Testimony

by Scott Turow

  His smugness and his powerful ability to shape reality to his liking made me eager to put him in his place.

  “And yet it was you, President Kajevic, according to what we have heard repeatedly, who sent an emissary to threaten the people of Barupra.”

  Bozic’s fine blue eyes rose from his pad. He’d been taken by surprise by the question and was alarmed. He laid his thick hand on Kajevic’s forearm.

  “A word with the president, please,” said Bozic. But he had the client from hell, who pulled free.

  “As I have told you, Mr. Ten Boom, I was hundreds of kilometers away. I did not menace anyone.”

  “Are you aware of any threats being made on your behalf against the people in Barupra?”

  Bozic lifted his palm to call a halt. Kajevic, whose eyes never left me, again answered anyway.

  “Whatever was said was idle talk. No actions were taken at my order.”

  “But do you know if the Roma of Barupra were informed that you would be exacting revenge against them?”

  “War is not a parlor game, Mr. Ten Boom.”

  “Does that mean that to the best of your knowledge such threats were made?”

  “I would say yes to that. Certainly I would not want to encourage others to do as the Gypsies had done.” This was what Attila had explained the night I got to Bosnia. Integral to Kajevic’s success in remaining at large was terrorizing anyone who might turn against him. Threatening the Gypsies for betraying him was essential.

  “And what precisely was communicated, President Kajevic?”

  “I would not know. I probably had no idea then, and certainly no memory now. Enough to instill fear: vengeance on any person involved—and those they cared for.” He added the second piece casually, as if there was nothing special about threatening innocents.

  I pondered. “But given your purpose, President Kajevic, which was to deter anyone else from helping NATO, it doesn’t seem to me that what you yourself call ‘idle talk’ would have been sufficient.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “We will never know. The Americans killed the Roma.”

  “Before you could?”

  He offered only a tiny, canny smile. He was after all a lawyer, and knew just where the lines were. To Bozic’s considerable relief, Kajevic signaled with a hand that he was now done answering on that subject.

  “Have you ever considered that it was not the Roma who informed against you, but someone else?”

  “It was not someone else, Mr. Ten Boom. We both know that. We dealt with outsiders infrequently for just this reason. Only the Roma knew where we were and by their natures would get maximum value for that secret.”

  I turned to Goos, to see if he had questions. He had been typing like mad on his laptop, and pressed a button to go back.

  “Did your nephew tell you the name of the Gypsy he bought the guns from?” Goos asked.

  “Probably. But who could remember after more than a decade?”

  “Ferko Rincic?” Goos asked.

  Kajevic threw up his long, elegant hands at the uselessness of attempting to recall.

  “What about Boldo Mirga?” Goos clearly was beginning to hatch a different theory about why Boldo and his relatives had died. Kajevic appeared more impressed by that name. He pulled on his chin.

  “That seems more familiar. But who knows with memory?”

  I glanced again to Goos for any more questions. He shook his head.

  “You are surprised, of course,” said Kajevic, “by what I have told you.”

  “Somewhat.”

  “The Americans, I assume, have blamed me for the deaths of these Roma.”

  I tossed my head in a way meant to show I couldn’t say.

  “No, that is how the Americans are. They love to look as innocent as schoolboys, but they are devious to the core. After our escape, we were required to make the threats we have just been discussing. Once the Americans learned that, they knew they could annihilate these Roma with impunity. And they did so. And then denied it, of course.” He shook his head, sincerely amazed by the depravity of the Americans. Like every other hypocrite alive, he was very good at applying unyielding standards to others.

  Bozic again straightened up to apply a note of caution.

  “Once more,” he said, “I remind you that President Kajevic described these threats as ‘idle talk,’” said Bozic. “No action of any kind was ever taken by him or anyone he had the power to guide.”

  “That is quite correct,” said Kajevic.

  “Do you know who among the Roma received those idle threats?” I asked.

  Kajevic looked upward a second to think.

  “I believe it was the fellow who sold the guns. Baldo? If that’s the right man. I did hear that he denied on the lives of his children that he had informed the Americans. As if we would believe that. We do not understand the Gypsies, Mr. Ten Boom. But, alas, they do not understand us.”

  We were all silent a second. Kajevic’s serene willingness to be both judge and executioner left a weird disturbance in the quiet room.

  Goos and I both took a second to search our notes, then I came to my feet. Goos, Kajevic, and Bozic followed.

  “May I ask a question of you gentlemen?” said Kajevic, as we faced each other.

  “You may ask, of course,” I said. “If we can, we’ll answer.”

  “When you came first to Madovic, you were there for what reason?”

  “Lunch,” I said.

  Kajevic continued to study me with formidable intensity. He wanted to know if he’d been betrayed, if our supposed search for Ferko was a ruse. These days he could probably not fully trust anyone’s loyalty. That question, I realized—and his desire to exact further revenge—was probably his ultimate motive in sitting down with us.

  “We had no idea you were there,” I said. “And no mandate to look for you.”

  “I see.”

  “And if your goons hadn’t kidnapped us, we would have had no reason to reexamine every minute of the day to figure out why that had happened.”

  A philosophical look overtook Kajevic. “It was an understandable response by those men. They have served me well. They did not recognize the difference between the courts in The Hague. I, naturally, did. I had read about your investigation.” Still staring at me without relent, Kajevic now added a more generous smile. “You have me to thank that you are still alive. But as happens so often, mercy was a mistake. I would not be here if those men had done what they meant to.”

  There was plenty of room for debate about that. At the time, Kajevic took the better bet that we’d continue to think the kidnappers were working for Ferko. Killing us, on the other hand, would have brought in Europol and the Bosnian Army in numbers and would have forced Kajevic to flee the monastery. Like General Moen, I suspected that he had nowhere to go. And I also wondered if assassinating investigators who weren’t really looking for him would have been costly to his alliances, especially among local police. Mercy, therefore, had had no role in his calculations. Self-aggrandizement, however, was second nature to him.

  “I am sure,” said Kajevic, “you are each quite pleased with yourselves.”

  “It was all accidental, President Kajevic. We both know that.”

  “I don’t credit your modesty,” said Kajevic. “It was your great moment. You will boast about capturing me for the rest of your lives. I was very curious to have some time with each of you. And I am grateful to have done so.” He looked back and forth toward Goos and me, taller than both of us. Again, he smiled bleakly. “Because I have seen there is nothing great about either of you.” He extended his hand to Goos. “You are a drunk,” he said, before turning to me. “And you are a very ordinary man who wets his pants at the prospect of dying.”

  Predictable. He could not let us depart without inflicting some harm. Whatever causes Laza Kajevic claimed, the flag he actually sailed under would always be sadism.

  I peered at him with his hand outstretched in mockery.

  “A
nd you are the very face of evil, President Kajevic,” I said. “Who will be punished every remaining day of your life.”

  He laughed. “Five hundred years from now, an entire people will still sing my name. They will read poems of love and gratitude to me every day. You, on the other hand, Mr. Ten Boom, will be so long forgotten that it will be as if your name had never been uttered at all.” Kajevic waved his chin at the guard. “See them out,” he said.

  As soon as we were back in the sun, Goos announced that he needed a drink. He made up for it at nighttime, but Goos didn’t touch a drop during work hours, and I understood his request as a sign of distress. I was willing to join him.

  We picked up our bikes and walked with them a couple of blocks to a place where there were outdoor tables and umbrellas. Goos was in a dark mood, sunk in himself, until he had downed half the beer the waitress brought.

  “So what about it?” he asked. “We believe him?”

  It was essential to Kajevic’s compelling persona that in his presence you tended to accept every word he uttered. In reality, Kajevic could have been practicing his own reprisals by blaming the Americans for actions that, in the end, he’d not merely threatened but actually carried out. But his revelation about the guns made his account feel convincing, and I told Goos that. His opinion was the same.

  “But this still has a rough feel to me, mate. The Americans have spent the last eleven years hiding the facts about those guns. Damned embarrassing to lose your troops with weapons taken out of your very hands, but it’s required a lot of energy to keep that secret so long.”

  “You think there’s more to it?” I asked.

  “Something else,” he said, “yay.”

  “A massacre by troops gone rogue?”

  “Could be.”

  We speculated a second longer. At this stage, there was one certainty: Almost no one we’d talked to had been completely transparent.

  “Let’s go dig up that fucking cave,” said Goos. He wrestled down his tie as a sign of resolve. “The bones won’t lie.”

  I was with him. Goos motioned for another beer.

  “And what about him?” asked Goos after a moment. “What do you make of him?” It conceded something not worth denying about the largeness of Kajevic’s character that it was unnecessary even to use his name. I had noticed earlier in my life, especially after meeting people who were regarded as ‘legends,’ that what is called charisma, this outsize attractive power, was often rooted in madness. We experienced these people as extraordinary because deep psychic disturbances prevented them from observing the same boundaries the rest of us had learned to adhere to.

  I was not surprised therefore that even half an hour later and far from the prison, Goos and I were both still oscillating from the interview. In our professional lives, as cop and prosecutor and defense lawyer, we’d each been through hundreds of encounters with criminals. Yet today we’d heard none of the standard guff—‘It didn’t happen that way,’ ‘The other guy did it,’ even ‘I was just following orders.’ Instead, Kajevic essentially rejected our entire moral order in favor of his religion of power.

  “There will always be ones like him, won’t there?” Goos asked.

  “Sure.” I nodded. “The brilliant charismatic crackpot who gets his hands on the levers of power and exults in mayhem? There will always be people like him.”

  “So what’s the point then?” said Goos. He leaned toward me, bringing his whole body over his glass. By Goos’s laid-back standards, he was quite intent. “Since I came up to The Hague, people in the courts always talk about deterrence: We’ll put the likes of Kajevic in prison and that will be a deterrent to the next madman. Does that make any sense to you, Boom? Does it really?”

  I understood his mood now. It had been a rough few weeks and it led to a bleak conclusion. We had no answers in our own case, and it didn’t matter anyway, because there was some flaw in the human DNA that would always spawn miscreants like this who’d crawl out of the muck.

  “Deterrence?” I asked. “Maybe I believe in it at the margins. But I don’t think some guy in South Sudan with a machete, who’s whacking off limbs in order to force dozens of people to jump off a ten-story building, is going to stop all the sudden, thinking, Wait, I could end up in the dock at the ICC. You know, after the years I’ve spent prosecuting and defending people, I’ve pretty much concluded that crimes, whether it’s genocide or petty theft, get committed for the same reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “The asshole thinks he’ll get away with it. They all convince themselves they’ll never get caught, no matter how ridiculous that is.”

  Goos uttered a croaky laugh, which a second ago had seemed entirely beyond him, while a hand crept down unconsciously to rub at his ribs. I’d spoken the fundamental truth of the trenches.

  “So why are you here, Boom? Why come do this?”

  Despite all our time together, we’d been guys and never quite gotten to this conversation.

  “It was the right moment,” I said. “Everything up for grabs in my life. Needed a change.”

  All that was true, but listening to my own words, I was instantly chagrined, because I was trying too hard to sound unsentimental.

  “How’s this, Goos? I know this much: Justice is good. I accept the value of testimony, of letting the victims be heard. But consequences are essential. People can’t believe in civilization without being certain that a society will organize itself to do what it can to make wrongs right. Allowing the slaughter of four hundred innocents to go unpunished demeans the lives each of us leads. It’s that simple.”

  Goos’s blue eyes, watery with drink, lingered on mine and he gave another weighty nod, then lifted his beer glass and clinked it against mine.

  VII.

  In the Cave

  29.

  War and Truth—June 26–27

  On Friday, the president and registrar informed us that our budget to exhume the Cave had been approved. Goos felt well enough to plan for a return to Bosnia the following Monday, and we agreed that once the initial excavation was underway, I would follow. That figured to be Wednesday of next week. In the meantime, we divided responsibilities to complete preparation.

  One item, indispensable from the perspective of Fien, Goos’s wife, was to ask NATO to provide round-the-clock protection. I spoke with General Moen’s aide-de-camp, who promised to make arrangements. I knew the NATO troops were stretched, but I asked that the detachment to guard us come from the organization, not the Bosnian Army, and the aide ultimately agreed.

  I also called Attila a few times but did not reach her directly. Instead, the registrar’s office returned a signed copy of Attila’s proposal for the earth-moving equipment, while I e-mailed to ask her to please set aside time for Goos and me next week. Over the months, I’d come to recognize that there was often more calculation to Attila than the blizzard of words made it seem, but I was inclined to believe what she was always implying—that it was higher-ups who were still rigidly adhering to secrecy about the details surrounding the Kajevic arrest, including the full nature of the convoy that the Roma had hijacked. Nevertheless, we had leverage now, because sooner or later we would have to file a public report with the Court, even if it was merely to close our investigation. If the Americans wanted us to avoid mentioning the weapons, they would have to explain the sensitivities, including telling us a lot more of the story than they’d been willing to so far.

  At home, Narawanda continued to avoid me. She was gone before I woke and returned just before bed, when I could hear her scurrying up to her room. I left a note on Tuesday to say that our interview with Kajevic had taken place and to thank her for her role in making it happen. Beside the coffee pot, I found a very brief response. “Very welcome. Working feverishly on motions.”

  I understood that she had embarrassed herself painfully at our last dinner with her declaration about struggling to behave properly. Yet I’d accepted that it was best for us to keep our distance. When
I returned from Bosnia, I would begin searching hard for a new place to live. Whatever fantasies about the two of us she might have been harboring—at least that evening, after three beers—were better ignored for both our sakes. I had done something incredibly stupid with Esma and had escaped with less emotional—and professional—damage than I had any right to expect. Getting involved again so soon, and with a woman who didn’t have even one foot out of her marriage, was dumber yet. None of that was to deny the many appetites Nara privately stimulated. Her innate modesty was a curtain behind which she liked to hide. She had a wonderfully active mind and a sly sense of humor that frequently overcame her pose as the blank-faced foreign girl. And her physical appeal had grown on me steadily over the months. But what I was drawn to most intensely was her earnestness. She had a rare gift among humans of being able to say how she actually felt, even if that was ‘I’m confused.’

  Despite that, whenever I tried to consider things carefully, I regarded myself as the party more at risk. For her, I might make a convenient spot for an emergency landing on the way out of her relationship with Lewis, but I was likely to be the first stop on that journey rather than the last. By my guesswork, I was seventeen years older than she was, which would look unappealing once she got around to the long view. Whereas I, especially after feeling the cold circle of the rifle barrel, was more and more ready to nest. I could fall for Nara hard and a few months along end up with a shattered heart—and nowhere to live.

  All of this was the kind of thing I could explain over a drink a few years from now, after she was well situated with a new beau—or husband. For now, it rested in the chasm of things unspoken that existed in most inchoate relationships between boys and girls.

  These thoughts about Nara, intermittent and gentle, contrasted with the hot anger I felt whenever Esma crossed my mind. For reasons I couldn’t quite comprehend, there seemed to have been a fundamental insult in the way I’d been duped. All of that sat side by side with the reality, made sharper by our imminent return to Bosnia, of how important it was to figure out what the hell had been transpiring with Ferko, and whether any fragment of what he’d said was true.