Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “Now,” I said to Attila, “you told me that all the trucks that NATO used in Bosnia were yours. CoroDyn’s. Right?”

  “Basically. The operational vehicles were under Transportation Corps command, but they all came out of my pools.”

  “Okay,” I said. “On the plane, I reread my files about that attempt to arrest Kajevic in Doboj. Most press reports said Kajevic fled in trucks stolen from the US Army. The first time I saw that, I thought that meant that Kajevic and his Tigers hot-wired the vehicles Special Forces had shown up in. But the whole ambush was too well planned to involve an improvised escape. So what I realized—actually in the middle of the night—was that Kajevic already had those trucks.”

  I’d seized Attila’s full attention now. Her thin, unshaped brows were drawn down toward her small eyes.

  “Which means,” I said, “that the vehicles Kajevic took off in were stolen from you and CoroDyn. Correct?”

  Attila’s lips squeezed around before she spoke.

  “I told you, Boom. I like you and all, but I’m not fucking up my security clearance.”

  “It can’t be a secret who those trucks belonged to, Attila. They had to be identified so the Bosnian police could look for them.”

  She shrugged.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “It was Roma from Barupra who stole those trucks from you and sold them to Kajevic. Right?”

  Attila was looking down at the table. When her eyes rose, she reached for another cigarette.

  “Boom, you ever talk too much?” she asked, with the flame hovering over her Zippo.

  “Occasionally.”

  “Me?” Attila said. “I been doing that my whole life. Shit comes sailin out of my mouth and I’m like, What the fuck did you go and say that for? And, Boom, I really don’t know the answer. I just get caught up in things.”

  I wasn’t going to be distracted by her retrospective regrets.

  I said, “But that’s how the Roma knew where Kajevic and his people were hiding. And that’s why they were able to give his location to Army Intelligence.”

  “I’m not here to lie to you, Boom. But I gotta be a lot more careful what I say.”

  “Well, maybe you want to respond to this, Attila. If the Roma told me where Kajevic was hiding, and I went there and got ambushed, I’d be mad, maybe killing mad, especially when I realized they had sold him the trucks he escaped in. It might have felt to me like one huge double cross.”

  Attila shook her head decisively.

  “That’s not how it went down.”

  “How did it?”

  “I can’t mess on myself, Boom. I know I ran my mouth, and with a smart guy like you, one thing leads to another. But I can’t say no more. Only thing is, you heard that lady was telling you Kajevic swore he was gonna kill those Gypsies.”

  Attila’s phone, which she’d set on the wooden table, started buzzing again, vibrating hard enough that I thought for a second it might fly through the window. She smacked her hand down on the cell as it was skittering away and she answered. I would have bet that Attila rang herself to avoid more questions, but the device had been right in front of me and I could hear a voice speaking Serbo-Croatian on the other end.

  “Fuck,” said Attila when she was done. She stood up. “Gotta bounce. I need to find five guys who speak Pashto and get them on the way to Kabul by twenty hundred hours tomorrow. And the problem, Boom, is that anybody who speaks Pashto has worked in Afghanistan. And anybody who’s worked in Afghanistan would rather get buttfucked than go back. This’ll cost me. Be makin calls all night.”

  She shook my hand and said she’d have a driver here in an hour to bring Esma and me back to Tuzla when we were ready to go. She’d moved off about five paces, when she circled back and leaned over the table, bringing close her small eyes and bad skin. Her voice was low.

  “Tell Esma nice to meet her. But watch yourself, dude. That chick is way too slick. Don’t never forget: She’s still a Gypsy.” She was gone again with a quick wave.

  The food—grilled lamb and vegetables crowded onto a large stainless platter—arrived a few minutes later, only seconds before Esma returned. I explained Attila’s departure and we both marveled about her for a minute. Esma seemed completely charmed. I noted only now that Esma, who’d been seated across from me while Attila was here, had settled now on my side of the table, close enough to brush elbows.

  “So, Boom. Did you learn anything useful today?”

  “I need to process,” I said. I was still loath to share my thoughts with her about the investigation. Instead, I asked about Lijce, knowing that her passion for her people would distract her.

  “The challenge of the Roma, Bill, is to open your society to those Roma, like me, who wish to join it, without imposing your values on the many who don’t.”

  “But how can Roma kids make that choice without an education?”

  “The value of schooling is not self-evident to many of my people,” said Esma. “In Romany, there are no proper words for ‘read’ or ‘write.’ There is wonderful Roma music. But no literature. Whenever my grandmother saw me with a book, she was concerned. ‘So keres?’ she would ask me. ‘What are you doing?’ For my people, knowledge is acquired in social interaction, by talking.”

  “An oral tradition?”

  She smiled a bit, amused by the elusiveness of Rom ways.

  “Yes, but do not think of Native American elders repeating legends to circles of young listeners. The Roma, Bill, are a people without a history, with no shared understanding of the past. My grandmother refused to believe it when I told her we did not emerge from Egypt, which is the common misunderstanding that led to this ‘Gypsy’ name. For us, there is no prevailing myth of creation, no seven days and seven nights. The Gypsy men I grew up with were fierce prizefighters, but there has never been a Gypsy army, because there is no land we have ever been inspired to conquer, or to defend, or even to return to.

  “And unlike almost any other group on earth, our sense of identity is not forged on the countless injuries of the past. We do not tell the tales of our centuries as slaves, unlike African Americans or Jews. Instead the Gypsy way is to excel in forgetting. You saw that with Tobar when you asked about Barupra. We live in the present. To Westerners we are as strange as Martians.”

  Again Esma delivered that huge smile, full of her delight and pride about this legacy of difference.

  “And what’s the impact on you, Esma? Do you feel caught between two worlds?”

  “Not really. I made my choices. To Roma like that old woman we saw in Lijce, I am not Rom at all. That is why she didn’t want to speak Romany to me.”

  “And what about your family? Is your mother more accepting of you than your father?”

  “My mother is gone. Cancer. All those cigarettes. She brawled with my father about my schooling, but I always felt that was more to oppose him than because she saw much value in it for me. When I was approaching fifteen, my mother started to talk to me about marriage. She had already spoken to another family. The boy, name of Boris, seemed to have a great fancy for me, but it wasn’t mutual. So Boris kidnapped and raped me. That is not unusual among the English Roma, for whom a stiff cock is often tantamount to a marriage proposal. Having had his way with me, Boris would declare we had eloped. But he was furious there was no blood on the bedsheet. His family of course disavowed his intentions toward me, and my father was irate.

  “Yet that was my liberation. Since I was now widely regarded as unmarriageable, I was free to continue in school and go on to university.”

  “Oxford?”

  “Cambridge. Caius College.”

  “And never a marriage?”

  “No, no. I am too independent, Bill. I still think about a child in wan moments, but I am not constant enough to be much of a mother.”

  The food, which we’d been eating as we talked, was excellent, prepared without much fanfare but flavorful and beautifully presented, with a grilled onion in the center of the plate from wh
ich banana peppers sprouted like antlers. Idling through the meal, we had started on a second bottle of wine.

  When we finished the pastries we ate for dessert, I called for the check, only to find that Attila had beaten me to it. Esma laughed and immediately pointed out that, as a result, I still owed her dinner.

  Outside, the limo Attila had promised was waiting, an old Yugoslav tank of a vehicle. Esma and I slid into the backseat and we headed down toward Tuzla, winding through the hills as it grew dark. I was not surprised when Esma, who’d outpaced me with the wine, became silent and heavy-lidded, and then disappeared fully into sleep, with her head tossed back and a small whinny escaping with each breath. A sharp switchback threw her against me, and she lay with her face on my shoulder, while I was caught in the net of sensation. I could caution myself as much as I cared to, but with her fine looks and power persona, Esma’s sex appeal felt like a live current, and I was not surprised that the heat and substance of her body so close, her breath on my neck, and the thick air of her perfume left me with a hard-on most of the way to town.

  Once we were bumping again over Tuzla’s cobbled streets, Esma roused and shook the sleep out of her head. She found her phone, but spoke only for a second in Romany.

  “I must meet Ferko,” she said when we’d stopped in front of the Blue Lamp. “I told him I would find some time tonight to discuss a few things.”

  I finally remembered to ask her about what Goos had overheard.

  “Goos said Ferko was insisting you give him what you’d promised. Forgive me, please, since I know I don’t need to tell you this, but if you’re compensating him somehow for his testimony, it’s worthless.”

  She took that with a laugh.

  “You do not need to tell me that. The only talk we’ve ever had of money is when I advised him years ago that he might receive reparations from the Court in the distant future if there is ever a conviction. But he hasn’t spoken of it since. What I did promise Ferko when he agreed to testify was that you would do your utmost to keep him safe. And he was well within his rights to insist that promise be kept. No?”

  I nodded. I had to be satisfied with that response.

  She said, “I have not yet had a chance to press him again about Kajevic, as you asked, but I’ll take that up now and shall report back to you.”

  Esma had listened to Sinfi, just as I had. It was hard to doubt the young woman, which meant it would be quite peculiar if Ferko—or anyone else living in Barupra—had not heard about Kajevic’s threats.

  She slid the phone back into her large bag, but took a moment to face me again with one foot in the street.

  “Thank you for letting me sleep a minute, Bill,” she said. “I was comfortable beside you.” She said no more but gave me a long look, frank in its intimacy, before walking off.

  Stepping onto the cobbles in front of the hotel, I was reverberating. And suddenly in mind of Layton Merriwell.

  13.

  Regret

  Entering the lobby, I caught sight of Goos. He was in the lounge with his beer glass, as I might have expected, making friends with two middle-aged British women, both short-haired blondes who seemed to be enjoying his company. I shook hands with each, Cindy and Flo, and noted their clear disappointment when I pointed Goos to one of the small two-tops in the breakfast room. His glass was empty and I took it from him.

  “You’re drinking on me tonight, Goos.”

  I returned with another for him and bubble water for myself. I’d had enough wine with Esma.

  “Sorry to have missed the bulletin on your background, Goos.”

  “Yep. Doctorate. The whole la-di-da. Probably prouder of it than I ought to be.”

  I asked the obvious—how he’d ended up a cop.

  “Well, you know, I was the typical layabout kid,” he said. “But good at school. So I stayed with it. I fancied anthropology, until I was most of the way through with it and realized I was actually rather keen on police work—truth be told, probably because I’d met up with a few too many cops on a professional basis. Not to say I was any kind of hoon—‘hooligan,’ you’d say. Just got myself into a little bingle now and then when I was rotten with my mates and had an overnight stay at government expense. But I reckoned that a good officer can make a lot of difference. Had an adviser at Antwerp who said, ‘Well, with forensic anthropology, you can probably catch on with a police force.’

  “Which I did. You know, my Belgium, that’s a pretty orderly place, not even two hundred murders a year and not many bodies to dig up. But still, it got me into homicide. And I was good with it. Found a pretty girl, became a right civilized bloke. But when the Yugoslav Tribunal was established, I thought, There’s a place to fully use my skills.”

  “And what did your skills tell you about that grave in Barupra?”

  “Got some bones in a bag, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How’d they look?”

  “Seemed right. Three males, two older than the last.”

  “You can tell gender and age?”

  “Hip size and certain bone formations in the pelvis. And bone density. I’ll be more certain with my microscope.”

  “And what about the bullets you were looking for?” I asked.

  “A couple. We’ll get the ballistics done back home.”

  “Is there a good crime lab there?”

  “Netherlands Forensic Institute? Top notch.”

  “Okay. We look at the bones, we look at the bullets, then what’s next?”

  “Well, we should put our heads together on some document requests for our friends at NATO, assuming you can square that with Akemi and Badu. And I’d like to come back here with a geologist. Worked with a professor at Nantes who’s very good. Madame Professor Tchitchikov. Love to know if she can tell us how recent that landslide at the Cave is. And I’d want her to have a Captain Cook at that grave for Boldo and them.” Goos said the Bosnian cops had returned at the end of the day and, eager to be able to say they’d done something, had been happy to surround the area he’d excavated with evidence tape. They promised to keep an eye.

  “I don’t know enough about the formations around here,” Goos said, when I asked what he wanted Professor Tchitchikov to examine at the gravesite. “Seemed pretty soft if the burial was a decade ago. To my eye, looked to be a mix of topsoil and subsoil there. But you know, that’s not my spécialité,” he said, using the French word.

  “But what’s the potential significance of a mix of soils?”

  “Might mean somebody had been digging in that grave a lot more recently than ten years ago.”

  “Grave robbers?”

  “Possible. Curious locals most likely. Probably kids. But could also be someone wanting a squizz at what we’d be finding.”

  “You concerned that was Ferko?”

  “He still seems a little dodgy to me, but that wasn’t my first thought.”

  “The bones were where he said, Goos.”

  He nodded, taking my point, then asked about my trip to Lijce. Like me, he was struck by what Sinfi had to say. But the moment when I seemed to have impressed him, probably for the first time, was when I unspooled my deductions about the trucks Kajevic had escaped in, and the possibility that the Americans might have suspected a double cross once the Roma’s information led them into an ambush.

  “Attila didn’t want to own up about the trucks,” I said, “but I think she’s trying to cover for the American troops. She understands the implications, but she sings from Merriwell’s songbook and insists the Americans would never have done it.”

  “Say this,” said Goos, “those American kids I met when I first started coming round Bosnia in ’97, they were a cut above. The Russians, the Turks, sometimes you wondered what prison they went to for army recruiting. They were bartering starving young girls food for their families in exchange for sex. But the American lot, those men and women were well disciplined, well trained. Played football and rock music with the local kids and handed out candy. Hard to see
them taking a hand in a mass slaughter.”

  “Group psychology is a funny thing,” I answered. I had prosecuted dozens of men and women, corporate executives and commodities traders and government officials, most with a lifelong pattern of blameless behavior, who’d then taken bribes or falsified records or cheated their customers, all offering the same timeworn excuse when they got caught: Everybody else was doing it. The most striking example to me, which I shared with Goos, was a friend of mine from the high school football team, Rocky Whittle, who was indicted while I was US Attorney. Rocky had spent years accepting small payoffs so he could maintain the confidence of the sixty other plumbing inspectors he worked with who all took a great deal more money than he had. Rocky’s fundamental decency remained so clear to me decades later that, after recusing myself from the case, I testified as a character witness at his sentencing.

  “But there’s a limit, Boom. Right? A few dollars in the pocket, or holding on to your job, that’s not mass murder. You give me your stories, I’ll give you one of mine. Been in mind of it all day. Enough to make me regret coming back here.”

  He drained his glass in preparation, and I again waved to the desk clerk, who brought another.

  “Was a witness I had for the Yugoslav Tribunal,” Goos said after a considerable silence, “woman name of Abasa Mensur. Muslim. She lived across the river in Sarajevo, on what all the sudden became the Serbian side. So the Chetniks storm into her house. This is just a few days after her husband was killed at the front a few blocks away. And with the Serbs, after a while you’d know this part without my telling you. They raped her—raped her while her children watched. Whole squad. Then when they were done with her, they started in raping her eleven-year-old daughter. Then just for kicks, they grab the three-month-old baby, Boom, and put the child in the oven, and turned on the broiler while they held guns on all of them. And the baby screams and screams, while one soldier or another is rooting the eleven-year-old. Then finally the crying stops, and when they took that poor little thing out, they laugh and hand it over to the mother and tell her, ‘This is what a grilled pig looks like.’ A Muslim woman.