The bodies haven’t been here for very long. My stomach bucks and the bile rises. I bend over and retch, drily save for a string of yellow. I have a terrible thirst. I pull the collar of my shirt across my mouth and poke in the earth with the stick, the wet leaves and ash with the stick. A twisted leg. The heel of a trainer. A yellowed hand, bent sharply at the wrist. Beneath the fingernails there is dirt. Dark unravelled entrails, strewn about by the birds, I suppose, caught in the low branches of a bush. The belly itself is a dark, gleaming hollow and the flies, chased away by the rain, are returning in their scores, bluebottles buzzing loud as bees. Every few seconds I have to stand to breathe, there’s a light wind that comes from the west. I turn my face into it until I can bring myself to look again. I have a duty. I count. There are at least five people, though there could be more.
A crow swoops down and rises back to the branch with a coil of intestine in its beak. The sudden movement makes me start and straighten. I lose my grip on my rifle and it lands on the corpse with the open belly. As I reach for it my hand touches the cold flesh and I snatch it back, I fight the urge to flee. I wonder again if I am alone here, whether I am being watched by whoever did this. I stand there, listening, holding my breath, but there is no sound. I am alone, standing on the edge of a ravine: the landscape I know so well is suddenly a new danger. Now the silence is terrifying. I turn and run. Once away from the ravine, under the cover of the trees, I stop. Up in the trees the other crows start to squabble over the piece of entrail. I try to think what all of this means. Of one thing I am certain: these are not the men I killed and threw into the swimming hole. Those men, the soldiers, are long gone. I have dealt with death. I dealt with the deaths of those men, disposed of their bodies. But these deaths are different. These are different people. These are people I know. One of them, the one with red hair, is a woman.
I think I know who she is: the baker’s wife, mother of the Mongol daughter. Perhaps the Mongol is buried there, too, the whole family. I don’t know.
I don’t know.
19
Things in Gost had begun to get to some people.
Grace, the first to see the damage, was red-eyed with crying. Laura stood with her hand over her mouth and her arm around her daughter. Matthew was sitting at the outside table, sleep-slow, his mind fractionally behind his body. He’d been woken up by Grace’s shouts.
Paint all over the mosaic: white gloss paint. Loops of it cover the rising bird, sliding immensely slowly downwards. Clots of paint lie under the water on the mosaic of fish and weeds. A trail of white between the wall and the fountain. No sign of the can. Whoever had done this had brought the paint with them, because it wasn’t mine. The gloss paint I’d been using was locked away in the outbuilding and anyway was blue. It must have happened the night before or very early in the morning, while they were all asleep. Not one of the family heard a thing.
‘How could this happen?’ asked Matthew.
‘You wouldn’t have woken up anyway,’ said Grace. ‘Maybe none of us would.’
‘I mean there’s no one else around here. They’d have had to come in a car or else it’s a very long walk.’
‘Probably they parked somewhere and walked the rest of the way,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘That would figure.’
‘But why?’ asked Grace. She rubbed an eye leaving a streak of white across her cheek. Paint on her face and hands.
‘They’re louts. Too many young men who don’t want to work and then don’t like it when other people have some money,’ I said quickly.
‘We’re going to have to go to the police,’ said Laura. ‘I mean, this is awful.’
I doubted, I said, they’d be moved to mount much of an investigation, though I could be wrong. It would be very interesting to see what they would do, certainly nothing that they thought would be bad for tourism. It was an idea in which people had never lost faith: the hordes of tourists who would one day return to fish and cycle and hike in the hills, transform the grey fate of towns like Gost. On the other hand they would want Laura to feel they were taking her seriously. They would make a show of investigating, but they had no interest in actually finding the culprit.
‘How do you get this stuff off?’ asked Grace.
‘We’ll do it. Easier before it dries too much.’ I touched the paint lightly with my forefinger. The skin was still quite thin and the paint was wet beneath, meaning it hadn’t been thrown all that long ago. If I’d gone up into the hills that morning, as I so often did, I even might have caught them in the act. Because so many of the tiles were glazed the paint wouldn’t be too hard to get off. On the whitewashed surface of the wall, white on white, it barely mattered.
‘What about the police? They’ll want to see it,’ said Laura.
I said most likely a photograph would do and so Grace went to fetch her camera.
A few hours later you could hardly tell it had happened. I fetched some soft rags from my house and we wiped away the worst of the mess. On the glass and glazed tiles the paint hadn’t taken. Worst affected were the cream-coloured tiles that made up the background, which were some kind of soft stone. For those we had to use stripper, trying not to do too much damage to the surface. I only had a third of a can remaining and so I left Grace at work while I headed into town to pick some up.
In town I went to the hardware shop (the one which is not part-owned by Fabjan, of course) and on my way back I caught sight of Krešimir. This time I made sure he didn’t see me: the last thing I needed was a repeat of the other day when he’d lost his temper with me at the Zodijak. Most probably he was going home for lunch. He was dressed for the office in a jacket and trousers, a pair of loafers. I watched him for a while, more or less to enjoy the sight of him. I wondered how he was feeling. The talk and the rumours slid through every street and house in Gost and, whenever the blue house was mentioned, so was Krešimir’s name. Krešimir Pavić. People would fall silent at his approach and drop their gaze, begin to talk again once he was (almost) out of earshot. They’d be enjoying it. Of all of this I was certain. He walked like he was in a bit of a hurry, with his shoulders square and his chin out. To look at him you’d think everything was fine. But I know Krešimir like nobody else. He hates to be shown up, he hates it. So he puts on a bit of bluff, meaning the more confident he looks the worse it is. At the door of the house he stopped and searched for his keys, but not finding them he rapped on the door. I expected to see his wife, but when the door opened there was Vinka, her black hair pulled back in the style she’d worn all the time I’d known her; from where I stood I could see the sharp divide of colour at the roots. Her face was skeletal, skin like uncooked fish. She was without lipstick but her eyebrows were crayoned sloppily and comically high on her forehead. Unsteady on her feet, she almost fell out of the door as Krešimir shouldered past her and would have, but for the fact she managed to catch the doorframe. Unseen, I watched as she turned to follow Krešimir, patting her hair like a faded belle and closing the door behind them.
I fried sausages and onions for my supper and peeled and boiled some potatoes. It occurred to me I would miss Laura and the family when they went. In four weeks I’d grown used to having them around. That moment I decided to call my mother and Danica. My mother had finally moved into her own flat, the years on the waiting list had paid off. All the same it was she who picked up the phone when I telephoned Danica and Luka’s place. Over the sound of the television in the background she began to complain. ‘The bedroom’s damp. It makes my legs hurt.’