Testimony

by Scott Turow

  “And God love her, Boom, Abasa, she came to The Hague and gave evidence and pointed to the captain who had been in charge. And Boom, I’m a hard-hearted policeman, I seen bad, I know what people can be like, but I sat in the courtroom with tears streaming down my face. And the captain, that man, if you could call his like a man, that man, thank God, is rotting in a prison cell. But of course, there’s eleven others who were with him we didn’t even bother trying to catch. Some of those blokes, after Dayton, they must have gone home and had babies of their own. And what did they think, Boom, when they held those children? How is it that every one of them just didn’t go put a bullet through his brain?

  “So group or no group, Boom, I want to say there’s some that wouldn’t have done it. Because I need to be able to say, Not me either. And not your cobber Rocky, I’d hope. And maybe not those American kids who were in service here and who’d been taught better, and didn’t come up listening to all the rellies spilling bilge about the Mohammedan monsters who’d done bad to their ancestors for centuries.”

  I drained my soda. After that story there was not a lot more to say, and I waited in silence for him to finish his beer. He was leaving in the morning for a long weekend in Belgium, and we agreed to reconnoiter on Monday in The Hague. Then I went upstairs to start on the e-mails that had accumulated over two days, hoping that work would help me shake off the horror of what Goos had described. Evil of that magnitude was like a dead star, sucking all the light out of life.

  I was over my tablet about half an hour, when I heard a light rap on my door. I expected that Goos had forgotten to mention something, but when I opened, Esma was on my threshold. She seemed to have refreshed her makeup and run a comb through her huge nest of hair, and I was taken again by how striking she was. But her expression was all business.

  “Might you have one second, Bill?”

  I stepped aside to welcome her. I offered her my desk chair and took a seat on the bed. I asked if she’d like something from the tiny minibar, which held tepid beer and water, but she declined.

  “I won’t be a minute,” she said. “But something has come up with Ferko that I know you’d want to hear.” She’d told him what Sinfi had said about Kajevic’s threats. “He acted as if he was only now remembering it, but he agreed that story had indeed run through the camp. I wasn’t pleased, and he could see as much, but he claimed he’d never connected the concerns about Kajevic to the night of April 27 because the Chetniks weren’t speaking Serbian.”

  “Are you convinced by that?”

  “I count it as possible but not likely. My suspicion is that he was terrified to mention Kajevic’s name.”

  That made sense. Ferko would not have been the first witness to go skinny on the truth out of fear. And while he may have misled Esma, he hadn’t lied in his testimony or his prior statements submitted to the Court. Still, I was concerned. If Ferko was trying to leave out Kajevic, he might have also altered other details, and that could trench on perjury.

  “We’re going to need another go at him, Esma.”

  “I understand. But may I suggest waiting a bit? See where your investigation leads and what other questions you might have. He’s reluctant as is, and he keeps asking me to promise that he’s done with this. We don’t need him doing an about-turn and refusing to cooperate at all.”

  Overall, I thought her advice was good.

  “Thank you for letting us know,” I said.

  She nodded and stood. From her feet, she gave me another of her long looks. She was holding on to something, deliberating, and abruptly sat again, this time beside me on the bed.

  “The other reason you’ll need to wait to speak to Ferko is that I’ve just explained to him that I shall no longer be his representative with the Court. When you want to see him again, the Victims and Witnesses people can ring him and, if need be, arrange for other counsel. I now have no connection whatsoever to this case.”

  She watched me as I gathered the import of what she’d said. The directness of her huge eyes on me was like staring into a leveled rifle—if a rifle could express yearning.

  “Is that for my sake?” I asked.

  “Well, Bill,” she said, with a cute smile, “I rather hope it is for mine.” With two fingers, she took hold of the necktie I’d been wearing all day in a silly effort to look official and whispered, “Bill, do you know the literal translation of the Romany words for desire? ‘I eat you.’ Not ‘I want you.’ ‘I eat you.’ Or more poetically, ‘I’ll devour you.’”

  She leaned in slowly and kissed me, not in a grazing or tentative fashion, but delivering her entire self to me in the process. That and the full soft weight of her breasts against me were electrifying. I realized that at some level I had known what was going to happen, whatever my excuses, the minute she came into this room. I was sure she could feel my heart flopping around with the desperation of a landed fish.

  “Allow yourself, Bill,” she murmured. “You will never know yourself completely unless you have lived the moment when there is nothing of you but pleasure.”

  With my tie still between her fingers, she drew me to her, while I confronted yet again the weight of being well into the second half of my life. The ‘Somedays’ accumulated through youth and middle age had become a collection in their own right, a wish list illuminating the boundaries between fantasy and life’s many limitations, with their unintended cruelty. ‘Someday I will learn to scuba dive.’ ‘Someday I will travel to Bhutan.’ ‘Someday I will quit my job and take up woodworking.’ ‘Someday I will clean up…my office…my closet, the garage, the storeroom, the boxes I never looked at after my mother died.’ ‘Someday I will learn to fly-fish.’ ‘Go back to the piano.’ ‘Someday I will live in Tuscany.’ ‘Someday I will live in Tuscany and read the works of Beckett and Erving Goffman.’

  After fifty-four years, the Someday pile had become mountainous—and with it, the inevitable recognition that almost none of it would occur. Having lived well, I felt little bitterness in knowing that. But in the moment, how can you turn away when Someday can suddenly be real?

  ‘Someday I will be with a woman like that, someone who somehow jolts an entire room by passing through the doorway.’ In how many rooms, gazing at how many doorways, had that utterly impossible promise strobed through my mind, a commitment made largely so I could do the polite thing and look away?

  Perhaps all Merriwell had meant to tell me—Merriwell and his many cohorts who’d been dragged down by the tidal pull of desire—was that at a certain age the bitterest of all emotions is regret.

  IV.

  For the Record

  14.

  Records—April 16–23

  Life had taught me a cold truth, that the long-savored dream, when tested by reality, rarely approached expectations. That was never so in Esma’s bed.

  Despite the porn sites and Internet postings that vividly document the outward doings, none of us will ever really know the internal experience of other humans at these moments. But the extremes of physical pleasure I experienced with Esma were new for me. Whether that was Gypsy magic or because I’d checked all inhibitions when I crossed a professional boundary I still should have observed, at instants I felt I had reached the kernel of life, a place where sensation was so intense that the rest of the world became remote and living was purely a thrill.

  Each encounter was novel, starting from the first time, while she was thrown over the arm of another of those beautiful leather chairs in my room. There were never any bars or borders, only whim and inspiration. Usually, Esma engaged in a constant narration, a virtual play-by-play in the most profane and arousing terms—‘Oh yes, look at that big thing. Oh yes. I’m going to touch it, would you like that, yes, you know how much you like that, does that please you, yes it pleases you so much’—that gave way now and then to whispered instructions about her own satisfaction. ‘There, slowly, please. Please.’ ‘Pinch.’ ‘Hard.’ ‘Harder.’

  But better than the ballet maneuvers and ma
chinery to which Esma introduced me, she offered an example in how to revel in desire and its satisfaction. She was remarkably free with her exclamations, and with the earthquake of pleasure that jolted her body with startling frequency. She turned the bed into a delicious, soupy mess, and yet always wanted more, reminding me of another unique truth about sex: You can see the Grand Canyon, exult in its majesty, and strike it off the bucket list. But everyone wants the next orgasm.

  Naked, Esma was an inspiration, even though her Rubenesque proportions were not favored in our era. As we undressed one another the first time, she suddenly picked up her silk dress from the bed and draped it across herself, just as her bra was about to slip away.

  “Do you like large breasts, Bill?”

  “Love them,” I said.

  “Prepare for paradise,” she answered.

  The sight of Esma languorously approaching me was always arousing and quickly took me beyond what I had thought were the physical limitations of middle age. But her appeal was far more than corporeal. Years before, I had represented a stripper who worked under the stage name of Lotta Lust and who’d neglected to file federal income tax returns for more than twenty years. There was nothing unusual about Stella’s—her real name—appearance, but she’d been in high demand onstage for two decades. It was all about self-confidence, she claimed. ‘A girl who believes that every guy she meets is dying to fuck her is almost always right.’ Esma made me feel every time that she was bestowing a gift as precious as the secret of alchemy.

  Because Goos was returning to Belgium from Tuzla, Esma and I stayed two extra nights at the Blue Lamp, departing Sunday morning. For the first forty-eight hours, I never put on a stitch, relishing that freedom, too. On Friday, Esma got hungry before me and ran out to the cevapi place across the street to bring sandwiches back for both of us. While I was waiting for her, I lay still on the bed, enjoying the momentary solitude and taking stock. My entire body still felt like a force field in which the voltage center was my dick, and I was gripped by an intense desiccated thirst that seemed to be the product of coming so often. But I did not want to move. Instead, I exulted in having so thoroughly escaped restraint, even while the ghosts of the Bosnian dead, the rapes, the broilings, and the unhindered savagery seemed to dance darkly somewhere within my joy.

  I reached The Hague late Sunday afternoon. When I entered the apartment, there was a suitcase in the middle of the living room, and without trying to snoop, I saw Lew Logan’s name on the tag. I recalled that my landlady had said that my trip abroad was conveniently timed, since her husband was set to visit, meaning they’d have their house to themselves. I went to the refrigerator for water and heard a consistent rapping overhead. It took a second to realize that it was their headboard, knocking on the wall. Standing a little longer, I thought I could make out Narawanda Logan’s low wail. I listened another second, smiling at them and myself. I intended to go out for a long dinner to give them their privacy, but Esma had exhausted me. I lay down for a nap and woke up about five on Monday morning.

  My encounters with my landlady had been as isolated as she had promised, due in part to the apartment’s floor plan. The lower level contained a small kitchen and a good-size living and dining area. From there, you went up three steps to the lone full bath. Off that landing, two separate facing staircases ascended, each leading to one of the two bedrooms.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I got up for my 6 a.m. calls with my sons, I would potter toward the kitchen to make coffee and would find Mrs. Logan in the living room, contorted in some yoga pose. She was dressed all in black, in clingy yoga pants and a loose top, very tiny but notably well formed and also unexpectedly graceful. On the weekends, or when she made an early return from work, Narawanda ran. She’d come in dripping and winded, in another all-black outfit, with the addition of a stocking cap and mittens. I was often reading in the living room, but she breezed by with only a muted “Hello.” I mentioned once that I’d been a runner myself until shin splints had stopped me several months ago, but I received no more than a courteous nod as she continued to the stairs. Overall, her social affect was slightly off-center, which was more or less what Goos had told me to expect.

  When I came down to the kitchen that Monday, after my return from Bosnia, Mrs. Logan was in her yoga clothes, staring down the electric kettle so she could have her tea before getting on to her morning routine. Her husband’s luggage was gone.

  I expected her to be in the same flushed tonic mood in which I’d awakened, but she was abstracted. She greeted me politely—“Welcome back. Good trip?”—but she was in one of those morning funks in which some people start the day, and she moved off in silence to begin her exercise.

  I headed into the office early, prepared for a backlog of paperwork. By the afternoon, Goos and I sat on either side of my pedestal desk planning our document request to NATO. We felt specifics would be the best wedge against the Court’s natural inclination to avoid controversy.

  Goos’s time with the Yugoslav Tribunal had given him a good idea of what might be available, and he’d drafted his own list.

  “Armies don’t really exist to fight,” he told me. “They are there to make records. Everything must be documented.”

  His top item was duty rosters and related records like mess reports. I understood his logic—a large group on leave might be our ‘Chetniks,’ playing dress-up on their free time. But I didn’t think that would get us very far, given the basic obstacle.

  “Under American law, we can’t go interview any of those guys, Goos, assuming they’re home by now.”

  “Yay-ay,” he said, employing that exaggerated Australian version of ‘Yeah,’ “but we can check Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, Boom. Been looking over the posts about Eagle Base for some time. Quite a bit, actually, but not much that’s interesting to us. But with names, mate, we can search up those former soldiers and try some questions from here. No law against that, and you can’t believe what these young people will sometimes disclose over the Internet, stuff you’d never get face-to-face.”

  I comprehended only now why Goos had been glued to his computer the day we met.

  The second request on his draft list was for truck logs and fuel depot records. I understood that we’d want to see if any heavy vehicles had left the base in the middle of the night, but I wasn’t clear why he was also asking for mechanics’ reports and requisitions for spare parts.

  “Driving around in that coal mine in the dark, Boom, a truckie could have broken an axle or damaged a wheel pretty easy.”

  Next, he’d listed day-of records from the camps’ infirmaries and sick bays.

  “Aren’t going to bully four hundred people onto trucks without somebody throwing a punch at a soldier, or an old gal setting her fingernails to somebody’s face, maybe a couple troops getting bashed by a flying rock after the explosion.”

  I agreed. Ferko had said one of the soldiers was hit with a rifle stock while they were trying to subdue Boldo’s brother.

  The fourth item would never have occurred to me, given my limited knowledge of our military: aerial surveillance records.

  “NATO had planes all over the place, Boom, and spy satellites, trying to make sure there were no troop movements by any side. Frightening the detail they get from outer space.”

  Goos had a number of other excellent ideas. In combat gear, US troops apparently wore blue GPS transponders that were designed to ping and thus prevent friendly-fire incidents. We decided to ask for all GPS records that might show US troops in or around Barupra on April 27, 2004. NATO Intelligence had probably also recorded all cell phone use and IP addresses registered in the area.

  On a separate line, Goos had next written, ‘Pictures.’

  “Pictures?” I asked.

  “Daily photographs. Parade shots. Formations. Can see who’s missing, maybe hurt. This was near the end of the US presence. Cameras were probably snapping full-time for auld lang syne.”

  I nodded in slow wonder. Goos
was something.

  His last suggestion was the entire NATO file concerning the effort to capture Kajevic in Doboj, everything from US Army Intelligence to operational plans beforehand and the investigative reports in the aftermath: ballistic results, investigators’ summaries, even the autopsies. This was the one item on which he and I at first disagreed. If Army Intelligence was anything like the intelligence units I’d dealt with at the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, they’d be adamant about not releasing any information for fear that even a decade later it would compromise techniques or sources. On the other hand, requesting these items would give us room to relent if we got into negotiations. All we really required was records that would show how the US had come to learn of Kajevic’s whereabouts and whether there were any later suspicions of a setup, plus all information about the trucks the Roma had stolen from Attila.

  As Goos and I were finishing up, my cell pinged. It was a text message from Esma.

  In a meeting in London. Just felt the last little goopy bit of you come sliding out of me.

  I sat there in a visible blush, a state I hadn’t experienced since my early teens.

  I had known from the time Merriwell had advanced the idea of going to NATO for records that my bosses—Badu and Akemi—might be, in the end, a bigger obstacle than the US Army. Caution was a way of life at the Court. The leaden bureaucracy of the ICC, so foreign from the freewheeling atmosphere of the prosecutor’s office I had worked in before, had only one consolation: It was essential. Without a permanent constituency, the Court’s sole insulation from the inevitable controversies was to maintain rigid procedural regularity, even though I often felt I was being asked to chase bad guys in a fashion as mannered as an equestrian routine. The rest of the week, my time was consumed by meetings with the heads of the Office of the Prosecutor’s three divisions—Investigation, Prosecution, and Complementarity—concerning the document request. No one questioned my legal analysis. The referral document from the Bosnians, with its wax seal and blue-and-yellow ribbons, gave the Court the right to acquire any record that the government of BiH was legally entitled to. But my colleagues remained reluctant, particularly because this maneuver was such a clear end-run around US law. I found the Complementarity people—who were basically the diplomats—particularly vexing. They were rule worshippers who sometimes seemed as if they’d be perfectly happy if the Court never prosecuted anybody again, as long as we avoided any flaps.