Rwanda was a former Belgian colony and Belgium still felt it had paternalistic responsibilities. Since there was no longer a government in Rwanda capable of doing any kind of investigation, Belgium immediately sent a team of its own investigators to reclaim the nuns’ bodies and do whatever they could to rough-out their own examination. In searching the school the Belgian team found the murder weapon, a knife with the nuns’ blood on it, in a footlocker with some other personal possessions. These were recovered and sent back to Belgium.
Now I knew the full story of the good sisters’ murders.
The Denver papers also provided stories about me which they must have pieced together by talking to my friends. They contained some information from a few previous stories in the local community newspaper, the Sun Valley Herald, about my involvement in the downtown neighborhoods and particularly my activities at the community center next to our clinic. It wasn’t a secret from my friends that I had been born in Africa and moved to France as a refugee, and then on to America to study medicine. They dug up my school records and my American Medical Association records which really said nothing, and they confirmed with the police that I had no previous record and hadn’t been issued even a speeding ticket since arriving in the US. No one who would comment for the stories had any idea that I was secretly a fugitive from the law somewhere else in the world. Of course, I hadn’t known this myself until a week ago.
Other stories were devoted to the conflict and genocide in Rwanda during the early nineties. These stories went into detail explaining the civil war between the minority Tutsis and the majority Hutu ethnic groups in the country. For several years the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a guerrilla Tutsi group, had been waging a civil war with the Hutu-controlled government. That prompted the United Nations to send in a peacekeeping force in October of 1993. But then, on April 6, 1994, the Rwandan president died when his airplane was shot down. The next morning the country’s prime minister was murdered and the ten Belgian peacekeepers who were trying to protect her were all killed and mutilated. During the next three months, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were indiscriminately slaughtered by the hardliner Hutus. That was when so many of us fled to the refugee camps that had been set up across the borders in neighboring countries.
I knew the story of the genocide well, having been there myself and then picking up bits and pieces while in the Nkwenda camp in Tanzania. What I didn’t know at the time, I learned over the subsequent years by following the war crimes trials. In late 1994 the United Nations had established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, an international court located in Tanzania that held trials right up until the end of 2009. But it didn’t finish its work and formally wrap up until December 2015.
Very few Americans had paid attention to the genocide or the war crimes trials. The Americans weren’t part of the UN Peacekeeping Force and had shunned formal requests for help. What the people of Denver were reading about Rwanda in their newspapers that morning was probably more information than they received during the actual carnage in 1994. It was an eye-opener for Steve, who knew little of this history, and even gave Anna information that she hadn’t picked up from me over the years.
But it seemed that none of the rest of the USA was yet getting any of this. The national news outlets had not picked up on my extradition as anything particularly newsworthy and so it wasn’t being reported on the networks or in the national papers. So far it was limited to the odd minor mentions in their online sites. It gave me little comfort to know that, but Steve said the less publicity, the better.
During the afternoon, Anna approached me with a subject that was concerning her.
“Freddie, I’m worried about you.”
“I’ll be fine, Anna. I’ll see you in a few days in Belgium. What can happen in a few days?”
“No, I’m worried about you slipping,” she said.
That was part of the code we used when we referred to my bouts of depression. Slipping was our euphemism to avoid coming right out and calling it what it was. I had been through my funks many times over our years together, and her patience and kindness were no doubt an important part of my therapeutic recovery. We both worried, but seldom talked about the possibility that I might someday slip into a severe and lasting depression. It seemed this was what was on her mind.
“I’m worried that you could slip quickly, and I won’t be right there to help you, Freddie.”
This had already occurred to me as well, but Anna didn’t need this worry on top of everything else we were dealing with. “I’ll be okay, Anna. That’s not going to happen.”
“You don’t know that.”
She was right. I didn’t know for sure that I could avoid falling into a depression, but somehow, I had a strong sense that it wouldn’t happen. Usually my funks came on me when things were going great, not when they were going badly. When things were humming along in my life and running smoothly, I would start to have these feelings of guilt and unworthiness for being in such a good place. These were most often the precipitant of my depressions. Now I was certainly feeling a lot of guilt for having brought this situation into our lives, but it wasn’t guilt stemming from things going too well; nothing was going well at the moment.
“I’ll be fine, Anna. Honestly.”
That didn’t really satisfy either of us, but what else could I have said?
That last night, as the early dusk settled outside, we only turned on a few lights in the house. It was likely going to be our last night together, and even then, it was only a partial night since the marshals were scheduled to pick me up at one thirty in the morning. Our plan was for Anna to meet me in Belgium, but we didn’t know exactly when we would see each other next, and we didn’t know whether I was going to be incarcerated or receive bail. Everything was an unknown.
I was upstairs lying on Stephanie’s bed, staring up at the ceiling, when Anna came in and lay beside me. We hadn’t spent much time in there lately, not like right after Steph passed, when we’d go in every day.
“I just got off the phone with Daddy,” she said.
“What did he have to say?”
“He doesn’t want me to go to Belgium.”
“I can’t blame him, really. If I were in his shoes I’d probably feel the same way.”
“Rob doesn’t want me to go, either. They both say I should stay here where I can get support from them and my friends.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
“That you need the support.”
I rolled into her and kissed her on the forehead. I knew that if she abandoned me, I’d be completely alone. I could already feel the desertion that was taking place elsewhere in my life, the shunning from a distance as friends and acquaintances jumped to the easy conclusion that I must be guilty. I could feel it in the same way that one can feel the presence of another in a dark room, or the way you know someone is looking at you even when you can’t see them. But I knew that even if I fought these charges, and proved them all wrong with my innocence, things would never be the same. Anna’s family, my patients and colleagues—they’d all still have lingering doubts about me. We could never have the kind of tight bonds that we did only a few weeks earlier. Anna was the only one I could count on to maintain the certainty of a relationship.
What about her relationships, though? What was to happen to them? Even if I was found not guilty, the same distancing and insecurities in her relationships with friends and colleagues and family would change things for her forever. And what if I was found guilty after she stood beside me? Would they brand her guilty by association? Perhaps I should be the one to force her away now and spare her the future pain and shame.
“We need to do what’s best for you, Anna,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we need to think of how you will come through all of this.”
; “Don’t start that again, Alfred, please. We’ve been over this more than once. Let’s just be together tonight. I need to be with you. I need to feel you.”
Since the time when we first met, Anna has had this uncanny ability to understand my thoughts, often more clearly than I do myself. At that moment, she must have been sensing my cerebral debate and she put a stop to it just like that.
We spent the next six hours, until the alarm on Anna’s phone went off around midnight, just being with each other, not sleeping, hardly speaking, just being. We maintained touch with each other softly for the whole time, lightly stroking forearms and the backs of hands and faces, and gently wiping tears from one another when they started to flow. Neither of us even tried to use words to express our love; everything was said in the silence of intimacy.
After the alarm sounded I could feel my pulse increase and my heart beat harder in my chest. I’m sure some of it was the anxiety of being taken away by the marshals, and some of it was undoubtedly the fear of being sent to a foreign country to possibly be put in jail for the rest of my life. But what registered with me the most was being separated from Anna. We’d been apart before, one or the other of us leaving for professional conferences, sometimes for up to a week. Or her taking Stephanie and going to stay with her parents for some time in the mountains together. Or me and her brother taking off for a weekend of hiking or mountain biking. But we’d never been separated against our wills, pulled apart when it wasn’t our choice. And all of this was happening less than three months after being permanently severed from our only child.
I clamped the inside of Anna’s wrist with two fingers and felt her pulse racing, just as my own was. Snuggling down, I placed the side of my head, my ear, to her sternum just above her breast and listened up close to the rapid thumping of her heart. She responded by cuddling tightly around me and stroking the side of my head, running her index finger absentmindedly along the length of my scar from my hairline, across my eyebrow, below my eye, down the side of my jaw, and back up again. Eventually we let go, kissed on the lips, and got ready for the marshals; Anna made coffee while I showered and shaved.
Belgium
Dawn isn’t breaking because there is a heavy mass of gray clouds, and below those a thick fog, but the sky is lightening a bit as we taxi to the landing gate at the Brussels airport. Both Brossard beside me, and Herweyer behind me, take out their cell phones and begin a series of calls the moment the plane pulls up, but neither of them makes any motion to leave the aircraft. I watch as the last of those needing assistance are helped from the plane and then rise stiffly when I am instructed to.
In Newark we were led through the bowels of the terminal by a lone security guard. Here we are met by three heavily armed men dressed in SWAT gear, openly brandishing automatic rifles, to take us to a secure customs area. The display of force is unnerving, and I wonder if they really think it is necessary, or are they just doing it for show? I obviously have nothing to declare at customs, but apparently there is some paperwork that has to be signed. I can see that part of it includes my passport, which has somehow made its way from my surrendering it in the Denver courthouse all the way here with Herweyer.
As I am learning, all airports have a backdoor security gate, and that is where I am taken after being loaded into another van. I can see through the windshield that there is something different about this gate. There is much more activity, even at this early hour of the morning. A commotion is taking place near the gate. After passing the checkpoint and moving outside the fence, our driver slows down, deliberately I am sure. I can see a small crowd of about twenty people standing in the roadway in front of us. The crowd parts at the last minute, letting the slow-moving van pass through. Fists are waved at the window, and there are a couple of homemade signs: butcher and rest in hell are held in the air to ensure that I notice them. Once through the small crowd, the driver speeds up, taking a ramp onto the freeway.
It’s quite clear that my case has not been kept confidential. This is further borne out by the hubbub in the police station. Brossard and Herweyer are there ahead of me, and there’s quite a crowd around them.
“Here’s the fucking black bastard now,” Herweyer says loudly in French, announcing my arrival. He basks in the celebrity among his cohorts and makes a show of ordering me through the intake process, relishing every opportunity to denigrate me. Brossard stands to the back, showing me some measure of dignity by his silence.
“I hear a lawyer is going to just be a waste of money with the case that the prosecutor has against you,” Herweyer says. “Do you want to see him, or should I just tell him to go home?” He jokes loudly for all to hear. After he gets their approval with a round of laughs, he motions for me to sit down. My handcuffs are traded for a familiar-looking bracelet which is clamped around my ankle and scanned to make sure it works. Another officer escorts me away from the ruckus to a private conference room where my lawyer is waiting.
“Dr. Olyontombo, I am Bartholomeus Verbeke. I apologize for your treatment.” His English is excellent, with the distinctly British accent common in Europeans.
This is the first show of respect that I have been offered in a while. He is a tall gentleman, a few inches taller than my own six foot two. His face tells me that he is probably in his early sixties, but his trim body, and the posture with which he carries it, makes him appear much younger. Balding white hair is brush-cut short, and astute gray eyes inspire confidence and ease.
“Mr. Verbeke, a pleasure to meet you,” I say. “No need for you to apologize, sir.”
“Doctor, how would you like me to address you? The official paperwork here says Azikiwe.”
“That’s a name I have not used in a long time. My name is Alfred now, sir.”
“Not sir. Bart. Please call me Bart. I have a car waiting for us outside. We should get out of here. I’m sure you’re tired. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
I am tired, very tired. It’s well after midnight New York time. We continue our conversation in the back of the car he has arranged for us.
“I’ve negotiated with the investigating magistrate to have you released into my custody, subject to the electronic monitoring. It was a generous gesture on his part, but despite the seriousness of the charges, you come with an impeccable reputation. However, I should warn you, if this makes it to the stage of a full trial you’ll have to expect to be held in jail.
“I’ve arranged a small apartment for you and your wife. We’ll take you there now.”
The mention of Anna almost chokes me up.
“I haven’t been able to speak with her for a few days.”
“So she told me,” he says.
“When did you last speak with her?” I ask.
“A few hours ago. While you were in the air. She’s been trying to reach you.”
I’m relieved to hear that she tried. I was more than a little worried, and still am, that Anna might have succumbed to the wishes of her father and brother.
“Where is she? And what did she say?” I ask, not completely sure I want to hear the answers.
“She didn’t know that you were being transferred here already. None of us knew that they would be ready to bring you over so soon. She says she’ll be here tomorrow. She’ll bring your things with her.”
I close my eyes to savor this news. It’s a relief and the best thing I have heard in over a week.
“Nothing is going to happen here in the next few days,” Bart says. “So why don’t you get settled in with your wife and rest, adjust to the time difference. I’ll come and see you on Wednesday. I should know more by then and be able to give you a full update.”
“Bart, when I left the airport this morning there were protesters. Were they there because of me?”
“Likely, yes.”
“How would they have known I was going to be there? You said that you didn’t even know when I was arriving
.”
“Alfred, your case has been going on for more than a year …”
“A year? And nobody told me?”
“The investigation has been taking place for a year. It’s like any investigation. The authorities don’t want to tip their hand until necessary. It would have been started by a prosecutor based on some level of information, and then, because of the international connections and the likely public interest, it was turned over to a judge for a full judicial inquiry. It’s the equivalent of your grand jury process.”
“And those protesters …?”
“There’s a lot of sensitivity amongst the public to what they are accusing you of. It’s impossible with all the investigators and police that are involved in this to keep it quiet. Someone’s obviously leaking. Probably family members of the victims. Perhaps they know this was going on and will have a lot of sympathizers among the police and elsewhere. We’ll talk about it more in a few days.”
Our car pulls up to a nondescript four-story building along a street lined with similar buildings.
“This isn’t fancy, but that serves a few purposes.” Bart nods toward the building. “First, it’s not too expensive. We have no idea how long you’ll be here, and I didn’t want to break your budget. But more important, it’s less likely that it’ll be found out as your residence if it’s one of the common places. When they do find out you’re here, as they eventually will, we’re going to have a lot of public sentiment against us. No sense antagonizing them further by having you holed up in the Ritz-Carlton.”
Truth, by Omission Page 24