Free The Dealer and the Dead by Gerald Seymour Page B

the
treachery
of the weapons paid for but not delivered. Betrayal. Treachery. Every day in the café they blamed defeat on the two evils.
    Her voice was sharper, demanding to know where in the garden he was.
    She had collected everything of value in the village in a plastic shopping bag, and during the day, through the night, the quiet times and when the bombardment was fiercest, the people of their community had come to the kitchen of Andrija and Maria’s home and had brought with them everything of value they possessed – jewellery, ornaments, heirlooms, cash, insurance policies, house deeds. It had all gone into the bag and been transferred to the care of Zoran. Maria had stripped the villagers of all that was precious to them. It should have bought the weapons but had not.
    The anguish was worse because a grave had been found. The American had been at Andrija’s house the last evening and had asked translated questions concerning the clothing his cousin had worn that night, nineteen years before. He was asked what colour undershirt and underpants, what pattern on the socks and what sort of boots. He had had no answers. He had sat in his chair and said he did not know. He thought his ignorance shamed him.
    He had nothing to live for. Devils beset him. Only in death would he escape them.
    He was kicked.
    She stood over him.
    His wife used the toe of her flat shoe to push him from his stomach on to his back and the grenade was exposed. It was Maria, a principal voice among the women in the refugee camp, who had demanded that each woman never replace her rings,necklaces, bracelets, brooches and earrings until the
betrayal
and
treachery
were answered. He closed his eyes. She bent over him and he felt her breath on his face. She did not kiss him – had not kissed him on the day they were reunited in the refugee camp of wood huts in the mud on the south side of Zagreb, or on any day since – and did not run her hand over the stubble on his cheeks or tousle his hair, but she took his hand. She prised the grenade away from him and he thought his finger would dislocate as she freed the pin.
    So, it would go on. The misery and the anguish were on a conveyor-belt and he had no escape from them.
    Andrija did not know how betrayal and treachery could be answered, and did not know how freedom could be regained. She walked away from him, with the grenade. Had he been prepared to pull the pin? Many had. He pushed himself on to his side, took his weight on his knee, then levered himself up with his crutch. He thought he would go to the café and fight again a day of the war.
    He did not know how the evil done would be answered.
    There had been a moment, for Robbie Cairns, of indecision. It had been overcast, sultry, that morning, on the south side of the river. His T-shirt had stuck to his chest and back when Vern had picked him up in the car. New number plates. They had crossed Southwark Bridge and gone north – had been close to the location when rain had spattered the windscreen. Rain mattered.
    In rain, would Johnny ‘Cross Lamps’ Wilson put on a raincoat or hoist an umbrella, then go down the street for his newspaper and a pot of tea? Would he say he could pick up the runners and riders later, skip the café and do without his walk? Robbie Cairns didn’t fancy hanging about between the electronic gates and the estate agent’s with the recessed doorway, or waiting opposite the newsagent on the other side of the street. He wore a lightweight windcheater, as unremarkable as everything else about him, but it had an inner pocket in which the Baikal pistol nestled. He would hardly want to be stuck out on a pavement,armed up, not knowing whether the target would come to him or stay in and watch breakfast TV or shag his missus while the rain hosed his windows. It wasn’t Robbie Cairns’s style to ask his elder brother for advice. Enough times in the past Vern had been driving him towards a target when Robbie had, abruptly,