Heart of Danger

by Gerald Seymour

And the others in the car had taken the bastard mood from Milan Stankovic.

  And because it was not personal to him, where they had been, the gravedigger, Stevo, thought it right to break that bastard mood. He leaned forward. The radio in the car played, faint and r distorted, and the singer was Simonida with the one-string gusla to back her. He tapped Milan's shoulder. "Milan, I love you .. . Milan, if you were dead, I would dig the best hole for you .. . Milan, why are you now such a miserable bastard .. . ?" The gravedigger thought he could break the mood with mischief. '.. . Milan, you are a miserable bastard, you are a miserable bastard to be with. If you want me to, Milan, I will go and dig a hole, as deep as I can dig it, so that I have to chuck the earth up over my shoulder, and you can go and lie in the hole and I will chuck the earth back on top of you, and that might cure you of being such a miserable bastard .. ." He had reached forward, and his fingers worked at Milan's shoulders, like he used to see the postman's fingers, Branko's, at Milan's shoulders when he loosened him before a big match of basketball. '.. . Milan, you are a miserable bastard to be with, and you make everyone else a miserable bastard. Look at us, we are all miserable because you are a miserable bastard .. ." And the man pulled himself forward, and broke the grave-digger's hold on his shoulders. And he thought he could play Milan because he had the sort of black humour that would make Milan laugh. The gravedigger was on the crest, and he could not see Milan's face. If he had seen it he might have sat back into the seat, let the springs tickle his arse, but he could not see it. "You know why you are such a miserable bastard, Milan? You are a miserable bastard because you are scared .. ." The gravedigger could not see Milan's face, and he could not see his hands. '.. . You are Scared. Have been scared since that old American came and farted over at Rosenovici. Why are you scared? Then he saw Milan's face. He saw the erupted anger. He saw the hands and he saw the pistol. The face was against his, bright red and flushed. One hand coming past his eyes and locking into his old straggled hair and pulling his head forward. One hand holding the pistol and driving it through his teeth, grating them, until the foresight ground against the roof of his mouth. And he had seen Milan kill, and he could not doubt that Milan would kill. And he had seen a bastard Ustase killed by a bullet fired from a pistol deep in the mouth, and seen the crown of the head, where the hair was thinning, lift off. And the postman had swerved the car, gone half into a ditch and come out, and the carpenter cowered away against the far window of the back of the car.

  And the anger was gone. The foresight of the pistol scraped the roof of the gravedigger's mouth and against his teeth and nicked at his lip. And the smile was there, as if Milan was saying that he was not scared.

  Stevo's mouth was raw agony and he could feel, already, the wet of his trousers at the crutch. He did not tell Milan that he thought he lied with his smile. He squirmed in the wetness that he sat in.

  Laughing. "We should go get the hag in Rosenovici. Lie up for her, like it was wild pig we were lying up for. Milan, you miserable bastard, you should be with us .. ."

  But the shoulders had ducked down, and he could not see the face, whether it still smiled, whether it was still angered. For the old American had come to Rosenovici, and Milan Stankovic ran scared.

  The map had shown the escarpment of high rock in the trees. It was where he had found the small torn shreds of the chewing gum wrapper, and he recognized the brand name of the wrapper, and he knew that Ham had been there, as Ham had said he had. There was a field of winter grass below the escarpment on which he lay. He could see the trails across it and the flattened grass in the middle. He could not see blood, but Ham had said he would not be able to see the blood. It was clear in Penn's mind, and the clarity killed the excitement that had been with him through the length of the day. He looked down onto the flattened ground where two men, wounded, had been skewered with knives, and he looked down onto the trails in the field where the bodies of two men had been dragged and no point in further thinking on it, the flattened grass and the trails in the grass, and Ham had not talked of the risk of capture. Penn moved down from the escarpment, down again into the depth of the trees. The shadows were longer, the grey merged with the falling gold of the evening. He had slept just, during the length of the day when he had rested up, he had eaten a pie and not yet missed his sandwiches. It was two hours back that he had left his resting place through the day, a shelter made by an uprooted oak. He had slept just, then woken at the sound of children's voices, but they had not come near him. Penn checked the map when he had reached the base of the escarpment rock. There was a plan, a fragile plan, in his mind. A better man, a Special Forces man, would not have moved across the damned river without a solid plan locked in his head. He did not have that training. The plan grew. He would get to the village of Rosenovici, he would walk at night along the route where they had taken Dorrie, where she had been. He would walk past the house where Katica Dubelj had lived. He would look for her in her house, and only there, nowhere else that he knew to look. It would only be a gesture, to look for Katica Dubelj, because he did not think she would speak English and he knew nothing of her language. He would find the disturbed grave in the corner of the field. It would be right for his report that he had walked the road through Rosenovici, and along the lane and into the field. It would be important for his report that he had gone to seek out Katica Dubelj ... It was not good enough for Penn that he should take a name from a telephone directory and embroider a story. Basil would have said he was a fool not to flick the pages of a directory. Jane would have said he was an idiot. Dougal Gray, who had been his friend in the Transit van, would have understood. With the plan he reckoned it possible that he could look back into the eyes of Mary Brad-dock, see her respect, and take her husband's money. He could tell them that he had walked where Dorrie had been. He moved away slower than before he had come to the escarpment, before he had seen the flattened grass and the trails in the grass. He thought he could move for another two hours before darkness came. "I'm so sorry to trouble you .. . Tell me, please, is the crossing point at Turanj open?" Ulrike Schmidt sat in her office. The Transit Centre was awash with the noise of shouting, screaming, laughing. The evening cooking smells filtered to her. Her assistant, a nice Ghanaian girl, but happily scatty, stared across from her own desk, confused. Ulrike had never before rung the liaison office with the request for information as to whether the Turanj crossing point was open, and her assistant knew it. "Thank you, but could you, please, make certain. Yes, I'll hold." She was thirty-nine years old. She held the telephone like a conspirator, like a teenage girl who spoke by telephone to a teenage boy and did not wish to be heard. When she went home, every two months for a weekend, back to Munich and the apartment near the Hauptbahnhof, then her mother and father told her of their pride. And her mother, each time on the one evening that she was at home, before they went to dinner in a restaurant, would sidle into her room and ask her nervous question. It was difficult to be truthful, and more difficult not to be truthful. No, she had no plans. No, there was not a particular man. It was difficult to be truthful because her mother's face would cloud and the question would not be repeated. The answer, always, was followed by the breezy excuse that life was too hectic, work too ferocious, to share. There were flowers and there were invitations, but there was no particular man. "Definitely, the crossing point is open. You have heard nothing about it being closed tomorrow? No .. . Thank you. It was just a rumour. I am so sorry to have troubled you. Good night." She put down the telephone, and her assistant was watching her, puzzled. Ulrike blushed. She gave no explanation. If she had given her assistant an explanation, truth, then the girl might just have climbed onto the central table in the office where the computer was, and danced. Her assistant was scatty enough. But the truth was that a man she cared about was behind the lines, across the river, in the place where the stories came from of atrocity and bestiality and torture. She cared because he took a road that was different from the turned cheek and the fixed smile. The truth was t
hat if a man had been captured behind the lines then the border crossing at Turanj would have been closed. The Serbs always closed the crossing point when they discovered incursion into their territory. If the crossing was still open then he stayed free. It was the end of the day, and the end of the map. There was a brisk rain shower falling into the upper branches of the trees. The last of the light showed Penn where he should spend the night. No mines laid off the track because there were tractor ruts and the tread of worn trailer tyres. A small tin hut had been abandoned beside the clumsy heaps of cut wood, and Penn judged it was where the timber men sheltered from heavy rain and where they made their coffee and ate their food. The men who came to the hut would be the same as the timber men on the estate of his childhood, who had talked with him and amused him, and they would kill him if they found him. Too dark for him to move further, and the hut was the final point on Ham's map. He squatted down in the hut, then curled onto his side, closed his eyes. In six hours, three at dawn and three at dusk, he had covered twelve miles according to Ham's map. It was important that he should sleep. Ham had said that where the map ended was six miles from Rosenovici, perhaps seven but not more. He would go forward, blind, in the first light of the morning. She was old, and Ham could not afford a girl. She was old enough and cheap enough to look for trade in the side streets off the square behind the big earth ramparts of Karlovac. It was usual for her trade to be with the Muslim men of the Transit Centre. Ham did not know her, he had not been with her before. It didn't matter to him that she was old, but it was important that she was cheap. Chicken shit pay from the army, and the slimmest cut left in his pocket from selling on the imported cigarettes, she had to be cheap. He lay on the bed. He could see she was old from the single unshaded bulb, hanging down from the ceiling, and he could see the flab ridges of her waist after she had unbuttoned her blouse, and the wide weight of her buttocks after she had peeled down her knickers. She smoked while she undressed, not the imported cigarettes that he handled but the loose filled sort that came from the factory in Zagreb. He had heard a child cry out in the night, from behind a closed door, and she had shouted back at the child. When she was naked, the prostitute straddled Ham on the bed, heavy above him, and her last gesture before earning the money that she had whipped from his hand and buried in her bag was to reach across him and grind out her cigarette.

  He tried to think of his Karen. It was always best when he closed his eyes and thought of Karen. But he could not find her in his mind. The pillow sunk below his head. She felt for him, opening his trousers. He could not find Karen in his mind. He saw the thin and faded wallpaper of the room on the sixth floor of the block on Mihovilica that was away from the old walls of Karlovac and near to the river and the bridge that carried the main road to Zagreb, and there was a narrow framed picture, not straight, of the crucifixion, and there were a child's plastic toys on the floor near to the chair where discarded clothes had been dumped. The bed heaved as she worked harder with her fingers. Couldn't help her, couldn't respond to her, couldn't think of Karen. Because the bed heaved, iron springs screaming, the child behind the closed door cried out again, and the woman ignored her child. Her face was above him, she had the waist of his trousers down to his knees, and his pants pulled back, and he could not respond to her. There was contempt at the woman's mouth. She had already been paid, and her interest was going.

  Couldn't think of Karen.

  He could only think of Penn.

  He, had checked at the operations centre before going out of the barracks in the old police station. Casual questions. Was it all quiet over there? Any balloons going up over there? Bored answers. It was all quiet over there, just a sniper, two rounds,

  near the milk factory that was across the river where they had the salient, nothing else. He was thinking of Penn, and Penn should now be at the end of the map because that was the schedule drawn for him, and Penn should now be holed up in the woodcutters' hut. The shiver came to him, and he thought of Penn who was alone, and the thought shrivelled him. The big mouth with the thick lipstick rim hovered above Ham, and he could not turn the face and the bagged eyes and the grey-flecked hair into the face of his Karen. And the big mouth with the thick lipstick rim curled at him in disgust because he could not respond. He hit her. He smacked with a closed fist into the side of her face. Faces replacing the pain in hers. The face of the barman that he had punched in the bar at Cullyhanna because the barman had back-chatted the patrol. He was hitting her with both fists, belting feverishly into the flab lines of her stomach. The face of the Irish sales representative who had jogged his arm, spilled his pint, in the pub in Aldershot, put on the floor with the fag ends and the beer puddle and kicked. She was off the bed and whimpering in the corner, crouched among the clothes she had dropped. The face of Karen, when he had belted her, when she'd cried, when she'd packed, when she'd gone out of the front door with her bag and his Dawn. All the faces, fleeting, gone .. . Penn's face stayed. He pulled up his pants and his trousers. Ham left the door of the bedroom open behind him, and the door of the apartment, and the woman whimpered and the child cried. He jogged down the stairs. Ham thought only of Penn, and his fear. The compliment, that Benny Stein would not have recognized, was that he was the most popular, the most revered, the most talked about driver in the aid convoy team sponsored by the British Crown Agents. Going off through those bloody awful people, through their bloody awful villages, was not worth thinking of without Benny Stein to humour them along. The Seddon Atkinson, his lorry, was loaded full, eight tons of wheat flour, yeast, sugar, and seed.

  And now the damn tricky girl was playing up on transmission, the only one of fifteen Seddon Atkinsons in the lorry park that was contrary. Two engineers worked with Benny Stein to get the tricky girl road worthy for the morning, and two more of the drivers had come back after their hotel dinner to the lorry park out by the Zagreb airport to see if the tricky girl would ride in the morning across the Turanj crossing point and down through Sector North and on into Sector South.

  If it had stood up and slapped his face, Benny Stein would not have recognized a compliment, but it was one hell of a big compliment to him that two engineers were prepared to work as long as it took through the night to get the tricky girl road worthy and two of the other drivers had come the long drag out of the city centre to check how they were doing.

  Past midnight, and the convoy manager had joined them to peer down into the exposed engine space, and leaning forward behind the convoy manager was the convoy administration manager, quite a crowd to get the tricky girl road worthy Not that Benny Stein, long-distance lorry driver, overweight, middle-aged, stubbed height, shiny bald head that was alive with oil smears, would have noticed. An aid convoy going down through Sector North and on into Sector South might not be safe if Benny Stein wasn't in the line, might not be fun. When the transmission was fixed, when he'd gunned the engine, when he'd driven round the lorry park lunatic fast, when he'd crashed the gears, done the emergency stops, when he'd put the tricky girl through the hoops, Benny Stein pronounced himself satisfied.

  He tried not to think of the past, but to concentrate on the present.

  The image of the fox was the past.

  Penn's present was each footfall of ten strides, then the listening and the silence, then the moving again. He could not kill the image of the fox. The present was going forward in the dawn and he had slept too poorly to have wanted to eat before there was enough light for him to leave the timber men's hut, and he counted himself lucky that the rain showers that had beaten on the tin roof of the hut had been cleared by the wind. Ham's map was finished, and the map bought in the shop in Karlovac was too small a scale to help him with much beyond the lines of the roads. He could get a rough bearing from the early movement of the sun and that was sufficient to guide him. He was deep in the woods and going well, but always there was the prickle of nervousness at his back.

  The past was the image of the fox.

  There had been chickens inside
a walled and roofed wire cage at the bottom of the tied cottage's garden. It had been his job through his childhood, each evening, to feed the chickens and to collect the eggs. It was easy enough for a fox to approach the cage, to sniff the wire mesh of the cage. But approaching the cage, sniffing the cage, didn't fill the gut of the fox. The fox had to find a way through the wall of the cage, scratch back the loose seams of the wire, dig frantically under the wire, chew at the frame of the door, if the fox were not to go hungry. And scratching, digging, chewing, aroused the frightened screams of the chickens. It was easy enough to get close but the bloody awful bit, for the fox, was doing the business. With the cackle of the chickens came his father with the shotgun, and the dogs from the shed and the big flashlight from the shelf beside the kitchen door. Three foxes were killed near the chickens' cage during his childhood, two shot by his father when caught in the flashlight, one trapped by the dogs against the panel fence by the fruit bushes. One fox had made it in. It was the night when his father and his mother had taken him to the pantomime in Chippenham, a foul wet night, and before the expedition to Chippenham he had fed the chickens fast under the rain and not latched properly the gate frame, not hooked the chain onto the bent nail. Penn couldn't count on it, that the frame door to Rosenovici would have been left open. It was easy enough for him to get there, but when he roused the chickens .. . But he was trying not to think of the past.

  Penn could hear the sounds of tractors.

  He had been going along the side of a hill that was close set with trees. He had no path to guide him, no trail. He could move well and quietly on the mat of damp leaves. He was drawn forward towards the engine sounds of tractors.

  Suddenly, he was looking into the valley. There had been a fine rock in front of him, weather-smoothed and lichen-coated, and the rock had blocked the valley from him. Past the rock, and he saw the valley. There was a stream going fast, well swollen, that cut the valley into halves. Two tractors worked in the grass fields on the far side of the stream from him, and both pulled old laden manure spreaders. The fields on his side of the valley were unworked and weeded up.