So you guys hungry or what?” Attila asked, as we departed from Lijce. “Kind of a cool place, a couple miles on.”
It was past four and none of us had eaten since breakfast. Attila stopped at a huge roadside inn erected on a hillside, a series of rustic buildings that could have passed as a dude ranch, enlarged A-frames with shake roofs and cedar sides decorated with old wagon wheels. To enhance the inn’s appeal to tourists, the lowest level featured reconstructions of Bosnian life one hundred years ago. In one stall, a wax dummy in vest and fez sorted through a sack of seeds.
On the second floor, we entered an open-air pine dining room, noticeably upscale. Waiters in formal vests and bow ties showed us to a windowside table overlooking another lovely mountain stream one hundred feet below, from which a romantic, rushing burble arose.
Attila, unsurprisingly, was a grand host. She ordered a white wine from Slovenia, although it turned out she didn’t drink. Her focus was on a huge appetizer plate of mild Bosnian cheeses and dried meats, a local delicacy, all accompanied by an unusual brown bread assembled from dozens of layers of thin leaves, a little like the crust of a strudel. While we relaxed, Attila smoked cigarettes without apology and Esma mooched a couple, explaining that she indulged only on the Continent while she drank.
Attila had just ordered the entrée when Esma excused herself for a moment. As soon as she was gone, Attila hunched forward confidentially. She was such a large personality that I was already accustomed to ignoring her odd look, with that big ball of kinky brownish hair, her uneven freckly complexion, her slight shoulders strangely squared, and her pale skinny arms poking from the same short-sleeved button-down shirt she was wearing when she picked me up at the airport yesterday.
“So whatta you think, Boom?” Attila asked. “Looks like Kajevic, right?”
“Maybe. I’m a long way from conclusions, Attila.”
“You ask me,” said Attila, “a guy sends a messenger boy to say he’s gonna kill a whole bunch of you fuckers and they’re all dead a week or two later, I got a prime suspect. No?”
“Sure. But it’s not the only possibility. What did you make of the lady who thought the Bosnians killed the Roma because they wanted the base back?”
“I thought she was as full of shit as the rest of them—everybody but the last gal. The US had withdrawn. That camp went back to government ownership. If the Bosnians wanted the Roma out, all they had to do was move in with bulldozers. No cause for a massacre.”
I sipped my wine, thinking how I wanted to approach the next subject. I had been meaning all day to get a second alone with Attila.
“And I’m not ready to declare the US Army above suspicion either.”
As I expected, Attila made a face. “And how do you get to that?”
“Well, Tobar confirmed something that I’ve heard for weeks now, that a few guys in Barupra were car thieves. As a matter of fact, you told me yesterday that you fired your Roma drivers when they disappeared with some of your trucks. Do I remember correctly?”
“Too true.” Attila nodded with her whole upper body.
Last night, I had awoken around 3 a.m., not unusual for me when I was contending with jet lag. I found my heart constricted by some dreamtime reconstruction of my encounter in the corridor with Esma. I had remembered the red nails as her hand rested on my arm, but the dream culminated in agitation and regret, although, as happens so often, once I was up I couldn’t recall the events I was sorry for. Eventually, when I settled myself and began to doze, my mind went to our case. It was then, halfway back to sleep, that I made a connection that had been nagging at me since I sat with Goos in the bar.
“Now,” I said to Attila, “you told me that all the trucks that NATO used in Bosnia were yours. CoroDyn’s. Right?”
“Basically. The operational vehicles were under Transportation Corps command, but they all came out of my pools.”
“Okay,” I said. “On the plane, I reread my files about that attempt to arrest Kajevic in Doboj. Most press reports said Kajevic fled in trucks stolen from the US Army. The first time I saw that, I thought that meant that Kajevic and his Tigers hot-wired the vehicles Special Forces had shown up in. But the whole ambush was too well planned to involve an improvised escape. So what I realized—actually in the middle of the night—was that Kajevic already had those trucks.”
I’d seized Attila’s full attention now. Her thin, unshaped brows were drawn down toward her small eyes.
“Which means,” I said, “that the vehicles Kajevic took off in were stolen from you and CoroDyn. Correct?”
Attila’s lips squeezed around before she spoke.
“I told you, Boom. I like you and all, but I’m not fucking up my security clearance.”
“It can’t be a secret who those trucks belonged to, Attila. They had to be identified so the Bosnian police could look for them.”
She shrugged.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “It was Roma from Barupra who stole those trucks from you and sold them to Kajevic. Right?”
Attila was looking down at the table. When her eyes rose, she reached for another cigarette.
“Boom, you ever talk too much?” she asked, with the flame hovering over her Zippo.
“Occasionally.”
“Me?” Attila said. “I been doing that my whole life. Shit comes sailin out of my mouth and I’m like, What the fuck did you go and say that for? And, Boom, I really don’t know the answer. I just get caught up in things.”
I wasn’t going to be distracted by her retrospective regrets.
I said, “But that’s how the Roma knew where Kajevic and his people were hiding. And that’s why they were able to give his location to Army Intelligence.”
“I’m not here to lie to you, Boom. But I gotta be a lot more careful what I say.”
“Well, maybe you want to respond to this, Attila. If the Roma told me where Kajevic was hiding, and I went there and got ambushed, I’d be mad, maybe killing mad, especially when I realized they had sold him the trucks he escaped in. It might have felt to me like one huge double cross.”
Attila shook her head decisively.
“That’s not how it went down.”
“How did it?”
“I can’t mess on myself, Boom. I know I ran my mouth, and with a smart guy like you, one thing leads to another. But I can’t say no more. Only thing is, you heard that lady was telling you Kajevic swore he was gonna kill those Gypsies.”
Attila’s phone, which she’d set on the wooden table, started buzzing again, vibrating hard enough that I thought for a second it might fly through the window. She smacked her hand down on the cell as it was skittering away and she answered. I would have bet that Attila rang herself to avoid more questions, but the device had been right in front of me and I could hear a voice speaking Serbo-Croatian on the other end.
“Fuck,” said Attila when she was done. She stood up. “Gotta bounce. I need to find five guys who speak Pashto and get them on the way to Kabul by twenty hundred hours tomorrow. And the problem, Boom, is that anybody who speaks Pashto has worked in Afghanistan. And anybody who’s worked in Afghanistan would rather get buttfucked than go back. This’ll cost me. Be makin calls all night.”
She shook my hand and said she’d have a driver here in an hour to bring Esma and me back to Tuzla when we were ready to go. She’d moved off about five paces, when she circled back and leaned over the table, bringing close her small eyes and bad skin. Her voice was low.
“Tell Esma nice to meet her. But watch yourself, dude. That chick is way too slick. Don’t never forget: She’s still a Gypsy.” She was gone again with a quick wave.
The food—grilled lamb and vegetables crowded onto a large stainless platter—arrived a few minutes later, only seconds before Esma returned. I explained Attila’s departure and we both marveled about her for a minute. Esma seemed completely charmed. I noted only now that Esma, who’d been seated across from me while Attila was here, had settled now on my side of the table, close enough to brush elbows.
“So, Boom. Did you learn anything useful today?”
“I need to process,” I said. I was still loath to share my thoughts with her about the investigation. Instead, I asked about Lijce, knowing that her passion for her people would distract her.
“The challenge of the Roma, Bill, is to open your society to those Roma, like me, who wish to join it, without imposing your values on the many who don’t.”
“But how can Roma kids make that choice without an education?”
“The value of schooling is not self-evident to many of my people,” said Esma. “In Romany, there are no proper words for ‘read’ or ‘write.’ There is wonderful Roma music. But no literature. Whenever my grandmother saw me with a book, she was concerned. ‘So keres?’ she would ask me. ‘What are you doing?’ For my people, knowledge is acquired in social interaction, by talking.”
“An oral tradition?”
She smiled a bit, amused by the elusiveness of Rom ways.
“Yes, but do not think of Native American elders repeating legends to circles of young listeners. The Roma, Bill, are a people without a history, with no shared understanding of the past. My grandmother refused to believe it when I told her we did not emerge from Egypt, which is the common misunderstanding that led to this ‘Gypsy’ name. For us, there is no prevailing myth of creation, no seven days and seven nights. The Gypsy men I grew up with were fierce prizefighters, but there has never been a Gypsy army, because there is no land we have ever been inspired to conquer, or to defend, or even to return to.
“And unlike almost any other group on earth, our sense of identity is not forged on the countless injuries of the past. We do not tell the tales of our centuries as slaves, unlike African Americans or Jews. Instead the Gypsy way is to excel in forgetting. You saw that with Tobar when you asked about Barupra. We live in the present. To Westerners we are as strange as Martians.”
Again Esma delivered that huge smile, full of her delight and pride about this legacy of difference.
“And what’s the impact on you, Esma? Do you feel caught between two worlds?”
“Not really. I made my choices. To Roma like that old woman we saw in Lijce, I am not Rom at all. That is why she didn’t want to speak Romany to me.”
“And what about your family? Is your mother more accepting of you than your father?”
“My mother is gone. Cancer. All those cigarettes. She brawled with my father about my schooling, but I always felt that was more to oppose him than because she saw much value in it for me. When I was approaching fifteen, my mother started to talk to me about marriage. She had already spoken to another family. The boy, name of Boris, seemed to have a great fancy for me, but it wasn’t mutual. So Boris kidnapped and raped me. That is not unusual among the English Roma, for whom a stiff cock is often tantamount to a marriage proposal. Having had his way with me, Boris would declare we had eloped. But he was furious there was no blood on the bedsheet. His family of course disavowed his intentions toward me, and my father was irate.
“Yet that was my liberation. Since I was now widely regarded as unmarriageable, I was free to continue in school and go on to university.”
“Oxford?”
“Cambridge. Caius College.”
“And never a marriage?”
“No, no. I am too independent, Bill. I still think about a child in wan moments, but I am not constant enough to be much of a mother.”
The food, which we’d been eating as we talked, was excellent, prepared without much fanfare but flavorful and beautifully presented, with a grilled onion in the center of the plate from which banana peppers sprouted like antlers. Idling through the meal, we had started on a second bottle of wine.
When we finished the pastries we ate for dessert, I called for the check, only to find that Attila had beaten me to it. Esma laughed and immediately pointed out that, as a result, I still owed her dinner.
Outside, the limo Attila had promised was waiting, an old Yugoslav tank of a vehicle. Esma and I slid into the backseat and we headed down toward Tuzla, winding through the hills as it grew dark. I was not surprised when Esma, who’d outpaced me with the wine, became silent and heavy-lidded, and then disappeared fully into sleep, with her head tossed back and a small whinny escaping with each breath. A sharp switchback threw her against me, and she lay with her face on my shoulder, while I was caught in the net of sensation. I could caution myself as much as I cared to, but with her fine looks and power persona, Esma’s sex appeal felt like a live current, and I was not surprised that the heat and substance of her body so close, her breath on my neck, and the thick air of her perfume left me with a hard-on most of the way to town.
Once we were bumping again over Tuzla’s cobbled streets, Esma roused and shook the sleep out of her head. She found her phone, but spoke only for a second in Romany.
“I must meet Ferko,” she said when we’d stopped in front of the Blue Lamp. “I told him I would find some time tonight to discuss a few things.”
I finally remembered to ask her about what Goos had overheard.
“Goos said Ferko was insisting you give him what you’d promised. Forgive me, please, since I know I don’t need to tell you this, but if you’re compensating him somehow for his testimony, it’s worthless.”
She took that with a laugh.
“You do not need to tell me that. The only talk we’ve ever had of money is when I advised him years ago that he might receive reparations from the Court in the distant future if there is ever a conviction. But he hasn’t spoken of it since. What I did promise Ferko when he agreed to testify was that you would do your utmost to keep him safe. And he was well within his rights to insist that promise be kept. No?”
I nodded. I had to be satisfied with that response.
She said, “I have not yet had a chance to press him again about Kajevic, as you asked, but I’ll take that up now and shall report back to you.”
Esma had listened to Sinfi, just as I had. It was hard to doubt the young woman, which meant it would be quite peculiar if Ferko—or anyone else living in Barupra—had not heard about Kajevic’s threats.
She slid the phone back into her large bag, but took a moment to face me again with one foot in the street.
“Thank you for letting me sleep a minute, Bill,” she said. “I was comfortable beside you.” She said no more but gave me a long look, frank in its intimacy, before walking off.
Stepping onto the cobbles in front of the hotel, I was reverberating. And suddenly in mind of Layton Merriwell.