As she walked in, he was at one end, presiding, the king at his banquet. Taking off her coat, Rachel wondered if she might contrive to sit close to him, but he was already sandwiched in by Edwin, Kaps and Spinoza, one of the photographers she’d seen in Split. The four of them were hunched up together and laughing raucously. Danny was the master raconteur, with an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes, the most trivial incident embellished to make it funnier. Fragments of a story drifted over to her, something about him hiding from the KGB in a hotel room before the fall of communism. Lithuania, she thought she heard him say.
‘So I knew they were looking for me, and they were banging on my door going, “Meester Lowenstein, can vee talk to you?’” Danny’s ridiculous Russian accent provoked more hilarity. ‘And I’m butt naked, but I jump out of bed and hide in a cupboard in the bathroom, and my heart’s pumping. And I hear them unlock the door and then this big bear of a guy’s opening the cupboard and I think I’m toast—and of course it’s the fucking room service I forgot I’d ordered, and the waiter’s looking at me in all my glory, saying, “Do you vont some mayonnaise?’”
Then the stand-up comic turned shrewd political analyst—Rachel noticed how effortlessly he could change gear. He spoke quickly, oozing confidence. Even when he digressed down labyrinthine side alleys, his sentences were so crafted he might have written them beforehand. His voice rose above everyone else’s, dazzling, demanding to be heard.
‘You see, Milosevic’s great trick is to demonise everybody else. The Slovenes? Secessionists. The Croats? Fascists. The Bosnians? Islamic fundamentalists. The Albanians? Terrorists. And d’you know what he is?’
A nationalist, of course,’ said Edwin.
‘No, not even that. An opportunist. He’s just ridden to power on the back of this whole notion of a greater Serbia. What was he under Tito? Just another dreary apparatchik, going nowhere fast. What future would he have had in a free, democratic Yugoslavia? Absolutely none.’
Watching him in full flow, Rachel decided his age added to his aura. Most of the others were in their twenties, but he was more than a decade older. He’d been there from day one, living and breathing the battles of Bosnia Herzegovina and, before that, Croatia. UN spokesmen, NATO generals, EU diplomats—they all came and went, but Danny was a constant, rarely taking holidays or retreating into comfort zones. He had written the seminal book on the war even before it was over, and his reports were required reading in the White House and Downing Street. He was everything Rachel admired in a journalist: smart and funny, ethical and angry. She decided to forget his disparaging remark about desperadoes: she must have misinterpreted it.
‘It’s like all wars,’ Danny thundered on, rampaging from one subject to another, ‘it’s about good and evil, and it’s also about religion.’
Rachel would discover later he said things like this to provoke Edwin, knowing this loyal English Catholic resented the idea that his God should be blamed for all the troubles of the world.
Edwin came to His defence as always. ‘Oh yeah, it’s always God’s fault, isn’t it, never man’s.’
‘They’re a lethal combination,’ shrugged Danny.
‘You know what I find strange, though, Danny; you think you’re this great atheist—what is it you call yourself, an atheist fundamentalist?—but even you need someone watching over you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘All that superstition, those magic bloody boots. You seriously believe you’ll die if you ever take them off. Okay, admittedly I sometimes hang out in churches with incense and relics, but I don’t think it’s too much weirder.’
Danny appeared to find this territory treacherous so he moved to firmer ground.
‘The point is, history is littered with religious wars. Islamist expansion in the seventh century, the Crusades in the eleventh, the Thirty Years’ War…the list goes on and on and on. And what the hell is Israel and the Palestinians, if it’s not religious?’
Edwin gave up. There was no point in arguing with Danny when he was at full throttle. He represented not a soul on earth, except his paper and some of his readers, and yet he always had to be right. He’d only end an argument when he’d won it. He pummelled away at people, grinding them down.
As the debate petered out, Danny looked up and caught Rachel’s eye. Perhaps she should get up and thank him again for the helmet, or make a joke about how big it was on her and kept slipping off. She tried to give him a half-smile of acknowledgement, yet if he saw it, he didn’t reciprocate. In fact, was that a scowl that was spreading slowly across his face, the beginnings of a thunderstorm that destroys a perfect sky? She was probably mistaken; he was just tired and irritable.
At her end of the table, the conversation was less erudite. It ebbed and flowed before settling, for no discernible reason, around Woody Allen and whether or not he could be called a good director, and Madonna, and whether or not she could be called a good musician. Compare and contrast. Rachel, however, wanted to escape America and her flawed celebrities, not spend all night discussing them. She pretended to listen to the gossipy chatter around her, while filtering it out and concentrating on Danny’s words instead.
After a while she slipped away to the toilet and, having peed, took a long look in the mirror and congratulated herself on a first day of achievement. Not bad, Miss Kelly. Not bad at all.
It was only as she was starting to make her way back towards the dining room that she heard Danny’s voice rising above the hubbub, as impassioned as it had been when she first walked in. It hit her like a sudden gust of wind.
‘But, Jesus, how could she? Does she have any idea, any fucking idea, how much pleasure she’ll have given him? Even his wife doesn’t do that. I mean, hell, she’s not exactly a world statesman. She’s a hack, and a pretty minor one at that, but he’ll have loved it even so. She’s an American, after all. He’ll milk it, you can bet your life he will.’
A pretty minor one at that. The words were rushing around her head at horrible velocity, a fairground ride spinning out of control.
‘Oh, don’t be so hard on her,’ someone said; a man’s voice, she thought. Kaps, the guy from Reuters. Yes, it was definitely that distinctive Afrikaner accent. ‘Look, it’s her first day, eh? So what if she shook his hand and he gave her a kiss? He was trying it on, the old bull. You can’t blame him, he doesn’t get to see too many pretty girls up there in his lair. So she made a mistake, didn’t get out of his way in time. Well, it’s not exactly going to change the war. And anyway, she’s a rookie. Wet behind the ears. Give her a break, will you, Dan?’
‘And what if she’d kissed Hitler? Or Stalin? Would you still be giving her a break?’
‘I doubt she’s into necrophilia.’
‘It’s not funny.’
‘Yes it is! Lighten up, you sanctimonious bastard.’ It was Becky. Good old Becky, thought Rachel, paralysed in her hiding place. ‘Loads of people shake his hand. I saw that guy from the BBC doing it the other day.’
‘We don’t,’ said Danny, categorically. We, the Something Must Be Done Brigade, who despise the Serbs and demand that the world should act against them. We, the gang that Rachel wanted to be part of. Not now, though. Club rules broken. Membership denied. ‘And we certainly don’t kiss him.’
‘Now you kissing Karadzic!’ Kaps shouted out. ‘What a pretty picture!’
It was another valiant attempt to puncture Danny’s righteous indignation. Rachel heard the whole table laugh. She silently thanked Kaps for defending her, she thanked him from the bottom of her aching heart.
Still, she had made a mistake.