She was told that evening, in a whispered telephone call, that the Family's most trusted nephew, Marco, was entrusted with a mission of importance by his uncle, had gone with a packed case to the airport at Messina, was travelling to a meeting of significance.
Giovanna thought Marco a handsome boy and im-porlant to the family's future, a boy of intelligence but trapped by the poison in the f amily's bloodstream, a boy with a life wasted a boy who might, one day, kill her.
Mislter had gone a dozen paces past the end of the line ol black station wagons, all with smoked-glass windows, past the knot of gossiping drivers, when he jerked to a stop. He was facing the swing doors of the hotel. The noise of a hundred voices, nasal and loud, billowing and American, buffeted him. His eyes narrowed. He peered through the doors. He turned in one swinging movement and faced Atkins. He reached in his belt, took the pistol from it and palmed it to Atkins.
'Leave it in the vehicle,' he said, 'and yours, and get the vehicle down the warehouse - now.'
He waited until Atkins had driven away.
'Right, Eagle, let's see what the party's for.'
They went through the door, shrugged out of their coats and laid them on the conveyor belt feeding the X-ray machine. They went through the metal detector, and were bleeped, because of the coins in Mister's pocket and the metal-lined case for the Eagle's spectacles. By the machine and the arch stood men with cropped haircuts and long, shapeless coats, with flesh-coloured wires coiled between their shirt collars and their ears. They were passed through. Every seat in the atrium bar was taken. Every table was littered with ashtrays, beer glasses, coffee cups and Pepsi cans. At the far end of the bar a woman addressed the little forest of microphones. Cameramen climbed on the soft-cushioned seats to see better. There was bedlam.
At the desk they collected their keys, and Mister was given a note from his pigeon-hole.
Eagle asked the receptionist, 'Who are all these people? What's going on?'
She told the Eagle that the American Secretary of State was due at the hotel in two hours, on a leg from Paris and Vienna, last stop before returning to Washington. This was only the advance party.
Mister heard what she said, but hardly listened. He read the note again and felt a small sensation of excitement, better than when the launcher had fired.
The Eagle repeated what the receptionist had told him.
'Yes, yes - I heard it the first time . . .' He laughed quietly. 'Would have been choice if I'd gone through without thinking . . . '
'But you always think, Mister, don't you?'
Mister was smiling. 'Tomorrow's not busy, not till the evening, and it's the day after tomorrow that matters. Anyway, I'll be out of town on a little trip.
You and Atkins can lose yourselves, can't you, till the evening?'
'Buckets to do here,' the Eagle said. 'Buckets of fun to be had.'
He thought there was a brittle snap in the Eagle's voice. If it hadn't been for the message he might have kicked the Eagle's shin, but he'd read it. They walked to the lift. The Eagle, as always, pushed the outside button for him and stood aside to let him enter first, then pushed the inside button for their floor. Mister was slow to recognize sarcasm: it was too far back in his life for him to remember the last man who had been sarcastic to his face.
Chapter Fifteen
Henry hadn't left a contact address. He'd been vague, infuriatingly obtuse, about where he could be reached when he was abroad. 'May be in and out of several hotels - I'll be on the move. It wouldn't really be a good idea for you to call me or me to call you - it's only for a few days.' It had never been Mo Arbuthnot's habit to quiz her husband on his work, and she'd let it go. He'd kissed her cheek and said he'd ring from Heathrow when he was back in the country.
Three hours before, while she and the girls had slept, the cars had crunched onto the pepper-coloured gravel of the drive. The dogs in the kitchen had woken first, had disturbed Mo, and she'd seen in a half-awake haze the headlights against her bedroom curtains. She'd heard the dogs' barking and the chorus of birdsong in the garden's trees, the slamming of doors, the scrape of feet across the gravel, and the peal of the bell. She'd gone down the stairs, shrugging into her dressing-gown, and peered through the front door's spyhole. They'd activated the security lights.
They were well lit: a cluster of men, and one woman, on the step; one face was masked by a plume of pipesmoke. She'd called out that they should identify themselves and small cards were held up to the spyhole. She'd opened the door. Four of the men and the woman had pushed past her, no word said, but the one with the pipe, the eldest, biting on its stem, puffing like a damned chimney, had intoned the text of the authorized warrant to search her home then handed her the sheet of paper as if she might want to check that an error had not been made. She hadn't bothered to read it, but she had claimed, had insisted, that there had to be an error. ' I doubt it,' the older man had growled. 'We make very few errors, ma'am.' A police car was parked behind their cars, but the two uniformed men stayed in it, as if this was not their business. She had demanded the names of the intruders, and had been ignored. When the older man had stepped sideways in the hall to go by her she had proclaimed, with all the haughtiness she could muster, that she did not permit smoking in her home.
He'd smiled, a chilling crack at the side of his mouth, then strolled back on to the outer doorstep where he had whacked his pipe against the raised heel of his polished shoe and the embers had fallen onto the grouted bricks. He'd left them glowing there and gone by her . . . Without proper points of contact, Mo Arbuthnot had no one to call, no one to cry to for help
. . . She thought her home was violated. Two of them were in her husband's study, his inner sanctum off the far end of the lounge. One was in the dining room and had the drawers and books out of the antique rosewood desk where she recorded the household accounts. Another had chosen the oak chest, Jacobean, in the sitting room.It had been like a wound to her.
But the worst of the wounds had not been the rape of her privacy, or the silent shock on the faces of her daughters who clung to each other at the top of the stairs, it was the woman and the family dogs. The woman had gone into the kitchen and left the door open. The dogs should have been leaping at her, or getting behind her legs and snarling at her ankles. She was down on the kitchen's heavy-weave carpet, scratching bellies, crooning to them: she had bought their affection. Then she had started to search every cupboard, every shelf, to open every cookery book kept on top of the dresser.
The older man, his warm pipe pocketed, tramped up the stairs. She saw the politeness with which he requested the girls to move aside and make way for him. He went into her bedroom. Out of her sight he would have been sifting in the drawers of her dressing-table, and that hurt too; but nothing hurt as cruelly as the betrayal of her dogs.
Mo Arbuthnot knew little of her husband's work.
He was a criminal lawyer, he worked through the week in London, and brought little of the work home.
At weekends, he did not discuss his caseload with her.
'Not what I come down here for,' he'd say. 'Down here is for getting away from it.' Sometimes, on a Sunday evening, he'd shut himself away in his study for an hour, and she and the girls would be in the sitting room with the television, then he'd bring out his briefcase and leave it by the front door for the early Monday-morning departure. It was always locked. At dinner parties or drinks sessions, at home or at their friends', if Henry was asked about work, he would answer in generalities and effortlessly steer away the talk. 'Legal stuff, anything that comes along, enough to make a c r u s t . . . How's the cricket team doing this summer?' The crust - she was not stupid, she could do the arithmetic - was in excess of two hundred thousand pounds in income a year, and there was a stocks portfolio and a pension scheme. She was looked after, as were the girls' schools, and the horses.
Few of the women she knew in the village, of her status, had a finger on the pulse of their husband's finances . . . She understood so
little of his life and never pressed to be told. Not often, occasionally, not more than once a calendar month, the phone would ring, and Henry would he in the garden or at the stables, and she'd answer it, and a very soft-spoken voice would say, 'Mrs Arbuthnot? So sorry to trouble you, hope it's not inconvenient - can I speak to him, please? It's Mister. . .' She'd go to the front door, or the kitchen door, or the french windows off the dining room, and shout that he was wanted and who wanted him, and Henry would always come running. Mister was, Henry said, 'just another client'.
They left They look nothing with them, went empty- handed to their cars.
She hated them., but most of all their chief. 'You see?'she said, with venom. 'You made a mistake. As a piece of rudeness this is beyond belief. You bullock into my home, you disturb me, you terrify my girls, and al the end of otl the exercise was without the slightest justification.'
The older man said, as he lit his pipe, 'What you should remember, ma'am, and tell your husband upon his return is that as a more unpleasant creature than myself once remarked "We only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky every time." Good day, ma'am.'
She went to the phone, rather than to her daughters. It was the sixth time she'd called their office number - she was too stressed to consider or ponder on it, that the previous five times she'd dialled out none of the men, nor the woman, had objected They had not tried to prevent her spreading the word of their search - and she was rewarded.
'Josh? Thank God I've got you . . . It's Mo Arbuthnot . . . I am in the middle of a nightmare .. .
No, no, I mean it. Our house, home, us, we've been invaded by people from the Customs. They had a warrant. They've been through every nook and cranny . . . Of course, I'm trying to be calm . . . I don't know where Henry is . . . I don't know what it's all about, they never told me. They were here three hours, they've just gone . . . Where is he? I want him found. Find him and tell him that his home and his family have been subjected to a nightmarish intrusion
. . . I don't care what he told you. We've been treated like criminals, and I don't know why.'
'Was that all right, Mr Gough?' the woman, SQG8, asked him.
'That was dandy.'
'We didn't find anything.'
They were out of the lanes and had reached the bypass skirting Guildford.
'It was more than satisfactory. Far from home and a panic call down the phone, sobs and screams, that'll make Eagle's day. I thought it went well, and yesterday . . . Do you know, my dear, you or I would have to work for thirty years - without deductions of tax, pension scheme and National Insurance, and not touch our salary, only bank it - to afford that house?
Perhaps it'll be on the market soon . . . Do you mind if I take a nap? I doubt there'll be much opportunity for sleep later.'
The note had come by hand delivery. It was dropped through the letter-box and the bell was rung to alert her to its presence on the mat. The Princess, nee Primrose Hinds, took the envelope back to her bed.
She settled against her feather pillows and slit open the envelope.
My dearest Princess,
I miss you.
It's going well, but slowly. I hope to leave on the 22nd, 23rd at the latest. Hope all is good with you.
With love, Mister XXXX
A letter from Mister was a rare treasure. She understood why he never used the telephone and why she must never call him. Even when he'd been on remand, in Brixton, and she'd been forbidden to visit him, he had never written. Verbal messages had passed between them via the Eagle. It would have been five years, or six, since he had last written, from Amsterdam. She would have been with him
in Amsterdam but for the influenza.
She kissed the letter, then lay back on the bed for a few moments, held a pillow and thought of him.
Then, she went to the en-suite bathroom, tore the page into small pieces and flushed them down the pan, as he would have wanted her to.
Through the hotel's big ground-floor windows, Joey saw the arc-lights that burned down on the Secretary of State. The wire services and the satellite news programmes would carry his words: 'Society here has to rid itself of corrosive corruption. Citizens of Bosnia Herzegovina, you must resist the extremists and the criminals, you have to turn your backs on the past.'
An American officer would interrupt the great man, cut him short in mid-stride, and would say into the microphone: 'I'm afraid, ladies and gentlemen, we've run out of time if we're to make our flight window.'
Joey watched the stampede of the circus around the great man as they went out with him through the swing doors. The Secretary of State was hemmed in by bodyguards, military liaison officers, advisers, stenographers and his own travelling media, and all were hurrying to the long line of station-wagons, governed by their pecking order of importance. They couldn't get shot of the place fast enough, couldn't race to the airport and climb onto the 747 too soon.
Troops waved them away, sirens escorted them down Zmaja od Bosne, which had been Snipers' Alley.
A stillness seemed to settle on the yellow and chocolate hotel building, as if all inside it now caught their breath, sighed, sagged .. . Joey saw the white UNHCR
truck pull up in the space where the station-wagon convoy had been. She slipped out of the vehicle. He recognized her.
She was only half-way to the swing doors when Mister came through them. They were like kids meeting in a park. No kisses, but their handshake was more about touching and holding than formal greeting. He couldn't hear their laughter, but watched the mute pleasure on their faces.
When they drove away, Joey followed in the van.
She had the wheel, Mister was beside her.
They went past the new American headquarters camp on the far side of the airport, and along the road were stretched little wooden shacks, closed and locked.
She said, 'It's a little part ol the black market. Later in the day they will be opened. They sell every CD
and video you ever heard of, all illegally recorded.
They've paid no duty on them, no copyright. Other than the market of servicing foreigners, the only industry is black. It is worse on the Tuzla road. There are not CDs and videos in the huts on the way to Tuzla, it is women, young women, some from Bosnia but most from outside - Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine.
When they have been "trained" here, they are sent on to brothels in western Europe - it is a disgusting, exploitative trade. Always, Mister, it is the criminals who win here . . . I am sorry, it is gloomy - but that is the reality.'
They climbed on hairpin bends and came to the village of Tvorno. There was lustreless snow beside the road, but the ice on it glistened prettily in the early sunshine. Rows of houses on the approach were gutted, roofless and burned, sandwiched between the road and a tumbling river. Beyond the river were rolling forested hills, then mountains that were snow-swept, formidable and magnificent. He was looking at the wreckage.
She said, 'We call them cabriolet houses. Do you understand? It is houses without roofs . . . I am sorry, perhaps you do not think that funny. I promise you, Mister, it is sometimes necessary to have a dark humour if you work here. If you are too serious then you would weep. It is very beautiful, yes?'
The road came down from the high ground into a wide agricultural valley, leaving the snow and ice behind them. She pulled off the road, produced battered, well-used Thermos and poured coffee for them. They stood beside her vehicle and looked down at the valley and the big river running through it, and at a town beyond the river where there were close-set houses and the chimneys of industrial plants. He looked for damage. All he saw was the collapsed bridge that had spanned the river and had linked the town to the main road. The water now flowed over the bridge.
She said, 'It is Foca. I don't go there. It is a place of evil. I should go there. I could go with troops from the SFOR, but I do not wish to. There is suffering there, the same as everywhere, but I am not perfect. Do you think it wrong to care less for the suffering of some than I do for others?
I could not argue if you thought that, Mister. Do you see men fishing? They have no work and they fish for food to eat. The factories have stopped, the chemicals leak into the river - it is the Drina river. I would not eat the fish but they are desperate . . . I do not go to Foca because it is a place where war criminals walk. Everyone knows their names, who the beasts are. You could meet them on the street in Foca just as in Sarajevo you could meet Ismet Mujic. In six years only once have the SFOR
dared to try to capture one of them - Janko Janjic, the mass rapist and mass cleanser. He had an eagle tattooed on his stomach and the words "Slaughter Me" on his neck. Every minute of every day he had a hand-grenade hanging from his throat, and he pulled the pin when German troops came to take him. The rapist and the murderer, in Foca, was a hero. Many thousands went to his funeral. Myself - and a good man like you, Mister we do not know how to speak with such creatures.'
He kissed her at that moment, first her cheeks, then her forehead, then her eyes, then her lips.
'How long will you he here?'
'Just a couple more days.'
'But you will come back?'
I will bring, more lorries but that won't be as important as coming, back to see you.' Mister held her close, hugged her. It was not the way he embraced his Princess. He clung to her as if he had been infected by the misery she spoke of. I will come back, not send people who could do it instead of me, I'll come back because you're here....I don't talk a lot - Monika, you are the best human being I've ever met.' He saw the openness of her face and the trust. He had thought of her at first as a contact, a tool to be used, an opportunity lo be exploited. 'They were alone beside the road and his arms were tight round her. She was looking down. The way he held her she could see his left hand She was looking at his hand and the heavy gold ring on his third finger, the ring the Princess had given him.
'Come on, Mister Charity Man, let's hit Gorazde.'
She disentangled herself. Her face was flushed. It was eighteen years since he had married his Princess and in that time he had not touched another woman.
The Untouchable Page 38
