by Henry Porter
He read the testimonies of the two men, a tractor mechanic named Orovic and a school sports teacher who was identified by his initials DS. They had been captured a day later and sent to the killing fields on separate buses. There they were forced to watch from the windows as a dozen men at a time were taken from the bus, lined up in the doorway of a derelict barn and shot. The men had prayed, begged with the soldiers and even tried to bargain for their lives, offering their savings of Deutschmarks. Only a few went to their deaths cursing their killers.
Orovic’s turn came early in the afternoon. When the shots rang out he fell backwards into the pile of bodies unhurt and lay there absolutely motionless, as more and more bodies were heaped on to him. During a lull in the slaughter, some time towards the end of the afternoon, Orovic had been aware of the general’s presence at the mouth of the barn. He also knew his face well. Some kind of inspection was obviously taking place. The general had come to make sure the bodies were going to be properly disposed of and that his men had enough ammunition and would complete their quota of killing the next day. He heard him say that there were several hundred men being kept in a hall a few kilometres down the road. As the voices receded, Orovic squinted his eyes open and saw the general strutting away, talking to another man. They turned and threw a final contemptuous look towards the barn before getting into a vehicle and driving off.
Later, after darkness had fallen, Orovic heard a whispering in the dark. It was the teacher, DS, who had been winged on the shoulder but was otherwise unhurt. They waited until the early hours of the next day, then they extricated themselves from the mound of bloody corpses and from the terrible smell that already filled the barn, and escaped through some loose panels at the back of the building. Several shots rang out when the soldiers heard them running across the gravel road. The two men plunged into some dense undergrowth on the other side and began snaking their way up the hill. Four days later they staggered over the Bosnian front line, suffering badly from blisters, hunger and dehydration.
As he read DS’s evidence, which was nearly identical to the mechanic’s, something began to fall into place for Harland. What linked all six people was the evidence of the general at the scene. But that could not be the point of interest for Griswald because the general was already the subject of an indictment for genocide from the War Crimes Tribunal. They had quite enough evidence of his involvement. Harland went back to the end of Simic’s account, to the part where she described seeing the general on the roadside.
‘There was a man with him,’ she said, ‘in a brand new uniform. I could not see his rank. All men in camouflage look the same. But this man was somebody of importance. You could see that by the way the general took care to consult him. I don’t remember much of what they were saying now. We were too frightened to remember. But I am sure the man was a foreigner, not Serb. He had an accent and he could not speak the language well. A few times they had difficulty understanding each other and the general would slap the man on the back heartily. The general was anxious to please him, you could tell that.’
The investigator had prompted her to give a fuller description of the general’s companion.
‘He was shorter than the general,’ she had replied. ‘He was the same age – late forties, maybe early fifties. He was a dark man with a small face and a well-shaped nose and mouth. He might have been quite good-looking in his youth. The general was excited and pumped up with nervous energy, but this man did not move much. He was very composed.’
Harland realised that buried in each account was a mention of this man. All the women had noted his presence in passing and he had been seen by the two survivors of the massacre at the barn. The sports teacher had got a much clearer view than the mechanic because he had fallen to the side of the door and was able to watch undetected through a crack between the planks of wood. He said the man walked with quick short steps. He also heard a foreign accent.
Harland was sure that this character was the person Griswald was investigating. He supposed that hundreds, maybe thousands, of interviews had been combed for evidence of his presence in Eastern Bosnia during the final Serb push before the Dayton Peace Accord. The witnesses’ statements which placed him at the scene of the massacre with the general were obviously of crucial importance in building a case against the man, whose identity Griswald must have known. But what did this all mean in the greater scheme of things? Why was Griswald being more secretive than perhaps he would have been about any of the other war criminals pursued by the tribunal?
Harland folded the transcripts and put them in his jacket pocket. For the rest of the trip he entered a shallow sleep. He awoke as the plane touched down at Toulouse in the dark, feeling dreadful. He bought himself breakfast and arranged for a hire car. Before leaving he called Madame Clergues to say that he was on his way.
Tomas Rath had slipped into Heathrow on a twin-engine turbo-prop from Reykjavik, having the day before flown from New York to Iceland in the hope that the route would make him a fraction less conspicuous. As he waited in the EU line for immigration control at Heathrow he turned on his cellphone and listened for his messages. To his surprise he heard Robert Harland’s deliberate voice suggesting they see each other when he got to London that day. He noted down the numbers that Harland had left him and snapped the phone closed. That was really great news, he thought.
On the way into London he tried calling Flick a couple of times. He wanted to tell her about Harland, to say that his impulsive visit to New York had paid off. But he couldn’t reach her. He supposed that she was at Covent Garden market because she often did the run to pick up the day’s order herself. Tomas usually went with her. It was part of their life together and he loved setting off in the van, listening to Flick’s collection of ‘adrenalin rock’, arriving at the huge flower hall just south of the Thames where he breakfasted on coffee and a bacon sandwich while Flick put together the order. His job – the lifting and loading – came later, so for the best part of an hour he watched her move between the stalls, haggling and flirting with the wholesalers. One morning a couple of weeks back he had caught sight of her in a shaft of light and his heart turned over. He knew then that he was falling in love.
He reached Belsize Park tube station and went through a complicated procedure which involved doubling back on the Northern Line to Camden Town, whereupon he left the station and walked to Flick’s flat in Hazlitt Grove, South Hampstead. When he got there, it struck him as odd that her dark blue van was still parked outside her flat. By this time she was usually either at the shop in Hampstead or at the market. He unlocked the front door of the house and found a note on the doormat. It was signed ‘Pete’, who was the manager at the shop. The note, dated and timed the previous day, asked if anything was the matter.
With a sense of dread, Tomas climbed the stairs. On the first landing he waited and listened. No sound came from the floor above – another sign that things were not right. If Flick was there, she’d have music on. He continued up the last two flights, taking care to avoid the creaking floorboards, and arrived at the door. Standing under the skylight he pressed his ear to the door. He could wait no longer. He thrust the key into the lock and pushed the door open.
He found Flick lying naked in a foetal position on her bed. Her legs and arms were bound. She had been killed with a bullet in the head. There was blood on the wall and on a pillow which had been used to muffle the shot. Tomas dropped to his knees beside the bed and touched her hands, which had been yanked down to meet the twine around her ankles. He knew that she had suffered terribly. He saw marks on her arms, breasts and thighs – cigarette burns and welts that had risen into livid bruises before she died. In the corner of his mind he had already taken in that the place had been turned over and that they hadn’t found anything. There was nothing to find.
He brushed her face with his hand. She was utterly cold. He let out a cry, not of self-pity, but of remorse. They had tortured her to find out where he was and they had tried to make her
tell them what she knew about his activities. But Flick knew nothing. She’d never asked and he had never told her. This was it – the retribution he’d been expecting. At that moment he would have given his own life never to have met her. But she had smiled at him across that bar, walked over and sat down beside him. He should have done something to put her off, but he’d let her take him home to share her quirky, beautiful, decent life. And now she was dead. Dead because of him.
He sat there for some time, tortured by self-loathing. This was the end for him too. There was nowhere for him to go. He could not bring Flick’s terrible fate on anyone else. Now he had to finish the job. He would let everything go – everything.
He rose and left the flat in a trance. On the first landing he stopped, unscrewed two locks, lifted the sash cord window and climbed out on to the narrow brick column which had been added to buttress the wall at the back of the house. Once he had got his balance he leaned over and pulled the window shut, then let himself drop three feet into a gully which was formed by the pitched roof of a Victorian extension. He edged along to a point where he knew the roof would take his weight and shinned up to a dormer window that faced the back garden. He reached the window and wrenched up a flap of roofing lead that concealed a small cavity. He groped inside with one hand, found the package wrapped in several plastic bags and slipped it into the big pocket inside his jacket.
When he had first moved in with Flick and was looking for somewhere to conceal the package, he had discovered that he could not take the route back to the landing window because the climb up to the buttress from the lower roof was too difficult. At the time he thought it was an advantage because it might deter others from venturing out there. Once he had got the package, he scrambled to the other side of the roof, let himself down to the top of a garden wall and into a paved area where refuse bins were kept. Within a few seconds he had left the premises and was walking down Hazlitt Grove – where to, he did not know.
Harland drove south towards the Pyrenees in bright sunlight. He made good progress and arrived at the small château on the bank of a river an hour ahead of time. He waited at the end of an avenue of lime trees until he saw a man leave in a Renault car, then drove up to the house and parked in front of the door. An attractive woman in her forties hurried out to meet him and introduced herself as Madame Clergues. Harland held out his UN identity card, but she didn’t take it.
When told about his son two hours earlier, Colonel Bézier had said that he already knew. Something had told him that the silence from the United States boded bad news. Madame Clergues said he knew inside that Luc was gone and that this firm intuition accounted for his frail state in the last week. She asked Harland not to cause him undue torment.
He was shown into a conservatory where an old vine had run riot. Bunches of shrivelled grapes hung from the glass roof and dead leaves had gathered under the table. Colonel Bézier was seated in a green wickerwork chair with a tartan shawl thrown round his shoulders. He gazed through the open doors across some pasture to a line of poplar trees, beyond which lay the river. Beside him was a table with several bottles of pills, a book, Le Monde, mineral water, glasses and an old Lalique lamp. Harland saw that he spent nearly all his time there. A few seconds after he entered, the Colonel turned and threw a hand out in the direction of a chair where he intended Harland should sit.
He looked much younger than Harland expected – no more than mid-sixties. Except for his white pallor, there was not much of the invalid in his face. He had a strong jaw and cheekbones and close-cropped, dark grey hair. He examined Harland for a moment with watery, dark eyes, then wearily asked him to tell him as much as he knew about his son’s death.
In rather mechanical French, Harland told him about the crash and his subsequent discoveries about Griswald and Luc Bézier’s business in New York. He left little out because he understood that the Colonel needed to hear everything. He even told him about the disc and the transcripts. Throughout, the sick man nodded, as though Harland was confirming things that he had suspected for himself all along. Eventually he said he had heard enough and methodically took out a pack of Gauloises, lit a cigarette and held out the pack. Harland declined although his hand had involuntarily jerked forward.
‘Good,’ said the Colonel flatly. ‘These things have put me in this chair.’ He let out a thin stream of smoke from his closed lips. ‘You know that my boy was a hero? Not the sort of hero you read about in the papers because he was on specialist operations. Four medals and too many commendations to count. That was Luc. That was my son.’ He paused. ‘I knew from the start that the business in the Balkans was a catastrophe. Those people massacre each other every fifty years. They’re barbarians. The rest of Europe should have nothing to do with them. We French understood this, but the Americans and NATO, they had to get involved. Let them stew in their own hatred, is what I said. But Luc went because he could not pass up a challenge. He excelled at his job, you see. You know that he learned Serbo-Croat in a matter of months so he could speak like one of those damned peasants?’
Harland shook his head and smiled. ‘What exactly was he doing there, sir?’
‘He was running an undercover squad. They were trying to seize the war criminals. His work was like my own early service in Algeria. Most of it was surveillance, but they captured one or two of the bastards – just cow hands, nobody important. They shot a couple more, although my son said several of these men developed the habit of travelling with children in their cars, so it wasn’t easy for the army. His longest job involved the man named Lipnik. Big Cat, they called him. For this operation, Luc’s team had to go beyond the area where the French UN troops patrolled in Bosnia, right into Serbia. They watched him for about two weeks. They got to know his habits and routines although he was very discreet. The plan, I believe, was to snatch this Lipnik at a restaurant where they knew he was going to dine early one evening. Luc told me about it in detail. You’ll see why in a moment.
‘They knew they’d got the right man because the Americans had traced his phone and intercepted a conversation with Lipnik making an arrangement to be at the restaurant. Luc was doubtful about spotting their target, let alone being able to seize him and spirit him away without a fight. Their plan was to pretend to be Serb security agents who had been sent to protect him against an assassination attempt. It gave them the perfect excuse for hustling the man out of the place and into a car.’
‘Sounds as though it might have worked,’ said Harland.
‘Well, they never found out,’ said the Colonel emphatically.
Harland was worried that he was becoming too agitated. He wondered whether his son’s death had sunk in properly.
‘What happened then, sir?’ he asked quietly.
‘They saw him arrive at the front of the hotel. There were no guards in evidence – just a driver. To their amazement, Lipnik chose a table at the front of the restaurant overlooking the street. He and his guest were visible to the whole team. Luc got the vehicles into position and waited for a wedding party to pass inside. Then he gave the order to move in, but at that moment two men appeared from the throng of wedding guests and began shooting. The men at the table were killed instantly – quite an irony, considering the cover story Luc’s team had made for themselves. In the confusion that followed, one of Luc’s men went into the restaurant to check that Lipnik was dead. It was a terrible scene – complete carnage, apparently. Those men were dead all right – they were unrecognisable.’
‘When was this?’
‘Late ’96 or early ’97, I’m not certain.’
Colonel Bézier’s gaze left Harland and drifted over the meadow in front of them. The sun had come out again to light the few brilliant yellow leaves that clung to the poplars and dance on the barely rippled water beyond. He fumbled for another cigarette. Harland understood that the Colonel was going to smoke as much as he liked now. There was no point in minding his health. They sat in silence for a long time before the Colonel shook a small h
and-bell. A maid arrived. He ordered a cognac and cocked his eyebrow interrogatively at Harland. Harland said that he was driving.
‘But that was not the end of the story,’ he said. ‘A little time afterwards Luc left the army. He’d had enough and he was interested in making some money and settling down. Sensible boy. He went into the art business. It sounds odd for an ex-soldier, particularly of Luc’s calibre, but he had a very good eye and he was ready to learn. He made a success of it because he applied himself. He’d been with a gallery for about two years last summer when he was sent to Vienna on business. He was walking in the street right outside a hotel when he ran slap-bang into Lipnik who was getting out of a car. This was only two or three months ago – about three years after the shooting in Serbia. But Luc was certain that it was the same man. Remember, Monsieur, that he’d studied his target minutely – he knew his mannerisms, his walk, everything. It was Big Cat! He was walking around, breathing like you and me – like you, at any rate.’
‘Who is Lipnik? Do you know his first name?’
‘A moment, Monsieur,’ he said irritably. ‘Let me finish. Naturally, Luc did his best to make some inquiries about the man he’d seen and eventually he told a friend in the State Intelligence Service. They took no action. But it was obvious to him that the whole thing had been a set-up – the shooting had been planned for the benefit of his team who, of course, had been made the unwitting accomplices to yet another crime in the Balkans. Two men were killed that day, remember, shot to pieces so no one would take a close look and ask whether one of them was indeed Lipnik. There was enough circumstantial evidence for the identification to go unquestioned. The restaurant booking, the fact that several people had seen Lipnik enter the establishment and the things they found on his body must have convinced them that this was indeed Lipnik. But it wasn’t. The man was a double, somebody who was persuaded to act like Big Cat for an afternoon and got killed for his trouble.’
