He'd watched. His help was neither asked for nor offered. She stripped out the back seat, with the metalwork under it and the door panels, then opened the heavy case. There were probes, terminals, a variety of light sockets, power units and gear he could not recognize. He'd thought he'd seen everything of surveillance equipment in the room used by Sierra Quebec Golf, but some of what he now looked at was smaller and more compact, and the rest he had never seen before. It all went into the door handle and under the back seat, then she rebuilt the car. Last, she took half of her clothes from the soft bag and casually dumped them into the case. He saw, before the case was closed and locked, a couple of cocktail dresses, items of underwear, and a pair of heavy walking boots, and they'd driven on. He carried only his camera, with the 300mm lens, and that could be explained. He had no paperwork with him.
The border was a line in the river between Dvor and Bosanski Novi. The bridge over it was military, an iron frame and rattling planks. The old bridge was collapsed and unrepaired from the precision of a USAF strike five years earlier. They crossed and were waved down. As she braked she asked for his passport.
She snapped out of the vehicle. She took charge.
She flourished the passport and a packet of cigarettes had emerged from her handbag, then another, as if they were loaves and fishes. The Customs men, who had been bored and lounging and smoking, were around her. She was their honeypot. She flashed smiles, and the cigarettes slipped into clawing hands.
She spoke their language and they laughed with her. She marched a man with sergeant's stripes back to the car, flicked open the case and her bag, then Joey's bag, and there was more laughter as she rolled her eyes when her underwear was exposed. She went into a dismal wood-plank shack. He wondered how many languages she spoke and where she had been, and he knew, in truth, that he had just not thought through the question of going into a Customs check.
When she came out, holding the passports, she offered her hand to the sergeant. He took it formally, slobbered a kiss on the back, and they were gone.
'Well done,' Joey said gruffly.
'Thrilled, I'm sure, to be honoured with praise.'
'You've been here before?' It seemed a pointless question.
'Where do you know best?' she asked.
'Nowhere, not abroad… ' He thought his answer confirmed that he was low grade. 'Workwise? Well, bits of London. On my team it would be Green Lanes, but the last three years I've hardly been out of the Custom House. Yes, it would be Green Lanes, that's north from Stoke Newington and south from-'
'Yes, yes… There's a dozen places I know best. Here's one, and you don't need to know the others.'
She drove fast. Twice he closed his eyes as, late, she swerved out of a lorry's path. She'd have seen that he flinched, and that hurt. She seemed not to care about the pot-holes in the tarmac.
It was dismal country, pocked with isolated farmhouses, and he saw women doing the subsistence work and digging in fields. His mind raced. Serb territory, and the atmosphere was of poverty from which there was no recall and helplessness. They went past gaudy, ghastly roadside bars, painted to grate on the eyes, and lonely little fuel stations. He thought he was in the land of the abandoned where the people paid a collective price for their crimes.
Coming towards Prijedor they skirted villages where weeds grew inside roofless houses and rake-thin dogs chased the car's wheels. No living person moved in these villages, which were being overwhelmed by undergrowth. He had seen these places on television, when it had happened, but he had not seen them since they were destroyed. Brambles and thicket bush survived where people had not.
She said quietly 'The north-west and the south-east were the worst for cleansing. That's their word, used in their army manuals. The word is ciscenje, to clean – as in minefields, barricades, enemy positions. They merely transferred it to people. They surrounded these villages, one at a time, and told the Muslims they were leaving. First they made them sign away their property rights and took all evidence of property possession from them, then they separated them. The women and children went into UN camps over the Croat border. The men were taken to camps close to here. They killed as many of the men as they could, by beheading, beating, disembowelling – you name it – and they bulldozed the cemeteries, poisoned the wells and blew up the mosques. They involved a lot of people in the cleansing and the killing so that the guilt was shared round. The guilt's collective, that was the skill of the leaders. The other part of the skill was the destruction of the heritage of those forced out. But remember, always remember, there were no saints among the warlords, whatever side we're talking about, only sinners. I don't suppose you feel hungry.
You can go off food here, easily.'
'I'm not hungry,' joey said.
She told him that outside Prijedor had been the worst of the camps, source of the skeletal human images on the television, where there had been the worst of the killings.
'Could we have done that?' Joey blurted. 'Could we have done those things in the camps, you and me?'
'Of course we could,' she drawled. 'It's about environment, a sense of survival and propaganda.
And it's about wanting to humiliate an enemy. Scratch anyone's skin and you'll find an abscess of beastliness hidden away. Where there's an obsession of hatred, where the loathing is targeted, where there's a desire to prove supremacy, any of us can get to act like that.
Go to Germany, stand in a queue with the pensioners, dear old folks, and ask them.'
He felt the growing sensation of an awesome helplessness, more acute than when they had first driven through the ravaged villages. On the road near to Banja Luka, high above the town, he saw a great metal-fabricated complex, which she said had been an old steel works. He could make out the tanks, armoured personnel carriers and troop-carrying twin-rotor helicopters, and she told him it was the headquarters of the British army contingent attached to SFOR in Bosnia, and explained that was Stabilization Force. She drove hard. Beyond Banja Luka the road deteriorated. It was hairpin and cut out of a rock wall beside a fast river. There were stones in the road that she swung the wheel to avoid, and crashed vehicles that teetered on the cliffs above the water torrent. He had thought there might be pride in rebuilding a country after war, but he saw none of that. There was a lake where the river was dammed and men fished among a debris of floating bottles and rubbish bags. He must have shaken his head, must have shown his bewilderment.
'You don't just pack up after a war, Joey, like nothing's happened. Nobody escapes, everyone is scarred. Because you don't read about it any more, that doesn't mean the scars have gone. All it means is that the rest of the world, which once cared, has got bloody bored
… Can't actually say that I blame it.
God helps those who help themselves, if you're with me. They don't know how to help themselves.'
The light was slipping as they skirted Jajce. They bypassed the town, which was dominated by a medieval fortress perched on a rock crag, and she said
– with the casualness of a tour guide handing down morsels – that the place had been a Second World War headquarters for Tito's partisans, where the German forces had not been able to reach him. More history, as if she too thought history as important as the academic had the night before. They had the heater on in the car but the cold was creeping in. He had started to shiver, through tiredness, hunger and a bright sliver of fear. Headlights speared them. Out of the Serb territory, into Croat and Muslim-controlled land, the road climbed. It was a better surface, but there was ice on it. There were oases of light, which they sped through – Donji Vakuf, Travnik and Vitez, with shadow figures walking nowhere on dull pavements, the blocks of old socialist architecture and closed-down factories.