That seemed to be the end of the conversation for Connor. He turned to walk away, closing one nostril with a finger and clearing the other on to the grass.
‘You heard about any Bosnians in the city?’
‘Aye, the fuckers haven’t lost any time bringing their tarts over. They got the whorehouses sorted out already. Those dirty fat NGO bastards will be spending their money soon enough.’
‘It’s a Bosnian ayatollah called Nuhanovic I’m thinking of.’
‘What the fuck does a Bosnian ayatollah want to come here for? They got enough of their own.’
I shrugged. ‘Just what I thought. You going to the party later?’
‘What the fuck for?’
Of course. He’d be going back to his hotel room to knock back a few pints of orange juice or whatever the new fad was, and get his head down.
‘See you, Connor. I’m staying here if you hear anything.’
‘Yeah. Don’t forget to get some in. Sort yourself out, for fuck’s sake.’
The night’s festivities were slowly getting under way. Some speakers were being rigged up in the garden area and the barbecue was blazing. I walked back into the lobby.
It wasn’t just military contractors and security companies that made money after an army had done its stuff. The bars and whorehouses sprang up like mushrooms in shit. It was nothing new – even the Romans had camp followers – but the set-up for these girls would be very different. They weren’t self-employed prostitutes, here to make some fast cash for themselves and their families. It was an open secret in the Balkans that people-trafficking rings ran through Montenegro to Bosnia and Kosovo.
The white girl the fixer had said he could get me was probably some poor kid who’d been kidnapped or duped, then smuggled in and forced to ‘repay her debt’ to her owners. It was just as easy to get these girls now as it had been during the war, when both sides had sold their female prisoners. Ads in the papers in places like Moldova or Romania spoke of well-paid waitressing and bar jobs in the Balkans. When the girls arrived at their new places of work, they were lifted. Their passports were taken off them, and the next thing they knew they’d been sold as sex slaves. It looked like the Bosnians were spreading their wings and going global instead of sticking to Europe.
No sooner had I got to the bar than the main doors burst open. A crowd surged through, chanting and clapping, all the women doing their Red Indian yodel.
Next in was the bride, done up to the nines in a big fluffy white gown. She was young and very beautiful. No wonder the groom beamed beside her, looking very smart in his shiny suit. The bridesmaids were in pink and looked like little princesses, tiaras and all sorts in their hair.
They surged off to the right and down a corridor, probably heading for one of the conference rooms. The women were all in trouser suits or dresses, the men in suits or leather jackets. It could have been a wedding anywhere in Liverpool, except this lot were unarmed. They’d probably had to leave their AKs in the B&Q garden shed.
Jerry came in at the end of the conga, clapping and smiling away with the best of them. ‘Great, huh?’ He grinned. ‘Life goes on.’
We headed to the lift.
‘Any luck?’ I checked out his Baghdad market gear: polyester trousers and shiny plastic shoes. They went down a treat with the lime-green shirt. He looked like one of the wedding party. ‘At the mosque, I mean. I can see you had none at the clothes shop.’
‘Yeah, funny. I’m not too sure. But I tell you what – he’s definitely here.’ He looked about him at the others in the lift. ‘Later.’
We got to the sixth floor. For once we were on our own. ‘He’s here, Nick. No one said anything, but you know when they can’t quite look you in the eye. The fucker is here somewhere. I had to leave kinda quick – some of the guys weren’t too happy that someone was asking questions. Any questions. What about you?’
‘I talked with one of the military contractors and a couple of guys I know. Maybe I’ll find out at the party. You coming?’
He looked me up and down. ‘Of course. Big question is, do you think the beer will be cold?’
‘Don’t care, I won’t be drinking it. Not on a job.’
36
From where I stood on Jerry’s balcony, Baghdad was now a patchwork of light and dark. On the other side of the Tigris, entire neighbourhoods were pitch black; I imagined them criss-crossed with cables so the locals could get their kettles on. Next to them, a few streets had lights that flickered, then whole sectors were reasonably well lit, probably thanks to generators like ours that droned on the back of an artic trailer with a sign saying ‘A gift from the people of Japan’.
‘You fashioned up yet?’
I’d drawn the curtains behind me so I wouldn’t be someone’s warm-up shot before a night’s sniping at any soldier who stood still long enough.
Jerry was changing out of his local ‘look at me, I’m one of you’ clothes. ‘Nearly. I’m dying for a beer, but the fridge is fucked.’
I looked down. Either the party had split into two or there’d always been rival events. The grassed area was full of people, and about twenty or so were congregated round the barbecue near the pool. Johnny Cash’s dad had moved out of the bar to serenade a group of Iraqis and whites sitting round a plastic table, and the Balkan boys were doing a meet-and-greet.
The raffia
Quite a few more people wandered around the pool as Bob Marley sparked up from the speakers and went into competition with Johnny’s dad, but neither of them was making much headway against the rumble of conversation and laughter. The whole lot got drowned out as a helicopter swooped low over the rooftops just the other side of the hotel.
Jerry came out and watched it go as he clipped his bumbag round him. ‘Must be the cheese-wire patrol . . .’
As we headed for the lift I wondered if Rob would turn up. I hoped so. Seeing these people again made me feel as if nothing had changed, and I liked that. It wasn’t as if Rob and I’d been in and out of each other’s houses during our time together in the Regiment, but whenever we met up we connected – mostly because we were the sad fucks who hadn’t scored down town all night and were still trying to chat up women at the Chinese takeaway on the way back to camp.
The lobby was still heaving. Loud Arab music drifted out of the wedding reception and the women were warbling big-time. They’d be knackered by the morning.
Outside, a crowd had gathered round the far end of the pool, waiting to collect food from the barbecue. The necks of beer bottles stuck out of big bins of ice like the spines of frozen hedgehogs. An Apple PowerBook had been rigged up to a couple of speakers, its screen displaying the music menu. The Wailers were fighting hard to make themselves heard over the country-and-western.
Jerry swayed to the beat and pointed at the strings of fairy-lights in the palm trees. ‘This could be the Caribbean, man.’
‘Must be what makes it so popular,’ I said, as I made my way along the pool side. ‘And I bet the Yardies don’t have many of those.’ A tracked vehicle screeched noisily down the road just the other side of the wall and helicopters clattered across the sky.
The guests were mostly Brits and Americans and seemed to know each other. The news agencies always did
