Testimony

by Scott Turow

  Catching sight of me, Esma came to a complete halt. Although her eyes never left me, she eventually reached for her lawyer’s elbow to send the woman ahead. After another second, Esma exited through the gap in the rail to approach me.

  “Bill,” she said. She seemed somewhat breathless from surprise. She was again dressed down for court: a simple gray dress, less jewelry, her overgrowth of dark hair tamed by a ribbon tied at the back of her head. She looked well and, as always, beautiful. “This is quite a surprise.”

  “I need to speak to you,” I answered.

  “Bill, I’m sorry I never returned your calls. But I don’t need to explain, do I?”

  “Not that,” I said. “Perhaps a few other things.”

  She pointed and we went into the dim corridor with its marble-clad walls. All in all, she seemed far more poised than I could have been after being discovered in a lie of this magnitude.

  “And how is it that you find me here?” she asked.

  “A little scouting around. You’d described this case to me.”

  “Ah yes. You can see it’s as I said, bitter and interminable.” She was walking me down the hall, out of earshot of anyone else. “By the way, your last message mentioned Bank Street?”

  “They claimed to have no information about you, Esma.”

  “That’s just Kayla, the receptionist,” she said lightly. “She’s protective of everyone’s privacy.” I was startled for a second, then suddenly comprehended her strategy. Assuming I remained none the wiser, she was continuing to pretend she was the lawyer in the Jahanbani case rather than the client. “And what is it that you need to know, Bill?”

  I was wrathful, but personal rebukes would predictably end our conversation. My priority had to be learning what I could about Ferko and her arrangements with him.

  “Do you know anything concerning Ferko’s current whereabouts?” I asked.

  “I don’t, Bill. And I don’t believe I would tell you if I did. We both know that’s information he doesn’t want shared. And he’s quite put out with you at the moment, as well as me, I might add.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “Once. A few weeks ago. After one of your round of messages asking to see him, I rang him. Or tried. When I found his line out of service, I used a number I had for his son. Ferko was quite angry. He thinks you led Laza Kajevic’s Tigers to him. Said they cuffed him about and asked questions concerning Goos and you. Is that possible?”

  “It was quite inadvertent,” I said, although Ferko’s answers had probably ended up saving our lives.

  “But you accosted Ferko at home?”

  “We did.”

  “Well, that’s very much against the rules of your Court, Bill. I’m not surprised he wants nothing to do with you. He was promised that would never occur.”

  I made no response. I was not going to take instruction from Esma about ethics.

  “So you’re saying you never even saw his house?” I asked.

  She tossed around her head and laughed.

  “Never. I had not so much as an address for him. I promised him from the start that I would keep no records that would allow anyone to locate him and punish him for giving evidence. When we met, I reached him by mobile and arranged to see him most often at my hotel.” That was how Ferko could perpetrate this hoax. As I’d realized, the very nature of being a protected witness meant no one ever investigated the basic claims he’d made about himself.

  “Do you care to know what we found, Esma?”

  Accepting that Esma was a studied composition at all times, her surprise, as I described what Goos and I had discovered in Vo Selo, appeared genuine. As she listened, she drew her chin back and pulled her face aside, finally looking behind to find a seat on a stone bench along the wall.

  “This is all very strange,” she said. “Are you suggesting he was playing a part?”

  “More or less.”

  “How awful,” she answered. Then she gave her face a quick little shake to show she didn’t quite accept what I was saying. “But you corroborated his testimony. I was there to see the bones in Boldo’s grave.”

  From a seat at the other end of the bench, I offered an outline of what Madame Professor Tchitchikov had concluded concerning the soil in the grave and what the forensics had shown about the bullets Goos recovered.

  “But to what end?” Esma asked. “What gain is there to Ferko in planting bullets or claiming his wife is dead when she is alive?” Those were the right questions—even though the logical answers seemed to involve Esma. “I can’t make sense of any of this,” she said. “We know there was an explosion. We know four hundred people from Barupra disappeared without a trace.”

  “We exhumed the Cave last week, Esma.”

  “Finding what?”

  “No bodies.”

  Esma’s features were reduced by incomprehension.

  “They are buried somewhere else?” she asked.

  “No, Esma. What proof was there ever that four hundred people are dead, aside from Ferko’s word? Nothing he said is true. In fact, we now believe that a number of the Roma who were living in Barupra at that time are in Kosovo.”

  “Kos-ovo?” She laid one finger on her chin. As I had known her, Esma did not often appear entirely puzzled. She usually had her own goals in mind at every moment, and a strategy for achieving them. “What on earth would impel Ferko to make up such a thing?”

  That remained the pivotal question. I gave her my best guess.

  “The only alternative that really makes sense to me is that you put him up to it. Paid him perhaps. All for the good of the Roma cause.”

  “Me?” She recoiled so far that she nearly rolled off the stone bench. Sharp anger was also not something I’d witnessed often from Esma. What she’d pulled off required mad skills as an actress, but even so, she was doing a superior job of appearing startled, uncomprehending and now indignant. “Me? What good is it to the Roma cause, as you put it, to trot out such an elaborate lie when it is bound to be ultimately exposed? Really, Bill. I know I disappointed you at one moment, but I am not completely daft. Or entirely disingenuous.”

  I dragged a hand down my face. I was ready.

  “Well, it doesn’t surprise you, does it, Esma, that someone would tell elaborate lies and live them out for years, for whatever gratification it offers?”

  “I should say I’m very much surprised. Even more so than you, Bill. I’ve believed all of this about Ferko for nearly a decade.”

  I held a beat.

  “Have you ever heard of a woman from a Persian exile family whose maiden name is Emira Zandi?”

  She jolted visibly again. Her eyes were wide and still and she’d drawn her shoulders around herself protectively. Despite her makeup, I thought there had been a change in her color. Most telling, all her wondrous brio was gone, replaced by the flickering arrival of an expression that was the rarest of all the new looks that had come over her in the last few minutes. She was scared.

  “Not really,” she said. “And what would that have to do with Ferko?”

  “Well, Emira Zandi bears a startling resemblance to you, Mrs. Jahanbani.”

  She waited for a thought. Her mouth twitched over words.

  “Mrs. Who?”

  “You’re a liar,” I said. “And a gigantic crackpot. You could spare me some trouble, not that you would care about that, if you told me why Ferko and you cooked this up?”

  I had suddenly given her a handhold, something relatively genuine to hang on to again: angry denial.

  “I cooked up nothing with Ferko. I persuaded him to give evidence to your Court, Bill, which required some cajoling. But that is because I so wholeheartedly believed him.”

  “And weeping over that photograph of his family, Esma.” I could still call her nothing else. “Whose idea was that?”

  She nodded several times, as if building up inertia to make a concession.

  “Yes, I suggested he bring a photo to court, Bill. And I surely
told him that it was not worth the anxiety and effort of taking the stand if he did not do his utmost to be sincere. But I did not instruct him to cry crocodile tears. I prepared him, Bill, as you have prepared hundreds of your clients over the years when they were about to go under oath.”

  It was an essential part of advocacy to rehearse your witnesses to be effective on the stand. Yet there were limits, admittedly subtle ones at times. Yet I never told anybody who was dry-eyed that it would be a good idea to cry.

  “Again, Bill, I had nothing to gain by any of the lies you say Ferko was telling.”

  “Except to call attention to the plight of the Roma.”

  “The plight of the Roma is painfully obvious on its own. Their suffering, which has gone on for centuries, is not a pretense. And I am not pretending either.”

  “I have no doubts about the miseries of the Roma. But I will never believe anything you say.”

  She stared, calculating and doing her best to appear not calculating at all.

  “It would take too long to explain this, Bill. But it is Emira Zandi who is a creation. I am who I have told you.”

  “I only wish. Because I actually liked Esma a good deal. She wasn’t the right gal for me for the long run, but she’s someone I enjoyed and admired. In some ways she was a dream come true.” A wet one, my inner wise guy would have added, but that was not to diminish the depth or the importance of the longing. “But there is no barrister at Bank Street, or in all of the UK for that matter, named Esma Czarni.”

  “I was called to the bar in my maiden name.”

  “You told me you were never married. Now I find you and Jahanbani have been involved in a protracted divorce here in New York.”

  “I knew you were far too respectable to become involved with a married woman, Bill, even though my marriage has been functionally dead for a decade.”

  She had reconnected with her skills as a liar, leveling her chin and steadying her eyes for the last declarations about Esma. We could leapfrog our way through her fabrications forever, with me exposing one and her answering by making up another, switching identities as need be. She was exorbitantly unhinged. And equally gifted. There was no point.

  “You lured me to your bed, Emira, so I would believe all this bullshit. Which I did. It was very exciting.”

  She responded sternly.

  “You wanted to be ‘lured,’ Bill, as you put it.”

  “True that. I did.”

  “But I was never going to be any more to you, Bill, than a playmate with big tits. You were never going to love me.”

  The boiling nature of that accusation struck me at first as another of the gambits a savvy fraud employed to put the other party on the defensive. She’d tried this before, casting me as the wrongdoer and herself as the victim. I was ready to remind her that it was she who’d warned me against falling in love.

  But again, none of this was about what was rational. It went without saying that someone who lived a made-up reality did so to experience what she wouldn’t otherwise. Given that, she had warned me against what in some ways she must have most wanted. Who, after all, ever feels she or he has had enough love?

  “I have always suspected you were in love with someone else,” Esma said. “I can see that I am right—the signs are all over you, the way you stand apart from me, so defiantly. That’s why you’re here in the US, isn’t it? It’s been coming for months. You have gone back to your ex-wife, haven’t you, Bill?”

  I gripped my forehead instinctively.

  “I would have hoped, Esma, Emira, whoever you are—” I stopped. “I would have hoped that whatever else, you would have actually learned something about me. Apparently not.”

  “You are covering up. I know what I know, Bill. You are now sure you are in love, and not with me. Go ahead, Bill. Go back to your wife and your silly little life in Kindle County.”

  I stood up. “Are you going to tell me why you did this? Why you engaged in this lengthy charade?”

  “The Roma people are entitled to justice, Bill. Whatever you think of me, or wish to believe, the Roma have never had justice. I wanted to bring them some. And in my zeal, I was taken in by Ferko, just like you and Goos.”

  That, I supposed, was the best I was going to get from her, as much as I would hear from beneath the mask.

  “Good-bye, Esma,” I said.

  I started down the corridor past her, and she laid her hand on my arm as I brushed past. She spoke in a low voice, her eyes again radiating some of their familiar power.

  “I never lied to you in bed, Bill,” she said.

  Outside, it had become an overcast day of jungle humidity. I looked for a place to gather myself. After making a wrong turn, I ended up on an avenue behind the jail, strung with the neon signs for bail bondsmen, where I found a hole-in-the-wall bodega. There were a couple of chipped linoleum tables beneath a clanging window air conditioner, and I sat at one, downing half of a soda from a waxed cup. The floor here hadn’t been mopped since the turn of the millennium, and the place had the faint stink of grime and bad plumbing. Several of the hustlers going to or coming from court dates filtered in, speaking too loudly to the Pakistani guy behind the cash register as they purchased lottery tickets or cigarettes. That man, presumably the owner, made no effort to be friendly. One of his hands never came above the scratched Plexiglas counter beside him, a display case of candy and gum bearing a makeshift padlock. I was relatively sure he was holding a weapon of some kind, probably a bat or a crowbar, out of sight.

  Pondering now, a few blocks and a few minutes away from Esma, I found myself less enraged than I expected. My parents, especially my father, were never far off whenever I started condemning her for her make-believe life. In truth, many of us did lesser versions of what she had done, settling into new selves at times. Only six months ago, I’d thrown over the life I’d spent a quarter of a century making in Kindle County, because I felt something more authentic calling to me from The Hague.

  The one thing that had continued to baffle me was why she wanted to be Roma. But going through my haphazard research about her again before departing for this trip, I’d noticed that probably the most famous person of Rom heritage in the academic world, Professor Bavel Wilson, an outspoken advocate for Roma civil rights, had been for decades a fellow at Caius College at Cambridge, where Esma passed her university years. He was a magnetic and inspirational figure in his YouTube videos, and it was not hard to imagine his effect on the younger Emira. But without the psychological excursions of a biographer, I would never fully comprehend her inner motivations. Did she feel deeply injured or abused for some reason? Probably. Why else would she want to present herself as a member of what Roger had appropriately called the most screwed-over group of white people on earth?

  But that remained speculation. The one thing I felt surer of, as I instinctively kept an eye on the lurking types who slid in and out of the bodega, was that Esma’s seductive power was rooted in her dual personas. Whoever she was being, some fragment of her consciousness had to be reserved for the other personality, so she could escape to it when need be. Except in the bed. The line of hers that would always excite me most in memory was when she urged me to experience that moment ‘when there is nothing of you but pleasure.’ For her, the bedroom was a place of purification, where, at peak moments, she was one soul, without reservations or ambiguity. Thus it was probably true that from her perspective she had never lied to me there.

  And for that reason she’d been able to recognize a kindred yearning in me. Digging through the layers of her lies and what they meant about the case, about her, and about me, I hit that locked chest that explorers in stories inevitably found when they hunted buried treasure. Within it was my own dirty little secret. No matter how baffling her motives, I would always have to acknowledge this: I had gotten exactly what I wanted from her anyway.

  34.

  OTR—July 9–10

  From the bodega, I tried several calls, connecting with no one. For Na
ra, it was too late; she’d already silenced her phone. Goos seemed to be out of range in Kosovo. And after getting Roger’s voice mail, I texted him all the contact info I had for Emira Jahanbani. In a few months, Rog and I would have dinner and a lot of wine in Kindle County or DC and decide yet again that we’d been friends for too long to turn away from each other now. Finally, I left a message on Merriwell’s personal cell, where an out-of-office recording said he’d return tomorrow.

  The one person I did reach was Teresa Held, one of my former litigation partners here, whom I met at my hotel for a drink. Teresa had been recently nominated for the federal bench in Brooklyn. She wanted my advice and help about making it through the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bipartisan fan club Roger thought I enjoyed on the Hill had its sole shadow of reality in Judiciary. My home state’s senior senator, who’d made me US Attorney, was now the committee’s ranking member, and I also had a friend on the other side of the aisle, my freshman dorm counselor, an R who was the junior senator from Kentucky. Todd remained a wonderfully decent guy, even though my jaw sometimes fell open listening to what he said on TV. I promised to call both senators for Teresa.

  Then I went upstairs to order room service and deal with my e-mail. I found a very sweet note Nara had sent before going to sleep, and a couple of messages Goos had forwarded while he was in Kosovo or on his way. Before looking at them, I sent him an e-mail offering a brief précis of my confrontation with Esma. “She claims ardently that Ferko duped her, too. God only knows why but I tend to believe her. She seemed sincerely surprised about his wife and his house and the grave. That said, I wouldn’t wager even a keim that there’s not a lot more to the story than she acknowledged.”

  The e-mails Goos had forwarded proved to be from NFI. The first was a report analyzing the explosive residues on the stones Professor Tchitchikov had first collected at the Cave five weeks ago. Given Goos’s physical condition, it had taken him a while, once we returned after Kajevic’s capture, to deliver the samples to the lab. The Dutch scientists then found it necessary to confer with the FBI. The report they’d finally prepared included a lot of terminology that was beyond me—‘fragment range and dispersal,’ ‘shock wave reflection’—but the conclusion was intelligible: The black stuff was characteristic of a small explosive device, such as a hand grenade, utilized by the United States military. Interestingly, NFI reached this determination based not on the chemical composition of the explosive material, but rather of the metal from the hand grenade wall that was melted into the residue.