The guide said they called it Bloody Omaha.
Forty-five thousand men went onto that beach, with an insupportable weight of problems: rough seas, the depth of the water when they were pushed out of the landing craft, too many tanks sinking immediately, the sea swamping the landing craft and men frantically baling with their GI-issue helmets, ineffective bombing of the strong points. Then there was a cliff to face, and half of the engineers, who were trained to scale those heights, were dead before they’d left the sand.
It was a cathartic moment for the tourists who stood high on the hill above the beach and watched sand yachts racing far below them. Around the group were the concrete strong-points and towards the horizon was the pure blue sea, the white crests of waves breaking at the shore. The guide would have quoted the words of Colonel George Taylor, of the Fighting 29th, when his men were pinned down at the cliff’s base and the sector advance was stalled: ‘Two kinds of men are going to stay on this beach, the dead and those about to die. Now, get off your butts.’
The group would have struggled to comprehend the scale of the casualties on the high ground and the beach. From V Corps at least three thousand men died, were wounded or posted as missing. An American lieutenant had yelled at his cowering men, ‘Are we going to lie there and get killed or are we going to do something about it?’ The guide said that 2,500 tons of supplies should have reached the beach in the first twenty-four hours, but only a hundred came ashore undamaged. The guide said, also, that it was a ‘near miracle’ that the landing succeeded on Omaha, and the final outcome depended on ‘heroic courage’. Harry Parley, of the 116th Infantry Division, recalled afterwards, ‘As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down, I became a visitor to hell.’
They group went back to the bus. They felt that being in this place, standing vigil, was recognition of the courage shown there. None wished to hurry away.
The afternoon promised and delivered sunshine. Drips from last night’s rain pattered from the trees and bushes on the slope below the path that walkers used. When the drops fell on leaves from the previous autumn the sound was sharper than it was when they landed on the camouflage tunic and trousers into which small sprigs had been woven. The two sounds made a steady, remorseless drumbeat as the marksman waited. The rhythm might have dulled his sense of what was around and behind him, but his attention was locked on a gap between a beech and an ash: through the gap he had a clear view of the edge of the patio and the lawn with the gravel path across it. At the end of the path, there was a small can, which would be for cigarette ends. Voices, excited and young, came closer, but were on the path and he thought himself well enough hidden. There had been no dog owners and no rambling children in the vantage-points on the slope above the Jewish cemetery or the abandoned tower blocks or by the old Olympic bobsleigh course: Sarajevo was free of them . . . The man must come. He himself had smoked half a pack in the car during the night, and the rest while huddled on a bench, his ear phones playing music from home. He waited for the man and was certain that the addiction to nicotine would provide him with the chance. Then his money would have been earned and more work would follow.
There was a confusing noise behind and to the right. He stiffened, then slowly turned his head. His finger remained outside the trigger guard. He saw the dog and the ball. The dog edged warily towards him but had more interest in the ball than in him. He was about to look back at the garden and resume the watch through the lens when a child came. The marksman did not appreciate that the glass of the lens was uncovered or that his own eye shone in the light. The dog had the ball, then turned in response to its name. The dog and the child left.
His eye was back at the lens, the focus tight on the patio. The range was marginally less than two hundred metres. He expected to hit all targets even at 800 metres.
A woman had come out. She had smoked in the sunshine and a shoulder holster’s straps had risen on her chest. Perhaps the man was trying to quit. He himself had failed eight times.
The man would come – the addiction would win – and he would be away.
The child was bright, the most intelligent in his class of six-year-olds. His mother and teachers often marvelled at the sharpness of his mind.
Neither a teacher nor his mother would doubt what the child said he had seen. Back from the path, the dog in the car, a call on a mobile: ‘That’s what he says he saw. If my son says it I believe him.’
It might not have been necessary to take such precautions, but Timofey Simonov met the man, a Moroccan known as ‘Morocco’, in a park by the river. In any other city he would have engaged in a business conversation at an outside location where bugs could not have been planted and where he was beyond the range of microphones and enhancing dishes.
That afternoon, as the sun lowered on the hill above his villa, he felt good, comfortable, confident. The message was through from his man that the transfer had been effected. They talked. More accurately, Morocco talked. Timofey listened. He rarely interrupted when he was given interesting information. He rarely took advice from the brigadier.
He was told, ‘It would require financing. It’s an opportunity for a person with prestige and cash to make an investment. They would remain in the background, then take a reward. It is what a Georgian group did in the South of France. In a year they did a thousand burglaries. They took iPads, tablets, laptops, good watches, anything electronic and small. The authorities in Cannes, Nice and Marseille did not recognise that an important organisation was behind the thefts. It was thought to be merely an increase in “minor offences”. There was a warehouse where the goods were stored, then loaded discreetly into a container. It was taken east across the Mediterranean and unloaded at the port of Batumi on the Black Sea. The flea markets in Georgia were flooded, but the sale went well. The profit was in excess of a million euros. Serious money. I would like you to consider it. I would have thought that an initial investment of a hundred thousand euro would see the business launched and the return could be measured at three hundred to four hundred per cent. I believe also that the opportunity is particularly good at the moment because there are so many new models in the electronics field and demand outstrips supply. Also, the market could move from Georgia into Azerbaijan and possibly to Iran where the currency in exchange would be resin from poppies. The items’ prices would undercut trade across the Gulf. The South of France would be good, but there would also be opportunities along the coasts of Italy and in the north.’
He was handed a slip of paper. A mobile number. He distorted it, entered it.
A pause and Morocco hesitated. He said, ‘I would hope this investment will not seem too trivial to you.’
A smile of encouragement, and Timofey Simonov saw the ambitious entrepreneur on his way.
For a man such as himself there were seldom opportunities he considered too small to be worth his while. He could remember, far back, some of the imprisoned zeks of Perm 35 – they never had been too grand, his father had said, to turn aside business. And he had heard that the Italians from Naples, Palermo and Calabria did deals where the margin was small but would grow. The brigadier still had the mentality of a senior officer and would have said such an investment should be ignored. Timofey Simonov could value his assets and investments at a half-billion euros. Nikolai Denisov was able to keep his wife in Prague, pay her bills and the school fees, but was at the beck and the call of an employer. Timofey enjoyed small deals. Against advice, he had organised the sale of weapons – at a knock-down profit margin – via his friend. It would take him back to Milovice, where the ghosts were. It was a pilgrimage for him and he might fire one of the weapons when they were tested. He loved the darkness of Milovice, and its safety.
He walked home, another late-middle-aged Russian who took advantage of the conditions of Karlovy Vary. He did not want to be out on his own after darkness, even though the road to his home, Krale Jiriho, was well lit. Extraordinary that a thief had been prowling at the back with an accomplice.
He had a few an
imal carvings by African craftsmen, reminders of the gilt-encrusted days when he had flown into central Africa. They stood around the fireplace in the living room, in his bedroom on the windowsill and in his office. An elephant of dark hard wood and a gazelle were in the hallway. They recalled the days when money had come easily. His balances in unidentifiable accounts had swelled, and the élite of Moscow had sought him out. Good days, he had raked in his fortune. The agency dealing with properties had said this house was the best in the town on the market at that time. He had bought it. All because of his success in Africa, and the little cloth bags that were given in payment. And now thieves roamed at the back of his property. It was as if his security had been violated. It would be sad if he had to move on.
Matthew Bentinick drove and his wife had her hand tucked at his elbow. She was trying to reassure him. He appreciated that. Their destination was to the east of where they lived, tucked away in a rural suburb. It might once have been the residence of a captain of industry but was no longer the ‘Grange’ or the ‘Manor’. The signboard at the gates read ‘Clinic’. It was where the ambulance had brought her years ago. His wife’s hand was on his arm because the wound was as painful that afternoon as it had been when they had travelled with her from Heathrow after the flight from central Africa. The driveway took them past a herbaceous border and a shrubbery. Matthew stared straight ahead, while his wife seemed to be studying the handkerchief crumpled in her spare hand. Their one child – now a grown woman of more than thirty – was only taken outside once a week because she seemed not to benefit from going more frequently. They had brought her here, had been with her in the closed ambulance, had come through the gates and seen her settled in the room where she now existed. A car provided by the Service had taken them home.
He parked. They walked across freshly raked gravel to the visitors’ entrance. She did not hold his hand, not where they could be seen. Pain, for Matthew and Rosie Bentinick, was neither shared nor displayed. They came every Thursday. The staff did not encourage more than one visit each week, but the one they were allowed was sacred to them both. Three winters before, in the great freeze that had closed roads across the south-east, they had walked nine miles there, had seen their daughter and walked nine miles back to a home as empty as it had been on the first night they had left her there.
They were greeted at Reception and asked to wait. The staff on her wing would take a few minutes to make her presentable, as if she was a doll.
‘You walked into a door.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Karol Pilar answered.
‘Not a Russian door?’
‘A door in my apartment.’
‘And there are no Irish doors in your apartment?’
‘My apartment is in Vinohrady. The doors are home-produced, not from Russia or Ireland.’
He was disbelieved. His boss was left with the decision either to confront the lie or to let it go. A cigarette was lit, a voicemail was checked. His boss didn’t like him. Karol Pilar was outside any circle in the detectives’ building on Bartolomejska. He did not have mates in the building, or at the Sherlock, the Al Capone or the Konvikt. He was not marked down for promotion, but his work was sound.
‘What do you want?’
‘A back-up unit, guys from the URNA team.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I believe the Irish here are making a contact and may have the opportunity to test-fire weapons, probably tomorrow. I don’t know the location or the supplier, so I want them on standby. Four would be sufficient.’
‘And are you able to go forward discreetly on this matter with our British colleagues? Without surprises?’
‘Yes. It’s straightforward.’
‘Watch out for doors.’
The phone was lifted and a terse instruction issued. The detail of armed men had been authorised. Pilar would do all he could for Bentinick. If it were fast and clean, discretion could be maintained and surprises kept to an acceptable level. He thanked his boss and backed out of the room.
They sat on a bench and the dusk closed around them.
Gaby Davies had guided him in, and Danny Curnow had homed in on her. ‘I’ll do the stag,’ he said. He saw her surprise. Then she shrugged – as if it wasn’t a big deal whether or not she resumed her watch on Ralph Exton.
‘When’ll I see you?’ she asked.
He said later – he’d call her – and added something about the next day being fraught, and some rest would be good. Then his eyebrow had flickered. She left.
The targets were across the park, sitting on a bench, the towering TV mast in front of them. He had come through some pleasant squares, flanked by the grand houses of a century before. He doubted Malachy Riordan had noticed the gardens or the grandeur of the buildings: his head was down and his shoulders were bowed. She was an attractive girl – he reckoned she enjoyed the glamour and excitement of being integral to a conspiracy, that she was an innocent – her hand was back on his shoulders, working at the muscles. Maybe she should have stayed with her college books. Danny was learning to know her: he always grew familiar with targets he tailed.
He envied Riordan the fingers on the shoulders. The pictures were on his walls, and the hands that had held the brush and mixed the pigments could have been on his back if he had been prepared to commit. But it was as if the beaches ruled him, and the graveyards. He served the dead.
The light faded around him. The mothers with their prams had gone. Schoolkids came past, laden with bags, and the work force was on the way home, heaving shopping. The couple stayed in view.
The next day it would finish. Danny Curnow thought he knew how – hoped he did.
Chapter 15
There had been a rain squall beyond the TV tower. It had melded with the last of the sun and had thrown a bright rainbow – Danny Curnow’s pocket map told him it was in Stare Mesto and the Zizkov quarter. It would not be there for long because the wind was strengthening.
Frankie McKinney came back with a six-pack of cans and two hot dogs. While she had been gone, Malachy Riordan had not moved. Shoulders hunched, head bowed. Danny would barely have recognised him as the well-built figure at the farmhouse. He didn’t need to see a man’s face to recall him: his stature was enough. A can was opened.
The rainbow died. Danny saw rain advance and blanket the tower. It reached him just seconds after it had started to fall on them. They were eating, and Malachy used his hand to wipe his mouth, then swigged at the first can he had opened. Frankie sipped from hers. A woman jogged past him, trying to beat the worst of the rain home, and the wheels of a buggy threw up water that splashed Danny’s legs. He had no need to sit in the open. Outside the small park there were the doorways of what had once been fine houses – he could have sheltered in one. From a bar behind him he’d have had a view of the backs of their heads. But it seemed right to share his vigil with them. He couldn’t have said why.
She took the napkin from his hand as he wolfed down the last of the hot dog, stretched past him and dropped it into a bin. The first can went after it, and he opened another.
More men and women came by, umbrellas up.
Their heads and shoulders were closer. Twice he saw the girl wipe rainwater from Malachy Riordan’s forehead with her hand. She threw the greater part of her own hot dog into the bin. Their shoulders touched. He thought he knew where Gaby Davies would be. He had given her full rein. He had a coat that kept off most of the rain from his shoulders and upper chest but hadn’t unfastened the hood and had no cover for his legs. Malachy Riordan was on the third can.
He was a voyeur. Danny Curnow had acted that part often enough. He had watched people throughout the years he had spent in Ireland, and had been on courses to refine his skills. He had looked across parks and through windows and had seen men and women prepare themselves to kill and . . .
The woman who looked after the secretarial side of Bentinick’s life at Gough had once been seen in a corner of the mess, nursing a coffee and reading from
the poems of William Butler Yeats. She had been asked which one, and why. Something about an Irish airman with the Flying Corps in the First World War:
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love . . .
The quotation had sobered the bar. Did they hate the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, who bombed and shot their way deeper into a cul-de-sac? Did they love the Protestant civilians, with their bigotry, intolerance and stupidity? Little hate and little love. She had read on:
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the skies . . .
Danny Curnow might not have been alone. ‘The lonely impulse’ had resonance. He remembered barely a word of any conversation from the Gough days, but the woman’s voice, calm, quiet and respectful, had taken root with the words she’d recited. His was a ‘lonely impulse’. He remembered how it had been in the gardens by the water at Honfleur, close to the lion statues and the small fountain, his stubborn refusal to abandon ‘commitment’, and her walking away. He remembered each Sunday evening when he drove through the harbour town to collect the battlefield visitors, and each Tuesday evening when he left them at their hotel to trail after her.
Frankie McKinney had her head close to Malachy Riordan’s and there was more water for her to wipe from his forehead. Danny remembered the look of almost sad defiance as she had gazed into his face, grimaced and muttered something he hadn’t quite heard. She might have wished him well. Then she had gone. Both, too obstinate to compromise. The rain slapped him. He was cold.
He watched them and thought of where he might have been. He knew the stories of men and women, once prominent, whose fortunes had corkscrewed: they had given up what they knew and had gone to act as witness to greater suffering. He knew where he should have been.
Vagabond Page 33
