Book of the Dead (40 page)

“No.” She lowers the rifle to the road and holds out the transmitter. She takes a deep breath. “Because
I
want to.”

She extends her hand—

[21]

—Dieter exploring the aquarium of the dead, intrepid Martian explorer alone and yet accepted, finally where he belongs, cartographer of the damned—

—Bill reborn, rising with the dawn, finally at peace with the world, content at last with a single purpose and mission: to feed—

—Leonard arboreal, monument to Darwin descending; Leonard
Rex Mortura
, King of the Dead; Leonard with power at last, returning to earth enlightened to survey these his new people, this the new necropolis—

     others but nothing for them i walk there is light past the treefoods i go near i press my face against the clear toward the light i shut my eyes and she is there with the soft of her hands and there is music and roger she says Roger come dance with me, and I take her hand, and I open my eyes, and there is music, and light, and I remember—

[22]

—and brings her finger down.

BY NICHOLAS ROYLE

The answers were those he had feared. It was practically impossible to obtain the necessary visas on behalf of another without leaving the country and engaging in dangerous, belligerent activities. Not that this came into conflict with his principles, for he had none. But it was hazardous. The pirate squads that roamed the purgatory of Yugoslavia were susceptible to incendiary attacks from both Eastern and Western forces. Hungarian troops patrolled in small units armed to the teeth with thermite grenades; and the American planes dropped napalm, because they were confident the casualties would be
mostly
Eastern, say 70 percent or so.

Hašek crawled back down the constricted steel-walled passageways he’d been forced to use to get to the visa information bureau. At a junction of three passages he stopped, rested his damaged back against the wall, and flexed his fingers, effortlessly twisting them into a breathless run up and down the keys he imagined to be there.

He emerged near the main square of old Tirana, facing one of Stalin’s many decapitated statues. Four ragged figures huddled round a flickering screen under a corrugated shelter to his left. Two of them were smoking, impossible since inhalation and exhalation were beyond their capabilities, but old habits die hard. A third man lifted a bottle to his disfigured mouth and poured alcohol down his throat; again, a useless act given the absence of thirst and physical sensation. These men were not necessarily new here; some creatures had been here for months and still indulged their former desires out of habit rather than need.

Hašek had to see about joining one of the squads conducting sorties across the border and as far north as Belgrade. For this he had to get to the Shkodra region of the city, and to get there he needed transportation. There was no public transport, so he had to get his hands on some kind of vehicle.

“Three hundred lek,” the old Albanian told him.

“Three hundred! You’re joking!” He looked aghast at the clapped-out old three-wheeler. “That wouldn’t get me to Durres, never mind Shkodra.”

“It’s a good vehicle. Three hundred lek. Very good price. Look elsewhere if you wish.”

Hašek knew Kadare had him; there was nowhere else to go. The old man had a virtual monopoly in the city and therefore in the country, for the city had expanded to such an extent that the two were now the same.

“Two hundred,” Hašek tried.

“Three hundred,” was the reply, no hesitation. “The tank is full. The battery charged.”

He drove most of the way one-handed. His left hand mimed the lower notes of “These Foolish Things” while the fingers of his right hand tapped out the high notes on the steering wheel. The sky appeared briefly between concrete walls and rusting iron roofs. Literally thousands of people were wandering about; war casualties, their Albanian hosts, and some of the American and European refugees who had fled the war and got in before visa controls were introduced.

The farther north he went, the more iron and steel dominated the ramshackle architecture at the expense of concrete and rough stone. The dead were everywhere, walking from one construction to another, visible also through gaps in the walls, sitting watching television and playing games.

Shkodra was close, just beyond lay Yugoslavia and his only chance of obtaining visas for Barton. She was waiting in West Berlin, checking every day at the replication unit where the documents would come through if Hašek was successful.

“Why do you want to join a squad?” they asked him, with some suspicion.

He’d decided against honesty. It would only create extra difficulties.

“I want something to do. I’m bored of the games.”

“So it would be just a game for you?”

“No. Far from it. It’s how we make our country rich. It’s serious business.” They just stared at him. “I want to be useful.”

They knew he was lying. The dead never did anything for the good of anyone else—unless by accident. They acted purely out of self-interest. Slaves to instinct. But it seemed he’d said the right words.

“There’s a squad leaving tonight, one man short. The fourth member finally lost all power of movement today. Sulphur mustard gas. Killed him some weeks ago, but left him able to move. Until today.”

The man took out a small map of the vicinity and began drawing on it. “Look. This is where you should meet them.”

It was like a gulch between two massive skeletal blocks of rough concrete apartments, built in the early days of the war when the first casualties were arriving by boat and pushing inland. The lights were purplish and glimmering. An ex-Yugoslav army jeep lurched up the rough road, throwing its two occupants about inside.

“Why did you want to join us?” asked the driver, a Russian called Varnov, who had been so badly burned he had no skin left apparent on his body. He wore a loose-fitting, torn-and-patched military uniform actually from the old Albanian armed services. He and Jensen, a tall, strong Danish woman with strange, mauve eyes and close-cropped, dyed-black hair, had picked up Hašek and another group member, Vollmer, a dark-skinned German, and were now jostling northwards minutes from the border.

“Something to do,” Hašek replied without turning his gaze from the mountains. Even here the city climbed the slopes in iron and steel and prefabricated units, on which the endless lights shone thickly. The sky was spiderweb-bed with reception aerials and radar warning systems. The defenses had so far proved impenetrable to military forces, though in fact little was known about the country outside of its own and Yugoslavia’s borders.

They had no trouble at the frontier, thanks to the agreement between the two states. Yugoslavia conducted corrupt arms deals for money and was living with both East and West, while Albania persisted in isolationism. But since many native Albanians had joined their leadership in accepting the Greek Orthodox Church’s offer to possess and settle on Corfu, the people of Albania—the dispossessed, the exiled, and in the greatest numbers, the dead— often crossed to Yugoslavia to enjoy a share of that country’s opportunities for exploitation.

Which was what Hašek was doing now. Varnov’s squad would cruise until they found living people who would be especially vulnerable to their particular form of attack. They were entering the outskirts of Titograd, where there was no shortage of black-market traders—the people with whom the squad would eventually do business—but their numbers were constantly multiplying as more flowed into the country, so that even with the death squads targeting them, they were not significantly depleted.

Smoke issued from a side street and a vehicle exited under its cover so suddenly that the squad’s jeep had to veer sharply to the right to avoid a collision.

The first they knew was a guttural scream from the German, Vollmer, sitting in the back on Hašek’s left. Two spikes of a grappling hook pinned him to the jeep’s bodywork, one through the shoulder, the other through his forehead and skull. A chain taut from the stem of the hook disappeared into the smoke, stretching to the other vehicle, still hidden but tracking the jeep. A second hook thudded into the hood and dragged the jeep off course. Varnov attempted to regain control, but the aggressor appeared to their left and smashed heavily into the side of the jeep. This set the jeep back on its original course, and as Hašek cut through the chain of the rear hook, and Jensen, in the passenger seat, worked at the front hook, Varnov regained power in his steering. Having done so, using the element of surprise, he jerked the wheel to the left and the nose of the jeep careened into the front right side of the other vehicle, a Hungarian armored car. Hašek and Vollmer, who had freed himself from the hook, opened fire on the Hungarian unit. A grenade bounced off their own bonnet and exploded away to the right. Jensen engaged her weapon and delivered a sustained volley of automatic fire across the gap between the two vehicles. Although the side of the car was visible, its occupants were not. They were still active, however, shooting sporadically and with no great accuracy, though one bullet did tear through Hašek’s upper arm, missing the muscle by millimeters.

Varnov passed something back to Vollmer, saying: “Use it. I can’t aim while driving.” Vollmer had a look; it was a thermite grenade. But before he had a chance to lob it over, his whole body jerked backwards, pivoting at the neck. Hašek twisted his head around. A man had jumped from the other car and was riding on the back bumper, holding onto a garrote around Vollmer’s neck. The man’s face trailed off halfway down: nose, mouth, and chin were gone, wiped out in some former conflict. Just tatters of flesh were left in front of his top vertebrae, which Hašek saw through the space where his throat should have been. Clearly the man was one of their own people, not a Hungarian soldier; but once engaged in hostilities, it was hard to let go. He freed one of his hands, took a pistol from his belt, and fired at Hašek. The Czech was thrown to the floor of the jeep with the force of the shot, which had lodged under his shoulder blade. He grunted, not with pain but with displeasure at being so unceremoniously floored by a man from the same side. He took aim with his own gun, but his stream of bullets hit air. The wire had sliced right through Vollmer’s neck and spine, and the faceless attacker fell away, clutching the German’s head. Meanwhile, Jensen had retrieved the grenade and skillfully threw it high so that it dropped in the armored car and exploded on impact. The thermite flashed brilliantly, silhouetting the remaining three dead men as they carbonated and were swiftly destroyed.

The men in the armored car had certainly been pirates, just like Varnov, Vollmer, Jensen, and Hašek, looking for the same thing but ending up mistaking the jeep’s crew for some of their living, breathing targets. Now the three had to press on, without Vollmer; the remainder of his body still sat uselessly alongside Hašek.

Jensen and Varnov wouldn’t think Hašek’s reasons for being there were any different from theirs: to plunder the living for their special booty, which in Yugoslavia was easily exchanged either for straight cash or for the technological hardware and luxury goods the new Albanians depended on.

They weren’t in it for the general good, but because personal instinct drove them on. And if a man had twelve televisions, he probably wouldn’t be able to watch them all at the same time, so his neighbor could take one almost without him noticing. In a land where the people had so few desires, they were well served by what was basically an anarchic system. All aspirations concurred.

Apart from a few exceptions. Hašek being one. He’d been creative in his life, a man of music. The memories of it haunted him. Even now his fingers were playing “Anthropology” on the butt and barrel of his submachine gun as the jeep rattled on.

They drove through another area of fires, keeping especially vigilant regarding the thick clouds of low smoke.

Hella Elizabeth Barton scanned the street behind her before turning into Gothaerstrasse. Her suspicion was not unfounded; she’d been under surveillance for some weeks now, ever since meeting and forming an attachment to Trefzger. A vociferous opponent of chemical and bacteriological weapons since before the war started, he had been a marked man, officially, for years; branded a communist, a pacifist, an anarchist, and generally a headcase, but a dangerous one, he lived under the constant watchful eye of military and civil authorities in West Berlin.

In the last few days, though, he had gone into hiding, and Barton had been doing her best to conceal her movements. Making love by candlelight was preferable to sex by torchlight, which they had endured in Trefzger’s old apartment, as the duty officers in the street and the building opposite played their torches constantly over his curtained windows.

Barton ducked through the basement window and felt her way around the decaying walls of the room to the door at the far side. She worked the locks and shut the door behind her. Down the steps, dripping moss and fungus, and through another locked door at the bottom. She was in the derelict U-bahn tunnel—commissioned, built, and never used—and had to feel her way again. She always expected a train to come scraping along the rusted rails, but one never did, nor ever would.