Chapter 16
Another town. Another fine church for Catholics and another magnificence for the Orthodox, the one with elegant towers and the other with a great onion dome. Another memorial to the bravery of the Red Army soldiers who had liberated the town, and it was eroded as if the stonework had been eaten by termites. Another neat little square with the clean paving that showed a minimal amount of European grant money had reached the town, and the square had been the priority for renovation. Another street market, where the thinness of clothing and the cheapness of footwear demonstrated that the economy of this forgotten corner of the Union was wrecked. Another corner where a bank had opened, but had more staff than customers, and another pavement where kids lounged with hoods over their heads.
Wlodawa was sited on the Bug river, a triple-junction point where Polish territory met Belarus and Ukraine, and he assumed — from the map he had looked at in the car — that the frontier was in midstream.
Again, he followed, a half-pace behind Reuven Weissberg, and he had the pressure of a pancake holster, filled, on the right side of his belt. He sensed it to be a well-worn trail. He saw nothing that threatened and his right hand hung loose and relaxed against the coat pocket that hid the pancake and the Makharov. They turned off a main road. There was open ground, worn, mud-smeared, with the tracks of cars and bikes, and with split-open rubbish bags on it, and there were concrete apartment blocks.
His man stood, hands on hips. At every other moment, his man had stature and magnetic authority, but here, staring at open ground and blocks of raggedly crumbling apartments, he seemed to shrink, his shoulders to sag. Carrick saw it, and thought he recognized humility.
The rain had eased but sufficient fell on the sloped roofs of the blocks, and he saw the waterfall from two places on the nearest where the guttering was broken or blocked. But, Carrick thought, in his man’s eyes this was a shrine, and his man was a pilgrim.
Carrick did not ask for an explanation as to why they were there, why the mafiya criminal stood in front of a mess of apartment blocks, his shoulders rounded as if defiance was gone. He looked behind him, as a bodyguard on duty would, and saw the two parked cars but only Mikhail was out of the lead car, lounging against a lamppost and smoking. It was a shrine. His man was a pilgrim.
Reuven Weissberg said, ‘It was where they lived. “They” were the parents, sister and brothers of my grandmother. And where her cousins lived, her uncles and her aunts. It was the place for Jews in Wlodawa. There were small streets, with mud, not tarmacadam, and small houses. Most were built of wood, and there were shops here in kiosks. In other streets there were Polish Christians, the neighbours of my grandmother’s family. He, the father of my grandmother, was an expert repairer of watches and clocks and many came to him, Jews and Christians. His skills gave him a reputation. Then there was the war. The Jews were moved, taken to the synagogue and kept there in filth. They were treated no better than cattle. No, I am wrong, it was worse than cattle. Do I bore you, Johnny?’
‘No, sir.’
‘After many months they were moved again. I believe the father of my grandmother would have kept a few of his tools, what he could carry, when they went to the synagogue. He would have had them with him when they were moved the last time. Did you see the synagogue, Johnny?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I did not identify it for you. I did not think you would be interested in every place in this town that is important to me, that is in my blood. The street where my grandmother’s family had lived was flattened, but there were other streets where Jews and Christians had lived beside each other and they were not destroyed. Christian Poles now lived where Jews had lived, had stolen the homes. Neighbours of the Jews and the customers of my father, whose watches and clocks he had laboured over, abused the column of Jews, threw mud and stones at them. It was done here, where now there is concrete and open ground. And they were marched by Germans and Ukrainians across that bridge. Do you see it?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Carrick could see an old bridge of steel girders, had a view of it between the blocks.
‘Across that bridge. You will see today, later, where they were marched to.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I told you, Johnny, it is in my blood. What happened here and in the forest is in the veins that carry my blood. Can you understand that?’
‘I am trying to, sir.’
Carrick thought his man, Reuven Weissberg, a prisoner of a past that had been shaped long before his birth. He seemed to see that column of humanity, men, women and children, young and old, tramping under guard past abusers and their missiles, and seemed to recognize a man who carried, perhaps in an old leather bag, the tools of his trade. Seemed, too, to see a young woman from a photograph, but her hair was as dark as the ravens over the Spey’s mouth, not pure and brilliant white.
‘I want you to know, sir, that I think I can imagine your grandmother and her family being marched here at gunpoint, and I can hear the abuse given them by those who had lived beside them, and I can feel the blows of rocks hurled at them. I can, sir.’
It was the truth.
Reuven Weissberg reached out, took the hair at the back of Carrick’s head and ran his fingers through it. Carrick had not seen him do that to Mikhail or Josef Goldmann.
He did not believe himself to be a wasp or a fly, trapped in a gossamer web, unable to break out. They walked back to the cars.
There was a long embankment, newly built, the Customs buildings, then a modern bridge that spanned the Bug. Flags hung desolate from poles and the wind could not stir them.
Davies had demanded they come here. ‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it, that a road crossing of the frontier will be here?’ Davies had said. ‘They went to Chelm, and this is the road over the border, so it’s where it will be. What do you think, Mr Lawson?’
He had won only a slow, sardonic smile; pretty damn typical of the old bastard. Then Lawson murmured about going in search of a toilet, and headed for the café.
It was the Dorohusk Customs point. It straddled the main road from Chelm, Route 12, that crossed the Bug and went on into Ukraine. The only other road links were fifty kilometres to the south, at Ustyluh, where the Bug curved to the east, or ninety kilometres to the north at Brest-Terespol. It had to be here, at Dorohusk, that the weapon — if it was more than a figment of bloody Lawson’s imagination, if it was a warhead — would be brought over the Bug. They’d be here to meet it, of course. Luke Davies stood beside the minibus door and looked at the creeping flow, the pace of wet mud on a slope, of lorries and trucks, vans and cars that went both ways along the embankment road. If it existed — there would be due warning because the targets would have parked up and the undercover would be with them — it would be on a vehicle such as those in the slow, edging motion towards the bureaucracy of the Customs checks. Their intervention might not be necessary, and that amused Luke Davies. British guys from Revenue and Customs had been on attachment in Poland to drag the locals up to speed, and the Germans had shipped in good detection equipment.
Davies had found something to focus on. A car went forward, a dozen yards at a time, a tiny four-door saloon. It might have been a Fiat, and was heading for Ukraine and it had three — yes, three — fridge-size cardboard crates perched on and bound to its roof. He thought this to be the most miserable, God-forsaken corner of the world. The town behind them had been rain-saturated,with an old tank mounted on a plinth in its centre, had oozed failure and decay. There had been life in Sarajevo, sunshine and crisp snow, mountains to get up in summer, and the start-up of wine bars and cafés; even the fought-over villages and small towns of Bosnia-Herzegovina had tried to pull themselves up after the ceasefire. Poverty ruled here, and deprivation, sheer damn drabness and rain.