Charlie Johnson in the Flames (16 page)

Buddy's mood was different. It registered in the way he gripped the wheel, the way he smoked. He seemed furious that he was locked into Charlie's fate and that Charlie didn't seem to care one way or the other.

‘I am doing this, Charlie, so that you will never say I was coward.'

He said this with such uncharacteristic solemnity that Charlie smiled. Cowardice had never figured in Charlie's view of Buddy. He felt a surge of tenderness for his ruined face, and the moustache yellowed with tobacco, and he wanted to tell him that he trusted him and knew him to be courageous. But he didn't say it, because he wasn't sure that it was all true. What
was
true was that Buddy had the Glock in his leather jacket pocket, and, like the true professional he was, the butt handle was sticking out for all to see. Charlie reached over and pushed it down out of plain sight. Did Buddy actually know how to use it? It didn't matter. It could make a noise. It could scare somebody. That would be enough. The gun was in the category either of a comfort or an embarrassment, but either way, it was coming along.

‘You're OK, Buddy,' Charlie said.

Over the bridge, down the ramp, off to the right, Buddy drove down into a parking lot at the foot of the block where the Colonel lived. ‘A lot of officers live here,' Buddy said, surveying the building. So it was a real hive of wasps, Charlie thought, and if their wasp needed help, the others would come swarming. Finely splint ered auto glass crunched underfoot, and black audio tape, torn out of somebody's car deck, drifted across in the breeze, picking up a sliver of light from the moon. Some lights of the ten-storey tower were still on, while from others lower down, the blue flicker of televisions glowed. It was cool, and Charlie's hands felt cold. He put them into his pocket and he gripped his tape recorder.

They weren't exactly sneaking up on him so there was no point, in Buddy's words, playing
Jemsbond
. The Colonel's name was on the board by the doorbell and so they rang it. Buddy went to the intercom and said his name, but whoever was on the other end did not answer. Instead, the electric lock on the glass door clicked open.

It had been too easy, and both Buddy and Charlie found this unnerving. On previous assignments, they had staked out guys for days and had never managed the slightest breach in the wall. There would be dogs, or cops, or disinformation and all trails would go cold. All the way through this one, there had been a strange lack of resistance. True, he had been knocked around and arrested, but he and Buddy had kept on coming, and now the Colonel was apparently letting them come the final distance. He had been released, Charlie believed, on the Colonel's order. So he was walking into some kind of a trap, but he reasoned it couldn't be much of a trap if he knew that it was. Anyway, if it was, there was nothing he could do about it now. He couldn't turn around, walk to the Lada, shrug and say, Buddy take me back to the Moskva, take me back for one more night with Etta, take me back to my life. That was the sort of sensible behaviour Charlie knew he would regret for the rest of his life. He knew exactly why. They had made a mistake. They had fucked with him. They had misunderstood who he was. Now they had to find out who they were dealing with.

Buddy and Charlie both reached for the elevator bell at the same time and thought how stupid they must look. They listened to the machine's sepulchral rattle as it descended from the upper floors, and then felt it settle with a crunch, and open, waiting to take them upwards.

They ascended in silence, not wanting to look at each other, knowing it wasn't even worth planning what to do. They simply had no idea. ‘You cover the door', ‘I'll do the talking', anything they would have said would have come from some cop movie, and was too stupid to quell the fear that had taken hold of both of them.

When the elevator juddered to a stop on the tenth floor, and they stepped out, light was coming from a door ajar at the end of the corridor. They went towards it, single file, and Buddy crossed the threshold first. Charlie, still in the hallway, heard a voice stop Buddy in his tracks.

‘The gun,' the voice said. ‘Empty the chamber and put the gun on the floor.' Buddy did as he was told, letting the bullets drop on to the polished wood, and then dropping down himself and giving the gun a little push so that it spun away. The voice said something else and Buddy repeated over his shoulder, ‘He wants to
see
you.'

As Charlie came around the door-frame, he heard the man say, ‘Empty your pockets,' and when Charlie stepped into view, he could see that he was armed, framed against the picture window which glowed from the lights of the city. His face was backlit and in shadow, but it was the man all right, legs apart, gun pointed, taking the measure of Charlie. So Charlie said – because he knew the safest way was to avoid any unannounced gestures – ‘I am going to reach in my pocket, and I am getting my tape recorder. I have no weapon. OK?'

‘OK. Then sit down.'

‘Where?'

Charlie said it as challengingly as he could, because an instinct told him to push back a little, see whether there was any give, any room to manoeuvre. There didn't seem to be any.

‘On the floor, there, where you are standing.' The English was good, and it made Charlie rush to fill in the blanks – an embassy posting, a spy job in London or Washington – but the blanks stayed blank and Charlie knew he was in a room with a man he knew next to nothing about, except for that gesture with a lighter, that casual flick of the wrist, the backward glance, the walking away, the unreachable, unteachable disregard.

Charlie considered turning the tape recorder on before he slid it across, but he discarded the idea. It had a tell-tale red light and made a sound, and this guy wasn't exactly stupid. So Charlie pulled it out and as he went down on his knees he shoved it across the floor.

‘On your face,' the man said, getting up from the chair.

‘Why?' asked Buddy.

‘Why not? What choice do you have, gentlemen?'

This was true enough. They lay face down on the floor. He approached, tapped the hall door shut and stood over them. Then he patted them down. Charlie felt thick fingers running across his body, snaking along the rim of his ears, spreading out through his hair, down between his legs, calves, ankles; even his shoes were given a feel. From where he lay, Charlie caught his first real sight of the man: forty-five to fifty, big, muscular, a plain white T-shirt, running trousers, bare feet, salt and pepper hair, like his brother, trim gut, and a service revolver trained at Charlie's head while the free hand patted him down. Their eyes met: and whatever Charlie had expected – fear or anger or even triumph – was not there. The eyes that took him in, face down on the floor, were neutral, professional and entirely unafraid.

He was doing it right, Charlie could see, confident enough in his ability to take on two strangers at night. Even with a warning, even with preparation, he was doing well. But there was a puzzle here, Charlie realised. He could have left everything in the hands of Watery Eyes. Most of them did. You never got close to war criminals. They let the police handle the foreigners, and contract killers handle the domestics, like Buddy. So Charlie was uncertain about his luck, but it did occur to him that the Colonel had planned this all along.

The Colonel stood back and said in a calm and uninflected voice, with a tinge of irony, ‘So you are a journalist. Interview me.'

Charlie and Buddy turned and sat up. He was motioning with the gun towards a sofa behind them.

He was smiling.

Which was a mistake since the smile was too perfect: too intelligent to be a smirk, but too pleased with itself to be anything other than a display of infinite self-regard. It was a mistake because it restored Charlie's self-possession, enabled him to think again, to feel what it was that had brought him here.

‘Could we get some light in here?' Charlie said, as he sat down on the leather sofa.

‘No,' said the Colonel, taking his seat, revolver on his right knee, legs apart, body straight, looking at them.

Behind him to the right were bookshelves and there was a hard line of light underneath a door leading to another room, a military shield or unit emblem, perhaps, hanging on the other wall. The apartment seemed spacious and spartan and there didn't seem to be any female touches about. But you couldn't be sure of anything. There could be someone else in the other room behind the door. Charlie couldn't tell. The only light came from the moonlit sky, still hours from dawn, and from the glow of the city across the river. Just behind the Colonel, there was a glass door, left ajar on to a balcony, and cold air from the outdoors streamed around their ankles. The Colonel was a few feet away. You could hear him breathing.

‘Are you the Colonel of Second Army Corps, Special Operations?' Charlie began.

‘You know this already,' he said.

‘Were you in the Drenica valley a month ago?'

‘You know this too.'

‘Prijedor? The Drina valley back in '92? I am told you were there too.'

‘Why not?'

‘Yes or no.'

‘We are not in The Hague here. All this “yes or no” is for prosecutors, and you, Mr Johnson, are not a prosecutor.'

Again, that smile, a glimpse of white incisors in the gloom.

‘What kind of a story are you writing, Mr Johnson?'

‘Yours.'

‘There is no story,' he said.

‘Forget stories,' Charlie said. He didn't want to play around any longer.

‘So what are we doing here? And you, Mr Savic, what are you doing with this man?' the Colonel said.

‘He is my friend,' Buddy replied.

‘And why the revolver?'

‘Because I wanted to kill you,' Buddy said.

The Colonel laughed softly. ‘Belgrade intellectuals,' he said. ‘For possession of this weapon, you will do three years.'

‘You will arrange this personally?' Buddy said.

The man nodded and shrugged, as if to say: ‘Yes, if it gave me pleasure. If I wanted to.'

Buddy, on the sofa beside him, felt Charlie's body stiffen and lean forward. He was as tightly wound as a hunter with his prey in plain sight, just there, through a clearing, waiting for a clear shot.

‘Listen to me,' Charlie said. ‘There was a woman. In the Drenica. A month ago. I was there with a crew. We have tape.'

‘Yes, Mr Johnson, I saw your report.' And the Colonel gestured into the gloom as if to say that he had sat there one evening in this very room, watching the nightly atrocity footage, lifted off the international network feeds, only in this case it had happened to be his unit and his atrocity, him in body armour and holding a cigarette lighter in his hand.

It had been one of Charlie's hopes that he would surprise the man. But there were no surprises after all. The Colonel knew everything. It didn't seem to matter that it had all been seen, that his secret was known and that Jacek's images had captured it all. There was something in the face in front of him that told Charlie the Colonel was even glad to have his very own home movie.

Charlie had been wrong about everything. He had thought the Colonel would have forgotten the woman, among all the others who must have passed through his hands or the hands of his unit in the years of war. Charlie had come to make him remember, and he remembered everything. You could see it in the face in the darkness. So now he had to feel it. He had both to remember and, for once in his life, to feel it.

Charlie's voice did not rise, it fell to a whisper. Every word came out with a pause between. ‘You. Set. Her. On. Fire.'

The face across the darkness was without expression. The gun on his knee did not move.

‘So what I want to know is why. I'm not a prosecutor. I don't give a fuck about justice. You'll never go to The Hague. But me, I just want to know. Why.'

Again, the man in the darkness did not move or speak. A silence ensued. There was the murmur of traffic noise from the open door of the balcony.

Charlie could wait. In the instant he had said the word
why
, he had felt everything come clear, the whole insane exercise making sense. Why. He wanted to know why her life turned out not to matter at all.

‘You think she was garbage?'

The Colonel said nothing. Instead he reached down to the floor, all the while covering them with the gun, and picked up the tape recorder. With his free hand he pressed Record, and placed it on the floor between the two of them. Now there was a tiny red operating light and a new sound in the darkness: the slithering of audio tape through its silver gate.

‘Why?' he replied. ‘You ask why?' He smiled again. ‘Because she was sheltering you.'

She
had
given them shelter. Except that she wasn't offered a choice. They had burst through the door and into the rootcellar, before she even opened her mouth. They had never exchanged so much as a word. But that wouldn't matter. She had not betrayed them, and for that she had paid.

‘You torch her for this?' Charlie was leaning forward.

‘So the others learn from her example, Mr Johnson.' He said it quietly, as one professional to another.

Charlie said nothing. Her example. The others. The way he said it stopped all thought.

‘The unit you were with sent a signal. We picked it up. You made an obvious mistake, Mr Johnson.'

Buddy couldn't understand the look on Charlie's face, its utter blankness. It seemed to Buddy that Charlie had not anticipated this questioning and that now he was staring down into an abyss.

‘And what were you doing there, anyway? When I saw your report on the television, I laughed. You proved that the terrorists had a base four kilometres inside our area of operations. You risk your life for this? You risk
her
life for this?'

You risk her life for this. It is not what you intend. But it is what results. No one ever intends the conse quences, especially when the intentions are good.