by Scott Turow
From the backseat, Goos asked, “He lived in Barupra, did he?”
“When I hired him first, he did.”
“Any reason for a man with money to make up a story about a massacre?”
“Hell if I can say,” said Attila. “Some Gypsies, scamming is a way of life. All I know is if the Jerko told me it was daytime, I’d run to the window to check.”
Goos went silent. I thought he was figuring things through, but the pain meds had caught up with him and when I looked back he was sound asleep, his mouth wide open so I could see the dark evidence of several fillings.
“Ferko,” said Attila, still trying to believe it. “You’re not really telling me this whole shitstorm is because of Ferko, are you?”
I’d basically missed two nights’ sleep, given the fitful slumber of a transatlantic flight, and I felt limp now. In memory, certain sensations, like the wind and the view from atop the water tank, had a high-def quality, but there were already vague spots in my recollection and some disorder about which events happened first. Goos, in the meantime, began snoring.
“By the way,” I said to Attila. “You owe me some records.”
“I’ll give you the records,” said Attila, “but hell if I know what for. If Ferko’s your big witness, dude, then your case is so over.”
Right now, I was too tired to care. After apologies, I reclined the deep seat in the A8 and followed Goos into a black sleep.
When we arrived at the Blue Lamp, Attila shook me awake to help with Goos. Now that he had time to stiffen up, Goos’s pain was worsening and he was also woozy from the meds. We walked him up the street, supporting him from each side with his arms slung over our shoulders, like an injured player leaving the field. Once we had him on his bed, I headed down to check into the hotel. With my luggage AWOL, I thought of going out to buy some cosmetics, but I had no energy for that. Attila promised to touch base tomorrow. When the clerk handed me the key card, I smiled. It was the same room where I’d frolicked with Esma. That already seemed far in the past.
Once I was upstairs, I found that my brief sleep in the car had revived me a bit. I sat on my bed, both comforted and terrified now that I was alone. I looked at my hands for some reason, lifted them and studied my fingers and palms. Being alive seemed such a profound mystery.
I was also a bit lost, not only about what had happened, but also about what was ahead. A good part of me wanted to book a flight back to the US and stay there, a feeling I resisted, in part because I realized again I didn’t even have a house to return to. The homiest activities I’d undertaken recently were fishing with my sons and eating herring in a café in The Hague with Narawanda.
I decided to check my e-mail. That seemed ludicrously mundane, but that was where much of the comfort of life actually lay for us, in the routine. I considered writing my boys, but knew I’d alarm them if I made even a sideways reference to being safe. Instead, I went down to the bar, drank most of a double scotch at two in the afternoon, and barely made it back upstairs. I finally changed my underwear, then slept until 12 o’clock the next day.
After I woke, I was surprised to find Goos downstairs already. He’d made himself a coffee from the machine in the lobby and was sitting at one of the small tables in the breakfast area, stirring his cup with his left hand. His second dose of hydrocodone had worn off a couple hours ago, he said, so he’d come down for ‘brekkie.’
We shared a long look across the white laminate.
“That was something,” I said.
“That was something,” he agreed. “Thought we were cactus, mate, for sure.” He told me about his closest brush before that, which had come while he was a police trainee in Brussels. He’d been called on a domestic—the male was Russian, which was unsurprising since they had a track record of raising hands against their women—but when the wife let Goos in, the guy grabbed Goos from behind and put a butcher’s knife to his throat. The stink of alcohol was all over the room. Fortunately, the woman started to go off on her man again, and he released Goos so he could charge her. Goos brought him down with his truncheon.
“I pissed myself when they had us kneeling there,” I told Goos. I knew he had to have noticed, so I wasn’t confessing much. “But it ended up being a good thing, because it brought me into myself.”
“What did you think of?” Goos asked.
I explained about my father. The most shocking part to me was how angry I was at him.
I asked Goos what had been in his mind.
“Ah,” he answered. “Wife, kids a little. Mostly, buddy, I couldn’t believe I’d been so daft as to come back to Bosnia.”
“Are you going to quit?” I asked. From someone else, the question might have suggested cowardice, but we both knew this was only a matter of logic.
“Don’t know,” Goos answered. “Need to get back and have a long think. One thing for sure, though, mate. We can’t go barracking around here without real protection. We’ll need the army if we come back. Badu will have to get on the blower and make that happen.”
“Are we coming back?”
“Well, we’re going to have to exhume the Cave, aren’t we? Ferko’s word is no good. And it’s been blasted all over the front page of the New York Times that we suspicion a massacre. So the only way to know if that’s so is to look for the bodies.”
He was right.
We were still at the table at about 1:30, when Attila breezed in, wheeling my suitcase. She’d sent two of her people to Vo Selo, where they’d picked up the rental car, which was now parked outside. Neither of us had even thought about the vehicle, and we thanked her at length. From under her arm, Attila withdrew an envelope and threw it on the table before making herself a coffee, too. She was wearing her usual rumpled jeans and the old pinstriped short-sleeved shirt. Attila could have vastly improved her fashion presence with a trip to Goodwill.
“What’s the report from the medical corps?” she asked.
Except for needing a dentist, and not being able to drink coffee on my right side because of my teeth, I was pretty good. Goos would require a few days.
Attila had told us yesterday she had a close friend on the police force, a lieutenant she’d trust with anything, and with our permission, Attila had gone to the station to have a word with Dalija. The lieutenant had made a few calls in Attila’s presence. In a town down the road from Vo Selo, two officers had reported that their car and uniforms had been taken from them at gunpoint the day before yesterday.
“That bag of asses,” said Goos. “Steal a police car in a small town where everybody knows everyone’s business? A fine way to get beaten with a pipe. No chance that happened.”
“You guessed last night that Ferko had financial arrangements with the local cops, didn’t you?” I asked.
Attila smiled at that idea.
“I’m sure they shake him down. But nobody’s gonna take orders from Ferko. You’d have to have had the numbnuts work for you to understand.”
“Well, he was clever enough to steal your trucks, wasn’t he?” Goos asked.
“He was playin follow-the-leader. Another Gypsy from Barupra, kind of the Big Man there, Boldo Mirga—he was the only one with the stones to do that.”
I looked to Goos, who was playing coy and avoided my eye.
“Okay,” I said. “And tell us how this truckjacking went down. I’m not sure we’ve ever heard the whole story.”
Attila hesitated. “Man, I got to be careful here.”
“Attila, those were NATO vehicles. If you want, I can send another letter to Brussels tomorrow asking for your records and their interview notes with you. That was all before the Kajevic thing. It can’t be classified.”
Attila pondered.
“You know, it ain’t all that much to tell,” she said. “The US was leaving, and Merry wanted to send a bunch more of the military equipment NATO had collected to Iraq. So I sent trucks and drivers down near Mostar to pick some of it up.”
“When was this exactly?”
Attila lifted her chin to think. “Late March 2004?” That would have been two weeks before the Kajevic thing in Doboj, and a month before the people in Barupra disappeared. “In those days, the roads were still crap. I mean you’d be drivin and come to a shell crater and need to build your own bridge with railroad ties you carried with. So it was a long trip, most of a day, and what with the roads, I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t drive back in the dark. But there was no sign of all of them by noon the next day. About Taps, Boldo and Ferko and the rest of them come strollin in, sayin while they were bivouacked some gang hot-wired six of the trucks and made off with them. The drivers were all Gypsies and they didn’t even have their stories straight. I fired them just about on the spot.”
“And what happened when it turned out that Kajevic got away in a couple of those trucks, the ones Boldo and Ferko stole?”
“Well, no one knew that for sure at first. It was most of a week after Doboj before the getaway trucks were recovered out in the country.”
“But what did those guys have to say for themselves then?”
“Boldo? Testicles of titanium. He just stayed with his story. Must have been the carjackers who sold the trucks to Kajevic.”
“And who were they telling that fairy tale to? Bosnian police? NATO?”
“NATO MPs and the Bosnians.”
“And did the law enforcement guys believe that?”
“Boom, I keep tellin you: Ain’t no one who takes a Gypsy’s word. Thing is, the only way to completely disprove what they were puttin out there would be with Kajevic and them. Nobody’d ever tell you Boldo was stupid.”
“And is there any chance Boldo’s story might have been true—that someone else stole the trucks and sold them to Kajevic and his Tigers?”
“Chance? Sure. The part that didn’t never make sense was Boldo dealing with Kajevic. You heard Tobar in Lijce. That’s mongoose and cobra. Gypsies hated Kajevic and Kajevic, he’d rather sit down to a meal with a snake and a rat than deal with the Roma.”
“And when was the next time you saw Boldo and Ferko?” I asked. Goos’s eyes quickly passed my way. He approved of me truth-testing Attila.
“Never. I’d sooner crap bricks than talk to any of them and they knew it. Steal my fuckin trucks? I’ve told you before. It wasn’t until August or September I heard this shit about all the Roma bein gone.”
There was a lot of news here, and almost all of it was confusing. One thing was clear, though. If we could ever crowbar the truth out of Ferko, we’d be on a much better footing, even though I’d require an armored vehicle and a box of Depends before heading off to that interview.
“Do you think you could get a phone number for Ferko?” I asked Attila.
“Not if he had any idea it was for me,” Attila said. “But I can gumshoe around.”
I finally picked up the envelope Attila had thrown on the table and asked about the contents.
“Truck logs from April 26 to 28, 2004.”
“Showing?”
“Nothing. No convoys out of either pool.”
I was about to tell her she was wrong, that her trucks were on film, when Goos’s blue eyes flicked up in warning. Clearly Merriwell hadn’t shared anything about the NATO material with Attila. As he maintained, Merry was keeping his distance and letting us do our jobs.
“Who made the records of vehicle deployments?” asked Goos.
“My people.”
Goos nodded and calculated, yet said nothing, but Attila read something in his response.
“Nobody took my trucks without my say-so,” she said.
“I thought Boldo stole them,” I said.
“That’s why I’m so sure. Because after that, I had three guys patrolling each depot. We just about tucked every vehicle into bed at night. That was even before we realized Kajevic had ended up with the trucks.”
Something in her last remark struck Attila. She angled her round face. In her eyes, I could see a thought taking her somewhere.
“Did you say you made some photos in Madovic?” Attila asked. “Any chance I could see them?”
I reminded Attila that the Bosnian Friendship Club had stolen our cell phones.
“What about the cloud?” Attila asked.
I went upstairs for my tablet. Until this moment, neither Goos nor I had given any thought to using the ‘find my phone’ app. We tried now, but no signal registered, implying either that the phones were off or, more likely, destroyed. But the photos and the short video I’d taken in Madovic had uploaded before then.
Attila looked all of it over for quite a while and replayed the video three times, finally spreading her fingers—and her ragged bitten nails—to enlarge the shot of the three monks approaching. I hadn’t even caught it in real time, but the one in the center had flicked his dark intense eyes toward us minutely, as we watched them from where we sat. He’d actually stared a bit longer than the nearer monk, whom I’d seen glance in our direction later.
“That’s why they were going to take you out,” Attila said.
I was astonished. “I had no idea it was forbidden to take pictures of monks.”
Attila laughed then and faced us looking a lot like a jack-o’-lantern on Halloween night, the same fiendish gap-toothed grin, appearing as if she were lit from within.
“See that one?” She put her finger on the screen, indicating the monk in the middle. “I’m almost positive you guys just found Laza Kajevic.”
VI.
Kajevic
23.
Who’s There?—June 4–9
Goos immediately wanted to inform his former colleagues at the Yugoslav Tribunal that we might have located the most wanted war criminal since Nuremberg, but Attila persuaded us that the better course was to contact NATO headquarters in Sarajevo. They were authorized to arrest Kajevic—in fact, hunting for him was probably their most significant remaining duty in Bosnia—and also had the most secure structure to preserve the secret. Attila, who evinced a junior-high giddiness about nabbing such a big-time bad guy, made the introductory call, followed by several coded communications, mostly by text, between Goos and me and various NATO officers. Goos was in a grim mood, which I attributed to pain. I, by contrast, was simply confused. My ability to adjust to dramatic news seemed to be like a broken transmission in which the gear spun without catching.
In the intervals, the three of us sat in the breakfast room, whispering as we reinterpreted what had gone down the night before last. Some conclusions seemed fairly obvious. Once the parking cop in Madovic had established that the yokelly guys snapping photographs of the monks and the monastery were from the International Criminal Court in The Hague, word had filtered back to Kajevic’s protectors, who sounded the alarm. Their plan probably was to take us out ASAP, before we could report our findings. Following us from Madovic, Kajevic’s cadre almost certainly witnessed our visit to Ferko before they were able to grab us outside Vo Selo. During the hours they were awaiting darkness before throwing us into the salt tank, somebody must have realized that the ICC and the Yugoslav Tribunal, where Kajevic was wanted, were not the same institution. Local inquiries would have validated that Goos and I were present to investigate Barupra, not capture the former president. Coincidentally, my rant that Ferko would never get away with killing us demonstrated to them that we didn’t realize what we’d discovered. At the last minute, some old Arkan commander had rushed to the salt mine to stop Nikolai rather than risk the intense manhunt that would have followed our murders.
Given these insights, though, it seemed likely that the Arkans would want to keep an eye on us, to be certain that we remained unsuspecting about the true reason we’d been kidnapped. Attila called her police friend, who swept by the hotel a few times in her private vehicle and confirmed that there were a couple of guys just sitting around in two different cars, both trained on the hotel. The news was instantly terrifying to me, and Goos didn’t appear any happier, but we agreed with Attila to await NATO’s input before doing anyt
hing to show we were aware of being under watch.
In our communications earlier with the NATO fugitive hunters, we’d set a meeting at Attila’s headquarters on the outskirts of Tuzla, where we all would pretend to be attending a business gathering related to our ICC work. We left the Blue Lamp at 6 p.m. Dalija, Attila’s cop pal, called to let us know there was a tail—and a fairly clumsy one, just two vehicles following at a short distance, almost as if they were the laggards in a funeral procession. Dalija said she’d keep everybody in sight, just in case.
Attila’s headquarters occupied an entire single-story building about the size of a small strip mall, decorated with a seemingly studied effort in the nondescript. Her office had indoor-outdoor carpeting, the color of brown dirt, and louvered vertical blinds. On the desk were several photos of the wife Attila had said she met here, a blue-eyed, black-haired beauty. The shots showed the two of them together, posed beside horses and dogs on their farm in northern Kentucky. Attila’s domestic life, which she almost never mentioned, seemed somehow incongruous, but she was pleased by compliments about how gorgeous it all was, house and garden and wife.
“Yeah,” Attila answered, “it’s amazing how fast a poor girl can get used to spending money.”
Not long after dark, the NATO delegation arrived in two pickup trucks bearing the logo of an international construction company. Attila had already made a dozen local calls, designed to put out the word that we were beginning preparations to dig up the Cave. The NATO soldiers were in jeans and windbreakers and hard hats, and all four of them carried clipboards. The commander was a Norwegian general, Ragnhild Moen, accompanied by three senior staffers, a Dutchman, a German, and an American. The general was lean and almost six feet tall, with impossibly long, thin hands. She proved disarmingly personable while remaining quietly authoritative. She had relatives in Minnesota where she had spent a year in high school, and she retained fond memories of Kindle County, which she had visited several times. Her student-exchange group had met the chief federal judge there, Moria Winchell, whom I knew well.