Sandstealers

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 (#u33ae17c6-68bd-57bd-82fd-9c44103daad7)

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.