Life had taught me a cold truth, that the long-savored dream, when tested by reality, rarely approached expectations. That was never so in Esma’s bed.
Despite the porn sites and Internet postings that vividly document the outward doings, none of us will ever really know the internal experience of other humans at these moments. But the extremes of physical pleasure I experienced with Esma were new for me. Whether that was Gypsy magic or because I’d checked all inhibitions when I crossed a professional boundary I still should have observed, at instants I felt I had reached the kernel of life, a place where sensation was so intense that the rest of the world became remote and living was purely a thrill.
Each encounter was novel, starting from the first time, while she was thrown over the arm of another of those beautiful leather chairs in my room. There were never any bars or borders, only whim and inspiration. Usually, Esma engaged in a constant narration, a virtual play-by-play in the most profane and arousing terms—‘Oh yes, look at that big thing. Oh yes. I’m going to touch it, would you like that, yes, you know how much you like that, does that please you, yes it pleases you so much’—that gave way now and then to whispered instructions about her own satisfaction. ‘There, slowly, please. Please.’ ‘Pinch.’ ‘Hard.’ ‘Harder.’
But better than the ballet maneuvers and machinery to which Esma introduced me, she offered an example in how to revel in desire and its satisfaction. She was remarkably free with her exclamations, and with the earthquake of pleasure that jolted her body with startling frequency. She turned the bed into a delicious, soupy mess, and yet always wanted more, reminding me of another unique truth about sex: You can see the Grand Canyon, exult in its majesty, and strike it off the bucket list. But everyone wants the next orgasm.
Naked, Esma was an inspiration, even though her Rubenesque proportions were not favored in our era. As we undressed one another the first time, she suddenly picked up her silk dress from the bed and draped it across herself, just as her bra was about to slip away.
“Do you like large breasts, Bill?”
“Love them,” I said.
“Prepare for paradise,” she answered.
The sight of Esma languorously approaching me was always arousing and quickly took me beyond what I had thought were the physical limitations of middle age. But her appeal was far more than corporeal. Years before, I had represented a stripper who worked under the stage name of Lotta Lust and who’d neglected to file federal income tax returns for more than twenty years. There was nothing unusual about Stella’s—her real name—appearance, but she’d been in high demand onstage for two decades. It was all about self-confidence, she claimed. ‘A girl who believes that every guy she meets is dying to fuck her is almost always right.’ Esma made me feel every time that she was bestowing a gift as precious as the secret of alchemy.
Because Goos was returning to Belgium from Tuzla, Esma and I stayed two extra nights at the Blue Lamp, departing Sunday morning. For the first forty-eight hours, I never put on a stitch, relishing that freedom, too. On Friday, Esma got hungry before me and ran out to the cevapi place across the street to bring sandwiches back for both of us. While I was waiting for her, I lay still on the bed, enjoying the momentary solitude and taking stock. My entire body still felt like a force field in which the voltage center was my dick, and I was gripped by an intense desiccated thirst that seemed to be the product of coming so often. But I did not want to move. Instead, I exulted in having so thoroughly escaped restraint, even while the ghosts of the Bosnian dead, the rapes, the broilings, and the unhindered savagery seemed to dance darkly somewhere within my joy.
I reached The Hague late Sunday afternoon. When I entered the apartment, there was a suitcase in the middle of the living room, and without trying to snoop, I saw Lew Logan’s name on the tag. I recalled that my landlady had said that my trip abroad was conveniently timed, since her husband was set to visit, meaning they’d have their house to themselves. I went to the refrigerator for water and heard a consistent rapping overhead. It took a second to realize that it was their headboard, knocking on the wall. Standing a little longer, I thought I could make out Narawanda Logan’s low wail. I listened another second, smiling at them and myself. I intended to go out for a long dinner to give them their privacy, but Esma had exhausted me. I lay down for a nap and woke up about five on Monday morning.
My encounters with my landlady had been as isolated as she had promised, due in part to the apartment’s floor plan. The lower level contained a small kitchen and a good-size living and dining area. From there, you went up three steps to the lone full bath. Off that landing, two separate facing staircases ascended, each leading to one of the two bedrooms.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I got up for my 6 a.m. calls with my sons, I would potter toward the kitchen to make coffee and would find Mrs. Logan in the living room, contorted in some yoga pose. She was dressed all in black, in clingy yoga pants and a loose top, very tiny but notably well formed and also unexpectedly graceful. On the weekends, or when she made an early return from work, Narawanda ran. She’d come in dripping and winded, in another all-black outfit, with the addition of a stocking cap and mittens. I was often reading in the living room, but she breezed by with only a muted “Hello.” I mentioned once that I’d been a runner myself until shin splints had stopped me several months ago, but I received no more than a courteous nod as she continued to the stairs. Overall, her social affect was slightly off-center, which was more or less what Goos had told me to expect.
When I came down to the kitchen that Monday, after my return from Bosnia, Mrs. Logan was in her yoga clothes, staring down the electric kettle so she could have her tea before getting on to her morning routine. Her husband’s luggage was gone.
I expected her to be in the same flushed tonic mood in which I’d awakened, but she was abstracted. She greeted me politely—“Welcome back. Good trip?”—but she was in one of those morning funks in which some people start the day, and she moved off in silence to begin her exercise.
I headed into the office early, prepared for a backlog of paperwork. By the afternoon, Goos and I sat on either side of my pedestal desk planning our document request to NATO. We felt specifics would be the best wedge against the Court’s natural inclination to avoid controversy.
Goos’s time with the Yugoslav Tribunal had given him a good idea of what might be available, and he’d drafted his own list.
“Armies don’t really exist to fight,” he told me. “They are there to make records. Everything must be documented.”
His top item was duty rosters and related records like mess reports. I understood his logic—a large group on leave might be our ‘Chetniks,’ playing dress-up on their free time. But I didn’t think that would get us very far, given the basic obstacle.
“Under American law, we can’t go interview any of those guys, Goos, assuming they’re home by now.”
“Yay-ay,” he said, employing that exaggerated Australian version of ‘Yeah,’ “but we can check Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, Boom. Been looking over the posts about Eagle Base for some time. Quite a bit, actually, but not much that’s interesting to us. But with names, mate, we can search up those former soldiers and try some questions from here. No law against that, and you can’t believe what these young people will sometimes disclose over the Internet, stuff you’d never get face-to-face.”
I comprehended only now why Goos had been glued to his computer the day we met.
The second request on his draft list was for truck logs and fuel depot records. I understood that we’d want to see if any heavy vehicles had left the base in the middle of the night, but I wasn’t clear why he was also asking for mechanics’ reports and requisitions for spare parts.
“Driving around in that coal mine in the dark, Boom, a truckie could have broken an axle or damaged a wheel pretty easy.”
Next, he’d listed day-of records from the camps’ infirmaries and sick bays.
“Aren’t going to bully four hundred people onto trucks without somebody throwing a punch at a soldier, or an old gal setting her fingernails to somebody’s face, maybe a couple troops getting bashed by a flying rock after the explosion.”
I agreed. Ferko had said one of the soldiers was hit with a rifle stock while they were trying to subdue Boldo’s brother.
The fourth item would never have occurred to me, given my limited knowledge of our military: aerial surveillance records.
“NATO had planes all over the place, Boom, and spy satellites, trying to make sure there were no troop movements by any side. Frightening the detail they get from outer space.”
Goos had a number of other excellent ideas. In combat gear, US troops apparently wore blue GPS transponders that were designed to ping and thus prevent friendly-fire incidents. We decided to ask for all GPS records that might show US troops in or around Barupra on April 27, 2004. NATO Intelligence had probably also recorded all cell phone use and IP addresses registered in the area.
On a separate line, Goos had next written, ‘Pictures.’
“Pictures?” I asked.
“Daily photographs. Parade shots. Formations. Can see who’s missing, maybe hurt. This was near the end of the US presence. Cameras were probably snapping full-time for auld lang syne.”
I nodded in slow wonder. Goos was something.
His last suggestion was the entire NATO file concerning the effort to capture Kajevic in Doboj, everything from US Army Intelligence to operational plans beforehand and the investigative reports in the aftermath: ballistic results, investigators’ summaries, even the autopsies. This was the one item on which he and I at first disagreed. If Army Intelligence was anything like the intelligence units I’d dealt with at the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, they’d be adamant about not releasing any information for fear that even a decade later it would compromise techniques or sources. On the other hand, requesting these items would give us room to relent if we got into negotiations. All we really required was records that would show how the US had come to learn of Kajevic’s whereabouts and whether there were any later suspicions of a setup, plus all information about the trucks the Roma had stolen from Attila.
As Goos and I were finishing up, my cell pinged. It was a text message from Esma.
In a meeting in London. Just felt the last little goopy bit of you come sliding out of me.
I sat there in a visible blush, a state I hadn’t experienced since my early teens.
I had known from the time Merriwell had advanced the idea of going to NATO for records that my bosses—Badu and Akemi—might be, in the end, a bigger obstacle than the US Army. Caution was a way of life at the Court. The leaden bureaucracy of the ICC, so foreign from the freewheeling atmosphere of the prosecutor’s office I had worked in before, had only one consolation: It was essential. Without a permanent constituency, the Court’s sole insulation from the inevitable controversies was to maintain rigid procedural regularity, even though I often felt I was being asked to chase bad guys in a fashion as mannered as an equestrian routine. The rest of the week, my time was consumed by meetings with the heads of the Office of the Prosecutor’s three divisions—Investigation, Prosecution, and Complementarity—concerning the document request. No one questioned my legal analysis. The referral document from the Bosnians, with its wax seal and blue-and-yellow ribbons, gave the Court the right to acquire any record that the government of BiH was legally entitled to. But my colleagues remained reluctant, particularly because this maneuver was such a clear end-run around US law. I found the Complementarity people—who were basically the diplomats—particularly vexing. They were rule worshippers who sometimes seemed as if they’d be perfectly happy if the Court never prosecuted anybody again, as long as we avoided any flaps.
The ultimate meeting with the division heads and coordinators took place in Badu’s office. I kept my eye on the old man throughout. Badu chuckled and nodded and groaned in his graceful way, imparting nothing that indicated that he understood in any depth what had been said. I was beginning to realize that Badu’s clueless manner insulated him from everyone outside the Court—and within—seeking to influence him. Near the end of the meeting, Badu said in his beautiful accent, “I have an old chum, Lord Gowen, who is the British ambassador to NATO. I am thinkin to geef him a coal.” My initial reaction was panic, fearing Badu could irretrievably screw things up, but after a second I realized that this might be an adroit move. If the other leading nations in NATO—the Brits, the French, the Germans, who were all also members of the Court—acknowledged the legality of our document request in advance, the Americans would have a much harder time resisting.
Within a day, Ambassador Gowen had encouraged Badu to proceed. NATO’s supreme commander at the moment was another Brit who, by the standard of other soldiers, was something of a supporter of the Court, and who signaled he would not stand in the way. Badu was careful to get the backing of the full OTP executive committee before I sent the formal document request to NATO. We all knew it was likely to provoke an explosive American response.
Back from Bosnia, I began to settle into a routine. On the mornings I didn’t call Will or Pete, I would wake an hour later and linger with my coffee over the New York Times online. After that, I often phoned my sister, Marla, for a few minutes of the harmless chatter we’d shared across a lifetime. I was reaching her at about 2 a.m. in Boston, while she sat up in bed, answering e-mails, clipping articles from the day’s newspapers to send to her kids, and reading the latest novel for her book club. The lights were burning while her husband, Jer, an orthopod, slept soundly beside her.
I got to the office by 8:30, ahead of many people, and was out by 5:30. I ate dinner in one of the cafés near the apartment and continued making my way through the pile of books I’d shipped to The Hague. Currently, I was rereading John Fowles, The Magus.
The day our document request was finally sent to NATO HQ in Belgium, I left the office a little early. It was the first fair weather I’d seen in The Hague. The solemn winter sky had broken into blue and a southern wind gentled the air. For a week now, the new vitality I’d acquired at the Blue Lamp had stimulated a yearning for exercise, of which I’d had next to none in the last few months. My landlady had offered me an old bicycle of her husband’s, which was part of the herd locked inside the front door, and I contemplated a ride now, but I still didn’t know the city and with my poor sense of direction was afraid of getting lost in some dead zone without cell reception.
When I came in, Narawanda was home early, too, probably also inspired by the weather. She was stretching in the living room for a run, her heel perched on the back of the sofa. It was the first time I’d seen her in shorts, and given the modesty with which we lived, I felt as if I’d walked in on her at an inappropriate moment.
I hustled toward the stairs, then regained myself and circled back.
“How would it be if I followed you for a little while?” I asked. “I’d just like to see your route. I promise I won’t hold you up. But I’d love to get back into running.”
She pondered that, almost as if I’d proposed cutting my rent in half, but she finally produced a tiny smile and nodded.
My plan was to run beside her as long as I could, then walk back. Our initial pace was halting as we dodged through the crowded little streets near the flat. But she soon led me on a quicker route, down the leafy esplanade on Lange Voorhout, past the monolithic US Embassy, which looked like a bomb shelter, and then eventually into The Hague’s vast park, Haagse Bos.
Based on our experience to date, I didn’t expect her to be talkative, but I asked politely about her husband’s visit.
“Nice,” she answered, which seemed a bit of an understatement given the vigor of the bed-knocking. “Lewis talked all the time about how much he loves New York, how wonderful it has been to be back there.” Her English was accurate, if occasionally somewhat stilted, and spoken with a Dutch accent—the rolled r’s and long o’s and guttural g’s—spiced with a little of the rising pitches of Java.
“And you?” I asked. “Do you love New York?”
“To visit? So exciting. To live? So difficult. It is not for me. I am accustomed to The Hague.” It felt like we had quickly reached a conversational impasse, but after a moment, she asked several questions about my trip. Her pace was much faster now, and I found every word an effort, but I answered expansively, in hopes of finally having some genuine interaction with her. I talked about my sons, and then BIH, providing a brief travelogue without going into details of the investigation.
Bosnia had been my first visit to a majority-Muslim country, and I had been impressed by how easygoing the version of Islam practiced around Tuzla had felt. The call to prayer had keened out from the minarets five times a day, but most of the women eschewed hijab, for example, and there was alcohol on every restaurant menu. Religion was a private matter, it seemed.
“That is the Islam I grew up with,” Narawanda said. “Modernist. My mother covered her head in the mosque, and went every week, when I was little, but she always reminded me of the verse in the Qur’an that says Allah Himself planned for many faiths.’”
I had made my observations about Islam in Bosnia without any thought that Narawanda herself was Muslim. She could see I was a little nonplussed, but waved off my apologies.
“I am more of a lapsed Muslim these days. I have not gone to mosque or done the fasts since Lewis and I married.”
“Was that what you two agreed?”
“No, no. Just as it has happened. Actually, at that point, Lewis and I said that if we were ever to have children, we would teach them that tradition.”
“And that’s changed?” I asked.
She reflected on my question for several strides.
“I really don’t know,” she said. “Right now, Lewis and I are not so close to having children. We do not even live in the same place.”
Given her odd manner, I wasn’t sure if she was miffed or just being matter-of-fact, but I could feel my lungs giving out. I waved her on without me, promising to do better if we ran again another time.