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 fat
her'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.
Heart of Danger Page 11
