Heart of Danger

Six.

"Yes, Mr. Penn, it was me that exhumed the cadaver…"

Penn felt a small tremor, excitement, masked it because that was his training.

Jovic had collected him from the hotel. Jovic had been morose and wrapped within himself. They had queued for a tram, squeezed on and strap-hung with the morning crowd. Jovic had played his own game, no talk, led him as if on a string, and taken him to the hospital. Jovic had abandoned him in a hallway of chaos in the hospital, and argued with a reception woman, and then with a manager, and then with a doctor. Jovic had led him through corridors and through swing doors and past wards, finally down concrete steps to a basement.

"I heard that Mrs. Braddock was in town, two weeks ago? When I heard she was in town I was stuck away up in Sector East. We've a big dig there, the Vukovar hospital people. I just hadn't the opportunity to break away. My problem now is, I've a plane to get myself from Zagreb to Frankfurt, and I've Frankfurt to Los Angeles tonight. Fifteen minutes is my maximum…"

Penn's hand was gouging into the briefcase, for his notebook, for his pencil, but not too fast because it was his training to hide rich and raw relief.

The Professor of Pathology from Los Angeles was a big man. He was well preserved, but Penn reckoned him over seventy years of age. The white hair was thin on his scalp and the skin beneath was dappled and discoloured. He had not shaved that morning and had white stubble for a beard. A scrawny neck, and hands with prominent veins. He seemed a man who cared.

"I can tell you when she died, that was early December in 1991. I can tell you where she died, in a field where a grave had been dug with an excavator outside Rosenovici village in Glina Municipality. I can tell you how she died, not with full technical detail, but knife wounds at the throat, blunt instrument blows to the lower forward skull, then a close-quarters killing gunshot above the right ear. I regret, and you have to believe me, that I cannot tell you who killed Dorothy…" Penn was writing fast. They were in an outer office and a woman brought the Professor a plastic cup of coffee. There was a vigour in the growling voice of the American, but a tiredness in his body and he drank deep on the coffee. "It's a hell of a place there, the village that was Rosenovici. It's a place of foul death, it's where murder was done. Those responsible for the killing, they would have come from across the valley, from the sister village, it's Salika. We had the one chance to get in there and took it. They watched us, the people from Salika, and because of their guilt they hated us. They won't talk… And they were careful, those sort of people always are careful, there were no survivors that I got to hear about, no eyewitnesses… To know who killed those men, and Dorothy, then you would have to cordon that village and find every knife, every hammer or jemmy or engineering spanner, every Makh-arov PM 9mm-calibre pistol. The knife would, probably, still carry blood traces. The hammer or jemmy or spanner would still hold tissue that could be matched. The pistol, that's straight…" Penn looked up. The American had heaved himself up from the table and gone heavily to a filing cabinet. He was ripping the drawers back on their runners, jerking up files, discarding them, searching. Beside the filing cabinet was an open doorway. In the next area was a mortuary slab and there was a skeleton body on the slab. The bone sections were marked with tie-on labels and at the far end of the body was the skull and there was an adhesive red arrow on it, and the arrow pointed to the dark pencil diameter hole. On the floor beside the mortuary table were three bags that Penn could see, unzipped, holding a mess of bones. The filing cabinet was slammed shut. The Professor laid in front of Penn a see-through plastic file cover which contained a crudely drawn sketch map, and another file which held black and white photographs. The photographs were tipped out, where he could see them, and the Professor's fingers shuffled them. He saw her face. Not the face of the photograph with her mother and stepfather, not the face posed with the village boys. He forced himself to look at the face of death, swollen, wounded. He closed his eyes momentarily. There was a rattle on the table. The bullet, misshapen, in a tiny plastic sack, bounced in front of him, rolled, was steady. The bullet was dull grey.

"Find the Makharov PM 9mm pistol, match the rifling, and you have a case. Find the pistol and you have evidence. You with me, Mr. Penn?"

"With you."

"Maybe not in my lifetime, but some time… In the Hague, in Geneva, here, maybe in London… I am an old man, Mr. Penn, maybe not in my lifetime, but I believe in the long arm of law. I believe in cold and unemotional justice. I believe in the humbling of the guilty by due process. I want to believe it will be in my lifetime. I have only scraps to work from, but I see a picture. She was a fine young woman…"

Penn's voice was small in his throat. "Tell me."

He was looking down at his watch. The woman who had brought his coffee was grimacing at him, and pointing to the clock on the wall. His bags were beside his chair. He slapped his finger on a photograph, two shapes that were just recognizable as corpses, locked, legs and arms together, torsos together, skulls together. Penn stared back into the opaque watering eyes.

"I have only scraps… She was a fine young woman because she did not have to be there. The scraps give you a jumble of a mosaic, and you have to put the mosaic back together. She didn't have to be there. They were all wounded, all the men. They all had old wounds, mostly artillery or mortar shrapnel. They were the guys who had fought for the village, and they had been hurt bad, and everyone who was fit enough to quit had run out on them before the village fell. They were left behind to the mercy of the attack force. She was a fine young woman because she stayed with the wounded…" He thought that he could hear Mary's voice. The stealing of a Visa card, taken from her mother's handbag, and the forging of her mother's signature. "She didn't have an old wound. She could have gotten out, but none of the men could, they would have been, each last one of them, stretcher cases. She stayed with them. It would have been her decision, to stay with them. That makes for me a fine young woman…" He thought he could see Mary moving easily in her kitchen, and pouring his coffee and bringing it to him. "There must have been one boy that she loved. It has to be love, Mr. Penn, to stay with those who are doomed when, yourself, you can be saved. Think on it, Mr. Penn, think on it like I've told it. It's my best shot at the truth. I'm an old man, I've seen about everything in this life that you wouldn't want to see. She makes my eyes, Mr. Penn, go wet. At the end, she was trying, Dorothy was trying to shield her young man from the knives and the blows and from the gunshot. The scraps tell me that, from the way they lay…" He heard Mary and he saw her. "A fine young woman, a young woman to be proud of…" The room had filled. There was a director and there were managers, and there were staff from the mortuary. No more time for Dorrie Mowat. The Professor smiled at Penn, as if it wasn't his fault aircraft didn't wait. The director and the managers were pumping the Professor's hand and embracing him, and the women on the staff were kissing him, and one had brought flowers for him. Penn had screwed up the farewells to two months of unpaid work. He heard it said that the car was waiting, and they were running late for the flight. The crocodile swept up the stairs from the basement mortuary and along the corridors and through the swing doors, and cut a swathe across the lobby. Penn followed and Jovic was silent behind him. From the open door of the car, the Professor caught his eye, called through the crowd, and held the flowers against his chest, awkwardly. "Good luck, Mr. Penn. Build a case, stack the evidence. I'd like to think we'll meet again, in court… good luck." He didn't say it, that he was just there to write a report. He waved as the car pulled away. The Botanical Gardens were always his choice for a rendezvous. It was where the First Secretary chose to take his informants. The Botanical Gardens on Mihanoviceva, a little tatty now compared with the time before independence, still gave good cover; there were sufficient evergreen shrubs and conifer trees to offer discreet privacy before the main summer blooms. It was his second posting, and it was the fourth month of his final year as field officer in the Croatian capital, and he had known Hamilton, Sidney Ernest for most of that time. The file on Hamilton, Sidney Ernest, designated Freefall, was fat, which meant that the First Secretary, as he had told his desk chief on the last London visit, knew about as much of the repellent little man as it was possible to know. So the business was done behind trees and shrubs presented to the city of Zagreb in the cheerful days of non-alignment. The map of a route taken across the Kupa river, across the territory of Sector North, was paid for with American dollars. The First Secretary checked that the map was of some small value with minefields marked and strong points identified. He was brusque to the point of rudeness as he discussed the map and the action behind the lines. Of all his informants in Zagreb he believed that he disliked the man, Freefall, more than any other. He strode away. The map would lie in the fat file. The mortuary office was a colder place with the Professor gone. Without his presence, without his passion and his caring, it was a colder and a darker place. Penn thought the work would slip more slowly. He was an interloper, and he was not offered coffee. But they gave him what he wanted. He left with photocopies of the sketch map of the grave site at Rosenovici, and of the Professor's notes on the exhumed bodies, and of the photographs of the dead, and of the written-out detail of the killing bullet that had finished the life of Dorrie Mowat. Penn followed Jovic out of the hospital lobby. He felt a sense of bewilderment. He reckoned that he knew right from wrong, that his mother and his father had taught from the time he could remember that there was good and there was bad. Too damned simple, wasn't he? Too damned simple to understand how the wounded could have been bludgeoned and knifed and shot. It was beyond his comprehension how a man could have looked into Dorrie Alowat's face and killed her. The photocopies were in his briefcase. The spring sunshine caught at his eyes, the freshness of the air surged to his lungs.

It was good to be gone from that place of cold and darkness.

She found him in a corridor leading off the main walkway that skirted the second floor of the Transit Centre. The walkway looked down onto the inner square, but he had made his hiding place in a shadowed corner of the corridor where the daylight could not reach him.

Ulrike dropped down, squatted beside the old refugee. He stank. She put her arms around his shoulder. He shook with his tears. It was a worn, time-abused face, and the suffering lines ploughed through the white stubble of his cheeks, and the tears ran across the lines and dribbled in the stubble. She did not know him, assumed he would have come the day before on the bus.

She did not know him, and so she did not know his story, but she could anticipate it, because she had heard the story too often. When she sat in her office with a delegation from the Swedish Red Cross or the Austrian Red Cross or the German Red Cross, when she blinked into the lights behind the television cameras of RAI or ZDF or the BBC, when she wrote her letters home she always said it was worst for the old men who were brought out from behind the lines. He cried. She took his hands, frail and thin and gnarled from work in the fields, and she felt the bones hard in her fingers. She thought, from his hands, that he had worked all of his life in fields, that he would have gone into the woods with a bow saw in the autumn for the winter's fuel, that he would have struggled down a ladder each morning of each winter with the fodder for his few cattle, that he would have been a man of pride. She held tight to his hands, tried to no give the old man strength. His home, his father's home, would have been flattened by an explosive charge. His barn would have been burned. His cattle would have been stolen, and his pigs. He might know that his son, the favourite, had been killed. It was worst for the old men who had lost everything, and hope. The children always searched for Ulrike in the Transit Centre, and they had discovered her now. The children stood in the corridor and they watched her as she squatted beside the old man who cried. She could not begin to say how the children would be affected by the sight of their flattened homes and their burning barns and their family's livestock being driven away, and by the fighting. She could see it in the old man, feel the wet of his tears on her face.

She understood the dialect of the village in Prijedor Municipality. His voice was a croak of anguish. It hurt her that the children watched. The children should not have seen an old man who had lost hope, forsaken pride.

"Our neighbours, our friends, who we worked with. How could they do it to us? Our neighbours, our friends, all of our lives, their lives, how could they destroy us? Is there no punishment for what they have done…?"

When she had found him she had been going from a top-floor sleeping room, where she believed, maybe, that marijuana was smoked, down to the kitchens. She was behind her schedule. She could not sit any longer with the old man and hold his hand while he cried. She could offer him sedation tablets. Very good, magnificent, brilliant, a bottle of sedation tablets. Pride, no. Respect, no. Sedation tablets, of course.

'.. Is there no one who will punish them?"

She could not answer. She took his name. The chief guards of the camps of the Neuengamme Ring had been punished, with the noose, for what they had done. The chief guards had been the defeated, the victors were never punished. She took his name so that she could leave a message at the dispensary, on her way down to the kitchens, for sedation tablets for the old man. Later, the young American would be at the Transit Centre. Perhaps the quiet and earnest young man from Alaska would find time to talk to the old man of punishment. She would push him towards in the American, therapy to go with sedation. She kissed his forehead. She patted the arm of his overcoat that smelled of his body and his animals' bodies.

He walked with Jovic, following.

Jane would have liked the city. He tried to turn again in his mind each word that the Professor had told him, but Jane usurped. As if she were with him, as if she tugged him back to look into the bright shop fronts, as if she pulled him towards the cafes in the sunshine, as if she demanded of him that he should buy her flowers to hold as they meandered in the squares and along the ochre-walled streets. Jane would not have listened to the words, the evidence, of the Professor but she would have danced to the band with Jovic and Jovic's friends. Loving Jane for her prettiness, loathing her because now she found him boring, slow, played out… Jane coming down to the tied cottage to meet his parents… Jane wearing a brief skirt and a gossamer blouse

… Jane not helping his mother with the dishes in the sink after the tense lunch, because she had spent an hour on her nails… Jane not walking with her father in the fields after lunch because it was raining… He hadn't warned her, hadn't told her, it wasn't her fault. Jane had reckoned them dirty, they had reckoned her tacky. Two camps at the wedding…

All his own bloody fault.

"Where are we going?"

"You wanted to see people who were in Rosenovici, did you not?"

The cable fault between sound and camera delayed Marty.

He worked methodically in the freight container to locate the fault, step by step, then repair it.

He could not do the work outside, he needed the desk surface, and the sweat ran on his body and across his fingers.

The freight container, he reckoned, had been parked as far across the parade square of the Ilica barracks from the administration block as was possible. From the open door of his freight container he could see across the parade square, past the drilling Swedish troops, past the bank of big satellite dishes, to the administration block. He was treated as if he had the plague, as if those in contact with him, up alongside him, risked contamination. He had been told to his face on his first day that the preparation of prosecutions was an 'irrelevance'. It had been given him straight in the first week, "All you achieve, winding people up in your naivete, is to further reduce UNPROFOR's credibility." What they said, those who thought he had the plague, was, "Of course there can never be trials, because the biggest criminals are those we need to sort out the mess', and they said it often. Those who thought he had contamination spat it at him, "What you're doing, Jones, it's just a cosmetic gesture to massage a few bruised consciences away across the borders." Alone in his converted freight container, hot as a cook in a kitchen, he ignored what they said in the big offices of the administration block. He could cope.. . He was reared in Anchorage. He knew what it was to be thrown down, have the optimism belted out of him. Anchorage was 'false springs' when the depression of the snow hanging on until late April had to be hacked. Anchorage was the collapse of oil prices and the good men, his father's friends, heaved out of work. Anchorage was where they bred the philosophy of goddamn-minded obstinacy, pig stubbornness. And, to back his obstinacy, he had a degree in International Law from the University of Alaska, and a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His mind, methodical when repairing the sound cable from the camera, was well suited to the work of gathering evidence. What they thought of him in the administration block caused no loss of sleep. It never had mattered to him, an Anchorage boy, what the men in suits thought. They were from his past, the men who came in by helicopter, the men who rode in the limousines to their oil company offices, the men who went out in the private jets when they had sorted the balance sheets and screwed up a few lives, like they'd screwed up his father's life. Marty Jones hated money and privilege and arrogance, and the hate was deep from his childhood. He reckoned, had reckoned from the first day he showed up on campus, that the due process of law was the one, the only, weapon that could cut down the money, privilege, arrogance of men in suits. The hate had translated to the power and the cruelty of the butchers. The hate made him a good investigator.

He would not take her anything, too demonstrative, not his way, but he looked forward to driving down the highway to Karlovac, and meeting the woman who administered the Transit Centre. He thought the German woman in the Transit Centre to be the finest human being he knew… But he would not tell her, did not know how to express that feeling.

Marty wiped the sweat again from his forehead and there was mist on the heavy lenses of his spectacles. The camera worked, the audio level light fluttered… But there was no smile of achievement; Marty seldom risked a smile.

"She called herself Dorrie. I would not forget her…"

Jovic said that it had been the camp for officer cadets.

Still taciturn, the artist had explained nothing. Penn did not ask, he assumed that Jovic had gone back to the ministry office, and perhaps he had apologized for Penn's rudeness, and maybe he had made a joke about Penn's ignorance, and it could have been that he had just said that the Englishman was a crap fool.

Jovic translated, flat, no emotion nor expression.

"Yes, I remember her. She had come to Rosenovici about one month before the attack from the Partizans. I remember her…"

They had taken the tram to the camp for officer cadets. Out to the west of the city, in what would have been the quarter for skilled industry, but drab and smoke-grimed. The officer cadets had been well provided for. Jovic went forward and talked quickly to the guards. There was an unmarked van parked up beside the small guardhouse and the guards had come from the van where they had been talking to the driver. Looking over the barrier blocking the entrance into the camp, Penn had seen the driver of the van. The face of the van driver was rounder, fuller, than what Penn had learned to see around him, and there was a tattoo at the neck of the van driver, couldn't place the tattoo, and the table in the guardhouse was stacked with cartons of Marlboro cigarettes. The guards at the barrier had wanted Jovic gone. Fast instructions. Penn guessed the cigarettes were black market, and knew it was not his business.

"The front line was already north of our village. It was not possible to go by road. We were isolated in Rosenovici. The fighting was all around our village and at night we could hear the guns, and in the days we could see the tanks of the Partizans moving forward on the main road, but the war had not yet come to Rosenovici. We felt some safety because we had always had good relations with the Serb people in Salika. We put our trust in those good relations. They were our friends, they were our neighbours, they were our work colleagues. We felt that they would speak up for us. We were no military threat to the Serb people in Salika, there were very few guns in our village, we could have done nothing to intervene in the war…" Her name was Maria. She shared a room with her sister that would have been small for the occupancy of an officer cadet. She said her sister was in the city that day, searching for work. She said that she had been secretary to the export manager of a furniture factory in Glina. She said that she was divorced. The room was spotlessly clean. Penn thought she had little to do, a refugee, but clean the room. As he listened, his eyes roved over the room, and he saw there were no ornaments, nothing of the past of a woman he estimated to be in her mid-forties, no bric-a-brac, nothing to sustain memories. "She came with a boy from Australia. She came because he returned to his home. When the war started there were many boys who came back to their country. I suppose they wanted to help, wanted to fight. They were not soldiers, this boy was not a fighter. We believed we would be safe, and when we found that we were not safe, then all the roads to the north were blocked. It was a Tuesday night when the artillery guns and the tank guns were turned on Rosenovici. Some people tried to flee that night, they went into the woods and they said they would try to walk in the woods and the hills until they reached the lines of the Croatian army. I don't know what happened to them. The rest of us, we thought that it was a mistake by the regular army to fire on our village, we thought that there would be liaison with Salika, with our friends and neighbours and work colleagues. We thought they would tell the Partizan officers that they should not fire on us. They fired on our village all through the Wednesday. There were only rifles in the village to shoot back at them. It was on the afternoon of the Wednesday that her boy was wounded…" Seeing Mary Braddock in the kitchen, drinking the coffee, feeling the warmth of the Aga, listening to the calm telling. The sixteenth birthday party, and Charles away on business, and Mary trying to do the right thing, and inviting in the teenagers of her friends in the village on the Surrey/ Sussex border, and buying a new dress for Dorrie, and Dorrie not wearing it, and the village boys from the council houses crashing the evening, and Dorrie dancing. "Across the lane from the church was a big farmhouse, Franjo's and Ivana's farmhouse. It was the oldest building in the village, it had the best and the biggest cellar. It was where the wounded fighters were taken. It was the fighters who were hurt because they tried to hold a defence line, they could not hide in buildings. Some were hurt, dead, some were hurt, wounded. She brought him back from the defence line to the cellar in the farmhouse of Franjo and Ivana. She was so small and he was a heavy boy and he could not help himself. She carried him back across the fields from the defence line and the snipers were shooting at her, and we could hear their voices, the snipers, and they were shouting to each other and making bets as to which would hit her. She brought him to the cellar and she went again across the fields to the defence line to bring another back.. ." Dorrie dancing. Dorrie in her jeans and black T-shirt. The boys, her friends, smoking their marijuana and passing the pills, and the teenage kids of Mary's friends drifting away and frightened. Mary coming from the kitchen, helpless and control lost, and Dorrie on the oval walnut-veneer table that had cost Charles 2,800 at auction and stripping out of her jeans and the T-shirt and her pants as she danced. Mary standing in the doorway, stunned, silent, seeing Dorrie's shallow breasts and seeing the straggle of the coming hair, hearing the splintering of the antique table. "She was alone with the wounded fighters all through the Wednesday night. By the time the darkness came on the Wednesday night, the Partizan snipers had come so close that the farmhouse of Franjo and Ivana was cut off from the rest of the village. We could not reach the cellar and the boys there were too hurt to make their own way out. She could have come. In the darkness she, alone, might have managed to come. I think she chose to stay.. ." The council house boys clapping their hands, speeding the dance, the white flashes of Dorrie's body. The dance finished when the table had collapsed and splintered. Dorrie drunk, Dorrie smoking, Dorrie popping the pills, Dorrie swearing abuse at her as she stood stunned, silent, in the doorway. Mary had told it calmly. Mary had said that it was done to hurt her. "It was on the Thursday afternoon that the village fell. On the morning of the Thursday, before it was light, many people had left the village, gone with what they could carry into the woods. I and my sister, we could not go, our home where we had sheltered was close to the store in Rosenovici and that is on the east of the village and it was open to the shooting from Salika. "There were very few of us left in the village when it fell. I had thought that it would be the regular troops who would come into the village when the flag was raised. There was a sheet tied to a stick and it was held out from a window of the store. It was people from Salika who came into the village, it was our friends and neighbours and work colleagues. They came across the bridge from Salika. They all wore uniforms, but I knew them as the carpenter who had made the table for my kitchen, and the gravedigger who had made the grave for my father when our own gravedigger was ill, and the postman who brought the letters to our village, and others that I knew, and commanding them was the man who was a junior clerk in the co-operative at Turanj. They took everything that we had, our wristwatches and our earrings and our necklaces and our money. They put us onto a lorry and they took us to a camp at Glina, what had been the prison there. I urinate blood because of what was done at Glina "And Dorrie, what happened to Dorrie?" "She was with the wounded in the cellar of Franjo's and Ivana's farmhouse when the village was taken…" "What happened to her?" The tears streamed on the woman Maria's face. Jovic said, "She doesn't know. She has told you everything that she could know…" Penn had been hunched forward on a small hard chair, and he had been writing hard. He sat back. He saw the face in the doorway, and the shabby washed-through uniform. He did not know how long the van driver had been listening, the man with the full and round face and the cropped skull and the tattoo on his neck. The woman, Maria, was speaking, and she had taken Penn's hand with urgency. She was choking the words. When he looked back to the door the face of the van driver was gone. He realized what the tattoo was, the wings and the parachute. Gone. Jovic translated, without emotion, without expression. "She was an angel. She stayed with them when no one else stayed with them. She was an angel in her prettiness, and an angel in her courage…" Penn squeezed the woman's hand. He followed Jovic out into the sunlight. There were children playing, kicking a ball, there were women hanging out washing on lines slung from the trees that were in first blossom. Jovic asked, cool, "It will be good for your report, yes?" The potential reader had to know the man. If the man were not a composite, not a picture, then quite impossible for any future reader of the file to comprehend. Not easy, damn difficult, to make the picture. Henry Carter, sweating now because Library was so damned hot, tried to make a shape of the morsels available. NAME: Penn, William Frederick. DOB: 27 May 1958. FOB: Cirencester, Gloucs. PARENTS: George Wilberforce Penn (farm labourer) and Mavis Emily (nee Gordon). 4, the Farm Cottages, Ampney Crucis, Nr Cirencester, Gloucs. EDUCATED: Driffield Primary, and Cirencester Comprehensive (name unlisted), 5 O levels, A levels in Geography and History.

EMPLOYMENT: SUBSEQUENT

EMPLOYMENT:

MARRIED:

MARITAL ADDRESS:

HOBBIES: RECREATION: INTERESTS: SUMMARY:

Home Office 1978-1980, clerk grade. Security Service 1980-1992 (resigned). Worked in F Branch (Subversives) and A4 (Surveillance). "Capable officer in area of field work, but limited in ability to analyse complex material."… (Join the club, young man!)… Resigned after being informed by Personnel that progress into General Intelligence Group was restricted to academic graduates.

Alpha Security Ltd, Wimbledon, SW19, as private investigator.

Jane Felicity (nee Perkins) 1989. 1 son, Thomas Henry, DOB 9 January 1993. 57B the Cedars, Raynes Park, Surrey.

None listed. None listed. None listed.

Had reached a plateau at Security Service. Was unwise to challenge promotion system. Could have continued at existing level. Perhaps believed he would be persuaded to stay, to withdraw his resignation. "Deeply wounded' that no such persuasion was offered? (my note HC).

Not much there, damn all there, the old desk warrior thought, and absolutely nothing there to give prior warning as to how the young man would react when confronted with that bloody awful place, with that surfeit of bloody awful misery.

More for Penny to type up when the dragon, the day shift supervisor, went for her rest-break and canteen tea.

He had a great bank of experience, seldom mined and seldom tapped, and it was a lesson he had learned… The dull men who were without hobbies, the ordinary men who were without recreations, without interests, usually managed to confound with surprise… God save the dull and the ordinary and the boring. God protect the human species from exciting and unique and fascinating men… that was a lesson Henry Carter had learned.

If it had not been for the war he would have been the mayor.

The Headmaster stood at the back of the hall of his school.

There was an order in these things, and the appointment to office of mayor would have come, that year, to the Headmaster, if it had not been for the war.

All of the village had gathered in the hall. A meeting was held in the school every month. He had never spoken out before, he had never stood up before to be counted, but he thought that as Headmaster he would be listened to. His was a position of importance in the village community of Salika, he believed it his responsibility to speak.

Because of the war, Milan Stankovic, nothing more than a clerk, was mayor. And not mayor for a year, but now in his second term, and there would be a third. Milan Stankovic, nothing more than a clerk, was mayor because he commanded the Territorial Defence Force, because he controlled the black market, because he could provide gasoline or diesel or spare parts or crop seed, because he killed. And the bodies had been dug up and taken away, and the Headmaster felt the confidence to speak.

He was at the back of the hall and standing alone. He would have to crane on tiptoe, when he spoke, if Milan Stankovic were to see him. Nothing more than a clerk, and sitting in a fraud's uniform at the table facing the audience of villagers, and beside him were the carpenter and the gravedigger and the one who had delivered post when there were letters to be delivered, before the war had come. The carpenter and the gravedigger and the postman also wore the uniform of soldiers, they were the new elite of the village. He had not talked to the Priest, had not confided that he would speak at the meeting, he had no trust in the Priest.

The Headmaster believed a new age of darkness had come to the village. It was his duty to speak. He was a small man with sparse greying hair above a short beak nose that held his iron-rimmed glasses. When he stood on his toes, when he could see Milan Stankovic, the image was blurred. His glasses should have been changed, but it was not possible now to get the replacement, because of the war. He had taught many of those who sat between where he stood and the table, and they followed, like sheep, a false deity. He thought it his duty to denounce Milan Stankovic.

He felt no fear…

The Priest should have been beside him. Of the men in the village, only he and the Priest had known higher education. He felt the Priest slipped from the responsibility of duty. He had a text, as the Priest had a text each Sunday. The text had been taken from an anthology of quotations, in the English language, that had been a treasured companion since his graduation from the university. Mr. Edmund Burke, 1729-1797, political theorist: "It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph." He had been across the bridge two weeks before when Milan Stankovic, who was a clerk, had been to the junket in Belgrade, he had seen the digging and seen the bodies lifted from the grey-black earth and seen them bagged. He had felt the disgrace of his village. That sense of disgrace was the keener because he had looked into the face of the elderly American who had supervised the exhumation, and seen contempt. He was sixty-two years old. He was respected throughout the village.

He was not afraid…

They sat in front of him, they stood in front of him, the sheep. They agreed to everything proposed by Milan Stankovic. Hands -rose in acceptance of what was proposed. They needed leadership, the sheep. The man who had been a clerk was beaming a smile and gathering together his papers, and there was a pistol at his belt, and his uniform was washed clean. The chairs were scraping. Little knots of villagers were sliding forward to beg favours. He did not understand how a good woman, Evica Stankovic, could share a life and a bed with such a man. He loathed the man, he loathed the power of the pistol at the man's belt.

It was the moment the Headmaster chose.

"Before we go, before we leave, there are matters that should be discussed…"

Shoulders swivelled, heads turned towards him, and behind the table the smile faded. He spoke out loud, and he stood on his toes that he might be seen by all.

"Not one matter, several matters… Your children go to the school, my school. At the school we have insufficient books. For children to learn it is necessary they have books. I had discussed the shortage of books with the UNCIVPOL officers from Petrinja, and the UNCIVPOL officers had promised me they would raise the matter with UNHCR, attempt to get more books, but those UNCIVPOL officers were harassed, sworn at, blocked, threatened by the militia of this village. It was the grossest stupidity to block the UNCIVPOL officers, and I will get no books for our children to learn from…"

The silence was around him. When he ranged his eyes across the sheep, when he caught their eyes, they looked away. Evica Stankovic, she had looked away.

"We should not be led, my friends, by men of the grossest stupidity. Nor should we be led by men who stain the name of our village. We should elect our leader, to speak for all of us, by a vote that is private and not by the vote of the bullet…"

He looked far ahead. Milan Stankovic stared back at him. He could not see the detail of Milan Stankovic's face, but he believed he saw surprise.

"We are a people who know suffering. Close to here is the great forest of Petrova Gora where our glorious Partizans fought with such courage against the fascist Ustase of the Great Patriotic War. Close to here, in Glina town, is the church where our grandparents were burned alive by the Ustase. Close to here, near to Petrinja, is the site of the concentration camp where the Ustase slaughtered the children of our grandparents. And we have here, amongst us, a new group of Ustase who stain the name of the Serb people…"

The Headmaster saw the movement at the table. The table was pushed back. Milan Stankovic advanced on him. The sheep scattered their chairs and moved aside to make a space for Milan Stankovic to reach him. Evica Stankovic was among those who moved their chairs aside. He had come to make a denunciation and now his voice rose.

"I saw, you saw, the old American who came to Rosenovici. There was a report about him on the foreign radio. He is a professor of pathology, he is an investigator of the dead. Because of what he searched for, what he found, and took away, the name of our village is shamed…"

The fist of Milan Stankovic, standing in front of him, blocking his view of the sheep, was clenched on the handle of the pistol worn in the opened holster. "We are disgraced, all of us, because of the wounded at Rosenovici…" The pistol whipped into the face of the Headmaster. He felt the stinging pain, and the blackness blurred in front of his eyes. He fell. There was no hand among the sheep to halt his fall. He was on his knees. There was wetness in his eyes. He saw the blood splatter below him. He groped his hand for his spectacles that lay close to the shined boots. "We are all criminals because of the wounded at Rosenovici…" He saw the sole of the shined boots cover the lenses of his spectacles. He heard the crunching of the broken glass. "What they promise on the foreign radio is that acts of criminality will never be forgotten…" The shined boot hacking into his ribs. The Headmaster gasped, "Wherever we run…" The shined boot belting into his chin. A whispered voice, "Wherever we hide…" A fist in the collar of his jacket, lifting him, and the tightness of his tie around his throat, and the punching starting, and the kicking. "Never forgotten… our shame…" The death of the Headmaster's voice. They let him drop, and when he had fallen they kicked him some more. He saw above him the gravedigger, the carpenter and the postman, and he saw Milan Stankovic bend and wipe blood from the toes of his boots. And behind them the hall of the Headmaster's school was emptied. The chairs were scattered without formation, abandoned. None had spoken for him, the sheep. He lay a long time on the floor, after they had gone, and he did not know for how long because the watch on his wrist was broken… He held, clutched, his secret, the secret was the location where a survivor of the destruction of Rosenovici still lived. The telling of the secret to the Canadian of UNCIVPOL had been the payment for the promise of school books… He lay a long time on the floor until he had the strength to push himself up to his knees and his elbows, and he gathered together the cracked shards of the lenses for his spectacles.

The Headmaster crawled to the doorway of the school hall. He saw no movement in the road. The lamplight from the houses came indistinctly to his eyes. All gone, the sheep. All barricaded in their homes, afraid. It was difficult for him to lock the door of the hall. He felt no fear, he felt only a loathing of the man who had been a clerk… He, alone in the village, held the secret.

He could not be certain, but it was his training to know when a tail was on him. The late afternoon and the early evening were spent in his hotel room making sense of the note form of the interviews, and then supper and a beer in the old town. It was when he had stepped off the pavement to give room to a whore negotiating her rate with a client that he had thought he was followed. He had swung, amused, to see better the face of the whore, and her dressed like a housewife, a cardigan and a floral skirt, and there was a shadow moving behind the whore, and the shadow froze when Penn turned full face.