Testimony

by Scott Turow

  Just outside of town, we pulled over in a spot with cell reception in order to get our bearings. We were at the side of a potholed road, just wide enough to qualify as two-laned by Bosnian standards. Beside us, weeds had already grown up thickly, and a stand of firs stood on the other side. I had just set my navigation app for Tuzla when a car pulled in behind us, a white vehicle with the word POLICIJA appearing amid a band of blue. In the sideview, I saw two policemen alight, one heavy-set, one thin.

  I assumed they’d stopped to be sure we didn’t need help, but Goos had another impression.

  “Oh, sweet Jesu,” Goos said. “Not again.”

  He rolled down the window and tried to chat up the fat cop who’d come to the driver’s side. In the meantime, the wirier one ambled up to my window, leaning on the door to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t escape. Goos again pulled out our court credentials, but the cop flicked a hand at us, as if the documents irritated him further.

  “He says we both need to get out,” said Goos.

  We did, and the two leaned us on the fender, frisked us, and took our cell phones, passports, and wallets.

  I thought they might look the documents over, but the fat cop simply slipped them in his back pocket. He returned to their car, while his partner watched us, his hand on his pistol, still holstered but with the white covering flap unsnapped.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He wanted to know what we were doing around here. I told him we were here to talk to a witness, but he said that we could not operate in the Republika Srpska without permission of the local police. He was quite emphatic.”

  When the cop ambled back, he pointed to their vehicle and told us we were going to have to come with him.

  Goos objected several times and even offered to follow them in the rental car, but the cop kept shaking his head. He was heavy enough that the mere stroll back and forth to his car had brought a line of sweat dribbling down from beneath his hat.

  “Don’t move,” Goos said. My suitcase, in the hatchback, made me particularly reluctant to abandon the Ford. Goos kept remonstrating in a patient way, while the fat officer continued pointing to their car and motioning, as if he were directing traffic. Finally the thinner cop took out his gun and pointed across the auto’s roof at Goos.

  Once we were both in the backseat of the police car, Goos said, “Mate, this doesn’t feel right at all.”

  “Is this Ferko’s posse?”

  “Damned if I know. Can’t say I’ve made a lot of friends in this part of Bosnia. Might be someone knows my name and wants to pay his respects.” He was being sardonic. “But it appears they’re getting orders. I saw the big fella on the radio before they decided to haul us in.”

  “Are we under arrest?”

  Goos found this laughable.

  “Boom, you are one of the least lawyerly lawyers I’ve met. Which I appreciate. But, you know, what does it matter what they call it? We’re in a police car headed nowhere we know with coppers who don’t seem to care about our credentials. To me, that sounds like big mobs of trouble, no matter what the label.”

  The longer we drove, the more concerned we became. After about twenty minutes, Goos asked again where we were going and the wiry cop told him to shut up. A few minutes later, Goos pointed to a road sign that said we were twenty kilometers from Tuzla, which clearly relieved him. He’d been worried, I think, that they were going to take us into Serbia, where, in many quarters, the international tribunals in The Hague were reviled.

  It was now after five, but in this season, the sun was still about two-thirds of the way above the horizon. The recognition that we had several hours of daylight left was mildly comforting, since the thought of traveling with these two in the dark seemed petrifying. As we continued winding through the mountains, Goos tried again to find out where we were headed. This time, the thin guy wheeled back, once more displaying the pistol, the barrel not quite leveled at us. We both subsided to silence. I could see from his pale blank look that Goos had gone from concerned to scared, a place I’d been since the thin cop first pulled out his sidearm.

  We drove around more than another hour, until we suddenly parked at a roadside turnout. It was a vista point, looking down on thick hills of green trees, amid which tiny beaches of snow remained in the deepest gloom. I thought one of the policemen might need to piss, as I did, but instead they directed us to leave the car.

  “Stay put,” Goos told me. He rattled on in Serbo-Croatian. It seemed as if he was now demanding to be taken to a police station at once. The fat cop walked away from him, while the wiry one returned with his pistol drawn and opened the rear door on Goos's side. He was about thirty, with lifeless blue eyes and the pebbled remnants on his face of some skin condition that had gone untreated during the war years. By long experience, I marked him as one of those cops who liked the job because it came with a license to be mean. Goos, probably of the same mind, was aggravated and continued telling him off. The cop seemed to be listening attentively when, with no warning, he smashed Goos in the temple with the gun barrel and pulled him out of the car. Immediately, the fat one opened my door and wrestled me out and pushed me along to the driver’s side of the car, where Goos was on all fours in the dust of the roadside. Blood flowed from a small gash at his temple, the steady drip coloring his hand and the ground.

  I started screaming when I saw that.

  “For God’s sake, what is wrong with you people? We are lawful investigators here, operating with the full authority of your government. And you beat this man? You have created a diplomatic incident. You will all be fired. Don’t you understand that?”

  The wiry guy responded by motioning with the pistol, instructing me to kneel beside Goos. The cop seemed to understand a little English and was smiling just a bit, revealing craggy yellow teeth. He might as well have said, “Motherfucker, you don’t have a clue.” He then grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me down, until I was on all fours. He pointed his gun again, instructing me to look at the dirt, as Goos was doing.

  “How are you?” I whispered to Goos.

  “A bit whirly,” he answered. “Bout thirty seconds now, I’m going to collapse and make out like he might have hurt me quite badly. Maybe we’ll get to a hospital.”

  Just as he said, Goos shortly reared up, held the side of his head, groaned deeply, and went facedown on the gravel. The thin cop sauntered up and felt the pulse in his neck. When I looked up at him, he slapped me open-palm in the back of the head and pointed down, then walked off at a casual pace. Compared to the way he’d hit Goos, his blow to me was minor, but my front teeth had smashed together and I could feel some lingering pain there.

  I was like that as much as half an hour, when I heard footsteps. In front of me, I caught sight of a pair of heavy work boots. I peeked up timidly and as I went south to north, I saw blue jeans and then a rifle barrel with a sight. Lifting my head fully, I found myself facing a man in a flak jacket and a black balaclava. He was holding a Zastava and smiled tauntingly through the stitched mouth of the ski mask.

  He beckoned with one finger, indicating I should stand, then ambled over to Goos, who was still lying there, feigning unconsciousness. The Chetnik who’d appeared in front of me suddenly kicked Goos in the ribs, with the velocity of a soccer player striking a ball far downfield. The boots were probably steel toed, and Goos cried out and flew up off the dirt, landing on his side. He went fetal, until two others, also masked and armed with Zastavas, hoisted him up by the elbows with their free hands.

  The first one looked beyond me and spoke, and I revolved to see a fourth man in a mask, with his AK pointed toward us. The cops and their car were gone. They must have coasted down the road, because I had not heard their engine.

  The man whose gestures had brought me to my feet now spoke in Serbo-Croatian, and I shook my head to show I didn’t understand. He repeated himself to Goos, who, while standing, was bowed limply toward the ground, clearly as a means to contend with his pain.
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  “He says put your hands behind your back,” Goos said. His voice was husky and I could tell it hurt him to talk.

  “Should I?”

  “Suit yourself, Boom. They’ll beat you until you do. You fancy our chances two on four, and them with assault rifles?”

  Goos tucked his hands behind his waist and I watched as the fourth man slid a white plastic zip tie over Goos’s wrists and wrenched it tight. I gave a second to the thought of fighting, largely as a matter of deduction. It was going to be my final chance, but I had learned in the last hour about the sheer terror that flows from the barrel of a gun. I’d never had a firearm aimed at me, and the fear driving stakes through my heart seemed entirely out of keeping with the reluctant cooperation and smart remarks people in the movies mustered in the same situation.

  Having tied us, the four masked men walked us over the crest in the road, about one hundred yards, to two small square cars with Serbian license plates. They shoved us roughly into the backseat of one car, while the apparent leader walked ahead to the other vehicle.

  I tried to talk myself down from panic, which would be paralytic. Killing two credentialed investigators from the International Criminal Court had to be bad juju. Cell tower records would provide a rough fix on our whereabouts when we were taken, and dealing with a dependent state like Bosnia, the Western powers behind the Court would demand accountability. Unless those countries had signed off on this. Perhaps that was why Merry had turned over the documents? As a cover? No, that was ludicrous. But I couldn’t understand why exposing a small-timer like Ferko seemed to merit a death sentence. We didn’t even know what we’d found.

  “I don’t think they’re going to kill us,” I said to Goos.

  The blood flow from his temple had still not fully subsided, accumulating on the front of his shirt and soaking the collar. The side where he’d been kicked didn’t seem to hurt any less now that we were sitting down. In response to me, he merely shook his head, not agreeing so much as acknowledging what I’d said.

  After a few more minutes on the road, I whispered to Goos, “Where are we?”

  “Near Tuzla,” he mouthed.

  I couldn’t understand the reason to take us back to where we’d been, except to return us to our hotel, even though logic told me that was unlikely. Did they want it to look like we’d disappeared on our way home? I kept on with thoughts like this, adding things up to mean we’d be safe, and then again, concluding we were in deep trouble.

  After another half hour, I saw out the window the same landmarks we’d passed when Goos said we were near Tuzla. I wondered why we were circling, which, on reflection, seemed to be what the cops had been doing as well. The answer, when it came to me, drove another icy shard of terror into me. They were waiting for dark.

  By now the sun was declining toward the mountains, the first faint hints of pink starting to color the sky. I tried not to be sentimental or morbid, but wondered whether this was going to be my last sunset. It was probably an illusion, but it felt worse to be dying for reasons I couldn’t understand.

  As the horizon faded toward purple, we started off in a new direction. The terrain seemed familiar, and for a second my hopes sparked that we were going back to the Blue Lamp after all. Then we made a sharp turn and headed up into the hills, where I knew no good outcome awaited us.

  About ten minutes later, we left the paved road to ascend on a dirt path, where the dust clouded up like fog, reflecting in the headlights. We passed through a gate, but the property, whatever it was, seemed heavily forested, leaving aside yellow and green pipelines that ran close to the road, rising and falling with the contour of the earth.

  “Ah, Jesus,” said Goos.

  “What?”

  “It’s a salt mine.”

  The words—or Goos’s agonized tone—intensified my terror. The old saying, ‘Back to the salt mine,’ seemed to equate places like this with harsh conditions.

  “Are we headed for the bottom of a mine shaft?”

  “Not likely,” said Goos. “They mine these days with water.” He outlined the process briefly. Rigs drilled as if for oil. The dense salt deposits created a sealed chamber under the earth, and freshwater was pumped in through the green pipeline, driving salt-laden water out in the yellow one. The salinated water was stored in the huge white tanks I’d seen before, when we drove by with Attila. The salt water was then shipped to production facilities, in which evaporation produced the celebrated salts of Tuzla.

  I was surprised that the two Chetniks in front didn’t bother to tell Goos to shut up while he was grunting his way through this explanation. I took it at first as a sign that our situation was completely hopeless—they didn’t care what we talked about because there was no way out. Then it dawned on me that they probably had another reason to let us speak.

  “English,” I mouthed to Goos and nodded toward the front seat. One of them was probably fluent and gaining intelligence just by listening. Goos smiled somewhat bitterly in response. I knew Goos had a better idea than I about what was coming, and that I should ask, but I was beginning to try to find a place of peace.

  In another moment, the cars ground to a halt. The four masked gunmen jumped out and tore open our car doors. We were parked beside three enormous white water tanks, each at least a hundred feet high. With AKs pointed, the men instructed us to walk toward the nearest tower. I still had no idea why, until we came around the side, where a narrow ladder ran to the top. Goos took one look and fell to the ground, and I followed suit.

  The one who had kicked Goos before did it again. With his hands tied behind him, Goos had no way to protect himself. The guy kicked him twice, the second time with another huge windup. Goos screamed and was left groaning afterward. In the meantime, the leader motioned to one of the men we’d ridden with. As I suspected, he spoke good English and sounded American. It crossed my mind that he might even have spent time in Kindle County, where we had a large Serbian community. I amused myself for a second with the thought of asking him if he knew Rusty Sabich, a judge who was also Serbian and could pass as my friend.

  “If you like,” the masked man said, “we can beat you so that you’ll be glad to be dead, or you can go up the ladder and die like men.”

  In the wake of the second kick, Goos was lying on his back, coping with his pain. He spoke in a low voice, once he was able to.

  “I’ve had enough, Boom. But suit yourself. No hard feelings either way.”

  He rolled over at that point and struggled to his feet with the help of one of the Chetniks. I thought about it and followed his lead, but told off the English-speaking guy as they were grabbing my elbows.

  “Ferko has no reason to treat us like this,” I said. “And he’ll never get away with it. They know at the Court that we were in Vo Selo and what we found. If we disappear, Interpol will make Ferko’s life a living hell. This is pointless.” I added another two-word message to Ferko, which, as they said when I was an adolescent, was not ‘Let’s dance.’

  At the bottom of the ladder, one of the Chetniks held a length of yellow plastic utility rope, which he formed into a noose. He put it around Goos’s neck and then, after letting out about six feet, doubled the rope around my throat so that Goos and I could basically be garroted at the same time. Then he sliced through the zip ties on our wrists with a steel box cutter. The two who had driven us here, including the one who spoke English, climbed up first, with their rifles slung across their bodies. The other pair circled their AKs as a sign for Goos and me to follow.

  “Ready?” Goos asked me.

  I nodded. I still wasn’t sure if we were about to be shot, or hanged by tossing us from the top. For the present, the nooses ensured that we couldn’t make any attempt at escape by jumping off the ladder as we ascended. Even if we miraculously timed it perfectly and leapt off together, the impact when we fell to the ground might effectively hang at least one of us, maybe both.

  Instead, we climbed slowly. The rope went tight enough to choke me ea
ch time Goos took another step, and I tried to follow him precisely as he talked me through it, right foot, then left. We paused on each rung. Given my aversion to heights, I made it a point not to look down. My heart was banging so hard I could feel it throbbing in my temples. Our pleasant lunch in the shadow of the monastery seemed a swallow away from forcing itself back up on me, which could prove lethal if Goos or I moved the wrong way in response.

  When Goos reached the top, the English-speaking guy had his automatic rifle pointed. Stepping over the top rung, Goos stumbled. The rope burned into my neck suddenly and for a second I saw black, while my forehead crashed against the ladder. The other Chetnik at the top grabbed the rope to keep me from falling off, then pulled me up as if he were reeling in a fish. Once I had my feet on the top of the tank, I saw that Goos’s noose had been removed, but his hands were again zip-tied behind him. They did the same to me. In the meantime, the leader and his lackey arrived.

  There was a three-quarter moon, providing considerable light. The dome of the tank was steep, probably to keep rainwater from accumulating, and it was edged with a steel band about six inches high. The surface was studded with little metal footholds that rose in ranks all the way to the top. The leader used them to climb up to a door in the dome, which he propped open.

  Goos had sunk to one knee while all this was going on. The temple that had been pistol-whipped was toward me, still glistening at the small laceration. That side of Goos’s face was streaked with three lines of clotted blood, black in this light, but it was clearly his side giving him the greater pain.