Testimony

by Scott Turow

“No,” I said. “Our business was to investigate the massacre of four hundred people who were supposedly buried in the Cave and who’re now AWOL.”

  “Yay,” he said, “but I’ve got some good oil on that. Was that I’d come over to tell you.”

  He put several screenshots from Facebook on my desk.

  “Am I supposed to read this?” I asked.

  “Not that you’ll enjoy it much.”

  “Goos, this is in Serbo-Croatian.”

  “Right, right, right,” he said and spanned his forehead with his hand. “Should I translate?” he asked.

  “I’ll take the gist.”

  “Remember our makeshift DNA database?”

  “You mean to identify the relatives of all those people we thought we’d find in the Cave?”

  “Right. So I put out a request on Facebook: Love to hear from blood relations of the folks who lived in Barupra from 1999 to 2004. Here’s two girls, both of them new to Facebook, saying they were born in Barupra.”

  “Born there? And where are they living now?”

  “Mitrovica, Kosovo. It’s where the Barupra lot came from, mate. One, the fifteen-year-old, she’s answered my messages today a couple of times. Says she and her friends, how they grew up, parents were such that you couldn’t even say the word ‘Barupra’ out loud. Not in the whole camp where they are. Plenty of her friends don’t even know they were born there. And I mean, Boom, I’ve tried ‘Barupra’ before on the net. YouTube. Facebook. Crime Stoppers. Whatnot. And nary a word from anyone saying they ever lived there.”

  “So what changed?”

  “Figure I better go there and ask, don’t you think?”

  “But these girls, they’re saying their parents lived in Barupra, too? And other people in this camp she’s in now. Right? That’s the implication, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the implication, Boom. Sounds like after all this, our Roma just went home.”

  The Investigative Fallacy is assuming facts you want to believe. Goos and I had been trained to take nothing for granted. But the unquestioned disappearance of four hundred people, as well as Ferko’s testimony, had somehow never allowed either of us to consider the alternative that they had all simply moved away. There were reasons for what we believed. The Roma had departed with no word to their few friends or relations in the area, not then and not in the last eleven years. And beyond that, they had no means of transportation for four hundred people. Unless, I realized suddenly, the US Army had arrived in the middle of the night with dozens of trucks to carry them home.

  32.

  Home?—July 6–7

  I came in from work on Monday, after my meeting with Goos, in a sour mood. I was prepared to tell Nara that I didn’t feel like running, but I could see at once that she had troubles of her own.

  “You should never try a career playing poker,” I told her.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re not very good at hiding it when you’re worried.”

  “Truly? People always tell me that I am so difficult to read.”

  I would have said the same thing months ago. It was a plus, I supposed, that to me she was now transparent.

  She motioned me to the sofa, so we were sitting side by side, and she touched my hand in her prim way.

  “Lewis,” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “He called and said he would like to come home to discuss things.”

  I hesitated. “Discuss what? Divorce? Reconciliation? Where to send his clothes?”

  “I do not know, Boom. I asked all of those questions and he said he thinks it is a good idea for us to sit down face-to-face and talk it all through.”

  “And what did you say?”

  Her large eyes were suddenly darker with some faint disappointment.

  “Boom, he’s my husband. I cannot refuse to speak to him.”

  “Of course not,” I said. But I felt everything inside me stalling out, as if I’d swallowed poison. “When’s he coming?”

  “This weekend.”

  “Ah,” I said. I held my breath emotionally for a second and then plunged again into the deep water. “And where will he stay?”

  She looked down at her hands. “We didn’t talk about that.”

  I nodded. “I’ll go back to Des Indes.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s in my interest to leave another bedroom available.”

  “Boom, please. I’m sure he’s thinking he’ll sleep on the sofa.”

  “You guys deserve your privacy.” Gary Cooper, or some other highly honorable movie hero of the past, couldn’t have uttered that line with greater resolve, but I hated saying it. You knew better, I thought. You warned yourself: Nowhere to live. And a shattered heart.

  There was not much more to say right now, and so we ended up going for a run. That night we ended up again in my bed.

  On Tuesday, I found myself more wallopingly depressed than I’d been since my mother died. The last five years of my life, my grand adventure, as Ellen called it sarcastically from time to time, were not going to amount to much. Lesson taken: You gamble, sometimes you lose.

  After lunch, I went down the hall to Goos’s office, which to almost every appearance could have been mine. He was leaving for Kosovo tomorrow. By now, he’d identified at least a dozen people in Mitrovica who said they had lived in Barupra. None had explained where they had been for more than a decade, or why they had seemingly rematerialized only now. Goos thought it was better to ask those questions in person, a judgment I shared.

  “What if I told you,” I asked him, “that while you’re gone, I’m going to head to the United States?” The idea had been growing on me all day. The worst part of how I felt was my sense of utter futility concerning everything we’d done for the last several months. And of course, it would be best to leave The Hague while Nara and Lewis were hashing things out. It would drive me insane to be a few blocks away. A dark night of the imagination.

  “For what reason, Boom?”

  “To try to corner several people who owe us some answers. Starting with Esma.”

  Goos pulled a mouth.

  “Think you might be breaking the law,” said Goos.

  “Not if I’m there as a private citizen. If I’m asking questions for my own sake, with no intention of using the information here at the Court, that can’t be illegal. We have this thing in the US called the first amendment.”

  “You’re the lawyer, Boom.”

  “You keep telling me that.”

  I thought about it a little more and got on the Internet. Jahanbani v. Jahanbani was listed for a hearing Thursday at 2:00 p.m. A Delta flight at 9:30 a.m. that day would get me to JFK before noon. I e-mailed Akemi and asked to take personal time for the balance of the week. Then I called DC.

  “How would you like to take a huge step to restoring a friendship that’s lasted nearly three decades?” I asked Roger as soon as he picked up.

  He took his time before he said, “I’d like that a lot.”

  “I need a favor,” I told him.

  He said “Okay,” in a chastened tone.

  “I lost my passport in rather difficult circumstances a month ago that you probably know all about.” They’d been tracking me much too carefully to have missed the kidnapping, especially once it was reported to NATO.

  “Without commenting on your assumptions, I may have heard about a nasty encounter you had. On top of a gas tank?”

  “Saltwater tank.”

  “Right right right,” said Roger.

  Coming and going from an EU country, with a pocketful of documents issued by the government of BiH, I’d had no trouble at the Bosnian or Dutch borders, but, ironically, I’d have a much harder time entering my own country without my passport. I’d applied for a replacement, but given the distance, the wheels were turning slowly.

  Roger asked for the relevant numbers, then put me on hold.

  “Do you know where the embassy is
?” he asked, when he returned after several minutes. I did, although because of my role at the Court, I’d avoided the place. “If you present yourself there late tomorrow afternoon and ask for Reeda James, she will have your passport.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May I ask if this has anything to do with your investigation?”

  “I won’t be acting on behalf of the Court, Rog, if that’s what you’re worried about. I may ask some questions for my own sake. Starting with my former girlfriend, as you like to call her.”

  “Ah,” said Roger.

  “I suspect you know this, but her name isn’t Esma Czarni, and she isn’t a Gypsy. She’s Iranian.”

  I didn’t hear Roger’s breath for a second.

  “Iranian?” he asked then. “Ir-ranian? You mean all this bullshit traces back to Tehran?”

  “Rog, I have no idea where it traces. She’s probably just a sui generis crackpot.”

  “Jesus Christ. Why didn’t I know this? Have you got any idea about those people, the delight they take in embarrassing the United States? She’s Ir-ranian?”

  We shared a moment of continuing mutual shock, albeit arising from much different sources.

  “Roger, you’re not actually telling me that the intelligence services of the United States get their information about people they’re concerned with from Google and Wikipedia, are you?”

  He didn’t answer that. “We need to have a word with her,” he said. “What’s her real name?”

  “I expect to see her on Thursday. Once I do, you can have at her.” I didn’t want Roger ruining my surprise. Esma/Emira would have a lawyer after a visit from the FBI. He groused about the delay, but knew he had no choice.

  “As long as I have you,” he said, “may I ask about the future of your investigation?”

  “I’d say it appears to be wrapping up. I’ll know for sure by the end of the week. There are still lots of questions, but being frank, none of them appear to be appropriate concerns for the ICC. I take it that you aren’t the Answer Man?”

  “I can’t, Boom. We probably know less than you think about the matters that concern you. Perhaps someone who’s not in the reporting chain any longer could speak a little more freely. As long as it’s completely off the record.”

  He meant Merriwell. I paused to think and Roger filled in the silence.

  “I handled things badly last week, Boom. I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted,” I said.

  I thanked him again for his help with my passport and promised to get back to him about Esma by the end of the week.

  “Iranian,” said Roger one more time before we got off the phone.

  When Nara arrived home, I was in my room. I’d gotten out a suitcase and was throwing a few things in, as I tried to figure out what I needed to wash for the trip. She looked stricken at the sight of the bag.

  “Are you leaving me?”

  “Just back to the US for a few days. Tie up some loose ends on my investigation. It’s a good time, in any event, to get out of your way.”

  “I don’t need you out of my way. I was actually thinking it might be a good idea if you were here when Lewis comes.”

  “That is definitely not the right approach. Nara, you need to do what is best for you. For your life.”

  She sat down on the bed shaking her head.

  “Please don’t talk like we’re in a play.”

  “I mean it. If you can salvage your marriage, you should think seriously about doing that.”

  She tilted her small face to look at me, manifestly displeased.

  “Do you truly believe that Lewis is the best thing for me?”

  I faced her with a couple of T-shirts in my hand.

  “Truly? No. He seems like a dick. No offense.”

  “And do you not honestly think that you are better for me? Honestly?”

  “Honestly, yes. I vote for me. But there are roughly three and a half billion other men on the planet and there’s a fair chance that one of them is even better for you than both of us.”

  She gave me that tiny impish grin.

  “I think my life is complicated enough with two men in it,” she answered. “I must skip the other three billion for the moment.”

  We went out to run, but rain started halfway along. Ordinarily, we might have kept going, but we caught each other’s eye and went straight home, where we climbed into the shower together.

  “Don’t give me away so easily, Boom,” she said as she clung to me afterward in my bed.

  “I’m not giving you away, Nara. But one of the worst moments a person can have is to look up years later and wonder what you did with your life.”

  “You say these things as if you have no stake in them. How would you feel if I say, ‘Okay, you are right, I am going to look for someone else, someone who’s certain he wants kids,’ or something like that?”

  “I’d feel shattered, frankly. But I’d try to understand. I think I would. And I’d move on. I’d have no choice. Only—”

  “Only what?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. I had no wish to guilt her, which would have been the result. And I was a little surprised at myself anyway. I’d been about to say, ‘Only I’d worry whether I’ll ever feel this way again.’

  VIII.

  Breaking the Law

  33.

  Foley Square—July 9

  I dropped my suitcase at a boutique hotel in Nolita that I’d chosen off the Internet, then walked through Chinatown to Foley Square and 60 Centre Street, the original home in New York City of the State Supreme Court. I had never set foot in this building, although I’d spent more time than I’d liked at the federal courthouse across the street. There, the zesty fuck-you air of New York had left relations between the prosecutors and defense lawyers so permanently embittered that I might as well have introduced myself to the Assistant US Attorneys I had to deal with as the Snake from the Garden.

  Like many other courthouses erected in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, 60 Centre was intended to be a temple of Justice, fronted by an imposing Corinthian colonnade. Within, I found what I regarded as standard New York building stock, which is to say a structure with gorgeous bones—marble footboards, graceful arches, grand beaux arts chandeliers on huge brass chains, delicate stenciling on the plaster, and a brightly restored mural over the rotunda featuring such all-stars of justice as Lincoln and Hammurabi. All those glorious details were overcome by weak light, years of grime, scaling paint, and decades of uncompleted repairs, accounting for the frequent use of duct tape on doorways, vents, and some furnishings.

  Part 51, the Matrimonial Division courtroom where the Jahanbani case was being heard, was in the same mood as the rest of the building, two and one half stories tall, with pressed panels of oak wainscoting and a lovely turned railing separating the well of the court from the straight-backed oak pews for spectators, where I took my seat. The beauty of the design appeared to be entirely lost in the rush of the day-to-day. A blue plastic recycling bin sat beside the jury box, while decades of justice had taken their toll on the handsome oak furniture on which the finish was splintered along the edges. This was especially true of the long table in front of the judicial bench at which I recognized Esma, seated beside a young woman whom I took to be one of her junior attorneys. At the other end of the same table, the opposing associate and client were also seated, a practice I hadn’t seen before and which seemed fairly injudicious, given the hot-tempered nature of divorce litigation. Looking at this arrangement, I suddenly understood how Mr. Jahanbani had gotten batted across the head. He looked none the worse for it, dignified and straight backed, a slender handsome elderly man, bald headed, with a vein beating visibly at his temple.

  According to my reading, Jahanbani v. Jahanbani now had a procedural history as complex and irregular as the growth pattern of some cancers. In the last few years, the Jahanbanis had been referred out three different times for trial of different issues before hearing officers,
called ‘referees’ in this system, but were back before the beleaguered judge for an evidentiary hearing about whether certain assets of Mr. Jahanbani—of which his wife wanted a piece—were within the jurisdiction of an American court.

  Listening now, I could hear the principal lawyers for Mr. and Mrs. bickering before the judge about the order of witnesses for the day. At this stage of my life, I had come to accept that I was basically a law nerd who could sit in virtually any courtroom and be drawn in. I was inevitably engaged by the nuances of the lawyers’ performances, and even more by the way the judges, who had heard it all before and, far worse, were going to hear it all again tomorrow, absorbed the speeches and complaints. Probably because the judge’s role was the only one here I hadn’t played, I was always fascinated by the demeanor each brought to the silent duty of listening. Some displayed visible boredom or churlish impatience, some sat expressionless as a zombie, others evinced a trace of whimsy or—the most admirable, because they were doing what I could never manage—avid interest in every word.

  Among trial lawyers, there was always a group who dismissed divorce cases as not litigation at all. I never saw it that way, although it was almost always true that the anguish of the parties dominated the proceedings. No matter what the lawyers’ art, you always heard the same agonized lament playing in the space between words like the muffled screech of a violin—‘S/he doesn’t love me anymore.’ That was an injustice for which the law had no soothing response.

  The judge, named Kelly, a middle-aged African American woman, had followed the idiosyncratic local practice, sometimes adopted as a bow to democracy, and wore no robe. Seated on the bench in her mauve business suit, Judge Kelly was in charge nonetheless, pleasant but efficient. She ruled without much elaboration in behalf of Esma on the latest dustup. With that, the justice, as judges were called here, announced a recess and exited. All stood, and Esma, chatting with her main lawyer, who’d returned to counsel table, faced my way as they proceeded toward the corridor. I waited just beyond the dark rail.