Joey said simply. 'My best friend at school teaches maths in a comprehensive in Birmingham.'
'So, what justified last night?'
'Are you listening?' Joey breathed in hard. His mind was a tangle of snipped string, no knots. 'It's about him, who he is – and about me, about who I am.'
'A winner and a loser is what you told me.'
'He's the highest mountain. Why climb a mountain? Because it's there. It's there in front of you. It's in front of you, indestructible, and laughing at you because you are so small – pygmy fucking small. The whole team of Sierra Quebec Golf spent three bloody years and they fell off the bloody mountain, they're history. I want to climb the mountain, beat the bastard, sit with my arse on his nose, because it's there
… because he' s there. They say he's no fear, I want to see him scared. They say he's in control, I want to hear him scream and beg. I want – little, small me, and it's the only thing in my life that I want – to bring down the mountain. Is that an answer?'
Maggie touched his hand. 'I think it's better than most could give.'
She thought that the clerk in Warsaw, in the shadows when he kissed her, would have said something like that, about mountains, if she'd asked him, and the Libyan boy on the veranda in Valetta's moonlight. She'd wept for them both. God, was that her future, growing old and sad because young men fell off the crags on bloody mountains?
They were climbing back into the Toyota, made huge by the binocular lenses, and she eased the van forward.
There were others in her organization, and in every one of the foreign communities camped in the city, who didn't care. She loathed their company.
With the lorry driver, Monika headed for the village beyond Kiseljak.
She cared. If she had not then she might as well, as she often told herself, have stayed at Njusford, sheltered by the mountains and overlooking a bay that was classified by UNESCO as a 'preservation-worthy environment'. The bay was on Flakstodoya island, one of the Lofoten archipelago. It was the home she had rejected. Because she had needed to care she had left Njusford, turned her back on the little coral-painted house that had been her home. She had seen in Bosnia everything that brutality had to offer.
She was toughened to suffering. She would not have acknowledged it of herself – she despised introverted self-examination – but part of her character that was remarkable was the absence of cynicism, and she did not know despair. The reward she found was in the gratitude of simple people – women who had nothing laughed with her and touched her arm or her clothes, children without a future chirped as they chanted her name. All the hours of sitting in officials' rooms and hearing excuses for procrastination were forgotten when she witnessed the gratitude and heard the chanting.
Bumping along in the lorry as it wove between sheets of ice on the road, she was cheerful, happy.
The man who had brought her the lorry had caused the lift in her mood. Most, if they had come with a lorry across Europe, would have wanted a photo-call and publicity for their generosity. She thought him the best of men because he had wanted nothing of her.
She sang cheerily in the lorry cab, not looking at the snow-capped peaks because they would have reminded her of home at Njusford. Thinking of home would have destroyed her mood. In that month, on that day, if the seas were not too fierce, her father would have been out in his boat with her elder brother, and her mother and sister would have been left to gut and behead the previous day's cod catch.
And all of them, when the boat came in, would have gone in the afternoon darkness to the grave of her younger brother. The black hours of winter, the harshness of the seas, the remoteness of the island and the agony of her brother's suicide had driven her away from Njusford. If she looked at mountains, she remembered. She sang with all of her ingrained enthusiasm.
They turned off the metalled road and lurched on a stone track towards the village with the charity load brought to her by a modest, caring stranger.
They were back from the court. For the midday recess, to save money, they avoided the canteen in the basement of the court building and went to his office to eat the sandwiches she always prepared at home.
While her father ate and concerned himself with the case papers, Jasmina threw her eyes cursorily over the overnight list of police reports. She would not normally have interrupted his concentration on a difficult case, which taxed both his humanity and his legal obligations. The case was murder. The defendant was a woman of twenty- two, already the mother of four children. The victim was a fellow gypsy, the father of two of the children. The weapon was an axe.
The defence was that the victim had beaten the defendant and she had acted to save her own life. The accusation was that the defendant had bludgeoned the victim nine times because he had found a younger lover. Self-defence or premeditated murder. Freedom or imprisonment. In the old days, before the war, her father would have been assisted in room 118 of the Ministry of Justice by a jury of professionals, but there was no longer the money for that luxury; he sat alone.
He must decide on guilt or innocence. It was typical of the cases thrown at him, without political overtones but laden with dilemma.
The fifth item on the police report of last night's incidents bounced back at her from the page.
She wheeled herself from her desk to the corner of the room, lifted a file and slid the rubber band from it.
She riffled among the top papers, selected one, then moved to his desk. He looked up irritably as she laid the report in front of him and pointed to the fifth item.
She waited until he had read it and when he looked up at her in annoyance she placed the page from the file on top of it.
A cloud seemed to shadow his face. He read the two pages a second time.
A drug addict, a disabled war veteran, had been savagely attacked in the Dobrinja district. Neighbours had seen nothing, had heard nothing, knew nothing except his name… A man of the same name and from the same address in Dobrinja had made a statement to the police on the death of the foreigner, Duncan Dubbs, in the Miljacka river.. . and the statement had been passed to the young British investigator, with permission for intrusive surveillance… and the IPTF had made the link with Ismet Mujic, who was the prime crime baron of Sarajevo, and Ismet Mujic was at the heart of his and his daughter's history.
'Better if I had never been involved,' he said. 'But I am, and I cannot step back from involvement…
There is an English expression – what do they say in English?'
'I think it is 'You reap what you sow.''
Frank, and all of the team, sat in on the briefing for the new man attached to the Kula station. He was introduced as a senior detective from Dakar, Senegal. The briefing was by the station commander, an intelligence officer from the Public Security Department of Jordan, who used a pointer and a blackboard to emphasize his message. 'We are not colonialists, we do not give out instructions and orders, we are here to advise and help the local police forces. Above all else, we must show them that we believe totally in the importance of the law. .. '
Frank heard the briefing with wavering attention, distracted by a nagging shame. He had tossed through the night, failed to sleep, and had felt his self-imposed reputation of dedication to policing slip through his fingers. He had no friends in Bosnia; he went about his work, struggled with it, without the support of comrades. The only men who greeted him with warmth, on the rare times they saw him, were the cousins who made up the Sreb Four – Salko, Ante, Fahro and Muhsin. He had welcomed the liaison opportunity and had hoped he would grow to like Joey Cann, out from London. But Cann was now the source of his shame.
The Jordanian droned on… Frank had come to Bosnia for many reasons, most to do with the split from Megan, but among them had been a heartfelt desire to help a war-weary community. He detested the crime that ravaged the city but, like his international colleagues, could see no way to fight it… He had been dragged down, with his fine ideals, by Joey Cann… He didn't want to see him, hear from him, again.
He began to dream – the Irish bar at the weekend at the top of Patriotske lige, fried breakfast-lunch, wearing the red shirt and the dragon, the pint of Guinness, and the satellite relay of the international match from home, and the shame gone… but only if Joey Cann didn't ring him.
November 1996
Headlights speared against the plastic that covered the windows and interrupted the feast and the celebration. Alija, the son-in-law of Husein and Lila Bekir, had come to Vraca for his week's leave from army
