done the boys first. The father of one was the farmer whose land had been mined and whose plough had exposed the grave site; the other father lived alone and kept his home as a shrine. The interpreter had told Anders, behind a hand, that the mother had been Serb and had run with the younger children. Scraps of clothing were sufficient for identification and estimates of size, stature. The third, the cousin, was decided by elimination – there was always a problem with the results thrown up by his painstaking examinations.
With his small brush, a spatula and a trowel – much smaller than his wife would use on her geranium pots in faraway San Diego – he had the skills to say how a victim had been put to death. With each corpse he had found bullet and shrapnel scars on bones, then holes and rents in the surviving clothing, but he had also removed the remnants of decayed gristle from the mouths. Usually he maintained total honesty in conversation with victims’ loved ones, and in his detailed reports to investigating magistrates and law-enforcement agencies. He knew of the mutilation of the three young men, and now turned to the last.
He had the shape of an older man from the construction of the pelvic bones, and could imagine the weight from the tread of the boots worn that night. Therefore he had a name. As background, he had been informed by a policeman, and it was corroborated by a hospital official, that a small group had been in the cornfields, waiting for a munitions delivery. They had stayed too long and had disappeared – until the plough had found them. The smell was foul. It was extraordinary, even to this forensic scientist, how the stench of the long-dead could penetrate his plastic gown to his skin and was hard to remove even with intense scrubbing. He started to work through the pockets of a battlefield camouflage tunic.
Coins, the fragments of a cigarette packet, a lighter, a handkerchief, still folded, a smooth pebble that might have been a keepsake, a comb – but this was a man of authority in the community and Anders understood the necessity of appearance, even in a goddamn life-and-death military scenario – lightweight gloves, a little torch and a small can of boot polish. He assumed it was for smearing on the face by a man who couldn’t tolerate bending to pick up mud and wipe that on his cheeks. There was also a wad of folded paper.
In the pit that had been gouged for the four bodies, this corpse was the last to be lifted clear. It had been first in, the deepest, and was the best preserved. There was more flesh on the bones, and the clothing had lasted, as had the boots and the folded paper.
It was the only piece of paper he had found on any of them.
He asked an assistant for clean gloves and another pair of tweezers, similar to those his wife used on her eyebrows. When he had what he had requested, and the clean gloves were on his hands, he used his own tweezers and those brought to him to open the closely folded sheet.
The preservation was remarkable but that didn’t surprise William Anders. Neither did the clarity of the writing, letters and numbers.
It started as half the size of a postage stamp. Opened out, the single sheet of paper, discoloured and crossed with the folding lines, was a little larger than the packet of twenty Marlboro Lite cigarettes that was already bagged.
He used a magnifying-glass to read.
There were moments on all the digs and autopsies when he was able to insinuate himself into the lives of the dead – in Srebrenica, Rwanda, East Timor, by an excavated pit outside Baghdad, and the place where a husband had buried his wife, then play-acted anguish for local TV stations – when he had called back a truth from the past. He didn’t know the significance of what he read but he sensed a moment of importance. The blood rushed into his face.
With the magnifying-glass covering the smoothed paper, he could make out the name and the individual numbers.
His back hurt, had stiffened. He felt the craving of the addiction and wasn’t inclined to fight it. He dropped the paper into a plastic sleeve, called a halt and told the assistant they would break for lunch – a sandwich, whatever. He was never put off eating by handling decomposing bodies and the smell that settled in the pores of his skin, never put off a drink and a smoke. He shrugged out of the robe, moved the face mask high on to his forehead, kicked off the plastic boots and shed the gloves. He pushed open the plastic sheets draped over an airlock entry to the marquee and stepped outside.
Each morning before he went to work, on whatever death site on whichever continent, he topped up his hip flask with Irish whiskey and loaded the leather cigar case to capacity.
There had been an Anglicised name and a phone number. A different ballpoint had been used to write the name of a hotel.
He took a serious gulp from the hip flask and felt the glow swill down his throat. Then he used the cutter to trim the end of a cigar and lit it. He wondered who Harvey Gillott was, and in what town or city he could find the Hotel Continental – Setaliste Andrije Kacica Mosica 1.
‘I was told you were back in town so I called by.’
Anders turned. It was the one man he knew in Vukovar and could call a friend, a wiry little runt. He held the cigar between his teeth and let the grin spread.
It was a mark of affection, Daniel Steyn reckoned. He didn’t think too many others had been offered three swigs from the thimble-sized screw cap at the mouth of the hip flask. Good stuff. There was an Irish bar further down Zupanijska, opposite the site of the command bunker for the 204 Vukovarske Brigade, but the prices were beyond his budget. He had been offered a cigar, which he had declined. Instead he lit another cigarette – they were cheap, brought across the Danube by smugglers from Serbia, usually using the area downriver near Ilok.
Steyn said, ‘It’s become legend – not in the mythical sense because it happened. Believe me. The teacher, extraordinarily, had a line into a weapons broker and concluded a deal. Cut out government, bypassed the defence ministry, kept the local military in complete ignorance. The teacher said – and would have been about right – that they’d commandeer any hardware. Government and ministry had given up on Vukovar and would have shipped it into the front line protecting Zagreb, while the local military would have tried to get it into Vukovar, rather than the villages, where a thousand fighters were on their last legs and their weapons were useless for lack of resupply.’
‘I never heard that before, not in all the times I’ve been here.’
Steyn dragged hard on his cigarette, then flipped it on to the grass, which in 1991, on 18 November, had been covered with bodies.
‘On the night the weapons were supposed to arrive, the teacher and three other men went into the cornfields – a damn hazardous route – and towards Vukovar along the fragile lifeline they called the Cornfield Road. They were caught in the open at dawn and the stuff they’d paid for never came. You got them in there?’
Anders gestured towards the tenting and the small refrigerated truck. He and Steyn were from different disciplines. The forensic scientist dealt with the fatal injuries caused by mass execution, major bomb blasts, such as Oklahoma City, or murder where time should have ravaged the potential clues left by a killer. Daniel Steyn was a general practitioner of medicine, but with a bent towards a meld of psychology and psychiatry. His father ran a hardware store in small-town upstate New York so he had paid his own way through university at Madison’s medical faculty. He had practised for a few years in the city and pitched up seventeen years ago in Vukovar, where he had thought there would be a job worth doing. He was now part of the fabric of society there, loathed by local politicians and despised by the town’s doctors, but he hung on and spoke unpleasant truths. He rejoiced when a friend turned up.
Another cigarette was lit and another ring of ash fell from the cigar. The thimble cup of the hip flask was filled again and passed. Steyn asked, in a harsh east-coast grating accent, ‘You find anything on the bodies – rings, jewellery, religious gear?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There’s a big blame culture here. They’re quality at chucking blame – but not at themselves. They’re always victims. Right now, there are two targets for a shit bucket of blame. First, the government that abandoned them. That was treachery. Second, the man with whom a deal was supposedly done and left them standing unprotected in a field of dead corn. That was betrayal. They’d paid up front – that was where the legend was born.’
‘Keep going. I have until my smoke is completed.’
Steyn jabbed a finger in emphasis. ‘The legend is about a collection. A price was agreed for the munitions, and I don’t know exactly what they were but they would have been important for the defence of that community, and expensive. Everything that anyone owned of value in that village, which was under siege, shelled, mortared and bombed, was dropped into a bag and used as currency for the purchase. It went down the drain. The weapons drop
