The Dealer and the Dead (10 page)

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 was never made. That is
betrayal
in my book. Only the teacher had the name of the seller, and he didn’t share it. You with me? The living don’t know who betrayed them. Did it jump out at you?’

The cigar was nearly finished and guttered in his fingers. Anders said, ‘No woman I saw wore even the cheapest earrings, and there wasn’t a brooch or bracelet in sight, not even a trinket you’d get out of a cracker at a kids’ party.’

‘Because a pulse beats in the place that no woman will wear so much as a wedding ring to replace what they put into the bag, until revenge has been taken on whoever sold them short. They live in the past – more so than any other community here that suffered, and plenty did. That village and community are trapped … Heh, it makes for clients – I could do a year’s work on that one village and not have seen half of them.’

The cigar butt was thrown down. Two hundred and sixty people had been taken from the underground bomb-proof shelter of the hospital, the wounded and the staff who cared for them, and butchered. Two hundred bodies had been taken from the ground and identified by William Anders and many colleagues. Sixty remained hidden, buried. Steyn knew his friend would keep coming back until the last grave was found. They’d have dinner together one night. His housekeeper would cook. He had little money, but the woman did miracles with what he could give her. On the refrigerator in his kitchen he had stuck postcards Anders had sent him from corners of the world where graves had been uncovered. God, he valued the man’s company. He clasped his friend’s shoulder and saw a car pull up, a Mercedes 300 series saloon. Daniel Steyn had not treated the village leader but knew him and his history. The door was slammed. He was acknowledged. A question was asked. Steyn translated: ‘Do you have the identifications?’

‘I do.’

‘He asks whether anything of significance has been found.’

He watched Anders’ raw, weathered face. He saw little lines form in it, as if a matter was worthy of consideration. Then an answer: ‘Not for me to censor. Hell, this isn’t a business in which we suppress. We throw light – we shine the beam into dark places.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Tell him to wait right here.’

William Anders pocketed the hip flask, strode back to the marquee and through the flaps that kept the internal air chilled.

The man – he knew him as Mladen – told Steyn that one of the veterans had that morning come near to suicide, but his wife had found him and a hand grenade was now back in the box beside the Dragunov rifle that a sniper had once used. Which man? He was given a name. He knew the man with the crudely chopped-off leg – surgeons under pressure had done their best with minimal time and skill.

Anders was behind him. ‘Translate this. There was a piece of paper in the teacher’s pocket, folded close enough for writing to survive. There’s a name, Harvey Gillot, and a phone number. In a different ink, and therefore written later, there’s the name of a hotel, too.’ Anders passed him a sheet of paper on which he had written the name, the number and the address. Daniel Steyn didn’t know whether he would have done that – probably not – but, hell, it was nineteen years ago and any trail would have chilled.

Mladen took the paper. He said softly, ‘Harvey Gillot …
Harvey Gillot …
Harvey Gillot …’

‘Does she have anything interesting or marginally relevant on Harvey Gillot?’ Her line manager put the question without looking up from his laptop.

Penny Laing thought it blatant rudeness not to make eye contact. She feigned indifference. ‘I sent it over to you. Do you want it sent again?’

His head was still lowered. She wondered what he was reading that so captivated him – maybe the new guidelines on safeguards required by human-rights legislation for intrusive surveillance, maybe the runners tomorrow at Doncaster, maybe the revised pension estimates for HMRC. She stood, waited, made silent complaint.

He said, ‘I didn’t learn whether you thought she was worth going to, following, sticking with. That’s what I’m asking.’ She ground a fingernail into her palm and let the pain remind
her that sourness was the fast track back to VAT work or worse. ‘Yes, she was. But – am I allowed to say it? The whole scenario got right up my nose. I did time in the Democratic Republic of Congo and—’

Now the line manager interrupted with a sweet smile to match his voice: ‘And I’ve worked in Halifax, Glasgow and Plymouth. Why is Megs Behan worth sticking with?’

‘Can I be blunt?’

‘Blunt will do.’

‘Because she has better assets than I do. Because she’s better informed than I can ever be. She knows where Gillot is, what deals he’s doing, when he’s in Ostend and what charters are then flying out and – are you getting me? It’s humiliating to be traipsing to an organisation like that when we don’t have the resources to do a proper job. Stick with her, yes.’

‘Remember the downturn, the crisis, the crunch.’

‘I do, with my corn flakes each morning.’

‘Also remember we’re somewhat of a luxury. A good conscience appeaser for legislators, the Church and the pink brigade. We’re a natural target for budget-slicing. To survive we need collars felt, court cases convened and sentences passed. Sorry and all that. Please, regular reports on Harvey Gillot – who is likely to be a right little shite.’

He was back at his laptop.

Penny Laing headed for her desk and wondered whether he was indeed an enemy. She swigged water and thought a thunderstorm was brewing – wondered if the target was touchable. The photograph in the file showed what she would have called a chancer’s face.

‘Harvey Gillot, oh, yes. Bloody hell, I’d nearly lost him.’

‘Who, Benjie?’

‘Harvey Gillot’s the name, Deirdre. Little man I used to know – and know no longer. One place for him.’

He had been known as Benjie since he was sent as a boarder to preparatory school sixty-one years before. By christening, he
was Benjamin Cumberland Arbuthnot. He and his wife, Deirdre, lived in a small, damp-ridden corner of her family seat, handed down on a line of inheritance for some two and a half centuries. He was now on the move. It was his seventieth year, so their son and daughter-in-law were giving them the push from the west wing, two floors of it, and consigning them to a cottage beyond the chapel adjacent to the pets’ cemetery. Clear-out time.

He might have been arrested, banged up in a cell without his tie, belt and shoelaces, if Special Branch had done a search and found the caches of classified papers – tea chests of them – he had accumulated during his time as an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service.

There was a brochure for a hotel in a Croatian coastal town, fastened with a paperclip to a three-page typewritten report – SECRET stamped in red on each page. He tossed it into the scorched oil drum that acted as an incinerator. More on that trip, and more stamped pages, than all the files from Peshawar – he was a magpie, unable to help himself, had always needed to take copies home. Always forgot to send them to Archive or an official shredder.

‘I don’t remember that name.’

‘You never met him, Deirdre.’

‘Did we never have him for a gin in Peshawar?’

‘God, no, we did not.’

‘Careful, you silly ass. Benjie, are you trying to singe yourself?’

Flames leaped. It had to be done. Half his damn life there, in the chests, now going into the fire. The Balkans. The Afghan trafficking of weapons. Too many files from Buenos Aires in late 1984 when relations were being restored over gin and more gin with the Secretariat of State Intelligence. The Balkans and Afghanistan were now unrecognisable grey flakes of burned paper.

He said, ‘Harvey Gillot was just a little man who was useful for a brief window of time. Then we closed the window and drew the curtain. With a fire like this we can get rid of damn near everything, but whether I have any eyebrows left is a moot point.’

He had always seemed an idiot – could give a polished
impression of imbecility and was clever at playing the fool. He chuckled as a flurry of seriously compromising documents spilled into the inferno.

‘A bit of a nobody who had his moment. Regarded me as God. Damn memory, I’d almost forgotten Harvey Gillot.’

‘Harvey Gillot – he betrayed us,’ Maria said.

‘Betrayed us and stole from us,’ the Widow said.

‘His word was worthless,’ the school-bus driver said.

‘We could have held back the tanks if we’d had the Little Baby that Harvey Gillot promised he would deliver to us, the 9K11 Malyutka. We had paid for it,’ said the man who had only one lung. He had lost the other to shrapnel and the surgeons had marvelled at his survival.

Andrija leaned against the inner door jamb. They were in his kitchen and only a single bulb, hanging from the ceiling, lit the table in the centre of the concrete floor. There was no linoleum or carpeting and no shade over the bulb. Some stood, some lounged against the kitchen units, but his wife and the Widow had taken the hard-backed chairs at the table. In front of them lay the slip of paper brought from the hospital. He had a pain in his abdomen from the kick she had given him. He offered them no alcohol, no coffee, but there was a filled water jug on the table and plastic glasses. She had been raped on the kitchen floor. Seven years later when they had returned, he had knelt on his one knee and she had gone to the far side of the kitchen. Together they had ripped up the flooring on which she had lain, dragged it outside and burned it. The scum had been drunk: she would not have alcohol in her home.

‘Now we can find him,’ Maria said.

‘It is owed to those who died, to those who suffered and survived, defeated, to search for him,’ the Widow said.

‘As one looks for a rat in a grain store.’ Maria again. Andrija thought he saw faint light in her eyes. She had not touched him when he had lain in the bed, after the amputation, and she had come to the hospital in the centre of Zagreb from the camp, nor
when he had been discharged and she had brought him back to the camp, or years later, when they had returned to the village. Their front door had been ajar, and they had realised that a Serb family had left within the last twenty-four hours. For eighty days Andrija had been a key fighter in the village’s defence, creating terror in the enemy trenches, but she frightened him, and showed him no affection.

‘And one stamps on the rat and stamps again,’ the man who drove the cesspit tanker said.

‘It is owed to those who were in the corn, to those who were wounded, tortured and violated because the village fell.’ Simun, Mladen’s son, had been two weeks old when the defence of the village was broken.

‘I think Harvey Gillot will have forgotten about us, but he will remember,’ Maria spat.

The widow said, almost with a smile of pleasure: ‘He will remember my husband, to whom he gave a promise.’

Mladen, the village leader who had been an electrician and now drove a Mercedes saloon, said, ‘Everything we had, except our lives, was taken by Harvey Gillot. It was an act of treachery.’

Andrija made no contribution. He had taken no part on that long-ago evening of decision-taking. He had not been there to speak for or against the purchase of wire-guided anti-tank missiles. He had been in a culvert drain that ran under a track that went into the corn. There had been a bare, open strip, perhaps because the seed had been diseased when that batch was planted, to which he could slide on his stomach from the culvert to gain a clear view of the enemy lines some two hundred metres away. He had dropped an officer, a medical orderly and a stretcher-bearer. Such was the fear he caused in the enemy that the bodies were left to the elements … On his way back into the village he had used a sharp flint to scratch three more lines on the wooden butt of the rifle.

His wife had organised the collection of valuables that the teacher had demanded. Andrija’s opinion had not been required then either. In the darkness, men and women had come to his
back door. He had seen the little items of jewellery and heard the clatter of rings as they were pulled from fingers and dropped on to the table. There had been envelopes that contained house deeds. His wife, Maria, had not thanked those who gave what they had – all that was precious to them – just tipped it into a shopping bag, which the teacher had taken, the next day, along the Cornfield Road.

Would the delivery of forty or fifty 9K11 Malyutka – the Little Baby – have made any difference to the outcome of the battle? Would the anti-tank weapons have held up the enemy’s advance on the village indefinitely? Would they have kept the
Kukuruzni Put
open for another two weeks, or a month? Andrija’s eyes roved the room. He noted who spoke and who did not: Petar and Tomislav had said nothing, and they had lost sons; neither had Josip.

‘We will find Harvey Gillot. When we search for him, he cannot hide,’ Maria said.

It was a small-wattage bulb, and shadows riddled his kitchen. Andrija knew what would be decided.

‘He should know of our agony and be punished for it.’ The Widow sniffed. She was the judge who passed sentence on a man, condemned him.