long grass to activate it. He had already been in the corn for sixty hours and was dehydrated, famished, exhausted. He was alone, with no comrade to help him. He had made a tourniquet above the wound from the laces of the boot on his right foot, now useless, and had dragged himself a little more than five kilometres. It had taken two more days to reach the lines. He could remember the dawn breaking over the cornfields when the teacher, the boys and his cousin had not returned. He had lain in cover with his sniper’s rifle and waited for sounds of them approaching, ready to give covering fire…
The grenade had a delay on the fuse of four seconds from the pulling of the pin. He would not be the first of his village: two men had used a grenade in the last year to end the torment. There had been three from the other villages, more from the town. Two years before he had thought it would be easier with his handgun. He held the grenade in his hand, a big hand, the grenade snug in it. Before the war he had delivered post in the three villages, a good job that offered status, security and a uniform. He had not worked since they had come back to the village.
He heard his name called, three or four times, with rising impatience. His wife, Maria, had a strong voice, a short temper.
Since they had come back to the house, thirteen years ago, and rebuilt it, they had not slept together as man and wife. He had not penetrated her; she had not opened herself to him. She had never told him how many had raped her. A section? A platoon? Regular troops from the JNA? Cetniks of Arkan, the terrorist? In 1991, when the village had been held and then fallen, Andrija had been twenty-three, a star athlete and handsome, so women had said. Maria had been twenty-five, a beauty and raven-haired. Now he was crippled, disabled and destroyed, and she was haggard, her hair grey, without lustre, and cropped short. They were removed from each other, ate their meals in silence and slept so that they did not touch. Many in the village were scarred by the siege and the defeat.
He rolled on to his stomach. The grenade gouged into his belly and the index finger of his left hand was inside the ring. He could pull it. He could end it.
He considered what his life consisted of. There was no joy and everything was a burden. He ate with her, cleared the plates, then sat on the porch and watched cars and lorries go past. People who walked by would call to him but he would seldom answer, only sucking at a cigarette. In the middle of each morning he would head down the road to the cafe, swinging on the crutch. There, he would be with Tomislav and Mladen and they would fight again the battles on the different pinch points of the perimeter. They could take two hours to re-create the moments when the last RPG-7 round had been fired against a slow-moving tank, and two more hours to chew on the killing, with the Dragunov sniper rifle, of a major whose death had stalled an infantry advance. They took a minimum of two hours to talk over the bayonet battle at close quarters on the far side of the village when twelve had stopped forty in their tracks. They were never defeated, never found wanting in tactics or strategy as they sat in the cafe, toyed with the coffee and smoked. Always they were betrayed – by the government, which had not allocated resources and fresh men, and had not broken the siege of the town and the villages – but they had also suffered the treachery of the weapons paid for but not delivered. Betrayal. Treachery. Every day in the cafe they blamed defeat on the two evils.
Her voice was sharper, demanding to know where in the garden he was.
She had collected everything of value in the village in a plastic shopping bag, and during the day, through the night, the quiet times and when the bombardment was fiercest, the people of their community had come to the kitchen of Andrija and Maria’s home and had brought with them everything of value they possessed – jewellery, ornaments, heirlooms, cash, insurance policies, house deeds. It had all gone into the bag and been transferred to the care of Zoran. Maria had stripped the villagers of all that was precious to them. It should have bought the weapons but had not.
The anguish was worse because a grave had been found. The American had been at Andrija’s house the last evening and had asked translated questions concerning the clothing his cousin had worn that night, nineteen years before. He was asked what colour undershirt and underpants, what pattern on the socks and what sort of boots. He had had no answers. He had sat in his chair and said he did not know. He thought his ignorance shamed him.
He had nothing to live for. Devils beset him. Only in death would he escape them.
He was kicked.
She stood over him.
His wife used the toe of her flat shoe to push him from his stomach on to his back and the grenade was exposed. It was Maria, a principal voice among the women in the refugee camp, who had demanded that each woman never replace her rings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches and earrings until the betrayal and treachery were answered. He closed his eyes. She bent over him and he felt her breath on his face. She did not kiss him – had not kissed him on the day they were reunited in the refugee camp of wood huts in the mud on the south side of Zagreb, or on any day since – and did not run her hand over the stubble on his cheeks or tousle his hair, but she took his hand. She prised the grenade away from him and he thought his finger would dislocate as she freed the pin.
So, it would go on. The misery and the anguish were on a conveyor-belt and he had no escape from them.
Andrija did not know how betrayal and treachery could be answered, and did not know how freedom could be regained. She walked away from him, with the grenade. Had he been prepared to pull the pin? Many had. He pushed himself on to his side, took his weight on his knee, then levered himself up with his crutch. He thought he would go to the cafe and fight again a day of the war.
He did not know how the evil done would be answered.
There had been a moment, for Robbie Cairns, of indecision. It had been overcast, sultry, that morning, on the south side of the river. His T-shirt had stuck to his chest and back when Vern had picked him up in the car. New number plates. They had crossed Southwark Bridge and gone north – had been close to the location when rain had spattered the windscreen. Rain mattered.
In rain, would Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson put on a raincoat or hoist an umbrella, then go down the street for his newspaper and a pot of tea? Would he say he could pick up the runners and riders later, skip the cafe and do without his walk? Robbie Cairns didn’t fancy hanging about between the electronic gates and the estate agent’s with the recessed doorway, or waiting opposite the newsagent on the other side of the street. He wore a lightweight windcheater, as unremarkable as everything else about him, but it had an inner pocket in which the Baikal pistol nestled. He would hardly want to be stuck out on a pavement, armed up, not knowing whether the target would come to him or stay in and watch breakfast TV or shag his missus while the rain hosed his windows. It wasn’t Robbie Cairns’s style to ask his elder brother for advice. Enough times in the past Vern had been driving him towards a target when Robbie had, abruptly, aborted. He only had to say it was ‘turn-round time’ and Vern would spin, cut across traffic lanes and be well gone. Vern was not one to debate – he did as he was told.
The indecision moment passed quickly. Some rubbish, plastic bags and a sheet of tabloid newspaper were blowing down the pavement, and a glance into the direction the wind was coming from showed that the rain was temporary.
They’d done all the talk.
No reason for him to do more explaining about where he would wait and where he would hit. He had done all of that the previous evening. Then he had put the detail of a killing out of his mind, and most of that evening he had been on the sofa with Barbie, watching TV, not thinking about being up close to a target and doing the hit between the eyes with a converted Baikal.
If he had wanted to abort he would have said so. Vern didn’t prompt.
The first time Robbie Cairns had taken a life was a week after his twenty-first birthday. He was doing debt collecting, going the rounds for a local man who dealt in tablets and skunk, and the joker at the door had told the fresh-faced lad who had come for the envelope to ‘Go piss yourself’. Then he had laughed and spat at Robbie’s feet. A little of the mess had gone on Robbie’s shoes. Robbie had not told the local man that his debt was as yet uncollected. He had gone into the family network, had hired the handgun and a half-dozen shells for the magazine. Three nights later he had been back at the door and was ringing the bell. Two issues to be resolved: unpaid debt and respect.
First he had shot the man, one bullet, through the kneecap. The pain had been sufficient to persuade him that paying up was sensible. There had been a trail of blood across the carpet as the man had clung for support to furniture before getting to the safe and extracting the necessary cash. But that had dealt only with the debt. Robbie had then settled the matter of respect. If he hadn’t laughed and spat, the man would still have been walking, awkwardly, down a Bermondsey street. But he had, so there was a handgun in his face. Nobody in the block had
