Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “That’s very kind,” I said.

  “Not really. I end up eating alone too often at the end of the day. Many friends meet me for lunch. But I’m not quite as welcome for dinner with the wives.” He gave a terse smile that was a little too pained to be fully humorous. “Besides, I like lawyers, Mr. Ten Boom.”

  “You don’t hear that said very often, General.”

  “My grandfather was the chief judge of the Military Court of Appeals. He was a very honorable man. Perhaps it’s his influence, but I’m engaged by the way lawyers think, in part because it is so different from the way a soldier views problems. You reason your way to core principles. We concern ourselves most with effects.

  “I guarantee,” he added, “that our interview ended when we walked out of the Bosnian Embassy, just as the law requires. And I assure you I don’t dine grandly enough to constitute a bribe.”

  I laughed. “No, General, the Roma advocate already paid for my dinner last month.”

  “Would that be Ms. Czarni? Is that her name? Then clearly you owe me the same opportunity. Although from what I’m told, I won’t be quite as compelling.”

  “She’s very attractive, if that’s what you mean, General. And very, very smart. And quite determined.” I experienced a familiar trill of feeling in speaking of Esma. “She’s a five-tool player, if you know that term.”

  He laughed out loud for the first time.

  “I do indeed. I love baseball. So we won’t be hard-pressed for conversation. We can talk about the prospects for this season. Any dietary restrictions?”

  “I only eat what’s dead. I draw the line at slaughter. Otherwise, I’m a lifelong member of the Clean Plate Club.”

  He smiled again and said, “Seven?” He gave me the address before walking off.

  7.

  Dining

  The general’s place was at the vast white Watergate complex, and he greeted me at the door to his sixth-floor apartment. Merriwell had removed his jacket but was still in his white shirt and his tie, with a half-consumed whiskey in his left hand.

  While Merriwell was hanging my suit jacket, I heard a clatter from the kitchen. My first thought was that he was living with someone, but then I remembered his remark about eating alone. A servant appeared in an instant, a small Asian man in a white coat, to offer a drink. The general introduced him as Paul and explained that the general’s older brother, a Marine officer, had gotten Paul out of Saigon as a young man.

  “He has four children now,” said Merriwell. “The youngest just graduated from Easton Law. That’s where you met Roger, isn’t it?” The general still had a fond hand on Paul’s shoulder. “We have a great country, Mr. Ten Boom,” he said.

  I held a native suspicion of American jingoism, but a month and a half away from the US had enhanced my appreciation for our country, and I experienced an emotional surge with the general’s remark. In this nation, we did a lot of very big things far better than anyone else.

  Paul returned with my drink, and a second for the general, then Merriwell showed me around the apartment. The decoration was sparse. The attractions were out the long windows. He had a fine view of the Potomac and the monuments. But the real treasury turned out to be his study. The room had a precise order I found intimidating, since I couldn’t keep a space as small as my briefcase that well organized. Merriwell had a collection of Army relics—the insignia of the units he’d served with and the ranks he’d passed through—and a wall of signed photos that made what I’d once been proud of in my office silly by comparison. Layton Merriwell had met virtually everyone in power in Washington in his time. He was pictured beside each president going back to Reagan, often with the incumbent secretary of defense and the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Colin Powell was in a number of pictures. All 8-by-10s, the photographs were arranged evenly on one wall from ceiling to floor, except for a blank spot in the lower right corner.

  “And who goes there?” I pointed. He opened his top drawer and removed an autographed picture of himself shaking with Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees star who was coming off a year’s suspension for using various performance-enhancing chemicals.

  “I’ve just reacquired this, Bill. Is ‘Bill’ all right now that we’re off duty?”

  “I answer more quickly to ‘Boom.’”

  “‘Merry,’” he said, tapping his shirt. I suspected his nickname had been awarded in the same spirit of adolescent irony as mine. Then again, he might have been far more cheerful years ago.

  He said, “It only took eighteen months of negotiations between the lawyers to get a few things from my study at home. You’ve been down this road, Roger tells me.”

  I instantly understood the true motive for my dinner invitation. Divorce after a long marriage is not an isolated phenomenon, but you join a minority for whom there are limited sympathizers.

  “At any rate, Paul’s just finished rearranging all the photographs so we can hang up Mr. Rodriguez tomorrow.”

  I laughed because I’d misunderstood. “I thought you’d just taken it down.”

  “Not at all. People who live in glass houses,” said the general. “I can’t imagine how many photos of me came off of walls in this city, Boom.”

  He forced up a game little smile and replaced the picture in the open drawer, but when he turned back his look was unfocused and he remained quiet for a second, staring at the blank spot on the wall. Unexpectedly, I felt full flush the magnitude of the general’s shame, far more poignantly than I had up until now. Layton Merriwell had been figuratively marched naked down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of a jeering throng. The major papers had been too decorous to publish most of his plaintive e-mails to his former mistress, but the lurid Internet sites that reveled in that sort of thing trotted out every word—angry, tormented, beseeching, and all too often, pornographic. He’d endured having all the teeming internal stuff most of us never share displayed to the entire world, knowing it would always come to mind with his name.

  I was saved from attempting a comforting remark, because Paul announced dinner. A bowl of crab soup was curling steam on the old mahogany table.

  The general proved to be a fine raconteur. As he’d promised, we talked about baseball. Merry had plenty of stories, insider stuff garnered from his relationships with a number of team owners and general managers. The anecdotes were funny, or more often inspirational, about the athletes who responded to their great success with unusual humility or generosity. Merriwell also possessed a remarkable memory for statistics. He had high hopes for the Yankees this year. Coming from Kindle County, a lifelong Trappers fan, I had no hope at all.

  When Paul removed the dinner plates, the general waved me back down the hall to his study, where he asked me to hold his scotch—the fourth, by my count—while he used a mahogany library stool to reach the top of a closed cabinet. He climbed down balancing two huge leather display cases with silver latches. He opened them both on his desk to reveal a remarkable collection of autographed baseballs. In every velvet-lined square compartment, the balls were turned precisely to reveal the signatures across their equators by the greats of the game going back to Napoleon Lajoie, who became a star near the end of the nineteenth century. He had signed balls from Honus Wagner, whose career statistics I’d known since I was a boy, as well as record-breaking hitters like Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby. Merriwell’s second case was devoted solely to Yankee stars of the last century—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Dickey, Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Jeter, and A-Rod.

  I wowed for several seconds, while the general extracted a pair of white livery gloves from a drawer. He put on one and used it to remove the Gehrig ball. Merry offered me the other, and then the baseball. Struck with ALS, Lou Gehrig had declared himself “the luckiest man in the world” on the day he retired. He, clearly, was the kind of guy a soldier would admire.

  “I have been all over the world in temporary quarters,” Merriwell said, “where I had nothing besides my uniforms. So I was surp
rised how much I missed these things. Of course, I still don’t have what I wanted most.”

  “Which is?”

  “The photos of my children, which were in my study at home. Florence claims them, too.” He shook his head in wonder at the tidal wave of bitterness that now engulfed his life.

  I explained that Ellen and I had divorced in relative peace.

  “I went through enough, though,” I said, “to know that five years of divorce litigation is worse than torture.”

  My sympathy was real, although it would not have been very hard to write a brief for Mrs. Merriwell. She’d held house and home together for forty years, while Merry was out being great, and had probably believed that she had the relatively contented marriage with all its sharp compromises and reluctant acceptance that many couples know. Then she picked up the morning paper. There she discovered not only that her husband had achieved some hitherto unknown peak of satisfaction with another woman, but that the female in question was younger than one of their daughters, and even worse, that he had ultimately begged that girl for the chance to throw over Mrs. Merriwell, to whom he referred repeatedly in unrefined terms. Perhaps the most painful revelation of all was that he regarded his time with his wife in the wake of the affair as a barren purgatory to which he was now confined as some kind of poetic punishment for the rapture he’d briefly experienced.

  “No end to that case in sight?” I asked.

  “I’ve wanted to negotiate. None of us—my wife, my daughters, or me—needs to provide the press with another field day by going to court, but I’m losing hope. I’m earning a large income for the first time in my life and Florence gets half of it as long as she holds out.” He glanced up, with that whimsical smile that had first begun to emerge near the end of our meeting at the embassy. “There is a reason people hate lawyers, Boom.

  “And, of course,” he added, “while nothing is resolved, my daughters seem to feel obliged to side with their mother. I had a granddaughter last year, whom I’m yet to meet.” He’d had too much to drink to remain completely stoical with that remark, and his gray eyes shifted south for a second. “But I received that photo at Christmas. So there’s hope.” I admired the picture of a beautiful, tow-headed lump framed at the very epicenter of his desk.

  “And what about your life now?” I asked. “How are you finding dating?”

  “Oh,” said Merriwell. “There’s been none of that. My lawyer believes it would only add fuel to the fire, since it will inevitably be a public event. And I’m not sure I’m ready anyway.”

  “After five years, Merry, you’re probably as ready as you’re going to get.”

  “Ten, really.” I didn’t understand for a second. Then I realized that he was referring to Major St. John. “It’s bound to involve compromises that I don’t want to face.” A crippling bolt of emotion, sped by alcohol, palsied his features for only a second and he refused to look my way as I took in the fact that the man remained heartbroken. Merry gazed into his drink.

  “I lived a life of discipline,” he said. “And then I could summon it no longer. I wish I could say that with hindsight I would never do it again. I am devastated by the pain I caused everyone else. But I have a far better idea now of who I am. I would never want to have lived without learning that.” He peeked up at last. “Is that shocking?”

  “Of course not,” I said, although I wasn’t positive I meant that. “I’m just trying to add it all up, Merry.”

  “And what does it come to?”

  “I doubt my impressions are worth much.”

  “No excuses,” he said. “Something seems to have struck you.”

  I turned it all over for a second more.

  “I’m sure I’m way out of place, and probably wrong,” I said, “but you seem to be giving everybody permission to punish you, starting with yourself, as if that will make up for the value you attach to that experience. I think it’s time to move on and take advantage of what you’ve learned. I have no clue where I’m going, but I feel a lot better moving ahead than I did during the years I seemed to be standing still.”

  In all likelihood, I was the one thousandth person to tell Layton Merriwell something like this. But that didn’t mean the other 999 had been heard. He stared at me as if it were the Annunciation.

  “Thank you,” he said at last. Nine had just passed. I called a car and removed my jacket from his closet. We stood together at the door.

  “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Boom. I hope it’s not the last occasion.”

  “Same here, Merry.”

  Life, of course, is full of people you discover you like a lot and then never see again. It’s one of the many small tragedies of going around only once. We both seemed to be contemplating that fact.

  “I wish you luck with your investigation, Boom. I truly do. I don’t know what you will find. But I’m certain what you won’t.” He opened the door and extended his hand, which I took. To my surprise, Merriwell held on for a second.

  “I did give some thought to what you said about the Army’s records absolving all of us. And there’s one aspect you may not have considered. The control of the documents you’d like to see, Boom, is more complicated than you may have recognized. Our troops were operating under NATO command. So some are NATO’s papers, others are duplicated in NATO’s files. If I were you, I’d look carefully at NATO’s Status of Forces Agreement and pay attention to the provisions about assistance in investigating crimes.”

  As soon as he said this, I knew it was a revelation unlikely ever to have struck me. Except for the US, all the countries in NATO had signed the ICC treaty, which meant they would be obliged to cooperate with a document request from the Court.

  I looked at him levelly for a minute before saying thank you.

  III.

  Bosnia

  8.

  Attila—April 11–15

  My weekend in Kindle County, as I probably could have predicted, proved frequently charged. Being back made me recognize how persistent my sense of foreignness had been in The Hague, where I knew from waking to sleeping that layers of meaning lay in virtually every word and gesture that were simply beyond me. The contrasting realization that I no longer lived in the Tri-Cities left me feeling slightly off-balance at all times.

  On Saturday, my younger son, Pete, who could magically score tickets for any sporting event, bought seats for himself and his brother and me for the Trappers game, the home opener. I pretended to be thrilled, but I’d given up on Opening Day two decades before, because it was almost never baseball weather in Kindle County. As I expected, the temperature did not reach 40, and after braving five innings, we adjourned to a nearby tavern, where we took turns making fun of each other, usually two on one, more often both boys against me.

  In The Hague, I’d had standing phone dates with each of my sons, 6 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively, when I was reaching them at the end of their days in the Midwest. They’d sounded good, but the reassurance of seeing them in the flesh now was uplifting.

  The Saturday night dinner with the Rosenbergs was a success, with warm toasts and nearly constant laughter. Pete and Brandi had been together since high school, and after years of misgivings from all four parents, we had all come to recognize what the couple had seen long before: They were a durable, loving match.

  Afterward, I went home with my ex and her husband, Howard, an engineer who’d become unfathomably rich as one of the original patent trolls. Having a former spouse with whom you get along is a little like acquiring another sibling, someone who knows you intimately and with indelible affection. On the other hand, most of us would go screaming in the other direction at the thought of again living under the same roof with a sib, and the prospect of even a single night here filled me with apprehension. I’d accepted because Ellen, in her usual direct style, had made an unassailable argument: “Who else are you going to barge in on at eleven p.m. on Saturday night? The boys don’t have room.”

  I’m sure Ellen had wanted to
show off the splendor of her new life in the mansion on Lake Fowler that Howard had built with his first wife, who’d died of cancer more than six years ago. But my stay proved calm and companionable. I enjoyed the comforts of their guest house, then moved down to Center City on Sunday morning to begin my labors with my former partners and clients. After two days of listening to oil executives make unconvincing excuses, I was happy to depart.

  I arrived in Bosnia at dusk Wednesday. From Kindle County, I’d had a nine-hour flight to Istanbul and a layover there in the terminal, which is stylish, but thronged and airless as a casket. In Sarajevo, I emerged into what was no bigger than a regional airport in the US, with robin’s-egg signs declaring DOBRODOSLI U SARAJEVO.

  Before I had taken my job in The Hague, Bosnia, to me, like most Americans, had always seemed remote, baffling, and largely irrelevant. The Cyrillic alphabet, which was used frequently, was indecipherable to me; the language, Serbo-Croatian, bore no resemblance to the Western languages I knew; and I understood next to nothing about the two largest religions, Islam and Serbian Orthodox. I arrived prepared for something very different, and found that expectation immediately met.

  Goos had flown into Tuzla through Austria that morning in order to complete arrangements for our trip to Barupra tomorrow, but had promised to send a car for me. I didn’t see my name on the placards carried by three or four dark-suited drivers, but I suddenly heard someone calling, “Boom.” The person waving was not only nobody I knew, but also weirdly unrecognizable on a more basic level.

  This is what I saw: someone rangy and lean, about five foot nine, with a springy mass of brown hair, dressed in oversize worn jeans cinched at the waist and a round-necked Members Only windbreaker at least two decades old, smiling exuberantly as if we were meeting again after years apart. I was feeling out-of-body due to the travel and the unfamiliar locale, and my mind spun like an old disc drive as it grasped for a fundamental category, namely, gender. I thought immediately of Pat, a sketch character on Saturday Night Live who appeared for several seasons, eluding the intrepid but fruitless efforts of everyone else to determine if Pat was a boy or a girl.