The Untouchable

He moved the aim down, raked across the ground, and then saw his Target One. Mister sat, and his arms were around his knees, his head was down and rested on them, but Joey couldn't hold the aim. He passed the weapon to Frank.

He saw Frank's hands move expertly over it, in the near darkness, to check it, then it was at his shoulder, locked there, as if it were a part of him.

'Don't bother to ask,' Frank said, and there was a grimness about him that Joey hadn't heard before.

'Yes, I've handled one, and I've fired one. Have you seen your Target Two? He's short of a leg.'

' I couldn't hold it that well. I didn't know he hadn't a leg.'

' It's off just below the knee. Full weight must have gone on it.'

Frank stared into the rifle sight, and Joey thought him mesmerized by what he saw.

'What happens?'

Frank said, 'Nothing happens, nothing can happen.

It's dark, if you hadn't noticed. Any man who goes walkabout in a marked minefield in darkness is certifiable. We could call the people out but they'd only be losing their beauty sleep – if they deigned to come. They won't move before daylight. Looks like he's fainted or something, best thing for him. The solicitor, right?'

Joey took the rifle. He peered into it a last time, then handed it back to Ante. The moon was at its highest point, and its brightest, but it was difficult for him to see either of the men in the field in front of him. 'Will he survive?'

'What do you want, the best bedside manner or the truth?'

' I don't give a damn whether he survives.'

'You have, Joey, a bucketful of humanity… I've been with de-miners, some of the foreign ones. They go to the Irish bar up by the Kosevo Hospital at weekends, they get pissed up, and they talk. Try stopping them. You have to move a casualty fast. Right now, in the wound, are the chemicals from the explosion, half a tonne of earth and the shrapnel that's been in the ground for five, seven years – and old cow shit, sheep shit, fox shit, rabbit shit. That's all in the wound. He should be in hospital in two hours, but he won't be.

It's not light for eight hours. When it's light they've got to make a path to him – what is it, eighty metres, could be a hundred? They've got to go on hands and knees with probes. That'll take the whole of tomorrow

… May I tell you a story? It's not first hand but I was told it by the guys al the station when I arrived, they'd been there, Eleven months ago there was a minefield on the edge of Sarajevo that's not in the backwoods, that's the capital city of this God-forsaken country – and it was marked with signs but not fenced. Ema Alic

– I was told the name and haven't forgotten it, won't ever – was a little girl, aged eleven. She was with two boys, both twelve years, and they'd gone out to play.

One of them detonated a mine. The boys were killed straight out. She lived. She lived for two hours. She was waving for help and screaming for help. A crowd watched her and listened to her, but they were too frightened to take the risk of going where the kid had. Sarajevo, right, and it's the middle of the day.

They can get de-miners there double fast. By the time they reached her, had made the corridor, she had stopped waving and had stopped screaming… Not even for a child do they hurry. You asked if he would survive.'

Flat-voiced, Joey asked, 'What does Mister do?'

'My question, what is his spirit?'

'At home, Frank, he has support.'

'Now he is alone.'

Joey thought of the hours, weeks, months, years of living with Mister's life. Never close, never able to touch – until now. There was no one in his life to whom he could have described his feeling of driven elation – not to Jen, not to his mother or his father, not to Dougie Gough. The elation was his own, and he guarded it.

Joey said dully, 'At home he has the Cardmen to enforce, he has an accountant and a solicitor, he has the Mixer as his chief of staff, he has the Eels for his transport, he has the Princess – he has a legal system that he holds in contempt because of its corruption and incompetence. He sits on the throne of an empire.'

'Alone, Joey. That's why it's different.'

'Will he break and run?'

In the darkness, Joey thought that Frank Williams, armed policeman, squirmed, seemed to shiver.

'Would you? Would I? I would not. If he stood up and walked away – I don't know the ground, and I can at best guess – he would have a nine out of ten chance of getting to the river, perhaps it is a ninety-nine out of a hundred chance. But that leaves one in ten or one in a hundred. Does he run or walk, or crawl? Does he close his eyes and just go, or does he test each step?

He will have been deafened by the explosion, he has no experience of this situation, he is traumatized because he knows that his companion has lost a leg, he is trying now lo think clearly but that is very difficult for him. He has not gone to the help of his companion, and that is a good decision because an amateur who tries to rescue is almost always the second casualty'

The wind was in the trees above them, zephyrs moving the bared branches, the same wind that tugged at Mister, who was alone.

' I like what you say,' Joey said.

'What do you want from him?'

' I want him broken.'

' It's the worst place a man can be.' A quaver stammered in Frank's voice. 'He is trapped in a minefield.'

' I wanl lo hear him scream, in fear.'

'There is a legal process.'

He said, 'I want him destroyed.'

'Are you sick? I think you're sick.'

Frank Williams blundered away. Joey sat with the dog. He leaned against a tree, and his feet were under the yellow tape. He scratched the dog's stomach, and his face was licked, and he laughed. He shouted into the night for all of the valley to hear. 'Heh, Mister, look over your shoulder, and I'm there.'

And Joey Cann laughed louder.

Midnight…

… as he helped her to undress and prepared her for bed in the shambles that was their home, Judge Delic asked his daughter, 'Do you think of him? Is he ever out of your mind?' Jasmina Delic said, 'I try not to, I try to think of the car and the new kitchen we will have, and our new life.' He thought she lied, but he had not the heart to tell her that he recognized the lie.

… Ismet Mujic reached his apartment in the city's old quarter. He had left the Turk, the Russian a nd the Italian at the airport with a private pilot who would fly them out. He was disgraced, humiliated, and he shouted in fury up the stairs, 'Have you found him?'

He was told by a craven man that his friend had not been found, and his world fell further into ruin.

… a body that had been snagged among sunken tree branches in the Miljacka river broke free and came to the surface, was carried on by the current past Hrasno and the apartment blocks of Cengic Vila, under bridges, and tumbled over the weirs.

… her day and evening in the Unis Building, Tower A, finished, on her way home to Novo Sarajevo, Monika Holberg pushed open the glass swing doors of the Holiday Inn. She went to the reception desk. She saw her letter in the pigeon-hole, untouched, unread, tightened her lips and went back out into the city's quiet.