by Scott Turow
The NATO officers huddled around my tablet and examined the photos several times. No one doubted Attila’s identification, especially not after comparing my photographs to pictures of Kajevic obtained in the last several years. The four spoke English among themselves, so for once I could follow the deliberations.
The abiding question was whether our presence in Madovic—or the initial misplaced response of Kajevic’s thugs—had been enough to spook him and lead him to move. The monastery offered advantages as a hiding place hard to equal, especially in the Balkans of today where safe harbors for Kajevic were probably dwindling. Commanding that kind of highpoint made it impossible for any large law enforcement or military detail to enter Madovic undetected. Only a single approach led to the mountain compound; even if troops blocked it off and surrounded the place, it was a near certainty, given the history of persecution of the monks, that the rebuilding had included subterranean escape routes, probably through the wine cellars. Finally, entering the monastery to arrest Kajevic was, even if not quite legally forbidden, likely to agitate many people, especially in Serbia, where the Orthodox Church would portray it as a grave violation of a sacred place.
All in all, the general thought it was best to attempt discreet intelligence-gathering in Madovic for several days.
“May I ask you to remain in the area, please?” she said. “We are likely to have further questions for you, if it turns out Mr. Kajevic has not departed.”
I could see that Goos was displeased by the request. He’d had enough of Kajevic and his Tigers, but the general promised to assign us an escort while we were in Bosnia, NATO troops in civilian garb, since the sight of military uniforms would be enough to send Kajevic packing. On the other hand, no one would wonder why we’d hired private bodyguards after the other night. In return for staying around, I requested the general’s help in replacing our passports and cell phones.
At the end of the meeting, Attila stood at the door to say good-bye to everyone. Despite her initial excitement about identifying Kajevic, after second thoughts she wanted no public role in this operation.
“Still need to do business in this country,” she said. “Anything you need on the DL, let me know.”
By the time we were back at the Blue Lamp, two soldiers had shown up in jeans and bulletproof vests, with sidearms visible on their hips. I thought the hotel people might object, but to them it was no more than an indication that the establishment was housing dignitaries. As far as handguns went, Bosnia remained the same kind of Wild West as the US, where anybody could carry one with a little paperwork.
Goos still wasn’t happy.
“Mate,” he said, when we returned to the lounge, “this isn’t our show. I don’t want to be the wuss,” he said, “but our Attila has the right idea. We’d best think carefully before spending the rest of our lives being known as the people who brought that fellow in. Some diehard will pin our faces on his bulletin board.”
I understood, but there were certain limiting realities. Merely the jostling on the short drive out to Attila’s office had been agonizing for Goos. An eight-hour trip back to The Hague, involving two flights, let alone dragging a bag of rocks from Barupra, wouldn’t be possible for him before next week, leaving aside a trip by medevac, an idea Goos immediately dismissed as too grandiose and humiliating.
We spent the following day, Friday, trying to get back to work and to make sense of the information we’d come across this week. Many pieces didn’t fit. But the priorities were pretty much as we’d figured: (A) Make arrangements to exhume the Cave; (B) Speak to Ferko; (C) See if Internet searches could help ID the soldiers assigned to the military intelligence unit in April 2004 and establish whether they’d posted anything that might shed light on what had occurred in Barupra.
Goos went back to poking through Facebook and YouTube. My job, which I didn’t relish, was to create some kind of report to our bosses in The Hague. The idea was to bring our Court supervisors up to date without being especially forthcoming, either about our kidnapping or whom we’d found, news which in both cases was guaranteed to spiral events out of control.
Late in the day, not long after our replacement phones were delivered, I received a call from Attila. She’d tasked one of her Roma employees, who, she said, lived like “a normal person,” to get information on Ferko. The employee had taken the trouble to visit Vo Selo.
“Ferko is totally un-assed,” Attila said. The story from the locals was that within a couple of hours of our visit to Ferko, four police officers had shown up at his house. They made an immediate impression by shooting all of the dogs. According to the one neighbor who had spoken to Ferko, the cops had punched him around until Ferko had coughed up the fact that he was a witness in a case in which we were the lawyers. Ferko swore he’d told us he wanted nothing more to do with us, which further corroborated that Goos and I weren’t looking for Kajevic. Presumably, that was what propelled Nikolai’s commander to run to the water tank to prevent our assassination. Back in Vo Selo, as soon as the cops left, Ferko and his family loaded their four cars with everything they could carry. The neighbor believed they were gone for good.
“Any idea where?” I asked.
“None,” Attila said. “Apparently he took a hammer to his cell phone right there, so no one could track him. I have the number, in case you want to try anyway.”
I went to report all of this to Goos, who was working in the breakfast area. Across from him at the little white table, I dialed the number Attila gave me for Ferko, which produced a long message in the Bosnian dialect of Serbo-Croatian. I handed the device to Goos.
“Not in service?” I asked once he’d clicked off.
“Disconnected.”
“Crap.” The fact that Ferko had run for his life, probably after dealing with Nikolai’s boss and other members of the ex-Arkan gang, did not require explanation, especially for us. But Goos remained baffled about Ferko.
“Here’s where I give it away,” Goos said. “Why’s he tell this story in the first place, not even to mention moving bones around and planting bullets so we think it’s all fair dinkum?”
I wasn’t sure if Goos was being rhetorical.
“You think Esma put him up to the whole act?”
“Why’s he bother, mate, for Esma or anyone else? That’s what I’m saying.”
“Maybe because it actually happened? Maybe he lost some people he cared about and wanted justice done?”
“Does that man with the dogs and the rings strike you as a figure of good citizenship? He’s telling this story, true or not, because there’s something in it for him, but I’ll be stuffed if I know what it is.”
Our conversation, and the riddles about Ferko brought me back to a place I did not want to go: calling Esma. She was the only person we knew who had any connection to Ferko, and we were also obliged to confront her, as an investigative matter, about who her erstwhile client had proven to be. I wanted to hear her say this was all a surprise to her, just to get a sense of whether it was actually true.
The complications for me in approaching Esma showed yet again why we should have kept our private parts private in the first place. My lack of success in sustaining dating relationships had made me fairly practiced about ending them, and I had learned that cold turkey was the only reliable approach. ‘Let’s be friends’ just prolonged the pain for the party more wounded, who took it as a beachhead for hope.
So it was unfair to call Esma. And understandable that she might not pick up. I felt obliged to explain this to Goos, and to apologize. He passed the back of his hand through the air.
“You won’t get a gobful from me, mate, about this. Wouldn’t be many single blokes who wouldn’t crack on to her.”
I didn’t need a translation. I’d acted predictably for any male with an unregistered penis.
Adhering to the ethical proprieties, Goos should have been the one to call Esma. But we both knew I was far more likely to get to the truth, if she was inclined to talk.
I started with the most antiseptic approach, a text: Must speak to you briefly. Business issue. Very sorry to have to be in touch.
She didn’t reply. On Saturday, I tried e-mail. And on Sunday, I finally called, twice in fact, leaving the same message both times. After that, Goos took over, but I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t answer either of us. It was the mess I’d made.
Goos and I slept in both days over the weekend. I dug through more e-mails, read more Fowles—I was now on The French Lieutenant’s Woman—and poked around Tuzla. Also, to be polite, I e-mailed Narawanda to advise her about my schedule, which I thought would bring us back early next week. After some thought, I added, “I hope your trip to New York went well and has made you feel better.” I got a one-word reply: “Not.”
On Sunday, I decided to venture out for a run. Overall I looked worse than I felt. Except for temperature sensation from my tooth, which shot unexpected streaks of pain through my nose and forehead, I was not in much discomfort. There was still a lump in my lip with the black line of a scab in the middle of it, and a colorful bruise had emerged along my jawline where it had met the rifle stock, and there was a welt on my forehead, which had collided with the top iron rung of the ladder. The broken front tooth made me look to myself like an unruly teenager. But as happens once you get accustomed to running, I felt a physical craving for the endorphin rush. One of the NATO MPs agreed to drive along beside me.
Tuzla was pretty, the old center mostly low bright stucco buildings decorated with white architectural details, like plaster medallions. The population was no greater than Peoria, but the city had a far more urban feel, with skyscrapers and minarets visible when I looked south.
The main square, through which I jogged, was marked by a geometric arrangement of multicolored tiles and an Ottoman well, centuries old, from which fresh water still burbled out of a copper nipple. I headed toward Lake Pannonica, the man-made seashore in the center of town, circling it several times.
Like the local police lieutenant, NATO recon were also convinced that we were under surveillance. Some guy had spent twelve hours at the cevapi place across the street, at a table on the front porch, pretending to read the paper, only to be replaced on Saturday and Sunday by a younger fellow doing the same thing at the little café on the corner, where he nursed countless cups of coffee while maintaining a direct line of sight to the hotel door. My bodyguards had been advised to look for a red Yugo, and it was occasionally visible now when I looked back while I was running. So long as we continued to give the impression that we believed it was Ferko, not Kajevic, who was watching us, the Arkan Tiger surveillance team had no reason to be discreet. A menacing presence, in fact, might hasten our departure.
I managed to enjoy myself anyway. The sun was bright and it looked like every person in Tuzla was on the sand in their skimpy European bathing suits, the little kids in sun hats dashing back and forth to the water with their buckets. I picked up a brochure about the lake and was astonished to learn that the ersatz seawater in the network of ponds was pumped in from the same tanks where Goos and I were supposed to die, although diluted many times. I struggled with the thought that if things had gone differently, these people might be splashing around amid indistinguishable little molecules of our remains, but it was almost like thinking about getting hit by oncoming traffic as you’re driving: It just didn’t happen.
For me, the terror was starting to recede, leaving aside a couple of throttling nightmares. As I trotted along, it was nice to feel under my own power again, less dominated by the shadow of trauma and fear. It dawned on me, however, that I had now visited the true Bosnia, sharing a little bit of the abiding national experience.
Monday morning, Goos said, “If you don’t mind being a tad impromptu, might be we could start back to The Hague tomorrow. Won’t quite be tickety-boo, but I think I can stand it. Know for sure in the a.m. Perhaps you can give the good general a tingle and let her know duty calls.”
When I got back to the hotel in the late afternoon following another run, there was a message on my cell from General Moen. I reached her aide-de-camp, who asked if we could come to Sarajevo to meet with the general at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow. The MP bodyguards would drive.
As soon as I relayed the message, I could see Goos was on the verge of saying no. He wanted to go home.
“Any idea what this will be about?” he asked.
“He—the aide—just said the general felt it was important to speak to us again.”
“‘Important?’ Christ the Savior, I don’t want to be important.” He seemed to give his remark some thought. “All right, let’s give it a burl.”
“We’ll go?”
He nodded.
Sarajevo, which had gone from Olympic city to the site of a harrowing siege, was by appearance, like much of Bosnia, seemingly returned to its former self. The military escort who was driving, a young Norwegian named Andersen, seemed to have developed deep affection for the city in his time here and stopped on an overlook, where, in a postcard shot, Sarajevo reposed beside the spangled Miljacka River, with the southern Alps majestic in the distance. From here, my eye went to the minarets and skyscrapers, the tile roofs, and, most striking, the ranks of stark white tombstones that occupied far more mid-city real estate than in any other urban center I’d visited. Andersen pointed to a large building in the heart of town, an old palace that was a bombed roofless wreck but which, he said, would appear lovely from ground level. He was not the kind of kid who would have said the the state of the building was a metaphor, but I think that was why it was so significant to him.
He drove us down into the old section, Bascarsija, where worn paths and walls of stone surrounded the sites rebuilt in the familiar white stucco with brown terra-cotta roofs. The hotel where we were headed was a couple hundred feet from the national war memorial, dedicated to the dead of World War II. Walking through the pedestrian way, Goos and I stopped to observe the evergreen wreaths with ribbons piled beside an eternal flame. In this country there was no end of carnage to recall. Here, where the population had been besieged because of their faith, there were more women in hijab than I’d noticed in Tuzla.
While the soldiers positioned themselves at the door, Goos and I went to the reception counter. Our cover was that we’d arrived for a business meeting with the same construction company whose logo the NATO folks had sported on their pickup trucks the other night. The clerk, a diffident young man who spoke excellent English, gave us keys and ran down the hotel rules, which included serving no alcohol. At that news, I felt Goos tense instinctively, even though we had no plans to spend the night.
On the third floor, the room keys opened a conference room in which the general and six other soldiers sat, all in civvies. A map had been fastened to a portable bulletin board. Everyone stood as we entered, a show of respect I immediately registered as a forbidding sign.
“You seem better,” said the general to Goos.
He answered that he was fine, which was obviously untrue. He was still limping to protect his right side, and the drive had been painful.
“Let us brief you on what we have found,” said General Moen. “The good news is the subject does not seem to have departed.”
She turned things over to an intelligence officer, an intense Hungarian, long and crew cut, a captain named Ferenc. He referred repeatedly to ‘assets,’ which made me think much of the allied intelligence apparatus had been called into play, although some of the information he was relaying had been obtained by sending two officers into Madovic to pose as German tourists.
For roughly a year and a half, Ferenc said, the three monks had been appearing in town at noon on weekdays, moving in slow procession to the hospital, where they prayed over the bedridden. Through the centuries, it had been a rarity for monks to leave the monastery, and the change had been the subject of much initial local conversation. The abbot, in his casual dealings with some townspeople, had explained that the three had been displaced by the war and
had arrived in Madovic seeking shelter and the opportunity to help heal the sick. Although the three monks were called to a different vocation than the regime of reclusive prayer and contemplation at the monastery, the abbot had granted them refuge indefinitely.
“I know Kajevic isn’t going to town for prayer meetings,” Goos said.
Ferenc nodded. The actual purpose of the visits, they believed, was to see a Serbian doctor, a radiologist. He relayed messages to and from Kajevic, who still regarded himself as the leader of a nation and remained in control of a large network of supporters. To NATO, the importance of the hospital visits was that they provided an ideal opportunity to bring down Kajevic outside the monastery walls.
“Zere are tactical problems,” Captain Ferenc added. His grammar was perfect but his accent was strong. He explained that the two men who were accompanying Kajevic each day were not monks either, but rather bodyguards with automatic weapons concealed under their cassocks. I was intrigued by the technology that had allowed NATO to identify the concealed firearms from a distance, but even going back to my days as US Attorney metal-finding infrared scanners existed, although employing them on US soil for random searches of the civilian population was barred by the Fourth Amendment.
“In hospital, vee know,” said Ferenc, “zere is one man, perhaps more, who vould fight for our subject’s freedom.”
An expectant silence fell over the room, which seemed to signal that it was the general’s turn to speak again.
“In order to avoid a repetition of what happened in Doboj eleven years ago,” she said, “we need a substantial force at the hospital. We continue to believe that one reason the subject has remained at the monastery is due to the vantage it affords, allowing them to detect any large-scale movement into town. We can infiltrate some soldiers appearing to be tourists with backpacks or guidebooks, but Madovic doesn’t ordinarily see more than a few such visitors each week, so a large presence—say a tour bus, which we thought of originally—might prove alarming. Also, troops posing as tourists can hide only pistols. So in order to get a force of combat-ready soldiers into that town, we need to ask for your assistance.”