I passed under a bridge where a homeless man sat, still wrapped in his sleeping bag, talking quietly to himself. He had a bowl in front of him but made no effort to ask me for any money. He didn’t even look up, and I wondered what his story was and how he’d got to this point in his life. Someone once said that we’re all the products of our own choices, but this, I thought, was only half true. A lot of choices are made for us, way back when we’re young, and those are the ones that often set us on our paths, good or bad. Mine was made for me when I was seven years old and my father tried to kill me. That had lent a dark cloak to everything that followed. You can work to limit the damage. But you never repair it entirely.
And sometimes it can consume you.
Half an hour later, as I was passing under the Pont d’Iéna, my new phone rang.
‘I’ve got a contact in Sarajevo who can help,’ said Archie. ‘As soon as you’re in the city, let me know and I’ll organize the intros. Then we’re quits, Ray. All right?’
55
Buying a car is remarkably easy when it’s second-hand, a private sale, and the man selling it just wants to see the money. My guy did, and his English improved remarkably as he gave me a rundown of everything to do with the car. I gave it a quick test-drive round the block with him in it, showed him my fake driving licence, which he wasn’t very interested in, and gave him the cash, which he was very interested in.
Then I was off. I didn’t bother spending a second night in my hotel but instead drove straight across eastern France, again avoiding the toll roads, and slept in the back of the van near the German border.
The following morning, having endured a pretty crap night’s sleep, I started early, crossed the border without any checks at all (ah, the joy of the Schengen Agreement), and drove south-east across Germany, crossing the Austrian border near the beautiful medieval city of Salzburg where I managed to find a guesthouse with views down the hill to the cathedral and the river, whose owners not only gave me an excellent dinner, but also washed my clothes. I was finding that the further I got from the UK, the more relaxed I became. The owners of the guesthouse, a gay couple in their sixties, were interested in talking. Usually this would have made me wary, but I could see their interest was genuine, so I gave them a story of how I’d got divorced a few months earlier and had decided to take off on a trip round Europe. I’d shaved off my beard in Paris and my hair was slowly beginning to grow back, so I felt more confident that I wasn’t likely to be recognized.
Setting off refreshed the following morning, I drove through Austria, Slovenia and Croatia in pretty much one go, and only had my passport checked for the first time when I arrived at Gradiška on the Bosnian border. It passed muster easily enough and I kept on going, finally pulling into Sarajevo at dawn on Friday morning, the day Alastair Sheridan was also due to arrive.
Let me tell you a few things about Sarajevo. One: considering it’s fairly well known for a city on the far reaches of southern Europe, it’s small, with a population of under four hundred thousand. Two: strategically speaking, it’s probably the most badly placed city going, sitting in a valley surrounded by hills on three sides, making it very easy to besiege – a fact the Serbs took full advantage of during the war of 1992 to 1995. Three: considering it was under siege for pretty much the whole war, with daily artillery bombardment, it’s in remarkably good shape, especially the old city which, bar the odd spray of shrapnel pockmarks on some of the buildings, looks completely intact.
According to Google, the main tourist area was round the old Turkish Baščaršija Square and bazaar, on the north bank of the river, so I found a small, basic hotel on a hill running down to it, where they had parking on a side road, and where they were happy to be paid in cash. I gave them enough for three nights, figuring I wasn’t going to need to be in the city any longer given that that was how long Sheridan was supposedly staying in the area, and as soon as I was in my room (very small, but clean, with no cockroaches) I hit the sack and was asleep almost before I shut my eyes.
I didn’t wake until early afternoon and, after a long shower, I called Archie Barker and told him I was in Sarajevo.
‘I’ll get my contact to call you. His name’s Marco.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you,’ said Archie. ‘I met up with him several times in the early 2000s as the representative of some business people in London who wanted to open a reliable land-smuggling route into the EU for certain products.’
‘What kind of products?’
‘It’s vulgar to ask those
