Testimony

by Scott Turow

  After more demurrers, I decided to take advantage of the situation and pointed out that now that Kajevic was in irons, there was less reason to withhold the intelligence reports from the effort to grab him in 2004.

  Merry laughed and told me I still didn’t understand the Department of Defense, but he didn’t stay on the phone much longer.

  When I came in Thursday night, Narawanda was dressed for our run, but she greeted me with her hands on her hips.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you guys were part of capturing Laza.”

  I explained that Goos and I deserved little credit and were eager to escape the blame from Kajevic’s malevolent followers.

  “As I hear it,” she said, “you were the center of the whole operation.”

  I was troubled that word of our roles had already leached into civilian circles. At the ICC, the secret had held for the day, since Badu and Akemi felt it was critical to maintain a separation between our Court and the Yugoslav Tribunal. Nonetheless, there were too many people in the reporting chain for me not to have received some meaningful sideward glances and nods of recognition, even though nothing was offered out loud. I was on the verge of asking Nara, with a little irritation, how it was she’d learned about this, when I realized her source.

  “You heard this from your client? He’s arrived in The Hague?”

  She shrugged to show she couldn’t breach the wall of confidence.

  “How’s his nose?” I asked. I didn’t even try not to smirk.

  “Quite swollen. He seems more upset about that than being in jail. He is quite vain.”

  “I would never have guessed.”

  “But your role in this made for a very odd initial interview. I had to confess I knew you well, both of you. I wish I had had a chance to brief Bozic before your names came up.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. From her perspective, I was subjecting her to some kind of conflict by keeping all this to myself. I apologized and asked how Kajevic had reacted to her disclosure. I was afraid it might cost her her role in the case, but she said Kajevic was unconcerned.

  “He assumes everyone knows everyone else in The Hague. Bozic actually suggested a formal conflict waiver and Kajevic made light of that and actually scribbled something out himself. But he said to send you his respects and to tell you he would like to meet Goos and you face-to-face someday.”

  Nara, predictably, didn’t seem to recognize the chilling import of the message. On the other hand, Kajevic’s inflation of our role conformed to my impression of his grandiosity. He’d assumed he could outwit NATO forever, and would much rather think that he’d been rolled up accidentally by a couple of hapless nincompoops.

  In the meantime, my conversation with Merriwell, and the unlikelihood that we’d ever get the intelligence file on the prior effort to arrest Kajevic, sparked a new idea.

  “If Mr. Kajevic really wants to see Goos and me, we can interview him for our case. There are a lot of questions he could put to rest for us.”

  Nara responded by laughing in my face, albeit in an inoffensive way, with no scorn intended. It was the same thing I would have done if the roles were reversed.

  “Bozic will never hear of it. Laza has trouble enough without talking his way into more. But I will pass the request on to both of them, so you can receive a formal no.”

  We went off for our run, but the skies opened unexpectedly, as they often do in The Hague, and we ended up at the Mauritshuis, The Hague’s little treasure box of an art museum. The grand seventeenth-century house, built in the classical Dutch manner with a steep tiled roof and an ornamented yellow facade over the brick, is now home to some of the most famous paintings in the world, including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, which are coincidentally displayed in the same tiny room. We’d run past the site often, with Nara chiding me virtually every time about not having visited. With the downpour we’d decided this was the moment, inasmuch as the museum was open late Thursday nights.

  I had forgotten Nara’s design background and was impressed by her incisive responses to many of the pieces on display. There were paintings—a Rembrandt portrait of an old man or a Vermeer of a town scene by a waterfront—that moved me intensely with what they held of the sheer force of life. The tiny rooms of the original house had been preserved as show spaces, which lent a secret, intimate feeling to the entire experience, as Nara and I whispered to one another, pressed close in the crowd.

  Once we’d circled through twice, returning to several mutual favorites, we retired to the café to wait out the rain, talking at length about the pictures. She had a lot to say about the genius of Rembrandt, who was centuries ahead in his understanding of what we actually see.

  We departed at closing, walking along slowly through what had now settled to a delicate mist.

  Nara sighed and said, “That was lovely.” She looked up at me, tiny and ever-sincere, the rain shining on her cheeks. “Wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” I answered.

  We walked home with little more said.

  On Friday morning, I found Nara standing over the coffee pot crying. I was astonished, since she ordinarily dealt with her troubles in a contained way and had been quite upbeat since I returned. She wasn’t sobbing, but there was no mistaking her tears.

  “Lew?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she answered. “My mother is on the way. She’ll land at Schiphol tomorrow morning.” It turned out that Nara’s mother had a blood disorder, well under control, but one that nonetheless required periodic visits with a specialist in Amsterdam. She would see the doctor on Monday. “I realize I have to tell her about Lewis, but I have no idea what to say. I left messages for him today and yesterday, but there has been no response. Is that how a marriage ends? Without even answering the phone?”

  I tried to comfort her. Lew was probably giving himself a break, I said. Many marriages resumed after a time-out.

  She shook her head decisively. “There is little chance. The Kajevic case will keep me here for years, and I am quite happy to stay. Lewis will never accept that.”

  I could have pointed out that it was she, as much as Lew, who had made the critical decision, but she would probably not see it that way. There is surely no human relationship more complicated than marriage, and I knew better than to try to get inside Nara’s.

  Instead I asked where her mother would stay. I could see that in her anguish about having to confess the state of things with Lew to her mom, Narawanda hadn’t considered that issue. Being Nara, she just told me the truth, without apology.

  “Well, normally she stays here. But I suppose that will not work.” She turned impish, a sideways thought suddenly lightening her mood, while, like a child, she used the back of her hand to smear away her tears. “It would be very cozy with Mum and you and your friend in your bed.”

  I did the chivalrous thing and said I’d go to a hotel for the weekend.

  “You cannot. This is your home. Mum will be fine at Des Indes.”

  “No chance,” I answered. I promised to tidy up tonight and be gone in the morning when they returned from the airport. After a little more Alphonse and Gaston, she accepted.

  “This is so kind of you, Boom. I feel terrible tossing you out. Can I pay the hotel bill?”

  “Never.”

  “Will you at least come for dinner tomorrow night? That would be a huge favor. Mum is a lot for me to handle alone.”

  I knew she meant it—Narawanda never employed devices—and I accepted. I paused on my way out of the kitchen with my coffee.

  “And I’m no longer seeing my friend, as you call her. That’s been kaput since the day I told you I was put out with her.”

  Nara reflected a second.

  “I am sorry, truly. You seemed very smitten. I hope that odd scene here had nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course not.”

  Relieved, Nara smiled in her
sly way. “I will never forget the sight of her, just as God made her, except that look-at-me hairdo.”

  The hairdo! I was always surprised by the way women saw each other.

  “There was never any future,” I said about Esma. “And the present, as I should have known, was much too complicated.”

  Nara seemed on the verge of saying more, but she stayed silent and I headed upstairs.

  At work on Friday, I endured a round of meetings about how to proceed with our case. The pivotal question was whether we should even continue, since we now had to ascribe virtually no value to Ferko’s potential testimony, even in the unlikely event he could be found. The conversations in the office were earnest and marked by a lot of worthwhile questions, but I was somewhat aggravated the discussions had to take place in layers—first with the division supervisor, then with Akemi added, and finally Badu, too. Each time we all agreed that notwithstanding Ferko, the NATO records, especially the aerial surveillance, left us with no alternative but to exhume the Cave. The bodies were now the only likely source of additional evidence. And as Goos had recognized, having embarrassed the United States on the front page of the Times, we were obliged to confirm the crime. Over this last point, Badu wound his head around sorrowfully and said somewhat churlishly that the leak had been very ill-considered.

  The deliberations about the future of our investigation brought back a thought I’d been avoiding: I needed to try again to contact Esma, in case she had an alternative way to reach Ferko. He was likely to have worthwhile information, even though virtually nothing he said could be taken at face value. For example, given his true vocation he was likely to know how the stolen trucks had ended up with Kajevic.

  Having failed via all electronic means of communicating with Esma, I reverted to the old-fashioned method and composed a lawyerly letter to her on Court stationery, saying that we had visited Ferko at his house with surprising results, which I felt obliged to discuss with her. The letter went out for overnight delivery, addressed to her chambers in London as well as her temporary dwelling in New York.

  When I was in college and law school at Easton and brought home friends, as I’d done with Roger, I was often torn by their reactions to my parents, whom my buddies inevitably judged cultivated and intelligent. I didn’t mind that my friends admired my parents—I did, too—but I was frustrated that they were unable to recognize the emotional tightfistedness that made them so challenging for Marla and me.

  Naturally, I saw the same process play out from the other side when Will and Pete brought their pals to our house, where, I could tell, Ellen and I appeared far less eccentric and annoying than the friends had been told to expect. It was another truism I’d adopted in middle age that parents and children always stood in a unique relationship to each other whose full effects were inevitably shuttered to everyone else.

  Nonetheless, given Nara’s agitation, I walked toward the apartment from Des Indes on Saturday expecting an awkward evening. It was a wet night, sometimes raining hard. I was in a slicker and hat, while the Dutch, as usual, were carrying on in defiance of the weather. As I strolled through the Plein, hundreds of the locals sat at the lines of outdoor picnic tables, drinking beer and huddled under the cafés’ umbrellas. I realized how much I had come to admire the Dutch, with their happy communal air and their polite determination to ignore small obstacles to doing what they liked.

  A block away from the apartment, I stopped in the local wine shop and bought a bottle of burgundy I knew Nara favored. Only when I offered it to her, as I was crossing the threshold, did I remember that alcohol was no way to make an impression on a Muslim woman.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, when I recognized my folly, and asked if I should hide the wine.

  “Just leave it in the closet with your coat. I won’t drink in front of her, but I promise, I’ll have several glasses once she’s asleep.” Nara rolled her large eyes, then took me by the elbow to introduce me.

  Annisa Darmadi proved to be bright and charming, and quick to laugh. Notwithstanding the dizzy spells that had brought her here to see her doctor, she appeared vital and healthy and, even at seventy, was a virtual look-alike of her daughter, with the same tidy form and dark round-faced handsomeness. Her hijab, which Nara said she wore more often these days, had been forsaken tonight, perhaps for her daughter’s sake.

  Mrs. Darmadi had insisted on cooking, as Nara had told me to expect, and she was occupied at the stove preparing several traditional Indonesian dishes. The ingredients were readily available in the Netherlands, with its large Indonesian population, and the mom couldn’t understand why her daughter hadn’t learned to take advantage of that. Having said as much, Mrs. Darmadi shooed Nara away whenever she even looked into the pots.

  We sat down not long after I arrived. Mrs. Darmadi was a fabulous chef. There was a soup with coconut milk called soto, a salad with peanut sauce—gado-gado—and a ball of sweet rice surrounded by a pinwheel of grilled beef, whose name I never got. Over dinner, we talked mostly of Jakarta, about which I knew next to nothing, as Mrs. Darmadi brought her daughter up to date on local events. The most interesting thing to emerge in conversation was that Mrs. Darmadi, although considerably younger, was a distant cousin of Lolo Soetoro, the man who became Barack Obama’s stepfather. She spoke of Lolo more approvingly than she did of Obama’s mother, whom Mrs. Darmadi referred to, without elaboration, as “a hippie.”

  Throughout the evening, Nara kept following up her mother’s remarks with explanations. This was ostensibly to augment the mom’s middling English. Nara’s amplifications about Indonesian culture were helpful, but very often she tried to temper her mother, who was clearly a woman of strong opinions.

  “By ‘hippie’ she merely means unconventional,” said Nara.

  I smiled at her and then Mrs. Darmadi and said, “Nara, your mother and I understand each other perfectly,” to which the mom responded with the same brief downstroke of her chin I had seen from her daughter a hundred times. Nara always described herself as ‘sheltered.’ But her mother was far more worldly than the homebound Muslim woman Nara portrayed, and I realized it was the mom’s sharp judgments that had left her daughter feeling hemmed in.

  I departed a few minutes before ten. When I opened the front door downstairs, I faced more rain and remembered that I’d left my slicker in the closet. I went back up, knocked several times, and finally used my key to let myself in, calling out “I’m back.” They did not seem to hear me with the tap running and dishes clattering in the kitchen.

  As I opened the closet, I overheard fragments of their conversation. During the evening, Mrs. Darmadi had occasionally addressed Nara in Javanese, which her daughter had answered either in English, for my benefit, or Dutch, when she didn’t approve of what her mother was saying. But now the mom had succumbed and they were having a mild quarrel in Dutch. In six months, I had gotten to the point where I could understand more than half of what I heard, although it would be a long time before I dared to speak, since I was befuddled by the grammar. Nonetheless, the mom, as a non-native speaker, talked much more slowly than Nara and thus was easier to track.

  The water was turned off for a moment, allowing me to clearly hear Nara’s mother saying, “Nice.” ‘Aardig’ was the word she used, a mild compliment. “That is not what troubles me. It is highly inappropriate for you to be living with a man who is not your husband, let alone one with whom you are so obviously fascinated. You turn to him like a flower to the sun. No wonder you are having difficulties in your marriage.”

  “Mother!” Narawanda answered. “Mr. Ten Boom has nothing to do with the problems between Lewis and me. We have been isolated from one another for years.”

  The mother answered as mothers do, “Ja, ja,” agreeing but not agreeing at all.

  I padded out like a burglar, willing myself to pretend I had heard none of that. It was only when I got back to the front door of the building that I realized I’d forgotten the slicker again. I turned up my collar and headed into
the rain.

  26.

  New Witness—June 15–16

  On Monday, we began the preliminaries required before exhuming the Cave, a process in which I again found the diplomats and bureaucrats crazy-making. Consent, they claimed, was required not only of several departments in the fractured Bosnian government, but also from the mine owners, the Rejka company, who had abandoned the site more than two decades ago and who had gone entirely unmentioned in the months we’d been crawling all over the place. As a result, I had to undertake the equivalent of a title search in Bosnia. Beyond all that, the president’s office was understandably concerned about the expense of the operation, which was what had held us back from the beginning. I phoned Attila to see if she could help us find a local real estate lawyer and a deal on earth-moving equipment.

  “I’ve been meaning to call,” she said. “You must be feeling pretty fucking special.”

  In the rush of everything else, I had not given much thought to the fact that we hadn’t heard from one of the world’s leading busybodies, who, in this case, could actually claim some role in these news-making events. Now she wanted every detail.

  Like everybody else, Attila was impressed about Goos’s courage in hindering Kajevic’s escape.

  “Goos keeps saying he was stupid,” I told her, “because a sixty-year-old man in a dress was never going to outrun a bunch of twentysomethings. But he was really brave, Attila. I was so panicked I’d have let him dash right by.”