‘Thank you for taking time out from your busy schedule to meet me this morning, Colonel Adjani,’ he says. ‘I will not keep you long.’
Colonel Adjani looks bored.
‘I would not be here if the matter for discussion did not have the potential to impact your negotiations on the future of Kosovo. That is a measure of its seriousness.’
Colonel Adjani leans sideways in his chair so that he can stare at the pink-faced woman’s legs.
‘Before we begin, I would like your undertaking that you will not give the British government or any of its agencies or employees as the source of whatever you may find out during the course of this meeting.’
‘You want to tell me something in secret,’ the Colonel observes.
‘Quite so,’ says the English spy. ‘Do you agree to this condition?’
‘OK, why not? I do not know you, MI6 man, and we have never met.’
‘Good,’ says the English spy, though it is obvious from his frown that he does not like being addressed as MI6 man. ‘So,’ he continues, ‘I have indicated the importance of this interview. You should know, Colonel, that there is mounting pressure on the International Police Task Force to investigate your brother Haclan.’
‘They’d be better off looking at the price of a taxi instead. Now that’s a scandal,’ says the Colonel.
The English spy is momentarily startled by the Colonel’s levity. ‘There is concern at the highest level,’ he resumes, ‘that your brother’s criminal activities in Skopje and elsewhere will bring the Kosovar cause into disrepute.’
‘Our cause is noble,’ declares Colonel Adjani. ‘No wise or just person would deny us the freedom we crave. It is a cause for which all Kosovar-Albanians will take up arms when called upon, all of them, down to the very last man, be he ten years old or a hundred and ten!’
He goes on in this vein for a minute, while the spy fiddles with his ring and his assistant tucks her legs out of view.
‘The Colonel says that his cause is noble,’ I begin, hoping to cut him short. He holds up his hand to shut me up and carries on. By the time he’s finished, I’ve forgotten how he started, but it hardly matters. I invent some suitably nationalistic bombast and conclude by saying: ‘You’d better get on with it, Mr Bond, because he can do this all night.’
The English spy looks at me sharply and the pink-faced woman studies her fingernails in order to stop herself laughing. Colonel Adjani sees them and frowns. ‘I told him you’re very busy and could he come to the point,’ I say in Albanian. ‘I hope that’s OK.’
The Colonel studies me from his sunken eyes.
‘I have no interest in his point.’
‘Perhaps you would confine yourself to translation, Ms. . .’ The English spy studies my name-badge. ‘Ms Galica.’
‘Sure. If only there were something to translate.’
‘Ask that girl if she’ll let me fuck her in the arse,’ says Colonel Adjani.
‘The answer’s no,’ I say. ‘She won’t.’
‘How do you know? English girls aren’t such prudes as you Kosovars. Even the Serbs get to fuck their translators.’
‘You know why that is? Because they’re not translators.’
‘Shall we get on?’ says the English spy. ‘If Haclan is arrested by the IPTF while the conference is in progress, which seems increasingly likely, there may be charges or allegations that will be disastrous for the reputation and credibility of the Kosovar negotiating team. The timing could not be worse for you. It’s not just that Haclan is your brother – it has been reported in various media that he is close to the KLA leadership.’
‘It has been reported in various media,’ Colonel Adjani mimics, in revealingly fluent English, before reverting to his native tongue. ‘The famous British SIS now gets its intelligence from the gossip columns. Some spy you are.’
‘The public perception of an association between your brother and the Kosovar leadership is what matters here.’
‘Don’t arrest him,’ says the Colonel. ‘Problem solved.’
‘We cannot interfere at the operational level. Surely I don’t have to explain such things to a man of your experience.’
‘But still you are here, interfering,’ says Colonel Adjani. He pauses while I translate, then goes on: ‘OK, I’ll call my brother. Dear Haclan, you must leave Skopje. Leave now, they want to arrest you. They always want to arrest me, says he. No, this is different, I tell him.’ Colonel Adjani pauses to eyeball the English spy. ‘How is this different, MI6 man?’
‘There is new information about Haclan’s operations in Skopje – detailed and very damaging information. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’
‘The woman who took her lies to the UNHCR won’t be helping you any further.’ He stares at the English spy, daring him to share some dark look whose meaning I do not understand. ‘But perhaps you mean this British man you have detained, this UNHCR officer. Bryan Harley. . .’ He says the name slowly and with emphasis. ‘The new information is from him, I think.’
‘How do you know about Harley?’ asks the English spy suspiciously.
‘I read it in a gossip column.’
‘I don’t think so. No details have been released.’
‘You are holding this Bryan Harley in secret,’ the Colonel says. ‘You locked him up in his apartment and interrogated him about my brother, but you have not charged him with any crime. This is illegal, I believe, under your ancient English law of habeas corpus. Are you above the law, MI6 man?’
I am so taken aback by the Colonel’s sudden concern for Harley’s human rights that my translation is wooden, but the English spy is impatient to reply.
‘I am not at liberty to discuss this further.’
‘Why not? In here, everything is secret, for sure. We can say what we like.’
‘You need to call your brother and tell him to shut down his operation in Skopje and leave. I have made arrangements for you to have access to a private telephone.’
‘So you can listen? What kind of fool do you take me for?’
‘Then find some other way.’ The English spy is exasperated. He thinks he is doing the Kosovars a favour, but the interview has been a disagreeable charade. ‘These things have a momentum of their own,’ he goes on. ‘It would be in your interests to act immediately.’
‘And yours, or you would not be here,’ Colonel Adjani retorts.
‘If you fail to persuade your brother to avoid his imminent arrest, you will be doing your people a grave disservice.’
‘You care nothing for my people,’ says Colonel Adjani, reverting to declamatory mode. ‘Milosh has insulted you, and for old times’ sake you would like to give the Russians a kick in the balls. Therefore, you will bomb Serbia and Kosovans will die. But that’s OK. That does not matter to you.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ mutters the English spy. ‘This meeting is at an end.’
I get my phone call at lunchtime. Eleni’s in a fluster, but there’s no news.
‘No one’s called or emailed, then? And the police haven’t got back to you?’
‘They shut the police station yesterday. I’m sorry, Anna. It’s got ugly here. The Serbs are lashing out while they still have the chance.’
I accost Hashim Thaçi after dinner and ask him what he meant when he said Katarina had probably been moved on.
‘I told you I’d ask around, but don’t push it,’ he says severely. ‘Wait to hear from me.’
He turns his back and I hurry to my room, undress and get into bed. I already know what he meant: the men who took Katya don’t have her any more. I realised that when the red Skoda stopped following me round Kric.
Piano music and laughter drift up from a salon full of Serbs below. Another night at the Prison de Rambouillet, wrapped tight in its velvet folds, stitched up with protocols and principles and rules of engagement. Colonel Adjani’s words reel through my mind. Kosovans will die. The English spy did not disagree. People are running away –
tens of thousands of them. It’s in the papers every day. Kosovans will die. Eleni thought so, too. They’ll break us all to bits. They’ll burn us and choke us and bury us alive. Kosovans will die. No one knows which ones. Katarina is Kosovan. To be exact, she’s half Albanian, half Roma, with ancestors from India and Turkey. She works hard at school and is a little shy and earnest. She’s pretty, with bright, hopeful eyes. She doesn’t deserve to die.
22
Newspapers are not allowed at Rambouillet, but the fat wretches have somehow sneaked through the cordon sanitaire, and next morning the assembled dignitaries discover that the world’s media have misjudged them. This convocation of grave, diligent politicians, resolutely defending the interests of their people while still finding space in their austere souls for that wise pragmatism which is the hallmark of true statesmanship, is being portrayed as a gaggle of shameless freeloaders, who spend their days lying recumbent on some stretch of goose-down-stuffed upholstery, ravaged by indigestion and incapable of engaging with the diplomatic realm unless by issue of the occasional belch. One (French) newspaper has acquired the catering department’s accounts and calculated that already enough alcohol has been consumed to keep the entire chateau in a stupor for the duration of the conference; and further, it reveals, the plateau de fromages offered round at every meal is loaded with no fewer than twenty varieties of cheese – several of which are not even in season!
The Kosovars find this depiction hurtful. The Serbs, Marta tells me, regard it as some kind of conspiracy that they are too tired to unravel. The Contact Groupies are livid. The agreements in principle are as elusive as ever, and now they are being jeered at. Their inner amanuenses are hastily excising the chapter of their memoirs in which they credit themselves with the salvation of Kosovo. The morning briefing is peremptory; at lunch, the super-abundant plateau de fromages has been replaced by a single Brie of colossal girth. If nothing else will, this shattering privation must surely drive the delegates to make peace.
Some of the Kosovar delegates have received death threats from hardliners back home. Your people lie bleeding in the hills of their beloved homeland, runs the narrative of the KLA campfires, while you eat cheese and grovel. A declaration that allows for any outcome other than independence would be a betrayal of the Račak dead.
I am being forced to take part in a farce, while my daughter is moved on. Extra bureaucrats and advisers and specialists have arrived to help break the deadlock, and Rambouillet is full to bursting point. But still the conference is constipated. Not a paragraph is accepted, not a phrase nor a word, no, not a syllable, not even a letter is even in principle agreed.
A cadre of NATO officials arrives to brief us on – whisper it not – the prohibited matters of execution. Their faces are grim-set and grey. Perhaps they’ve just come from inspecting the bombs tucked up in their numbered steel cribs. There’s execution for you, there’s an implementation issue lying in wait for Kosovo. The NATO men are passionate devotees of Kosovan autonomy, apparently. And Serbian integrity, I’d like to know? Rugova smoothes the cravat at his throat, which he wears as a symbol of the throttling of Kosovo by the imperialists of Belgrade.
The NATO men leave to brief the Serbian delegation, who are carousing on the floor above. The Kosovar team is left alone and the mood quickly becomes petulant. They’ve located the limits of their power and found it extends no further than the right to squabble with each other in a dusty room at the crapaudière and hope the Serbs foul up. I listen to them wearily for an hour. You said this. But you said that. Who did? Not I. Categorically so. In writing, or just categorically? Check the minutes, Anna, check the drafts, the revisions, the emendations and the strikings-out. Consult the versions once thought superseded but now significant once more.
‘The will of the people is for an independent Kosovo,’ Colonel Adjani declares, stroking his bruised mouth with a brandy-addled hand. ‘If it takes a NATO assault to kick Milosh out, let’s get on with it.’
I pick up three folders of paperwork and slam them down again. ‘You stupid fucking shitholes!’ I scream, as the densely annotated drafts slide across the gleaming rosewood table. ‘You jumped-up, preening cjaps! You wave your fucking donkey kollodoks about like anyone gives a fuck what you think!’
The Kosovar delegation is silent with astonishment.
‘What do you know about the will of the people, you prick? The will of the people is to not be bombed! You know what the Contact Group think of you zuzar? They think you’re a bunch of fucking criminals and they’re embarrassed to be anywhere near you. They only got you along so they can pretend it’s a peace conference. Well it’s not a peace conference, it’s a declaration of fucking war. So sign some bits of paper and go home. Any bits. Here, sign this.’ I pick up a folder and fling it at Colonel Adjani. ‘Then they can bomb us all to hell in our own fucking names.’
‘Get this bitch out of here,’ says the Colonel.
I steal a set of six teaspoons as a gift for Eleni, and leave a note for President Rugova, apologising, and one for Hashim Thaçi, reminding him that he’s agreed to help me. I get my phone back and call Eleni but she has nothing new to say.
‘Everyone is leaving Pristina,’ she tells me. ‘Nina and Milo went yesterday.’
Nina and Milo are Serbian Catholics. If they don’t feel safe, no one should.
‘Can you pick me up at the airport? My flight gets in at nine-twenty.’
‘Of course I will. Anna, I think we should go to Skopje for a few days. We’ll hand out leaflets and visit the UNHCR.’
‘I’ve written to them four times and called them I don’t know how many.’
‘They can’t brush us aside so easily if we are there in person. It’s for the best. We can stay in my uncle’s apartment.’
I was by then so hollowed out I would have done anything she’d proposed. The main roads into Macedonia were choked so Piotr’s Uncle Mikhail loaded the Fiat Frightful onto his truck and drove us to Skopje via a maze of mountain tracks. Up there on the bare plains with the jutting peaks standing hard and imperious against the bare sky, I suddenly felt very close to Katarina, and it dawned on me that there were ways of being together that did not require actual presence or contact. Then I felt appalled, because I realised this was how I might think about her if she were dead.
James
23
Clive Silk’s three wide men couldn’t believe their luck. It was unusual for a member of the officer class to be arrested at all, rare for that officer to be in army intelligence, and unheard of for the slimy Rupert to resist. They set about their work with ill-disguised glee – the hangover I’d earned the night before making their job a whole lot easier than it should have been. They concentrated on my back and thighs – no doubt motivated by the knowledge that for the next four hours I’d be trussed up in a slung canvas seat on a military flight into Brize Norton. The blood pooled in my bruised legs, and by the time we landed I was a jangling rictus of cramp.
They had to drag me by the armpits to the car waiting outside the terminal. We drove for three hours and it was dark when we arrived. They attached a tag to my left ankle with a tamper-proof band, then fed me tinned soup and cold toast and insulted me while I ate. I was escorted upstairs and locked in a small bedroom. I crawled to the bed, tried to get onto it. Failed. Curled up. Slept. A night of ugly, sinuous dreams that clambered over each other like foraging rats.
‘Up! Shower!’
A bruiser I hadn’t seen before stepped into the room.
‘Fuck me,’ he said, ‘so that’s what a paedo smells like.’
I hobbled along the corridor to the bathroom. As soon as I was in the shower, he opened the door and took my clothes. I soaped my hands and ran them over my bruised, lumpy body. I was a mess, and the physical injuries weren’t the half of it. I was furious that I’d been arrested on this vile charge, and longed for the moment when my superiors’ embarrassed faces would feel the scorching heat of my outrage.
Yet some part of
me welcomed the swellings and contusions as the just desserts for a sinner of such recklessness and violence. I’d failed to deliver the girl I’d carried out of Kosovo to the proper authorities, for no better reason than that I’d been possessed by a feverish desire to return to action and prove myself a worthy member of TJ Farah’s SAS unit. I’d been wrong to do what I’d done to the boy in the farmhouse loft and the Bura leader in the woods: too eager to kill, and then too weak to refuse to kill.
Then there were the men who’d pursued me near Syrna Street. Self-defence? Picturing the scene in the back of the van, I wasn’t sure that plea would pass muster. Finally, I’d allowed my inebriated lust for a dyed blonde in a dressing gown to dupe me into taking a taxi ride to the Vegas Lounge – a place that any fool would immediately have recognised as a cesspit of depravity. The brawl that followed might have salved my conscience, but I was uncomfortably aware that, for all the righteous grandstanding, I’d left a child behind, in the clutches of her abusers.
I stepped out of the shower and dressed in the tracksuit bottoms and white T-shirt which lay on the stool where my clothes had been, then went to the frosted-glass window and pushed open the fanlight – the only part that wasn’t locked. Beyond the house was a scrubby field occupied by a small flock of daggy-bottomed sheep. The land rose in a shallow slope surmounted by a large stack of straw wrapped in tattered black polythene that rippled and flapped in the gusty wind. I shut the fanlight and knocked to be let out. After a long wait, the bruiser came and unlocked the door. He didn’t step aside, so I was forced to push past him.
‘Watch yerself, filthy perv.’
He barged a meaty shoulder into my sternum so that my head snapped back against the doorframe. I was going to have to get used to this.
The view from my room wasn’t up to much, either: an apron of muddy grass surrounded by a high stone wall, a track leading to an expanse of conifer bisected by a narrow lane. The sky bore down on the horizon like a wall of putty-coloured mud.
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 16
