9.

The Blue Lamp

Attila shook me awake in Tuzla. “Hat up,” she said.

Down the curve of a street that bore the narrow dimensions of a road first built for carts, I could see the hotel sign. BLUE LAMP, it read, BOUTIQUE HOTEL. Attila walked ahead with my luggage. The cool night, in the high 40s if I’d done the conversion from Celsius correctly, refreshed me slightly. There was a small shop on the corner that looked to be a convenience store, and some young men in their close-fitting leather jackets milled in the doorway, waving cigarettes at one another and jiving the way young men always do. There was no other traffic. The tranquil domestic air of Tuzla was a testimonial to how wrong Hobbes had been. The natural state of man is peace.

Buzzed into the hotel lobby, Attila immediately got into laughing byplay in Bosnian with the young man and woman who were behind the front desk.

“They say I’m the king around here,” Attila told me. “You should be honored I’m carrying your luggage.” She gave me her card and told me to call if I needed anything.

As soon as Attila was gone, I detected a gesture from my right. Over my shoulder, there was a small lounge area with coffee tables and black leather armchairs. I was not surprised to see Goos with a beer glass in his hand, which he tipped in my direction. Once I had my room key, I plunged down beside him. The chair had the gleam and soft feel of the furniture in the embassy in DC. Leather, I took it, was a Bosnian thing.

“Welcome,” said Goos.

“I’m on another planet,” I told him. The mix of grogginess and jet lag made me feel like half my body was still in Kindle County.

“Drink?” Goos asked.

One of the desk clerks came over to pour a scotch for me, which I asked for as silent acknowledgment of Merriwell, who remained in mind after my talk with Attila. The clerk set down another beer for Goos at the same time, already familiar with his routine.

“Who was your driver?” Goos asked.

He laughed out loud in response to Attila’s name.

“Wanted to hire a few blokes to help out tomorrow,” said Goos, “and everybody says ‘Call Attila.’ Been trying to get hold of him all day.”

“Her, actually.”

Goos stared at the front door, through which Attila had departed.

“Really?” he asked.

“She said you sent her to pick me up, by the way.”

“Did she now? Not as how I reckon. Finally rang a taxi service to go get you.”

“I guess she owns it.”

“Tell you one thing, mate,” said Goos. “We won’t be using her as a translator. Those young folks over there said, ‘You think you’re the king around here, and here you are toting the man’s luggage,’ and he turned it all around so you should be honored. She,” Goos added.

The Blue Lamp had a contemporary appearance, comfortable but not fancy, with dark mahogany trim and white laminate fixtures in the compact spaces. A little breakfast area with a few white tables was visible behind Goos. Over the angled front desk, a large-screen TV displayed a slide show of Bosnian scenes—mountain glades, the Grand Mosque in Sarajevo, and an old Roman castle somewhere near Tuzla. The same images played on a smaller TV screen on the wall beside us.

I had e-mailed Goos over the weekend about the notion of going through NATO to get the US Army’s records. Before leaving The Hague, he had dug up the Status of Forces Agreement that Merry had referred to. Goos read it to me now off his phone.

“‘The receiving and sending States shall assist each other in the carrying out of all necessary investigations into offences,’ blah blah blah, ‘including producing evidence.’ Blah blah blah.”

“That’s pretty good,” I told him. “We can stand in the shoes of the Bosnians to demand the documents.”

Goos nodded. “Course, you lawyers will do what you always do, say none of those words mean what they say. Might be ten years before we’re close as cooee to those papers. But still, good thinking, Boom.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I said. Given the legal issues, I had been careful about what I put on paper concerning my meeting with Merriwell. Goos straightened when I told him that the guidance about going via NATO had come from the general.

“The other helpful thing I got from him,” I told Goos, “was that he didn’t deny that the Roma in Barupra had assisted the Army somehow in their attempt to capture Kajevic. Attila said the local gossip was that the Gypsies gave the US Kajevic’s location. But I’m having a hard time making sense of that.”

“Because?”

“Well, I reread my file on that whole mess with Kajevic in Doboj on the plane. And I can’t imagine why a bunch of threadbare Gypsies would know more about Laza Kajevic than NATO Intelligence.”

“I believe that’s why they call us investigators, Boom.” Goos smiled.

Like me, Goos was also puzzled by Merriwell’s helpfulness. I shared Attila’s theory that after disgracing himself, Layton Merriwell now had a large stake in clearing himself and his soldiers. Remote from the American press and its obsessions, Goos knew nothing of Merriwell’s affair. I summarized the story and also told him about my dinner with Merriwell, which I characterized as an invitation offered so I could commiserate about the hardships of middle-aged divorce. Apparently I hadn’t said much to Goos before this about the demise of my own marriage, and he responded by looking deep into his pilsner glass for a moment.

“I could never quite reckon on divorce,” he said. “Couldn’t see how it would make anything much better.”

He finished the second half of his beer in a single gulp and lifted a finger to the desk clerk for a refill. Goos had been sitting down here drinking long enough to have acquired his own conversational momentum.

“It’s just the facts, mate,” he said. “Seven billion people on the planet and I wake up with the same one every day? Everybody after a long time is bound to feel stuck. Just a matter of how you react to it.”

I understood that attitude, the fatalistic approach to marriage. Ellen and I had been unable to settle for boredom. Instead it was accompanied on both sides by a relentless, grinding resentment.

“Cobber of mine,” Goos said, “says beer’s a better companion than a woman anyway. Always there. Know how you’ll feel after one or two or five. And how you feel is always better than when you started.”

He smiled equivocally as he pondered that observation, while a ruckus rose up at the door. Esma Czarni, followed by a driver laboring with two large suitcases, arrived at the reception desk. She paid the driver, while one of the young desk clerks, who greeted her by name, welcomed her back and stepped around to help with the bags. Esma had not dressed down for travel. The collar on her Burberry mackintosh was turned up against the chill, and a furry purple scarf was stylishly doubled over her bosom. Her skirt was short to show off her legs in her glossy high-heeled boots.

She summoned an effusive smile as soon as she saw me, and advanced at once.

“Bill!” She delivered Continental kisses, while I reintroduced her to Goos. He took a second to brief us both on the schedule for the morning.

“Are we drinking?” Esma asked, motioning at our glasses with a hand heavy with several gold rings I hadn’t noticed before.

I explained that my scotch had left me close to dizzy and that I was ready to retire.

“Good thought,” she said. “Truth told, I’m rather weary myself. I’ll walk you upstairs.” Goos, as usual, said he was going to stay on for another beer, although he gave me a fleeting look, too quick to read.

My room was on what the Europeans call the first floor, the second to us. In one of those Continental efficiencies that make you embarrassed at our profligacy, the overhead fluorescents were controlled by energy-saving motion detectors, and they sprang on as we ascended, giving us light as we arrived at the corridor that led down to my room. Standing there, we did another second’s worth of business as I asked Esma to question Ferko one more time to see if he had any idea how someone in Barupra might have known where Laza Kajevic was hiding. Then, as I was about to turn away, she cast an appraising look at me.

“I must say, Bill, that I’m rather pleased to see you. You’ve been on my mind.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Esma.”

She averted her dark face slightly and delivered a hooded look from her eyes, large within the dusky shadow, adding a trifling smile. The communication was on the order of something one of my high school teachers liked to say: Don’t kid a kidder.

I waited just a second, then decided, despite my trepidation, that the moment was at hand.

“Esma, I’m as tired as you were the night we met, and not as good as you without sleep. So I’m probably going way out over my skis, and if so, I apologize. But when I was about twenty, I was struck by what seemed to me to be a very sad truth. When I find a woman enormously attractive, other men do as well. Which means you don’t need to hear me repeat what you’ve undoubtedly heard a thousand times.”

She smiled hugely, a glamorous display of large, perfect teeth.

“Some things never become trite, Bill,” she answered.

I smiled as well.

“But nothing can happen here, Esma.” I used my right hand to etch the air between us.

“You’ve become involved?” she asked.

“It’s not that, Esma. You’re an advocate for a client whose claims I’m supposed to objectively assess as the prosecutor in this case.”

“Ferko is not my client. I was appointed to assist him for a single hearing, which is now over.”

“If he’s not your client, Esma, why else are you here? And besides, the technicalities don’t change the appearances. You’re far too good a lawyer not to understand what I’m saying.”

As before, the compliment pleased her, if only briefly.

“I’m not sure I see it that way, Bill. I’m as conscious as you of the professional commandments. But I had the thought that we could be good for each other.”

“But not at the moment, Esma. Who we are in this case can’t help being entangled in who we’d be to one another.”

That was the self-deception that Layton Merriwell or Bill Clinton or hundreds of other men had practiced, and the reason people mocked them: The power that proved so seductive to certain women was not actually theirs; it was a gift entrusted to them temporarily and for much different purposes.

But Esma shook her head slightly.

“I don’t come to the same conclusion, Bill. Yes, the professional informs the personal. But there is nothing false about it. Do I misperceive you? I take you as a man who has given up a comfortable life, who has come thousands of miles from home, so he can know that his energies as a person are devoted to making large wrongs right. That is very attractive to me, you’re correct. That kind of conviction is a rarer quality than you think.”

As she spoke, the lights blinked out again. In the shadows, I became suddenly conscious of her perfume, a power scent, full of sweetness and allure, which I had heretofore absorbed merely as part and parcel of her strong sensual presence.

I knew Esma was far too nimble intellectually for me to triumph via argument. I went with trump.

“I can’t, Esma,” I said. I thought I was speaking from principle, but with the words, I experienced, strangely, a sense of my own weakness. I realized again that I was in some way afraid of Esma.

For a second the hotel was still around us, then a door slammed resonantly a floor above.

“Very well, Bill. I shan’t push myself on you.” In the weak light, she stared up at me a second longer, then approached to kiss my cheeks as she had downstairs, a bit more slowly this time. “But I foresee that in the future you will change your mind.”

“‘Foresee’?” The word amused me. “Do you tell fortunes, Esma, like the Gypsy women in their wagons?”

“I am somewhat psychic,” she said. “Most Roma women are. Don’t smile either. That is a truth.”

I nodded rather than disagree.

“Certainly I know minds,” she said. “I know your mind—what you do not care to say or even know you need.” She was utterly serious, without a hint of irony, and quite commanding. “And I foresee that you will have a change of heart.” She had laid her hand on my arm as she was kissing my cheeks, but now removed it.

“Perhaps, Esma. But sadly for me that will be far in the future.”

She turned then, and with her sudden movement, the fluorescents powered on again. In the painful brightness, she offered a gallant little wave and turned away.

I dragged my bags into my room. The door closed solidly behind me, a fatal definiteness to the sound. Alone, recoiling, I felt regretful and forlorn, but opened my case to find what little I would need for sleep.

All my life, my unconscious has expressed itself in song. Habitually I’d find myself humming a tune for reasons I was slow to recognize. Now, as I lifted the stacks of clothing into the dresser drawers, I was tootling a soul ballad Pete had introduced me to a few years back. It took its title from the first line of the chorus that rose up amid big horn flourishes. I da-da-da’d until the words came back to me. It was called “Don’t Make Me Do Wrong.”