by Tom Saric
“I know, but the way research works is that it has to be shown effective overall for every patient enrolled. That doesn’t mean it isn’t effective in individual cases.”
“Okay, the study was negative. It doesn’t really matter. To us.”
“It does, though.” He opened the chart and removed a letter on Department of Health letterhead. “The government won’t cover medications that aren’t proven effective.”
Luka and Sara sat rigid. Morrison kept both hands on the manila chart, holding it over his chest like a shield. Natalie kept on playing with the rollercoaster. Beads clacked.
“So,” Luka said, “where does this leave us?”
“You don’t have private insurance?”
Luka wasn’t sure if this was a question or a statement.
“I’m a mechanic. I’m self-employed.”
Morrison’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. The good doctor faltered for the first time. “Well, I think we’ll have to retry another medication. The methotrexate might—”
“That made her sleep sixteen hours a day! And gave her constant stomach pain.” Sara’s voice broke off and she doubled over, face in hands.
As Luka rubbed her back, he took a deep breath and tried to collect himself.
“How can they do this?” he demanded. “It’s helped her so much. Maybe we could ask the government for an exception?”
“I’ve already sent a letter. At this point, they’re not willing to do that. They said that in addition to the ineffectiveness of the trial, a number of children experienced serious side effects.” He took a breath. “I called the drug company too. They’re not able to provide compassionate coverage since the Rebonex is still experimental.”
“You can’t let her go back to what she was,” Sara pleaded. “She’s a little girl.”
“I’m so sorry.” He lowered his head.
“But Dr. Morrison, there must be some way,” Luka said.
“The only way is direct payment.”
“You mean paying out of pocket?”
He nodded.
Sara sat up, grabbed a Kleenex from the desk, and wiped her eyes.
“How much does it cost?”
“A three-month course is about twelve thousand.”
“Dollars?”
He nodded.
This sent tears streaming down Sara’s face again. Luka put his hand on Sara’s shaking shoulder and squeezed. Where would a homemaker and a mechanic who worked out of his garage get that kind of money?
“We don’t have that,” she said.
Luka released her hand and twisted his wedding ring around his finger with his thumb. He glanced at the doctor and nodded ever so slightly.
5
Natalie had fallen asleep in the car, so Luka carried her to her room and tucked her into bed. He sat on the edge of the bed, his hand touching her back, feeling the slow rise and fall of her chest. He would normally tiptoe out of the room, taking care not to make the floorboards squeak, but right now he wanted a few more minutes with her. A few more minutes to take in her innocent face, the gentle sound of her breathing, her smell.
He assumed that every father thought his little girl was the most beautiful creature on earth. But as he looked at Natalie now—asleep, her long eyelashes resting together, her hand tucked underneath her cheek—she appeared angelic.
He had taken her braids out before she lay down. He couldn’t look at them without experiencing a wave of nausea. The last image of Natalia running out of the basement in Nisko flashed through his mind.
When the ultrasound showed they were having a girl, Sara wanted to name her Julia. But Luka insisted on Natalie. He convinced himself that it wasn’t an attempt to create another Natalia, just like he convinced himself he could create a new identity as easily as slipping on a new pair of socks. He just liked the name, or so he told himself.
But as Natalie had grown, she started resembling her in ways he couldn’t have expected. Blue eyes. Plump lips. But whenever Sara braided Natalie’s hair, it killed him.
Luka left Natalie’s bedroom and walked to the kitchen, where Sara was scrubbing potatoes under the tap. Luka came up behind her and offered to help.
“No,” Sara said, pressing the tap off with her forearm and throwing the potato she’d been holding into the sink. “I can’t help her, so I might as well make my baby her favorite food.”
“We should talk about—”
“Talk? You? Mr. Secrecy? You don’t talk about anything.” She whipped around, lip quivering. “Because we can’t pay for that. I don’t work, and you barely make anything by fixing your friends’ cars for free.”
“I can start charging.”
She stared at him, incensed. She’d been nagging him for years to not do work for friends free of charge. Every time he tried to explain that eventually more business came through providing free work on small jobs, it ended in an argument. “It’s too late.”
“We could reapply for a loan,” Luka said. “A few years have passed, so maybe they’ll let us try again?”
“What, you’ve found the documents? You’ve suddenly found a valid birth certificate? They were clear about it.” Her voice shook. “We should have been thinking about this years ago. I should have gone back to work. Now our baby’s going to suffer.”
Her anger was replaced by tears and sobs. Luka knew better than to touch her. She needed space. He turned slowly and descended the stairs to the basement.
He flicked on the lights in the corner bar, grabbed a dirty tumbler from one of the glass shelves, and rinsed it under the tap. He looked up at the one piece of art he owned, an acrylic painting of a village surrounded by steep hills, a brook carving the scenery in two. No sign of a living person. It could be any village, Luka convinced himself. Not that one. He reached under the counter, grabbed a bottle of Napoleon cognac, and poured himself three fingers’ worth. The first warm sip went down.
They had applied for a loan three years ago so Sara could open a flower shop. Before the final signature, the bank manager informed them that the application had been rejected. They had bounced back from that financial disappointment. But this? His daughter forced to suffer from arthritis because he couldn’t come up with enough cash to pay for medicine?
He thought he’d shed the skin of Luka Pavić. But somehow, like an unpaid debt, it had found him. Having a family made things worse. Previously, if he had been caught, tried, and convicted, only he would be affected. Now, he’d added two more people to the mix—three lives in the gun sights. At the time, he hadn’t understood Tomislav’s words: “Don’t get too personal with anyone. It won’t end well.” Now, it was too late to come clean. What started out as a few omissions had multiplied into a forest of lies.
Sara was so perfect when she stepped up to his seafood stand at Place Saint-Francois in Nice, trying her best to buy flounder in broken French. She wore a white satin dress that flowed off every curve of her body, and she laughed at herself as she struggled to pronounce “patauger.” Quickly, she realized that he too couldn’t string more than three French words together. His accent reminded her of her parents, she told him. And sure enough, her family had emigrated from Croatia and were now living in Canada.
The lies had started from there. Being upfront with her about his background would have scared her off. A few weeks later, she walked out of the bathroom of his one-bedroom apartment holding a white plastic stick with a blue plus sign on the little window. He couldn’t leave the child fatherless. He had to lie to protect her, and each lie led to more. No one was getting hurt, he had reasoned at the time.
Until now.
Over time, Sara grew suspicious. She pried, asked little questions, looked for inconsistencies in what he said about his family. He gave little, but what he did say was consistent. On some level, she knew something was amiss. She could have pushed harder, but finding out more would have threatened what they had. Part of her didn’t want to know. She’d colluded with him and protected the lie, hadn’t
she?
He downed the rest of the cognac and walked past the cellar into the back room. A single bulb flickered on. A transmission lay in pieces on the table, a project he was planning to finish that afternoon, but now that the cognac was on board he wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. Plastic dishes with bolts, nuts, and gears were lined up along the floor. Welding gear was tucked against a wall.
He spent most of his time in the dingy workshop, which annoyed Sara, but this was where he felt safest. And to Luka, feeling safe was rare. When they first moved in, he’d spent even more time down here. He wouldn’t let Sara in for four months, until he got things just the way he wanted in his “man cave.”
He grabbed an aluminum ashtray and a pack of Players from the metal toolbox, then lit one up. Smoke rose up, and he turned on the small fan and slid the window open a crack, hoping Sara wouldn’t smell the cigarette burning—another one of his secrets.
He reached into one of the dishes on the workbench and retrieved a small key, then unlocked the gunmetal-steel safe hanging on the wall. Inside were half a dozen polished hunting rifles. At the bottom, inside a bullet box, he removed a leather-bound Bible and flipped it open.
He pulled out the Bank of France card, which he hadn’t touched since the day he left Croatia. Luka had made a promise to himself then that he wouldn’t use it unless he absolutely needed it. He twirled the plastic card between his fingers.
6
The Hague, the Netherlands
In 1993, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 827, creating a court to prosecute war crimes committed during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The official name was shortened to The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In total, 161 individuals were indicted, singled out as the worst of the worst: those committing genocide, murder, and rape. Nearly all had been captured, though a few remained in hiding. It was lauded as a truly international effort, a model for cooperation among nations. However, there were notable exceptions. Both the United States and China refused to participate in the court, stating that their citizens would be treated unfairly for political reasons. The United States had only recently ended a hostile campaign to try to guarantee Americans immunity from the court, threatening, among other things, to end food and medical aid to nations that refused to comply.
The court was located inside an elegant stone building not far from the finest museums and hotels The Hague had to offer. Surrounded by sloping green grounds and a manmade pond, the court’s interior featured a marble-floored entry hall and tall, arched windows. Security guards checked visitor identification, ran a metal detecting wand over them, and confiscated food, drinks, and cameras.
Down one of the hallways lit by chandeliers that gave off a harsh blue-white light, Robert Braun sat on a stone bench in front of courtroom number two, drumming his fingers on the cover of the thick red binder on his lap. At 2:46 p.m., a bailiff poked his head out of the courtroom door and said they were ready for him. He stood up and stuffed his hands into his pockets to dry his palms on the Kleenex inside. He wasn’t nervous, Braun told himself; the sleepless night and churning stomach were signs of eagerness.
This was the day of reckoning.
He buttoned up his suit jacket—grey, like Nicole had advised. She wanted him to appear unassuming. He straightened himself, adjusted his black plastic-frame glasses, and pulled his shoulders back while pinning the binder under his arm.
The bailiff who held the door open looked old enough to be Braun’s stepfather, but his face looked more worn and tired, possibly from listening to the details of the case. One could only hear so much about systematic killing before it took its toll.
The courtroom was average-sized, but only a handful of people were inside, making it seem large and hollow. He looked at Nicole, seated to his right at the prosecution table beside her two fellow attorneys. As chief prosecutor for the Tribunal, she rarely came to trial, instead leaving it to the rest of her team. She spent her time planning strategy, issuing indictments, and organizing the search for fugitive war criminals. But she told Braun that his testimony was so important to this case that she wanted to be there. Part of him thought that she did so to support him, a friendly face in a sterile room. But she barely glanced at him, turning her head only a few degrees.
Juan Mereles was the only person in the galley, and he sat stone-faced. Juan had been Braun’s partner up until two years ago, when he became frustrated by the politics and bureaucracy of the Tribunal and decided to become a private contractor. The move had made Juan even better at his job: he could still stay two steps ahead of the fugitives he hunted and gain access to the most secure locations, and his fluency in eight languages and light-brown skin tone and nondescript features allowed him to blend in with Africans, Indians, Arabs, Turks, Italians, or even Dalmatians. However, now that he was no longer associated with the court, he was not inhibited by bureaucratic red tape. That made him indispensable.
The bailiff led Braun down the aisle towards the witness stand located next to the panel of three judges: two men and a woman. They wore ceremonial maroon gowns with white bibs. Their eyelids looked heavy. They had been in session since eight in the morning, with only an hour for lunch and two twenty-minute recesses. This was the day the prosecution would lay out the final pieces of evidence against the accused: witnesses who would testify to the atrocities they had been subjected to.
Braun stepped onto the witness stand, taking in his surroundings and waiting until he felt settled before looking at the accused—not out of fear, but because he wanted to remember this image of him: powerless and scared. During the war in Bosnia, Radoslav “Ratko” Banović had been the commander of a Bosnian-Serb paramilitary group named the White Tigers, who had systematically killed twenty-eight Muslim men, women, and children. They starved the victims, then lined them up in groups of five in front of a stone wall and shot them. The women and children were killed inside an abandoned schoolhouse. They were estimated to have killed hundreds more over the course of the war, but only those twenty-eight could be directly tied to them. Even proving that had taken over ten thousand man-hours of investigation.
The problem was that none of the deaths occurred by Ratko’s gun. The White Tigers were tight-lipped, protecting their master, denying that he had given the order. As a result, the only charge he was going to be convicted of was “aiding and abetting persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds.” If convicted, he faced ten years. Ten years for twenty-eight lives.
But the binder Braun had on his lap would change all of that.
Ratko looked like he had aged ten years in the six months since Braun had arrested him in a smoky café in downtown Belgrade. His hair had thinned and greyed, making his forehead look longer. Puffy bags hung under his slate-grey eyes. His cheeks were sunken and his skin looked thinner, almost translucent.
His eyes turned towards Braun and held his gaze. It came as no surprise to Braun that he saw no remorse or shame in Ratko’s eyes. The corners of Ratko’s lips rose, and he winked.
Braun refused to break eye contact. Sociopaths were always like this: they couldn’t fathom that they would end up being held responsible for their actions. In their minds, no one could match wits with them. Braun had seen this attitude in every one of the criminals he had arrested for the Tribunal. The war had given all of the sociopaths in the Balkans an avenue through which to express their barbaric urges.
Braun gave him a slight nod and winked back. It was game on, and Ratko didn’t know about the ace Braun had up his sleeve.
Ratko sat at the defense table alone because he had refused his right to counsel, stating that he didn’t recognize the court’s authority and, as such, would not adhere to their protocols. So he chose to represent himself.
He had been a nightmare for the court. He spoke out of turn, his cross-examinations of witnesses nearly came to blows, and he made audacious accusations against both the court and the witnesses. Nicole anticipated that the trial wo
uld take three weeks, but it had been going on daily for four months because of these antics.
Judge Yun asked Braun to take the declaration.
Braun raised his right hand, not taking his eyes off Ratko. “I solemnly swear I will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
He placed his binder beside the chair and sat down, resting his hands on the cool leather arms while Harold Pink, the prosecutor, moved to the podium.
Braun had gotten to know Pink over the past few weeks as they rehearsed this cross-examination, but Braun had to do a double-take before he recognized him. All prosecutors were required to be robed, so Pink was in a long black gown with a white flap collar. He wore an off-white wig, and the sight of the tight poodle curls framing his basset-hound face almost made Braun laugh.
No one else was in the courtroom because all of the Tribunal cases were closed session unless the panel of judges ruled otherwise. This was for a simple reason: the indicted had so many victims that no courtroom in The Hague was large enough to hold all the family members.
As Harold unfolded papers on the podium, Braun lifted the red binder onto his lap.
“Can you please state your full name for the court?”
“Robert Wolfgang Braun.”
“Can you tell us when and where you were born?”
“March 23, 1962, Luxembourg City, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.”
“And what is your occupation, Mr. Braun?”
“I’m a senior investigator for the Tribunal for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
Pink flipped a page over and readjusted his stance. “Mr. Braun, you have been called as a witness to an interview you conducted with a member of the White Tigers. When did this interview take place?”
“August 3 of last year.”
“And where did this interview take place?”
Braun hesitated, biting his lip and looking at the judge pleadingly, just like Pink had coached him.