Read THE HEART OF DANGER Online
Authors: Gerald Seymour
Tags: #War Crimes; thriller; mass grave; Library; Kupa; Croatia; Mowatt; Penn; Dorrie;
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chairs of the pavement cafes were taken. The sun shone, warm enough
for Penn to have turned on his heel after a hundred-yard walk,
collected his room key again, and dumped his coat and his scarf and
his
gloves. A fine morning to walk, and for the second time he passed
the
taxi line in the road outside the hotel. It was all a culture shock
for Bill Penn, and he had the guidebook to tell him that this was
an
old city, historic and finely preserved, and he could not square the
city with what he had seen in his hotel room on the television from
the
satellite news. On the news, across country, was Srebrenica where
a
town was being shelled and starved to surrender, and on the same
bulletin had been clear colour pictures of British squad dies hand-So
ling charred bodies, and a young officer had said his men would need
counselling if they were not to be scarred for the rest of their lives.
And there had been film of an American aircraft carrier, across the
water, taking off with the bomb loads in place for practice runs.
A
war in Bosnia across country, and nothing of it to be seen by Penn
as
he viewed, for the first time, the capital city of Zagreb. He walked
quickly. He was not a tourist. He was on assignment. He had
polished
his black shoes in his room, he wore his charcoal-grey trousers and
his
blazer and he had brushed the flecks from the shoulders. He had his
white shirt and a quiet tie, and he carried his old briefcase, and
it
was difficult for him to realize that the months had passed by, that
it
was not a 'government' assignment. He had a starting place but not
yet
a programme. He went up Haulikova and across Andrije Hebranga and
up
Preradoviceva and came to a wide square. He felt comfortable; he
liked
the feel of the place; he would write a good fast report; he thought
that Jane would have liked the feel of the city .. . On Ilica, looking
left, jumping out of the path of a damned tram, he saw the flag. Red
and white and blue, and looking as if it needed a full wash and tumble,
and hanging limp. It was an old building and there was an arched
entrance to the inner courtyard, and a brass plaque at the side door.
Of course the embassy was Perm's start point. He saw the posters
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on
the stair walls. Edinburgh Castle, British butterflies, a Cotswold
village, badgers outside a sett, Buckingham Palace, it was the world
to
which he had once belonged .. . Inside a small lobby, and the
Englishwoman at the desk smiling and asking him with studied
politeness, "Can I help?" "My name's Penn, Bill Penn. I'd like to see
one of your diplomats, please. It's in connection with Miss Mowat.
It's about the late Miss Dorothy Mowat." It was as if he had sworn, or
unzipped his flies, because the smile was suddenly gone from her.
She
gestured for him to wait, and her face was cold. He wondered if she
had been here, Dorrie, turning the faces cold. He thought that Mary
Braddock would have been here, sitting on the hard chairs in the small
lobby and turning the pages of the English magazines, killing the
smiles. He could see the Englishwoman blurred through the frosted
glass of the adjacent office. He wondered if anyone had jumped when
Mary Braddock had come the first time to start a search for her
daughter and failed. The blurred shapes meandered across the face
of
the glass and towards the door. He thought the papers would have
been
sorted here, stamped here, duplicated here, for the repatriation of
the
corpse. The Englishwoman stood in the door and gestured Penn
forward,
and stepped aside. The room had been large once, perhaps the salon
of
a well-proportioned apartment, but it was now sub-divided into rabbit
hutches. There was a tall man, in shirtsleeves and braces, rather
young. He didn't offer a handshake. Cigarette smoke curled from
an
ashtray. He didn't give his name. The desk was a confusion of
paper.
He stood. "I'm the First Secretary. Who do you represent, Mr.
Penn?"
"I represent Miss Mowat's mother. I've been hired by Mrs. Mary
Braddock." "And what are you, Mr. Penn?" Pederast, no ... pusher, no
... pimp, no ... private investigator, yes .. . "I am a private
investigator, I have been employed by Mrs. Braddock to examine the
circumstances of her daughter's murder." "Why do you come here?"
Penn
bridled. "As a starting point. She was British, I'm British,
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natural
enough to attend Her Britannic Majesty's talking shop .. ." "We gave Mrs. Braddock every possible help, she left here knowing as much
as it
was humanly possible to know." "Can't accept that. She wrote a note,
Mrs. Braddock, of what she had been told, which I read. She had
been
told nothing. If she hadn't been told nothing, then I wouldn't be
here. Because .. ." It was a sharp little voice, reedy. "We have a
full load of work and about half the staff necessary to accomplish
it... No, don't interrupt, listen. Mrs. Braddock was told
everything
about her daughter's death that it was possible to discover,
everything. I wouldn't imagine that private investigators have too
much time to read newspapers. If you read a newspaper regularly then
you would know that there was a pretty horrible war going on down
here,
and facts, truths, tend to be rather a long way down the order of
priorities. Where Miss Mowat died only a lunatic would have been.
She
died because she was a fool. As regards facts, in that dirty little
war some 20,000 Croatians lost their lives, more than 30,000 were
wounded, 7,000 are missing presumed dead, 250,000 have fled their
former homes .. . Do I make myself clear? There has been an
earthquake
here of human misery, and against the reality of that destruction
the
demands of a mother for a fuller investigation into the death of one
young lunatic woman is quite unreasonable. First day here, is it?
Well, get yourself a map, Mr. Penn, learn a bit of geography. Where she died is behind Serb lines, where she was killed is closed
territory. I wouldn't want to see you or hear of you again, Mr.
Penn,
because if I see you or hear of you again then it will mean you have
caused trouble. I've enough to concern me without freelancers
interfering in sensitive areas and making trouble .. ." He had torn a
sheet of paper from a notepad. He wrote fast on it, passed the paper
to Penn. '.. . I imagine you have to justify an inflated fee. I
don't suppose you speak fluent Serbo-Croat, no? That's an
interpreter.
Second is the name of the man who runs the Croatian war crimes unit,
he
won't know anything, but he'll be impressive on your report. By the
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by, do you know how Mrs. Braddock came to know that her daughter
was
here? A demand for money. Do you know how she came to know her
daughter was missing? The money wasn't collected, it was sent back.
Didn't she tell you? We're not talking about a very caring young
woman, you know ... Go away, Mr. Penn, and I suggest you allow the
dead to sleep." He walked to the door and opened it for Penn. Penn took himself past the Englishwoman to the main door. He went out
onto
the street, numbed. It was as if a cold wind had come. The hunger
strike was spreading on the third floor. Men were smoking more in
the
sleeping rooms and she had shouted and threatened. She had more
families coming from Bosnia in the morning and the accommodation area
was already saturated. She had received, smiling and cheerful and
a
sham, a delegation that afternoon from the Swedish Red Cross. It
was
close to midnight and she was exhausted. She had had the police in,
accusing the children of stealing in the town. Men from Prijedor,
on
the second floor, had been close, almost, to a riot at the counter
for
"Onward Movement'. Another day ending for Ulrike Schmidt as she
slipped, dead on her feet, out from the high heavy doors of the Transit
Centre. She went to her car, parked in the square, and she did not
look back at the old barracks building that was the Transit Centre
for
Bosnian Muslim refugees. The end of another eighteen-hour day and
she
had no need to look back on the building. The building consumed her
attention, eighteen hours a day. She slumped behind the wheel of
the
little Volkswagen Beetle, bit at her lip, turned the ignition key.
Ahead of her was a cold supper in the fridge of her apartment, a
night's heavy and unrewarding sleep, the clamour of an alarm clock.
That was the life of Ulrike Schmidt, paid by the United Nations High
Commission for Refugees to administer the Transit Centre at Karlovac.
The men were on hunger strike because they had been promised entry
with
their families to Austria, the papers were in place, but the visas
were
delayed. The members of the delegation of the Swedish Red Cross were
disarming and friendly, but adamant that they could offer only
medicines, not entry permits. If the men smoked in the rooms of the
barracks where the floors were covered with mattresses, where each
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family made personal boxes from hanging blankets, then the fire risk
was just appalling. If the police came in and demanded the right
to
search, and if the police took away children for thieving, then there
would be fighting. And if more families came in the morning, and
the
resident families had to be pushed into making room for them ... if
more entry permits were not available at the "Onward Movement'
counter
.. . She drove away. She left it behind her, for six hours, the misery
of 2,400 refugees who were her charge. Ulrike Schmidt had told the
delegation of the Swedish Red Cross that the Bosnian Muslim refugees
were the most traumatized people in the world. She had told them
that
where they stood, grasping their fact-sheets, was the most
traumatized
place in the world. How did she cope? she was asked by a
severe-faced
woman from Gothenburg. "When you fall over you have to pick yourself up, wipe off the dirt, start again." And she had smiled, and they
had
all laughed, and they did not understand what was her life for
eighteen
hours of the day. She drove through the deserted streets of the front
line town towards her apartment. It was the day a letter usually
came
from her mother in Munich. Her life, her emotions, were shared only
with her parents who wrote to her once every week. She allowed no
one
else access to her emotions. The jeep passed her. Her headlights
caught the open back of the jeep, and then the vehicle, arrogantly
driven, cut across her. She braked. She slowed. There were four men
in the back of the jeep. Her headlights snatched at their faces that
were indistinct from the dirt and the camouflage cream. The jeep
stopped hard outside the sandbagged entrance to the old police
station.
She was at crawl speed. Three men out of the back of the jeep,
jumping down, pulling after them their weapons and their backpacks.
One man left in the jeep. As she went by him she looked into his
face.
The man sat in the open back of the jeep and his hands were locked
onto the barrel of his rifle. He was older than the others and he
had
weight at the jowls and the cheeks of his face. The eyes were full
of
74
fear and shock. She saw the trembling of the body of the man and
he
blinked into the headlights of her car, and he had made no movement
to
climb down from the jeep. She saw the filthy uniform that was
mud-covered and soaked wet. Ulrike Schmidt understood. She drove
on.
The fear and the shock and the trembling belonged to those who came
from behind the lines, across the Kupa river. After her six hours,
after the alarm had gone in the morning, she would be at the crossing
point at Turanj and she would meet the new party of refugees, for
whom
she had no space at the Transit Centre, and she would see the same
fear
and shock and trembling in those who had come from behind the lines.
She speeded her car.
A silent little prayer played at her lips that the letter from her
mother would be waiting at her apartment.
Five.
Sitting upright, uncomfortable, Jovic was waiting. Penn had learned
to
use the staircase rather than wait for the interminable lift. He
paused at the angle of the stairs, and saw the young man immediately.
The hotel lobby was filled for the gathering, before the first