Gemini

by Mark Burnell

  She closed the door quietly behind her and headed for the lifts. There was a man walking towards her. In and out of the murky pools of light cast by the green frosted wall-lamps, he had a small knapsack over his shoulder, just like the one Maliqi had. The man stopped a moment before she did.

  Stephanie thought she saw an instant of recognition before the panic. In her own mind there was confusion. Not enough time had elapsed. He should have been in Macao. He turned and ran. Even as he did so, the reaction struck her as perverse. She was coming out of his room yet he hadn't challenged her. He hadn't even shouted at her in protest.

  Stephanie accelerated after him. Maliqi didn't bother to try the lifts. He crashed through the swing­door and down the stairwell. When they reached the ground floor they erupted into the lobby, carving a path towards the exit, scattering guests and luggage. By the time anybody was ready to react, Maliqi and Stephanie had gone.

  Nathan Road, the principal artery feeding Kowloon, was packed. Cream and green double-decker buses processed slowly while impatient taxis darted between lanes. The pavements were generating their own heat, faces washed by the garish light emitted from sparkling stores. Above, neon shut out the night, illuminated billboards lighting up the street like a stage: Anna Kournikova sporting an Omega watch, George Clooney in Police sunglasses, Budweiser, Marlboro. Between these, the names of bars, clubs, rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms and eat-all-you-can restaurants. All set against the city soundtrack, the deep throbbing hum of engines, sirens, phones, shouted conversations.

  Maliqi made little attempt to weave between people. He cut through pedestrians like a scalpel through soft butter, fear driving him on. Stephanie's path was no easier. In his wake he left bodies and dropped shopping.

  At Kansu Street he veered right, skidding as he did so, colliding with an elderly woman yapping into her phone. She tumbled into the road, a taxi screeching to a halt just inches from her. Stephanie crossed the road on the diagonal, as Maliqi took the first left. Woosung Street, followed by another right and left. Now they were heading down Temple Street. In open flight she closed on him, but he seemed quicker through the human traffic. Not far ahead was Nanking Street, where she was staying, but before that, he turned right into Ning Po Street, then cut back, up an unlit alley.

  In the musty darkness she snatched blurred images: an old woman sitting cross-legged in the dirt, a clay pipe between her lips, a partially open door offering a glimpse of a thin girl picking her toenails.

  Then she tripped, skidding as she tried to correct herself, the uneven ground slick underfoot, her ankle folding. A complete fall was prevented by the wall to her right. It buttressed her, scraping skin from her arm. She pressed on but Maliqi, diminishing ahead of her, had reached Saigon Street, where, briefly, he grew brighter.

  She heard the squeal of locked tyres followed by the shrill cry of a horn and the cushioned thud of a body bouncing off a bonnet. By the time she reached Saigon Street the driver was out of his Nissan and Maliqi was off the ground, running again, but with a pronounced limp. Now she was closing in on him and Maliqi knew it, casting nervous half-glances over his shoulder. He ducked down another alley, Stephanie close enough to hear him panting.

  Half-way along he spun round to face her, taking her by surprise. In the foetid darkness there was an arc of winking light as she tried to slither to a stop. A knife. Out of nowhere, it seemed. He lunged at her. Off balance, she twisted to her left and fell. Maliqi was above her immediately, thrusting downwards. Stephanie rolled to her right. The blade jarred against concrete. Stephanie lashed out with her foot, connecting with the left shin, just below the knee. He buckled but didn't fall, then was coming at her again.

  It was Stephanie who fell but Petra who rose. She scrambled to a crouch, feinted right as he swiped at her and missed, then jumped at him, shoving him back. Unsteady on his feet, he threw a loose jab at her ribs that she dismissed with her left arm, opening up his front. As he struggled to retain his balance Petra took a step away, to give herself space, suddenly seeing clearly in the dark. Again his right hand was moving but she was ahead of him now, the weight transferred to her right foot, the left lashing out, cracking against his wrist. The hand splayed, the knife slipping from his fingers.

  Petra was still moving, the sweep of the kick complete, her weight and balance shifted. Maliqi never saw the elbow that caught him between jawbone and cheekbone. The blow knocked him against the alley wall and he collapsed.

  Petra retrieved the blade from the dirt. It was a paring knife. Bought locally, she presumed. She stood over Maliqi and reached down. Still stunned, he tried to beat her hand away. She punched him in the mouth then grabbed a fistful of khaki T-shirt, hauling him upwards. She thrust the knife forward until the blade was an inch from his left eye.

  'What are you doing?' she hissed.

  She wasn't sure what she was looking at. Fear, certainly, but something more.

  His voice was a rasp, his English heavily accented. 'Who … are … you?'

  'What are you doing in Hong Kong?'

  She could smell herself, a feral scent rising off the sweat that was running through her hair and down between her shoulder-blades. From the tip of her nose a drop fell, hitting Maliqi in the eye. With a drum-roll pulse, her body was fizzing with adrenaline. Yet she was under complete control, everything functioning according to design. These were the moments she could almost savour; Petra über alles.

  She lowered her face to his. 'Tell me.'

  Maliqi swallowed, then shook his head.

  Petra pressed the knife into him. Just below the eye. A small slice, slowly drawn. Maliqi gasped, then froze, suppressing the squirm, the instinct to protect his eye­ball superseding the pain. For several seconds Petra left the tip of the blade in the wound, her own eyes wide open, absorbing everything.

  Then she withdrew the knife and brought it up to the left eyeball, holding it there, her grip steady, the bloody tip wiped by his eyelashes every time he blinked.

  'Last chance …'

  'You thought you recognized me, didn't you?'

  Maliqi made an exaggerated examination of the tip of his unlit cigarette.

  'Who did you think I was?'

  No answer.

  'Who?'

  Agitated, he lifted his stained khaki T-shirt to reveal a recent scar on the left side of his abdomen. 'The woman who did this to me. When I saw you coming out of my room, I thought it was her.'

  'Why?'

  'Because you look the same.' As though that was the most natural answer in the world. Her surprise prompted Maliqi to add: 'Well, not really. Not now. But in the corridor, in that light, for a moment …'

  Stephanie said, 'When did you get the scar?'

  'Two months ago.'

  'Here?'

  'In Berlin.'

  'Who was she?'

  'I don't know. But she works for him.'

  'Who?'

  'Milan Savic.'

  They were sitting in a franchised patisserie off Chatham Road South, far enough away from the alley of an hour earlier. Stephanie had given him a choice. They needed to talk, she'd told him, but it was up to him. He could walk away, if he wished. On the other hand, if he wanted to know what she'd been doing in his room …

  He hadn't been sure at first. He'd sat there in the dirt, wiping blood from the cut beneath his eye, then massaging his bruised mouth. Who are you? he'd asked. She'd said that wasn't a question she was prepared to answer until she had answers of her own.

  They'd cleared the immediate area quickly, later finding public toilets on the edge of Kowloon Park. As she had in his hotel room, she'd tried her best to wipe herself clean, scrubbing her arms, rinsing her face, running water through her hair, then slicking it back. In the mirror she'd seen a wreck, but it was still an improvement. Outside, she'd had to wait five minutes before Maliqi appeared. He'd asked her if she'd thought he might run. No, she'd replied, both of them knowing it was a lie. After that they'd headed for nowhere in particular, which was exact
ly where they ended up: a French patisserie as envisaged by a fast-food corporation. For all its charm it could have been a Burger King in Kansas City.

  Maliqi said, 'You don't work for him, then?'

  'Savic? No.'

  'Why were you in my room?'

  'Why weren't you in Macao, when I was in your room?'

  He frowned. 'What?'

  'You went to the ferry terminal …'

  'You followed me?'

  'All day. Until you decided to go to Macao. Or rather, didn't …'

  Maliqi found a wallet of matches from the Shanghai Hotel in his pocket. They were still dry. He lit his cigarette and said, 'If you're not working for him, maybe you're after him. And you came after me because you thought I was working for him. Perhaps you thought we were the same.'

  'Why would I think that?'

  'What nationality are you?'

  Good question. 'German.'

  Maliqi looked a little startled, then broke into German himself. It was better than his English. 'I'm from Bosnia. Savic is a Serb. For you, maybe that is the same thing. Just another Balkan dog …'

  'Considering what you thought you saw in the hotel, I wouldn't be so quick to start jumping to conclusions. What's your interest in Savic?'

  Maliqi drew on his cigarette. 'Simic.'

  She understood the name was a probe. 'Simic?'

  'Goran Simic.'

  One of the nine names on the list that David Pearson had recovered.

  Stephanie said, 'Never heard of him.'

  'Simic fought under Ratko Mladic, first for the JNA, then for the Bosnian Serb Army.'

  He left it at that, as though that was enough. And up to a point, it was. Stephanie had known about Mladic long before she'd heard of Milan Savic. He'd been commander of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) garrison at Knin until he was transferred to Sarajevo in 1992. Not long after that he'd become the first leader of the Bosnian Serb Army. His men had loved him while the media had characterized him as a soldier's soldier. As ever, the truth was more complex: Mladic was a psychopathic coward with a talent for organization.

  As leader of the Bosnian Serb Army he presided over the flight of hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians. It was Mladic's men who established the detention centres that became extermination camps. And it was his men, under his leadership, who committed atrocity after atrocity, culminating, in 1995, in the massacre of thousands at Srebrenica. For Mladic, though, as deluded as he was, such actions were always justifiable because he truly believed he was fighting for the very survival of the Serb people. In that sense he was a man forever marooned among the bodies at Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, on 28 June 1389.

  Maliqi said, 'I was at Omarska. You know Omarska?'

  'No.'

  'A Bosnian village, close to Prijedor, although at the time of the Second World War it was Serbian. There was a massacre there in 1941. Of Serbs. Some people say that is one of the reasons for the horrors that took place in the summer of 1992. Revenge …'

  'A Balkan speciality.'

  Maliqi nodded. 'Omarska is a mining area, rich in iron ore. And it was the industrial facilities – the factory sheds, the compounds – that were turned into the camps. When my village was cleansed I found myself transported to Omarska. There were thousands of us there. We had little food or water, no facilities. Every night the guards would come and take away ten or twenty prisoners. We would hear them being beaten. Sometimes they used weapons, sometimes just their hands. When they were finished, a bullet in the back of the head made sure. I don't know what they did with the bodies. A truck used to take them away in the morning. At Brcko they used to get rid of them in the animal-feed plant.

  'Sometimes they poured petrol over the prisoners and set them on fire. Sometimes they just knifed them. Or they'd take a dozen out, castrate them, cut off their ears, slit their throats. Maybe that would be enough, or maybe they'd come back for a dozen more. Some nights it was thirty or forty. They used to blood their army recruits with us. I watched a teenage Bosnian Serb knife a man old enough to be his grandfather. He was just a child. Crying like a baby, he pissed himself with fear. But the officers wouldn't let him off. They made sure he did it. Go on, don't be a woman. The first is the hardest. The second is when the fun begins. After that, it's easy. I won't ever forget his face.'

  'That was common?'

  'Sure.' Maliqi blew smoke out of the corner of his mouth. 'That boy was different, though. Most of the boys his age couldn't stick the knife in quick enough. For them, killing their first Muslim was better than losing their virginity …'

  'Goran Simic was at Omarska?'

  'For a while, yes. Until the end of July 1992. While I was there. And he was among the worst. His favourite way to kill a prisoner was with a hammer. He used to do it naked so that his clothes wouldn't become soaked in blood. And he wouldn't always stop once the victim was dead. It was incredible. I never saw anything like it. His insanity was a raging fever. He would turn a head into stew and not even realize it.'

  'You saw this yourself?'

  Maliqi nodded. 'He liked an audience. Many of them did. Especially when they were drunk, which was most of the time.'

  'What happened to you?'

  'I survived. My father, my brothers and one of my uncles – they didn't.'

  'Was Simic involved with any of their deaths?'

  Maliqi averted his gaze. 'My brothers. Both of them. In front of me. And neither said a word.' He looked back at her, nothing in his eyes at all. 'That's what saved me. He never knew I was the youngest of three …'

  For a moment the ghosts of her own family flared before her. When they were gone, it was back to the bad overhead lighting and piped music.

  'Do you have anyone left?'

  'In Sarajevo. My mother lives there with cousins of hers. One of my sisters is there too. The other went to Germany. I don't know where she is now.'

  'What about you?'

  'When I was freed I just wanted to go home. But there was no home to go to. They'd destroyed everything. In our village there wasn't a single building left. They removed it from the map.'

  'What did you do before the war?'

  'I was a teacher. But I never confessed to that when I was detained. They killed members of the so-called intelligentsia first. I told them I was a labourer.'

  'Then what?'

  'For a while I did nothing. I drifted. Prijedor, Bihac, then into Croatia and down to Split. I worked in a bar for a year, getting worse.'

  'Worse?'

  'All I wanted to do was kill them. The men responsible: Mladic, Karadzic, Milosevic. Then any Serb at all. I couldn't sleep at night. I'd lie on my bed imagining what I'd do. Imagining what I'd use. A pitch-fork, electric cable, boiling oil. All the things I know they used. For those who weren't there, it's hard to understand the animal behaviour that occurred in the countryside that summer. It wasn't normal war. It was a psychopathic rampage. The work of devils done by librarians, farmers, bus drivers.'

  Maliqi drifted into a silence she understood. She left him to it. Five backpackers entered the place, bright rucksacks, shorts, baggy T-shirts, tanned skins and sun­bleached hair. Damp and merry, they shuffled and took their time at the counter. In their twenties, by the look of it, and totally carefree; she envied them. Her twenties had been stolen from her. Now, just a few months shy of her thirtieth birthday, she wondered what the next decade would bring.

  Maliqi said, 'In the end I just ran out of energy. I changed jobs so many times, I don't even remember half the things I did. When I was awake I was asleep. That probably sounds stupid but …'

  'No. I understand,' Stephanie insisted. 'I understand perfectly.'

  He looked up at her, wondering if she really did, and saw something that convinced him. Which surprised her. Was it so obvious?

  Maliqi tapped ash onto the floor. 'Finally I thought about the future. Not in a big way. Just – you know ­ getting some money. For my mother and sister in Sarajevo. I had friends working in Germany
. And my younger sister was there too. So I contacted a family I used to know in Banja Luka and they told me to come. And I've been living and working there ever since.'

  'So you became a gastarbeiter?'

  'Yes. I have a job with Deutsche Bahn in Berlin. I check the track.'

  'So what does that make this? A vacation?'

  Maliqi managed a tired smile. 'Officially, yes.'

  'Why Berlin?'

  'That was where my sister was working. At least, that's what she said. I went there to find her but there was no club. No one had heard of it. The address she gave, it was just derelict offices. I don't know where she is now. To be honest, she was always the wild one in our family. It wasn't a surprise when I didn't find her. But I had to keep looking … our mother, you know?'

  'Of course.'

  'So I kept going until I ran out of money. After that, I couldn't go anywhere else. I called the family from Banja Luka – they were living in Dortmund – and they sent a little cash and put me in touch with Farhad Shatri, a Kosovar living in London. He was with the KLA during the Kosovo conflict. He lives in London now but has strong links with Germany. He helped me get somewhere to live, a job, some documents.'

  Stephanie drank some more of her sterile coffee. 'And you've been looking for Simic ever since?'

  Maliqi fingered his cut. The blood wasn't flowing but the wound was still wet. Beneath it, a bruise was beginning to emerge.

  'No. Only since last June.'

  'Why did you wait so long?'

  'Because before that there was no need to look for Simic. He was dead. Blown apart by a land mine between Banja Luka and Prijedor in 1995. He was in a vehicle with three others. They were all killed.'

  'Just like Savic.'

  'Yes.'

  Stephanie considered the date. 1995. Four years before Savic's own death. If Gemini had existed as a coherent entity, when had it started?

  'Tell me about Simic.'

  'He was in Hamburg last June, staying at the Atlantic Hotel.'