Sandstealers

She looks down on to the street. It’s empty. No one dead, no one dying, much to her relief. Must have been a few rounds for practise. Or was it just for show? Becky has had men all over the former Yugoslavia posing for her with their guns. Wankers. Silly little boys with toys. Probably got small pricks, she thinks. This is where people like him belong, in a kid’s bedroom, skulking around between Disney curtains.

Dragan points over to a darkened alleyway on the far right-hand corner of the street. He is matter-of-fact about it, not boasting. The expert’s finger helpfully pointing something out; not something, someone. Becky can see now, wondering quite how she has missed her. A middle-aged woman sprawled on the pavement in a pool of blood. From this distance it looks the colour of red wine. A bag of onions she was carrying has spilt out all over the pavement. Red wine and onions, red wine and…

Becky’s hands and fingers work quickly, instinctively, abandoning the short zoom for the long, focusing in on a distant shot of the victim down below: someone’s mother, wife, daughter. Another motionless statistic.

And then the wave of revulsion. And guilt. And panic. The killing of an innocent woman, and she has connived in it. No, not the ‘killing’, Becky corrects herself: that suggests a legitimate act of war. The cold-blooded murder.

There is no room for Rachel at the window. Just as well. She has been spared Becky’s trauma, but all the same she has heard the shots. And as they have rung around the city, all of Sarajevo has heard them too, everyone asking the same, stark question: who? For the sniper’s bullet is unlike any other in a war zone. It has one single name lovingly engraved upon it, nobody else’s will do. The simple sound of its crack and whistle haunts because of all that it implies: a bullet meant for just one human being, selected by another.

‘What’s happened, Beck? He hasn’t actually—’

‘Yes, he fucking has. He’s gone and killed a…’

‘Who?’ Like Sarajevo, she needs to know the answer.

‘A woman. Shit, I don’t believe it. Bag of onions in her hand. Poor bitch. Poor fucking bitch.’

Rachel thinks she can hear the sound of crying in Becky’s broken voice, but she isn’t sure.

Wisely perhaps, Alija translates none of this for the sniper.

There is a pause. Twenty seconds, maybe more. Becky cannot bear to look out of the window again, but she wants to know what’s happening—she needs to know. Is the woman really dead? Or maybe just badly hurt, with others already rescuing her, racing her up to Kosevo hospital and a miracle cure? She pops her head up again to take another look, convinced the woman will have a happy ending, just like Snow White and her dwarves. But the woman and the onions and the wine are still there. Alone. No one dares approach. They know too well the sniper’s game.

It is precisely what he wants, and Becky watches him now, finger at one with the trigger, in loving harmony. He is waiting for some hero or heroine to creep out—against their better judgement—to try and save a fellow Sarajevan.

This can’t be real, Becky is telling herself. She has broken out in a hot flush. Well what did she expect? That this pretty-boy sadist would put his killing on pause for a while, so he could pose for her? That he’d just let her walk out the door afterwards, morals intact, conscience all clean and tidy?

Rachel is pushing her way up into the window. Like a child who feels excluded, she wants to see what everyone else can.

‘You okay, Becky?’

‘Never fucking better.’

‘Mind if I take a look down there?’

‘Be my guest.’

Now Dragan has a new co-pilot in his cockpit, and he smiles at Rachel—a smile that disturbs her even before she spots the fruits of his labour in the alleyway below.

She knows she needs to elicit more quotes from him, or there will be no story to go with Becky’s pictures. Where is he from? What drives him to do it? Does he have a family, does he have a mother like the woman he’s just killed? Does he sleep well at night or is he tormented by bad dreams? But Rachel cannot bring herself to talk to him at all and, for a man who has just snuffed out a life, every question she half-frames in her mind sounds far too antiseptic. Instead it is Dragan who decides to interrogate her.

‘He wants to know why you hate the Serbs,’ Alija translates.

‘We don’t,’ says Rachel.

‘He says you’re liars. He wants to know why you’ve come here today.’

‘To hear his side of the story, his side of the war.’

‘Bullshit, he says. You could get that from any Serb soldier—any one of thousands. He says you’re voyeurs, both of you. Says you’re fascinated by someone like him, someone who kills like this. That you think he’ll make a…’ Alija hesitates.

‘Go on,’ says Rachel. ‘We think he’ll make a what?’

‘He says you think he’ll make a sexy story.’

Tell him he’s right, she wants to say, but he already knows it. They all do. And now Dragan is planning a way to make it even sexier.

‘He’s asking if you want to have a look through his rifle. To see Sarajevo the way he sees it.’

‘Um…no. No thanks very much.’ Rachel is tempted all the same.

‘He insists. He absolutely insists.’

It is more than bad taste, she knows that: it is morally reprehensible. Danny would have them expelled from the country, boycotted by the international press corps, cast out as lepers for the rest of their careers. But who is going to tell? Not her, and not Becky either, since they are both in this together, for better or for much, much worse. In any case, Dragan doesn’t look like he’s giving her a choice. He stands aside from the gun and motions for her to put an eye to its sights. She obeys and, to her relief, it is at first a hazy, out-of-focus blur. Rachel moves away.

‘Hvala.’ Thank you.

‘No, he wants you to look some more, he says. Until you see someone else.’

‘Well, thank him again, but tell him I’ve seen enough. Really.’

‘No, you don’t understand. I’m afraid there is no option to refuse.’

Another shiver, and the dawning realisation that Dragan is playing a game with them. Bosnia mind-fuck for beginners. She returns reluctantly to the telescopic sights, and is horrified to discover that now she can see through them. A mother and her little daughter cowering behind a bus-stop, paralysed by indecision, wondering whether or not they might be spotted.

Hide and seek. Can he see us? Of course he can see you, idiots! Now move! Move while it’s me looking down the barrel of this goddamned gun and not him! Please, in the name of whatever god you want to worship, just move away from that fucking bus-stop!

But they don’t. The woman lies near them, red wine and onions proof enough of the dangers of venturing away from cover. No, they will stay put, convincing themselves they are safe even though they’re sitting ducks.

‘He’s asking if you’ve seen anyone.’

‘No.’ But Rachel’s throat is so dry she can hardly speak. ‘No one at all’

‘He says not even that mum and kid behind the bus-stop? Surely you can see them, he says.’

Alija’s voice is trembling too. He has a sense of foreboding about the direction of this conversation, and he would give anything in the world for it to stop. Why did they ever bring him here, these silly girls who understand so little about the Serbs?

Rachel does not answer, but her silence is enough. The sniper can smell her fear, just as he can smell it from the people down in the street, hundreds of feet away. The scent wafts up to him. Unmistakable. Irresistible.

Then he is saying something else, pulling down the handkerchief from his mouth to make himself more clearly understood. Lest there be any doubt. Alija does not translate though: he will not, he cannot.

‘What’s he saying? Please tell me.’

She doesn’t really want to hear it though, and neither does Becky, who is busying herself in the black pouches of her Domke camera belt, fiddling with her mini-flash, checking her supply of film, creating work, trying to lose herself in it the way she has done all her life.

‘I…I don’t think I know how to translate what…’

‘Tell her!’ Dragan is suddenly speaking English, surprising them all. It is a command, not a request, and Alija obeys.

‘I’m afraid he says he wants you to choose. Which one he should kill. Of the two people behind the bus-stop. He says he will kill one and let one live, but he wants you…to decide.’

Rachel stares at Alija, but dares not even look at Dragan. Waves of panic engulf her. What should she do? Why didn’t she just stay at home in Arlington, in her little girl’s bedroom—not so very different from this one.

‘Tell him to fuck right off.’ Becky is out of her camera bag again, out of her reverie.

‘I’m not sure I can. You see he says if Rachel doesn’t pick one—the mother or the child—he will simply kill them both. It’s up to her. He says she should look at it positively. He says she has the power to save a life today.’

‘Oh no.’ Rachel wants to weep.

‘Ignore him, Rach,’ says Becky, back on her feet, aware of her responsibilities, stronger, wiser, more experienced—handing out tips on everything from water heaters to ethical dilemmas. ‘We’re getting out of here right now. The guy is a freak. You can tell him we’ll be complaining to the people in Pale, the people we arranged this through. He’s going to find himself in deep shit. We have a hotline to Karadzic himself.’

Alija translates laboriously and they wait with pounding heartbeats.

‘Fuck the people in Pale, he says, and fuck Karadzic. They’re all cunts; spineless, low-life cunts. You don’t leave this room until you make the choice.’

In slow motion, they watch him pull a pistol from his belt. He waves it around vaguely in their direction. He is smirking with the timeless grin of a Serb who wants to prove a point, who feels a victim of history. Becky has seen it before, in countless leery Chetniks, but this one is different: he is handsome when he smiles. Again he addresses them in English:

‘Now!’

He gestures for Rachel to get back to the window and look through his sights once more. To select her victim. Roll up, roll up, come and play God for a day! To her despair, they are still there, trembling by the bus-stop. Why the fuck didn’t they run for it when they could, when she was keeping Dragan talking? Why didn’t they take their chance to sprint across the street, or back to where they came from?

‘Well?’ Dragan is relentless.

‘Tell him…I just can’t…he knows I can’t possibly…’

The sniper screams, and Alija struggles to keep up with the litany of derision.

‘He says you’re pathetic, just like all the Western governments who can’t decide what to do and who to help. Just like all the bleeding hearts who come to a place where they don’t belong. He says you should…well, fuck off back to America and leave Serbia to the Serbs. He says you’re both dirty little whores, you deserve to be—I really don’t want to translate this—gang raped up the arse by Arkan and his boys before they cut your tits off and stuff them in your mouths.’

Rachel’s hands are shaking violently, volts of fear electrocuting her body.

‘Novinari!’ shouts Becky. ‘We’re fucking novinari!’

Journalists. As if that one word is an excuse and a reason and an alibi all wrapped up in one.

Dragan pushes Rachel aside, so hard she tumbles from the window and sprawls on to the floor. There is a shot, just like before. Five seconds later, another one.

Silence. No screams, just the hush of three people in shock and one who thinks he has proved a point.

‘Oh my God,’ says Alija eventually.

‘I think we should leave now.’ Becky is carefully closing up her pouches.

The sniper looks round at them again: another smile, this time of total contempt.

‘He says he wants you to come back up here and take one last picture. For posterity, he says. For history’

‘I…’

‘Becky, please. It really is an order.’

What have we done, she asks herself. What has Rachel done? Why didn’t she just choose? It was not nice, it was not fair, but why couldn’t she have saved a life, the deal Dragan had offered? Becky braces herself to see a dead mother and child by the bus-stop and a black cloud of irrational anger overcomes her.

‘Oh, Rachel, for pity’s sake. Why couldn’t…’

But as she looks out, there is only empty pavement around the bus-stop. No bodies. No dead hand reaching out tragically from parent to child. No more red wine.

Dragan is laughing, a raucous bellyache of a laugh. Bosnia mind-fuck. You disgust me, his laughter says, you and everyone else in the self-satisfied, Serb-hating world you come from.

And of course he disgusts them, except what troubles Becky is that his is a face that, in another time, another place, she could quite easily have fallen in love with. The devil’s face. She catches a whiff of his slivovitz and yearns to take a slug of it.

As they prepare to leave, Rachel can barely feel her legs. She curses herself, she curses Becky and she curses Dragan. But most of all she curses Danny Lowenstein, without whose cruel jibes she never would have been here.

6

Post-Liberation Baghdad, August 2004

When the convoy delivered them back to the walled sanctuary of the Hamra, Rachel, Edwin and Kaps agreed they should write about what they’d seen amid the dust and sand at al-Talha: the bullet-ridden car, the bloodstains, the nervy troops who’d only just managed to secure the area. It was the hardest story they’d ever had to file. Should they make it a heart-wrenching account of what had happened to their lost friend Danny, or a conventional report on the missing American citizen Daniel L. Lowenstein, couched as if they’d never met him? They had no doubt which Danny would have chosen: he’d have milked it dry.

They went to their offices and tapped away at battered laptops. Words that usually rolled off their fingertips were suddenly elusive. Even so, it felt good to be reporting again. Only Becky couldn’t bring herself to return to work. She hadn’t been able to take a single photograph in al-Talha—she hadn’t even taken her cameras—and now she sat in the Presidential Suite, waiting for the phone to ring. For the first time she was alone there and she poured some whisky into a teacup. It was rough, like bad petrol, and it scalded her throat, but she drained it quickly.

She used to think somebody could just come along and mend her—a shrink, a counsellor, a lover—but now she doubted that anyone could help. She heard a voice she barely recognised emerge from deep inside her, cracked and hoarse:

‘Oh sweet Jesus, how did it come to this?’

Tommy Harper and Munro had announced they were meeting some Sunni tribal ‘contacts’; when Camille asked if she could join them, Munro said that in his experience the presence of a Western woman might make things harder. He was sure she’d understand. Camille was irritated: perhaps she was being oversensitive, but he seemed to regard her as unnecessary baggage to be dumped at the hotel.

She stood on the terrace where, she’d been told, Danny and the Junkies used to have their poolside parties. She could almost see him amid the creepers and the trellises, his languid body stretched out on a cheap patio chair, reflected in the rippling water. His spirit seemed to stalk the place. She wondered what she would do, what she would say, if she came face to face with him after so many years. For a guilty moment, she felt relieved he wasn’t standing there in front of her.

She could recall the moment it began, or at least the moment she first noticed. He was 14, she was 17 and their school report cards had both arrived. Hers was average, his was scintillating: top of everything, star pupil of the year, head and shoulders above the rest. When Danny thrust it into his father’s hands, full of expectation, Lukas Lowenstein gave it a glance before tossing it on to the kitchen table. ‘Not bad,’ he said. With Camille’s, Lukas took twice as long, and pulled her to his chest. ‘Well, this is fantastic, honey. I’m so proud of you.’ She looked across the kitchen and Danny’s face had crumpled, with a glistening in his eyes and a chin that quivered. As Danny’s big sister, she was supposed to watch over him, but here she was, if not inflicting pain on him, then colluding in it. She told herself her father was just trying, in his own cackhanded way, to make her feel a little better, but over the years she came to see it as the start of Danny’s punishment.

It was precocious intelligence that had been his downfall, Camille was sure of that. If only he hadn’t been so damned smart. It was his own fault, in other words—not hers.

At first, she assumed he’d be their father’s favourite: he was, after all, son and heir to Lowenstein Steel, the small but thriving family firm in Pittsburgh. The more he read and thought about the world, however, the more he challenged Lukas Lowenstein’s politics (conservative Republican), his lifestyle (corporate America) and his religion (Lutheran Church). Danny was too interested for his own good in subversive literature: books that challenged capitalism and tore apart the Bible. He asked too many questions, had too many doubts. She wondered why he couldn’t just read detective stories like all his friends.

Camille, on the other hand, did everything her father asked of her—she went to church, read her Bible, sang in the choir—while Danny wanted to go to Washington to protest about Vietnam.

Slowly, inexorably, a wedge was being hammered between the siblings. Lukas spent less and less time with Danny: he couldn’t find anything they had in common. It was Camille, he felt, who really needed his attention.

As usual, the lift had a sign in English saying’ out of action’, because the power was out of action, because the country was out of action. Camille was about to take the stairs back up to her room when she caught sight of Jamail, the kindly hotel manager who’d been so helpful to her. He was grey-haired and stout, with a flattened nose that had big pores in it, and a slightly crooked back. From the day she arrived, he’d made sure she had everything she needed—phones, faxes and speedy room service. He was the only Iraqi she’d ever talked to properly—albeit in his broken English—and her heart had warmed to him: when there was so much to disorientate her, she found his presence reassuring. He told her Jamail meant ‘charming’, and she decided the name suited him. From what she had heard about her brother’s murdered driver, Jamail and Mohammed were very much the same, both gentle and generous men. True Iraqis.

He was going through some paperwork at the reception desk when she saw him, occasionally handing out or collecting a room key.

‘Ah, Miss Camille, hello!’ He gave her his usual lifting smile. ‘Anything we can do for you?’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

She could tell he had something on his mind. He was looking around to see who else was in the lobby; no one was, but he lowered his voice anyway.

‘I want to say to you, I have friend—Saddoun.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘We fight in war together, against Iran. The long, long war. Too long. You hear of Fao Peninsula?’

‘Yes, sure.’

‘We fight in trench there. Many friends die. Me and Saddoun we okay, thanks be to Allah.’

Camille wondered how any of this might be relevant to her, but he deserved her patience.

‘I get work for him here in hotel. With journalists. Yesterday, his son call me to say Saddoun gone. Disappeared. He hide, afraid for his life.’

‘Right.’ There were plenty of frightened people in Iraq, Camille was tempted to say; in fact, very few who were not.

‘“Why?” I ask him. “Why disappear?” Because he drive journalist, say his son. He drive one of Mr Daniel’s friends, he say, very best friends. One day only, big money. They shot at, but Saddoun good driver, like racing driver, like Michael Schumacher! He get away. He—how you call it?—he make them feel small. In Iraq that very bad thing, you understand? So he frightened, too much frightened. They know his face, they know car.’

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