LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

Hassan’s wide eyes told McKelvey all he needed to know about his own condition.

      “You see a guy come out of there the last few minutes, which way he went?” McKelvey said, his voice thick, nasal.

      A lifetime on the force, and he’d never been punched in the face with such velocity or precision. Kicked, spat upon, stabbed at, and yes, even shot at on two occasions—once at the deadly shootout intersection of Jane and Finch, the other time in the hallway of his own home as he and Duguay drew like gunfighters—but this, this was otherworldly. He had come as close to blacking out as his fragile male ego would allow. Held on there to the tassels of faint hope, pulled himself up through sheer stubborn determination, an ode to his Celtic ancestry. It was the fucking pill, that little half tablet that had dulled his edge. As bad as taking a drink on duty, for Christ’s sake. Rather than being ashamed of himself, he was angry and embarrassed and wanted to get this asshole face to face in a fair fight, no sucker punches thrown from the dark.

      Hassan relayed the facts as he had processed them, his cab driver’s eyes always recording—which is what made drivers such a great source for the dicks of the various crews working in Hold-Up, Homicide, Sexual Assault. McKelvey put his head back on the headrest in the back seat and took a haul of air between clenched teeth. His face could come off if he pulled hard enough. He could pull it off and hand it to Hassan and walk away and find another face somewhere. He was cotton-headed, tongue-thick. He had the four numbers from the plate, the general description of the asshole wielding the sledgehammer in his right hand. He closed his eyes and centred himself, willing forth the last of the reservoir, the needle well past “E”. His mind flashed to the image of the stark white refrigerator and that single square magnet stuck to the door.

      “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, opening the door, and stepping out on legs no longer connected to his hips. “I forgot something.”

      “Please sir, let me take you to the hospital,” Hassan said.

      “That’s our next stop,” McKelvey said.

FOUR

      Three days earlier…

      Kadro stands on the balcony of the cheap airport-strip motel smoking a Canadian cigarette. Du Maurier. The cigarette is smooth. Fine. Back in the war, he liked those mornings best when the sun had not yet burned away the fog completely, and he could stand alone with the gun slung over his shoulder and enjoy a cigarette all to himself. The fields seemed peaceful then and not at all associated with the gruesome acts of war. The bullets, the bombs. The effect of shrapnel on the human body. The sweet, sick stink of the dead, the sounds they made in their own moment of dying. None of it seemed possible inside the stillness and clear sunshine of those fields. He would smoke his cigarette and watch the morning glow within itself, and it made a man feel grateful to stand with his legs wholly intact, heart still beating, still pushing blood. He understood in those moments what it meant to be entirely alive, because he was already dead—his generation expendable as a matter of birth and name and timing. The great lottery of life. His number was accounted for; it had been waiting for him just up ahead all the days of his life. The next field, the next town.

      “Always daydreaming,” that’s what Krupps used to say. The weary squad leader with the perpetual smirk, the crooked grin. The dimpled cheeks of a farm boy contrasted against the dead eyes of a killer, their best shooter. Removed the head from an enemy soldier at six hundred yards. At dusk. With a hard wind blowing at them. Krupps had collected on the bet from every man in the squad, including Kadro. It was supernatural.

      But it was Krupps who was dead and not him. Dead going on seven years now. And only just yesterday. Life was funny that way, how time shifted, played tricks so that even now Kad could close his eyes and actually smell the cordite, the blue-grey smoke from their guns—and then the other smells that came on, the stomach-curdling stink of death, the foul funk of bodies left to bloat and swell in the hot summer sun, a smell that settled in your mouth like a taste, something that stayed on your tongue for days.

      “This,” Krupps said, handing him a pint of plum brandy, “is the only thing that gets rid of the stink. Drink it. And then smear some under your nose… ”

      Yes, life was funny. Kad’s brother Tomas had studied at a school in Chicago, because he was the smarter of the two, always reading these thick books, preferring conversation and debates to sports or roughhousing. And it was Kad who’d stayed home with the rifle and the grenades, the bayonet that he could mount on his rifle when the fighting got that close, that dirty. Kad was not jealous of his brother. He was proud of Tomas and happy that he had been spared these years of war. To see the world come to an end, to stand each day in the midst of the apocalypse. To have killed men, to have witnessed the cause and effect of the bullets stored in the belt slung across his back. Kad had seen the brochures for his brother’s school in Illinois. Ill-in-noise—how many times had he said that word as he tried to imagine this unknown world his smart brother had flown to with scholarship dollars. The fields that looked like a golf course, the thin white girls with blonde hair, always blonde. What perfect timing Tomas always had. He graduated and earned his scholarship—his ticket out—in the very months before the war came to their villages, to their homeland. At first it was the whisperings of independence that reverberated around the world.

      “I will come home to fight,” Tomas had told his brother in their last phone call.

      “Father will not allow it. You are the only hope we have… stay where you are.”

      Everything happened so fast. But not really. No, this was two thousand years in the coming. It was always there, as Kadro’s grandfather had said, this wound without stitches. When Bosnia voted for independence from Yugoslavia on February 29, 1992, the dominoes teetered. In the days following the vote, the Yugoslav Amy disbanded, looting the Bosnian reserve units of their weapons and ammunition, equipment and uniforms. There remained the fledgling and poorly trained Armija—the government army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or perhaps the 7th Muslim Brigade of the Armija for the truly devout. Neither option appealed to Kadro, for he was neither devout nor interested in guaranteed annihilation as part of an ill-trained and ill-equipped army fighting for a country so new, it had barely had time to ink a national emblem.

      The storm clouds gathered and the fates conspired. Yugoslav Army soldiers fresh from the killing fields of Croatia paused to catch their breath in Bosnia, there along the Drina Valley at the Bosnian border with Serbia. A pileup of tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, soldiers smoking and stewing and drinking in the local pubs—drinking and talking and fermenting their hatred, this notion of revenge for the homeland.

      The line of dominoes toppled and fell with the Siege of Sarajevo, the guns in the hills opening with salvos of artillery and incendiary tank shells. And so Kadro’s new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina—recognized as sovereign by the U.S. and most of Europe—was truly a nation born into war. The days were merciless. It was mayhem. Kad’s father would meet a group of men at the tavern in their small village and return with updates, fragments of news. To his wife and daughter he would say only that the war would be over before it reached their town, and anyway, what did anybody want with a bunch of poor farmers this far from the city? They were but a dot on a map, of no strategic value. But to his son he spoke the truth. This village had fallen, such and such official had been hung from a telephone pole. He told Kadro of the reports from the front, what the men were doing in the villages to the women, the girls.

      “I am too old to fight,” his father had said, “but I will. To my last breath those bastards won’t touch your mother or your sister. I will burn my own home to the ground before I give them the satisfaction. There is no choice now, my son, you must fight. Either with our small army or with one of the units forming up… ”

      And so it was that Kadro joined a handful of his classmates in a paramilitary unit that was rumoured to be funded by a wealthy landowner with business connections in Russia and the Balkans—this never-seen entity referred to simply as “The Colonel”. They were a rag-tag jumble of farm kids and country kids who could shoot well but lacked any formal military training, no understanding of comportment.

Скачать книгу