The Dealer and the Dead by Gerald Seymour Page A

we never have him for a gin in Peshawar?’
    ‘God, no, we did not.’
    ‘Careful, you silly ass. Benjie, are you trying to singe yourself?’
    Flames leaped. It had to be done. Half his damn life there, in the chests, now going into the fire. The Balkans. The Afghan trafficking of weapons. Too many files from Buenos Aires in late 1984 when relations were being restored over gin and more gin with the Secretariat of State Intelligence. The Balkans and Afghanistan were now unrecognisable grey flakes of burned paper.
    He said, ‘Harvey Gillot was just a little man who was useful for a brief window of time. Then we closed the window and drew the curtain. With a fire like this we can get rid of damn near everything, but whether I have any eyebrows left is a moot point.’
    He had always seemed an idiot – could give a polishedimpression of imbecility and was clever at playing the fool. He chuckled as a flurry of seriously compromising documents spilled into the inferno.
    ‘A bit of a nobody who had his moment. Regarded me as God. Damn memory, I’d almost forgotten Harvey Gillot.’
    ‘Harvey Gillot – he betrayed us,’ Maria said.
    ‘Betrayed us and stole from us,’ the Widow said.
    ‘His word was worthless,’ the school-bus driver said.
    ‘We could have held back the tanks if we’d had the Little Baby that Harvey Gillot promised he would deliver to us, the 9K11 Malyutka. We had paid for it,’ said the man who had only one lung. He had lost the other to shrapnel and the surgeons had marvelled at his survival.
    Andrija leaned against the inner door jamb. They were in his kitchen and only a single bulb, hanging from the ceiling, lit the table in the centre of the concrete floor. There was no linoleum or carpeting and no shade over the bulb. Some stood, some lounged against the kitchen units, but his wife and the Widow had taken the hard-backed chairs at the table. In front of them lay the slip of paper brought from the hospital. He had a pain in his abdomen from the kick she had given him. He offered them no alcohol, no coffee, but there was a filled water jug on the table and plastic glasses. She had been raped on the kitchen floor. Seven years later when they had returned, he had knelt on his one knee and she had gone to the far side of the kitchen. Together they had ripped up the flooring on which she had lain, dragged it outside and burned it. The scum had been drunk: she would not have alcohol in her home.
    ‘Now we can find him,’ Maria said.
    ‘It is owed to those who died, to those who suffered and survived, defeated, to search for him,’ the Widow said.
    ‘As one looks for a rat in a grain store.’ Maria again. Andrija thought he saw faint light in her eyes. She had not touched him when he had lain in the bed, after the amputation, and she had come to the hospital in the centre of Zagreb from the camp, norwhen he had been discharged and she had brought him back to the camp, or years later, when they had returned to the village. Their front door had been ajar, and they had realised that a Serb family had left within the last twenty-four hours. For eighty days Andrija had been a key fighter in the village’s defence, creating terror in the enemy trenches, but she frightened him, and showed him no affection.
    ‘And one stamps on the rat and stamps again,’ the man who drove the cesspit tanker said.
    ‘It is owed to those who were in the corn, to those who were wounded, tortured and violated because the village fell.’ Simun, Mladen’s son, had been two weeks old when the defence of the village was broken.
    ‘I think Harvey Gillot will have forgotten about us, but he will remember,’ Maria spat.
    The widow said, almost with a smile of pleasure: ‘He will remember my husband, to whom he gave a promise.’
    Mladen, the village leader who had been an electrician and now drove a Mercedes saloon, said, ‘Everything we had, except our lives, was taken by Harvey Gillot. It was an act of