I arrived in Kindle County about two on Saturday afternoon. As soon as I turned on my phone after the long flight, there was another series of messages from Esma—multiple missed calls, a plaintive e-mail, and two texts. I had refused to answer her again after our last brief conversation, and the silence seemed to be driving her to extremes. The most recent SMS read: Bill—I wanted to say this in person, but you must know that try as I must, I think I’ve fallen in love with you. I simply cannot let go. It is much too late for that. I must see you and try to make this right.
This sounded like dialogue from a 1930s movie, and the subtext seemed to be all about Esma’s ego. Esma was in ‘love’ with me only because I was not in love with her, never mind her own cautions on the subject. Someday, when I finished bringing international justice to the globe, I was going to figure out the connection between self-image and love.
From the airport, I went to the home of close friends, where I was going to spend the night. Sonny Klonsky, now a federal judge, had started in the US Attorney’s Office about the same time I had. She had made a happy second marriage to Michael Wiseman, a nationally syndicated columnist, a delightful wise guy with whom I shared a sense of humor. They hosted a barbecue in my honor Saturday evening, to which they invited several old pals of mine, including Sandy Stern, everyone’s favorite defense lawyer, who was living in the alternate universe of cancer remission, in which, he admitted, he was never quite sure he was really here.
On Sunday, I left the Wisemans at 5 a.m. so I could fish with Will and Pete. The white bass were running in the River Kindle, and down water the boats were anchored so closely you could have walked shore to shore on their prows. But the boys and I had a secret spot where we fished near shore in waders. It was just below an outcropping in a public park that we reached with a minor act of vandalism requiring pruning shears. The late spring morning was bright and warm, and there were plenty of fish, attracted by another family trick, a bit of red yarn above the lure.
I was proud of my sons, who had both become decent, loving, industrious men, although I always recoiled a bit when I noticed failings of their mother’s or mine one or both boys had incorporated—Ellen’s judginess, or my occasional remoteness. One of the sayings I live by about families is that children occupy the space provided. Will had taken on my solid manner and was advancing quickly at the Tri-Cities office of a New York firm, where he did the legal engineering for complex currency swaps on the Kindle County exchanges. At twenty-nine, he’d found one of those comfortable niches in the law that was virtually guaranteed to provide a livelihood forever.
Pete, by contrast, had been the brooding child, the one we worried about more. There were drugs in high school and academic struggles in college. He had emerged from that period with a keen interest in computers and had developed three different apps that had been purchased by bigger companies. Will always seemed a bit affronted by the magnitude of Pete’s success, although he often joked he was relieved to find out he would not be obligated to support his little brother.
With both sons, there had been a rough time when I left their mother. I knew what it was like to be surprised and disappointed by a parent; and I understood that my sons had lost the home they’d always counted on being able to return to. But their absolute conviction that their feelings were the only ones that mattered became infuriating. After a year, I had declared a rule that once in every conversation they had to ask, “How are you, Dad?” whether or not they really cared about my response.
But all that was now past. My move to The Hague and Pete’s imminent marriage had somehow completed cooling all the lava to solid rock. Standing in the shallows, a few feet from shore, we were three independent adults who accepted our mutual connections as indelible.
After fishing, we had lunch while watching the Trappers game in a sports bar, then Will drove me out to Lake Fowler, where he’d already agreed to stay for dinner. Ellen and Howard’s house seemed no less stupendous, a decorator’s showcase with huge two-story windows looking down on the lake. Once Will was headed back to town, Ellen and Howard and I had one more glass of wine in their kitchen while we compared notes about our sons. The articles in the Times had also sparked my hosts’ curiosity about my work at the Court. I tried to say little but didn’t deny what was obvious, that my meeting with Merriwell was related to that investigation.
“Can I meet him?” Ellen asked, hunching down a bit, almost as if she were ducking from her own adolescent impulses. I gallantly assured her that the general would undoubtedly want to acknowledge their hospitality. I had known from the start that Merry was the kind of figure, a flawed genius in many eyes, likely to be fascinating to Ellen.
The end of our marriage could have been described with the same term pathologists these days apply to someone who dies from old age: multisystem failure. But from my perspective the real trouble had begun more than fifteen years before, when Ellen had become the director of special events at Easton. I saw the job as a strange choice for someone who’d just received her MBA, but the position allowed her to hang with Nobelists and the vanguard of world thought leaders, which I discovered was the company Ellen secretly yearned to keep. With friends, she often gushed about the Life of the Mind, which, apparently, was not the life she’d been living with me.
I never pretended to be as flat-out brilliant as my ex. When she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate, I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. But once she took her university position, Ellen began to exhibit a fierce need to look down on me intellectually. I knew intuitively that I was doing something to provoke this (a point proven beyond doubt when she married Howard, who, while a true engineering wizard, has never found any book ever written more interesting than ESPN). Instead of trying to figure out why I was alienating my wife, I went into private practice, even though I should have known that move would make things worse. With court dates, meetings, depositions, and trials, I was suddenly out of town at least a third of the year. I worked ridiculously long hours, as I had with the government, but Ellen didn’t see the point now, since defending wealthy bad guys was a far less noble cause. The lone advantage of my new job—that I was making gobs of money—was actually demeaning in her eyes. The grim fact was that I bored Ellen, bored her to the point of weariness, and bearing the brunt of my wife’s judgments left me grinding my teeth whenever I walked into the house. I thought I was doing both of us a great favor when I admitted that we’d lost interest in a life together. The secret of the friendship that we’d forged in the last couple of years was that Ellen was now willing to admit, with whatever irony, that this was one instance when I’d been a lot smarter than her.
Ellen was outside, dressed for work, when Merry’s limo turned up their long driveway at 7:00 a.m. She wore a black sheath with pearls, full makeup and high heels, the kind of getup that could double as business attire and something suitable for the cocktail circuit on which she frequently found herself. Ellen remained trim, and she’d always had the tidy blonde looks that get described as ‘perky.’ I’d never thought about it, but my ex was probably more physically attractive than many of the women I’d dated, even those quite a bit younger, although she’d never had—or aspired to—Esma’s sizzle.
“Boom,” Merry said, as he rose from the limo. We shook and he slapped me on the shoulder, offering a welcoming smile. I couldn’t help wondering how our warmth struck my ex. On the driveway, Ellen hovered in a somewhat starstruck posture, with her hands in the air as if she was afraid to touch anything.
Merriwell reached back into the car for a weathered caramel-colored briefcase and I walked him over to Ellen, whom he thanked several times. She tried to gossip about a mutual friend, a former MIT classmate of Howard’s who now taught there, but Merry had little to say on that score, and she realized, with visible disappointment, that she had no option but to say good-bye. I hugged her farewell with profuse thanks of my own. Tonight, I’d be on my way back to Bosnia, via JFK, to meet with Madame Professor Tchitchikov and Goos at Barupra.
Merriwell watched her clack her way down her driveway.
“Truly your ex-wife?”
“Truly.”
He shook his head in amazement.
“Not in this lifetime,” he said. “And you trust her discretion?”
“Completely.” As the wife of a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Ellen took pride in her ability to keep secrets, and even after our divorce she had never spilled any of them, even the juiciest about prominent folks around town.
“And what about you?” I asked Merry. “Are things any better with your ex-to-be?”
“No improvement,” he answered wearily, “but despite that, I am far better.” He looked it. He sported a vacation tan and appeared far less tired. Gesturing to the guesthouse, he suggested we get started, because he had to head back to the airport in two hours. “As usual the world is falling apart,” he said.
The guesthouse was compact and tasteful, clearly the work of the same architect who’d designed the main house. Upstairs there were two small bedrooms, each with its own bath. Downstairs it was all open space off the beautiful kitchen, with its gorgeous hand-tooled cabinetry in some reddish South American wood. The windows were large, to catch the astounding light off the lake, and were dressed in billowing scarlet roman shades raised with surgical precision to half height. A small dining table separated the living area from the kitchen, and there Merriwell and I placed ourselves in leather Breuer chairs with chrome arms.
I served coffee and put out a basket of muffins Ellen, despite my protests, had asked a caterer to deliver this morning. I’d also taken the precaution of borrowing a bottle of scotch, which I’d positioned innocently at the far corner of the kitchen counter, but Merry never even seemed to look that way. He put the briefcase on a chair he pulled beside him. It was one of those wonderful old valise-type bags lawyers used to carry when I started practice, with a hinged brass mouth that opened wider than the compartment below, and a leather strap that fit into the lock on the other side to close it.
To start, I told him that I had not authorized or engineered the leak to the Times, but he waved that off. Merriwell was a veteran of domestic political wars as well as the ones we got into overseas, and seemed to regard both the leaking and the denial as part of the game.
As we turned to business, there was a notable change in Merriwell’s air, which instantly struck me as not simply businesslike, but dour and solemn. He secured a sheaf of papers about three inches thick from the case.
“I’ve brought what I’ve received,” he said. “There is more coming, but you’ll be interested in what’s here. Because time is limited, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of what you’re bound to figure out on your own, so you can ask questions now. No bar on more later.”
“Any overall comment?” I asked him.
Merry stopped to frown, a lip puffed up, the expression drawing deeper grooves in his narrow face.
“Overall, I am chagrined and surprised,” he said. “And still disbelieving.”
The concession was enticing, but I waited politely. From the shiny edges at the top of the stack, I could tell there were a number of 8-by-10 photographs.
“Your request for official photography was quite brilliant,” he said.
I told him it wasn’t my idea.
“Never fail to take credit for the accomplishments of your staff,” he answered, and smiled. “All right,” he said. “At Eagle Base they photographed everything, including the playing of reveille, retreat, and taps. Here’s taps on April 27, 2004.”
It was a flash photo of a bugler at the base of the empty flagpole. The shot was in color, and the figure against the blue night made a striking image, but on first glance the picture seemed otherwise unremarkable.
“Back here,” said Merriwell.
At the top of the photograph, rising up the page, there was a line of lights moving off sinuously in the distance.
“Convoy?”
“So it appears.”
I looked more closely. The red taillights were visible on one or two of the vehicles, and the headlights appeared as a swath of brightness in front of them. The vehicles—trucks I’d say—were departing. I counted, although the last of them were little more than a blur.
“About twenty?”
“Give or take.”
“And what time was this photo taken?”
“Taps is twenty-two hundred hours.”
Ferko said the first men arrived at Barupra a little before midnight. Travel time to the village would have been no more than ten or fifteen minutes, even on the bad roads of those days.
“Any theories about what they might have been doing with an extra hour and a half?” I asked.
“I’m happy to explain what you see in front of you, Boom, but I’ll have to keep any speculations to myself.”
“Well, if I said that was enough time to change uniforms and rehearse an impending operation, is there any obvious reason I’d be wrong?”
He shook his head tersely—either indicating that I was right or that he wouldn’t be drawn into commentary—then reached back to the stack.
“Here, I’m afraid, is what will most interest you.” He pulled several photos off the piles. They were black and white, clearly enlarged many times. To me, at first it was like looking at an ultrasound, just lines and blurs and dark spots, although one little rectangle looked whiter than the rest.
“This is a satellite photograph,” Merry said.
“Wow,” I said. “You can get recognizable forms from a hundred miles?”
“It’s an impressive technology.”
“I’ll say.”
“You asked for records of the GPS transponders. As you know, they are worn by our troops and were standard issue even then on operational equipment, like trucks or tanks or aircraft. Whenever they are off-base, the satellite will follow the transponders and photograph their location. There are several more photos here, but they all focus on one truck.”
“As opposed to the troops?”
“Correct.”
“So the soldiers had removed their transponders?”
“Or weren’t our soldiers.”
“But someone neglected one truck?”
“I don’t know why one transponder was left functioning, but by the time the satellite made its next orbit ninety minutes later, there are no photographs.”
“Clearly an oversight that got corrected,” I said. Merry refused to respond.
Beyond the one truck that was automatically highlighted, the others appeared in the photo as grayer boxes with white bumps in front of them, the projections of their headlamps. When I lowered my nose to the page, I could also make out distinct ant-like grains.
“Are these people?”
“That’s my interpretation.”
There were hundreds, once I understood how to recognize the forms. And at the top of the photograph was a stripe of black—the valley that led down to the Cave.
“So this is the residents of Barupra being rounded up?”
“Again, I leave the ultimate explanations to you.” But his face was pouty and somber.
At the first sight of the photograph my pulse had quickened considerably. The skeptical piece of me, the trained professional, had yearned for solid proof to back up Ferko. I would have been jubilant if I did not recognize that this was a visual record of four hundred people being marched to their deaths. Merry and I said nothing for a second, as I took on his grave mood.
Although the satellite could have been in range only for a few minutes, there were at least a hundred photos. The last showed three trucks, apparently fully loaded, turning toward the winding dirt road that led down to the Cave.
“What do the truck logs we asked for show?”
“Those,” said Merriwell, “you will have to retrieve from our friend Attila. But CoroDyn has been asked to provide them, and Attila called Friday to assure me they should come along shortly. Apparently there were two motor pools, one operational, one logistical. She wanted to know if we needed the records of both and I said yes.”
“And do you know if Yugoslavian-made trucks were ever used in the motor pools?” I was thinking of what Ferko had said in his testimony.
“Not for certain. But most of the frontline equipment, which was US manufacture, had already been moved to Iraq. NATO had seized thousands of vehicles from the various combatant forces. So if some were repurposed, I wouldn’t be surprised. Again, Attila will know.”
“She’s been very helpful so far. I have you to thank for that.”
Merry shook his head resolutely. “Not me,” he said.
“Well, when she picked me up in Sarajevo she said you’d asked her to assist us.”
Merry reclined with a small, skeptical smile.
“With Attila, you always have to bear in mind that there’s an improvisational side to her character. She called me the morning after we met. She knew you were on the way and asked if I had any idea what you were looking for. I spoke well of you—solid guy, that sort of thing—and I might have said there was no reason not to assist you. You’ve met Attila, so you understand. She wants to know everyone’s business.”
I smiled. “She’s very loyal to you.”
“I appreciate that. And so far as I was concerned, she was indispensable. Do you know the saying, ‘Civilians think about strategy, but generals think about logistics’?”
I’d never heard that.
“Well it’s a deep truth,” said Merriwell. “She is truly a logistical genius. No matter how many moving parts had to be coordinated, she could do it. She was more capable than any officer I had in QC. I actually talked about sending her to OTS, but she wasn’t interested while women were excluded from combat. And the truth is that someone as unusual as Attila got a lot less scrutiny as a noncom. But I was a much better commander having her to rely on.”
“She doesn’t think many of your peers would have been as welcoming.”
“Probably not. Her lifestyle was not typical for the Army, especially at that time. But soldiers can be very pragmatic when their lives are at stake. On task, Attila was exceptional.”
“A great soldier?”
“I’d say very good.” I wasn’t surprised that Merry talked about Attila more cold-bloodedly than she did about him. For her, Merriwell occupied that idealized role of mentor and savior. For him, she was a valued cog in a large machine. “She was outstanding when she was at a distance from her commanders and could function with some independence. On the other hand, she was a ridiculous busybody who refused to accept need-to-know limitations. And she has less talent at taking orders. Commands she disagreed with received a very idiosyncratic interpretation. Frankly, I was relieved when she became a civilian employee. I got the benefits of all her abilities, but none of the phone calls and telexes asking me what the hell she was doing now. But she’ll have your truck logs, I’m sure, and will be able to answer your questions. Apparently you’re headed back to Bosnia?”
“Word travels fast.” In preparation, Goos had gotten hold of Attila to secure laborers. Obviously she was Merriwell’s source.
I had our letter to NATO out on the small walnut table where we were seated and ticked through the remaining items.
“Duty rosters? Mess reports? Sick bay?”
“Help yourself.” Merriwell shoved a couple hundred pages between us.
“This is one day?”
“Two actually. You asked for April 27 and 28.”
Goos had correctly assayed the nature of armies and recordkeeping. The first thing I noticed, when I started thumbing through, was that the name of every soldier had been blacked out. I’m sure the look I gave Merry was not kindly.
“I don’t recall agreeing to expurgated records,” I said.
“I believe the agreement was that you’d get whatever the supreme commander was willing to provide. And the supreme commander is not serving up the heads of any soldiers on a silver plate. If there was a massacre—”
“It’s not much of an ‘if,’ Merry, looking at these photographs.”
“If that is what happened—and I remain hopeful of other explanations—then there was a chain of command. And at the top of that chain is where responsibility lies, not with privates and PFCs who were following orders and probably didn’t realize what was going to occur until it happened. Boom, this is what you’re getting.”
“We’ll have to talk about it back at the Court.”
“Our position won’t change,” he answered.
I had no doubt that removing names had been demanded by the Defense Department. And despite my rigid pose, I knew that after months of his net searches of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube, Goos had assembled a good list of many of the personnel at Eagle. Complete duty rosters would have been far better, but the key remained finding a former soldier willing to correspond with us.
The pages in my hands were a maze of black and white, columns of names and units, weapons and language training, assignments and dates on duty. There were pages labeled Combat Support Battle Roster and sign-in sheets from the mess for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There were also stacks of sheets that showed, beside the obscured names, the officers’ and enlisted men’s units and duties for the day. I focused there.
When I reached the records of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, First Battalion, I had something. Against the captain’s report for Charlie Company, I matched assignments with the leave column. Every soldier identified as being part of the Second Platoon had been relieved of duty on the second day, April 28.
I could tell that Merriwell was not happy once I’d pieced that together.
“Is that an ordinary development—an entire platoon on leave?” I asked.
“There might be reasons,” said Merriwell.
“General, I said ‘ordinary.’” I meant to sound testy.
“For a single day, I would not regard it as ordinary.”
I went back to the captain’s report, counting the platoon members with the metal button on the top of my pen. There were thirty-four lines where the names were blacked out. Ferko said some ‘Chetniks’ entered Barupra on foot, the rest in the trucks. The numbers seemed right.
“And who was the captain for the company, and the lieutenant for this platoon?”
Merriwell shook his head with his lips sealed.
I made a face.
“Boom, don’t be greedy,” he said with some exasperation. “You have far, far more information than you did an hour ago.”
I left the table with a heavy sigh, but came back with some of the food the caterer had placed in the fridge. Merriwell and I each had small helpings of chicken salad and a can of soda. In the meantime, he latched the strap over his case.
I asked if I could hitch a ride with him to the airport. I was more than five hours early for my first plane, but I had to make my way from LaGuardia to JFK in New York and didn’t mind getting started on that now. At JFK, I’d find an Internet connection and get some work done. I grabbed my suitcase and joined Merry on the leather bench in the rear of an old Lincoln sedan. As we traveled, I rebooked for a 10 a.m. flight to LGA, then Merriwell and I talked about baseball and the season’s surprises: A-Rod’s play was steady so far. More incredibly, the Trappers were winning. By long experience, I was trying to contain my optimism.
“Can I go back to business and ask about one more thing?” I said when we were still a few minutes away from the Tri-Cities airport.
“You can ask.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t believe that the people in Barupra were murdered in reprisal for setting up your troops for ambush by Kajevic.”
“Because that’s not what happened.”
“Explain.”
“We aren’t going to have another conversation about classified material, are we, Boom?” He told me he was still plodding through the files regarding the efforts to capture Kajevic, but that virtually none of them were going to be released, for fear of compromising Special Forces techniques that were still in use. “But I will tell you explicitly that in my review, I have seen no reports even suggesting that the Gypsies conspired to lure our troops into a trap, nor frankly do I have any memory of hearing that at the time.”
“You won’t deny, General, will you, that it was the Roma who informed Army Intelligence of Kajevic’s whereabouts?”
“I won’t confirm it either.” He turned on the seat to face me. “I’m sorry, Boom, to sound racist, but Army Intelligence—and our Special Forces—knew better than to take Gypsies at their word or to completely depend on them. Assuming the Roma provided information, it would have been corroborated by days of surveillance. And the Roma had no role of any kind in the action, and no advance information about how or when we were going to go after Kajevic. Even if the Gypsies wanted to betray us—which would make no sense given how well we’d treated them—they didn’t know enough to do that.”
“Yet as we’ve already discussed, General, there is every appearance that Kajevic was aware you were coming.”
“I agree. But not because of anything the Gypsies knew. As I’ve explained, our forces couldn’t close off four square blocks in Doboj without informing the local authorities, all of Serb ethnicity. I’ve always assumed that was where the leak came from.”
When I was US Attorney, we engineered a number of big busts, dozens of federal agents in SWAT gear taking down drug kingpins and gang leaders. But we learned the hard way to be cautious with the Kindle County Unified Police Force. There was never any telling which cops were jumped in to the gangs or on a dealer’s pad. So our first call to the Force for backup wasn’t made until the battering ram was about to hit the door. Special Forces had to be even more circumspect than we were. Whatever they were obliged to tell the Bosnian Army or the local police would have been passed on far too late to allow Kajevic to set up the elaborate trap that had greeted the American soldiers.
“He had to have known earlier than that, General.”
“I take the point, Boom,” said Merriwell. “But if that’s true, we never established how that happened.”
“So what you’re saying, Merry, is that you know of no reason that Army elements were furious with the Roma?”
“On what basis do you think they were?”
“On the basis of a dozen photos you just showed me of those people being rounded up and driven to their deaths.”
Merriwell pouched up his thin mouth and his face went dark with irritation. It was the closest to angry I’d seen him, although I couldn’t tell if he was put out with my persistence, or with himself for not incorporating the implications of the evidence he’d turned over. He also might have been peeved by other thoughts he couldn’t share. After a second, he offered another determined toss of his head.
“Boom, I’ve done what I can to allow you to investigate this matter without interference. As you’ve told me before, that’s your job. So I haven’t asked anyone who served under me to explain these materials. But I will never stop believing in the men and women I commanded.”
I could see that we’d need the testimony of one of his soldiers before Merriwell accepted that there was an American role in the massacre. Until then, as he’d just acknowledged, he’d assume there were innocent explanations. We had reached the airport anyway.
I was flying from a different terminal than Merry, and the car dropped me first. The general rose from the limo to wish me well, fixing the center button on his suit coat while he stood on the pavement. Overall, I was impressed by how much stronger he seemed, more fit, and even, if it was possible, straighter. Despite his clear unhappiness as we were going over the NATO records, he otherwise seemed buoyed by a self-confidence that had been absent when I had first visited with him, although I wasn’t sure I liked him as much without that sad contemplative air.
I told him again how good he seemed.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Life is far better, even if a bit more complicated, but I have you to thank for the improvements, I believe. Your advice hit home.”
“Just timing. I didn’t say anything new.”
“And you?” he asked. “Roger seems to think you fell under the spell of the compelling Ms. Czarni.”
There was no point denying it.
“Well, Merry, I’ve learned how deeply a man can long to do something completely stupid.” I decided there was no polite way to tell him how often he’d crossed my mind in the process. “It’s over now.”
He studied me, squinting in the spring sun.
“I suppose, Boom, if it’s something you will still remember in your waning days, then it might not have been stupid at all.” Merriwell looked at his watch. “To be continued,” he said, and slid back into the car.
Merry’s last remark stayed with me as I entered the terminal. His personal observations had far more power for me than our back-and-forth about business. After clearing security, I called Esma’s New York cell and she picked up on the third ring. I told her that I would be going between airports and could hopscotch through Manhattan and meet for coffee around 1:30.
“I’m in court but I could beg for an early recess,” she said. “It’s golf season, so this judge is always happy for an afternoon off.” She said she was staying at the Carlyle.
“Is there a coffee shop near there?”
“Oh, Boom. Don’t be pedantic. You’re not going to leave me weeping in a Starbucks, are you?”
She told me to ask for ‘the Jahanbani apartment’ when I arrived.
No part of America ever seemed as impressively rich to me as the Upper East Side, because the fury of so much of Manhattan is subdued there, almost as if there were border guards posted somewhere in the Sixties, checking tax returns before anyone was admitted. The doorman at the Carlyle directed me to a separate entrance, where the receptionist called up to announce me.
Esma opened the door and fell on me. I turned my face away, but she still held me for quite some time. She was in her courtroom apparel, deliberately subdued, a loose royal-blue jumper without much of a waist. Her makeup was minimal and her bosk of hair had been tamed in a bun, giving her a schoolmarmish appearance. But the modest look was becoming.
Predictably, I found Esma residing in glamour in a two-bedroom apartment furnished with Francophile elegance. There were antiques in the style of Boulle with gilded decorations on rich woods, a gray velvet sofa with rolled arms, and windows a story and a half high with orange drapes. The artwork was nineteenth-century etchings and watercolors.
“Nice digs,” I remarked.
“Ah yes,” said Esma. “What lawyer doesn’t love rich clients? Madame Jahanbani is allowing me to stay here during the trial.”
She offered wine, and I settled for a glass of water from the tap as Esma sat a safe distance from me on the other side of the velvet sofa. She asked where I had been and I explained only that I’d been back in Kindle County to visit.
“Staying again with your ex-wife?” Her eyes were sharp.
“And her husband.”
“Ah, Bill. What you don’t see.”
Esma arranged herself a bit and folded her hands primly in her lap and rolled her lips into her mouth, preparing for launch.
“Where do I begin?” she said then. “I made a mistake, a terrible mistake. I assumed you would be pleased. That was a ridiculous misjudgment on my part, I admit that freely. I promise you, swear to you with my entire heart, that nothing like it will ever occur again. But to end our relationship over this is an even bigger mistake, Bill. I truly feel that way. We have an exceptional connection.”
“Esma, I feel ill-used. I couldn’t have been clearer. You were acting for the Roma cause. Not for my sake.”
“Not at all.” Her entire upper body quivered in disagreement. “Not at all.”
“Esma, this is exactly what I was afraid of from the start. That the roles would become confused.”
She sat calculating.
“So what is your theory, Bill? That I was using you to get information which I would then deploy to further the Roma cause, as you put it?”
“That’s a little coarser than I would have it.”
“But still a grain of truth?”
“A grain.”
“And what does that make me, Bill, if I was sleeping with you for that reason?”
“Mati Hari?”
“‘A whore,’ is what I’d say, Bill. Free-spirited I have no doubt been. But my body has never been available for a price. It’s insulting that you would think that were possible.”
“Don’t try to turn the tables on me, Esma, and make yourself the injured party. You betrayed my trust.”
“Yes of course.” She nodded eagerly, virtually bouncing up and down on the sofa. “I understand why you feel that way. And I have explained. But we are in touch, Bill, in a vital way, you and I. A deep way. You don’t have to call it love, although on my side, I believe that may be the word. But please don’t turn from this because I made a foolish error.”
As she’d expected, in Esma’s presence I felt her full force, not just the deep sensual appeal but that fierce intelligence that was so deeply engaging to me. In her company, I’d always felt like life was being lived at a faster speed.
“Esma, when I read that newspaper, I realized what I’d known all along—that I was an idiot. Even if I accept your word that there will be no further ‘mistakes,’ as you put it, that the words ‘Barupra’ and ‘Ferko’ will never be uttered between us again, the appearances remain. They compromise me at the Court. I have dodged a bullet somehow, but I’m not going to chance it again. We must end this.”
She stopped and looked at her hands and again drew her lips into her mouth for a second, then glanced up trying to be brave.
“You are resolved.”
“I am.”
She edged closer and reached for my hand.
“Then come to bed with me, please, one last time.”
I took a second. “To what end?”
“To make one more remarkable memory. Or are you saying you wouldn’t enjoy it?”
“You know better.”
“Then come.” Still holding my hand, she stood. “Haven’t you ever heard of a farewell fuck, Bill? Come fuck me farewell. Come on. And do a good job of it, please.”
With the terms so clearly established, there seemed no reason to say no. It was the price she was asking—and yes I’d heard of such things. The bedrooms were up a spiral staircase. The one she was occupying contained a platform bed, and to my amazement, a mirror on the ceiling. Even when I was on top, it left me feeling that we were being watched, and as ever with Esma, I found a way to enjoy that.
If she thought I would feel sharper regrets, recognizing what I was losing, she was right about that, too. Even if this was not our greatest moment together, it was close enough, and the memories of the others were so much at hand that at the height of things I even thought briefly, You’re insane, this is realer than anything else, this is. But it became one of many great truths that dissolved within moments of reaching climax.
Afterward, Esma napped. I rose and dressed. In the living room I drank down the rest of my water. Across the way, in the rosewood breakfront, in the intensity of the halogens over the glass shelves, dozens of netsuke, the little Japanese ivories Esma collected, reposed. I admired the intricacy of the detail on several. Then I found a pad in my briefcase and scribbled a note.
Sorry to run off, but rush hour can be such a mess, and probably better this way anyhow. Will miss you. Truly. Bill.
I couldn’t mark the precise start of my relationship with Esma. The intensity had been unrivaled, but the duration was not. Since my divorce, whenever I’d known a woman about two months, Bermuda Triangle forces seemed to exert themselves.
In the elevator down, I thought again about what a remarkable person she was. Then my heart stalled as my mind stumbled over certain details. The mirrored ceiling seemed a bit much for a respectable lady still in the midst of a divorce, and I was also suddenly struck by the collection of little ivories. Who, no matter how eccentric, transports thousands of dollars of antiquities to a temporary residence? Let alone for only a month or two?
This, the place I’d left, was Esma’s home. It had to be. But by the time the doors opened into the hushed lobby, I had turned all of that over again. My suspicions made no sense—why bother claiming I was in somebody else’s house? I realized instead that my brief unwillingness to take her word was symptomatic of how deeply ingrained my distrust for her had become. It was just as likely that the client, Madame Jahanbani, had stimulated Esma’s interest in building a collection of netsuke of her own.
I stood a second longer studying the patterns in the marble floor and absorbing my overriding response to all of this. Esma would always be a person of enigmas. What was striking to me now was the conviction in my core that I no longer cared about figuring her out.