Testimony

by Scott Turow

  He nodded. “You recall, I then sent Sofia some of our skeletal remains, so she could examine them. As bones decompose, certain trace elements from the surrounding soil more or less merge into them. And what she found ingrained in those bones is of a completely different mineral composition than the fireclay and sandstone of this grave. Magnesium and iron, especially, you’d expect to find in higher concentrations, if the bones had been laying here.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, Boom, I reckon this is what’s called in the trade a ‘secondary grave.’ We saw plenty of that with the Yugoslav Tribunal as the armies tried to clear out the mass burial sites before we got to them. Same idea here, only in reverse. Those bones back at NFI, the ones that I dug up here, they were moved from somewhere else. You remember our strange bullets and our DNA contamination? Well, there’s your explanation. This grave has been staged, more or less for our consumption.”

  I struggled to make sense of that and, after a second, argued with him.

  “Those three men, they share a Y chromosome. There are bullet holes in those bones consistent with Zastavas. And we’ve just looked together at visual evidence of those people being loaded onto trucks.”

  “Yay. All true. But those bones we have weren’t buried here, Boom. Simple as that. Remember, I was questioning Ferko about dragging three bodies all this way? There’s plenty of loose lignite down below. He could have mounded over the corpses where they lay to keep the animals away from them, if that was all he was trying to accomplish.”

  “Then why are they here?”

  “Closer to the road, I imagine. Once they brought the remains back, they had no desire to go gallivanting over the rocks. But those skeletons haven’t been laying here very long, because the local soils haven’t leached into the bones.”

  “Ferko was lying?” I asked Goos.

  “Mate, according to the tale he tells, he was the only soul who knew where those bodies were buried. So unless he buried them, dug them up, and moved them somewhere else for a decade and then reburied the bones here again in the last six months, yay, he was lying.”

  “Fuck,” I said. I was already weighing the implications for the case. This was far more serious than shorting Esma about Kajevic’s threat. I couldn’t count the number of trials I had been involved in as a prosecutor in which the major witnesses had told substantial lies, but with enough evidentiary backup on the big points that we won convictions anyway. Jurors were rarely perplexed when a scumbag witness acted like a scumbag. But I’d been warned that at the ICC, the atmosphere of moral purity also prevailed in the courtroom. I asked Goos what he thought the damage might be.

  “’Uge,” he answered, and told me in a state of revived bitterness about one of his cases at the Yugoslav Tribunal. With enormous effort, they’d developed an insider witness who had worked as a guard at a Croatian-run concentration camp. For whatever reason, the man had kept a diary, and the written record was intricately corroborated.

  “Even when the bastard wrote down it was raining, weather records confirmed him. But after the war, he became a drug dealer, and we had to turn over reports that he’d used his thirteen-year-old daughter as a courier to deliver cocaine. Once the judges heard that, they wouldn’t even let him finish giving evidence. And tell me the truth, Boom. You remember the part in scripture where the Virgin Mary helped perpetrate mass murder?” He was about to head back down to the professor and asked the last question over his shoulder. He answered his own question with a grunt. “Cause that’s who these damn judges seem to expect our witnesses to be.”

  I sat in the rental car stewing while Goos was aiding Tchitchikov with the rest of her soil sampling around the grave. When Goos returned half an hour later, I said, “Let’s find Ferko. We need to know what the hell is going on with him.”

  Goos eyed me, rubbing his hand over his chin. He was not inclined. Ferko was a protected witness and under Court rules, investigators could not contact him directly; that fell to the Victims and Witnesses section.

  “I’m not wasting another three months,” I said, “doing the Dance of the Seven Veils with Victims and Witnesses just to see if Ferko picks up the phone when they call. We’re here. Let’s find him.”

  “And where would that be, Boom?”

  “We know he lives within an hour of here, because Esma was able to whistle him in when we left Tuzla. Remember?”

  “Might be he was just staying nearby temporarily.”

  That was possible, but there wasn’t much to lose except the time. The day we went to Lijce, Attila had told me there was another Roma town in the vicinity. I couldn’t imagine Ferko choosing to reside away from the People. One of the laborers said this second town, Vo Selo, was about forty kilometers due east, well into the Bosnian Serb enclave, Republika Srpska, near the Drina River. The drive would take about an hour.

  Goos shrugged and said to me, “You’re the lawyer.”

  We took off in the rental car, another little Ford, navigating by cell phone GPS. It was about 1 p.m. The main roads were surprisingly navigable, given what I’d heard about winter drives that were sometimes impossible because of potholes and landslides. With the spring sunlight luminous on the high clouds, we both relaxed. For me, sidestepping the Court’s iron-headed rules made our trip feel a little like a high school lark.

  Once we reached the river, we turned north. As Goos was negotiating a switchback, an immense structure suddenly loomed over us. It appeared so abruptly it seemed like a magic castle, with proportions to match. Erected atop a mountain of gray rock perhaps a thousand feet high, the building, on first impression, seemed to be a fort built to command the river. Then I noticed that the roof’s highpoints were Byzantine domes topped with Orthodox crosses.

  “What the hell,” I said to Goos.

  “If you’ve got data reception on your mobile,” said Goos, “check the Internet.”

  “It’s a monastery,” I told Goos after a few minutes of poking around, “first built with the permission of the Ottomans in 1566 on the remains of an old church by the Hrabren family.” Within its gargantuan stone walls, the monastery had been a world of its own for centuries, with a winery, guest quarters, a library, and a seminary. Like so many other places, it was also a relic of the region’s dismal history. In 1942, the Croatians had raided, tortured the monks, and thrown them into a pit in which they had all slowly died of infection and starvation while the Ustase—the Croatian version of Chetniks—burned most of the buildings to the ground. The monastery was rebuilt, only to be torched again by the Croatians in 1992, as Yugoslavia fell apart. This time the Croatians plundered the treasury and burned all the books, including irreplaceable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts. The monastery had risen yet again after the Bosnian war as a stubborn testimonial to the Serbs’ dedication to their faith.

  “Take a look?” I asked Goos. It was time for lunch anyway.

  The town beneath the monastery, Madovic, was small, with cobbled streets built for horse traffic, but it did not have the dusty, depleted look of other little places we had passed through. The merchants seemed to have prospered, supplying the many goods the monks did not produce on their own. While we waited a few minutes for a table in the busiest restaurant, it became apparent that Madovic was also a regional medical center. A three-story hospital stood at the other end of the long main street, and nurses and doctors in their long white coats comprised at least half the clientele who were eating.

  Across the way, not long after we sat down, three monks passed by in long brown rassas, as the Orthodox cassocks are called. Bird’s-nest beards drooped down their chests, almost reaching the wooden crosses suspended on prayer ropes from their necks. Each monk carried a long shepherd’s crook and wore the same exotic cylindrical headdress, a little like a brimless stovepipe hat. They moved in slow, matched paces as they made silent pilgrimage back from the hospital where presumably they had prayed with the sick. I surreptitiously snapped photos and a quick video, in order to e-mail
them to my boys, who had implied last weekend that I existed in a state of moral degradation because I’d ventured to a place as exotic as Bosnia without filling Instagram and Facebook with dozens of images. I tried to explain that a criminal investigator generally did not make a visual record of his doings, no matter how many likes I might have attracted. But for this scene I was willing to make a brief exception. I put the phone down when I thought I saw the nearest monk’s eyes shift toward me.

  Once we were done with lunch—I was yet to get a bad meal in Bosnia—we strolled up and down the main street, just to see what we could and to take a couple of photos of the colossal monastery overhead. It was close to 2:30 when we returned to the car.

  As we did, a police officer appeared from the corner behind us. He might have been waiting. In any event, it was clear to me, as he lectured Goos, that the cop was maintaining that we had parked in the wrong place. I walked a few steps while Goos was engaged, but saw nothing that could have been a sign. Traffic shakedowns of tourists were routine in Bosnia, according to Goos, and with my back turned, I located a twenty KM bill in my wallet, a little over ten bucks, which I suspected would be adequate.

  The cop was very young, still with acne, and it was possible he was just one of those overeager newbies familiar to police forces all over the world. He was in the police summer dress: blue pants, white hat, white blouse with epaulets, and a white belt that included a holster, so his pistol was also clothed in white, making it all the more noticeable. Goos appeared to be humbling himself appropriately, apologizing for our innocent error, but the cop remained grave, subjecting Goos to surly questions. Ultimately, Goos produced our letter of introduction from the Bosnian government, which explained we were emissaries of the Court. The cop read it over several times, seemingly unconvinced, and then instructed Goos to hold it open between his hands while the policeman took out his old toad-size cell phone and snapped a photo. With that, he walked off without my money.

  “What do you think that was about?” I asked Goos, when we were again headed to Vo Selo, the Roma town.

  “No idea. I suspect he’s going to call someone just to be sure the letter’s authentic.”

  “I thought he was looking for money.”

  “I as well. Kept waiting for him to come the raw prawn, as they usually do, how he would pay the fine for us so we could be on our way.”

  Vo Selo turned out to be no more than another fifteen minutes up the road. As we reached the outskirts, Goos rolled down his window and asked a dark fellow, Roma by his looks, if he knew Ferko Rincic.

  The man responded by laughing. He waved over his shoulder toward a hill and, according to Goos, said we couldn’t miss it. He shouted something else as we pulled away.

  “‘Mind the dogs,’” Goos said, when I asked for a translation.

  “Dogs?”

  “He said ‘dogs.’”

  That made sense. If Ferko lived in fear of retaliation by the people who’d massacred everyone in Barupra, he would want security of some kind.

  On the other side of the hill was the town, which appeared even poorer than Lijce. Most of the dwellings were like the shack of the disagreeable old woman I’d talked to, a room or two with grab-bag exteriors—corrugated metal or stucco, but most often mud and twigs. I also saw at least one family huddling in the discarded portion of an old concrete viaduct, and several living only under tarps suspended between a few trees. The lone exception to the prevailing poverty was a house that loomed over Vo Selo almost as dramatically as the monastery we’d just left. It looked a little like a castle, but built not just with palatial grandiosity but also monumental bad taste. There were nine separate turrets, each with a balcony from which, in most instances, the laundry hung. Even from a distance, we could see that scenes had been painted on the stucco walls, and that the top roofs were festooned with animal sculptures, dogs and frogs, atop a gilt railing.

  “The mayor’s house?” Goos asked.

  “Baro Rom,” I answered, repeating the word Esma had applied to Tobar, the so-called Big Man who had established himself in a place of clan leadership.

  On the narrow road through Vo Selo, we stopped again to ask an old lady about Ferko. She responded with emphatic motions up the hill.

  “That there,” said Goos as he again got behind the wheel, “is Ferko’s house.” He was pointing at the little palace.

  I processed. “Can’t be the same guy.”

  “I asked her for Ferko Rincic. You heard me. She said we have to be very special because he treats the whole lot of them like they’re wackers, not even worth hello.”

  We drove up the rest of the hill and parked at the side of the road in front of the huge house. Now that we were here, I could see that construction was still incomplete. Electrical wires sprouted from the turret walls. More revealing, an open trench near the road showed a sewer pipe without a connection. For all its grandness, the house seemed to lack indoor plumbing.

  The perimeter was guarded by a white stucco wall about eight feet high, capped with pieces of jagged glass cemented in place. Two wooden doors of the same height stood at the center, with an iron lift-latch between them. A stick could have easily secured entry, but no one would dare, since there were three dogs who charged us in fury, barking and snarling, jumping at the breach between the doors and revealing their pink gums and huge teeth slimed with foam. They were all the same breed, brindled but with the pointed faces of Dobermans.

  Goos looked around for a while, then suddenly raised a finger and returned to the car. He returned with the little takeaway box in which he had saved the remains of his lunch as a possible snack, and a small branch he’d picked up from the roadside. From the carton, he extracted three logs of cevapi, which he held to the gate. The dogs suddenly quieted, bounding against each other for a chance at the scent.

  “Prepare to bash off,” he said. He shoved me behind him, then lifted the latch with the tree branch. He pulled the gate open, tossing the cevapi a good fifty feet toward the road. As the dogs ran off baying for the meat, he jerked me inside and bolted the gate.

  We were now in a courtyard. A fire pit, with some speckled graniteware pots thrown beside it, was nearby, and several rugs and a mattress lay before the front doorway, making me think that some or all of the residents slept here. A bell on a string extended near the door, and Goos gave it a jerk. In response, we heard voices and motion on the other side.

  The man who threw the door open was in some senses Ferko. It was undoubtedly the same man, with the same broken nose and bad teeth visible when his mouth gaped in surprise. But he was dressed resplendently, as if for date night, had it occurred in the 1990s. He sported a big-collared shirt of chartreuse and turquoise blocks, and it was open almost to his waist, revealing a heavy gold chain that held a watch the size of a sommelier’s salver over his pelted chest. When he raised his hand, every finger bore a thick gold ring.

  Now that the door was ajar, a hefty woman, whom I instantly recognized as the wife I’d seen in the wrinkled picture Ferko had brought to court, peeked behind him. Clinging to her skirts was a little boy of about four. In the rear of the open passageway that had been revealed, I could see a portrait of a caravan drawn on the stucco in the overripe style of paintings on black velvet.

  Ferko looked us up and down one more second, then said something to Goos in Serbo-Croatian and slammed the door.

  “He says we don’t belong here,” Goos told me.

  We rang the bell several more times. Goos yelled out in Serbo-Croatian that Ferko was required to speak to us, and finally, as a last gambit, screamed that unless Ferko spoke to us now he could receive no share of the reparations the Court someday might pay on the case. After all of that, Ferko responded with one sentence from the other side of the door that Goos instantly translated.

  “He says he has called a neighbor to round up the dogs, and he will set them on us if we don’t leave now.”

  We discovered almost at once that the threat had not been vain. A thu
ggy-looking fellow, unshaved, with dark greasy hair and a distinctly hostile look, arrived with the dogs tugging him along by the leashes he’d fixed to their collars. He was wearing a black leather jacket, odd garb in this weather, and I thought he might be hiding a gun.

  We were in better stead with the dogs, however. The cevapi did not seem far from their minds, and only one of them growled a bit as we backed away.

  21.

  Back to the Salt Mine

  So Ferko is the richest man in town?” I asked Goos when we were under way once more in the small Ford. We were both in a somewhat wounded state and seemed eager to get back to Tuzla to take stock of the day.

  As we traveled, we speculated about Ferko, although I offered most of the commentary. Goos’s responses were limited, one-word answers or grunts, his mood expressed principally in the vehemence with which he shifted gears.

  Given the fact that Ferko could summon a hood to menace us, he was clearly a person of stature in some organization. Drugs seemed the most likely business—there was said to be a lot of meth, often call ice, in Bosnia. Indulging in ethnic stereotypes, it was also possible that Ferko was boss of a gang of child thieves or beggars, or full-grown pickpockets. One thing was sure, though. The fellow who’d come to glower at us didn’t have the look of anyone attached to a legitimate businessman.

  Taking for granted that Ferko was a crook of some kind, I weighed the implications for our investigation. In order to protect his identity, Ferko had never answered the questions routine for virtually every other witness, stuff like ‘Where do you live?’ and ‘What do you do for a living?’ So he hadn’t lied about those matters. But between staging the grave and claiming under oath that his wife was dead—assuming my eyesight was good and she wasn’t—his testimony was worthless, even by the most forgiving standards.

  Deepening my dismay was the realization that I was going to have to call Esma. I took it that today’s revelations about Ferko would be news to her, because any trial lawyer puts her entire career in jeopardy by allowing a client to lie under oath. Yet Esma was the only person who might be able to get Ferko to sit down with us again to see if there were any explanations that might help us salvage the investigation. We were facing the law’s version of real tragedy: the murder of four hundred people goes unpunished because the lone witness manufactured a bunch of eccentric lies.