Testimony

by Scott Turow

  I called the receptionist at Bank Street next, but she told me politely that she had “no information” on Esma Czarni, which is pretty much the tactic US firms utilize as an obstacle to clients who want to follow their attorney to the new workplace. So I called George Landruff, the silk—that is, senior barrister—whom Esma and I both knew at Bank Street and had spoken about for a second when we first met.

  George had never mastered what parents with young children refer to as an ‘inside voice.’ He spoke at all times at the stentorian volume fitting for the centuries-old acoustics in the courtrooms of London. From the first blast of “Hallooooo,” I kept the phone two inches from my ear.

  “George!” When talking to him, my inevitable reaction was to shout, too. I reintroduced myself, but he recalled me at once. We had enjoyed a couple of dinners, one in London, one in New York, during meetings of an international trial lawyers society we’d both been honored to join. George had the kind of understated wit that escaped, like a pleasing scent, through the ventilation of his very proper British upper-class manner, offering the assurance that he was neither a stuffed shirt nor a buffoon.

  “George, I am trying to find a colleague of yours—perhaps a former colleague—who kept chambers at Bank Street.”

  “Who might that be?”

  When I told him, the phone gathered static and he finally asked me to repeat myself.

  “Male or female?” asked George.

  He took one more second to think and said, “Very sorry, Boom, but can’t say I recall her.”

  “George, she knows you. We’ve talked about you.”

  “Did you now?”

  He repeated Esma’s name again, then asked, “Do you mean Emira Zandi?”

  I spelled her first name. “Roma heritage.”

  “Describe her.”

  “Mid-forties. Very handsome. With what other women apparently would describe as a look-at-me hairdo.”

  “Good man, I believe you’re speaking about Emira Zandi. Read law at Caius College?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s Emira! And what did you say about her background?”

  “She’s Roma.”

  “Gypsy? No, no. This lady is Persian.”

  “Persian?”

  “Iranian exile family. But she hasn’t been around here in more than a decade. Married an Iranian billionaire thirty years her senior and moved with him to Manhattan. Fine barrister she was, but I can’t pretend, Boom, there wasn’t some relief when she departed. There always seemed to be several gents after her and a lot of hissing and scratching as a result. Actually had the first fistfight I can recall in the corridors here between two fellows who each believed they were her one and only.”

  “And what was the name of the man she married?”

  “Ah, all the tough questions. Not sure I recall. It’s that metal plate they seem to have put in my head as I’ve grown older, Boom. I can ask around, though. Wait!” he screamed then. “His first name sounded a little like, Who’s that. Hoosmeth? A bit like that. Hoosit Jalanbani. Owns a few skyscrapers in Manhattan.”

  I asked George to take a guess at the spelling. Something was scratching at me as I looked at what I wrote on the pad. After a few more words with George, and a promise to get together next time I passed through London, I hung up and continued staring at the paper. Then I recalled. I’d visited Esma in the residential apartment at the Carlyle of a woman she called ‘Madame Jahanbani.’

  When I first met Esma, I’d found no photos of her on the net, although she had a significant entry in Wikipedia, focusing on her role with the European Roma Alliance. I took it that she was like many people who are camera shy, because no photo ever captures what they see in the mirror. Attila had wanted to have a picture taken of the three of us while we were eating at that streamside restaurant after our visit to Lijce, and Esma had refused, saying it would take too much time to get her hair right.

  But Emira Zandi Jahanbani was far less reticent. There were dozens of images of her, posing most often in low-cut evening gowns at fund-raisers and looking—to be a wise guy—like a billion dollars. There might have been a stylist involved: dusky eye makeup, torrential hair, face tilted to the most availing angle. Yet it was Esma, smiling toward the camera, quite often with that sealed smile full of mystical allure.

  I had run without Nara on Monday and Tuesday—it was starting to be beautiful many days—but on Wednesday she wandered in as I was about to go out the door. She was completely abstracted, although when I asked if she wanted to go “for a trot,” she agreed that fresh air might do her good. She dressed quickly but had virtually nothing to say as we jogged together for almost an hour. I was still far from a complete match for her as a running partner, and I often encouraged her to double-time the last mile without me, which was convenient inasmuch as it allowed her to grab a table at the fish place.

  Today, she shook off the suggestion when I told her, at the usual place, that she was at liberty to canter ahead. I had thought at first it was simply our current role as opposing attorneys that had silenced her, but now I was baffled. When we started out at the apartment, she’d mumbled about going back to work this evening, saying she’d gotten nothing done during the day. Now she had no will for that. We stopped for a quick dinner at the usual place, and she had two beers before the food arrived.

  I asked if her mother was okay, which she was, safely back in Jakarta.

  “Lewis called me,” she said finally. “While I was at work. I expect he thought I wouldn’t be able to pick up.”

  “And?”

  She played with her utensils on the steel table for a second.

  “I asked him if he was seeing someone else. I was surprised I had the courage. But I have been wondering for a while.”

  I’d been thinking the same thing, but had kept that idea to myself.

  “He gave me no answer,” she said. “He said he wanted to talk about our future. And I said, ‘You do not regard it as relevant to our future, if you are involved with someone there?’ He said he was not ‘involved,’ but I knew that was semantics. When I asked him again to just say yes or no, he accused me of avoiding the subject. I couldn’t stand it. He always has to find a way to be superior. I finally told him about Kajevic, that I could not give up a case of this importance, and said I hoped he would come home. And he answered, ‘Well, that pretty much does it, doesn’t it?’ And hung up on me.” She laughed, trying to find amusement as she continued to play with her fork. “Should I be crying?”

  “Even if it’s for the best,” I said, “the end of a marriage is nothing to exult over.”

  “I’ve been thinking about hiring a detective in New York.”

  I made a face. I didn’t know a thing about Dutch divorce law, but I was fairly sure that would be unnecessary.

  “No,” she answered. “It’s not because I doubt that he is involved with someone. I am curious about her.”

  “To what end?” I asked.

  Nara’s eyes, which always seemed larger and deeper without her glasses, darted up to meet mine briefly.

  “I want to know if she’s like me at all,” she said. That line was enough to make her well up. I watched in silence and then briefly touched her hand.

  “I knew,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “But it’s still humiliating,” she said.

  “The exit ramps from marriages are pretty much lined with other bodies. It makes the abstract real, I guess.”

  “And it is so infuriating, too. He’s running around and I have been doing everything to behave properly.” She’d had her third beer. Her black eyes again lit on me, suddenly large with alarm, then flitted about in evident confusion. She rose abruptly and walked a good twenty feet from the table, standing with her back to me. I motioned to the busboy so he wouldn’t clear our plates, then approached her. I touched Nara’s shoulder, still damp from the run, but she shirked my hand in exasperation.

  “I’m being an idiot,” she said. She was cr
ying again and trying to contain herself. She looked at me, attempted a smile, then crushed a hand to the center of her face. “Do you mind if I walk home alone?”

  I should have spent Thursday organizing for our interview of Kajevic and speaking to the lawyer Attila had recommended in Tuzla, but there was just one thing on my mind: Esma. Twenty-four hours had only deepened my incredulity.

  I searched ‘Jahanbani New York City,’ which brought up several hits, the most recent a small news item about the divorce of Hooshman Jahanbani from his wife, Emira. With that hint, I used the online records of the New York Supreme Court—which, confusingly, is what the trial-level court is called in New York State—to read through the ream of pleadings and and briefs in the case, now eight years old.

  Mr. Jahanbani, who had fled Tehran when the Shah fell, owned commercial real estate all over Manhattan. He had been married for close to fifteen years to his second wife, who was thirty-two years his junior, and whom he had originally met because Hooshman was close friends with her father, another Persian expatriate, who was in the oil business.

  According to the complaint in the divorce case, Mr. Jahanbani was alleging abandonment, in that Emira had purportedly been absent from the marital home for a decade. She had—probably unwisely—countered with charges of infidelity, alleging her husband sought a divorce only in order to marry a woman from his office who was not yet thirty years old. In response, he had produced evidence of his wife’s frequent affairs, involving several prominent New Yorkers—both male and female—the romances in a couple of cases apparently overlapping. The many trial sessions had apparently had their moments of drama. Emira had been found in contempt a couple of years ago for responding to one of her husband’s insults—in Farsi—by smashing him over his bald head with a folding umbrella, drawing blood. From my research it appeared the case was still nowhere near conclusion.

  All of this was stunning, but also somewhat comical, even if part of the joke was at my expense. Nevertheless, I was willing to entertain the thought that Emira might have regarded an alias as a logical step, given the fractiousness of everything surrounding her marriage. Yet my sense of alarm became far sharper when I moved on to searches about the European Roma Alliance. There were organizations with similar names—but that entity simply didn’t seem to exist. The few entries that appeared online were all in conjunction with Esma, who was always referred to as the group’s founder. At last, I phoned what online sources described as the leading Roma advocacy organization, which was based in Paris. I was passed around to several desks, but absolutely no one had heard of Esma’s outfit. The European Roma Alliance pretty clearly was another piece of her fictionalized identity.

  I paced around my office. I had cut my emotional connection to Esma fairly quickly. Even recognizing that our physical relationship would always give her a special place in my memory, I had processed in depth that she was no one to rely on. But this. My entire professional life as a lawyer had amounted to extended on-the-job training in making out lies. But Esma’s sexual power had short-circuited my detection systems.

  I had learned a dozen years ago that living two lives was neither as unusual as people might think nor as difficult to bring off. I had represented a prominent corporate lawyer, Bill Ross, who for years had left client meetings in order to trade stock in the companies whose mergers he was arranging. His brokerage account was in the name he’d been born with, Boleslaw Rozwadowski, and utilized the Social Security number Boleslaw had been issued before becoming Bill. Knowledgeable and wily, my client had been smart enough to deal in small lots so as not to attract the attention of the SEC. Infuriating as the crime was, I was more intrigued by Bill’s use of the proceeds, which the prosecutors had traced. Bill’s trading profits didn’t go for hookers or drugs or gambling, the standard motives for many white-collar crimes. Instead, Bill sent the money to support a family he had in Poland, and whom he visited once a year. His Polish wife, a girl he’d first impregnated while they were students in gymnasium, still thought he was a house painter in the US. Despite that, and Bill’s spouse and two kids in Kindle County, the Polish wife had no trouble welcoming him back when he finished the three-year prison sentence I negotiated for him.

  Observing Bill, I’d realized that the principal requirement in maintaining two identities is chutzpah, and the ancillary ability to keep your lies straight. It was shocking to all of us who knew Bill, but not because the mechanics were particularly intricate. The surprise was much more because maintaining two lives is at odds with the struggle most of us endure to find one true self.

  Yet it didn’t take more than about ninety minutes’ research to figure out how Esma had actually pulled this off. Her background—the caravan, the abusive father, Boris with his stiff dick—appeared to have been lifted whole from an autobiography called Gypsy Girl by Aishe Shopati, which had been published about a decade ago to nice reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. There was an online language course, Romaninet, from which she might have mastered the basics of Romany—and a person of her wealth could easily have hired a tutor anyway. Changing the name on her existing British passport took no more preparation than filing a form called a ‘deed poll’ for the cost of £36 at the Royal Courts of Justice, which then would have allowed her to get credit cards, bank accounts, and a national ID in Esma’s name. By exercising some care about being photographed, there was little risk that the world of a Manhattan billionairess would ever collide with that of a Roma activist on the Continent.

  The mechanics of Esma’s lie were nowhere near as confounding as trying to suss out how far it went. Pondering all her brazen falsehoods on top of Ferko’s, I had to confront a sickening suspicion: The Barupra massacre was simply another invention to glamorize the life of ‘Esma Czarni.’

  Friday evening, Goos and his wife invited me for dinner. When he called with the offer, he claimed it was all Fien’s idea, even though he had tried to convince her I wasn’t entitled to yet another free meal.

  His condition was much improved. He said he felt fully on track to return to work Monday.

  We had a lot to discuss. Complementarity had informed me that the various Bosnian parties had consented to exhuming the Cave, but the president and the registrar were still asking if there was any way to reduce the cost.

  “No one even cracked a smile, Goos, when I told them it was a bare-bones budget.”

  I knew I’d scored from the speed with which he grabbed his ribs.

  We spent some time figuring out if there were costs we could reduce. There was virtually no DNA database on any of the people who had lived in Barupra, so we agreed to dispense with the team of techs to do DNA sampling on-site. Instead, we could preserve the remains until we figured out how to identify the bones. That, however, was no small point, since the skeletons wouldn’t be worth much in court unless we could prove they were those of the Roma residents of Barupra.

  I had passed many idle moments reviewing in my head every conversation I’d had with Esma, and I remembered now that she’d told me when we first met at Des Indes that Ferko had agreed to his first interview with her just as she’d been about to go to Kosovo to look for the families of the people who’d fled to Barupra.

  “What about relatives?” I asked Goos. “If we can drum up blood relations of the people who went to Barupra, can’t we do DNA profiles of them? And match that against the bones we bring back? If we get common alleles across a broad enough sample, that would be fairly compelling, right?”

  Goos liked the idea. Accordingly, it would be his job when he got back to work next week to see if he could use social media and other means to find people—most likely in Kosovo—who claimed shared blood with the Roma in Barupra.

  Fien poked her curly head in to announce dinner, but before we sat down to socialize, I needed to tell Goos about Esma.

  “Lord, mate! You must have been ready to cark it.”

  I admitted I’d been upset.

  “Do you think Ferko and Esma made all this up tog
ether?” I asked him. “Or were they lying to each other?”

  “Mate, who knows? With this investigation, I won’t be saying ‘I’ll be stuffed’ about anything else. We have four hundred people gone walkabout overnight, and photos of them being loaded onto trucks while the Cave was still a hole in the ground. We’re not going to know what to believe until we dig it all up. And if it turns out the Cave is full of gold bars or old parade confetti,” he said, “I’ll just nod my head.”

  28.

  Kajevic—June 23

  At 10 a.m. the following Tuesday, Goos and I presented ourselves at the ICC Detention Centre. It was situated in an old stone castle, converted to a prison by the Dutch long ago, in Scheveningen, the town adjoining The Hague that is, whatever the ironies, on the beach.

  I had been reading a lot about Kajevic in the last few days and watching video, but I remained uncertain what to expect. During my years as a line assistant, I had questioned a few killers, including a contract murderer who gave off something—an aura, a pheromone—that froze my heart. But Kajevic was in a category of his own, a political leader whose charisma and rage had been enough to lead an entire nation into a realm beyond conscience. As someone whose professional life for the last thirty years had involved a sort of professional study of evildoers, I realized that today would represent a personal high-water mark. With any luck, Laza Kajevic would retire the trophy for the biggest criminal I ever met.

  The detention center looked like the iso wing of many American jails, where inmates were housed who could not live in the general population, either for their protection or that of other prisoners. Along the solid white corridor where we walked, there was a line of avocado steel doors with heavy locks and tiny observation windows, too small to fertilize any fantasy of escape. Formidable-looking pay phones, twice the size of what I last saw in the US, and solely for credit card use, hung outside the doors.