At nine in the morning, we arrived on the yellow rock of Barupra. Traveling in caravan, we were led by a line of squat Bosnian police cars that had been waiting for us outside the hotel when we departed. The tubby little captain insisted with great animation that the Bosnian government wanted to do everything possible to assist the Court.
“A pig’s arse ‘assist us,’” said Goos, as soon as we had closed the door to our little Ford.
“What else would they be doing?”
“They’re watching us, buddy. This is still a country with factions within its factions. You have three different national governments here, and every cop will be reporting to somebody else.” Goos shifted gears somewhat emphatically and pointed at me. “A fit job for the lawyer will be to get rid of them. Ferko won’t fancy lairing around in front of coppers.” Esma had already made the same point to me. The loyalties of any single Bosnian policeman were always open to doubt.
The police now led us on what seemed to be the back route out of town. We rose into the hills on residential streets that reminded me of the canyons of West LA. There are rich people everywhere and in Tuzla this seemed to be their hangout. The country roads onto which we eventually emerged doubled back as they ascended, with impressive vistas of the city below occasionally peeking through the trees beginning to leaf. After about twenty minutes, we reached flatlands, still dotted with snow, and buzzed past farms and little whitewashed houses that could have been home to Hansel and Gretel.
On this highland south of Tuzla, the US, after Dayton, set up a base with a network of six camps. Predictably, the US military installations stood at the border between areas controlled by Muslims and Croats on one hand, and on the other, the territory of the Serbian Bosnians that became their autonomous enclave of Republika Srpska. The Army’s air base at Camp Comanche subsumed a former MiG landing strip of the Yugoslav Army, which years later became Tuzla’s civilian airport, where flights arrived on two commercial airlines several mornings a week.
Due east of Comanche, on the other side of the hills, Camp Bedrock had been built on the waste of two adjacent open-pit coal mines. The brown-black slag had been bleached by sun and wind to a color like whole-grain mustard and was piled high to create a rocky prominence looking out over the Tuzla valley in the distance and the Rejka coal mine immediately below. It was the kind of highpoint that armies going back to the Romans had prized, trading stark exposure to the elements for virtual invincibility to ground assault.
The cop cars led us onto the former camp, turning down a rocky dirt road that ran behind the old wire-fenced perimeter, past an old basketball court on which the asphalt was now split by weeds. I got out of the car. This was Barupra.
In the eleven years since the Roma had disappeared, the site had become a town garbage dump, perhaps as a gesture of good riddance. Between the large gray rocks, most of the area was covered by what appeared to be construction waste, especially scraps of shredded plasterboard, amid the usual hardy detritus of dusty bottles, aerosol cans, and of course the ubiquitous and indestructible bright plastic bags that will blow through empty spaces for centuries to come and for which the millennia to follow will curse us.
Aside from Goos and me and the police, there was another small car in the cavalcade, containing three laborers Goos had hired from Attila’s company. Accompanied by her driver from last night, Esma arrived last. She was still dressed like a lady, her lone concession to the landscape a pair of flat-heeled boots.
Once we stopped, all of the police officers left their vehicles to light on their fenders. Goos had it right. They were here to spy.
I approached the captain. After several minutes, I convinced him that the protocols established between the Court and the Bosnian government required us to work unobserved. Even then, Esma insisted that Ferko would also be unwilling to speak in front of the three laborers, whom we ended up dispatching to Vica Donja, the nearest town, to find a coffee, which you could seemingly obtain on even the remotest mountaintop in Bosnia. Only then did Esma take out her cell to summon Ferko, whom she had called earlier and now had waiting nearby.
He appeared about ten minutes later in a red wreck of a car, an Opel sedan, perhaps from the 1990s, with a rust hole in the front fender and a line of duct tape applied vertically to hold on a rear door. Unfolding himself from the red car, Ferko seemed taller and thinner than I had recalled against the stark landscape, especially next to Esma, who, without her high heels, proved rather short. Esma gripped his arm at the elbow, almost as if she were escorting a prisoner. Ferko had on a pair of plaid pants, the same vest and hat he had worn to testify, and beneath his open winter coat, a large-collared orange shirt. Goos stepped forward to welcome him, but Ferko was still speaking to Esma with wide gestures and Goos, in a purple windbreaker, stopped and peered back at me with something of a vexed look.
At last, Ferko was ready and the four of us tromped across the stones and swales of Barupra as Ferko relived his narrative. He showed us where the lean-to he called a house had stood, about a hundred yards into the camp, and then across the village the outhouse in which he’d hidden when the masked raiders arrived. For whatever reason, I had imagined a wooden structure, but what remained had walls of cinder block, meaning it was the lone structure still standing, even though the roof and door were gone after more than a decade. He then pointed out the spot where Boldo and his son and brother had been slain.
After that, Ferko led us to the back of the camp, overlooking the village, where he’d watched the destruction of his family and everyone he knew. The mine plunged down dramatically below us, a steep drop of several hundred feet. I had never been a fan of heights, and the falloff left me feeling somewhat imperiled, even as I appreciated the majesty of the vista of the surrounding green hills, which wore hats of white at their upper reaches. The wind flapped Ferko’s wide trousers as he gestured to the switchbacks on the gravel road below. Perhaps a quarter of a mile down, a slope of dark coal and lighter-colored rock lazed over what had once been the Cave and was now a secret burial ground. Staring out solemnly, Ferko delivered a single shake of his head.
We hiked back into the former site of the village. Ferko showed us the approximate location where his son and he had concealed themselves following the murders. Finally, he again led us slowly toward the road until reaching a depression where he said he’d buried the bodies of the three men who had been gunned down. He had built a cairn of white rocks to mark the place. It had been kicked over by passersby or playing children, but several stones were still massed there, making him sure this was the spot.
Goos stooped to examine one of the rocks and kept it in his hand. He gave Ferko a surprisingly hard look.
“Long way to drag three bodies,” he said.
As soon as Esma translated, Ferko stomped one of his running shoes on the ground to bolster his point.
“He agrees,” Esma said, “but it was not easy to find a place soft enough to dig.”
Ferko already had taken a few steps back toward the red car that had delivered him.
“How far down are the bodies?” asked Goos.
Esma and Ferko had a bit of an exchange.
“He says he only dug far enough to keep the bodies from being consumed by animals. No more than two feet, probably less. With the wind over ten years, it may not be much more than a foot to the bones.”
Ferko raised a hand weakly then and turned his back on us. Esma walked along with him.
I sidled close to Goos.
“You heard something just as he arrived you didn’t like.”
“Ah yes.” He bowed to the memory. “They were jabbering in Romany, but he used a word or two of Serbo-Croatian for emphasis. Ste obecali. ‘You promised.’ Kept saying that. ‘I want what you promised.’ Better not be that she’s paying him on the side, Boom. His evidence isn’t worth a thing if it’s bought.”
I promised to raise the issue with Esma later. As soon as Ferko was gone, Goos called the diggers back. While he was on his cell with them, another problem suddenly struck me.
“We can’t really just scrape up this ground, can we, Goos? Don’t we need a forensic anthropologist to do this right?”
He’d been half turned from me, to shield his phone from the wind, but he revolved in my direction at an inching pace, his thin mouth slightly parted.
“Mate,” he said at last, “I am a forensic anthropologist.” Ordinarily easygoing, Goos had grown increasingly sour this morning for reasons I did not understand, and now he appeared totally disgusted with me.
I wanted to say the obvious: No one told me. That was true, but we both seemed to recognize a deeper insult, the implication that I’d somehow not taken him seriously enough to find out.
He turned away to await his crew.
In the small hollow that Ferko had brought us to, a few spots of snow remained, latticed with grime. Beside them, the inspiring green sprigs of some early grasses had nosed out of the earth. Goos’s crew arrived with shovels and canvas bags apparently bearing other tools. He unzipped a bag and stepped into white coveralls and donned a surgical cap and plastic gloves. Then he crouched over the low point, studying the spot as if it contained something metaphysical, pushing through the loose earth until he scooped up a handful of dirt, which he deposited in a sealable plastic bag.
I asked what his purpose was.
“So we can check the mix of subsoil and topsoil.” He was still grouchy and answered in a bare grumble. He looked down into the duffel and extracted a small video camera, handing it to me.
“Make yourself useful. Record the dig so nobody can say we planted evidence.”
It took me a while to master the buttons, but Goos got to work at once. He started with a stainless steel T-bar, three feet long and with a pointed end, which he hoisted over his head and then suddenly stabbed into the ground. He called for a measuring tape, which he used to determine the depth of his probe, making a notation in a little spiral notebook he kept in his back pocket. Then he motioned for another tool, as long as the first but with a pair of vertical lips near the bottom. He twisted it into the ground to extract another soil sample, which he levered free with a simple wooden chopstick, like the kind that comes with Chinese carryout. He said nothing to me except for calling out measurements loudly enough for the camera to record them.
Eventually, he had the laborers spread four large blue tarpaulins on all sides of the depression. He gave each worker a small garden spade and demonstrated how to scoop shallowly, depositing the diggings on the tarp. With his chopstick, Goos picked through what they uncovered.
I’d been silent a good twenty minutes, when I finally asked what he was searching for. It still took a second for him to answer.
“Bullet fragments for one thing,” he said. “They slip out of the bodies as they decompose. If we recover any, we’ll want to do ballistics.”
With the small tools, the dig went at a laborious pace, but finally, after another quarter hour, Goos abruptly raised his gloved hand and snapped a halogen light on an elastic band over his forehead. He loosened the ground with a new set of chopsticks, then used a small brush, sweeping decorously until I could see a brownish lump the color of a toadstool. I realized he was excavating a hip bone.
These remains, just the first sight of them, affected me more strongly than I had been prepared for. Lawyers—all lawyers—live in a land of concepts and words, with precious little physical reality intruding. In the years I was a prosecutor, hearing a judge pronounce sentence and watching a US deputy marshal clap cuffs on the defendant and lead him to the lockup tended to distress me. It was only then that I seemed to fully appreciate that my efforts were aimed not simply at accomplishing that abstraction I called justice, but more concretely, at caging a human being for a good portion of his remaining life.
Goos had exposed most of the pelvis and the top of the femur, when Attila’s A8 bumped down the road, raising dust as it came. I was relieved to have a reason to leave the gravesite and handed the camera to one of the day laborers.
Esma, who’d also kept her distance, approached me.
“Finding anything?”
I nodded.
“I don’t like blood or bones,” she said.
“I’m with you,” I said.
She laughed and threw her arm through mine as we moved up toward Attila. I made introductions.
“The famous Attila,” said Esma. Her driver, seemingly like half the working people in Tuzla, was in Attila’s employ.
“Not half as big a prick as they say,” she answered. “If you ask me.”
“On the contrary, you’re very well liked.”
Attila beamed. Being shunned so often had undoubtedly left her vulnerable to any compliment. After a minute, Attila, with her rolling, slightly pigeon-toed walk and her oddly erect posture, strolled over to the gravesite to confer with Goos, just to be sure he was getting the help he needed. While she was gone, I had an inspiration for something useful I could do that would get me away from the boneyard.
“Esma, didn’t you tell me that you first heard about Ferko in a Roma village?”
“Indeed. I’ve been back now and then.”
“Is it far?”
“Lijce? I’m not sure.”
Given the closed circuitry of the Rom community, I thought we were likely to find the best information about Barupra there. When Attila came back, she said the town was no more than twenty minutes and offered to drive me.
I returned to Goos. He’d already felt his way to a second skeleton, but at the moment he’d fixed a fine tungsten carbide needle to a hand pick to loosen the dirt on the first set of leg bones, examining them for signs of trauma.
He listened to me long enough to agree with the plan. As I turned away, Goos said behind me, “Wasn’t trying to up myself on you, Boom.” He was apologizing for being pretentious.
“Hardly,” I replied. “Fault was all mine. I should have known.” He nodded, apparently satisfied by that answer.
When I returned to Esma and Attila, I found that Esma was preparing to dismiss her driver and come with Atilla and me. All Roma were her people, to whom she had a proprietary connection, and Esma was known in Lijce. Even so, I was reluctant to have her present, since confirming Ferko was one principal reason to go. I drew her aside to explain that.
“Do you speak Romany?” she replied. “Because many of those people are fluent in no other language.”
She had me there. I checked back with Goos, who thought overall she could help more than hurt, at least on an exploratory visit. We could always come back with our own translator later.