcoholic. He lived in the village because he could think of no better place where he – and his past – would be accepted.
And he nurtured secrets. His grandfather had been a policeman in Split in the Ustase days of the Second World War and had died hanging upside-down from a lamppost, his throat slit by partisans. His great-uncle had been a guard at the Jasenovac concentration and extermination camp and had fled via Trieste. He was thought to have gone to Paraguay but had never been heard of since.
The angler came.
His car had Osijek plates, but he would change them once a month, and his old Opel saloon every third month. The angler was an officer in the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order. With its recent past, and the ever-present threat of communal violence in Vukovar – Serb on Croat, Croat on Serb – the Sluzba Za Zastitu Ustavnog Poretka retained an officer dedicated to clandestine surveillance of the community on the bend of the Danube. Josip had been recruited while he was still in gaol.
There had been an Englishman in the gaol, sentenced for trafficking class-A drugs. He had shown Josip how to play two sides – had spoken of ‘hunting with the hare and the hounds’. In the name of Christ, the government had betrayed the town and the villages. He did not feel he did wrong and it was important, always, to have a protecting friend.
Josip said softly to the officer of the SZUP – and did not see himself as Judas: ‘His name was Harvey Gillot. I do not have detailed knowledge. In payment of the debt, a contract has been taken and…’
5
Petar drove his Massey Ferguson. The tractor was pulling a trailer that might have been loaded with manure, corn or logs. The evening before, he had been out in his yard, using a power hose on the wheels, chassis and cab of the tractor, then the trailer. Both shone in the morning light. The trailer bore four coffins, each with the country’s flag spread over it.
The four hearses had come from the hospital in Vukovar and had stopped at the village’s outskirts where, nineteen years before, there had been an anti-tank ditch, a roadblock, a felled oak and trenches for machine-guns. Tomislav would have been there with the Malyutka missiles, and would have had a good field of fire. From the hearses, the coffins had been lifted on to the trailer and Petar had pulled them to the part-rebuilt church that was on the village’s crossroads. A service had been held there, taken by a bishop who had travelled from Osijek and assured the congregation that these men were never to be forgotten as guardians of freedom. Hymns had been sung and prayers said; politicians from the region and from Vukovar had attended.
Tomislav thought the singing had been subdued, that there had been little celebration of the lives lost. The local priest, who came every third week and whom they shared with other villages, walked briskly in front of the tractor. Tomislav was behind the trailer, in the front rank, a small terrier skipping beside him, held close on a length of baling twine. Alongside him were Petar’s wife, Andrija and the Widow. It was unusual for women to walk immediately behind the coffin of a loved one, but she had demanded it. There were no flowers on the trailer, not even a simple posy.
He had wondered if his wife would come, if any of the other three children – now adults – that she had taken with her would want to be there. He had had no contact with any of them since they had left. His eldest boy had stood beside him as they walked away, a broad arm around his shoulders. Tomislav walked with a firm stride behind the coffin that carried the fleshless bones of his son. He was pleased his wife had not come.
During the siege, he would have been regarded as the weapons expert. He was given control of the RPG-7 grenades – only eleven of them – that could be used at close range against armour. He would have had charge of
