had thought it well-styled. He would have few opportunities to show it off – short-sleeved, button-down collar, soft blue with a light check – to an admiring audience because he was one of the few young people, beyond school age, who had remained in the village. They were scattered, but Simun would not leave his father. Others had gone; he had not. His story, often told by his father, made him unique.
On the last night, after his father had swaddled Simun to leave, the women had give them a cup of milk, taken from the cow two days before – the last cow. Petar had shot the rest because of their agony when he hadn’t had the opportunity to milk them – and two slices of old bread. Mladen had gone alone with his infant into the night, out past the last perimeter strongpoint and into the corn.
They had been, father and son, three days and nights in the corn. The baby had never cried, and the milk had been finished by the second day, the bread – softened in rainwater – by the second evening. On the first night, his father had realised that, after five hours’ walking, he had doubled back on himself and been within sight of the ruins of the church tower that the artillery had failed to bring down. He had had to start the journey again, and had detonated a mine, a POMZ-2 fragmentation stake mine. Simun knew its make, power and the spread of its blast because Tomislav had one in his shrine to the village. The mine had fallen half on its side and the blast was restricted but many pieces had lodged in his father’s leg and in the arms that had protected the baby. They had been saved from the Cetniks by a herd of cattle that had been close to the explosion: the animals had stampeded and there had been shouts in the darkness that one had snagged the trip-wire.
Then his father – bleeding – had swum the Vuka river on his back, with the baby tied to his chest, and had trudged the last kilometre to the lines at Nustar. A nun in the hospital at Vinkovci had said the baby’s survival was a miracle. A father had said that the child’s quiet while they were traversing the cornfields, where Cetniks searched for survivors from the village, was another. In the refugee camps Simun had been labelled ‘the miracle’.
His father was now undisputed leader of the community. Simun was the son of his father. No one in the village, not even the Widow, would criticise him. He was subsidised by his father, with the state disability pension, and he traded in pills. He had that monopoly in the community.
It did not concern Simun that for twelve years he had not been beyond Vinkovci or Osijek, or that he had never slept a night outside his village. His horizon was where the ripening corn met the skies. His experience of a world beyond the village was from the American programmes imported by Croatian TV, but he hardly watched them – and never the news bulletins – preferring to sit in the cafe or play pool in its back room. Simun knew the name of every fighter who had died in the defence of the village, where each man had died and how: by what weapon and its calibre. He knew because he had heard it in the cafe.
Nobody had ever lectured the miracle child, now nineteen, tall and well-presented, with his mother’s looks, on a life going to waste.
Penny Laing drove into the town, and was not sure how she had stayed on the road. She had been tired enough when she had flown into Zagreb. At the airport she had hired a small, slick Renault from Hertz, black- painted because the Investigation Division always used black cars: they didn’t stand out as primrose yellow or tangerine would.
She had been to the embassy. Might have been a hepatitis-B carrier for the welcome she’d had. No coffee, no lunch – certainly not a life-saving beer – but bottled water and some plain biscuits in an interview room. A first secretary had met her and another man had sat in a corner and not contributed. Sod him, Penny Laing had thought. She’d assumed that the interloper was the station officer, the source of the intelligence. There had been from the first secretary the predictable line about not offending the natives, going by the book and liaising at every step on her journey. She’d asked direct: ‘Are you the guy who kicked this off? Supposing you are, we’re concerned about what credence to give it. High or low? It would help to know.’ The spooks, in her experience from Kinshasa, and those who helped with more sophisticated bugging than HMRC could get their hands on always seemed to have a little mischief in their eyes and the faintest of smiles, and never answered a direct question. Her eyes had been on him and he had fixed his gaze on the ceiling, as if he was looking for cobwebs.
The first secretary had said, ‘It’s a backward part of a backward country, and it was seriously traumatised by warfare of the most vicious and merciless sort. Simple people, they make loyal friends and dedicated enemies. But you, Miss Laing, will be neither friend nor enemy. I would suggest trust few and believe little. Stay aware, Miss Laing.’
She had given the first secretary a curt handshake, but the other man had kept his hands firmly behind his back.
The road, a highway, had taken her to the outskirts of Nova Gradiska, then Slavonski Brod, where she had stopped for fuel, had had a leisurely cup of coffee and reflected on the lorries that seemed to deny her a space in either the fast or slow lane. She had been trembling as she held the polystyrene cup because of near misses and great beasts carving her up, forcing her to swerve or stamp on the brake. North of Zupanja, she had turned off the A3 and crossed a wide agricultural plain. The sun had been sinking when she skirted to the west of Vinkovci, and then there was Nustar and signs directing her to the outskirts of Vukovar.
There were no more lorries to force her out of their path, but there were big grain silos to her right. When the low sun caught them she saw the cavernous holes that artillery shells had blasted. She didn’t know what she might achieve.
It had seemed easier in London where there had been certainties. She no longer had them. There were ruined buildings on either side of her and trees grew through what had once been living rooms that fronted on to the street. She saw a sign for a hospital, a green cross on an illuminated white background – the lecturer had told her what had happened at a hospital in Vukovar.
Penny Laing took her left hand off the wheel and smacked her cheek, catching her nose. She had not come for a bloody history lesson. She had come to nail down Harvey Gillot, arms dealer, who had had an issue here.
He slept, like a baby, in the principal guest room. Harvey Gillot had worked all day – telephone and email – on a deal to replenish stocks of artillery and tank shells for use on army ranges.
Josie was in her own bed. She had cleaned, gone to the supermarket, cooked and put his food on the table, lunch and supper, but had not eaten with him. She had taken food to the horse and had watched a movie on TV.
Shadows bounced off the walls of the house, darkness nestled on it, and the wind rustled dead leaves.
8
An atmosphere that a knife could have cut, dense and threatening.
‘Is it real or not, Mr Roscoe?’
The look Gillot flashed at her – his wife – was savage. Roscoe assumed that he had told her his own opinion as to whether or not it was real. She, however, deliberately posed the question again and would reckon to belittle him that way. Roscoe didn’t do marriage guidance, seldom attempted any degree of conciliation. He had had a good drive down – had started early enough for the road to be clear – and had walked into a snake-pit with no serum.
‘It’s a simple enough question, Mr Roscoe. Is this a serious threat to us or is it merely gossip from the bazaar?’
Another look from Gillot. Roscoe thought it would have halted a charging buffalo in its tracks, but it had no effect on the wife. He had sensed that Gillot had anticipated their meeting would be one on one, man to man: he had been walking Roscoe from the hall towards the open door of what seemed an office when she had come out of the kitchen and hijacked him. Gillot was not going to tell his wife to ‘eff off’ in front of a stranger. Roscoe had been led out on to the patio: a view that didn’t have a price. Cliffs, rock promontories, an expanse of sea, a great open mass of sky and a distant shoreline stretching away to the east, the bright sails of yachts… There were loungers and, thank God, an upright chair, which he had snaffled, and a parasol that threw shade. Gillot had sat on the end of a lounger, scowling. The wife was stretched out on another, but with the back raised, in shorts and a loose, long- sleeved blouse. He thought she looked well-cared-for. He did not, of course, know what Gillot had told her and wondered if he was walking towards a minefield. Anyway, he didn’t know whether the threat was serious or not. He couldn’t fathom whether Harvey Gillot had told his wife it was actual or a piece of mythology passed down from an ill-informed height. He had been given gassy water to drink.
