She said, 'It is Foca. I don't go there. It is a place of evil. I should go there. I could go with troops from the SFOR, but I do not wish to. There is suffering there, the same as everywhere, but I am not perfect. Do you think it wrong to care less for the suffering of some than I do for others? I could not argue if you thought that, Mister. Do you see men fishing? They have no work and they fish for food to eat. The factories have stopped, the chemicals leak into the river – it is the Drina river. I would not eat the fish but they are desperate… I do not go to Foca because it is a place where war criminals walk. Everyone knows their names, who the beasts are. You could meet them on the street in Foca just as in Sarajevo you could meet Ismet Mujic. In six years only once have the SFOR dared to try to capture one of them – Janko Janjic, the mass rapist and mass cleanser. He had an eagle tattooed on his stomach and the words "Slaughter Me" on his neck. Every minute of every day he had a hand-grenade hanging from his throat, and he pulled the pin when German troops came to take him. The rapist and the murderer, in Foca, was a hero. Many thousands went to his funeral. Myself – and a good man like you, Mister we do not know how to speak with such creatures.'
He kissed her at that moment, first her cheeks, then her forehead, then her eyes, then her lips.
'How long will you he here?'
'Just a couple more days.'
'But you will come back?'
I will bring, more lorries but that won't be as important as coming, back to see you.' Mister held her close, hugged her. It was not the way he embraced his Princess. He clung to her as if he had been infected by the misery she spoke of. I will come back, not send people who could do it instead of me, I'll come back because you're here…I don't talk a lot – Monika, you are the best human being I've ever met.' He saw the openness of her face and the trust. He had thought of her at first as a contact, a tool to be used, an opportunity lo be exploited. 'They were alone beside the road and his arms were tight round her. She was looking down. The way he held her she could see his left hand She was looking at his hand and the heavy gold ring on his third finger, the ring the Princess had given him.
'Come on, Mister Charity Man, let's hit Gorazde.'
She disentangled herself. Her face was flushed. It was eighteen years since he had married his Princess and in that time he had not touched another woman.
They drove alongside the Drina river, passed the wreckage ol the front line, and went on through the flattened emptiness of no man's land.
Goraz. de was a finger town pressed down between the hills.
Mister never reached across her and looked into the mirror, never saw that he was tracked. He would sleep with her. After the meeting he would sleep whole night with her before going to the airport and taking the plane home. Because he would sleep with her, afterwards, he knew, was certain of it, he would be supreme at the meeting.
A methodical man, with a long training of counter-intelligence operations behind him, Sandor Dizo was a survivor. Eighteen years of his professional life had been in the service of the 111/111 State Protection Directorate, but in 1990 he had effortlessly changed allegiance – not desk, chair or working hours – and had become an executive of the Office of National Security. He had the same view of the roofs of Budapest, from the same room, as he'd had before the collapse of socialism. Then he had worked to stifle internal dissent, now he turned the same standards of intellect to combating the rise in newly democratic Hungary of the influence of organized crime. He had unlearned the practices taught him by the KGB instructors, and had learned those of the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States and the Security Service of the United Kingdom. He was today's man.
The work of that day, and many others past and many to come, was his surveillance of the movements of Russians who were active in the vory v'zakone crime group. If Sandor Dizo had had available to him today the powers of coercion he had enjoyed prior to 1990, the opportunities of the old days, there would have been no Russian criminals on Hungarian territory, but those powers had been withdrawn. He was now a creature of government by computer, provided by the Americans, and fieldcraft, taught by the British. Instead of broken noses and broken necks, he followed the new rules and provided the printouts listing the coming and going of the Russians and filled the files with their photographs. It was not a surprise to Sandor Dizo that the Russians now flourished in Budapest. They ran prostitution, controlled the clubs, moved and sold narcotics, laundered money through the recently opened hanks, directed the country's oil-distribution Mafia; they were behind every rip-off fraud of public and private enterprises, they trafficked weapons, and they killed. Being an exact man, Sandor Dizo could list each of the one hundred and sixty killings and attempted murders and bomb explosions on his capital city's streets since he had joined the Office of National Security. On the fingers of one of his plump hands he could count the minimal number of arrests and convictions of those responsible. Without interfering with their operations, he had gained a comprehensive knowledge of the Russian groups.
Nikki Gornikov had left Budapest that morning. He had been photographed leaving his apartment on Prater Street, and photographed again on Line 2 of the Metro. He had then been seen to take the classic anti-surveillance procedure of diving for a taxi, had been spotted at the airport and watched on to the Vienna flight. By the time those strands of information had been sifted on Sandor Dizo's desk, Nikki Gornikov could have driven a hundred miles from Vienna, or could have boarded any of a dozen flights. He called him ironically, when he thought of him, Baby Nikki because he was a forty-nine-year-old bear bull of a man with a face made ugly by smallpox and knife fights. On Baby Nikki there was a fifteen-page computer printout and a four-centimetre-thick file was laid down by the American and British tutors of a democratic intelligence service, he noted the departure of Baby Nikki Gornikov, of the vory v'zakone group, from Budapest, put another page in the file and hoped the man – wherever he had gone – might slip, stumble, fall under a convenient tram or trolley bus. The place for such a man, so sadistic, cruel and vicious a man as Nikki Gornikov, was the prison yard at dawn.
His tasks of the morning done, Sandor Dizo called to his secretary in the outer office for coffee, and some biscuits if there were any.
'It was their graveyard, but when the Muslims were put out of their homes, the Serb boys used it as a football pitch.'
After her death at St Matthew's hospice, after the funeral service in church, his mother's body had been cremated. Her ashes now lay in an oakwood casket in the crematorium's Garden of Remembrance. It was a lovely garden, clean-raked and dignified in winter, bright with flowers in summer. If kids had come into that garden, just across the North Circular from where he lived, to play football over her casket Mister would have taken a shotgun to them, or a pickaxe handle, or an industrial strimmer, or a chainsaw. None of the little tossers would have been in a state to kick a football again – none of the little bastards would have had the knees to walk again, let alone run. But that wasn't Monika's answer.
' I don't blame the Serb children,' she said. 'They know nothing else. They have never been shown another way.'
'Isn't there a proper pitch in the village where all the kids can play?'
'There was, but it was a park for tanks. It was destroyed. There is no pitch.'
He stood beside her and looked across the graveyard that was a soccer field