by Scott Turow
“Attila Doby.” A sinewy hand was extended in welcome. Attila was a male name, but the voice was thinner and sounded like a woman’s. The jacket was open but the blue button-down shirt was too loose to reveal if there were skinny breasts beneath. “Merry said you was on your way. So I told my guys who were fetchin you to stay home and I’d zip down from Tuzla myself.”
Attila’s racial origins were also uncertain. There was the freckly complexion of people who years ago were called ‘High Yeller,’ but Attila’s eyes were muddy green, even if the nose had an African breadth. ‘American’ was the only biographical detail I was certain of after he or she had spoken the first words.
Attila grabbed my bag and wheeled it along, waving me to follow across the small parking lot. Attila had a jerky, knock-kneed walk, elbows held away from the body, shoulders peaked as a result. Ultimately, he—that was my best guess—opened the door to a cushy Audi A8, into whose trunk he tossed my luggage.
“So,” Attila said from the driver’s seat, hiking around to back out, “you’re thinking, ‘What in the fuck have I got here?’ Right?” Attila’s eyes hit me briefly before turning forward to put the car in drive. “Don’t bother apologizing. I go through this shit every day. That’s what you’re thinking, true?”
“Right,” I said, realizing I had no way out.
“A woman, okay? Married to a woman. And dress however the fuck I please. But last time I had a skirt on, I was thirteen. Played with the boys since I was three. Okay?” Attila smiled throughout all of this, as if it was all a good-natured joke at her expense.
“And yes,” she said, “the name is Attila. Etelka, actually, but Attila is the closest thing in English. Mom is Hungarian. Dad was a US Army lifer, master sergeant, born in Alabama and passed until his daughter came out a little toasty looking, after which everybody pretended like they didn’t notice. So yeah, I’m one big fuckin freak, and now we got that out of the way, okay?”
“Okay,” I answered, and started laughing. Giddy from jet lag, I couldn’t figure whether I should have been quite this amused by Attila’s candor. “Did you say that General Merriwell sent you?”
“No, I talked to Merry, but it was your guy who ordered a car. Swan?”
“Goos?”
“Goos, shit. Any kind of vehicle for hire—truck, half-track, limousine—that’s my business. One of them anyway.”
We were entering Sarajevo proper, where Tito-era apartment buildings, concrete blocks that resembled high-rise prisons, stood beside contemporary glass towers dressed up with garish Shanghai-style lights. The city I was seeing was no longer the shell-ravaged wreck of twenty years ago, but reconstructing the buildings was probably a lot easier than recovering from the trauma.
“And how is it you know Merry?” I asked.
“He was my senior commanding officer close to half my time in service. Sergeant Major Attila Doby,” she said, sticking a thumb into her sternum, “US Army retired. Twenty years in and a whole fruit salad on my chest. I served under Merry in Desert Storm and he brought me along when he come to Bosnia. I was the top noncombat NCO here—Quartermaster’s Corps. Shit’s always the same in the Army, but QC’s worse. Senior officers were all in Virginia signing contracts and managing future requirements. But you wanted so much as a sheet of toilet paper to wipe your heinie, then better call me.
“My twenty come up in 2000. I mustered out, but the US, man, fifteen years ago—black and queer? People didn’t know what to do with me. I ended up back here a couple years later to straighten out CoroDyn. You know what that is?”
I said no. Attila took a second, nodding to herself as she looked out the auto windshield.
“So here,” she said. “Merry was a great field commander for a lot of reasons, but one of the most important was that he wasn’t afraid to change things. He sort of invented using private defense contractors to take on noncombat functions. It’s a volunteer army, so you need to stretch the troops. Why have your privates doing KP when they can be out toting a bang-bang? CoroDyn was the contractor here, and when I was in service, I was the Army liaison, making sure they did what-all they were supposed to.
“But Bosnia, after the war, there just wasn’t any normal here. And a lot of CoroDyn employees were into sex slaves, twelve-, fifteen-year-old girls they were fucking on the job and trading back and forth. The press got wind of that when Merry was at NATO CENTCOM. After he’d just about choked their CEO to death, he called me up personal and said, ‘How much do I gotta make these monkeys pay you to get you to come back here and run it all?’
“We basically did everything on base that didn’t require shooting. Fed the troops. Ran the buses. Washed the clothes. Provided the trucks and drove them. Stockpiled captured weapons. Handled all the trash. And did most of the bookkeeping. We were like the stage crew and the soldiers were the actors.”
Attila had taken a detour on our way to the highway to show me City Library, an extraordinary structure built in Austro-Hungarian times. The masonry alternated stripes of salmon and rust, while the roof sported a Moorish dome and a line of decorative crenellations. According to Attila, the whole thing had been resurrected from rubble.
“And why is it you’re still here?” I asked. “Your wife?”
“Nope. Met my wife here, but she’s a hell of a lot happier in the US. I gotta go home to see her, isn’t that somethin? Why I’m still here is cause the US Army had hired thousands of Bosnian civilians. Speak English. Clean records. Security clearances. And best, most of them are Muslims, which means they know the rules in Islamic countries. So after the US withdrew, I basically set up an employment agency. I supply Bosnian workers for US military support operations all over the Mideast. Iraq, Afghanistan. Kuwait, Saudi. My people make a good buck and so do I. They work for a year, come back, fuck the wife and buy a house or a car, and then take another assignment. I had four thousand people on my payroll at one point; still more than fifteen hundred. And in the meantime, I bought all the vehicles CoroDyn had no more use for in Bosnia and I rent them out. Like I said, I’m rich, man.”
“And you stay in touch with General Merriwell?”
“Try. Merry was never one of those generals who didn’t know the names of his NCOs. He give me a call two weeks ago about this massacre bullshit, when he was deciding whether to talk to you, and I phoned him back today to hear how it went. And he says he thinks we should be helping you out. That’s all I need to know. I’ll tell you this about Layton Merriwell. I’d lay down my life for the motherfucker. How many generals you think there were in the US Army that’d look at a bull dyke cross-dressing half-breed and say, ‘That’s one fuckin smart soldier, I got her back’? I’m here in Bosnia livin like a king, I got a wife at home in a goddamn mansion, and I owe it all to Merry. So he says help you, here I am.”
I laughed again, enjoying Attila, who seemed to equate speaking with pageantry. I thought she might give me an honest answer to one persistent riddle.
“And why is Merriwell doing that? Trying to help? Do you understand?”
“Well, he didn’t say nothin to explain, but I kinda think I get it. You know, one day everybody from the president of the US on down is suckin your dick and sayin you’re the greatest military commander since Eisenhower, and then all the sudden it’s a headline that you’re this dogbreath jerk that wouldn’t be welcome in most alleys. Try telling yourself you don’t care what people think of you then. So Merry—this is how I figure—Merry is all about his reputation as a commander. Okay, he stuck his pecker in a meat grinder, and everybody laughs instead of salutes when he walks by, but what he’s thinking is, History’s on my side. Eventually, it won’t be about who he was fucking, but the way he led our troops. But not if there’s this story going around that NATO’s first-ever combat operation included burying four hundred people alive in a coal mine. Then he’s just a flat-ass fuckin failure.”
Attila’s theory about Merriwell seemed fairly convincing, although the desire for historical redemption could almost as ea
sily lead the general to lie. But assuming Attila was correct, it made even more remarkable what Merriwell had said to me a few nights back—that when it came to Jamie St. John, he would do it all again.
I asked if Attila had known the major.
“Jamie? Sure. You knew Merriwell, you knew her. She was all the time as close behind him as a fart. Smart, nice shape, no beauty queen. Really good soldier. And always treated me with respect. She was a real person. And Merriwell and her, man, they had it going on. You would have needed the Jaws of Life to extract him from that pussy. He was gettin it like he’d never gotten it before. And good for him, too. Why die wondering, you know?”
Why, indeed. The Jaws of Life had never had to be applied to me, at least not at any time in my memory. I doubted I was better off for that.
“You hungry anyway?” Attila asked. “There won’t be anything open by the time we get to Tuzla. Nice city, but not exactly Manhattan.”
We stopped at a roadside place Attila knew for cevapi, which occupied the same space in the Bosnian diet as a hamburger in the US. They were highly seasoned little logs of ground lamb and beef, served like a gyros on pita with onions and sauce. I enjoyed the cevapi a great deal, but not the trip to the squat toilet in the restaurant, which immediately ensued. There is nothing like the plumbing fixtures to remind you that you’re not in Kansas anymore.
By the time we were back in the car, night was full upon us. In the dark, this part of Bosnia, which I could see only in outline, seemed to resemble Colorado, with mountains of fir trees and A-frame houses, steep-roofed to shed the snow. I was starting to fight sleep, as I still needed to spend some time with Goos once we got to Tuzla. In order to stay awake, I wanted to keep Attila talking, which did not seem like much of a task.
“You mentioned a while ago the ‘bullshit’ I’m investigating.”
“That wasn’t personal, you know. It’s just bullshit.”
“What is?”
“That Americans had anything to do with killing Gypsies.”
“And what about the Roma being massacred? Do you believe that happened?”
“Well, they’re sure as shit gone. You know, with several thousand locals as employees, I heard all kinda stories. As soon as folks noticed that Barupra was a ghost town, the rumor started in that Kajevic got some old Arkans to bury those Gypsies alive. That bunch, the Tigers, they’d seal Granny in a cave if Kajevic said so.”
“And when was it you began hearing that?”
“Shit, I don’t know for sure. When did this supposedly happen? Spring 2004? By late summer, then. Maybe the fall.”
“And why would Kajevic kill four hundred Roma?”
Attila glanced over from the wheel with a telltale smile.
“You’re asking what folks were sayin, right? Cause this security clearance I got is very dear to me. I lose it, and I go back to Kentucky to shovel horse poop and do everything else on the honey-do list. Whatever I know from work, which ain’t much, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Understood. Just what you heard from the locals.”
“They was sayin it was the Roma who tipped the Army about where Kajevic was.”
I took just a second with that, so I didn’t lose my inquisitorial pace. But this pretty clearly was the fact Merriwell had been circling around.
“And how did the Roma know that?”
“Like I said. If I knew and I told ya, I’d have to poison your next cevapi.” She smiled broadly. “But don’t you have some big fuckin secret witness who supposedly was there? Ask him.”
The problem was that Ferko—at least according to Esma—knew nothing about any Roma involvement with Kajevic.
“And Kajevic,” I said. “He would really kill four hundred people for revenge? Women? Children?”
Attila just snorted.
“The guy’s been on the loose fifteen years now. You think that’s just because he’s got the right camouflage gear? He’s made it so if he walks into a supermarket in downtown Sarajevo, everybody turns to face the wall and acts like it would be worse than staring at Jehovah. Killing four hundred people, that’s as good as putting up a billboard that says, Talk and die.”
I said to Attila, “General Merriwell believes there is no way a massacre like that could have happened without American forces knowing.”
Attila responded by making the raspberries.
“Generals,” she said. “I mean, even that general. Sometimes they’d drink their own piss and think it was lemonade.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“But in April 2004,” I asked, “you were working around the American base, if I understand?”
“Every damn day.”
“And at that point—not in the summer, but in the spring—you never heard any Americans talk about the Roma disappearing from Barupra?”
“Not as how I recall.” I took a second to mull on that, and Attila looked over again from the wheel. “You don’t believe me?”
“Well, Attila, it’s strange. There’s no argument there was a big explosion in Barupra in the middle of the night. With four American camps within a few miles, it’s hard to figure that no US troops heard that or asked about it.”
“I didn’t say nobody heard it. What I will tell you is that explosions around Eagle Base were nothin to talk about. Bosnia was the most heavily land-mined area on earth. The Serbs had done it to keep the Muslims from returning to their villages. Which generally worked. I mean, talk about a pathetic sight: These poor folks in rags come back to their houses after a couple years, and you got a whole family sometimes down on their knees, sticking pencils in the ground every three inches, delicate enough to be fucking Tinker Bell. And you know, as soon as they move back in, somebody steps on a square inch they missed, and the house is gone and half the folks in the family have no legs. Around here to this day, you don’t go walkin without someone can tell you what’s safe. And you better pay attention, too.” She looked from the road to be sure I grasped the warning.
“And land mines weren’t all,” Attila added. “Do you know what the main industry is around there?”
I told her I had no idea.
“Mining. Digging for stone. Coal. Salt. ‘Tuzla’ means ‘salt’ in Turkish. By 2004, they were trying to get back to business, which means people were all the time blowing these mountainsides to hell.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Safest time to do it. Everyone’s inside, sheltered from debris. The only thing I’d a done after an explosion from the direction of a coal mine would be cover my head.”
“And what did you think in the fall, when you finally learned that the Roma in Barupra were all gone?”
“Truth? What I thought was, Don’t let the door hit you in the ass. Those people were just always trouble. Capital T. Rhymes with P. And that stands for ‘puke.’”
“And it was okay if Kajevic killed four hundred of them?”
“Course not. But with the Roma, you never know what to believe. The only thing for sure is that whatever they’re tellin you isn’t true.”
I gave Attila a dim look and asked, “But as far as you know, no one from NATO investigated this rumored massacre?”
“That wasn’t our job no more. The Bosnians were back in charge.”
It was exactly as Esma said: Four hundred dead Gypsies were just four hundred fewer problems.
“Besides, you need to understand Bosnia, Boom. This was hell on earth. Even in 2004, there was still horrible shit being discovered every day—mass graves or bones washing up on riverbanks. I know what-all this sounds like when I talk about the Gypsies,” she said. “Having people hate you for no reason? That is my fuckin autobiography. But by 2004, me and just about everyone else was up to here with them in Barupra. I mean, I was around when they first got here in June ’99. You know that story?”
By now, I’d read reports. Like tens of thousands of other Roma in Kosovo, they had been driven from their homes, usually by the Albanians, who took them as Serb allie
s because they practiced the Serbian Orthodox faith. This particular group had been placed in a refugee camp in a town called Mitrovica in Kosovo, right after the NATO bombardment had forced the Serbs to retreat. Within days, the Albanians marched across the main bridge there, surrounded the camp, and set fire to it. Only the intervention of the US ambassador saved the Roma, who then begged the UN to move them close to the US bases in Bosnia, assuming—ironically—they would be safest there. Somehow the UN trucks carrying the Roma refugees arrived at a deserted US installation, Camp Bedrock, before their resettlement had been approved by US commanders.
“One day,” said Attila, “Camp Bedrock is this empty yellow rock, full of weeds and garbage, and the next day all these grimy-looking Gypsies are putting together their shabby-ass tent city. That’s what ‘Barupra’ means in Romany—‘Bedrock.’ Sorta. MPs come out and tell the Blue Hats—you know, the UN guys—Take them back where you got ’em. Like that was gonna work with the UN. Those dickless twerps are probably still driving around trying to find their way back to Kosovo.
“And you know,” Attila said, “your heart hurt for those folks. Run out of one country and livin like dirt in another? The kids especially, they all have these huge dark eyes.
“Merry was the commander here back then, and I was still in service, quartermastering, and he’s like, ‘Attila, see what you can do for these poor wretches.’ So I go over to CoroDyn, asking to find a few of them jobs. Mind you, eighty percent of the Bosnians have got no work. But these Gypsy motherfuckers are truly starving to death. And do you think they show up for work? They breeze in at noon for the eight a.m. shift and then tell you they don’t like paving roads or washing trucks.
“Don’t ask what’s wrong with me. Must be I got a heart bigger than my head, but once I come back from Stateside and was in charge of CoroDyn, and all those folks were still living so bad in Barupra, I decided to try it again. Gypsies all think they know cars like they know horses. So I said to a couple, Tell you what, you don’t want to wash the truck, how about you drive it? They liked that well enough. But they always showed up with a few kids. I could say no all I wanted. Guy’s there every morning with his thirteen-year-old and his ten-year-old, instead of sending them to school, and whenever I turn my back, he’s letting the little one drive a half-track. And if all that wasn’t enough, the bastards started stealing the equipment. You’d send a Gypsy out with a truck in the morning and that was the last you’d see of any of it, them and the truck and whatever was in it. I just had enough finally. I fired them all. God only knows how many millions in shit was missing.”