Talking things through on the top of the tank, Goos and I agreed that the best idea would be to get down the ladder and run like hell. But there was a reason that jailers around the world used zip ties. After sawing them against the rough edges of the footholds for at least thirty minutes, we’d accomplished nothing besides cutting our wrists. The rope that had been around our necks had been left behind and I crawled over to it—Goos was much too sore to move much. We figured if we could somehow secure one end up here, and then fasten it around us, we could make the climb down, but the line proved far too short to reach the ground. Without that, descending the ladder with our hands bound behind our backs was pretty much suicidal. However, after more than an hour of working back to back, we had gotten surprisingly adept and managed to loop the yellow strand over a rung of the ladder. We then threaded the ends through the belt loops on our trousers, making the rope a kind of safety harness. This allowed me to explore the top of the dome a bit, although I failed to discover anything that could razor through the ties. We pondered using the hinge of the door on top, the place where we were supposed to die, like a wire cutter, but we decided we were more likely either to cut off part of a hand or fall in. Ultimately, we settled down on either side of the ladder to wait for daylight, in the hope that the workers who were sure to arrive would not shoot us as intruders.
With rest, the adrenal rush was subsiding, making each of us more aware of our discomfort. Goos was much worse off than I was. My mouth hadn’t seemed to stop bleeding, and my shoulders were aching from using my hands so much with my arms tied behind my back. Other places hurt, too, but not enough to warrant a lot of attention. Overall, we were both exhausted. Goos lay down to try to sleep and actually dozed for a while.
As our kidnapping was progressing, I had thought only in spurts about why this was happening, and even now I couldn’t fully piece things together. I still had no clue what kind of enterprise Ferko held status in. There had always been a mob in Bosnia—they’d been fierce fighters during the war and were the first to commit atrocities against the Serbians—but I couldn’t imagine what stake organized crime would have in promoting the story of a massacre at Barupra. Perhaps the mobsters had been the killers, and Ferko was covering for them by blaming ‘Chetniks’?
Not long after sunup, two fellows in white jumpsuits drove into the graveled area below in a truck with the logo of the salt mine on the side panel. They parked about a block up, near what I could now see was a small wooden office. I started screaming at them, and Goos woke up and joined me in Serbo-Croatian. They heard us relatively quickly, but couldn’t place where the voices were coming from, even as Goos repeatedly shouted “Ovamo,” meaning, ‘Up here.’
When one finally caught sight of us, he immediately demanded we come down. It took a few minutes to persuade him that we were tied up. Instead of rescuing us, the two went off to call somebody else, but the man they summoned, named Walter, sussed things out quickly and was up the ladder with a wire cutter in a matter of minutes. He ordered the two men on the ground to bring up security belts, and once they were fixed on us, we headed down the ladder, latching and unlatching the carabiner clips on each rung. I was a lot weaker than I would have guessed and was glad to be attached.
Walter was a sincere, decent guy, and as soon as he heard our story, he wanted to call the police. Goos and I responded politely that that was not a good idea, which Walter was quick to accept. Instead, he allowed us to use the office phone, from which I dialed Attila.
“Fuck, I must have called both of you six times,” she said, as soon as I said hello. She’d wanted to be sure we didn’t need more workers. I told her in outline what had happened last night.
“Joke, right?” she said first. She promised to come immediately.
Walter made us coffee while we waited in the small office, which had the dimensions of a trailer. More people were arriving for work now, and each did a turn at the door looking us over. We were a sight. Most of Goos’s shirt was black with clotted blood, and the agony in his side left him slumped awkwardly in his chair. My lip was blown up to the size of a squash ball, and a streak of bloody brown ran from the corner of my mouth to my chin. The company had a nurse on call nearby. She took Goos to the small washroom and washed off the wound at his temple, applying gauze and a wrap that went all the way around his head. She also taped his ribs. She pronounced me much better off. My chin was bruised and there was a lump on the side of my head from the rifle barrel, but the only lasting damage was that the bottom third of one of my upper front teeth was gone, with the tooth beside it divoted by a chip. Our wrists were still bleeding, and she treated them with iodine and a sterile wrap. My trousers had dried, but not my underwear, a problem I kept to myself.
Through Goos, Walter explained that he was the deputy chief engineer and lived on the property, but more than a mile away at the motor works, where the enormous pumps operated. Because the water pressure had to remain constant, the machinery was always whining, meaning Walter could hear nothing happening outside. As a result, the mine had been dealing with persistent vandalism since reopening about a decade ago. A security guard was supposed to make rounds every night, but he had not showed up last evening. In front of us, Walter called the guard, who claimed that his wife had taken ill suddenly. Walter fired him on the spot, saying, “You work for crooks, let them pay you.”
“He is Orthodox,” Walter said, after he put down the phone, “and people here told me not to hire him, but that is not how we were in Tuzla, and how we must never become.”
Attila arrived half an hour later.
“Jesus motherfucking Christ,” she said, stopping in her tracks when she saw us. “You’ve gotta start drinkin in better places.”
Our first stop on the way back to the Blue Lamp was a small one-story clinic nearby, equivalent to a rural emergency center, so Goos could be x-rayed. As always, everyone seemed to know Attila, and the doctor, a young man who wore his white coat over his blue jeans, saw Goos ahead of four or five waiting patients.
It was all good news. Goos did not have a skull fracture, and he exhibited no signs of a brain bleed from his pistol-whipping. Three of his ribs were cracked, but none with a through-and-through break that would have required total bed rest for fear of puncturing his lung. A nurse at the clinic put a butterfly on Goos’s temple and retaped his ribs and sent us off.
As we were driving, Attila asked us for a full version of the story, beginning from when we left Barupra. Her initial suspicion was that the men who had kidnapped us were the remnants of one of the Serbian milicija, the civilian militias, which had it in for Goos and probably had trailed us all day. To me, that didn’t add. Our kidnappers never seemed to make any distinctions between the two of us. And they’d had plenty of opportunities to grab us before we reached Vo Selo. Things had gone to hell only after we rang Ferko’s bell.
To explain, I told Attila about our encounter with the man I referred to as ‘our major witness.’ I had gotten as far as describing the house and the dogs, when Attila smashed on the brakes. Goos cried out in the backseat as the seat belt constricted against him, and Attila pulled over at the roadside to be sure Goos was okay. She then surged toward me in the passenger’s seat.
“Fer-ko? Ferko the Jerko is your big witness?”
I looked back to Goos. He was supposed to be resting with one leg across the rear bench, but his eyes were closed and he was grimacing. I had the feeling that was about more than his ribs.
“How do you know Ferko?” I asked.
“That soup-sandwich motherfucker used to work for me. Just for one thing.”
“Doing what?”
“I told you,” said Attila. “Remember I told you how I hired Gypsies? Ferko was a driver. Until he started in stealin the trucks. The ungrateful fuckface. He’s basically gone Elvis, but I caught sight of him sneakin around Tuzla a few years ago, and he ran like he was in the Olympics. That jagbag knows better than to ever let me catch him.”
“But why does he own a big house?”
“Ferko? Ferko’s a fuckin car thief. I guess you could say I gave him his start in show business, stealing my flippin trucks. Now he steals cars all over Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, mostly on order. He can break into a car and drive it away in ten seconds.”
“Does he work for the crime gangs?” I remained focused on why he’d been able to deploy the goons who’d captured us.
Attila laughed out loud.
“Ferko sells cars mostly to the Russian mob. Everyone in Russia wants a car. Have you seen the traffic in Moscow? They still have seven families sharing an apartment, but every one of them needs a Buick. That’s how they know Putin is better than Stalin. But Ferko’s a fuckin butler to those guys. He’s small-time. He might pay off the local cops, but nobody’s takin orders from Ferko. Or kidnapping anybody for his weak ass.”
From the backseat, Goos asked, “He lived in Barupra, did he?”
“When I hired him first, he did.”
“Any reason for a man with money to make up a story about a massacre?”
“Hell if I can say,” said Attila. “Some Gypsies, scamming is a way of life. All I know is if the Jerko told me it was daytime, I’d run to the window to check.”
Goos went silent. I thought he was figuring things through, but the pain meds had caught up with him and when I looked back he was sound asleep, his mouth wide open so I could see the dark evidence of several fillings.
“Ferko,” said Attila, still trying to believe it. “You’re not really telling me this whole shitstorm is because of Ferko, are you?”
I’d basically missed two nights’ sleep, given the fitful slumber of a transatlantic flight, and I felt limp now. In memory, certain sensations, like the wind and the view from atop the water tank, had a high-def quality, but there were already vague spots in my recollection and some disorder about which events happened first. Goos, in the meantime, began snoring.
“By the way,” I said to Attila. “You owe me some records.”
“I’ll give you the records,” said Attila, “but hell if I know what for. If Ferko’s your big witness, dude, then your case is so over.”
Right now, I was too tired to care. After apologies, I reclined the deep seat in the A8 and followed Goos into a black sleep.
When we arrived at the Blue Lamp, Attila shook me awake to help with Goos. Now that he had time to stiffen up, Goos’s pain was worsening and he was also woozy from the meds. We walked him up the street, supporting him from each side with his arms slung over our shoulders, like an injured player leaving the field. Once we had him on his bed, I headed down to check into the hotel. With my luggage AWOL, I thought of going out to buy some cosmetics, but I had no energy for that. Attila promised to touch base tomorrow. When the clerk handed me the key card, I smiled. It was the same room where I’d frolicked with Esma. That already seemed far in the past.
Once I was upstairs, I found that my brief sleep in the car had revived me a bit. I sat on my bed, both comforted and terrified now that I was alone. I looked at my hands for some reason, lifted them and studied my fingers and palms. Being alive seemed such a profound mystery.
I was also a bit lost, not only about what had happened, but also about what was ahead. A good part of me wanted to book a flight back to the US and stay there, a feeling I resisted, in part because I realized again I didn’t even have a house to return to. The homiest activities I’d undertaken recently were fishing with my sons and eating herring in a café in The Hague with Narawanda.
I decided to check my e-mail. That seemed ludicrously mundane, but that was where much of the comfort of life actually lay for us, in the routine. I considered writing my boys, but knew I’d alarm them if I made even a sideways reference to being safe. Instead, I went down to the bar, drank most of a double scotch at two in the afternoon, and barely made it back upstairs. I finally changed my underwear, then slept until 12 o’clock the next day.
After I woke, I was surprised to find Goos downstairs already. He’d made himself a coffee from the machine in the lobby and was sitting at one of the small tables in the breakfast area, stirring his cup with his left hand. His second dose of hydrocodone had worn off a couple hours ago, he said, so he’d come down for ‘brekkie.’
We shared a long look across the white laminate.
“That was something,” I said.
“That was something,” he agreed. “Thought we were cactus, mate, for sure.” He told me about his closest brush before that, which had come while he was a police trainee in Brussels. He’d been called on a domestic—the male was Russian, which was unsurprising since they had a track record of raising hands against their women—but when the wife let Goos in, the guy grabbed Goos from behind and put a butcher’s knife to his throat. The stink of alcohol was all over the room. Fortunately, the woman started to go off on her man again, and he released Goos so he could charge her. Goos brought him down with his truncheon.
“I pissed myself when they had us kneeling there,” I told Goos. I knew he had to have noticed, so I wasn’t confessing much. “But it ended up being a good thing, because it brought me into myself.”
“What did you think of?” Goos asked.
I explained about my father. The most shocking part to me was how angry I was at him.
I asked Goos what had been in his mind.
“Ah,” he answered. “Wife, kids a little. Mostly, buddy, I couldn’t believe I’d been so daft as to come back to Bosnia.”
“Are you going to quit?” I asked. From someone else, the question might have suggested cowardice, but we both knew this was only a matter of logic.
“Don’t know,” Goos answered. “Need to get back and have a long think. One thing for sure, though, mate. We can’t go barracking around here without real protection. We’ll need the army if we come back. Badu will have to get on the blower and make that happen.”
“Are we coming back?”
“Well, we’re going to have to exhume the Cave, aren’t we? Ferko’s word is no good. And it’s been blasted all over the front page of the New York Times that we suspicion a massacre. So the only way to know if that’s so is to look for the bodies.”
He was right.
We were still at the table at about 1:30, when Attila breezed in, wheeling my suitcase. She’d sent two of her people to Vo Selo, where they’d picked up the rental car, which was now parked outside. Neither of us had even thought about the vehicle, and we thanked her at length. From under her arm, Attila withdrew an envelope and threw it on the table before making herself a coffee, too. She was wearing her usual rumpled jeans and the old pinstriped short-sleeved shirt. Attila could have vastly improved her fashion presence with a trip to Goodwill.
“What’s the report from the medical corps?” she asked.
Except for needing a dentist, and not being able to drink coffee on my right side because of my teeth, I was pretty good. Goos would require a few days.
Attila had told us yesterday she had a close friend on the police force, a lieutenant she’d trust with anything, and with our permission, Attila had gone to the station to have a word with Dalija. The lieutenant had made a few calls in Attila’s presence. In a town down the road from Vo Selo, two officers had reported that their car and uniforms had been taken from them at gunpoint the day before yesterday.
“That bag of asses,” said Goos. “Steal a police car in a small town where everybody knows everyone’s business? A fine way to get beaten with a pipe. No chance that happened.”
“You guessed last night that Ferko had financial arrangements with the local cops, didn’t you?” I asked.
Attila smiled at that idea.
“I’m sure they shake him down. But nobody’s gonna take orders from Ferko. You’d have to have had the numbnuts work for you to understand.”
“Well, he was clever enough to steal your trucks, wasn’t he?” Goos asked.
“He was playin follow-the-leader. Another Gypsy from Barupra, kind of the Big Man there, Boldo Mirga—he was the only one with the stones to do that.”
I looked to Goos, who was playing coy and avoided my eye.
“Okay,” I said. “And tell us how this truckjacking went down. I’m not sure we’ve ever heard the whole story.”
Attila hesitated. “Man, I got to be careful here.”
“Attila, those were NATO vehicles. If you want, I can send another letter to Brussels tomorrow asking for your records and their interview notes with you. That was all before the Kajevic thing. It can’t be classified.”
Attila pondered.
“You know, it ain’t all that much to tell,” she said. “The US was leaving, and Merry wanted to send a bunch more of the military equipment NATO had collected to Iraq. So I sent trucks and drivers down near Mostar to pick some of it up.”
“When was this exactly?”
Attila lifted her chin to think. “Late March 2004?” That would have been two weeks before the Kajevic thing in Doboj, and a month before the people in Barupra disappeared. “In those days, the roads were still crap. I mean you’d be drivin and come to a shell crater and need to build your own bridge with railroad ties you carried with. So it was a long trip, most of a day, and what with the roads, I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t drive back in the dark. But there was no sign of all of them by noon the next day. About Taps, Boldo and Ferko and the rest of them come strollin in, sayin while they were bivouacked some gang hot-wired six of the trucks and made off with them. The drivers were all Gypsies and they didn’t even have their stories straight. I fired them just about on the spot.”
“And what happened when it turned out that Kajevic got away in a couple of those trucks, the ones Boldo and Ferko stole?”
“Well, no one knew that for sure at first. It was most of a week after Doboj before the getaway trucks were recovered out in the country.”
“But what did those guys have to say for themselves then?”
“Boldo? Testicles of titanium. He just stayed with his story. Must have been the carjackers who sold the trucks to Kajevic.”
“And who were they telling that fairy tale to? Bosnian police? NATO?”
“NATO MPs and the Bosnians.”
“And did the law enforcement guys believe that?”
“Boom, I keep tellin you: Ain’t no one who takes a Gypsy’s word. Thing is, the only way to completely disprove what they were puttin out there would be with Kajevic and them. Nobody’d ever tell you Boldo was stupid.”
“And is there any chance Boldo’s story might have been true—that someone else stole the trucks and sold them to Kajevic and his Tigers?”
“Chance? Sure. The part that didn’t never make sense was Boldo dealing with Kajevic. You heard Tobar in Lijce. That’s mongoose and cobra. Gypsies hated Kajevic and Kajevic, he’d rather sit down to a meal with a snake and a rat than deal with the Roma.”
“And when was the next time you saw Boldo and Ferko?” I asked. Goos’s eyes quickly passed my way. He approved of me truth-testing Attila.
“Never. I’d sooner crap bricks than talk to any of them and they knew it. Steal my fuckin trucks? I’ve told you before. It wasn’t until August or September I heard this shit about all the Roma bein gone.”
There was a lot of news here, and almost all of it was confusing. One thing was clear, though. If we could ever crowbar the truth out of Ferko, we’d be on a much better footing, even though I’d require an armored vehicle and a box of Depends before heading off to that interview.
“Do you think you could get a phone number for Ferko?” I asked Attila.
“Not if he had any idea it was for me,” Attila said. “But I can gumshoe around.”
I finally picked up the envelope Attila had thrown on the table and asked about the contents.
“Truck logs from April 26 to 28, 2004.”
“Showing?”
“Nothing. No convoys out of either pool.”
I was about to tell her she was wrong, that her trucks were on film, when Goos’s blue eyes flicked up in warning. Clearly Merriwell hadn’t shared anything about the NATO material with Attila. As he maintained, Merry was keeping his distance and letting us do our jobs.
“Who made the records of vehicle deployments?” asked Goos.
“My people.”
Goos nodded and calculated, yet said nothing, but Attila read something in his response.
“Nobody took my trucks without my say-so,” she said.
“I thought Boldo stole them,” I said.
“That’s why I’m so sure. Because after that, I had three guys patrolling each depot. We just about tucked every vehicle into bed at night. That was even before we realized Kajevic had ended up with the trucks.”
Something in her last remark struck Attila. She angled her round face. In her eyes, I could see a thought taking her somewhere.
“Did you say you made some photos in Madovic?” Attila asked. “Any chance I could see them?”
I reminded Attila that the Bosnian Friendship Club had stolen our cell phones.
“What about the cloud?” Attila asked.
I went upstairs for my tablet. Until this moment, neither Goos nor I had given any thought to using the ‘find my phone’ app. We tried now, but no signal registered, implying either that the phones were off or, more likely, destroyed. But the photos and the short video I’d taken in Madovic had uploaded before then.
Attila looked all of it over for quite a while and replayed the video three times, finally spreading her fingers—and her ragged bitten nails—to enlarge the shot of the three monks approaching. I hadn’t even caught it in real time, but the one in the center had flicked his dark intense eyes toward us minutely, as we watched them from where we sat. He’d actually stared a bit longer than the nearer monk, whom I’d seen glance in our direction later.
“That’s why they were going to take you out,” Attila said.
I was astonished. “I had no idea it was forbidden to take pictures of monks.”
Attila laughed then and faced us looking a lot like a jack-o’-lantern on Halloween night, the same fiendish gap-toothed grin, appearing as if she were lit from within.
“See that one?” She put her finger on the screen, indicating the monk in the middle. “I’m almost positive you guys just found Laza Kajevic.”