Truth is that you cannot make people live together when they actually hate each other, then hate us nearly as much… Can I top you up?'
Joey shook his head.
'Even me, Joey, and I'm an old hand – I was here during the war, where I met Maggie – I'm quite astonished at the viciousness of the place. We haven't even started, haven't begun to start, getting rid of this brutality. Do you know, in the Brcko region the Serbs held Muslim civilians in a furniture factory. They had shredders there to make wood chips out of raw timber
– for chipboard, you know. They fed Muslims into the shredding machines, got human chips out of raw bodies, then spread the chopped-up stuff on the fields… Just to give you an idea of what we're up against… I'd better circulate. Anyway, nice to have met you. Have a good stay, and please don't cause me any problems, you know what I mean. Have another drink.'
Joey stood alone against the wall.
He watched her. There was a little bag in her hand, leather and delicate.
One moment she was in the group, the next she was gone and the knot of older men were peering around, over their shoulders. He looked to see which appeared the most bereft. Then she was beside him.
'Come on, time to go.'
Joey said sourly, 'Only if you've finished enjoying yourself.'
'I was working.'
'Looked as if you were working hard.'
'Don't be so bloody pompous.'
They left. She didn't bother to wait in the queue and thank her host. Moments later, they were out in the cold air, walking down a winding cobbled street, the party's noise behind them. Her hand was back in his arm and he could smell her scent. The little shops they passed were shuttered with steel and wooden grilles. The street was empty.
'What was the work?'
'You wanted a name.'
'I'm sorry, I'm not focusing – what was the name I wanted?'
'A judge's name. You know, the needle in the haystack…'
'Come again?'
'The name of a judge to trust – God, you didn't think I was talking to those deadbeats for the good of my health? Cop on, Cann. Here, the judges co-operate with politicians and Mafia, drive a big car, live in a big apartment and their kids get university places. Or the judges don't co-operate and they listen to all the horseshit the foreigners give them about the sanctity of the rule of law, and they're machine-gunned or car-bombed, and they're dead. Least likely, they're marginalized, and don't get involved, not noticed – actually it's not "they", it's only one… He's straight, but the problem is – if you want to stay legal – he's useless. He stays alive and lives like a pauper. If you want "straight", then Zenjil Delic's your man.'
'Thanks.' They walked fast. 'What is this place?'
'It's the old market, the heart of the old city… The Serbs hit it with a mortar, the final straw that brought in the Americans. Thirty-eight dead and eighty-five wounded.'
He gazed over the gaunt frames of the market stands, now cleared for the night. A floodlit mosque minaret reached up towards the low cloud, the spit of snowflakes cavorting in the beam. 'Were you here?
Did you see it?'
'You never ask for war stories in Sarajevo, Joey. You get enough without asking.'
'How near was the front line?'
'A few hundred yards, maybe four hundred.'
'How was the line held?'
'It was held because there was nowhere else to go.'
'Weren't they heroes, the commanders who held the line, saved the city?'
'Bad luck, Joey. Nothing here is as it seems. One day they held the line, the next day they did deals across it for the supply of black-market food, cooking oil and bullets. They weren't heroes, they were thugs.'
In the folklore of the city, he was the man who had preserved its name, identity, its heartbeat.
He had the title of legenda. He could strut the streets of the old quarter, walk at liberty on the Mula Mustafe Baseskija, the Branilaca Sarajeva, the Obala Kulina Bana, and the old and the young would recognize and make space for him. Some of the oldest would wish to touch his hand as their saviour and some of the young would dream of working for him.
A message reached him from London, passed by cut-out figures from the Turkish community there to the Turkish community in Sarajevo, that Albert William Packer travelled to his city the next day, and that he and his colleagues should be shown respect. In his apartment, richly furnished and luxuriously fitted, he talked of this matter with the deputy commander of the Agency for Investigation and Documentation, and with the nephew of the ruling party's politician controlling the Ministry of Justice. The latest message came by the same route as that which, two weeks before, had introduced the first visitor – now dead, taken from the river and freighted back whence he had come.
The legenda called himself Serif. He was Ismet Mujic. Old police files had listed him as born in 1963, reared in an orphanage following the disappearance of his father and the committal of his mother to a psy-chiatric ward after a nervous collapse, but the files had long since been taken from the shelves and destroyed. After running from the orphanage, a few days after his fourteenth birthday, he had joined the street kids roaming loose in the city and had begun a life of thieving. His early career had had two sides: he had also gained rich rewards from informing the police about other kids who followed the same trade.
Then, and it had not seemed unnatural to him, he had become a policeman… He could remember very clearly the man who had come, and he could roll his tongue over the strange-sounding name of Duncan Dubbs. By 1984, Olympic year and a year of prime pickings, he had been a police bodyguard to the same official who was now paramount in the Ministry of the Interior and had mixed his duties with the lucra-tive provision of 'protection' to those traders, club-owners and restaurateurs who made fat killings from the Winter Games. When the war had started and chaos had gripped the undefended city, the legend of Serif had taken flight. The city had been about to collapse under the onslaught of the Serb forces, and its Muslim community had neither the men nor the munitions to prevent its fall. The scale of the impending catastrophe had thrown up, spewed out, a fighting leader. He had gone to the old prison, cleared out the hardest of the convicts, driven them in two lorries to the Central Bank and rifled the cash tills, then gone on to the Marshal Tito barracks on Zmaja od Bosne and thrown the banknotes at the officer commanding the regular troops' armoury then taken out all the small arms that could be loaded onto two lorries, and they had gone into the line. On those first days, the greatest threat to the city's survival had been the Serb infantry push from Grbavica towards the former Olympic complex of Skenderija. In fighting of primitive ferocity, the line had held. It had been rifle against rifle, grenade against grenade, knife against knife, fist against fist. He became a fire brigade. First he deployed in Grbavica, then on assaults up the hill between the gravestones of the Jewish cemetery, then in Dobrinja to protect the tunnel linking the besieged city to the outside world – and his wealth had grown.
By the end of the war his power over the city had been absolute.
Serif discussed again with the intelligence officer and a politician's nephew the proposal that had been made by Duncan Dubbs two weeks before, as they had discussed it before the visitor's death and after it, sipping good imported whisky. It was a natural arrangement in that city that a 'businessman' and an official sworn to defend the security of the state and the young relation of a principal politician should meet to talk over the merits of a contract offered by an outsider.
'What does he know?'
'Nothing,' the intelligence officer said.
'A list of witnesses has been given to the idiot judge, Delic, who will sing the same song, and the pathology report is in place – there is nothing he can know,' the politician's nephew said.