The Untouchable (17 page)

The
legenda
called himself Serif. He was Ismet Mujic. Old police files had listed him as born in 1963, reared in an orphanage following the disappearance of his father and the committal of his mother to a psy-chiatric ward after a nervous collapse, but the files had long since been taken from the shelves and destroyed. After running from the orphanage, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he had joined the street kids roaming loose in the city and had begun a life of thieving. His early career had had two sides: he had also gained rich rewards from informing the police about other kids who followed the same trade.

Then, and it had not seemed unnatural to him, he had become a policeman . . . He could remember very clearly the man who had come, and he could roll his tongue over the strange-sounding name of Duncan Dubbs. By 1984, Olympic year and a year of prime pickings, he had been a police bodyguard to the same official who was now paramount in the Ministry of the Interior and had mixed his duties with the lucra-tive provision of 'protection' to those traders, club-owners and restaurateurs who made fat killings from the Winter Games. When the war had started and chaos had gripped the undefended city, the legend of Serif had taken flight. The city had been about to collapse under the onslaught of the Serb forces, and its Muslim community had neither the men nor the munitions to prevent its fall. The scale of the impending catastrophe had thrown up, spewed out, a fighting leader. He had gone to the old prison, cleared out the hardest of the convicts, driven them in two lorries to the Central Bank and rifled the cash tills, then gone on to the Marshal Tito barracks on Zmaja od Bosne and thrown the banknotes at the officer commanding the regular troops' armoury then taken out all the small arms that could be loaded onto two lorries, and they had gone into the line. On those first days, the greatest threat to the city's survival had been the Serb infantry push from Grbavica towards the former Olympic complex of Skenderija. In fighting of primitive ferocity, the line had held. It had been rifle against rifle, grenade against grenade, knife against knife, fist against fist. He became a fire brigade. First he deployed in Grbavica, then on assaults up the hill between the gravestones of the Jewish cemetery, then in Dobrinja to protect the tunnel linking the besieged city to the outside world - and his wealth had grown.

By the end of the war his power over the city had been absolute.

Serif discussed again with the intelligence officer and a politician's nephew the proposal that had been made by Duncan Dubbs two weeks before, as they had discussed it before the visitor's death and after it, sipping good imported whisky. It was a natural arrangement in that city that a 'businessman' and an official sworn to defend the security of the state and the young relation of a principal politician should meet to talk over the merits of a contract offered by an outsider.

'What does he know?'

'Nothing,' the intelligence officer said.

'A list of witnesses has been given to the idiot judge, Delic, who will sing the same song, and the pathology report is in place - there is nothing he can know,' the politician's nephew said.

'And because he knows nothing, he comes with the promise of gifts,' Serif mused.

The intelligence officer murmured, 'Gifts should always be accepted, and after they have been given, the decisions can be made.'

They left the apartment as his boy, Enver, his sweet boy, returned from walking his Rottweiler dogs. They went out on to the street where the guards had machine pistols hidden under their coats. They walked with a cordon of guards around them. Serif had physical presence: he was short, broad-shouldered, with a clean-shaven head, and dressed always only in black. In Bascarsija's narrow lanes he owned the DiscoNite and the Platinum City where those few with money came and filled the tables, but in each a private room was always kept for him. The Platinum City was near to the river and they headed for it. It was where he had entertained Duncan Dubbs on the night of his death. At the door he paused. 'The man who came, Dubbs, he understood nothing of us.

The man who is travelling with gifts, who looks to buy us, whom we are urged to treat with respect, I doubt that he understands more of us . . . '

His mobile phone rang. It sounded sharp in the night air. He answered it. 'Yes? . . . Yes, yes, this is that number . . . Who is that? . . . Who is it? . . . Do you have a wrong number? Who are you? Go fuck your father . . . ' He closed the call and pocketed the phone.

He Shrugged. 'Just some woman, she asks me if she has the right number and reads off the digits, then says nothing - some crazy bitch.'

They went down the stairs and into the throb of the dance music.

New Year's Day 1993

The radio said that the war went badly. They did not need to be told. The tanks had come to the far side of the valley on the day before the enemy's Christmas festival. They had not fired on the day of the festival, but the shells had hit Vraca each day afterwards. The troops at Vraca had no tanks, no artillery and no heavy mortars for retaliation. Led by Husein Bekir, those villagers who had stayed in their homes spent the nights in their cellars and the days cowering in the outhouses at the rear of the houses, or they had gone to live in tents in the cover of the trees that climbed above the village. In the daylight hours it was assumed that the tank crews slept or drank themselves stupid, but it was still not safe to walk between the houses because two snipers operated from close to the river and the bullets from their long-barrelled rifles could reach Vraca.

And it had rained ever since the enemy's festival.

The day the tanks had arrived across the valley the low clouds had scattered a fine carpet of snow over the two villages and the valley between them. From Vraca, Husein had been able to see the track trails they left as they nudged into the hiding-places chosen in the wreckage of Ljut. He had seen the lorries arrive and the unloading of the bright brass shell cases. Then the rain had started. Snow was seen only rarely in the valley, but the rain came down with a particular and cruel intensity, battering the roofs of the damaged buildings and through windows and doors that had been blasted off their frames. And with the rain came the cold.

Smoke from the fires the villagers lit to warm themselves was a beacon to the tank gunners. Even when it had been safe to light fires, the kindling and split logs were too damp. There was no heating-oil left in the village; it had been finished a month before the snow-fall and the arrival of the tanks. They lived, like animals, day and night, in darkness, wrapped in wet blankets; their food and the troops' rations were near to exhaustion. At dawn, on the enemy's New Year's Day, the officer came to Husein Bekir's home. He was panting because he had sprinted from the village, across open ground, to the house and then down into the cellar.

There was no coffee, if she could have heated it, that Lila could offer to the commander of the troops. ' I have bad news - and then perhaps worse.' The officer grimaced.

Over the weeks since the troops had come to Vraca, they had almost become friends. Husein thought the officer a good man, and did not believe him responsible for what had happened across the valley, in Ljut, on the autumn night of the attack over the river. They could never be close friends, but he respected the man's honour, and in return was always treated with courtesy. He was the first of the village's civilians to be told of military plans. The officer was from the east, and the town where his family lived, his wife and two children, had been purged of Muslims, and he did not know whether his family had fled successfully or been killed. The officer talked with them, Husein and Lila, as if they were his own parents.

'Brigade does not believe that Vraca is of sufficient strategic importance.'

'What does that mean?'

'That we will pull out, retreat to a more defensible position.'

' A n d . . . ? '

'We have information from behind the lines on the other side that the tanks have come to soften our defence before an attack on the village. When it comes, it will not be from soldiers but from the scum of the White Eagles. They are the same as Arkan's criminals or Seselj's. When they come, esteemed friend, they will kill every male, old or young. They will violate every woman, old or young, and they will destroy the village and flatten the cemetery where your people are buried, and mine. They will make the men watch the violation of their women, their daughters, their sisters and their mothers, and then they will kill them. As the chief man of the village, you would be selected for torture in front of all the men, women and children. It is what they have done all over the country. The military do the fighting, then the scum come to scavenge, and kill.'

'Because of what your men did in Ljut.'

'I cannot justify that madness - but we did not begin the barbarism.'

'And you will abandon us?'

'We will escort you from a place that is no longer defensible - I am taking casualties for no gain. Our position does not make military sense.'

'Can you not put down mines, as they have done?'

'We have no mines, we do not have the factories as they do - we have to go, Husein, and we will take you with us.'

The old farmer pulled himself to his full height, the crown of his balding scalp brushing against the beams and the sodden plaster of the cellar ceiling. Emotion broke his voice. 'It is my home. They are my fields.'

'We all have homes,' the officer said grimly. 'We all have families, and we all have cemeteries where our people are buried. My orders are to evacuate you.'

'Where will we go?'

'I don't know . . . to a camp, or abroad.'

'What can we take?'

'What you can carry - no more.'

'When do we go?'

'Tonight.'

The officer climbed out of the cellar. Husein's wife held him, and the tears streamed down his cheeks. He smelt the damp of her clothes. Without speaking they clung to each other for several minutes, near to a quarter of an hour. The village was their lives, and had been their parents' lives and their grandparents'

and, until the madness came, they had assumed it would be their grandchildren's lives. She took a grimy handkerchief from the pocket of her apron, under a heavy coat, and defiantly wiped his eyes; she had not wept. He climbed the steps, treacherous from the damp, from the cellar. She would pack. She would know better than him what they, old people, could carry.

He went out of the back, then tried to run to the outbuildings. He could not go quickly and his best effort was a slow, crabbed short stride and he bent his spine to make a smaller target. The one shot was high.

He reached the buildings where the cattle bellowed in protest, They were hungry: no fresh fodder had been brought to them for three days.

He went to the main double door of nailed planks, and threw it open. The rain spat on to him.

Husein Bekir looked out over the valley, peered through the driving rain. Past his rusting tractor, and his fields that had died from inattention, past his vineyard where the weeds sprouted and the posts sagged, grey streams of water ran down the hill from the village of Ljut and from the high ground that flanked it. The track from the far village was a watercourse, but many more streams were pounding in torrents from the hills and pressing past the bare trees to the flooded river, which had already broken its banks.

Although he was not stupid, with a deep-set experience of agriculture, and cunning where money and commerce were concerned, Husein Bekir did not have the intelligence to consider that a minefield was, in effect, a living organism with the power of movement.

His eyes roved over those places where he had witnessed the mines being laid, and he did not know that some of the PMA2 anti-personnel mines were now being buried deep under silt that would provide a protective layer over them, and that others would be lifted by the flood's force and carried metres from where they had been sown. Neither did he know that the wooden stakes holding in place the PMA3s and the PROMs could be pushed from the ground by the streams, as the stakes holding the trip-wires had been dislodged. He did not know that some of the points he believed to be poisoned with the mines were now free of them, and some of the places where he had thought the ground safe were now lethal.

As he looked across the valley there was nothing to see of this secret movement.

The whole of the afternoon, he stayed in the outbuildings and talked quietly with his cattle, the beef calves and the sheep. He told them what he would do and, in his simple way, he wished them well, and said that he would return. He would come again, he said, and they nuzzled against him. At last light, the main door to the outbuildings left open, he went back to his home where Lila had filled two small bags.

He shouted at his dog. His voice was sufficiently angry to ensure that it ran from him and hid. He could not take it, or bring himself to shoot it.

His animals were already out and foraging for food when Husein Bekir, Lila, the villagers and the troops, in the growing darkness, trudged slowly away from the village. He found only minimal comfort in the knowledge that when he came back he would remember where the mines had been laid.

Bent over his desk, her father had not noticed.

For a long time after the call had ended, Jasmina Delic sat with the phone in her hand. She had been helping her father to clear his desk. She had to nag him to keep control of the paper mountain that covered it. There were no resources to employ the staff who should have worked for a judge. She had taken one file from the pile in the corner where they were stacked, and casually opened it. At the top had been the note from the IPTF policeman, Williams, concerning the drowned Englishman, and the telephone number retrieved from a bedside notepad. Idly, she had rung the number. She had heard the voice, she had asked if the number was correct, and it was confirmed. She had recognized the voice, had listened to it until the call was cut.

She put down the phone, closed the file, wheeled herself to the corner and dropped it onto the floor.