Charlie Johnson in the Flames (11 page)

Etta hadn't considered this possibility. By
corruption
Magda meant that two men, more or less decent, had been coarsened by the scenes their profession paid them to witness. Neither man would have known what was happening to them, but anyone who cared to look could see the irritable edginess, the distance, the sudden fury that would take them over, for nothing, when they were uncorking a bottle that wouldn't release its cork or the car wouldn't start or … anything. Something was taking them over, eroding their capacity to protect themselves from what they saw. Whatever it was, it was eating away at their very judgement. Magda said, you couldn't merely watch what Jacek had seen. You couldn't merely frame it up in the viewfinder, year after year. Etta had seen the footage too and most of the time she didn't even notice it, but now she understood what Magda was trying to say. Those boys with guns, hopping and popping on the balls of their feet, wasting everything with arcs of fire, those chopped and desecrated bodies, those eyes of weeping women, those forlorn barefoot orphans, they slowly came inside and took possession. And once inside, they would never leave. So that when Charlie and Jacek finally saw something that broke their hearts, when they saw the woman die, looking up at them from the realm beyond hope, the only purification would lie through violence.

Etta understood now what Charlie must have been thinking when he walked out of Shandler's office, with the picture of that militia officer in his hand. He would have thought he was free. He would have thought he was in the grip of truth. He would have thought righteousness was within his grasp. But in reality, all the truth and righteousness calling to him was nothing more than annihilation.

Etta saw him so clearly now, with a tenderness made possible by Magda's feeling for her husband. Charlie was not himself and she had to get him to see that.

Kill the son of a bitch.

She wanted him to realise that he owed the woman something better than vengeance. We will not forget you. We will seek justice for you.

As she watched the city emerge out of the dark and the undercarriage groaned loose and the plane began to settle towards the ground, she knew that her chance of getting Charlie to understand any of this was small. At most she might be able to deflect or delay him till she could make him see that he was possessed, not himself. He might hear something in her voice, she reasoned, that would make him pause and consider before taking an irrevocable step. He'd needed her once. He might listen to her now.

N
INE

                                                                  

C
harlie went to the Moskva on automatic pilot, straight from the airport, the way he always did. Now that he had been suspended the trip was on him, but he thought he needed the Moskva, even though it didn't come cheap. He wanted it to feel like old times. Big handsome Goran behind the desk obliged. ‘Like old times,' he said, and smiled as he handed Charlie the key. Goran had always been a minor puzzle. He was so well dressed, and there wasn't a woman who didn't think he was interesting. But he was the night clerk at the Moskva. This suggested either that he possessed an aristocratic soul and didn't care about money or that he was moonlighting for the authorities. As he signed in, under Goran's benevolent gaze, Charlie grew certain that the gorillas would soon know where he was staying. But they probably knew he was there already. That charming creature in the embassy in London who doled out the visas had made certain of that. So what if they knew? They'd let him in, that was all that mattered.

It was reassuring to return to the eccentric double-decker rooms, with their internal balconies and 1930s parquet, on the second floor right, where they put all the foreigners, presumably so that it made it easier to wire them up for sound. Charlie was also pleased to see the late night girls at the bottom of the stairs, right by the elevator, sitting in the chairs, smoking and opening and closing their legs slowly in case you didn't get the point. They looked sensational, and if he were truthful, he felt a little needy. But he had never paid for it, believing that with a degree of low cunning you could always get it somewhere else for free. So he waved a little wave and they waved back, thinking what kind of a jerk is this, and he went up to his room lonely, but no lonelier than you would be if you woke up a couple of hours later with twenty-two-year-old Sonia surveying you like a ruin while she cleaned her teeth with the tip of a purple fingernail.

First call, as always, was to Buddy.

‘Etta told me to be expecting you,' Buddy said in his low, smoky voice. Charlie wasn't delighted to learn this but he let it pass.

They'd worked together for so long that Charlie had forgotten Buddy's last name. In his address book he was just Buddy, a veritable on–off switch – either ‘There is problem' or ‘There is no problem.' ‘Problem', in Buddy's parlance, tended to mean that the course of action Charlie proposed might involve loss of life. ‘No problem' meant that Buddy saw a way to lower the risk from lethal to manageable. This time, when he sat down under the blue awning of Moskva's outdoor café and studied the image Charlie handed him, giving special attention to the uniform, searching the epaulettes, looking for signs of a unit, he didn't say anything. This assignment seemed to go beyond the available categories of Problem, No Problem. Charlie was aware that his request – ‘I want to find this guy' – didn't exactly add up. For one thing, where was Jacek? Why did he want to find someone if he didn't have a crew? If he was asking to locate some guy in a special unit uniform, heavy-set, with that particular mid-distance stare in his eyes, Buddy reasoned, it was going to be a war crime story. They'd done them before.

Charlie did not think it was advisable to let Buddy know where this was headed. He wasn't too sure himself. He had Jacek's parting words at the airport in his mind, and that gave a good general indication, but the operational details were still fuzzy. There was not what you would call a plan. Buddy, always discreet, looked at the red patches on Charlie's hands and did not ask questions. He could make the necessary deductions. Charlie had seen action down at the front and he'd seen something that left him strange and disconnected. It was also obvious that the picture Charlie gave him had been taken from output shot down there. So certain things added up and Buddy seemed to take the assignment for granted. This is what he always did. What Buddy ventured, after giving the matter some thought, was that he knew some guys. What kind of guys? Buddy shrugged and winced slightly. Guys.

So Charlie looked at the girls walking by the café and thought how glad he was to be back in Belgrade, while Buddy called his guys on his cellphone. Charlie didn't know the language, but he could tell that Buddy was getting somewhere.

Buddy was thin, withered even, and older than Charlie, with the air of a lapsed or defrocked professor. Once, years earlier, they had talked late into the night, and Charlie remembered that it was all Gadamer this and Marcuse that, and Buddy seemed to shed years and become the type of eager, hopeful Marxist who used to meet foreigners in the '70s and talk about socialism with a human face. Now all that was gone and it had left nothing behind besides good diction and a choice use of language. Somewhere along the line, after the wreckage of an academic career, he had spent a few years in New York, in Brooklyn to be exact, but exile had not suited his nature. ‘In shit is better', is all he would say about why he came home, although Charlie believed he had gone with every intention of staying and had been defeated by ordinary things, like living in a language that was not his own. And there had been some business with a Suzanna, if Charlie's memory served, who was much younger and got into Fordham Law School, so the story went, while Buddy languished at home in Brooklyn, listening to short wave radio. So Buddy came home, speaking perfect English, a little more mournful than before and a good deal older, just as his country took its suicidal plunge. ‘Timing was perfect,' he said once. ‘I leave and country is fine. I come home, and we are conducting experiment in mutually assured destruction.'

The one unreconciled resistance to English in Buddy's syntax was the dropping of definite articles. It was always ‘problem', not ‘the problem'. Otherwise his accent was New York perfect. Indeed it was a little too perfect. It didn't seem entirely trustworthy to be so fluent, to pass in and out of another language and leave so little trace of your own. He even asked Buddy about it once. ‘Why is my English perfect?' Buddy pondered the question. ‘Because English is primitive compared to our language.' Then he smiled and showed that amazing row of long, yellow teeth. Still, perfection raised suspicions in Charlie's mind. People who were perfect in English usually turned out to be spooks. But it would be pretty imaginative recruiting if Buddy turned out to be one. As he watched Buddy with the cellphone cupped to his ear, nursing the cigarette that hung from his lower lip while his eyes scanned the crowds, Charlie thought he was wrong not to trust him. Or rather, he could trust Buddy as far as he could trust anyone. He felt dangerously detached, looking at the girls in jeans strolling by as if they were all on celluloid in some dull late night movie, rather than in the sizzling sulphur light of the street lamps. He didn't like this feeling of detach ment, and he wanted it to stop, but like a state of advanced drunkenness, it wouldn't go away when you wanted it to.

Come to think of it, Buddy
was
OK. There had been that night on the highway in '92, during the Drina clearances in '92, when they were stopped by the Tigers at the check point. They pulled everyone out of the Jeep and into this shit-smeared interrogation room in the station house nearby. They'd given Buddy the real treatment. ‘It is normal,' Buddy said to Charlie under his breath when the drunk waved the gun about and said he would fucking kill everyone, fucking everyone. What Buddy meant by normal was that the swearing was a giveaway. Real shooters don't swear. This guy, sweating, eye-rolling drunk, wasn't dangerous, just unreliable, so Charlie kept thinking this is normal, and the drunk waved the gun about for the benefit of the boys lolling against the back wall of his office. Creeps like that always go for the local speaker, and they had gone for Buddy. This one had English. ‘They fuck your mother? That's why you work for them?' ‘They pay me,' Buddy said. ‘What do they fucking pay you?' He gave him a number.

‘What's your fucking name?'

Buddy gave him his name.

‘So why this shit bag calls you Buddy?'

‘It's my nickname.'

That's when he hit him. Jacek lunged, but the guys at the back had their hands on him and sat him back down hard.

‘Don't get smart with me, shit bag.'

It took three hours for the asshole to sober up, three hours for the toxicity in the room to dissipate and for everyone to agree cheerlessly that it had been a misunderstanding. They got Buddy back into the Jeep, which had been stuck by the checkpoint, surrounded by Tigers wearing black garbage bags over their fatigues to keep off the rain. The Tigers raised the barrier and let them through and Buddy went silent as the smoking wood fire in the barrel by the checkpoint died away in their rear-view mirror. He stayed silent right through the next four checkpoints as they passed out of the active zone. He didn't even smoke a cigarette, though Charlie had offered him one. Yeah, Buddy was OK.

After talking with his guys, Buddy's plan was this: go south to this particular town on the municipal bus, spend time in a bar that Buddy knew and wait till some guys from the unit showed up to drink. Then get them to talk. Why this town? Well, mostly because the special units were stationed there and maybe some of them would talk. The reason they might talk was that the only known uprising of reservists had been there too. The boys came back from the zone, on leave, and went to the local press and said they wouldn't go back, they were sick of it. They even organised a demonstration in front of the party headquarters. So, Buddy reasoned, one of them might finger the guy Charlie wanted to talk to.

But the plan, such as it was, was risky. The organs would pull you off a bus if they found you heading there. But then they could do the same here, if they found you talking to anyone in uniform. So Charlie would have to make himself inconspicuous and play Buddy's idiot brother or something and say nothing for a hundred and fifty miles of two-lane blacktop. But it could be done. It was good calling it a plan, though both of them knew it didn't deserve the name. They had to get an informant, they had to get lucky. It was obvious to them that they didn't know what they would do if they
did
get lucky. ‘It is an improvisation,' said Buddy. Charlie peeled off a roll of dollars, Buddy palmed them, and they were in business again.

The good thing about him, Charlie realised after he'd got back to his room, was that Buddy never asked the motivation question. He did not say: Charlie, what is the story? What are you doing? This praiseworthy reticence was the result, Charlie judged, of all those years as a fixer for foreign outfits. They came in, they had stupid ideas for stories, usually stolen from a com petitor, and Buddy never asked why. He had allowed luxuriant growth in the ‘They don't pay me to think' side of his character. The result was mostly attractive: for example, he didn't chatter in the crew van, didn't volunteer dumb ideas and he didn't smoke all that much either, just slumped staring into the distance, occasionally telling a joke about a girl he knew in the town they were passing. The jokes had a certain charm in that Buddy enjoyed presenting himself as the hapless victim of one weasel-like blonde after another, although it was doubtful there was much truth to this persona. But there were sides of him that could be irritating. Once Charlie had come to town to track down a refugee story and they wasted a week discovering that the massacred refugee children, the innocents put to the sword, were all a mirage. Instead all they'd found was a drab motel on the outskirts of town, hung with laundry in the corridors, where the massacred children had turned up, safe and sound. It was funny, at least later on, how they had stormed through the motel, with Jacek irritably slashing the laundry lines aside, furious that the kids were actually there after all, grubby, tired, bedraggled and unharmed. The look in Buddy's eyes had said he had known it all along.