Zagreb Cowboy (22 page)

They played a couple of hands of gin rummy back at the cottage, Harry having to remind della Torre of the rules, and then they read, with Harry playing Benjamin Britten’s
Sea Interludes
and Bach cantatas on her newly acquired portable CD player.

“It’s going to be expensive to replace my records with CDs,” she said.

“I’m sure Mr. Strumbić will be happy to take the pain.”

“I wonder.”

“Well, maybe not happy. But not unhappy. If he doesn’t know about it.”

When it became sufficiently dark, they climbed the narrow, steep staircase to their bedrooms, Harry leading. He looked up towards the seat of her jeans. He had a nearly irresistible urge to slide his hand up along the insides of her legs. But seeing as she’d never more than laid her hand on his forearm, he thought better of it.

She stopped on the landing and gave him a wicked smile.

“If we’re to catch the tide, we’ll need to be up early,” she said. “Sleep tight.”

They stared at each other. She rose on tiptoes and touched her lips to his. He bent towards her, leaning into the kiss. She pushed him back.

“Let’s get some sleep. We’re up here to do some sailing. Remember?”

He nodded, running his hand over his top lip, missing the feel of the bristles.

“Can’t think of anything I’d rather be doing this weekend,” he said.

“Night night,” she said, shutting her door with a soft finality.

W
HEN
HE
WOKE,
Harry was already up, reading a Sunday newspaper and drinking a cup of tea, dressed in one of his T-shirts.

“Hope you don’t mind. I forgot my nightdress.”

She must have gone into his room at night, when he was asleep. Had she really just gone to find a T-shirt?

“I don’t mind. You bought it for me, after all.”

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“Is that a trick question?”

“Maybe.” There was mischief in her eyes.

The ocean glistened like fish scales in the morning light. He scanned through whatever bits of newspaper Harry wasn’t reading, looking for news on Yugoslavia.

Croatia’s independence referendum had gone through. The percentages looked like old-style Communist ones, 93 percent in favour on an 84 percent turnout. Except he believed those numbers. Many of Croatia’s Serbs had refused to vote. And the Croats were itching to sever ties with Yugoslavia. The Slovene referendum had registered similar numbers a few months before.

There was speculation that Croatia and Slovenia would formally declare independence the following month. If they did, della Torre didn’t see the Yugoslav national army sitting back, twiddling its thumbs. Its whole purpose was to defend the integrity of the Yugoslav state. Take away its two wealthiest republics, and suddenly the Yugoslav state was not only a lot smaller but a lot poorer. And the Yugoslav army’s generals knew who was picking up the tab for its tanks and jets.

The conflict was already turning bloody. There were a couple of paragraphs about the killings in Borovo Selo earlier in the month. A busload of Croat policemen had driven into an ambush in a Serb-dominated Croat village on the Danube, on the eastern borderland with Serbia.

Croatia’s Serbs were becoming increasingly militant everywhere. The country was shaped like a boomerang, with the western arm making up much of the Adriatic coastline. There the Serbs had effectively cut the republic in two by carving out an independent mini republic that stretched from the Bosnian border to within a few kilometres of the Dalmatian coast. The Yugoslav army had made it clear it wouldn’t brook efforts by Croatia’s military forces to recapture the land and reopen the republic’s southern highway. Della Torre couldn’t see how civil war could be avoided.

What would he do? He’d disappeared effectively enough; no one had tracked him down. But only at the cost of severing all ties with his former life.

It wasn’t just that. He still wasn’t sure he could run to America. The thought of going back somehow frightened him. Was it the memory of his mother? Was it because in America there were fewer excuses for failure? The country was a vast, open wilderness waiting to swallow pilgrims . . . Pilgrims.

But his fate was tied in to Croatia. If Belgrade won, even America wouldn’t hide him. Better to die on a Croat battlefield than be assassinated on a suburban street in Ohio.

He’d taken his coffee out to the seawall, where he could smoke. He watched with astonishment as people walked down the beach, dancing awkwardly across the shingle, and stripped off their dressing gowns and plunged into the North Sea.

“Already had my swim this morning. You were still asleep. I thought it best not to wake you,” she said.

He looked at her horrified, though he shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d been swimming in the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath the past three Saturday mornings.

“Maybe you’d like to take a dip later, after we’ve come back from sailing.”

“When I was in the army, they made me do things like that. The only reason I did was because they held a gun to my head.”

“Would they have shot you?”

“You know, I think the commandos were crazy enough to. But I never wanted to find out.”

“So you did it?”

“And I swore I’d never indulge in any form of masochism. Ever.”

“None?” There was that wry, seductive smile again.

They followed a potholed gravel road that ran along the seawall at the opposite end the town to where it ended in a collection of sheds. The river flowed to within fifty metres of the sea and then turned away and flowed south, separated by a widening spit of land. Grassed river walls, protecting land-side meadows, had been built up on either side of the river. Looking inland, della Torre could see white triangles sliding above the green meadows. For a while he couldn’t tell what he was looking at and then realized they were sails poking above the river wall.

The yacht club was a white, square building with a balcony overlooking the river and a three-armed flagpole overhead. Beyond it was the dinghy park’s forest of masts. The dinghies ended just short of a fortress-like dark brick, curved building.

“Don’t tell me, a mini nuclear power station,” he said, pointing towards the structure.

“A Martello tower. A signalling fort from the Napoleonic era. This is the most northerly one, but they stretch down around the coast. The principle was you could see a lit beacon from one to the next. They were used as invasion signals. Those concrete blocks you see on top of the seawall here were Second World War tank traps, defences against invasion. As the French say,
plus ça change
,” she said.

They walked behind the yacht club to a converted shipping container. Harry nipped in and got them each a life vest.

“I’ll try not to capsize. But you might as well put this on anyway.”

They stopped at a wooden boat near where the dinghy park ended and the landscape of low marsh grass began. Harry untied the heavy canvas cover, pulling it off the boat.

“So how does this work?” della Torre asked. “You just help yourself to a boat here?”

“I hope not. This is mine.”

“Yours?”

“Yup, inherited it. It was built for my grandmother in the 1920s, when she was a girl. You only get these particular clinker-built boats on this river.” She did some preliminary checks of the interior, and then they wheeled it on its trolley to a concrete ramp that led down to the river. Della Torre felt the smooth varnish against his palms. The wood was beautifully shiny, polished like fine antique furniture. The boat was almost five metres long — about the length of a big rowing skiff, but with a mast. At the concrete slipway, they stopped and Harry dealt with the rigging.

“Here, take this end of the sail and feed it through this little channel in the boom and tie it off.”

He did as he was told while Harry dealt with a sail in front of the mast. Or as he thought he had been told.

“What sort of knot is that?” she asked.

“It’s a knot. That’s the sort of knot.”

“It’s a granny knot. Strictly forbidden on boats. Tighten it too much and we’ll have to cut the rope to get it undone,” she said, undoing his efforts. “Can you pull the main halyard up a bit while I feed the sail into the mast?”

He stared at the boat for a while and then asked, “Can I what the what?”

She laughed. “Sorry, you did say you’d never sailed. Here, pull on this thin little rope, steadily but not too hard, while I get this big sail sorted.”

He did as he was told. When they’d got most of the little boat assembled, the sails flapping slightly in the breeze, Harry told him to take his shoes off and roll up his trousers. She hadn’t equipped him with sailing clothes in London. They launched the dinghy onto the grey-green river.

Della Torre got into the boat uncertainly. It rocked under his weight, and for a moment he thought it might tip him overboard, but Harry made him sit still and then pushed them off, nimbly hopping into the boat before the water became too deep. With quick, assured movements she got the rudder biting into the water and tightened the mainsail so that the little boat jumped into the middle of the stream. Larger yachts were tethered to buoys like a string of giant thoroughbreds. Even secured fast, they emanated a feeling of speed, all pointing downstream, straining at their mooring lines.

“Drop the centreboard — that’s the bit in the middle like a lever. Pull that back towards me,” she said. “And when you’ve done that, can you pull in the jib sheet, please. There aren’t many people around this morning for some reason, but it doesn’t do to be sloppy.”

Della Torre gave her a look. “I’ll be happier if you start speaking English. Or you can practise your Italian on me. But I don’t talk boat.”

“Sorry. That thickish rope opposite you. Pull it in until the sail makes a nice curved shape and doesn’t flap, and then come to this side and sit still until I tell you otherwise.”

There was a decent breeze coming from the south and east, and the little boat heeled as Harry took it in hand. Della Torre grew nervous about being forced to swim.

“You sure we’re supposed to be over like this?” he asked.

“Lean back a bit. Sit up on the gunnels and get a grip of that webbing with your toes so that you don’t fall out. Your weight will balance us and you’ll see how nicely she rips along for a little old lady,” Harry said, beaming. “The tide’s coming in. It’s strongly tidal here, by the way, so we’ll go against the tide for a little while, down to the south. The river doesn’t meet the sea for another sixteen kilometres or so; that land on the seaside bank is a giant shingle spit, a long peninsula. We’ll go down as far as the castle downriver, and then we’ll run back in no time at all.”

The river widened considerably, so that they could do long tacks. At first, della Torre was unsettled about having to swap sides of the boat, getting tangled in that cramped space, losing track of the rope he was meant to be responsible for. But before long, the exhilaration got to him as well. There was a real impression of speed as the boat beat into the stiffening breeze, the river’s little waves breaking over the bows, leaving della Torre wet with chilly water and grateful for the sun.

The scenery was harsh and flat; even on a sunny day it had an unforgiving quality. There were low marshes on either side of the river, and the expanse of shingle in the distance. He looked up at the huge, open sky and remembered something from Dickens. He’d never read Dickens much, never liked it, but there had been something about the marshes that darted into della Torre’s mind with the speed of one of the rock swifts above. Magwitch.

“What do you think?”

Della Torre thought for a while in silence. “Bleak . . . Bleak and at the end of the world. It’s almost beautiful too.”

“Britten loved it. A lot of his music only makes sense if you think of this place.”

But here too, sharp intrusions pierced the scene.

“What are those?” he asked, pointing to rows of frail metal towers anchored to the ground by constellations of wire.

“Top secret. They’re military radio masts. And if you look over there . . . Wait, let me tack and then you’ll see them when the sail’s out of your line of sight. Ready about, lee ho,” she said, turning the bow through the wind. “There.”

They were impossible to miss. Rising above the shingle was a group of massive concrete buildings with hat-like roofs held aloft by the most spindly columns. They looked like temples built by an alien culture.

“They’re the pagodas.”

“The pagodas? What are they?”

“They were used for atomic weapons research. Something to do with testing the bomb triggers. The pagodas were designed so that if something accidentally went wrong and the bomb blew up, the columns would collapse and those massive roofs would drop down, sealing the buildings.”

“Atomic bomb testing,” he repeated.

“Something like that. It’s all off-limits, though they’re supposed to be decommissioning the site. But if you go twitching —”

“Twitching?”

“Birdwatching. Some of the birdwatchers around here know a lot about the military stuff too. It’s all top secret, but they’ll tell you stuff about it if you ask nicely. Especially if you’re a girl. A couple of those great big buildings . . . I can’t remember what they’re called.” She thought for a moment and then gave up. “Something beginning with
s
. Anyway, the military people are meant to have refined uranium there. The machines aren’t there anymore. The government’s been winding the whole thing down, but there were lots of the machines, hundreds and hundreds of them. Nobody’s supposed to know anything about any of it.”

Della Torre mulled over the bleak landscape.

“Hard to hide a big site like this.”

“Sure is. Even at the end of the world, like here.”

The wavelets picked up and the boat became skittish.

“I think we might start getting back,” Harry said. “The wind’s shifted a bit so that it’s behind us, which will make for quick going, but if it starts dancing around there’s always the risk we’ll jibe.”

They were back near the Martello tower when the wind fluked, and Della Torre learned what it was for a boat to jibe. The boom, which had been sticking straight out over the water from the opposite side of the dinghy, swung around before he could register what was happening. The force with which it hit his head knocked him into the river. He bobbed up, choking on the salty water, the weight of his clothes countered by the buoyancy jacket. Harry had already turned the boat and was pulling up alongside him.