Sandstealers

Later, when it was all over, she would think about how different things would have been for her if she’d just said: ‘No thanks, Mr Duval.’

‘Yes please, that’d be good.’

Soft morning light fell upon the carnage of the night before: a fresh batch of mutilated corpses, dumped around Baghdad like garbage put out for collection. Some lay down alleyways, some amid the bulrushes in the Tigris. Danny’s friends knew they would be out there and couldn’t help thinking he might be among them.

The Junkies were prone to insomnia at the best of times and now sleep seemed a physical impossibility. Their wakefulness meant there was an eternity of time to fill but work was unthinkable: why head out to cover some new Iraqi tragedy when they had their very own?

‘Fried eggs and tomatoes, anyone?’ Edwin was buzzing around the suite’s kitchenette, pouring olive oil into a scratched old frying pan. ‘I’m making breakfast.’

‘You’re always doing something,’ said Becky.

He looked confused, so she let it pass.

‘Oh, all right then, why not. Two, please, sunny side up.’ She had no appetite, and neither had the others, but they would eat because it kept Edwin happy. He had loved to cook for them on the road—the more challenging the circumstances, the better: Bosnia, Africa, Chechnya, it didn’t matter where. It was one of the therapies that worked for him.

When the unnecessary business of breakfast was complete, the long silence began. Everyone slipped into memories of Danny until a knock at the door reverberated around the room and jolted them from their reveries. Becky jumped, as if it was a gunshot.

Adi stood there with three people they’d never seen.

‘Guys, I’d like you all to meet Tommy Harper from the Times, Jim Munro, who’s here as a security adviser, and this is Camille Lowenstein, Danny’s sister.’

She was the only one they looked at. She was just like Danny; a little taller and older, but with his presence. For a moment it felt as though he were with them again, back from the dead. The same persuasive eyes peered out at them through Dolce & Gabbana glasses, black and oblong, giving her the stern, studious look of the tutor you admired at university and wouldn’t want to cross.

Rachel leapt up from the sofa and hugged her, while the others were more circumspect, shaking her hand one by one and introducing themselves.

‘You got here pretty fast,’ said Rachel.

‘My bank has been fabulous but I’m kind of dazed; one minute sitting in Dubai, the next here in Baghdad—which isn’t exactly the sort of place you expect to find yourself at a moment’s notice.’

Her educated East Coast cadences rolled easily over them in much the same way Danny’s always had.

Kaps led her to the shabby armchair he’d just been sitting in and fixed her a coffee while she took in the faces around her, especially Rachel’s and Becky’s, with their puffed-up, reddened eyes.

‘So how was the flight in?’ Rachel, like an uneasy cocktail-party guest, was determined to clutch at small talk. Becky, slumped beside her, said nothing at all.

For half an hour, between more tears and drifting silences, the Junkies told them what they knew of the area where Danny had disappeared, the various insurgent groups who operated there and the extent to which the Americans were or were not in control. At the end of it, Harper and Munro thanked them and said they needed to make some calls.

‘I should be going too,’ said Camille.

Why, said the look on Rachel’s face. What the hell else is there to do?

‘Stay if you like. It’s nice to talk about Danny.’

When Turner and Munro had gone, Camille asked them again if they knew what he’d been doing in al-Talha.

‘That’s the beauty of being freelance, and the curse,’ said Kaps. ‘You don’t have to tell anyone your plans, but when it all goes wrong, no one knows what you’ve been up to. He could be pretty secretive.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s the reason he left the Times in the first place—to be a free spirit. Said the bureau had become a fortress, with all the security consultants and armed guards you had to have there. Soldier boys like your friend Munro.’

‘He took a lot of risks?’

Kaps chuckled.

‘We all take risks. You’re taking a risk just by being in this city, in this country. But Danny? Yeah, he took more than most.’

He handed Camille the coffee he’d just made. She grabbed it in the palms of both hands, defying its heat. You’re a tough cookie, Kaps thought, and something told him to be a little wary about what he said.

‘And what d’you think are his chances?’ Camille asked. ‘You guys know Iraq so well and I really don’t have a clue.’

‘Okay then, no bullshit,’ said Kaps. ‘If this had been down south with the Shia, I’d say good. But we could be talking about al-Qaeda—al-Zarqawi in particular. Not exactly renowned for the quality of his mercy.’

Camille nodded slowly. She was scared they’d think he was Jewish: people often assumed they were because of the family name, when in fact Lowenstein was the town in Germany her parents had originally come from.

‘So are you and Danny close?’ asked Kaps. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Danny talk about his sister.

‘Not especially, I’m afraid. Different worlds; me in Dubai, him in all these war zones.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘This is going to sound crazy, but I guess it would have been a few years ago.’

She was too embarrassed to admit it was actually twelve: she didn’t want to have to answer all the questions it would provoke. As it was, she could sense a frisson of surprise ripple around the room.

It had been 22nd June 1992, to be precise, and she remembered not only the date but his last words before he put the phone down on her: ‘I just don’t think we have a thing to say to each other any more. I know I’m supposed to love you, but the truth is I don’t even like you very much. Maybe it’d be best if you didn’t call again.’

For the rest of that week, Camille was busy at the embassy. Adi reported that First Cavalry had pulled in a bunch of local hoods around al-Talha and army intelligence was grilling them, so far without result. The news blackout had been lifted and he wanted her to record an appeal they could put on al-Arabiya television, but no one could agree on what she should say: was she asking for the return of a hostage or a body? And how should she sound? On a conference call with Washington, the FBI advised her to be tough, while the man from the State Department urged a more emollient approach. ‘Remember, you may just have his life in your hands,’ said the disembodied DC voice.

After the embassy meetings, Harper would go back to the bureau of the New York Times, where he was staying, while Munro was happy to hang out with old SAS chums now employed in Baghdad’s burgeoning security industry. Camille would have dinner at the Hamra and spend time with Danny’s friends. Getting to know them was as good a way as any of getting to know him. She found them fascinating, like rare species in a zoo, so unlike all the expats in her world who had done nothing and seen nothing. These people—she could tell it from their eyes—had seen so much. Too much perhaps.

‘He’s been in good hands since…well, whenever it was you last met with him,’ Rachel told her one evening. ‘He was…I mean he is… such a good friend to us.’

No one else said anything. Camille was becoming used to these gaping holes in the conversation.

‘I do read his stuff from time to time,’ she said after a minute or so. ‘I mean, I can see what a good writer he is.’

‘Unique,’ said Rachel. ‘And driven like you wouldn’t believe.’

‘I think I would. Driven is a Lowenstein family trait, and not always an entirely healthy one. But please, go on. It’s good to be with the people who were closest to him. What was it that brought you guys together?’

‘We were thrown together, I suppose,’ said Rachel sadly, but smiling too. ‘And I guess we shared a feeling, a spirit.’

‘A “spirit”?’

‘Well, I’ll tell you how Danny once put it. I remember it so well, we were lying on a rooftop in Mogadishu. The al-Sahafi Hotel, starlit and tracer-lit as usual. He said, “We live more in a year than most people live in a lifetime.” There was a kind of arrogance about that which I loved, like we were better than mere mortals.’

For a while the only sounds in the Presidential Suite were coughs and sniffles, and the distant din of the Baghdad traffic trying to seep in through the windows.

‘And when Danny said that, it made me think about when I was about ten, on holiday with my parents on the west coast of Ireland. We were on a beach, by a loch. Local builders would come along with a big tractor and trailer, and dig up the sand. They wanted it for making concrete and didn’t see why they shouldn’t just help themselves. I remember going up to them and saying, “But you can’t just steal the beach; you can’t steal the sand.” And they laughed their heads off at this silly girl from America then turned their backs on me. Well, I used to tell Danny we were no better than those guys; we were sandstealers too. I had this vision of an hourglass—you know, where you pour sand from one bit to another to measure time. The way I saw it, we were stealing sand and stealing time, because every day of our lives was so damned rich, and every year seemed to last so long. Danny loved that, absolutely adored it. From that day on he was always calling us the sandstealers.’

‘So when was it you first met up?’

Rachel’s eyes twinkled and the tears in them seemed to dry as she was carried back to the day that everything began.

‘It was 1994—in my case, anyway. Another century, another millennium. The truth is, your brother inspired me. I’m really not sure I’d have ever become a journalist without him. I think I was only about 16 when I started reading his stuff. There was nothing on earth I wanted more than to do what he was doing and see what he was seeing, so I went to where I knew he was, simple as that. I just got up one day and went to Bosnia.’

Her friends shifted uncomfortably, wondering if they should stop her reminiscing, but it was too late already.

3

The Balkans, January 1994

Rachel Kelly was a tender 23 when she arrived, via Budapest, in Split. The Croatian port amounted to a backstage holding pen for all those war-zone wannabes who yearned to perform in Sarajevo, the theatre of their dreams, but she couldn’t hide from herself a mild sense of disappointment: she’d come to watch a war and so far found only the humdrum routines of peace. In the bustling streets of Split, there were the sounds of bells and buskers, but where were the lightning cracks of gunfire and the thunderclaps of artillery? On a crisp morning, Rachel was breathing in clean, fresh air rather than the cordite of explosives, and it didn’t smell good.

The citizens of Split could still scarcely believe their luck. They’d escaped the Balkan inferno, and every day they were glad to be alive. These were beautiful people in a beautiful city, and it gave Rachel an idea of what Sarajevo must once have been—a magnificent painting, now slashed apart by war. Outside her hotel, she watched a young couple canoodling without embarrassment. They kissed in a way that said they appreciated peace and were determined to make the most of it. After all, had they been born just a few miles to the east, they would be fighting now—either killing, maiming and raping, or being killed, maimed and raped. Street-side caresses in winter sunshine seemed endlessly preferable.

By lunchtime, Rachel was happy to be checking in for a UN aid flight into Sarajevo, heaving her bag and rucksack on to the scales.

‘These weigh too much,’ said the soldier from Norwegian Movement Control—NorMovCon, in UN-speak. Ultra-blond, with slightly feminine cheekbones, he belonged in a gleaming Scandinavian airport with polished floors and expensive shops and bars. ‘Twenty kilograms, that’s your limit. Sorry, but these are twenty-three.’ Rachel decided he was the epitome of precise, European efficiency, no amount of which had been able to save this corner of the continent from sliding into civil war. ‘You will have to lose three kilos, please. Thank you.’

She gave him a look to make him melt, as other soldiers would melt in the years of warfare that lay ahead for Rachel Kelly, Arlington’s young warrior. Norwegians, she thought: nice, even when they’re trying to be nasty.

‘All right, just today,’ he sighed, thumping one of the many clean pages of her passport with a big blue stamp that said, intriguingly: Maybe Airlines, Sarajevo. ‘But there is no guarantee you get a seat. P3s are lowest priority.’

‘P3s?’

‘Journalists. People like you.’ He said it with a certain relish, pleased to hint that reporters like her were not fit to wipe the boots of some of the other heroes on board today’s flight—peacekeepers, doctors and aid workers. ‘We call you if there’s room.’

But Rachel had to get to Sarajevo. The war had been raging for two years and she was horribly late already. She couldn’t afford to miss another day.

She found a broken plastic seat close to a gaggle of photographers who were chatting among themselves. Cameras hung like ripe fruit around their necks, with more around their ankles as if they’d fallen from the tree. They had weather-beaten, battle-hardened faces and the air of people who had seen all there was to see in the world. Rachel, who had seen nothing, was intimidated. The men were tall with stubble on their chins, exotic scarves and an earring here and there, but there was a woman too, which helped Rachel pluck up the courage to approach them.

‘Hey there! Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I just wondered if you guys are heading up to Boz?’

Boz? No one who’d ever been to Bosnia would dream of calling it that, and it sounded even worse in a happy-go-lucky American accent. Boz, for Christ’s sake! They inspected her for a moment, this new girl, so breathlessly enthusiastic: she was pretty, with conventionally straight, shoulder-length brown hair parted on the left and a flurry of freckles that had fallen on the slopes of a ski-jump nose. No doubt they should have faded years ago, but they’d decided, stubbornly, to stick around.

‘Boz?’ said the lone female. She wore no make-up and was wearing a black woolly hat and a torn, blue Gore-Tex jacket. It tried to hide a body which was heavier than Rachel’s and not flattered by comparison. ‘Oh, I see. You mean Bosnia?’

Rachel had rather much too much going on in her head to detect the irony.

‘Yeah, I’m hoping to get on the flight, only the UN guys said we’re low priority.’

‘’Course we are!’ The accent was wild Australian, honed somewhere in the outback. ‘We’re the parasites, scum of the earth. Then again, not too many people are mad enough to want a plane ride into Sarajevo—that’s if the plane ever makes it. They don’t call it Maybe Airlines for nothing.’

‘That’s what they stamped in my passport.’

‘Maybe they give you a seat, maybe they don’t. Maybe it takes off, maybe it gets shot down…’

‘I’ll take my chances,’ Rachel said with a cool determination the Australian rather liked. She remembered her own first flight into Sarajevo two years earlier.

‘I’m Becky. Becky Cooper. I was just heading over to that shitty little café. Can I get you something? Whatever they put in your cup, they’ll add about half a sack of sugar. If that doesn’t get you going, you’re probably dead already.’

She let out the little laugh which, Rachel would discover, was the culmination of almost everything she said. She used laughter like bad punctuation—randomly, even when she wasn’t happy or when what she said wasn’t funny. Her face was round and lit up by a big white smile that never seemed to leave her. In time, Rachel would come to see the sadness that lay beneath it.

Becky stepped away from the others, who’d already lost interest in Rachel, or pretended they had, and the two women shook hands firmly, like men do.

That’d be great, thanks. Rachel Kelly, by the way. So who are you working for?’

‘Sigma. They sell my stuff on. Usually Newsweek in America, or Stern in Germany. Basically anyone who’ll pay.’

Rachel was impressed. Newsweek had been her weekly bible for years. She’d curled up in bed with it when her friends were reading teenage magazines about pop and puppy love and first-time sex.

Becky handed over a stash of damp, dog-eared notes for two small coffees. As they found a table, she yanked the woolly hat off her head. Balkan sun, fighting its way through grubby airport windows, appeared to backlight her. A tangle of curls tumbled down, flame-red in unexpected contrast to pale white skin. Rachel’s immediate thought was Queen Elizabeth the First, the Warrior Queen. A few days later, when she mentioned the comparison, Becky was unusually downcast. Virgin Queen more like, she said.

‘Anyway, good to meet you, Rachel Kelly. So who are you with then?’

‘No one, to be honest. It’s my first foreign assignment. And when I say assignment, I guess the truth is I’ve assigned myself.’

‘My God, that’s brave.’

‘It’s just something I’ve wanted to do…’ She paused, then mumbled, half hoping Becky wouldn’t hear the rest, ‘…for so long.’

Becky was disarmed. She was warming to this young American. It was what she liked about the war: you could meet someone and be their friend within days, or even hours. Spinoza, one of the other photographers, called it fast-food friendship.

‘Well, stick with me and I’ll show you the ropes.’

Rachel felt the tension slip away from her. As she sipped the thick, syrupy Turkish coffee, she explained how she’d abandoned her local paper in Arlington (‘a tedious little rag’) and got a portfolio of strings with some bigger ones, plus an obscure monthly magazine about foreign affairs. It would be just about enough.

‘So then, Sarajevo? Quite a place to do your apprenticeship.’

‘The truth is I’m lazy. I just can’t face crawling up the ladder—all those training courses and job applications and interviews, I’m just not cut out for it. I hate to sound pushy, but why wait ten or twenty years for your guys on Newsweek or the Post to make me a foreign correspondent when I can appoint myself one—right here, right now.’

‘Mmm. And you hate to sound pushy! Well, it all seems deliciously simple.’ Becky gave her coffee a sceptical stir but she recognised in Rachel’s eyes the same yearning to see Sarajevo that she’d once had. ‘As a matter of fact, I do think it’s pretty simple.’ Becky unleashed a gust of can-do Australian enthusiasm. ‘You make your own luck in this business. If you’ve got an ounce of talent, Sarajevo will help you shine. The whole world is watching, after all. Watching that city, but watching it through us.’

Rachel’s mouth widened into a grin. For so long people had doubted her. Now here was a pro, and a Bosnia pro at that, who seemed to believe in her. Perhaps her fantasies weren’t so crazy.

Becky noticed the wad of photocopied cuttings Rachel had stuffed into a transparent plastic folder. They were tatty from constant reading and re-reading, and when Becky started leafing through them, Rachel felt not only like the new girl but the swot, caught in possession of homework it was most uncool to have.

‘You’ve only got the collected works of Danny Lowenstein in here!’

‘I really like his stuff. I find it so…you know…emotional.’

‘Yeah, emotional. Fictional, too, sometimes.’

‘Really?’

‘No, not really. I’m just being a jealous bitch. It can get like that in Sarajevo.’

‘D’you know him then—Daniel Lowenstein, I mean?’

‘It’s Danny, not Daniel. And yes, of course I do. All the girls adore him.’

They both steeled themselves for a last sip. All the girls adore him. In the long years of pain and pleasure that lay before her, Rachel would find it to be a statement not of opinion but undisputed fact.

When the flight was called, Becky and Rachel were the only journalists allowed on—to the consternation of the other photographers. ‘Ladies first,’ Becky grinned at them.

Rachel crossed the runway to the plane like an old lady with curvature of the spine; she was bent double beneath her rucksack, which contained not only Danny’s epic, 423-page account of the break up of the Balkans but all the clothes she could cram in, including a bulk supply of underwear in case laundry was impossible. There were industrial quantities of soap, deodorant, make-up, perfume and tampons, and—for bribes—cigarettes and chocolate (even if the temptation to eat it herself might well prove overwhelming). There were half a dozen notebooks, a box of pens, her laptop with all its assorted cables, a torch and batteries and a short-wave radio—her lifeline to the world.

Becky put an arm round her as the loadmaster helped them squeeze through the plane’s narrow door. The engines were revving louder and louder, and Rachel could no longer make herself heard, but she beamed Becky one of her made-in-Heaven smiles, which said ‘thanks’ and ‘this is going to be fun’ at the same time.

‘Next stop Sarajevo!’ the loadmaster shouted as they taxied for take-off. Next stop your new life, Rachel Kelly. He gave her some squashy yellow earplugs and helped her snap together the complicated, four-pronged seat belt. The Hercules heaved itself off the runway, spectacular in its defiance of the laws of gravity, and Becky quickly fell asleep. The familiar motion of flight drugged her, like a weary commuter on her way to work.

The passengers were crammed together uncomfortably on narrow canvas seats arranged in a long line. Most were aid workers or officials from UNPROFOR, UNHCR and various other acronyms from the UN’s bewildering myriad of agencies. Most soon had their eyes shut, but from the moment she first clambered aboard Rachel had never felt more wide awake. She tried to peer through the tiny porthole behind her, but only briefly could she glimpse the Balkan hills and valleys down below, wondering what they had in store for her. As the Hercules reached its cruising altitude, she shivered, coveting Becky’s unglamorous woolly hat.

At the end of its journey, the Hercules plunged into a sudden, suicidal nosedive. Rachel’s stomach flung itself from her body. She’d always suspected this plane was just too damned big for its own good.

Becky stirred slowly, and bellowed into Rachel’s ear.

‘Don’t worry, it’s just in case anyone wants to take a shot at us. Like I told you—Maybe Airlines.’

The plane levelled off at the last minute, and Rachel swung around once more, just in time to see a blur of blackened, roofless houses and the jagged ruins of mutilated tower blocks.

‘Hello, war,’ she mumbled to herself beneath the engines’ roar.

Snow was falling steadily on Sarajevo, trying to hide its horrors from the world.

‘Where now?’ asked Rachel.

‘Oh, I’m getting a ride into town,’ said Becky. ‘We’re getting a ride.’

There was a tedious, 25 minute wait before finally he strode in.

‘And about time too.’ Becky gave him a brief embrace. ‘This is Rachel, one of your fellow countrymen. You have to be very nice to her, it’s her first time—so to speak. Rachel, meet Daniel L. Lowenstein, award-winning reporter and our cabbie for the day.’

Rachel shook his hand, surprised Becky hadn’t mentioned he’d be meeting them when they’d discussed him earlier. She couldn’t help compare the face in front of her with the immaculately lit, carefully posed picture on the dust jacket. He looked rougher in the flesh, unshaven and uncombed, and the familiar dimple in his chin was largely buried beneath stubble. Now that she could see him in colour, she realised his eyes were a rich chocolate brown. They were good eyes, but they didn’t look at her for very long; they didn’t seem interested and flitted around elsewhere.