by Scott Turow
“She certainly had. Today I’m very put out with her—and with myself for not staying away.”
“Sex is very potent for men,” she said. “And willingness. A woman who radiates experience and confidence is very sexy, I think. No?”
“Yes,” I answered.
Her face darkened somewhat. “I was a virgin when I married. That was one vow to my mother I could not break. Now of course I regret that.” Her eyes again were aimed at the floor. Then she recovered and said we should run.
Nara’s remark about her virginity was not wholly shocking, since there really was never any anticipating what precisely was going to come out of her mouth. Nevertheless, as we took off, I was struck by her note of retrospective regret about her sexual history.
As we ran, I was happy I’d followed her example and worn a hat and gloves. The wind off the North Sea today was like an ice pick. Nonetheless, we kept up a good pace through the park for nearly an hour. Afterward, given the weather, we found a corner inside at a café on the Plein.
“So how was London?” I asked.
“Well, clearly not very good, if I was home a day early,” she answered. I didn’t know if she was annoyed at me for playing dumb, or simply irritated by the memory, but I explained, somewhat apologetically, that I’d had no idea why she was back early, and thought it might have been due to a change in Lew’s plans. That remark inspired a bitter smile.
“Well, his plans have changed in a way. Lewis asked me to find a job in New York.”
“Ah.” I said no more.
“We talked about that before we married. Now he acts as if all of those discussions do not count.”
“I’m sure he meant what he said when he said it, but it’s hard to be away from home,” I said. “I enjoy The Hague, but I would need to think hard about making a lifetime commitment.”
“He did think hard,” she answered. “And besides, how am I to find a position in the US? The job market for lawyers is still not very good. And I love my work here. If they ever capture Kajevic, and they will someday, I’ll join his private lawyer as senior counsel on his defense team. Mr. Bozic has already asked me.”
“I don’t think I’d count on them rounding up Kajevic, Nara. It’s been what, fifteen years?”
“Of course. My point is that I have more and more responsibility at the Court and I enjoy that.”
Having failed at my own marriage, I did not regard myself as an adept counselor, but she was clearly seeking consolation of some kind.
“People manage marriages in two cities.”
“Separated by an ocean? We decided together that we did not want a life apart.”
“Then you can trade off five-year blocks—five in New York, five here. I know couples who do that, too.”
She moved her head unhappily. Normally stoic, Nara was nearing the point of tears. Despite the frankness of our conversation, there remained some topics that were unapproachable and probably paining her, especially the question of children.
“It is not merely a matter of what or where,” she said. “It is the idea that he thinks he can make an announcement. Lewis has always been very self-sufficient. But he threatens me with that.”
Nara unfailingly described her husband as insular. My impression was that at the time they married, she found his remoteness a comfortable match for her own reticence, but that compact, and the size of their separate emotional spaces, was starting to trouble her.
I was sympathetic with the problem of having a spouse who felt unreachable at times. In some ways, Nara spoke about her marriage much as I might have talked about mine at the same stage, assuming I would ever have discussed it with the same guileless openness she did. In the long haul, the Logans’ relationship was probably not a good bet. But I would have been petrified if anyone had said as much to me, and I would have regarded the prediction as offensive. Perhaps, like Ellen and me, Nara and Lew would have kids and in that satisfaction mend much of the natural breach between them.
“Marriage is hard, Nara. It’s a little like Churchill’s remark about democracy. It’s a terrible idea, except for the alternatives. At least for most people.”
She’d had more than her usual one beer as the conversation had worn on, and once we were walking home, she reached up to give me a comradely pat on the back.
“You are a good friend to me, Boom. I am very grateful.”
The coverage of the skirmish between the US Defense Department and NATO continued throughout the following week. Because Bosnia was the first actual combat operation NATO had ever engaged in, many questions I would have thought were long resolved had to be decided for the first time. It turned out that most of the records of SFOR—as the Bosnian operation was known at NATO—or digital copies of them, were housed in the NATO archives in Belgium. Although it struck me as one of the idiotic ways the law finds to resolve difficult issues, the physical location of the files was central to the legal analysis, because the Service-Members’ Protection Act applied only within the US.
The political scrambling was also going full speed. The White House and the State Department were taking a different tone than DoD, since the story was not unspooling favorably for the US. References were appearing online to ‘a new My Lai,’ the massacre of five hundred Vietnamese villagers by US forces more than four decades ago, to which Merriwell had referred as a signal event of his days as a newly minted officer. In the ten-second world of broadcast news, the reports were framed as the US Army stonewalling questions our allies wanted answered. The journalists, who by professional bias despised bureaucratic secrecy, were piling on. Badu and Goos were correct: This was working out rather well. The publicity even seemed to light a fire under the Bosnians, who approved our return trip, which would now depend on the convenience of Madame Professor Tchitchikov.
Esma was calling me several times a day but I refused to pick up. Finally, she must have borrowed someone else’s phone.
“May I see you in person to discuss this?” she asked.
Her strategy was laughably transparent. Get me in a room and let the little head think for the big one.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Esma. Once burned, twice wise.”
“Oh please, Bill. Don’t be so fucking dramatic. It was a miscalculation on my part. I thought you would be overjoyed.”
“Esma, principle is clearly far less important to you than it is to me.”
“Bill, don’t condescend. We cannot hash this through on the phone. I can get to The Hague next weekend.”
“Don’t do that, Esma. You’ll be wasting your time.”
I hung up, albeit with more than a small pang. A part of me did not want to accept that this was over, particularly the tonic element Esma had added to my life.
On Friday, a week after our talk on the Plein, Nara announced that she’d taken a few days’ leave and was going to New York.
“That sounds like a smart idea,” I told her.
“I am not very sure of that,” she answered. “Lewis is brilliant about using many different words to say the same thing. He rarely changes his mind.”
“Then try changing yours a little. You’ll never regret giving this your best.”
She stood on tiptoe to deliver a fleeting half hug as she departed.
“Okay, asshole, this is how it’s going to be.” I was in my office at the Court about 3 p.m. the following Wednesday when my personal cell rang.
“Good day to you, too, Rog.”
“Let me tell you right now that if it was up to me, I’d tell you to fuck off. The whole thing with these records will be forgotten next week.”
I chose not to respond.
“The records,” he said, “all the records, will be provided to the NATO Supreme Allied Commander at the time of the alleged incident for his review.”
It took me a second. “Layton Merriwell?”
Rog cleared his throat. “I think that was the guy.”
“Okay, so the supreme commander, whatever his name was, g
ets the records. Then what?”
“If he chooses, he may meet with you on US soil. And if he gives you any records, that’s his choice, even though it will be a clear violation of the Service-Members’ Protection Act.”
I didn’t get it. “Merry and I get to share a prison cell?”
“There’s no criminal provision in that law, hotshot. And as you already know, Merriwell is in favor of opening the books on all of this. But if any American were to be prosecuted in the future on the basis of any of these documents, he or she could claim that the records were produced in violation of the act and therefore are not competent evidence in any court.”
It was a clever plan, aimed at reducing the risk that any American soldier could be prosecuted on the basis of these documents. I told Roger I’d need to run it up the flagpole here.
“You may as well just say yes now. Because it won’t get any better. You have twenty-four hours before this offer vanishes. The generals will get to someone in Congress by then. If you accept, the State Department, NATO, and the Court will each release their own statements that say the matter has been resolved and not one word more.”
Badu and Akemi agreed with me that this was a pretty good deal for us, assuming Merriwell would make a full breast of the documents. But since he was the one who’d suggested going to NATO in the first place, that seemed largely assured.
I called Rog back to go over a couple of nuances and then agreed.
“Deal,” I told him.
“Let the record reflect that I resent the shit out of this,” Roger said.
“So noted.”
Merriwell called the next day.
“So we meet again,” he said.
“It will be my pleasure. Are we back at the embassy?”
“No, no. We have to meet on American soil in order to preserve any future claim that the Service-Members’ Act has been violated. But the press has gotten interested in me again this week. Any chance we could get together at your house?”
“In Kindle County?” I was about to tell him I didn’t have a home there any longer, but I realized instantly how eager Ellen would be to make the guest house available for a matter that had been mentioned on the front page of the New York Times. And even the most intrepid reporter was unlikely to follow Merry to the Tri-Cities.
As I expected, Ellen was excited by Merriwell’s name, even though I apologized for being unable to explain much about why we were meeting. After comparing calendars, we all agreed that Merry and I would get together at Ellen and Howard’s the following Monday. To further complicate things, the French geologist announced she would be available next week for the only time in months. So I made plans to again ping-pong between the continents, going to the US first and then to Bosnia to meet the professor and Goos.
V.
Trouble
19.
Home Run—May 30–June 1
I arrived in Kindle County about two on Saturday afternoon. As soon as I turned on my phone after the long flight, there was another series of messages from Esma—multiple missed calls, a plaintive e-mail, and two texts. I had refused to answer her again after our last brief conversation, and the silence seemed to be driving her to extremes. The most recent SMS read: Bill—I wanted to say this in person, but you must know that try as I must, I think I’ve fallen in love with you. I simply cannot let go. It is much too late for that. I must see you and try to make this right.
This sounded like dialogue from a 1930s movie, and the subtext seemed to be all about Esma’s ego. Esma was in ‘love’ with me only because I was not in love with her, never mind her own cautions on the subject. Someday, when I finished bringing international justice to the globe, I was going to figure out the connection between self-image and love.
From the airport, I went to the home of close friends, where I was going to spend the night. Sonny Klonsky, now a federal judge, had started in the US Attorney’s Office about the same time I had. She had made a happy second marriage to Michael Wiseman, a nationally syndicated columnist, a delightful wise guy with whom I shared a sense of humor. They hosted a barbecue in my honor Saturday evening, to which they invited several old pals of mine, including Sandy Stern, everyone’s favorite defense lawyer, who was living in the alternate universe of cancer remission, in which, he admitted, he was never quite sure he was really here.
On Sunday, I left the Wisemans at 5 a.m. so I could fish with Will and Pete. The white bass were running in the River Kindle, and down water the boats were anchored so closely you could have walked shore to shore on their prows. But the boys and I had a secret spot where we fished near shore in waders. It was just below an outcropping in a public park that we reached with a minor act of vandalism requiring pruning shears. The late spring morning was bright and warm, and there were plenty of fish, attracted by another family trick, a bit of red yarn above the lure.
I was proud of my sons, who had both become decent, loving, industrious men, although I always recoiled a bit when I noticed failings of their mother’s or mine one or both boys had incorporated—Ellen’s judginess, or my occasional remoteness. One of the sayings I live by about families is that children occupy the space provided. Will had taken on my solid manner and was advancing quickly at the Tri-Cities office of a New York firm, where he did the legal engineering for complex currency swaps on the Kindle County exchanges. At twenty-nine, he’d found one of those comfortable niches in the law that was virtually guaranteed to provide a livelihood forever.
Pete, by contrast, had been the brooding child, the one we worried about more. There were drugs in high school and academic struggles in college. He had emerged from that period with a keen interest in computers and had developed three different apps that had been purchased by bigger companies. Will always seemed a bit affronted by the magnitude of Pete’s success, although he often joked he was relieved to find out he would not be obligated to support his little brother.
With both sons, there had been a rough time when I left their mother. I knew what it was like to be surprised and disappointed by a parent; and I understood that my sons had lost the home they’d always counted on being able to return to. But their absolute conviction that their feelings were the only ones that mattered became infuriating. After a year, I had declared a rule that once in every conversation they had to ask, “How are you, Dad?” whether or not they really cared about my response.
But all that was now past. My move to The Hague and Pete’s imminent marriage had somehow completed cooling all the lava to solid rock. Standing in the shallows, a few feet from shore, we were three independent adults who accepted our mutual connections as indelible.
After fishing, we had lunch while watching the Trappers game in a sports bar, then Will drove me out to Lake Fowler, where he’d already agreed to stay for dinner. Ellen and Howard’s house seemed no less stupendous, a decorator’s showcase with huge two-story windows looking down on the lake. Once Will was headed back to town, Ellen and Howard and I had one more glass of wine in their kitchen while we compared notes about our sons. The articles in the Times had also sparked my hosts’ curiosity about my work at the Court. I tried to say little but didn’t deny what was obvious, that my meeting with Merriwell was related to that investigation.
“Can I meet him?” Ellen asked, hunching down a bit, almost as if she were ducking from her own adolescent impulses. I gallantly assured her that the general would undoubtedly want to acknowledge their hospitality. I had known from the start that Merry was the kind of figure, a flawed genius in many eyes, likely to be fascinating to Ellen.
The end of our marriage could have been described with the same term pathologists these days apply to someone who dies from old age: multisystem failure. But from my perspective the real trouble had begun more than fifteen years before, when Ellen had become the director of special events at Easton. I saw the job as a strange choice for someone who’d just received her MBA, but the position allowed her to hang with Nobelists and the vanguard of world thought leade
rs, which I discovered was the company Ellen secretly yearned to keep. With friends, she often gushed about the Life of the Mind, which, apparently, was not the life she’d been living with me.
I never pretended to be as flat-out brilliant as my ex. When she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate, I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. But once she took her university position, Ellen began to exhibit a fierce need to look down on me intellectually. I knew intuitively that I was doing something to provoke this (a point proven beyond doubt when she married Howard, who, while a true engineering wizard, has never found any book ever written more interesting than ESPN). Instead of trying to figure out why I was alienating my wife, I went into private practice, even though I should have known that move would make things worse. With court dates, meetings, depositions, and trials, I was suddenly out of town at least a third of the year. I worked ridiculously long hours, as I had with the government, but Ellen didn’t see the point now, since defending wealthy bad guys was a far less noble cause. The lone advantage of my new job—that I was making gobs of money—was actually demeaning in her eyes. The grim fact was that I bored Ellen, bored her to the point of weariness, and bearing the brunt of my wife’s judgments left me grinding my teeth whenever I walked into the house. I thought I was doing both of us a great favor when I admitted that we’d lost interest in a life together. The secret of the friendship that we’d forged in the last couple of years was that Ellen was now willing to admit, with whatever irony, that this was one instance when I’d been a lot smarter than her.
Ellen was outside, dressed for work, when Merry’s limo turned up their long driveway at 7:00 a.m. She wore a black sheath with pearls, full makeup and high heels, the kind of getup that could double as business attire and something suitable for the cocktail circuit on which she frequently found herself. Ellen remained trim, and she’d always had the tidy blonde looks that get described as ‘perky.’ I’d never thought about it, but my ex was probably more physically attractive than many of the women I’d dated, even those quite a bit younger, although she’d never had—or aspired to—Esma’s sizzle.