Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “Are we just lonely?” she asked suddenly in a small voice.

  I took a second.

  “No,” I said then. “It doesn’t feel like that to me. Does it feel like that to you?”

  “This is such an immense step that I am still in shock, especially with myself. I am not sure of anything, except that my life after tonight will never be the same. But for many weeks now, when I have dared to be honest, I have thought I was falling in love with you.”

  “But now you don’t know? That’s high praise for me as a lover.”

  She poked my side hard in reprisal for the teasing. Against my expectations, we’d both had a grand time. For all her occasional timidness, this was one arena where Nara had proved to have no trouble letting go.

  “You are changing the subject,” she said. “Do you love me, Boom? A little?”

  “At this moment, yes. Far more than a little.”

  I was afraid she would regard my answer as hedged, but instead she giggled.

  “A friend of mine, an older woman, once told me that every man is in love for an hour before and after each orgasm.”

  I laughed, too.

  “This is more than orgasms, Nara. For both of us. Of that I’m sure.”

  She pushed herself up to an elbow to peer down at me with her essential earnestness.

  “And what will happen?” she asked. “With us?” She was trusting me as a sage older person to be able to tell her. “Do you know?”

  “No. Not yet. But I’m not prepared to worry about it. We’ll breathe. We’ll live.”

  “But I’m not even sure what happens next.” She meant on Monday or Tuesday when better sense invaded us both.

  I pulled myself up in the same posture as her so I could face her. Then I smiled.

  “That much I know,” I answered.

  “Really?”

  “Let me show you what happens next,” I said and gently eased her down on the bed again.

  30.

  The Cave—June 29–July 2

  Goos called from Bosnia about noon on Monday in what was, for him, a fairly agitated mood.

  “Any word from your cobber Attila?”

  “You mean today?”

  “Today, yesterday. I’ve got my whole professional staff out here, ready to go fossicking about in the Cave, and there’s none of the heavy equipment he promised.”

  “She.”

  “She, he. Nothing. And not one of the hired blokes we were looking for either.”

  “Did you call her?”

  “Constantly, mate. Just finally spoke with her office. Back in the States, they say.”

  “Maybe there was some emergency.”

  “Not so, buddy. They say she’s been planning a vac since last week.”

  As had grown common recently, I was having a difficult time discerning motives. Perhaps Attila had been instructed to stop being so helpful by the people she relied on for business at the Department of Defense. Or perhaps that direction had come from Merriwell.

  “Doesn’t sound like she’s on our side anymore, does it?” I asked.

  “That might not be a change, mate.”

  I understood why Goos was saying that, but the person who picked us up from the salt mine seemed, within the limits of recent acquaintance, a genuine friend. Attila’s fundamental delight in life seemed to come from thinking she’d been helpful. It was hard to square that with the notion that she’d been playing us false all along.

  Goos and I signed off and spoke again around 5 p.m. He had reached the construction company that had helped him and the Yugoslav Tribunal exhume some of the hundreds of mass graves near Srebrenica eighteen years ago. The firm was still in business and said they could have equipment on-site tomorrow afternoon. Their price was actually lower than Attila’s. As for laborers, with 25 percent unemployment in Bosnia, Goos wasn’t worried. He’d called one of the desk clerks at the Blue Lamp, who said she could organize a team of workers by nightfall. Digging would begin late Tuesday. Unless I heard otherwise, Goos and I agreed I would come Wednesday as we’d projected originally.

  I had told Nara I would be going back to Bosnia, but she was unhappy receiving the news as we were dressing to run Tuesday evening. I emphasized that armed troops would guard us at all times.

  Our new life together, now in its fourth day, did not seem all that different from our old life. We went to work. We came home. We ran. We ate seafood and drank wine and talked, except that now it was between bouts in bed. Whatever caution I had meant to exert evaporated in the heat of our bedroom and the clutch of intimacy. I trusted Nara Logan. I knew she would never harm me intentionally. As important, she had seen too much of me, over the months in which we’d dwelled in the same space, for me to engage in the attempts to conceal weak points in my personality that were typical at the start of a relationship, when people were waiting to find out how much love could change them. Nara’s guileless honesty sometimes exceeded sensible boundaries—as when she compared Lewis and me as lovers, naturally giving the prize to me, even though as a male I was apparently no match for Lewis’s generous proportions—but overall I relished being with a person so free of calculation. With Nara, I was as much myself as I was ever going to be in the company of someone else.

  Over time, we would see whether that would endure and how far it could take us, but by Tuesday I’d faced the fact that I was utterly mad for Nara. Somewhat perversely, I was glad to be leaving town, just to see how much of my consuming hunger for her would remain when we were apart.

  At the Sarajevo airport, where I arrived around 1 p.m. after a stop in Munich, I had no trouble spotting my two NATO escorts. Just beyond the secure area, they awaited me in the full combat gear of the Danish Army, including flak vests, helmets, and M10 carbines. The sight of assault weapons in the airport attracted a fair amount of attention, but General Moen was clearly making an emphatic statement to anyone who might want to revenge Kajevic’s capture.

  An SUV was at the curb with the blue NATO flag, sporting its four-pointed star, mounted over each headlight. We sped into the Bosnian hills that I had first seen deep in snow, and which were now dressed in the heart-lifting green of summer. Mid-journey, I felt a brief spurt of terror when something in the mountains, a shape or even the angle of the light, ignited a memory of my last trip to this country. For the most part, though, I was calm and strangely pleased to be back.

  I asked the driver to take me straight to Barupra, as I wanted to get there before work closed down for the night. We arrived a little before four.

  Looking down from the edge of the former refugee camp, I saw that the site of the Rejka mine was a hive. Heavy equipment had been inched perilously down the narrow dirt road. Two bright yellow backhoes had climbed up the face of the Cave on their treads and were clawing into it. Goos had told me the night before that he had checked with Madame Professor Tchitchikov, who was confident that the original hollow in the rock formation, the result of stripping out the vein of coal, would not collapse while the new rubble was cleared. After easing off the rock pile, the backhoes emptied their buckets into the beds of two red articulated dump trucks, which then wove down to the valley floor, depositing the contents through their liftgate onto huge green tarpaulins. There, a cadre of workers in orange hazmat suits was sorting every rock individually. Much farther from me, I could see a collection of blackish objects—bones, I guessed—that had been segregated onto smaller blue tarps. Other workers in orange were photographing what lay there.

  As usual, I avoided focusing on the remains. It was not easy to see that far anyway. The dust being raised by the digging rode on the air, a brownish fog with an acrid odor and bitter taste. Everyone was wearing white face masks, including the NATO troops who were positioned at the corners of the site, with rifles across their bodies.

  My NATO driver went through an elaborate back–and-forth on his radio. Apparently, the mining road was barricaded by a huge construction crane whose operator couldn’t be located. I assured everybody
that there was no reason I couldn’t walk. I had worn jeans and hiking shoes and I tromped down to the site of the dig, while my two bodyguards watched from above. More than half of the Cave appeared to have been excavated now, leaving the outer edge of original overhang visible, a darker brown than the surrounding rock.

  A dump truck driver was leaning out of her cab when I got that far.

  “Beel?” she called. She motioned to her passenger seat and ferried me down to the valley floor, where Goos in his white mask was waiting. He pulled it up to his forehead and took a swig of water from a bottle in his hand. The flesh the mask had covered was several shades lighter than the rest of his face.

  I asked how he felt, but he backhanded the question like a fly.

  “And what about the digging?” I asked.

  “I’d say we’re about two-thirds of the way. Come have a look.”

  I followed him toward the blue tarps, a walk of several hundred feet. I wrestled my phobia, but when I finally dared look up, I could see that what had been laid out was not bones.

  I stopped dead, grabbing Goos’s arm. “Guns?” I asked.

  “Yay, weapons,” he said. “And bits of trucks.”

  On each tarp, there were a couple of hundred small arms laid side by side, a virtual armory that, all told, covered an area nearly the size of a football field. There were the green tubes of antitank weapons, shoulder-fired missiles and their launchers, grenades, carbines, sniper rifles, submachine guns and pistols, drab mortars with their attached tripods, and, most frequently, Zastavas. Here and there the workers had also laid out lines of helmets and body armor. The most distant tarps held cases of ammunition and bands of machine gun bullets.

  “Gonna be around five thousand guns, I’d say,” Goos told me. “Today, getting into the rear of the Cave, we’ve been digging up some truck parts, whole gamut from fenders through engine blocks. Like maybe they had some kind of small warehouse back in there.”

  “And how many bodies?”

  “So far as I reckon, nil,” said Goos. His blue eyes were narrowed in the dust but fixed to me to await my reaction. “Late yesterday, we found a couple of bones and were barracking about for a few minutes, quiet like, not that it would be anything to celebrate. Turned out to belong to a fox. So far, those are the only biologic remains.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “We’ve got two blokes putting an eye on every speck of dust. It’s the same protocol we used near Srebrenica, Boom. We’ve found the usual kids’ junk—wrappers, bottles, a busted beach ball. But no clothing, no bones. We’re spraying with Luminol at random, but no blood either. Only decent discovery is here.” He led me over to another blue sheet, where pieces of electronics had been isolated. They were dust-covered and usually no more than tidbits of wire and semiconductors and metal, but on a corner, about a dozen square old cell phones, each the size of a dinner biscuit, were segregated, largely intact.

  “It’s the devil’s own dance getting into these things anymore, but at NFI they may be able to do it. Might be some photos, messages, something to help identify the people who were here. Hardest part will be finding chargers.”

  “And that’s the best we’ve got?”

  “How I reckon, Boom, this here, the Cave, was some kind of arms depot. The weapons are mostly Yugoslav made, with a few old Soviet items here and there. They’ve got marks engraved on the components. We’ll need to check with some military types, but I think that signifies that the stuff was in NATO custody at some point.”

  “Are you thinking NATO buried these weapons here?”

  “Truth told, Boom, I haven’t even begun to think about why these arms are here. Still stuffed that there aren’t any human remains.”

  “Could the bodies turn up?”

  Goos tilted his face up at the mine.

  “Well, like I say, Boom, we still have a third of the way to go, but how I figure, fitting four hundred people in a space of that size, we should have found something already. My guess, we’ve got Buckley’s chance any bones will turn up.”

  Like Goos, I looked to the Cave, where the powerful engine of the crane had just fired to life, farting black smoke. The bitter dust in the air was already gathering at the back of my throat and there was some irritation in my lungs. But my principal reaction was emotional, somewhat dizzied that this was what the last months had amounted to.

  “So Ferko was a stone liar?” I asked. “It was all bullshit?” Even now, I’d expected to discover some truthful elements in his testimony, but Goos solemnly turned his head one way, then the other.

  “Sheer rort,” he answered.

  General Moen and Colonel Ruehl journeyed to Tuzla for dinner that night. Ruehl’s arm remained in the cast he’d be wearing for several more weeks, so an aide intervened whenever he needed to cut something on his plate.

  The dinner was meant to be a celebration. Goos and I weren’t really in the mood, and as it turned out, the NATO people weren’t either. It was a good thing for the world that Laza Kajevic had been captured, and an achievement for the soldiers who’d been hunting for him, but even the thought of Kajevic and his crimes was enough to dampen emotions.

  Goos brought several of the weapons we’d recovered to dinner in a canvas bag, and both Ruehl and General Moen examined the contents, discreetly enough that only a few of the diners took notice. Neither of them was familiar with the markings, but Moen’s aide had been here in 2004 and confirmed that the laser engraving was typical of what NATO, especially the American forces, had done when they seized weapons stocks in Bosnia.

  While we were eating dessert, General Moen asked if we’d heard any reports in The Hague about how Kajevic was adapting to confinement. I said only that I’d been told he did not care for Dutch food.

  On Thursday morning, I sat down for breakfast with Goos before I flew back to The Hague. Goos was staying on until the excavation was complete and all the arms and truck parts had been photographed. He preferred to bring everything he’d uncovered back to The Hague, but transporting weapons would require permits. Goos planned to go to Brussels on Sunday, to help Fien pack. With their youngest grandchild now school-age, Fien had decided to move to The Hague, at least for the rest of the summer, perhaps permanently.

  “Told her I’d give the program another burl,” Goos said. He didn’t quite allow his eyes to meet mine.

  I had noticed that he wasn’t drinking last night at dinner and was afraid he wasn’t feeling well, maybe from all the dust the exhumation had raised. I nodded now, just to show I had heard him. There was a lot of information in his last sentence.

  “If it takes,” Goos said, “then I’ll have to give Kajevic his due.” I wasn’t sure whether Goos was referring to Kajevic’s insult, telling Goos he looked like a drunk, or the moment of reflection the Tigers had provided for us on the top of the water tank. It didn’t make much difference either way.

  We shook hands, which wasn’t customary for us with our comings and goings, then I stood up to get ready to leave the Blue Lamp. We’d had some eventful times here.

  31.

  Fallacies—July 3–6

  I returned to The Hague Thursday. Friday morning, as I approached the entrance to the Court, I was astounded to see Roger, in his twenty-year-old suit, a narrow-brimmed felt hat protecting him from the sun. I bounded up the last step to hug him.

  “What the hell?” I asked. “What brings you here?”

  “You, actually. I’ve been flying all night. Can we have a cup of coffee?”

  It was easier to go back under the concrete underpass of the Sprinter to Voorburg than to try to get Roger approved as a guest at the Court, where the security team required at least a day’s notice of any visitor. As we walked over, we exchanged briefings on our families. Rog was going to have them all together at the Eastern Shore for the Fourth. I smiled imagining Roger pottering around out there in his über-WASP attire, displaying his skinny legs in lime shorts, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and penny loafers without socks.


  Once we were on some old wood-slatted folding chairs outside a café, Roger got down to business.

  “You sort of interrupted my holiday plans,” Rog said. Today was a federal holiday in the US.

  “Me?”

  The wind ruffled the red feather in his hatband, and he had to keep his fingers on the brim to keep the chapeau from blowing away.

  “There’s a story circulating that you didn’t find any bodies in Bosnia.”

  I looked at him for a second.

  “Rog, aren’t you guys embarrassed about keeping an eye on me? Go protect the embassy in Benghazi or something. I’m not worth this kind of trouble.”

  “There are people in the Pentagon who think you’ve been a lot of trouble. That massacre story in the Times left them spitting whenever they hear your name.”

  “I told you—”

  “Right, it wasn’t you. Spare me. Anyway, there are plenty of them who think turnabout is fair play. They want to tip the Times that you didn’t find any bodies.”

  I shrugged. “They’re entitled to the follow-up. The exhumation was a public event.”

  “But they want to wipe out the original story. I mean, punish it. The narrative they’re pushing is that a prosecutor, eager to return to the limelight, starts sleeping with the Chief Allegator and checks his judgment at the door, doing her bidding instead of smelling out pure bullshit. I wanted you to hear this.”

  My fingertips were ice cold. There was no point asking where the Pentagon people were coming up with these details. I’d just chided Roger for the way the spooks had kept an eye on me. He’d started referring to Esma as my girlfriend a couple of months back.