A few yards outside the terminal I stopped. Staring up at me from the pavement was a picture of a girl. Even in the gloomy light from the streetlamps overhead, I recognised her.
The girl I’d left at Syrna Street.
I picked it up – a leaflet, torn and smeared by the feet of passers-by. It did not show the miserable, frightened bundle I had carried out of Kosovo – just an ordinary girl having a picnic on a sunny summer’s day. But there was no mistaking the pretty oval face and lustrous eyes; she’d even tucked her black hair behind one ear, exactly as she had when I’d given her a plate of pasta in my apartment. I turned the leaflet over. Have you seen this girl?
I looked quickly around me, heart thumping in my chest. Whoever was handing these out might not be far away. I searched the thronged concourse, then started to walk round the terminal. On the second corner stood a slight woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a dark blue parka with a fur-trimmed collar. Her face was pale as milk, her hair dishevelled. I watched her accost a tall, smartly dressed man – I had the impression he would usually brush such people off, but there was something about her that compelled his attention. Even from forty or fifty yards away, I could see her dark eyes glittering, the graceful arc of her neck as she looked up at him, the gravity of her demeanour. I too was transfixed. The man took the leaflet and listened politely, before moving off with an apologetic shrug. Her head dropped, then she braced herself for another attempt on another shoulder-shrugging passer-by.
I hurried over to her. The bleakness in her face was frightening.
‘I have seen this girl.’
‘You’ve. . . Katarina. . .’ Her eyes searched mine with such clarity that I felt stripped bare.
‘Is there somewhere we could talk?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Is Katarina all right? Is she. . . ?’
‘She was when I saw her. That was about two weeks ago.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘I’m not sure. There’s a refuge in Kosovo, not far from the border—’
‘Come back to my apartment.’ She took me suddenly by the wrist, as if frightened I might try to escape. ‘My car’s not far away. This refuge, is she there now, do you know?’
‘I. . . Perhaps. I’m not sure. I’ve only just got here,’ I said lamely.
‘You will help me find her?’
I nodded. She led me to her car, a decrepit yellow Fiat parked in a side street five minutes’ walk from the bus terminal, and we climbed in.
‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘James Palatine.’
‘I am Anna Galica, Katarina’s mother. I want to ask you many questions, James Palatine, but now I am so agitated. . . I don’t think I can drive and listen to you at the same time. I am not familiar with Skopje.’
She turned the key and the starter motor pulsed hectically for a few seconds, started to die, stopped, turned over again. I felt huge inside her car, a vast, sweaty thing, reeking of desperation, scalp skewed against the roof, legs crammed into the footwell. A series of grumpy coughs from the exhaust and the engine whined into life. She eased the gearstick forward until it clunked into first, and pulled out sharply into the street.
30
As we careered across Skopje, I took a surreptitious look around the interior of the car: it was strewn with books, files and papers, the remains of meals eaten on the go – sandwich packs, apple-juice cartons, and perhaps a dozen limp ice-cream tubs from a place called the Yankee Doodle Dandy Diner. Where sprinkles come free! it said in multi-coloured letters on the lids. A blue vinyl overnight bag lay on the back seat, half covered by a damp raincoat. The radio was making a tuneless whistling noise and an empty wine bottle clanked against a seatbelt buckle at every bump in the road.
We drew up at a set of traffic lights and she said: ‘I can’t wait. At least tell me what were you doing in Kosovo when you saw Katarina?’
She looked over at me and I felt a current of empathy pass between us – made all the more powerful by the expression in her large, unblinking eyes. The reserve with which people usually guard themselves from strangers was entirely absent. She was sad and angry, she was weary, she was struggling to keep her spirits up. She was determined. Her eyes showed all this and did not care who saw it.
‘I’m in the British Army,’ I said. ‘Or at least, I was. I’m not so sure right now.’
‘You ran away?’
‘Yes. I’ve been accused of something I didn’t do and—’
‘It doesn’t matter. How well do you know Skopje? Right now, I am lost.’ She brought the car to a standstill outside a shuttered mini-market and indicated the glovebox. ‘There’s a map. The address of the apartment is written on the front.’
I extracted the map and looked for an interior light to read it by. She pushed open her door and the light came on. ‘Nothing in this horrible car works properly. And I see it doesn’t fit you very well.’
‘I have to say it’d be more comfortable without the seat.’
She gave me a dutiful smile, from which I saw that she was glad I had made the joke, even if she wasn’t disposed to laugh at it.
‘I don’t really know Skopje. I lived here for a few weeks, that’s all. Do you have a rough idea where we are?’
‘The apartment is in Čair, off Kemal Sejfula, at the north end. We can’t be far away.’
I squinted at the tiny lettering.
‘They teach you to read maps in soldier school, I expect.’
I found it eventually and we pulled back into the traffic, then quickly got lost again. I had to keep opening the door to turn the reading light on.
‘Turn the map upside down,’ she advised, ‘if it helps.’
Čair was in the old town, a tangle of run-down, cobbled streets sandwiched between the Gazi Baba Park and the Ilinden army barracks – where weeks that seemed like years ago I’d been to a reception for the officers of foreign army units stationed in Skopje. Our Macedonian hosts had drunk too much, and there’d been a lot of strutting and bristling, punctuated with bursts of gaudy laughter.
Eventually we parked outside a six-storey concrete block with a peeling ochre balcony on each floor. I refolded the map and tried to cram it back into the glovebox, but it snagged on a sheet of printed A4. Anna was already standing on the pavement, waiting to lock the car. The paper had a badly photocopied image of a Toyota Invincible exactly like the one I had driven up into the forest with the Bura in pursuit – fat wheel arches, polished chrome, brutish snout. I tucked it under the map, shut the flap and got out. Why would Anna Galica have a picture of such a thing? The fantasy wheels of a man in her life, perhaps. Anyway, I surely didn’t know her well enough to enquire about the contents of her glovebox. We entered the building and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor.
‘My friend Eleni will think the worst when she sees you,’ she said. ‘This is her uncle’s apartment – his wife died a few years ago. He’s in California, waiting for things to settle down.’
Before she could unlock the door, it was opened by a large woman dressed in a burgundy woollen skirt and an elaborately embroidered cream cardigan. She had a broad, kindly face with lightly pockmarked cheeks. Her inquisitive brown eyes surveyed me suspiciously, then Anna reproachfully.
‘This is James,’ said Anna. ‘He’s going to help us.’
She stepped past her friend, drawing her by the arm towards a room on the far side of a tiny hallway. I shut the door behind me and stood there listening to them arguing in Albanian. Eleni spoke in a sensible tone undermined by a trailing edge of hysteria. Anna was matter-of-fact. After several minutes, she beckoned me in.
‘Come, James. We’re making some tea.’
The kitchen had a small blue-painted cupboard, numerous wooden shelves lined with strips of floral wallpaper, a narrow stainless-steel sink and an ancient enamelled stove.
‘Sit down, please,’ said Anna. ‘You make everything look so small.’
I took a chair at a wooden table set against one wall. In fro
nt of me was a stack of leaflets. Eleni was filling a kettle and declining to meet my eye. Everything was in abeyance, and I sensed that, as much as she longed to hear news of her daughter, Anna feared what I might tell her. For now, she could hope and believe that the arrival of this stranger was the first step on the road to a happy reunion with her daughter; once I’d said what I knew, that consolation might be exposed as a cruel fiction.
‘We’ll be more comfortable next door,’ she said suddenly, and hurried out of the kitchen. Eleni gestured for me to follow, an expression of deep foreboding on her matronly face.
The little sitting room was like a shrine to the embroidery skills of Eleni’s deceased aunt, and to the artistic skills of Eleni’s uncle who, it seemed, spent his retirement painting watercolours of Macedonian ruins – there was a work in progress on an easel by the door to the balcony. I spent a lot of time looking round vaguely at the embroidered rugs, cushions and antimacassars, and the pallid pictures of once-glorious things because I didn’t want to meet Anna’s eyes. I’d been over my story a thousand times, but never in a form tailored for the girl’s mother. I should have told her everything, of course. Instead, I kept stalling. . . Though I barely faltered over the reasons for my brief tour of southern Kosovo, which, for political and military reasons, I had most reason to conceal.
‘You were planning to bomb Kosovo – before Rambouillet even started?’ Eleni said. ‘How could you dare!’
‘Not planning, preparing,’ I said feebly.
Eleni pulled her cardigan tight and flexed the muscles of her heavy shoulders. I told them how I’d found Anna’s daughter shivering in a ditch not far from Father Daniel’s refuge – I didn’t say how close she was to death – and taken her to my apartment, where I’d fed her spaghetti with tomato sauce, and in the morning borrowed clean clothes for her to wear. Anna drank in my words and the tears streamed down her cheeks. What a fraud I felt, then, seeing in eyes swollen with emotion how she took me for a saviour, a guardian angel, a knight in shining armour. How could I disabuse her of those comforting delusions? How could I tell her that I’d left her daughter in the hands of a pimp and gone back to Kosovo to play the murderous bastard in a night of slaughter in a forest outside the town of Kric? And then, how my clumsy attempts to undo my terrible mistakes had led me to the squalid backrooms of the Vegas Lounge? Better for her, I told myself all too readily, to believe that I was the hero she needed me to be.
Eleni consoled her friend with interjections in Albanian and hugs and squeezes which Anna pushed away in her eagerness to draw my story out. When I got to the point where the sleepy-eyed blonde took Katarina into the house on Syrna Street, I stopped again.
‘That’s as much as I can tell you. Your daughter was OK when I saw her last. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what’s happened since.’
‘But you saved her life,’ said Anna. ‘You saved Katya’s life. I. . .’ She wiped her eyes. ‘It’s a miracle that you found her. And now I’ve found you. I’d almost given up hope. Thank you, James, thank you. So now, she’s back at the refuge, do you think?’
‘We must hope so.’
The stilted quality of this reply did not escape Eleni’s notice.
‘What do you mean, hope so?’ she said sharply. ‘I am sure you checked.’
‘I couldn’t get hold of Father Daniel. Then I had to go back on tour for a few days. . .’
‘To prepare the destruction of Kosovo.’
‘Eleni, let James finish. It’s not his fault.’
‘And after your tour?’ said Eleni haughtily.
‘That was when I got into trouble. They’d seen me crossing the border into Macedonia with a girl—With your daughter. They thought I was. . . Well, I don’t exactly know what they thought, but I was arrested.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Anna. ‘You explained, of course?’
I could see from Eleni’s face that she thought it ridiculous, too, though not for the same reasons. She saw the loose ends of my story flapping pathetically, and she feared that the whole edifice of half-truths was about to unravel.
‘I tried, but they took me back to England and locked me up. I escaped – I’d only just arrived in Skopje when I saw the leaflet and found you.’
‘Why did you escape?’ asked Eleni. ‘Since you have not done anything wrong.’
‘Anna’s daughter is the only person who can prove that. I came back here to find her.’
‘I must call Father Daniel now,’ said Anna. ‘Do you have the number?’
I didn’t. And I dreaded the call being made.
‘I will look for it,’ said Eleni. ‘Father Daniel is a member of the Order of St Hugh, you said. And what was the village called?’
‘I don’t know, we passed through very quickly.’
I hadn’t told them about the scene in the farmhouse, either. Eleni produced a map and I showed her the place. The farmstead wasn’t named, but the church opposite the refuge was: the Orthodox Church of the Holy Saviour and Saint Panteleimon. She went to a small wrought-iron chair by the window, picked a telephone off the floor and dialled a number with a determined air.
‘You can check with Maria at the café – she didn’t see Katarina, but she lent me the clothes. I know this must be a lot to take in. . .’
Anna stood up and walked rapidly out into the hallway, then rapidly back again. ‘James, I already believe you. Eleni doesn’t want me to get my hopes up, that’s all.’ Eleni confirmed this by glowering at me from her iron chair. ‘I’ve waited so long for something good to happen, and now suddenly you arrive and it feels as if I lost her only moments ago and I want to hold her in my arms again so much I can’t bear it.’
Directory enquiries took a long time to answer. Anna paced the room and kept stopping to look at me, as if she doubted that I really existed. She made more tea, then told me I must be hungry and brought some dry crackers and a tube of fishpaste. I went to the bathroom to clean myself up and on the way back cannoned into a side table and sent a small collection of china horses sliding to the floor.
‘What happened to your daughter?’ I asked, once the horses had been tidied up.
‘Katarina,’ she said. ‘You must call her Katarina.’ She told me how a gang of Serbian militia had snatched Katarina from a Roma village where she’d been staying with her grandmama, how she’d managed to trace the vehicle they’d been driving, a Toyota Invincible with Road Muscle Body Kit, how they’d seen its charred remains being towed from the forest near Kric after a KLA attack.
Things slid into place, then, assumptions and deductions realigning themselves like a puzzle of sliding panels in a gothic chamber. It was the Bura crew who had taken Katarina; and it wasn’t the KLA who had attacked them but I and my SAS comrades on a rogue mission of revenge. I remembered the chief’s office, the crucifix and girly pics, the seatless chair and box full of knuckledusters. A sick feeling crawled in my stomach.
‘Katarina’s uncle rescued me from Kric one night. We got into a fight. When was it you found her?’
‘The twenty-eighth.’
She went to the kitchen and returned with a newspaper cutting. ‘That was the night before the attack.’
I know, I killed one of them myself, I thought. But what good would it do Anna to know this?
‘And then on the twenty-ninth you took her to this place on Syrna Street. So Katya can’t have been in Kric when I was looking for her there – I didn’t go until the thirty-first. I was so afraid I’d alerted them and they’d taken her somewhere else.’
‘Hush,’ said Eleni. ‘I can’t find a number for the refuge, but I’m calling the Order of St Hugh in England.’
‘I was sure I heard her cry out,’ Anna said mournfully.
She stood up. We waited in silence, listening to the faint burr burr of the phone. I imagined the Rector General’s study in the stately old Elizabethan manor, its handsome window and ranks of polished silver. The phone rang out and I felt an ignominious sense of relief.
‘It
’s late,’ said Eleni gently. ‘We can try in the morning. They will help us. Certainly they will help us.’
‘Katarina’s at the refuge right now,’ said Anna, with a bravado that shamed me to the core. ‘I am so sure of it. If we can’t get Father Daniel on the phone, we’ll just go and pick her up tomorrow.’
‘We should visit the house in Syrna Street first,’ said Eleni.
‘I’m going to see Katarina soon,’ Anna said, looking at each of us in turn. ‘I feel in my heart I will.’
31
I slept deeply, without dreams or interludes of wakefulness, but in the morning I found that my feet had snapped the armrest off the end of the sofa. I was searching in the upholstery for some bolt or bracket by which I might reattach it when Eleni came in, dressed for the day in another of her sensible skirts and armoured cardigans. She stopped to observe me kneeling by the stricken sofa, then stepped out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette.
‘You don’t know your own strength, I see,’ she said, coming back inside but leaving the door open behind her so that the room quickly filled with cold air.
‘I’ll replace it, as soon as I can.’
‘It must be repaired. It is an ugly thing, but to Uncle Semyon it is the place where his wife sat. The caretaker can do it. What will Father Daniel say when I speak to him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, but the lie was a poor thing.
‘Katarina is not at the refuge.’
‘I don’t know that.’
‘Why do you suspect it?’
‘I didn’t like the look of the house where I left her. It felt wrong.’
‘But anyway, you left her there.’
‘I had to get back on duty. And there were queues at the UNHCR building.’
‘Queues?’
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 21
