Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “And what comes next?”

  I answered that we were still awaiting what might be the big break in the case, the production of records.

  “That could only be from the US Army.”

  “I really shouldn’t say, Esma.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it’s confidential. The Court is a very formal place. Everything is secret. There are always rules.”

  “And if you followed them strictly, we would not be lying here.”

  She was right about that, even though I was perturbed to hear her acknowledge this only now, when it was convenient. On the other hand, the legal principles involved in the document request were not secret. I explained the concepts, without saying explicitly we had acted upon them.

  “And the US is rebuffing NATO?”

  “NATO doesn’t report to me. But that’s certainly my impression.”

  “And no one can force the Americans to comply. Is that the point?”

  “We could sue in the International Court of Justice. But the Bosnians probably wouldn’t support that. And even if they did, it would take another four to five years to get the records.”

  “No other options?”

  “None that I can think of.”

  She propped herself up on her elbow and smiled disarmingly.

  “The press can be very effective in this kind of situation, you know.”

  “Badu and Akemi would have a fit. Leaking is not their style. I had to move heaven and earth to get them to do this in the first place.”

  “You don’t need permission to leak, Bill. You need deniability.”

  As US Attorney, I had been rigid with my staff about leaking. The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure forbade any disclosure of grand jury matters, and I had no use for the idea that prosecutors should enforce the law by breaking it, no matter how effective it might be. I had to assume that the ICC’s Rules of Conduct for prosecutors were the same, although the truth was that I’d never bothered to look. I promised her that I’d undertake the research, but only so we could change the subject.

  Around 3 a.m., I had come for the fourth time that day—as to Esma, there was no way to keep track, because she peaked so often—and she had padded down the stairs afterward to use the john. I was lolling ecstatically, amazed with myself, thinking without conclusions about Merriwell’s declaration that he might well do it all again, when I suddenly froze. I thought I had heard the front door slam. Nara was not due back until late on Sunday, at least sixteen hours from now, and I told myself that the sound must have come from the rear apartment. But I was still listening intently when I heard the distinct clack of high heels on the wooden floor of the living room. I searched my closet desperately for my robe and was still wrestling it on as I rushed down.

  Just below me, a remarkable confrontation was occurring outside the bathroom door. Esma, who wore not a stitch, had used her hands as cover-ups, one sloshed across her breasts, the other over the female triangle. Nara and she were staring at one another, startled but also somehow unflinching. When I was still a few stairs away, Esma let her arms fall, in an act of what seemed both pride and defiance.

  I dashed between them and, stupid as it was, made introductions. Esma smiled a bit at Narawanda, who was in a silk dress and hosiery and heels, but said not a word. I grabbed a bath towel out of the john and offered it to Esma, but she ignored me and turned to head slowly up the stairs, looking very good while she was at it.

  “I didn’t realize you were having a guest,” Nara finally managed.

  “I didn’t either when you left. She arrived unexpectedly this morning. I would have said something had I known.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was sure you said you wouldn’t be back until late tomorrow.” I looked at my watch. “Or today, I guess.”

  “I did. My plans changed unexpectedly.”

  “I should have called you. I’m sorry.”

  “Nonsense. You live here. It is I who should be apologizing to you. I said I would be away.”

  We looked at each other haplessly for a second, and then Nara picked up her small red suitcase, which had been behind her, and started up her side of the stairs.

  Esma, still naked, was propped against the pillows in my bed, smiling subtly, when I arrived. She seemed quite pleased with herself.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  Esma shook her head slowly. “Not a word. Neither of us spoke. We each knew who the other was. There was no need for introductions.”

  Given my qualms about the proprieties, I had certainly not told Nara that I was seeing Esma, but I took it that Esma meant that the circumstances had led each to rather quickly appreciate the other’s position: the lover, the landlady.

  “She had a fight with her husband?” Esma asked.

  “She didn’t say that.”

  “A woman arrives home at 3 a.m.? A woman who you’ve told me likes to be asleep by ten. She left London precipitously. Bill, really. I am constantly flabbergasted by how little you understand about my half of the species.” She smiled. “Come lay down. Let’s nap awhile and then make the bedposts knock before I must go.”

  18.

  Deal—May 15–28

  Five days later, early Friday morning, I was reading the New York Times on my tablet while I stood in the kitchen, drinking coffee. As the lead news bloomed on-screen, I endured one of those instants when your vision throbs and your heart seems to cramp as you realize that the life you know and value has changed against your will.

  An article on the lower left side of the page was headlined:

  Army Blocking International Court and NATO in Roma Massacre Investigation

  The United States is refusing to comply with a request by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for U.S. Army records being sought as part of an International Criminal Court investigation of the alleged massacre of 400 Roma in Bosnia in 2004. U.S. troops who were acting as NATO peacekeepers in the area are potential suspects in the case.

  The U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court, and U.S. law bars American cooperation in the court’s investigations, but legal experts say that American treaty obligations seem to require the Army to surrender the records to NATO. The U.S. has refused to do so and has reportedly made vehement protests about NATO turning over records from the organization’s own files.

  The situation is said to have caused serious tensions within NATO’s multinational Central Command in Belgium, and considerable consternation at the International Criminal Court, which has no formal means to enforce U.S. compliance.

  In March, a survivor of the massacre testified before the court, which is situated in The Hague in the Netherlands, that in April 2004, 400 Roma in the Barupra refugee camp at the edge of a U.S. base were rounded up at gunpoint by masked soldiers and buried alive in the pit of a coal mine. The witness could not identify the soldiers’ military affiliation, but said they were not speaking Serbo-Croatian, the language of the local armies and paramilitaries.

  The alleged massacre occurred within weeks of the death of four American soldiers and the wounding of eight others during a failed attempt to capture the refugee Bosnian Serb leader, Laza Kajevic. According to NATO sources, the Romas at Barupra were suspected of providing some of the equipment used by Kajevic’s forces.

  The second half of the article quoted a former general in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and two law professors, all of whom had been asked whether the Army could refuse to provide the records, given the conflicting mandates of the American Service-Members’ Protection Act on one hand, and on the other, the NATO treaty, the Dayton Accords, and the NATO Status of Forces Agreement. The former general called it a “close question, but one where the Army might not prevail,” while the two law professors believed that the treaty obligations clearly prevailed, especially with regard to records not stored in the US.

  I rea
d the piece several times. It claimed to be based on multiple sources, and it was especially notable that someone at NATO, given the chance, had taken the opportunity to piss on the Americans. But there were also details concerning the Court—that there was consternation regarding how to respond to the US refusal—that left me with a nauseating feeling about where the reporter had gotten her start.

  My phone rang as I was pondering. The caller ID was blocked, which was not an encouraging sign.

  “Well, aren’t you a clever motherfucker.” It was Roger. By my calculation, it was a little after midnight in DC, which meant the alarm had gone out at State when the Times was posted about an hour ago. Roger was the one who’d convinced his colleagues that I was a square guy who’d do it all by the book.

  “It wasn’t me, Rog.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” he said. “You’re too smart for that, Boom. It was that tramp you think is your girlfriend.” A couple of words resounded: ‘tramp,’ of course, and especially ‘girlfriend.’ Why hadn’t I bothered to wonder if the CIA was going to follow me around? Or was it Esma they’d been tailing?

  Roger had done a lot of work in an hour and called in some favors. No one at the Times would give up Esma’s name, but he’d wheedled enough out of somebody—probably three or four people—that he could triangulate his way to an answer. I had a litigator’s response to his harsh tone and was unwilling to concede anything.

  “Read the article again,” I said. “I have no clue what’s going on at NATO in Brussels. So go wake up somebody else.”

  “Fuck you. Don’t play that game with me. You know how this works. One person talks, then somebody else spills so they can spin things their way. But the daisy chain started with Little Miss Gypsy Hotpants. I’ve got that nailed down. And I know how she works. I’m sure the whole activist network is set to squeal—Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, along with various leftie congressmen who hate having to pretend that they respect the military. But let me tell you right now: You won’t succeed. I didn’t think you were this low, Boom.”

  One thing trial lawyers get used to is fierce fights with close friends. When I was US Attorney, I watched countless former colleagues march to the door of my office in fury, indignant about my decisions regarding their clients. It was part of the job.

  “Stop the high-and-mighty routine, Roger. I didn’t do it. And it would be nothing compared to the changes you ran on me. You sent me over here with about one percent of the information you actually had. Did you really think I’d miss all the evidence that points at the US troops?”

  He took a second. “And why do you say that?”

  “Rog, you’re not asking me to break any rules about the confidentiality of investigative information, are you?”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself.”

  “Let me ask you something. Is this the first time you’ve heard that the Roma at Barupra supplied some of the equipment Kajevic used when he killed those four soldiers?”

  He was quiet.

  “Anybody ever say to you, Rog, that the Roma had actually set up the Americans?”

  “You’re full of shit,” said Roger and hung up.

  I phoned Esma next.

  “How dare you,” I said as soon as I heard her voice. “After all the bullshit you gave me that you were choosing me over your involvement in this case.”

  “Bill?” she asked. I’d clearly woken her.

  “You took advantage of my confidence and our bedroom.”

  I could hear her breathing, weighing her options. Assuming she’d been sleeping, she couldn’t have read the article yet, and thus didn’t know how much of her role was betrayed by what had been printed.

  “I did what you wanted but couldn’t do yourself,” she said finally.

  I hung up on her.

  I pedaled to work feeling like I was going to my beheading. The only positive note was discovering that I really didn’t want to lose this job, especially not in disgrace.

  I was in my little white office no more than ten minutes when Goos came in and closed the door. He rolled his lips inward, trying not to smile. He was happy, but looked a little haggard. I took it that Thursday was a drinking night in The Hague.

  “I’d call that a ripper piece of work, Boom,” he said. “Brilliant.”

  “It might have been, Goos. But I didn’t do it.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he answered at once.

  “No horse hockey. This may be my fault, but it wasn’t anything I intended to set in motion.”

  He let his head weigh back and forth. He was accustomed to the world of the Court, where there was so little formal power that you took advantage of whatever you had. In the case in Sudan I’d been reviewing, the investigator had smoked out witnesses with a false leak, bought by the papers, that an insider was cooperating with us. But that tactic had been approved at the top.

  “Well, I think this will work out rather well, despite that,” Goos said.

  “If I keep my job.”

  “Keep your job? Mate, you still have no idea how this place works.”

  Within the hour, I was summoned to a meeting of the OTP executive committee. We sat around the corner table in Badu’s office beside the large windows. As we gathered, the old man was reading what appeared to be a printout of the net version of the article. He set it down when all of us had taken our seats.

  “Do we half any idea how this o-ccurred?” Badu asked.

  Octavia Bonfurts, a grandmotherly looking former diplomat, who was representing Complementarity today, spoke up before I could even clear my throat.

  “This has Gautam’s DNA all over it,” said Octavia. “I checked the archive. This reporter did a profile of Gautam when she was appointed. Look at the heavy-handed portrait of the evidence against the Americans.”

  Badu nodded gravely. As the discussion continued, I learned that Badu had felt obliged to advise the president of the Court, one of the judges who serves as the Court’s chief executive, about the document request to NATO. She, in turn, was likely to have informed the other two judges on the Court’s administrative committee, Judge Gautam being one. Furthermore, now that I considered Octavia’s remark, the brief précis of Ferko’s testimony did sound just like Gautam. As Roger said, leaking had a bandwagon effect: Once the story was coming out, everyone wanted to tell it his or her way.

  Akemi, with her fright-wig hairdo and heavy glasses, was bent close to the page. As always, she was focused on the details.

  “These Gypsies provided Kajevic equipment? What kind of equipment?”

  I explained what we knew thus far about the trucks, and the motives both the Americans and Kajevic might have had for revenge in the aftermath of the shootout. Around the table, my colleagues made various approving gestures, intrigued and somewhat impressed by what we had discovered. I was so relieved about the way all this was unfolding that I wanted to hug everyone here.

  We took a second to discuss the possible American responses to the article. They did not seem to have good alternatives, except thumbing their nose at the world, which was probably not worth it on what was from a global perspective a minor matter.

  Badu laid his large hands on the papers in front of him, uttering that throaty chuckle.

  “I would say,” he said then, “dis has worked out rudder well.”

  As we adjourned, I suspected that a secret ballot would show that at least half the people in the room believed Badu was the source of the leak.

  I had not seen Narawanda since the incident with Esma late Saturday night, and I realized that her scarceness was no accident. When I arrived from work on Friday, she was in her black Lycra outfit, wearing a knit stocking cap to ward off the fierce sea wind that had blown in this afternoon. I’d caught her again with one of her legs stretched on the back of the sofa. Every time I saw Nara getting ready to exercise, she looked like someone else. Today, with her hair completely covered, isolating her round umber face, she resembled a Buddhist nun. Her eyes hit the floor
as soon as she saw me.

  Half turned, she asked, in the especially stilted way she adopted when she was most uncomfortable, “Shall I await you?”

  “Please.” I changed and was back in a minute. She had put on her gloves in the interval.

  “Nara, I need to apologize to you again.”

  “Oh no.” She shook her head with some force but was still too embarrassed to actually face me. “This is your home. You must do as you please here. If my head was not in the clouds, I would have given a call.”

  We could go on with each of us blaming ourselves for quite some time. I raised my hands just to indicate it was a standoff. I started to stretch myself.

  “She is the Roma advocate?” Nara asked. “When you gave me her name, I recognized it from the articles about your case I read online.”

  I straightened up. There was a lot contained in that sentence. For one thing, I was surprised Nara had been curious enough about me to bother with any research. More to the point, however, was my concern that she understood Esma’s role in my case.

  “Do you feel you should report me?”

  Nara’s mouth parted. “For fucking?”

  Narawanda’s word choice was often amusing, but this time I couldn’t stifle an outright laugh.

  “For fucking someone involved in my case.”

  Nara wobbled her head to show she didn’t get the point.

  “I don’t know the rules of your Court completely, but at our Court she would have no official role right now. And besides, you don’t fully understand The Hague. So many people are away from home for long periods. There are always affairs and sneaking around. You would be surprised what gets ignored here.”

  I wasn’t sure other people’s infractions did anything to cure mine, but I took her analysis as kindly. I also noticed how instinctively Nara became a defense lawyer.

  “She is very handsome,” said Nara. “With an impressive physique.” This time that tiny ironic grin crept from the shadows for a second. “She has enchanted you?”