When dawn came, the body was snagged in the branches of a tree. Not that it was easily recognizable as a corpse.

In spite of the foreigners' alternate pleading, threatening, and throwing money at the city's municipal authorities, refuse collection had again broken down.

In many of the streets back from the river rubbish was piled high outside business premises and at the doors of the old apartment blocks. The residents of the blocks facing the river, not believing that the dispute between the foreigners who nominally ran the city's affairs and local officials was about to be settled, had taken to heaving their plastic bags into the water. The body was wedged between two plastic bags, and was disguised.

The tree, holding it fast, was marooned on a spit of gravel half-way between two of the bridges straddling the river. One bridge was overlooked by the scaffolded and screened building where the National Library of historic documents without price had been housed before being hit by incendiary shells, and the second bridge marked the position taken by Gavrilo Princep eighty-seven years earlier in the moments before he had raised a handgun and fired the bullets that killed an archduke and an archduchess, and con-demned Europe to a conflagration of a scale unknown before.

The roads running either side of the Miljacka river

– the Obala Kulina bana on the north side, and the Obala isa-bega Isakovica on the south side – were already jammed with cars, vans, lorries and the foreigners' military jeeps and trucks. No driver had time to waste peering down into the river to notice the tree. Pedestrians crowded the bridges, smoking and hurrying, gossiping and continuing last night's arguments, and none of them, young or elderly, paused to stop and stand against the rush of movement to look down at the mud-brown water, the spit of gravel and the tree beached on it. As they had in the recent siege of the city, people hurried to complete their journey.