Читать книгу Sandstealers - Ben Brown - Страница 11

When morning arrived in Sarajevo like an unwelcome visitor, Rachel wondered where to start. She had made it here, but what now? Where to go, what to see, who to talk to? It wasn’t as easy as it had seemed back in Arlington. She thought that breakfast might be the best place to begin so she went down to the dining room, a dingy ghost of what it once had been. The waiters were like apparitions too, in their white shirts and black bow ties. Their stoical demeanour insisted that, against all the available evidence, it was business as usual. They could have been restaurant staff on the Titanic.

The guests were dressed in fleeces, Puffa jackets and parkas. Rachel sat conspicuously alone, toying with a cold omelette, convinced everyone else was studying her solitude.

From the corner of her eye, she saw Danny approaching and her heart sank. She wondered if he was going to harangue her any more. He was carrying a helmet.

‘Good morning. Thought I might find you here.’

‘Oh. Hi there,’ she pretended she hadn’t noticed him coming over.

‘A present for you. I never use it. Just let me have it back when you leave.’

‘God, that’s so…’

‘I know, you’re pathetically grateful.’

It had a strip of silver gaffer tape across it with Lowenstein, A Rh+ scrawled in marker pen.

‘Obviously you’ll want to change the name tag.’

‘Obviously,’ she laughed, but he wound up the conversation before it had begun.

‘Okay then, see you around.’

Rachel played with her omelette for a couple more minutes, and was relieved when Becky arrived. She was heading up to Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters. They had an interview with Karadzic—‘the crazy doctor’, as she called him—and Rachel was welcome to come along if she felt like it.

‘’Course she feels like it,’ said a deep voice just behind her. ‘What else is she going to do here, hit the beach? Hello there, I’m Edwin Garland. Daily Telegraph. And you must be the young Rachel Kelly we’ve all been hearing so much about?’

She was getting used to shaking people’s hands.

‘Well, if you guys have got room…’

‘Sure we’ve got room,’ said Edwin. ‘We’ve got Bessie.’

‘Bessie?’

‘My armoured car. One of my predecessors christened it Bessie. To be honest, I’ve never been quite sure why.’

He was English, with a naked scalp that Rachel couldn’t take her eyes off. At first she thought it might be from some dreadful childhood alopecia, but then she detected a bluish haze of would-be stubble and decided he must shave it. In which case, how? Did he cover his head in foam every morning and scrape it with a blade, or use an electric razor? The thought of either made her wince, but the more she studied this brutal baldness, the more she realised it quite suited him, accentuating his heavy eyebrows and the dark brooding eyes beneath. It gave him an exotic look—of an eccentric adventurer, perhaps, or, less charitably, a convict.

In the car park, the underbelly of the hotel, Becky touched the same bit of wall she had when they arrived and banged her fist against Bessie’s thick armour.

‘She makes you feel…well, invulnerable. The only time you’re ever really safe in this city is when you’re deep inside her womb.’

Rachel struggled to open the passenger door: it was stiff and rusty and a dead weight she had to heave towards her.

‘Hope you don’t mind me hitching a lift. I feel a bit of a parasite.’

‘Well, we’re all parasites, I suppose, living off the blood of others. Spilt blood, usually. Anyway, glad to have you with us.’

At the last minute, someone from Reuters joined them too. He was called Kaps, apparently—Rachel was unclear if that was his Christian name or surname—and in stark contrast to Edwin, he had long, sandy brown hair down to his shoulders, gathered and tied up in a ponytail. He sat next to Becky in the back, closer than he needed to since the long bench seats that faced each other offered plenty of space. There was a wedding ring on his finger, but Rachel detected an air of possibility between them. Or impossibility.

They emerged on to Sarajevo streets buried beneath fresh falls of powdery snow.

‘He’s a bit of a nervous driver, aren’t you, Ed?’ shouted Becky from the back. He ignored her but she was determined to explain herself to Rachel: ‘You wouldn’t think he once drove tanks for the British Army. He wrote one of these off last year, you know; managed to skid it into the side wall of a little old lady’s home. The poor love thought the bang was a Serbian shell: just closed her eyes and prepared to die. And when she opened them, guess what? A handsome young Englishman stepping out from his Land Rover—in the middle of her fucking living room. She almost kissed him, she was so relieved.’

Edwin listened patiently but Rachel was embarrassed for him. The story was clearly Becky’s party piece, retold frequently and always at his expense.

‘Thanks for that recap, I’m sure Rachel’s absolutely fascinated.’

‘Of course she’s absolutely fascinated.’ Becky performed a caricature of his public school accent—Ampleforth: posh and very Catholic.

‘Okay, that’s enough. If you don’t want me to drive, I’ll turn round now.’

Edwin was serious. He’d had enough of being riled and Rachel saw for the first time how sensitive this former soldier could be. His scalp embodied the contradiction: it looked macho enough, but the delicate skin stretched across his skull spoke to her already of a dangerous vulnerability.

As they drove out of Sarajevo and over the hills into Radovan Karadzic’s lair, an empty Coke can rolled around irritatingly on Bessie’s floor. It was covered with the debris of assorted Junkie road-trips: Mars bar wrappers, half-eaten ration packs, film canisters and pages of ancient newspapers brought out from London long ago, now faded and mud spattered. Edwin rummaged through a stack of cassettes on the dashboard and picked out one labelled Songs of Sarajevo. To the sound of Seal performing ‘Crazy’—which Rachel would discover was their anthem—she gazed down on the crazy city they’d just left behind. From this height, it looked like easy pickings: a scrawny kid in the playground, smart but pitifully weak, beaten up by the bullies every day. The Serbs of the Yugoslav National Army—the third-biggest military machine in Europe—had their tanks and howitzers up in these hills. In their sights was brave, sophisticated Sarajevo, with its old Ottoman heart still beating, as bold a statement of multi-culturalism as you could find, a living example to the world. Mosques mingled with churches, Orthodox and Catholic. Now it was being blown apart, a foolish dream no one should ever have dared to entertain.

As they climbed higher towards Pale, there was an even thicker shroud of snow.

‘You know what’s really scary?’ Edwin said. ‘Just how easily Europe can turn her charms. It’s like the Nazis, plotting a holocaust in the forests of Bavaria. It looks so pretty, but behind the picture-postcard scenery, they’re busy coming up with clever plans to exterminate a people. There are no devils left in hell, they’re all up here in Pale. See these chalets, Rachel?’ Edwin was pointing as he drove. ‘It’s where the well-heeled of Sarajevo used to have their holiday homes. They’d pop up at weekends for a spot of skiing. And that’s the Panorama. Used to be one of the main resort hotels for visitors. Now it’s where the Serbs run the war.’

She took in its menace and held her breath. It was only a few miles south of Sarajevo, but it felt like another country.

Inside the Panorama, they shivered for more than 90 minutes. If it were possible, this was a place even more glacial than the Holiday Inn. The cold made their bones ache. Karadzic was in a meeting, they were told. He’d be with them when he could. Around them scurried sullen Chetniks, some with long hair and beards who hadn’t washed for days and looked as though they’d just returned from another busy day of ethnic cleansing. One or two glared contemptuously at the visitors, as if to say: Who the fuck let you Muslim-loving, do-gooding Westerners in here? What would you know about us, the proud people of Serbia? What could you possibly understand about the endless centuries of our suffering?

Eventually, the man himself strode in, beaming at them from beneath the shocking mane of his wild grey-white hair.

Rachel had read so many profiles of him, seen him so often on the television, this self-proclaimed poet and psychiatrist, and now he was coming up to her, offering his hand in greeting. She took it and, after the briefest hesitation, shook it. At last she felt part of the war whose every twist and turn she’d followed. Day one, and she was meeting the man who had masterminded the entire conflict, its very architect. Already there was something to tell her children, and for them to tell theirs: that she’d had face time with one of the principal characters of late twentieth-century Europe.

‘Hello, sir, Rachel Kelly. From the United States.’

The others introduced themselves, too, but Rachel noticed how they avoided shaking hands, nodding awkwardly instead with thin, noncommittal smiles.

‘Shall we go through?’ asked Karadzic in his flawless English, so familiar from the television bulletins. ‘It’s rather cold out here.’ He didn’t bother to apologise for being late; he didn’t even mention it.

For the next half an hour the Führer of Pale explained, over a table laden with French cognac and fine cheese, how the loss of every life was to be regretted, but how the Muslims had made the war inevitable. We wanted to live in peace, he said, but you have to understand, they are trying to launch an Islamic Jihad right here, in the heart of Europe. For the good of Christianity, for the sake of world civilisation, they must be stopped. We will defeat them, even if the only friends we have left are God and the Greeks. Remember this, he said as he puffed on a Cuban cigar, soon they will not need to count the dead in Sarajevo, they will need to count the living.

Rachel wrote down every word, her hand soon stiff with cramp.

Towards the end, he offered them some coffee and it was then that Rachel made her cataclysmic error—a ‘crime’ Danny Lowenstein would call it when he heard. As Karadzic bade them all farewell, he managed to kiss her quickly on both cheeks. She felt his skin on hers, cold and slightly rough. She inhaled the smell of his aftershave and thought it curious he should bother with such vanities in a civil war. It all happened before she realised what he, or she, was doing.

That night it was supper in the dining room. Becky had pushed three tables together and about a dozen of the press corps were sitting round them. Rachel, exhausted but elated after her debut day in Pale, was ravenous. She didn’t care what the menu offered, she’d have whatever there was and more.

As she walked in, he was at one end, presiding, the king at his banquet. Taking off her coat, Rachel wondered if she might contrive to sit close to him, but he was already sandwiched in by Edwin, Kaps and Spinoza, one of the photographers she’d seen in Split. The four of them were hunched up together and laughing raucously. Danny was the master raconteur, with an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes, the most trivial incident embellished to make it funnier. Fragments of a story drifted over to her, something about him hiding from the KGB in a hotel room before the fall of communism. Lithuania, she thought she heard him say.

‘So I knew they were looking for me, and they were banging on my door going, “Meester Lowenstein, can vee talk to you?’” Danny’s ridiculous Russian accent provoked more hilarity. ‘And I’m butt naked, but I jump out of bed and hide in a cupboard in the bathroom, and my heart’s pumping. And I hear them unlock the door and then this big bear of a guy’s opening the cupboard and I think I’m toast—and of course it’s the fucking room service I forgot I’d ordered, and the waiter’s looking at me in all my glory, saying, “Do you vont some mayonnaise?’”

Then the stand-up comic turned shrewd political analyst—Rachel noticed how effortlessly he could change gear. He spoke quickly, oozing confidence. Even when he digressed down labyrinthine side alleys, his sentences were so crafted he might have written them beforehand. His voice rose above everyone else’s, dazzling, demanding to be heard.

‘You see, Milosevic’s great trick is to demonise everybody else. The Slovenes? Secessionists. The Croats? Fascists. The Bosnians? Islamic fundamentalists. The Albanians? Terrorists. And d’you know what he is?’

A nationalist, of course,’ said Edwin.

‘No, not even that. An opportunist. He’s just ridden to power on the back of this whole notion of a greater Serbia. What was he under Tito? Just another dreary apparatchik, going nowhere fast. What future would he have had in a free, democratic Yugoslavia? Absolutely none.’

Watching him in full flow, Rachel decided his age added to his aura. Most of the others were in their twenties, but he was more than a decade older. He’d been there from day one, living and breathing the battles of Bosnia Herzegovina and, before that, Croatia. UN spokesmen, NATO generals, EU diplomats—they all came and went, but Danny was a constant, rarely taking holidays or retreating into comfort zones. He had written the seminal book on the war even before it was over, and his reports were required reading in the White House and Downing Street. He was everything Rachel admired in a journalist: smart and funny, ethical and angry. She decided to forget his disparaging remark about desperadoes: she must have misinterpreted it.

‘It’s like all wars,’ Danny thundered on, rampaging from one subject to another, ‘it’s about good and evil, and it’s also about religion.’

Rachel would discover later he said things like this to provoke Edwin, knowing this loyal English Catholic resented the idea that his God should be blamed for all the troubles of the world.

Edwin came to His defence as always. ‘Oh yeah, it’s always God’s fault, isn’t it, never man’s.’

‘They’re a lethal combination,’ shrugged Danny.

‘You know what I find strange, though, Danny; you think you’re this great atheist—what is it you call yourself, an atheist fundamentalist?—but even you need someone watching over you.’

‘Meaning?’

‘All that superstition, those magic bloody boots. You seriously believe you’ll die if you ever take them off. Okay, admittedly I sometimes hang out in churches with incense and relics, but I don’t think it’s too much weirder.’

Danny appeared to find this territory treacherous so he moved to firmer ground.

‘The point is, history is littered with religious wars. Islamist expansion in the seventh century, the Crusades in the eleventh, the Thirty Years’ War…the list goes on and on and on. And what the hell is Israel and the Palestinians, if it’s not religious?’

Edwin gave up. There was no point in arguing with Danny when he was at full throttle. He represented not a soul on earth, except his paper and some of his readers, and yet he always had to be right. He’d only end an argument when he’d won it. He pummelled away at people, grinding them down.

As the debate petered out, Danny looked up and caught Rachel’s eye. Perhaps she should get up and thank him again for the helmet, or make a joke about how big it was on her and kept slipping off. She tried to give him a half-smile of acknowledgement, yet if he saw it, he didn’t reciprocate. In fact, was that a scowl that was spreading slowly across his face, the beginnings of a thunderstorm that destroys a perfect sky? She was probably mistaken; he was just tired and irritable.

At her end of the table, the conversation was less erudite. It ebbed and flowed before settling, for no discernible reason, around Woody Allen and whether or not he could be called a good director, and Madonna, and whether or not she could be called a good musician. Compare and contrast. Rachel, however, wanted to escape America and her flawed celebrities, not spend all night discussing them. She pretended to listen to the gossipy chatter around her, while filtering it out and concentrating on Danny’s words instead.

After a while she slipped away to the toilet and, having peed, took a long look in the mirror and congratulated herself on a first day of achievement. Not bad, Miss Kelly. Not bad at all.

It was only as she was starting to make her way back towards the dining room that she heard Danny’s voice rising above the hubbub, as impassioned as it had been when she first walked in. It hit her like a sudden gust of wind.

‘But, Jesus, how could she? Does she have any idea, any fucking idea, how much pleasure she’ll have given him? Even his wife doesn’t do that. I mean, hell, she’s not exactly a world statesman. She’s a hack, and a pretty minor one at that, but he’ll have loved it even so. She’s an American, after all. He’ll milk it, you can bet your life he will.’

A pretty minor one at that. The words were rushing around her head at horrible velocity, a fairground ride spinning out of control.

‘Oh, don’t be so hard on her,’ someone said; a man’s voice, she thought. Kaps, the guy from Reuters. Yes, it was definitely that distinctive Afrikaner accent. ‘Look, it’s her first day, eh? So what if she shook his hand and he gave her a kiss? He was trying it on, the old bull. You can’t blame him, he doesn’t get to see too many pretty girls up there in his lair. So she made a mistake, didn’t get out of his way in time. Well, it’s not exactly going to change the war. And anyway, she’s a rookie. Wet behind the ears. Give her a break, will you, Dan?’

‘And what if she’d kissed Hitler? Or Stalin? Would you still be giving her a break?’

‘I doubt she’s into necrophilia.’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘Yes it is! Lighten up, you sanctimonious bastard.’ It was Becky. Good old Becky, thought Rachel, paralysed in her hiding place. ‘Loads of people shake his hand. I saw that guy from the BBC doing it the other day.’

‘We don’t,’ said Danny, categorically. We, the Something Must Be Done Brigade, who despise the Serbs and demand that the world should act against them. We, the gang that Rachel wanted to be part of. Not now, though. Club rules broken. Membership denied. ‘And we certainly don’t kiss him.’

‘Now you kissing Karadzic!’ Kaps shouted out. ‘What a pretty picture!’

It was another valiant attempt to puncture Danny’s righteous indignation. Rachel heard the whole table laugh. She silently thanked Kaps for defending her, she thanked him from the bottom of her aching heart.

Still, she had made a mistake. Everyone conceded that much, her defenders as well as her detractors. Fuck, Rachel said, almost aloud. I’ve only just got here and already I’ve screwed up. Not an inaccurately reported fact, not a missed scoop, but an error of judgement that would offend and alienate those she most wanted to be close to. She should return to her meal, but all she wanted to do was to scurry back to the sanctuary of the toilet and lock the door. She did neither, staring at a curled-up, dried-out piece of wallpaper that seemed to resemble her career.

A pretty minor one at that.

Maybe that’s all she would ever, could ever, be. Maybe Billy Kelly was right and she should have stayed with him, where she belonged. Maybe Maybe Airlines would have to fly her straight back to Arlington and that box bedroom she never should have left. Thoughts of home made her want to go upstairs, curl into a foetal ball and fall asleep, but somehow she had to carry on: it had been almost five minutes and she had to go back in. Later, she would think it took more guts to walk back to the table than on to any battlefield.

By the time she got there, the conversation had moved on. Only Becky saw the dewy glint of tears she was trying to hold back.

In her room that night, Rachel read more of Danny’s book. She didn’t much feel like it, but she needed to have her faith in him restored. It was towards the end of the chapter on Sarajevo.

The only reason I paid any attention at all to Ljubica was because she was a little girl with no front teeth and her hair in pigtails. I guessed she was six or seven, and when I walked past her, near the Unis towers, she was skipping in the snow and laughing hard. In Sarajevo, laughter had become something out of the ordinary, enough to get you noticed. I smiled at her and she smiled back.

I had just turned the corner when I heard the mortar’s impact, and part of me knew who its victim had to be. I ran back the way I had come and she was already in the arms of a heavily bearded man—her father, I assumed, though I dared not ask. He was screaming at the sky, accusing it of this atrocity. He shook a fist at whatever gods up there he thought had done this. Ljubica’s little body had been torn apart, her pigtails were wet with blood. Somewhere in her dying face, I thought I could see a trace of that same smile she had given me, that laughter that got her noticed.

It was the Lowenstein technique again. She doubted she’d ever have the confidence to write about laughter being ‘enough to get you noticed’, but whereas the day before, she’d have admired its audacity, now she thought it might just be corny. She asked herself if it was all entirely true. Had Ljubica really smiled at him, or was that just poetic licence? Had he embellished his story, as he embellished his well-worn anecdotes at the table? What was it Becky had called his writing? Fictional. For a moment she wondered whether Ljubica even existed, or Nermina either, for that matter.

Becky knocked on Rachel’s door again, with more Vranac.

‘I brought something to cheer you up.’

‘But I’m absolutely…’

‘I know you heard. That man’s just so far up himself sometimes.’

Rachel gulped down the dry red wine and soon it was working its wicked magic. Becky drank in sympathy. Rachel was grateful for her company. She might have been suspicious why this perpetually cheerful stranger had latched on to her quite so fast, but on a night like tonight Rachel realised that if Becky needed a friend in Sarajevo, then so did she. Becky had stood up to Danny for her, and she couldn’t ask for more than that.

‘You need to learn to ignore him. And anyway, it was our fault. We should have held you back from snogging the crazy doctor.’

‘It was a peck not a snog,’ protested Rachel.

‘Well anyway, I find him quite attractive in an older-man kind of way. Don’t tell Danny.’

The drink helped turn Rachel’s shame to anger. How dare Daniel Lowenstein—or Danny or whatever the fuck he called himself—who barely knew her, by the way—judge and condemn her, and on the very first story of her on-the-road career? Well, fuck him, the wine said; fuck him and his sanctimonious bullshit.

‘He was my hero, you know.’ Rachel might as well have been confessing to a sordid fantasy.

‘Who, Karadzic or Lowenstein?’

‘Lowenstein, you idiot.’

‘We noticed. Listen, he still can be. He’s a great guy and a fabulous journo. We love him to death. We go back a long way.’

Becky started talking about how they had all met three years earlier during the Serbs’ other war, against the Croats. Edwin had just left the army in 1991, knowing plenty about war but nothing about journalism. Kaps was the opposite, an experienced wire reporter but new to the battlefield. Danny had taken both of them under his wing. Becky had been there at the same time, with another photographer called Frederique.

‘Freddie, we called her. She was only 20, and way more talented than me. We were all driving in a convoy to Vukovar one day, the five of us. The Serbs had flattened it, as only they know how. We were in soft-skins and a round came through the window. Took off half of her face, that lovely, lovely face. The worst thing was her eyes, though. Her agency in Paris paid for the best eye surgeon in the world. She couldn’t lose the gift of sight, the gift of taking pictures. She couldn’t; but she did. The operation failed.’

‘I’m so sorry. What happened to her?’

‘Freddie? Oh she’s alive and kicking, but her world’s a darkroom otherwise she’d be out here with us now.’

Rachel wondered if she’d been lined up as a replacement and it sent a shiver through her, but Becky was moving on, so fast it was hard to keep up.

‘Just take it as a warning. Anyway, d’you want to know how to really piss him off—Danny, I mean? When we were up there—in Pale—this really seedy guy offered me a kind of facility, to go and see some Serbs in action. I told him I didn’t want just any soldier, I wanted a sniper. I want to know what it’s like to be on the other end of that high-powered rifle. I want that picture of him looking down on his victims, to see his finger on the trigger, his eye gazing through the telescopic sights. Picture of the bloody year. Well guess what? The guy agreed.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘Nope. Said they’re going to line up Sarajevo’s kingpin sniper for us.’

‘Us?’

‘Of course. I do the pics, you do the words.’

Becky explained how they would cross over the front line into Grbavica. It was only a stone’s throw from the Holiday Inn, but they would have to go the long way round, across the airport and back into the city from the Serb side, stopping off at Lukavica barracks for Republika Srpska paperwork and a minder.

‘In peacetime, we’d be there in five minutes, but it could take us three hours. Still, I guarantee it’ll be a story. They say he kills half a dozen Muslims every day. Most of them babies in their prams, probably.’

‘So why would he want to talk about it to us?’

‘Because he’s a cocky little shit, I expect. Pleased as punch he’s top of the league and wants the whole world to read all about it. It’s the whole Serb propaganda thing.’

‘And we’re playing along with it? I’m not so sure I want to be part of that.’

‘Oooh, so we’ve decided we’re not covering the Serb side of this war, have we? Fresh into town, and we’ve already worked out who’s in white and who’s in black?’

‘Ain’t exactly rocket science.’

‘Ain’t exactly objective, either. I think you’ve been listening to Mr Lowenstein after all. Look, the point is, we crucify this sniper prick. Let him hang himself. Whatever he says, your readers end up hating him.’

The prospect of a good old-fashioned exclusive—her first in Sarajevo—started to appeal to her. She didn’t want to let Becky down, not after she’d shown such solidarity, and if she lost more of Danny’s respect—well, he didn’t seem to have too much for her in the first place. Before she knew it, she could feel the moral high ground collapsing beneath her feet as if there’d been a landslide.

‘Okay, deal’

They performed a drunken high-five in which their hands very nearly missed each other and set about planning their day out on the Serb side of town, a day that would haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

They find him on the fifteenth floor of a boarded-up apartment block, hiding out in a child’s bedroom. A doll’s house lies broken on the carpet, its roof smashed in. Little plastic people are scattered around it, dead or horribly wounded. Schoolbooks are littered everywhere, an empty satchel nearby. It is as if the child has had a tantrum, hurling her belongings from the shelves, but she has gone: it is the Serbs who have ransacked her room, of course, looking to loot money or jewellery, but finding only dolls and toys and fairy stories. And in place of the pretty schoolgirl who used to live here, the room has a new occupant: a man with a bandana round his head and a tattoo on his left forearm depicting the symbol of Greater Serbian unity—four Cs back to back, ‘their version of the swastika’, as Danny called it. By his side there is a bottle of slivovitz—homemade brandy. It is full. Perhaps he does not drink until he has something to celebrate.

His name is Dragan and he lurks between the girl’s Disney curtains that show not emblems of Serbian nationhood but scenes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. He is gazing out across the Miljacka River, looking for a kill. He is a god, dispensing life and death as he sees fit.

‘Zdravo,’ mutters the sniper when they come in: hello. He turns round briefly to check them out before hauling his eyes back to the streets below, the eagle in search of prey. He only has four hits that day, two of them kills for sure. So far the pickings have been slim. His masters in Pale will be disappointed. Productivity must be increased. The dream of Greater Serbia must come true.

‘Zdravo’, say Becky and Rachel in reply. They have come with Alija, Edwin’s translator who is not long out of college but already, with his small spectacles and an impeccably groomed beard, bears the permanently quizzical look of a university professor. He’s half Serb—on his father’s side—and when he’s in this bit of town, he changes his name to Bosko. He enjoys his alter ego as though he’s creating one of the characters in the books he reads.

But what are they doing here, exchanging pleasantries with a man who is gratuitous Serbian cruelty personified? It seemed such a good idea when they were knocking back the Vranac, basking in their defiance of Danny Lowenstein, but now they have entered the sniper’s lair, they can scarcely believe they are in his presence: it’s a journalistic scoop but an ethical abomination. Kissing Karadzic—even having sex with him—could hardly compare. Rachel dares not even imagine what Danny would say if he could see them now.

A face at last for the anonymous marksman who is terrorising this part of Sarajevo. He turns to them briefly. He is young, probably no more than 25. Green eyes, electric green. Becky supposes he works with them in the same way she does: looking through the sights of a gun, looking through the lens of a camera—the sniper and the snapper are perhaps not so very different. Both have their victims.

Most of the time, he stays hunched over his gun and with his back to them. He is reluctant to leave his work, even for a minute. He has a stilted conversation with Alija, two such different products of the same crumbling country: trained killer and trained intellectual. A redness is spreading across Alija’s erudite face. His eyes are watering.

‘What is it? What did he say to you?’ asks Becky.

‘Nothing, just chit-chat.’

‘Come on—what? You look upset.’

‘No, really, I…’

‘You’re here to translate for us, not choose the bits we’re allowed to hear.’

‘All right, all right. I told him I’m half Serb and he asked me which half. I said from my father’s side. He said in that case, he’d like to fuck the cunt of my mother and after he’d finished, to slice it open with his sharpest hunting knife, and carry on cutting up through her body until he reached her throat, and then he’d put his cock in there as well. Satisfied?’

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’

The sniper talks some more and this time Alija translates simultaneously, lest anyone accuse him of holding back.

‘His name is Dragan. Don’t be afraid, he says. Come up and join him here. He says it’s his window on the world.’

Becky and Rachel creep forward nervously, worried a rival sniper from the Bosnian government might pick them off, and already trying to think through their potential complicity in the assassin’s work. Still, it is why they have come, isn’t it? To get Sarajevo’s other story. And to get the picture. Picture of the bloody year.

They stand either side of him, peering down into the streets on the Muslim side of town, their side of town. Only a few hundred yards away is the nauseating yellow of the Holiday Inn itself. They can’t help watching the city as the sniper does, scanning it, scouring it for signs of life, for potential targets. Every now and then matchstick figures dash from their cover, waiting for the crack and the whistle and—if their luck is out this chilly morning—the sudden, catastrophic explosion of pain.

The matchsticks need to make life-and-death decisions every minute of every day. Which route to take, whether to walk or run, whether to bear a fatalistic straight course down a street or to zigzag, duck and dive, in and out of alleyways. Anyone can be a target any time. The more vulnerable the victim, the keener the sniper is to select them for the kill, for it serves as proof to Bosnians that they can never expect even the most meagre drop of mercy from the Serbs, only ceaseless cruelty. An elderly pensioner here, queuing up for food, a mother and her baby there. Death has its eye on them, and death is a handsome young man called Dragan.

‘He says conditions are perfect. A cold clear day is the best. It means people wrap up with lots of clothes.’

‘Why’s that good, then?’ Rachel isn’t sure she even wants to know the answer.

‘He says because it makes them bigger targets. And if there’s no fog or mist or rain to obscure his vision…well, so much the better.’

‘Does he…enjoy it?’ she asks.

A pause. The sniper squinting hard into his sights, dozens of tiny facial muscles stretched hard in concentration. Eyeing up a kill, or just thinking about an answer?

‘He says it’s a job, like any soldier’s job. He’s good at it, he says, so there’s a certain satisfaction. But it’s not so different from an artillery gunner or an infantryman. In this war, he says, every Serb must play his part. Unity is strength.’

The answers sound like he’s been drilled in Serb propaganda slogans, taught them by rote just so they can be recited to Rachel and Becky.

‘So how many kills?’ Becky decides it’s time to cut to the chase.

‘He says today or altogether?’

‘Both.’

‘Two today, and maybe a couple of hundred altogether. He says he doesn’t keep count. Anyway, he doesn’t always go for the kill, he says. Sometimes you hit them in the knees, just to bring them down. It ties up enemy resources and manpower to look after a casualty, whereas if someone’s dead, they just have to be buried. Nice and quick, he says. Too quick.’

Rachel writes it all down in her notebook, scribbling furiously, cursing the fact that she’s never bothered to learn shorthand. While she scrawls away it is Becky who is thinking up the next question, reporting now rather than taking pictures. Her conviction is that to photograph people properly, you need to understand them.

‘But sometimes he goes straight for the kill, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So how does he decide—you know, when to maim and when to kill?’

The question is translated and when Dragan hears it, he puts down the long, ungainly rifle. His voice falls to a hush and Alija has to ask him to repeat what he has said.

‘He says when the mood suits him.’

‘And what sort of mood is he in today?’

A long pause before he answers.

‘He says stick around and you’ll find out.’

‘Is he okay if I take his picture?’

‘Sure, but he wants to wear something over his face. And you mustn’t use his name. Not even just his first name.’

Why so jumpy, they wonder, when he’s so high up here, so invulnerable, doling out mercy or cruelty upon a whim, allowing life to carry on as normal or snatching it away in a fraction of a second?

Dragan pulls a purple handkerchief from his back pocket and ties it over his mouth and nose, cowboy style. He is hiding his face, just as he is hiding his body behind these Snow White curtains. As Rachel and Becky study him, it occurs to them this is a very personal style of soldiering: the crew who fire their shell or their mortar bomb have no idea who it is they kill, and neither does the humble infantryman who sprays machine-gun fire from the hip. The sniper, on the other hand, selects his victims with the coldest calculation. He knows what they cannot know, that they have been hand-picked for the kill, that they are about to die.

Bow down before the God of Sarajevo.

With the bandana round his head and the handkerchief covering the lower half of his face, there is little left to see now except the predator’s piercing green eyes. Becky, who’s been in a trance for a moment or two, starts to work at last. The long zoom hanging on her shoulder is unused; instead she selects the short zoom round her neck, for this is to be a close-up study of a killer. At first there is too much daylight streaming in, and his face ends up a silhouette. Then she gets it right: the perfect portrait. She’s even come up with a caption: ‘Eyes of a Sniper’. It will make cover for Newsweek, no question. She is so absorbed in her shot that she doesn’t realise he’s preparing for his.

An enormous crack, the window shaking.

The shutter clicks, again and again.

Another crack and then another in quick succession. A pure, clean sound, echoing slightly amid the boarded-up apartment blocks.

Before she knows it, Becky has burnt off a roll of Fujicolor film, and grabs another from the pouch around her waist.

Sniper and snapper at work together, in tandem.

She looks down on to the street. It’s empty. No one dead, no one dying, much to her relief. Must have been a few rounds for practise. Or was it just for show? Becky has had men all over the former Yugoslavia posing for her with their guns. Wankers. Silly little boys with toys. Probably got small pricks, she thinks. This is where people like him belong, in a kid’s bedroom, skulking around between Disney curtains.

Dragan points over to a darkened alleyway on the far right-hand corner of the street. He is matter-of-fact about it, not boasting. The expert’s finger helpfully pointing something out; not something, someone. Becky can see now, wondering quite how she has missed her. A middle-aged woman sprawled on the pavement in a pool of blood. From this distance it looks the colour of red wine. A bag of onions she was carrying has spilt out all over the pavement. Red wine and onions, red wine and…

Becky’s hands and fingers work quickly, instinctively, abandoning the short zoom for the long, focusing in on a distant shot of the victim down below: someone’s mother, wife, daughter. Another motionless statistic.

And then the wave of revulsion. And guilt. And panic. The killing of an innocent woman, and she has connived in it. No, not the ‘killing’, Becky corrects herself: that suggests a legitimate act of war. The cold-blooded murder.

There is no room for Rachel at the window. Just as well. She has been spared Becky’s trauma, but all the same she has heard the shots. And as they have rung around the city, all of Sarajevo has heard them too, everyone asking the same, stark question: who? For the sniper’s bullet is unlike any other in a war zone. It has one single name lovingly engraved upon it, nobody else’s will do. The simple sound of its crack and whistle haunts because of all that it implies: a bullet meant for just one human being, selected by another.

‘What’s happened, Beck? He hasn’t actually—’

‘Yes, he fucking has. He’s gone and killed a…’

‘Who?’ Like Sarajevo, she needs to know the answer.

‘A woman. Shit, I don’t believe it. Bag of onions in her hand. Poor bitch. Poor fucking bitch.’

Rachel thinks she can hear the sound of crying in Becky’s broken voice, but she isn’t sure.

Wisely perhaps, Alija translates none of this for the sniper.

There is a pause. Twenty seconds, maybe more. Becky cannot bear to look out of the window again, but she wants to know what’s happening—she needs to know. Is the woman really dead? Or maybe just badly hurt, with others already rescuing her, racing her up to Kosevo hospital and a miracle cure? She pops her head up again to take another look, convinced the woman will have a happy ending, just like Snow White and her dwarves. But the woman and the onions and the wine are still there. Alone. No one dares approach. They know too well the sniper’s game.

It is precisely what he wants, and Becky watches him now, finger at one with the trigger, in loving harmony. He is waiting for some hero or heroine to creep out—against their better judgement—to try and save a fellow Sarajevan.

This can’t be real, Becky is telling herself. She has broken out in a hot flush. Well what did she expect? That this pretty-boy sadist would put his killing on pause for a while, so he could pose for her? That he’d just let her walk out the door afterwards, morals intact, conscience all clean and tidy?

Rachel is pushing her way up into the window. Like a child who feels excluded, she wants to see what everyone else can.

‘You okay, Becky?’

‘Never fucking better.’

‘Mind if I take a look down there?’

‘Be my guest.’

Now Dragan has a new co-pilot in his cockpit, and he smiles at Rachel—a smile that disturbs her even before she spots the fruits of his labour in the alleyway below.

She knows she needs to elicit more quotes from him, or there will be no story to go with Becky’s pictures. Where is he from? What drives him to do it? Does he have a family, does he have a mother like the woman he’s just killed? Does he sleep well at night or is he tormented by bad dreams? But Rachel cannot bring herself to talk to him at all and, for a man who has just snuffed out a life, every question she half-frames in her mind sounds far too antiseptic. Instead it is Dragan who decides to interrogate her.

‘He wants to know why you hate the Serbs,’ Alija translates.

‘We don’t,’ says Rachel.

‘He says you’re liars. He wants to know why you’ve come here today.’

‘To hear his side of the story, his side of the war.’

‘Bullshit, he says. You could get that from any Serb soldier—any one of thousands. He says you’re voyeurs, both of you. Says you’re fascinated by someone like him, someone who kills like this. That you think he’ll make a…’ Alija hesitates.

‘Go on,’ says Rachel. ‘We think he’ll make a what?’

‘He says you think he’ll make a sexy story.’

Tell him he’s right, she wants to say, but he already knows it. They all do. And now Dragan is planning a way to make it even sexier.

‘He’s asking if you want to have a look through his rifle. To see Sarajevo the way he sees it.’

‘Um…no. No thanks very much.’ Rachel is tempted all the same.

‘He insists. He absolutely insists.’

It is more than bad taste, she knows that: it is morally reprehensible. Danny would have them expelled from the country, boycotted by the international press corps, cast out as lepers for the rest of their careers. But who is going to tell? Not her, and not Becky either, since they are both in this together, for better or for much, much worse. In any case, Dragan doesn’t look like he’s giving her a choice. He stands aside from the gun and motions for her to put an eye to its sights. She obeys and, to her relief, it is at first a hazy, out-of-focus blur. Rachel moves away.

‘Hvala.’ Thank you.

‘No, he wants you to look some more, he says. Until you see someone else.’

‘Well, thank him again, but tell him I’ve seen enough. Really.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I’m afraid there is no option to refuse.’

Another shiver, and the dawning realisation that Dragan is playing a game with them. Bosnia mind-fuck for beginners. She returns reluctantly to the telescopic sights, and is horrified to discover that now she can see through them. A mother and her little daughter cowering behind a bus-stop, paralysed by indecision, wondering whether or not they might be spotted.

Hide and seek. Can he see us? Of course he can see you, idiots! Now move! Move while it’s me looking down the barrel of this goddamned gun and not him! Please, in the name of whatever god you want to worship, just move away from that fucking bus-stop!

But they don’t. The woman lies near them, red wine and onions proof enough of the dangers of venturing away from cover. No, they will stay put, convincing themselves they are safe even though they’re sitting ducks.

‘He’s asking if you’ve seen anyone.’

‘No.’ But Rachel’s throat is so dry she can hardly speak. ‘No one at all’

‘He says not even that mum and kid behind the bus-stop? Surely you can see them, he says.’

Alija’s voice is trembling too. He has a sense of foreboding about the direction of this conversation, and he would give anything in the world for it to stop. Why did they ever bring him here, these silly girls who understand so little about the Serbs?

Rachel does not answer, but her silence is enough. The sniper can smell her fear, just as he can smell it from the people down in the street, hundreds of feet away. The scent wafts up to him. Unmistakable. Irresistible.

Then he is saying something else, pulling down the handkerchief from his mouth to make himself more clearly understood. Lest there be any doubt. Alija does not translate though: he will not, he cannot.

‘What’s he saying? Please tell me.’

She doesn’t really want to hear it though, and neither does Becky, who is busying herself in the black pouches of her Domke camera belt, fiddling with her mini-flash, checking her supply of film, creating work, trying to lose herself in it the way she has done all her life.

‘I…I don’t think I know how to translate what…’

‘Tell her!’ Dragan is suddenly speaking English, surprising them all. It is a command, not a request, and Alija obeys.

‘I’m afraid he says he wants you to choose. Which one he should kill. Of the two people behind the bus-stop. He says he will kill one and let one live, but he wants you…to decide.’

Rachel stares at Alija, but dares not even look at Dragan. Waves of panic engulf her. What should she do? Why didn’t she just stay at home in Arlington, in her little girl’s bedroom—not so very different from this one.

‘Tell him to fuck right off.’ Becky is out of her camera bag again, out of her reverie.

‘I’m not sure I can. You see he says if Rachel doesn’t pick one—the mother or the child—he will simply kill them both. It’s up to her. He says she should look at it positively. He says she has the power to save a life today.’

‘Oh no.’ Rachel wants to weep.

‘Ignore him, Rach,’ says Becky, back on her feet, aware of her responsibilities, stronger, wiser, more experienced—handing out tips on everything from water heaters to ethical dilemmas. ‘We’re getting out of here right now. The guy is a freak. You can tell him we’ll be complaining to the people in Pale, the people we arranged this through. He’s going to find himself in deep shit. We have a hotline to Karadzic himself.’

Alija translates laboriously and they wait with pounding heartbeats.

‘Fuck the people in Pale, he says, and fuck Karadzic. They’re all cunts; spineless, low-life cunts. You don’t leave this room until you make the choice.’

In slow motion, they watch him pull a pistol from his belt. He waves it around vaguely in their direction. He is smirking with the timeless grin of a Serb who wants to prove a point, who feels a victim of history. Becky has seen it before, in countless leery Chetniks, but this one is different: he is handsome when he smiles. Again he addresses them in English:

‘Now!’

He gestures for Rachel to get back to the window and look through his sights once more. To select her victim. Roll up, roll up, come and play God for a day! To her despair, they are still there, trembling by the bus-stop. Why the fuck didn’t they run for it when they could, when she was keeping Dragan talking? Why didn’t they take their chance to sprint across the street, or back to where they came from?

‘Well?’ Dragan is relentless.

‘Tell him…I just can’t…he knows I can’t possibly…’

The sniper screams, and Alija struggles to keep up with the litany of derision.

‘He says you’re pathetic, just like all the Western governments who can’t decide what to do and who to help. Just like all the bleeding hearts who come to a place where they don’t belong. He says you should…well, fuck off back to America and leave Serbia to the Serbs. He says you’re both dirty little whores, you deserve to be—I really don’t want to translate this—gang raped up the arse by Arkan and his boys before they cut your tits off and stuff them in your mouths.’

Rachel’s hands are shaking violently, volts of fear electrocuting her body.

‘Novinari!’ shouts Becky. ‘We’re fucking novinari!’

Journalists. As if that one word is an excuse and a reason and an alibi all wrapped up in one.

Dragan pushes Rachel aside, so hard she tumbles from the window and sprawls on to the floor. There is a shot, just like before. Five seconds later, another one.

Silence. No screams, just the hush of three people in shock and one who thinks he has proved a point.

‘Oh my God,’ says Alija eventually.

‘I think we should leave now.’ Becky is carefully closing up her pouches.

The sniper looks round at them again: another smile, this time of total contempt.

‘He says he wants you to come back up here and take one last picture. For posterity, he says. For history’

‘I…’

‘Becky, please. It really is an order.’

What have we done, she asks herself. What has Rachel done? Why didn’t she just choose? It was not nice, it was not fair, but why couldn’t she have saved a life, the deal Dragan had offered? Becky braces herself to see a dead mother and child by the bus-stop and a black cloud of irrational anger overcomes her.

‘Oh, Rachel, for pity’s sake. Why couldn’t…’

But as she looks out, there is only empty pavement around the bus-stop. No bodies. No dead hand reaching out tragically from parent to child. No more red wine.

Dragan is laughing, a raucous bellyache of a laugh. Bosnia mind-fuck. You disgust me, his laughter says, you and everyone else in the self-satisfied, Serb-hating world you come from.

And of course he disgusts them, except what troubles Becky is that his is a face that, in another time, another place, she could quite easily have fallen in love with. The devil’s face. She catches a whiff of his slivovitz and yearns to take a slug of it.

As they prepare to leave, Rachel can barely feel her legs. She curses herself, she curses Becky and she curses Dragan. But most of all she curses Danny Lowenstein, without whose cruel jibes she never would have been here.