Testimony

by Scott Turow

  I closed my eyes to think it through. If I was Merry’s lawyer, I’d see the perils very clearly. The people above Merriwell in the chain of command would bob and weave. They’d say they didn’t know in advance that the Iraqi defense minister was going to divert the weapons, and certainly not to Al Qaeda. And in a fluid situation, where the truth moved like quicksilver and calamity was always at hand, it was possible, even likely, that Roger and Merry hadn’t waited for all the right approvals. Even eleven years later, there would be fury, starting with the families of every soldier who died in Iraq in that period. It would get really ugly, really fast.

  And Layton Merriwell—who even tried to help me in order to avoid further damage to his name—was clearly not up to another scandal. Or to shredding one more career. Or years of grand juries and lawsuits, or even prosecution. With his government pension, Roger had a special vulnerability. I didn’t need to reread Title 18, the US criminal code, to figure out if arming the enemy was an offense. The second shipment, after Merriwell and Roger knew the guns were likely to go awry, would be very very hard to defend—which was why the officials above them were bound to maintain they never had the complete picture.

  “Three years later, in 2007,” Merry said, “the Administration and I were no longer on the same page about the war, as you know. I was just starting to read my name in the papers—”

  “As a presidential candidate?”

  He nodded. “There was suddenly a flurry of congressional inquiries about the weapons we’d gathered in Bosnia. I understood it was a shot across the bow. Eventually, senior Administration figures intervened to convince a couple of committee chairs that this was Pandora’s box for many people besides me.”

  “Is that why you decided not to run? To end that investigation?”

  He laughed a little.

  “I had many reasons for not running. Florence was completely against it. My chances were slight. For the most part, I couldn’t imagine spending every day begging for money like a monk with a tin cup. But yes, my announcement that I was staying in the military certainly encouraged everyone to let the sleeping dogs lie.

  “One odd development, though, was that the compelling Ms. Czarni showed up in Bosnia asking about Barupra at almost exactly the same time. I’ve always assumed that was a coincidence, but I could never convince Attila.”

  “Speaking of Attila—she was the one who told you that the people of Barupra were alive?”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “When?”

  “A few days before I first met with you.”

  “Did you ask where they were? Or why someone couldn’t just tell the Court that?”

  “Attila said they had been promised complete confidentiality concerning their whereabouts. It was like the Witness Protection Program on a large scale.”

  “Because?”

  “Because Laza Kajevic wanted to kill them. He’d sworn revenge on them after the firefight in Doboj. They would always be in mortal danger as long as Kajevic remained at large.”

  A surprised sound escaped me, although now that Merry said it, I realized I should have put that together on my own. That was why people who’d been AWOL for the last eleven years were suddenly out in the open.

  “Attila’s explanation made some sense, Boom. But certainly, under the circumstances, it wasn’t my secret to tell you. Nor was it my right to put those people at risk. I did my best to lead you to the NATO records, thinking they’d provide you some clues. Once I saw those aerial surveillance photos, I admit I got a sinking feeling. I hoped Attila had some role in moving those people. It was possible, of course, that she had lied to me, and the Gypsies in the pictures were instants away from their deaths. But I could never make myself believe that.”

  “You didn’t ask Attila?”

  “I learned a long time ago, Boom, that when it came to the intelligence services and the civilian contractors, I was very much ‘need to know.’ I stayed between the lines. And, by contrast, I never discussed the materials I turned over to you with Attila. It was your job to get to the bottom of all that, not mine.”

  I understood the eyes-forward mentality, but I didn’t really approve when the question Merriwell avoided asking Attila was, Did you commit a crime against humanity? But his logic was that there was nothing to gain. If Attila said no, Merry would still be unsure whether she was speaking the truth. And even worse, what would Merriwell do if his former top NCO answered yes?

  “And what about my witness, Ferko? Any idea what he was up to? Was he protecting the people of Barupra by testifying they were dead?”

  “Same answer: I never asked. My assumption was that his testimony was a contrivance of Ms. Czarni’s, but your guess is as good as mine. Maybe he was being heroic.”

  Lawyers and judges, who placed a sacred weight on testimony, seldom saw perjury in that light. And as Goos and I had acknowledged, it was hard to conceive of the man we met in Vo Selo, with his little castle and a ring on each finger, as a bold protector of his people. But perhaps. What had Merriwell said? With their need to live in an ever-changing present, the Gypsies don’t really see it as lying anyway.

  I closed my eyes again to concentrate and conjure up my remaining questions. I’d made notes on the plane, but it didn’t seem sporting to take them out.

  “And in 2004, what did you understand about the Roma’s role regarding Kajevic?”

  “Less than you seem to think. I knew that the Roma had provided the intelligence on Kajevic’s whereabouts. My information was that they sold his people black-market goods—car parts, something like that—and recognized only later whom they’d been dealing with. But even after our soldiers were killed and wounded, I didn’t know that the Roma had stolen the weapons or sold them to Kajevic. I admit, Boom, that those arms were a sensitive issue that we didn’t want the press or Congress to explore for fear of where it would lead. But, as you point out, the identity of the thieves was not central to that concern.”

  “So who did you think stole the weapons?”

  “I’d been told at the time that those trucks had been hot-wired in the middle of the night by thieves who escaped unseen. Because of other information, Army Intelligence formed a theory that the thieves were jihadis who wanted to get the guns to the Middle East. That’s why we were so unprepared for the firepower Kajevic had acquired. I left for Iraq two days after the raid, when no one yet had an explanation for how Kajevic got his hands on the weapons—or the trucks, for that matter.”

  “When did you learn about the Roma’s role in that?”

  “I think it was 2007 when Ms. Czarni showed up in Bosnia. Attila told Roger, and Roger told me, that the disappearance of the Roma had some relationship to the weapons Kajevic used. Again, I didn’t ask for details.”

  I took a second again to piece things through. In the interval, Merriwell hiked across the room to speak to his assistant on the phone. I could tell that his next meeting was ready to start. I promised him not to be much longer, but he took the time to refresh our coffees from a black plastic Thermos before he resumed his seat in his leather chair.

  I asked the question I’d been saving for last.

  “Any chance Attila sold the weapons to Kajevic?”

  Merriwell did me the favor of briefly reflecting on the possibility before shaking his head emphatically.

  “Her behavior has been a bit odd. I imagine you could see that I was surprised when you thanked me at your ex-wife’s house for encouraging Attila to assist you. The day before that, she’d been on the phone, raising her voice with me and insisting I was crazy to turn the NATO records over to you. And she was very put out when I told her that I couldn’t describe the documents. Attila hates no answer more than, I can’t tell you. But selling weapons to Kajevic? There isn’t money enough to make Attila Doby betray her country or our soldiers.”

  “She’s back in the US apparently,” I said. “Do you have her address?”

  “I’m sure.” Merriwell crossed the office again—he
really needed a backpack and a walking stick in here to go end to end—and eventually phoned one of his assistants, who, he said, would provide me with all of Attila’s domestic contact information on my way out.

  At the door, Merry again offered his hand. I remained impressed by how hale and confident he looked with his summer tan. He was a complicated guy, like most of us. But I felt he’d told me the truth today. For the most part, he always had, at least about what concerned me: There was no massacre.

  “I hope you will stay in touch, Boom. I still look back on that dinner we had as a transformative moment in my life.”

  “I take no credit.”

  “You gave me hope,” he said. “Which was borne out. You’ll have to come to dinner again to take a look at my place next time you’re in town. Jamie’s redecorating. I’m sure you saw that it needed it.”

  I could feel my face fall.

  “Oh.” Merriwell smiled hugely when he saw my expression. It was probably the most amused I’d ever seen him, grinning broadly enough to reveal a lot of gum recession. “I guess the American gossip rags don’t reach The Hague.”

  “I don’t keep track of them, that’s for sure.”

  “Jamie’s come back to me.” He was referring to Major St. John. “She left Rick. I would never have had the courage to reach out again were it not for you.”

  I shook his hand once more, and on my way out accepted a piece of paper from Merriwell’s assistant, but I remained dazed. I could not imagine what Merriwell heard in my advice to move on that he reinterpreted to fit his own needs. But he had what he wanted, at least for a while. I had told him, ‘Stay happy,’ as I departed, but I left feeling the man was probably doomed.

  35.

  Foreign Voices—July 10–11

  I stayed overnight in DC at the Huntington and managed to reach college friends, Melvin and Milly Hunter, for dinner. The Hunters—he was black and she was white—were both physicians, Milly an ENT and Melvin an oncologist. We talked mostly about our kids, but the subject turned to race, everything from Obama through Michael Brown. When I first met Melvin, he did not like to mention in public that he was black, but he seemed increasingly desperate about how inescapable color was in America, particularly for their kids, whom they’d idealistically brought up to check ‘Other’ on forms asking about race.

  I was asleep early, but left my phone on, hoping to hear from Nara. We’d been exchanging voice mails, but still hadn’t connected. As I was leaving The Hague, she appeared just a little uneasy that I was going to see Esma, although her discomfort was minor compared to my apprehensions about her visit with Lew. Near 4 a.m., my phone pinged and I roused myself and turned on the light, sitting at the edge of the bed with my hands on my thighs while I tried to remind myself where I was.

  The text was from Goos. He’d positioned himself at an Internet café and wondered if we could speak by Skype. He’d attached several photos of the people he’d interviewed in the last couple of days.

  His image swam a bit on the screen and shattered into uneven lines before it cohered. We ended up starting with a rundown on my conversation with Merriwell.

  “Think we’re lucky he’s taken a liking to you, Boom.”

  “Maybe. He knows I’m reluctant to burn Roger. But I think he was afraid not to tell me the truth.”

  Like me, Goos could see how Merry and Roger would be left holding the bag if the Iraqi weapons shipments became a subject of public discussion. Even if they ended up pointing fingers at the White House to save themselves, it would make a grim end to their public careers, with no guaranteed outcome.

  Eventually, we turned to the results of Goos’s efforts in Kosovo.

  “Talked to about forty people in the last two days,” Goos said. “Some by themselves, some in groups. Have a couple folks standing by, if you’ve a mind to ask questions yourself.”

  “What’s the executive summary before we do that?”

  “Making it very skinny, the 386 souls who used to live in Barupra arrived here on April 28, 2004.”

  “And here is Mitrovica? The refugee camp where the locals tried to burn them out in 1999?”

  “Right you are, Boom. Not much more popular now hereabouts, I’d say. A hundred thousand or so Roma in Kosovo back then and ninety thousand ended up as refugees. Usual story. Everybody hates them.”

  I was experiencing some difficulty sorting out my reactions. I was supposed to be happy these people were still alive.

  “And what happened to them once they got to Mitrovica?”

  “Well, I sent you photos, but here, this café is just across the street.”

  He swung his laptop around. What I saw was not much better than Barupra, shacks with corrugated tin roofs, sided in canvas or bare planks. As in Barupra, there were dwellings under blue tarps and, in one case, the old drab tenting of the UN relief agency. Clothing hung on wash lines, and as always there were piles of metal refuse everywhere. The place was deep in mud.

  “The reason there was still room in the old camp here,” Goos said, “was there’d been a lot of whinging that folks were getting sick. Turns out it’s right down the hill from a lead mine. Place was finally closed a few years back. But there’s still thirty, forty of the Roma from Barupra squatting here.”

  “What about lead poisoning?”

  “What about it? There’s dead kids, blind kids, kids with all manner of problems. Some of the grown-ups have got nerve conditions. But there’s nowhere else to go. Most from Barupra are over in a better camp, former UN barracks, little white buildings. And a lot have fallen back in with the Roma community in town, the Mahalla. But aren’t a lot of them here, Boom, wherever they’re living, that’ve got a piece of piss for a life—it’s all damn hard.”

  “No happy endings for the Roma?”

  “Not in this movie.”

  On my tablet, I navigated to the photos Goos had sent: kids in cheap dirty clothes, most of them in short pants, as seemed to be the custom without regard to the season. The adults had the insular weathered look I’d seen before. They wore Crocs and no socks and polyester jackets and surplus T-shirts with ridiculous slogans that had caused the garments to go unsold until the Roma bought them for pennies. The sight was starting to have a disheartening familiarity.

  “Was it easy getting them to talk?”

  “Not easy. The younger ones were better. A couple months back, before Kajevic was captured, I’d have had Buckley’s chance with any of them.” That was more or less what I’d pieced together with Merriwell.

  “How it turned out, Boom, I was a bit tin-arsed.” He meant he’d been lucky. “Recollect Sinfi from Lijce, the other Roma town? You told me all about her.”

  I wouldn’t forget Sinfi soon. She was the thin beautiful young woman who first informed us about Kajevic’s threats, while holding her nine-month-old on her hip.

  “I was having a squizz around the camp here,” Goos said, “when I saw this sheila and thought to myself, Must be she’s Sinfi’s sister.” He had to be referring to the withered arm. “So I asked her, you know. Turned out I was right. I lent her my mobile to call Lijce. No one here’s got international service. Happy times, Boom. Tears of joy. I was everybody’s mate after that. Only thing was the lot of them wanted to be double sure Kajevic was in irons. Had a couple NATO photos to show them.”

  “So you’re the big man on campus?”

  “Could say. You know, Boom, I suspect some of them are looking to have a lend of us. Just their way. They’ll stick their hands out soon enough. Reparations? Whatever they can get. You understand, Boom. They’re poor.”

  I didn’t need to tell Goos how to steer around that: Make no promises but, on the other hand, don’t tell them now that their hopes were unrealistic. It was almost impossible to deal with the Roma without screwing them over in some way.

  “So here’s our man Ion.” Lacking directorial skills, Goos forgot to re-aim the camera, which I assumed was in his laptop, perched in turn on a café table. But eventually Ion was
at Goos’s side. Ion was chunky, with a full face and wiry black hair and brown as an old penny. He was a good-natured sort, smiling often, despite his dentition, in which his two front teeth appeared to be alone in his upper gum. The sight of him took me all the way back to childhood and a puppet called Ollie, a dragon with a single tooth that overlapped his lower lip.

  Ion spoke quickly in Serbo-Croatian and also knew a few words of English, since he was another former CoroDyn employee. But Goos frequently held him up so he could translate for me.

  Ion had worked on Boldo’s crew and drove regularly for Attila and CoroDyn. In mid-March 2004, he was deployed on several convoys, picking up stores of weapons at various facilities around Bosnia and delivering them to Camp Comanche for what I now knew was air transport to Iraq. The final convoy did not follow the pattern.

  “They went down toward Mostar and picked up the load of weapons, twelve trucks, but when they got back toward Tuzla, Boldo suddenly tells half of them, Ion included, to take the arms and the trucks to Barupra. Boldo had them steer these rigs down that road to the Cave in the middle of the night, which didn’t make any of these blokes especially content, but Boldo is mean as cat’s piss. In the morning, Ion and a dozen of them from the village unloaded the weapons from the trucks. Boldo is strutting around, grinning like a shot fox, saying how he had a customer for some of this.”

  “Was this new?” I said. “Did Boldo deal in stolen guns regularly?”

  “Boldo,” Goos told me, after he’d asked, “was pretty good at boosting cars and chopping them. But weapons, so far as Ion knew, that was a new lurk for Boldo.”

  Goos and Ion again chatted for a minute. In the afternoon, after all the arms were unloaded, Boldo and Ion and the other drivers were taken back to where the rest of the convoy had waited. Then they proceeded to Commanche, where Boldo reported the hijacking. The next day, the men working for Boldo warehoused the weapons in the Cave.