by Scott Turow
“Ion was up top of the ridge for a rest when he sees a car raising dust across the valley. Looked like a jet with a vapor trail, doing 150 kilometers at least.”
Ion was a vivid storyteller like so many other Roma. He was in the midst of rolling himself a cigarette but was able to do a pantomime illustrating the speed of the car, even while Ion held the unsealed paper, lined with tobacco, in his other hand.
“Sedan parks in front of the Cave, and even on top, Ion can hear Attila screaming, cross as a frog in a sack. ‘Where’s Boldo? Where’s Boldo?’
“Boldo comes sauntering down and Attila gets up in his grill. Quite the blue.”
Ion made a shooting gesture.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Says if either had a sidearm there’d have been bullets fired, that’s how mad they were.”
“Did Ion hear any of the argument?”
“He and quite a few others started down the road to watch. But mostly it was in English, with some Bosnian at times. He remembers Boldo saying to Attila, ‘When generals steal they are heroes, and when Gypsies steal they are thieves.’”
Ion added something then at which Goos drew back. He was clearly asking Ion to repeat it.
“Ion also recalls Boldo saying to Attila, ‘You said we should steal these weapons.’”
I took a second.
“And how did Attila respond?”
Ion took the time to light his cigarette, then made the shooting gesture again with his thumb and his forefinger.
“And what’s the conclusion to this argument?” I asked.
“Attila gives a bunch of orders. Boldo is all sulky. Attila is standing there, like a mom over a kid, while Boldo gets out his acetylene torch and starts parting out one of the trucks.”
“Chopping it?”
“Yay, they get done with a couple and put the pieces back in the Cave and call it a day.”
I asked Goos, “Do you understand what was up with Attila?”
“Nary a clue.”
“Okay.”
“As soon as Attila is gone, Boldo starts mocking her, how no dyke is gonna be telling him what to do. Eventually, Boldo slinks off to town. Usually does some dirty business in the clubs outside Tuzla, them that will let a Gypsy in.”
Goos turned back to Ion to listen.
“Right,” Goos said. “Next morning this pimply bogan, kid maybe twenty, druggie-looking, gray teeth from meth, shows up, so much cash it doesn’t fit in one pocket. Ion gets called back down to the Cave, and he and several other blokes load up two of the covered cargo trucks that haven’t been chopped, with a hundred assault weapons, body armor, ammo, RPGs, mortars. Very big score for Boldo. About 40,000 keim.” Roughly $20,000 American. “Boldo is going to deliver all that after dark.”
“Did Ion make the delivery?” I asked.
In reply, Ion was emphatic with Goos.
“No. For that, Boldo sent three of his regulars who helped him boost cars, including our friend Ferko. Ion and Ferko were mates in those days, so Ion heard about this from Ferko afterwards. Apparently the trucks and weapons went to the wrecked part of Doboj that took a lot of hits while the Serbs were driving out everyone else.
“Now Ion here doesn’t know exactly what Ferko heard or saw, but Ferko, when he comes back he’s all ropeable and gets into it with Boldo. Boldo puts a pistol on Ferko in the end to shut him up. Afterwards, Ferko is still spewin, tells Ion that Boldo is dealing with Satan and this all is never gonna come good: Between NATO and the Bosnians, every person in town who so much as looked at those weapons is gonna be at the bottom of a dungeon somewhere. Made enough of an impression on Ion that he didn’t go back down there to the Cave again.”
“And when is this exactly, Goos?”
“Could only guess, Boom, but maybe April 1.”
“Two weeks before the firefight with Kajevic?”
“I’m guessing, yeah.” Goos shook with Ion, while Goos waved in a woman he introduced as Florica. Her arm was held close to her body. A tiny cramped hand, dark and skeletal, protruded from her sleeve. This had to be Sinfi’s sister. She was much shorter than Sinfi and quite round, wearing a long skirt and head scarf. She was a smiler, though, and instantly appealing. Ion continued lurking in the background.
Goos asked her to repeat what he’d heard from her before.
“About three weeks later—” Goos said.
“April 20?”
“Thereabouts. A couple soldiers show up in Barupra from Republika Srpska. Boldo, you know, he’s on commercial terms with many of the local gendarmes, and she thinks these two are here for the same reason, but no, these two tell Boldo in front of Florica and half the camp that they have solid info that Laza Kajevic intends to kill every greasy Gypsy in the place for dobbing him in to NATO.”
“And how did Boldo react?”
Unbidden, Ion moved back into the frame to act out the scene between Boldo and the soldiers, falling to his knees with his hands joined in prayer.
“Boldo is swearing that’s a lie. He gets two of his children and, on their lives, says he did no such thing. No one in Barupra is such a dill as to speak against Kajevic.”
“But someone in Barupra did exactly that, right? Informed?”
“Bloody oath, Boom. You and I missed a lot of this story, but we got that right a while ago. One of the Roma told NATO where Kajevic was.”
“Like maybe Ferko?”
“How I’m thinking.”
“And what’s the reaction in Barupra?”
“Panic, Boom. Kajevic, you might have noticed, cunning as a dunny rat. He doesn’t threaten anybody who can run and hide. This way he gets a giggle out of putting a knife to their throats. Truth is they’re refugees already. These folks have nowhere to go and no way to get there. They can’t ask NATO for protection, because NATO and the Americans would lock up half the village for stealing the weapons in the first place. All the trucks are either sold or chopped by now.”
“And what does Boldo say to this threat?”
Goos put the question to Florica.
“Boldo is all like, No worries. The soldiers believed him, he says, that he never told NATO. Besides, if they ever see Kajevic’s Tigers coming, they’ve got five thousand weapons down in the Cave and can defend themselves. In the meantime, a different family will stand sentry every night, just in case.”
“Boldo hasn’t sold the rest of those guns yet?”
“No no. Seems like Attila warned him off that. Florica here says some people in Barupra wanted Boldo to hand out weapons to every family, but he wasn’t hearing that.”
Ion offered a sardonic interjection with a bitter smile.
“Ion here thinks Boldo was afraid if he handed out rifles, someone in town would shoot him and bring the body to the Bosnian Army as proof that Kajevic didn’t need to kill anyone else. Boldo, for all of that, he started in sleeping with his AK.”
The scene around Goos, especially Ion’s theatrics, had begun to attract a small crowd, mostly kids. Naturally, some of the children began to stick their faces in front of Goos’s camera, and both Ion and he had to shoo them away. Florica actually swatted one of the boys in the back of the head, not a serious blow but enough to make a point.
“And where are we in time now, Goos?”
“Well, we’ve got to be in the last week in April 2004, because a few nights later, Ion and Florica say they woke up to find armed Chetniks going house to house in the village.”
“What happened to the sentries?”
Goos asked Ion. I could make out the word ‘Ferko’ in his response.
“Ferko was the sentry?” I asked.
“Ferko and his sons and his sons-in-law.”
Ion rattled on again for a minute. “He says,” said Goos, “that was the last they heard tell of Ferko until about a month ago when he showed up here again. There’s to be a kris in a week or two—you know, the Gypsy court—to decide whether to expel him. Ferko is saying he saved all of their lives. And they’re
thinking he sold all of them out.”
“Any opinions on that, Goos?”
“Well, we know Ferko more or less assumed Boldo’s business.”
I took a second to ponder Ferko, who was still not coming into focus. I’d never sensed in him the kind of guile these manipulations with the Americans required.
I asked Goos to direct the witnesses back to the entry of the Chetniks into the village close to midnight on April 27. In the interval, another person, Dilfo, had intruded onto the screen. He was an old man, rotund, with a face like a potato. He was Florica’s father-in-law and the father of Ion and Prako, Florica’s husband. All three began talking and Goos held them up at times to translate.
“These Chetniks are very well organized. First thing Ion and Dilfo see is they encircle Boldo’s house. And there’s a commander outside who speaks good Serbo-Croatian using an electronic megaphone to tell Boldo to come out with his hands up. And Boldo instead comes flying out with a Zastava and they gunned him down when he was not more than four steps from his door. Commanding officer fired first, and then there were shots from each side.”
Goos and Ion conversed for a while in Serbo-Croatian.
“Ion says anyone who knew Boldo would know he wasn’t gonna be raising his hands. It all happened very fast. Boldo goes down. Then the son runs out and grabs his father’s AK and another soldier shoots him. Then the brother arrives, screaming that Boldo never talked to the Americans and how can you kill him? They try to disarm the brother, pretty much like Ferko testified, but the brother, Refke, he gets shot, too. I mean, I heard about forty different versions of this part of the story in the last couple days, Boom. None of them tell it quite the same.”
“The usual,” I said. Few humans cultivated skills of cool observation while they were watching people get killed.
“In the meantime, the Chetniks go house to house, rousting everyone. The Roma are all begging for their lives to start, assuming this is Kajevic come to kill them, but the Chetnik on the megaphone is saying, ‘You’re safe, you’re going back to Kosovo.’ The soldiers search everybody and take the cell phones from the few of them who owned such back then. And load the Roma on the trucks at gunpoint. No one is fighting now that Boldo and his kin have been shot.”
Dilfo, in the center of the picture, suddenly propelled his hands in the air.
“The explosion?” I asked.
“Exactly,” says Goos. “Last truck is maybe eight hundred meters out of town when they hear the explosion down below.” Goos translated Dilfo directly for a moment.
“‘We are in the trucks about eight hours until we arrive in Mitrovica. Seeing what we’ve come back to, the People are crying and carrying on. And the Chetnik commander, who’s still wearing the balaclava, gets on top of the truck and says in Serbo-Croatian, “We brought you here for your own good. Because sooner or later Kajevic and his Tigers would have killed every last one of you. He’s sworn a curse on the whole village of Barupra.”’ Roma, you know, Boom, they put a lot of stock in curses. And they heard the Bosnian soldiers deliver Kajevic’s threat anyway.
“The commander goes on: ‘No one can know you are here. That’s why we took your cell phones. As far as Kajevic is concerned, you’re all dead back in that Cave, and it’s up to you to leave him thinking that way. Some of you will want to let your kin know you’re alive. But you can’t. If Kajevic finds out that the people of Barupra live, he will hunt you down. Every last one of you.’
“Most of them, of course, Boom, they’re with their families anyway, they don’t have a lot of people back in Bosnia to tell. The Big Man, new one after Boldo, goes around and has a heart-to-heart with every family. Everyone signs on: ‘Barupra’ is a word none of them will ever speak. They don’t like telling the non-Roma—”
“The gadje?”
“Right. They don’t like telling the gadje their secrets anyway.”
“And do they know who these men in balaclavas are?”
Goos asked, which caused the three of them to talk over each other and quarrel among themselves.
“They argue to this day,” said Goos.
“I can see.”
“Some people think they were Kajevic’s Tigers who were pretending not to be. Or some other paramilitary, like the Scorpions, doing the Tigers’ dirty work. Boldo’s family is sure of that, that they came to kill Boldo.” Florica interjected something and Goos nodded. “Florica, she says the Chetniks had NATO papers to get across the border to Kosovo. She was peeking out of the truck. So perhaps they were Germans or French.”
“But the people on the trucks recognized nobody?”
“One,” Ion answered in English.
“The Chetnik commander,” said Goos. “Some people say this Chetnik was a man. But people like Ion say otherwise.”
Ion looked into the camera.
“Atee-la,” Ion said.
“Attila? In person?” I asked.
“Yay, Attila. Look close at the photos I sent. Dinky-di, I say. That’s Attila.”
“Shooting Boldo, right?”
“That’s my guess.”
Goos thanked the three witnesses and let them go on their ways. Then he took a seat so his face filled up the whole screen.
Largely as an act of intellectual discipline, I tried to figure out if we had any kind of case left. The Roma clearly had been forced to return to Kosovo at gunpoint, although it was hard to calculate whether they or I would be more reluctant to see any of them near a witness stand.
“You know, Goos, forced migration is designated as a war crime in our governing statute.”
“Well, you tell me, Boom. Is it a forced relocation if you bring people back home? Especially to save their lives?”
I was at that hinge point where a lot of good prosecutors become bad prosecutors, trying to justify months or years of hard work and bad assumptions by hammering the facts into the shape of an established crime.
“We’re done,” I said. “Agree?”
“Carked for sure, mate.”
“I still have a plane reservation to Cincinnati in the morning.”
“For?”
“I’m going to try to find Attila. She’s got a horse farm in northern Kentucky. Remember the pictures?”
“To what point, Boom?”
“Well, there’s a lot we don’t know. Like who put up Ferko to lying through his teeth? Why did Boldo say Attila told him to steal those guns? Mostly, I want to look Attila in the eye and tell her I don’t care for the way she blew smoke up our ass.”
We talked a little more. Nara had texted while I was on with Goos, and I was anxious to speak to her.
“Make sure you send me a selfie,” Goos said, “when you get to Attila’s. Not being a larrikin. Just so there’s proof of your last whereabouts. There’s more to Attila than we reckoned.”
That sounded extreme, but I agreed.
At that moment, Dilfo wandered back into the picture to deliver some parting thought to Goos.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Wants us to get them out of Kosovo. All the People. Says Kajevic made them prisoners here for a dozen years. Now they deserve to go someplace better.” Goos looked into the camera and added, “Some place they’re welcome.”
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” Nara said when she picked up.
“Should I read you the phone book?”
“I was thinking of something like, I love you.”
I obliged.
“I talked to Lewis. He will be here in an hour.”
“Any clues about his state of mind?”
“He said that he was reconsidering everything.” She took a second. “I told him about you.”
“Was he upset?”
“Very. But I didn’t want him to walk in not knowing.”
Overall I saw her point.
“And what about your state of mind?” I asked, even though I was certain she’d know nothing for real until her husband was standing in front of her, in the home they had share
d.
“I am trying to follow your advice and consider everything. But I do not believe that is how people make choices in these situations. As if it was a decision tree. Falling in love is not easy, Boom. Certainly not for me. If you say to almost every person on earth, Would you like to live with love or without love, what do you think they would say? People don’t choose against love, Boom.”
She was a smart girl. But that misstated her choice. Seeing Lewis, if he said the right things, she might feel something else, a rekindling of whatever brought them together to start.
Nara said, “But I have thought a lot about what I said the other night. About you giving me away?”
“And?”
“I think I am correct. You want me to walk away—”
“I don’t want you to walk away.”
“A part of you does, so you do not have to deal with the difficulties. How can you deny someone you love the experience of children? But how can you parent a child if you lack the will? So you tell me I should think, so you are not forced to choose.”
I didn’t know how to calculate the duration of our relationship, given the months we’d dwelled together platonically beforehand. But by my quick arithmetic, Nara and I had been lovers for all of three weeks. Couples often said, when things worked out, that they’d known it from the first instant, but I suspected there was a lot of retrospective reshaping in those declarations, no matter how clear it all seemed looking back. The wiser part of me knew that even if Nara sent Lewis packing, it would be a long time before the two of us would have a sure view of our future. But on the other hand, as a man who’d flunked out of every relationship before this one, I’d learned that it was never too early to calmly say, This will never work—if you were certain that was the case. Narawanda was right to require me to answer her question, even though a truthful response seemed far more elusive than my feelings about her.
“Do I actually have the right to make that choice?” I asked her. That might have sounded to her like a way to buy time, but to me it felt like the proper order for decision, what my contractor clients liked to call ‘the critical path.’ I would never be able to reach conclusions in the abstract.