split upper lip. Roscoe stood, lifted his head and would – for a moment – have weighed whether or not to beat ten shades of hell out of Gillot. Gillot nearly laughed. It wouldn’t have fitted the duty of bloody care to return the punch.
Gillot walked on. Reckoned he’d won space for himself.
They were squashed into the car. Dropping off Roscoe and giving his place in the front to the long-legged Anders had made little difference to the lack of comfort, but it had been bearable when they were on the decent road surface out of the town. He was guided by Penny Laing, who directed him at junctions where narrow roads branched off with no signposts. A quiet had fallen on them and Benjie Arbuthnot rated it an inappropriate time to lift the mood with humour. Now he drove the hire car off the road, on to a track, didn’t slow, and allowed the vehicle to bounce.
He followed Penny Laing’s directions. Through the village, with a brief commentary by Anders on the number of casualties suffered in the siege, past the church and the cemetery – he saw through the open gate the fresh graves. No one spoke and all were thrown about inside the car. He did not slacken his speed.
There were markers ahead.
He could see, as dust piled on to the windscreen, bobbing heads that wound in a slow-moving line above the tips of the crop. He had been once in South America when a pope had visited and could remember the huge crowds moving in crocodile formation towards the rendezvous where mass would be celebrated. He recalled taking his elder son to a music festival and, again, seeing trudging queues heading for campsites beside the Thames… Something magnificent and emotional about columns on the move in the early morning and a great event expected. The army ahead of him, however, wore neither the uniform of the faith nor their culture: the women were in black and carried hand weapons and the men were in camouflage fatigues, with firearms on their shoulders. They were strung out along the length of the track.
Anders said, ‘I don’t want to be a pooper, Arbuthnot, but I don’t see our presence being welcomed.’
Megs Behan said, ‘I cannot believe now in the rule of the mob. We have to go on.’
Penny Laing said, ‘We owe him nothing. We’re not in debt to Gillot.’
He made no reply. He could have tucked the car in behind them and crawled at their pace, could have dumped it, turfed out his passengers and walked. He heaved the wheel and went through the corn. The mass of green closed around the windows. He made a bypass, then swung back towards the track.
He saw that the village people formed little clusters ahead, and understood. Penny Laing murmured to him which was Tomislav, who had made a memorial of his home and would have fired the Malyutka missiles if delivery had been made, and which was Andrija, who had been the sniper and had lost his leg in the break-out when the women and wounded were left behind. She indicated Petar, who farmed this land, whose wife was deaf and whose son had died when the consignment had failed to come, and Mladen, who led the village, and his son, who had been carried out as a two-week-old baby through the cornfields. Always a witness, always an observer, Arbuthnot noted, and squirrelled away her blush and the tremor in her voice as she spoke of the boy – good-looking kid. He saw, ahead, that Steyn waved to him and beside him were two crow women.
He had seen enough, so he did a three-point turn that flattened more of the crop, and began his drop- off.
It was Megs Behan who asked the question. It would have been in all their minds but she posed it. ‘Can we save him?’
‘No, we cannot,’ Arbuthnot said. ‘But it’s possible he can save himself.’
Steyn was the first to see him.
He knew Maria, wife of an amputee. She had consulted him on a possible infection of the ovaries. He’d thought her a pitiless woman, but he knew what had been done to her when the village had fallen. He had seen, also once, the elderly widow, who played that part with enthusiasm, had painful arthritis and a great bagful of bitterness at the loss of her husband. He thought each lived in the days and nights of an autumn turning to winter when their lives had depended on the lottery of where a shell landed, or where a sniper aimed his bullet. He thought each lived through that day and night of an enemy unzipping his fatigues, lowering filthy underpants and tearing down knickers.
He stood by the women, and saw him come over a low hill. Crown of the head, the full face and then the shoulders. He knew well the history of the Kukuruzni Put, could imagine how it had been to sprint or crawl between the rotting crop rows. He saw that Gillot carried a white plastic bag in his right hand. He walked briskly but without bombast. No trace of a swagger or the hesitation of the intimidated. Daniel Steyn fancied himself a reasonably skilled and caring general practitioner of medicine, but more as a psychologist. The man did well, struck a good posture. Once an American special-forces officer had come to Vukovar to examine the ground and the strongpoints, and to learn of the battle. They had talked late, over whisky, about bluff. The officer, if the holding cells of the Lebanon hostages of the 1980s had been positively located, would have been on the rescue squad, and he had spoken of one, a Briton, who had successfully played the bluff game on visits to Beirut: simply by his bearing and understated confidence he had created a safety cocoon around him, until the bluff was called. Then he had had no battalions behind him, only a pistol pressed up under his chin. On the Cornfield Road bluff might play well and might not.
The policeman was behind Gillot. Fifteen or twenty paces. More opportunity for the psychologist: would have been duty-driven, would not have had the flawed personality to claim the right to a ten-hour break – many would – and hands washed of a problem. Steyn saw the dried, dark blood, the stains on the suit jacket, the smears on the shirt. Understood that, too. The bluff factor was not compatible with a bodyguard in tow.
Gillot closed on him.
No eye contact, nothing resigned, nothing fearful and nothing confident – no recognition.
The women were in the middle of the track and the corn grew high at either side of them. The widow had her stick and Maria a grenade bulging in a pocket, a knife in her hand. He thought it the sort of a knife that would be used to cut up a slaughtered pig in a shed behind a village home. They blocked Gillot’s way.
Genius. He reached them and stopped. He looked into the faces, would have seen the emotions that could kill him. He did that little smile, apologetic, but without a cringe. He offered no defiance and stepped to the side. Perhaps they expected argument, might have expected explanation or gushing apology. He was past them. Cleverly done.
At a price. The stick was thrown after him, which must have hurt the widow because the arthritis ravaged her. It caught Gillot on the back of the head, but he rode it. Then Maria hurled a stone, which hit Gillot square in the back, by the bullet holes in his shirt. He staggered but didn’t go down. Steyn thought that if he had he would be gone. He would not have risen again. More stones and earth clods rained on Gillot, but he stayed upright.
Steyn walked with Roscoe.
In front, where the path bent, he saw his old friend, Bill Anders, who was – maybe – the architect of the whole damn thing, and in the group with him was Tomislav, who held an RPG-7. His wife had quit before the heavy fighting had started and gone to the enemy. He understood the hate.
A stone cut the back of Gillot’s head and blood matted his hair.
Roscoe could not have put himself into Gillot’s mind. He thought he should have been on one side of the Tango and the doctor on the other. They should have walked beside him, but the stinging ache in his nose and the swelled lip told him where he was wanted and where denied. The women were behind him. There were shouts, curses… Sometimes the doctor, almost with embarrassment, translated what was yelled at Gillot.
So, Roscoe broke ranks. He jogged a few paces and came near to Gillot’s shoulder. One stone jarred his back, low down, while another hit Gillot and glanced off the angle of his neck.
He did it from the side of his mouth. ‘I don’t want you. I don’t need you. You have no place here. You’re not a party to this argument. Get back. I don’t ask you-’
Gillot didn’t have to finish.
It would have been a stone that a plough had turned up, too heavy for the old woman to lift and throw, so it must have been the younger woman who had hurled it. A good aim. It hit the detective somewhere at the back of the head, then bounced on to the track and corkscrewed into the corn. Roscoe yelped, then took two more steps, or three, and subsided. Gillot left him. There would have been another tedious, futile debate: Gillot’s needs against the other man’s sense of obligation.
He didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have helped him to see the detective. He didn’t want to know whether the man was stunned, out cold, or had merely gone down and then pushed himself to his feet again. He went
