Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “I think you do,” she said. “But I will tell you for sure after the weekend.”

  36.

  Bad Person—July 11

  In Attila’s office, I had seen the pictures of her place in northern Kentucky, but in the height of summer, the farm and the surrounding landscape had a lushness and serenity that photography could never reflect. She lived about an hour from the Cincinnati airport, halfway to Louisville, outside of Carrollton. The site overlooked a tranquil stretch of the Ohio River, closely resembling the River Kindle beside which I’d passed much of my life, a bluish satin ribbon between the low green hills. Following GPS to the address I’d received from Merriwell’s assistant, I found myself at a call box beside yet another set of gold-tipped iron gates.

  A woman answered, her accent distinct even as she said hello, and I gave my name, adding I was a friend of Attila’s. I was prepared to be refused—She’s not home, She’s busy, She’s sick, She doesn’t know you, Go way—but the motorized gates swung open, and I proceeded up a drive of fancy French pavers a good quarter of a mile. The house, all white stone but with Georgian looks in the grand McMansion style, was at the top of a knob behind several acres of velvety lawn, amid areas of deep woods.

  Attila’s beautiful wife, a stately-looking woman even in her jeans, made her leisurely way from the house to greet me. She had straight black hair, shining like ravens’ wings, halfway down her back, and blue eyes that stood out from fifty feet.

  I left the car and introduced myself. She was Valeria.

  “Attila at store,” she said. “Back soon.” She sounded Russian or Polish, and not long from the boat. “You funny name. Remember from Attila.”

  She offered coffee while I waited, and showed me in, past the stout oak doors at the entry, which were tooled with a coat of arms that I’m sure had nothing to do with Attila or her. The sleek kitchen, with its marble counters and appliances hidden in the sycamore cabinetry, was straight from a design magazine, and rivaled the luxe features I’d seen at Ellen and Howard’s.

  Valeria produced a cup of coffee from a chrome device across the room, then seated herself on a black leather stool on one side of the counter and pointed me to another. The air grew a little thicker as I tried to figure out how to start a conversation.

  “How did you meet Attila?” I asked.

  She smiled thinly. “Bought me,” she said.

  It had to be the accent, I figured.

  “I’m sorry, but I thought you said she bought you.”

  Valeria managed a grimly ironic smile. The story, even as she struggled with language, was riveting. Valeria was from Tiraspol in Moldova, where the post-Communist transition to a market economy had created a desperate time of cascading inflation, no work, and little food.

  “Woman, Taja, say ‘Come Italy, be waitress.’” Taja took Valeria’s passport, supposedly in order to obtain Italian work permits. But once Taja had possession of the document, Valeria, along with four other girls, was forced at knifepoint into a horse van, in which they were driven for hours. Eventually, they found themselves on a small boat, making a nighttime passage into Bosnia. There she and approximately twenty other young women were taken to a barn and at gunpoint instructed to remove all their clothing. After inspection, they were sold. The woman who bought Valeria owned a club near Tuzla.

  “Very mean, this woman. All the time she say her sons, ‘Bitter, bitter.’” Beat her, I realized. “Still hear when sleep.”

  The first time Valeria was told to have sex with a patron, she refused. As it turned out, the bar owner had a customer who paid well for the right to be the first to beat and rape each of the women.

  “We live four girls in room behind bar. This also place for meet with customers. Smells? Dirty rubbers on floor. Never wash sheets. Sleep six hours maybe. One time each day food, but four, five man. And she, boss lady, she say, ‘Escape? You got no work paper. I call police, they take you jail.’”

  Valeria was told that after six months the debt she supposedly owed the club owner for the cost of bringing her here would be considered repaid and her passport returned. Instead, as the date approached, the owner informed Valeria that she had a new boss, who’d paid 3,000 deutsche marks for her.

  “Was Attila. Seen before around bar. Was man, I’m thinking.” She again briefly deployed her taut smile. “Attila take me her house. Give me clothes, food. Say, ‘You want leave, leave. But you so beautiful, I cry.’ I say, ‘Okay, few days.’ Attila good. Very good. Very kind. Love very much. Here now, have everything.” She raised her long hands toward the kitchen and heaven above.

  I pondered the obvious question, but after you screwed to stay alive, I would imagine tenderness made a big impression.

  “Do you have friends here?”

  “Some. Church. But Skype now all day with Moldova. Attila say, ‘How you learn English, talk all day Romanian?’ Understand English good. But can’t speak.”

  I told her about my struggles with Dutch in the last several months. The front door slammed then.

  “Hey, baby, who’s here?” Attila sang. She sounded lighthearted, but hung on the threshold when she saw me.

  “Boom,” she said. She approached very slowly and shook my hand without the usual vigor. Her odd complexion was sunburned and her fashion sense had not improved. She wore plastic flip-flops, jeans cinched with a rope, and a T-shirt that did a good job of obscuring any sign of gender. “What the fuck you doin here, man?”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “I thought you guys couldn’t investigate in the US.”

  I had already guessed why Attila had headed for home so suddenly.

  “We can’t,” I said. “This is for my own sake.”

  “Just you and me?”

  “I’ll tell Goos.”

  “That’s all? Like it never happened? I just don’t want to get my dumb half-black, half-Hungarian ass in any deep roughage.”

  “Did you do something wrong, Attila?”

  “Well, fuck yeah, I did. You probably know that by now, don’t you, Boom?”

  I wasn’t ready to give her any clues.

  “I know you gave me a pretty good line,” I said.

  “Not really,” she answered. “Mostly it was about what I didn’t say. I like you, Boom. I told you all along those Gypsies weren’t dead.”

  “But you didn’t tell me you hid them.”

  I had her with that. She didn’t stir for a second as she watched me.

  “It was that fuckin GPS, wasn’t it?” She meant the one transponder that had briefly showed up on the aerial photographs. “Tell me true, Boom. Do I need to get myself a damn lawyer?”

  “Look, Attila. If I report what you tell me, either at the Court or to anybody in the US, I’m the one who’ll end up in trouble, because I have no permission to be here asking questions.”

  She considered whether that was good enough. I threw down my ace.

  “I spoke with Merry yesterday.”

  “Huh,” she said, then went to what proved to be a refrigerated drawer in the huge central island and poured an ice tea in a mason jar. After making another for me, she led me outside to the screened porch. The air was thick here, far more humid than I’d felt in a while, but a breeze rose off the river, and there was a lovely view of the serene water idling below. We were high enough that the birds and dragonflies zagged over the trees at eye level.

  I told her some of what I’d discovered: the light arms, Iraq.

  “I have lots of questions,” I said. “But maybe we should start with a simple one. How the hell did a bunch of Gypsies end up with guns to sell to Kajevic?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Is it untrue?”

  “Fuck no, it ain’t untrue. I’m just tryin to figure how you found out is all. You’re good, Boom. You and Goos. You’re good at your job.”

  “I’m too old for you to tell me how pretty I am, Attila. How about just letting me hear the whole story.”

  She l
ooked at her mug, while using her nail-bitten index finger to draw a figure in the moisture gathered on the glass. Her gaze was still there as she said, “You know, I ain’t a bad person, Boom. I’m really not. I was tryin to do right by everybody. You’ll see that’s so. Sometimes you just get deeper and deeper in shit.”

  I nodded, but hesitated to provide any spoken comfort. I’d heard a lot of similar excuses in my law office.

  “You know,” she said, “Merry takes the blame for this whole arms-to-Iraq thing, but I’m still believin it was your buddy Roger’s idea. Whoever, it was purely fugazi, man. All this top-secret crap. The whole operation was run on the intelligence side with private contractors. Our armed forces never touched those weapons, probably so they’d have deniability.

  “And don’t you know, two days after the first transport takes off for Iraq I’m getting all these freaked-out calls from the Green Zone in Baghdad about where in the hell did the weapons go? And it’s not two weeks before a telex arrives from Army Intelligence. They’re recovering assault rifles from Al Qaeda in Iraq, which have either the serial numbers we’d recorded or our laser engraving, usually both. You know, the Iraqis tried to torch off the identifiers before they sold the firearms, but they were as good at that as they were anything else.

  “Okay. So bad enough we sent 200,000 small arms to Iraq to kill Americans, but no more than two weeks later, right after I start hearing about where these weapons are endin up, Roger calls me to say we’ve got to send a second shipment, 300,000 more. And I’m like, Fuck you, I’m not in business to kill US soldiers, or Canadian soldiers or British soldiers or anybody else on my side. And he’s like, You don’t understand shit about what’s goin down here. It’s bedlam. We need to reestablish the police and the military, and if 50,000 guns walk away, then that’s what happens. And besides, did you ever hear about following fucking orders? I can replace your worthless ass with one phone call.” Attila paused to wag her chin. “Hate that prick,” she said.

  “I thought you were explaining how the Roma got the guns they sold Kajevic.”

  “I am.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Cause there was a bunch of Gypsy drivers standing around in my office when I got that last call from Roger.”

  “Why were they in your office?”

  “Payday. Those Roma don’t know from bank accounts, so I had to give them their wages in cash. And Boom, I’m a big boy—how I run my company, I’m the only one who handles large amounts of currency. Just fact.”

  “And who exactly was there with you when you had that argument with Roger?”

  Attila lifted her face and squinted at me.

  “Have you got that jackass Ferko in your pocket?”

  “Attila, just answer me.”

  She pouted briefly.

  “Well, I argued like that with Roger more than once, and I can’t say who-all was there for sure, but it must have been six, seven of them. Boldo. Ferko, I imagine, and Boldo’s dumb brother, Refke, cause they was almost always with Boldo. Three or four others who’d driven that week.”

  “Remind me about Boldo. How did you know him?”

  “Boldo? You go on the Internet and you Google ‘anus,’ there’s gonna be a great big picture of Boldo right there. He’d been in Dubrava prison in Kosovo up until maybe a month before the Roma got torched out in Mitrovica in ’99.”

  “What was he in prison for?”

  Attila shrugged. “How I heard, he sliced up some guy in a bar. Maybe it was thievin. He was a real thief. Anyway, NATO bombed the prison and the Serbians overran it and let the non-Muslims go. So Boldo was with the whole Gypsy mob when they came to Bosnia. And pretty much the Big Man there. Over time, Boldo got into chop-shoppin, and stealin cars, too.”

  “And you employed him anyway?”

  “That’s why I hired that whole lot, Boom. Do I want them rippin my trucks? I had them on payroll so they’d leave my shit alone. Plus that kept anybody else from boostin my equipment, seein as how Boldo was the main place you’d go to move it. I mean,” said Attila, peeking at me, “it’s business.”

  “And how many of them were in this group?”

  “There was maybe ten in all I’d see from time to time.”

  “Names?”

  Attila scratched her chin and looked upward to recall. She came up with about six names, Ion among them.

  “All right,” I said. “So we’re in your office. You get a call and you and Roger have this intense argument while these Gypsy drivers are standing around waiting to be paid.”

  “Right. And when I get off the phone, I just lose my shit. I mean it’s a real and total hissy fit. I’m rattling on in English, throwing shit at the wall, while these guys are just starin with no clue. ‘Fuck me if I’m gonna send guns to Iraq to arm Al Qaeda, even for Layton fuckin Merriwell. Fuck me if I’m gonna let the fuckin Iraqis steal this shit that thousands of NATO soldiers have risked their lives to collect. Fuck me, fuck me. If I had any real stones, I’d steal those fuckin guns myself and send them someplace where they wouldn’t be shootin Americans.’ I went on and on how Merriwell had lost his mind. Only I forgot one thing, Boom.”

  “Which was?”

  “Boldo spoke English. He was the only one. The rest of them didn’t even speak Bosnian well. But Boldo, he understood every word.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Yeah, ouch,” said Attila. “Like there goes my clearance if anyone hears I was so loose with all that classified shit. I mean, Boom, I told you a long time ago: I talk too much. I’ve been stepping on my dick like that my whole life. I just always think I’m so fuckin entertaining.” She stopped with her narrow shoulders drawn and seemed to reflect for a second about herself.

  “Any rate, I finally done like I was told and pooled another 300,000 or so light arms. And the last transport is about to fly off for Iraq from Comanche. We actually held it for a couple hours waitin for the final convoy, and these Gypsy so-and-so’s drag in tellin this tale bout how six of the trucks got hot-wired overnight and are gone. I didn’t think all that much of it at first. I wanted to get the planes off the ground. I telexed Roger and everybody else in Iraq, and we reported this to the Bosnian police and the NATO criminal investigators.

  “But a day later, it ain’t sittin right with me. I looked at the reports that were taken from Boldo and Ferko and the rest of the crew, and they hadn’t even bothered to match out their stories. No two of them said the same about where they were overnight, or what the bad guys looked like, or even how the six that had their trucks stole got back to Barupra.

  “So I go tearin off for the refugee camp to find Boldo. I come the back way into the valley and I hike up to the Cave, and you know what I see? Merry’s weapons. Thousands of them. Zastavas. And ammo. Mortars and RPGs.

  “Boldo comes down like he’s a king and we really got into it. And the jagoff, you know what he says? ‘You told me to steal these guns. All these guys heard you.’

  “And I’m like, ‘If I tell you to go fuck yourself right now, are you gonna do that, too?’

  “And he’s like, ‘I’ll give you half what I get. I think I already have a customer for some of this.’

  “And I’m like, ‘You numbnuts moron, you may know all about stealing cars, but you don’t know shit about this stuff. These weapons are marked. You try sellin them and the first guy who gets caught with one, he’ll be giving law enforcement your name faster than he says his own. NATO will be up your rectum with a router and a flashlight. You’re going straight back to prison.’ All of which was true.

  “But Boldo hears all this, and smiles and says, ‘Yeah, but you said to steal ’em.’

  “He was screwin with me, naturally. But he wasn’t stupid. If I turned in Boldo to the Bosnians or NATO, he would repeat everything he overheard on the phone, about Al Qaeda and the Iraqis and Merriwell, and say I was the one who decided to steal a few weapons to do what little I could to stop that. So the upshot would be I’d end up fuckin Merriwell, I’d l
ose my job and my clearance, and I’d have to deal with Boldo and his gang lyin on me.”

  I lifted a finger to interrupt.

  “But you didn’t tell him to steal the guns, right, Attila?”

  She bolted back from the table.

  “Fuck, Boom.” She scowled at me.

  “Is the answer no?”

  “No. The answer is Fuck No. Never. You don’t believe that, do you?” In her vulnerable moments, Attila was easy to read and she clearly was wounded, but I still took a second to be certain about what I thought.

  “I don’t,” I said then. I reminded her where she was in the story, which was her confrontation with Boldo outside the Cave. Attila’s narrow shoulders trembled with a sigh before she plunged back in.

  “So okay, gotta make lemonade out of lemons, right? I tell Boldo, ‘Fuckjob, you bury these guns right here. Right in the Cave. That’s the last you or me or anyone else ever sees of them.’ As for the trucks, that’s more trouble than it’s worth, if they turn up again. So I say to Boldo, ‘This is all you’re gettin out of this. You can chop these trucks and sell the parts. But you assholes are done driving for me. That’s over.’

  “I actually stand there for a while to watch Boldo start piecing out the first vehicle.

  “Anyway, no more than three days later, I get a message on my cell from Ferko, who’s just about wettin himself he’s so scared. He literally wants to meet in a cellar and makes me swear on the lives of the children I don’t have, that I’ll never let any of this bounce back on him. Apparently, Boldo encountered some scumbag kid in one of the sex clubs outside Tuzla and agreed to sell him two trucks and a hundred AKs, and Boldo sent Ferko and a couple others to deliver the shit in Doboj.

  “But the guys who received the equipment, every single one of them had the Arkan tattoo—it’s a roaring tiger—right on their hands. And more than one is laughin about how ‘the president’ loves that he got these weapons off the Americans. And the kid is some kind of relative to Kajevic and keeps talking about ‘Laza.’ And I mean, Ferko, he ain’t no intellect, but he’s a survivor.