Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

  "There's no goddamn hot water ..." Marty stood in the door and shouted in frustration. The towel was loose at his waist. '.. . I want goddamn hot water."

  "There is no hot water."

  "Heh, smart man, I am not a fool. I know there is no hot water. I want my shower, I want hot water. I pay for hot water .. ."

  "There is no hot water. There will be hot water for your shower in the morning."

  The doctor sat at the bare wood table and his study books were in front of him. The evening had come and the light was poor in the room, but the doctor had not switched on the electricity nor had he switched on the immersion that heated water for the shower.

  The American yelled, "Damn it, I pay for hot water. It's part of the rental that I can go take a shower, and not in the morning. I want .. ."

  And Marty let it go. He let it go for his own survival. If he did not let it go, if he kept shouting about the need for hot water for his shower then he would get the big story, again. The big story was Vukovar. Not that Marty Jones did not think the story should be told, just that he knew the story of each day, each night, each hour, of Vukovar, because the doctor had told him it. The doctor had been in the hospital through the siege of Vukovar. Marty paid $175 a week, $700 each calendar month, for his room and for the shared use of the sitting room and the kitchen and the bathroom, and the rental was supposed to include hot water, each evening, for a shower. He let it go ... and the doctor should not have been studying close print without the electricity, and he let that go. The doctor was paying his way through the college for surgeons and he was keeping his mother, widowed in Vukovar, and his nephews, orphaned in Vukovar, and he was keeping the family of his close friend, killed in the hospital at Vukovar when the 250kg cluster bombs fell. He knew it all because he had been told it. It was not easy for an American, employed out of Geneva by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, to find good accommodation in Zagreb. It was damn near impossible, on the allowances paid him, to find anything that was a personal apartment with its own front door. He lodged with the doctor, it was the best he could get. And if Marty Jones complained that, again, there was no hot water for his shower then he would get the story of the amputations carried out with a firewood saw, and the casualty wounds cleaned with boiled rainwater, and the surgery patients kept warm by a woman's hair dryer, and the fatals stacked in the yard because it was too dangerous to go bury them and there were no coffins and the pigs and dogs running wild and going for them ... He didn't need the stories, not when he was scratchy and hot and at the end of his day. "Right, no shower. No shower and no problem .. ." He went back to the bathroom. He turned the water tap and sponged soap under his armpits. The doctor called to him, "Marty, did you have a good day ... ?" He shuddered under the cold water. It was hard to have a good day in the converted freight container that had been dumped on the corner of the parade square of the barracks on Ilica, his work place. It would be a good day tomorrow when he drove the jeep down to Karlovac and got to talk with the new arrivals from some village in the Prijedor Municipality. But the best days for Marty Jones were indeed when he sat in the converted freight container, where the sun cooked the interior, where he had his computer. The best days were when he scanned the memory of the computer through what he called his 'snapshots'. These were his interviews with refugees, now from Bosnia, earlier from Croatia. The pick of the best days was when he scanned the memory with the trace, when he hacked through to a recurring name. The name might be that of an officer in the former JNA, or it might be the name of a local policeman, or a mayor's name, or the name of a man who had come through from civilian life to take a position of command in the militia, or the name of a warlord like Arkan or Seselj. The interviews in the memory were always recorded either by audio or video tape, and because he was a lawyer by training, Marty knew what was necessary as evidence. The best days were when he found the traces, when a name recurred, when a name gathered evidence. It was what he was paid to do, to prepare cases and accumulate evidence. The close friend of the doctor had been butchered after the fall of Vukovar when the wounded had been given by the regular army to the militia, when the grave had been dug at Ovcara, when the wounded had been shot. There was a named man, there were good traces, there was evidence of the order being given for a war crime.

  "Getting there, not too bad a day .. ."

  He tore the message pages into many pieces.

  Two message pages, telephoned from England, from Mrs. Mary Braddock, requiring him to call back.

  He tore them up, dropped them into the rubbish bin in the bathroom, and let himself out of the hotel room.

  No way that he was going to jump to her, no bloody way that he was going to be on the end of her string. She would wait until he was ready to report, and she could sweat, fret, whatever, until he was ready .. . And he had little to report. He could have reported a failed meeting with a First Secretary at the embassy, and a failed meeting with an official from an out-of-reality office believing that the cavalry would come, one sweet day, and take the bad guys off to the thorn bush tree where the rope hung .. . Jovic had said that he would fix something for the morning. What would he fix for the morning? It was not often that Penn felt loneliness, but he felt it here after two wasted days, which was why he had snatched the offer of a few drinks with some friends of the interpreter.

  Jovic was waiting outside, as if the hotel was dross. They walked in the darkness away from the hotel.

  "I don't know yet, but something, I have to make some more calls. You worry too much, and there will be something .. ."

  "Now, see here .. ."

  "You want to do it yourself? You're free. You make your own programme, just tell me what time, what place, and you arrange it .. ." But then Bill Penn was not a graduate, didn't have the bloody intellect, and had been heaved. Bill Penn was not material for General Intelligence Group. Bill Penn was clerk grade, executive officer grade, pathetic grade, with need of a nanny to hold his hand tight. Bill Penn was the jam my bastard' who had londed the big fat one, and who was out of his depth, and who shpuld have stayed on debt collection and rummaging through dustbins and Service of Legal Process and surveillance tailing of a jerk who didn't know he was watched. Two days had been wasted, and he had nothing to report. "Do what you can," Penn said. The streets were bright and full. The windows lit the young faces gazing at the heaped goods from old Europe. The best of London and Paris and Rome and Frankfurt brazened in front of the wide teenage eyes. Cameras and computers, furs and fridges, Scotch and silks, all there and piled high in the windows on Trg Bana Jelacica. Perhaps Jovic read him. "An illusion," the artist said. "We have nothing but independence. Old men say that independence is important. Myself, I prefer to have two arms, no war, and I prefer to paint rather than trail round with an innocent. You are goddamn patronizing, Mr. Penn .. . Surprise, surprise, they have nice goods in their shops. They are affluent .. . Innocence to me is shit. Innocence means that you did not bother to find out before you came .. . Right, Mr. Penn, understand our truth. We have no work, we have inflation, we have no factory production, but our shops are full and so you congratulate us. Who has money, Mr. Penn, to go to the shops? Profiteers? Black marketeers? Pimps, spivs, crooks? Anything can now be bought in our independent nation state .. . What do you want, Mr. Penn? If you want a woman, you can buy her. If you want a gun, you can buy it. If you want a life, Mr. Penn, you can buy it. You would be surprised, in your innocence, at how cheap comes a woman or a gun or a life .. ." They had reached the club. The music battered out onto the pavement. And the lights strobed from the doorway and fell on the anger of Jovic's face, and he thrust the stump of his arm into Penn's face.

  '.. . But you would not be interested in the price of a woman or a gun or a life. I apologize for forgetting your interests .. . Would you feel everyone who died here was a pig? Was it only Miss Dorothy Mowat who was a pig?"

  They were inside, they had a table. Penn wore his uniform, his charcoal-grey slacks and his white shirt and h
is quiet tie and his brushed blazer. They ignored him. He bought the beers for Jovic and Jovic's friends and they ignored him. The hash smoke played at his nose. He wondered if Dorrie had been here; it was her kind of place and not Penn's. They talked, excited, laughing, in their own language and he bought more beers and the bottles crowded the table, and Penn felt a fool and a failure, and one of the girls leaned her head against his shoulder as if he were a pillar or a wall. The music of a band, New Orleans Creole jazz, punished him. He was a failure because it had slipped beyond his control.

  "Jovic, the morning .. ." Penn was shouting, and the head of the girl was leaden against him. "What do we do in the morning?"

  Jovic was banging his empty glass among the empty bottles, and there was a sneer in his face. "Was she really a pig of a woman .. . ?"

  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.