Sandstealers. Ben Brown
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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