Despite Goos’s remonstrance, he was placed on a stretcher and driven in the 4x4 down to the hospital. The real Bosnian Army was now on the scene, securing the small emergency area so that Ruehl and Goos could be treated. The two patients lay side by side on adjoining stainless steel tables, with blood on a standard being drained into Ruehl’s arm. As the Bosnians hustled in and out, including a growing number of civilian officials, there was an increasing hubbub of loud voices and a lot of tense rushing around. I was delighted when General Moen arrived and immediately took the situation in hand. She banished everyone but a few NATO troops and the medical staff from the ER. She explained that the lone radiologist had been detained for questioning, and thus there was a delay as they struggled to find a doctor to look at Ruehl’s and Goos’s X-rays. After more tape and Demerol, Goos was insisting on going home now.
A private ambulance was summoned, so Goos could lie flat on the trip to Tuzla airport. Andersen, now in uniform, drove me back to the Blue Lamp, where I packed up Goos’s room and my own. When I returned to the airfield, a NATO plane had landed. Goos was already aboard on a paramedic’s rolling stretcher, and in very good spirits, particularly when he didn’t try to move.
We were flown a couple of hours to the NATO air base at Geilenkirchen in Germany near the Dutch border. From there, General Moen had arranged for another ambulance to take us the remaining two hours to The Hague.
When we arrived outside the little condo Goos had bought years ago, he insisted, with considerable effort, on getting to his feet. I understood this was for the benefit of his wife and his older daughter, who’d rushed down from Brussels. The wife, a thickish figure with wavy blonde hair, and the daughter, a mess of tattoos, took over to help him make a halting entry to the building. He took a single step at a time, resting a second before the next effort. His wife never stopped talking a mile a minute in Flemish.
It was midnight when I slipped into my flat. I was stunned to find Nara, in her black running tights, still awake. She was curled in an easy chair in the living room as she read under a shell lamp that provided the only light in the apartment. On sight, she instinctively moved toward me and brought her small hand to my face, where the bruise along my chin and jawline had turned green and yellow.
“Oh my,” she said.
“Looks worse than it feels.”
I dropped my bag and fell onto the sofa. Now that I was back, I was suddenly so exhausted that it felt as if even my bones could give way.
“A business thing ended up getting physical,” I explained. “Goos was with me. He’s worse off. But he’s mending.”
For many reasons, starting with our continuing safety, Goos and I had agreed to keep our role in Kajevic’s capture a vaulted secret. I changed the subject to Nara.
“New York wasn’t good?”
“I was in town three days and saw Lewis for all of an hour. We had a furious argument in the hotel lobby and never spoke again while I was there.” Her tone in relaying this was characteristically odd—she was surprisingly light, as if the entire trip had been a passing annoyance. On the whole, she seemed upbeat, and in a second I understood why. “Laza Kajevic was arrested today,” she announced. “It must be huge news in Bosnia.”
“All I heard about,” I said.
“He has a private defense lawyer from Belgrade, Bojan Bozic, but I worked with Bozic on General Lojpur’s case, and he always promised me I would be senior trial counsel with him if Laza was captured. He will file the papers tomorrow asking for a joint appointment.” Her face was ripe with the cute childish light of unsuppressed pride. We both knew as lawyers that it was one of those cases you’d be going to dinner on for the rest of your life.
“Congratulations.” I lifted my palm for a genial high five. But I found myself peering at her afterward. There was a lot about this woman I did not understand, because we tended not to talk much about work, given our roles laboring on opposite sides. Yet with Nara, because of her frequently unfiltered responses, I knew I could speak my mind.
“And it won’t bother you to defend a monster like this? The camps and executions, the systematic rapes?” In a way, this was a completely galling question coming from me, given the big-league cruds who often had been my clients. Over the years, I had seemed to specialize in ego-drunk CEOs, men in all cases, who’d looted their companies with no more hesitation than they would have exhibited in picking up the loose change from their sock drawers, and who frequently exhibited a variety of loutish behavior toward women. I believed in the mantra that everyone deserved a defense, but I had resolved long ago that the defense didn’t necessarily have to be provided by me. Mob clients, for example, were always on my personal Do Not Call list. The unprovoked and conscienceless violence on which their business was erected was too much for me.
“I don’t mean to sound like some boor at a cocktail party,” I said, “asking how you can stand up for such awful people. But Laza Kajevic is probably a finalist for the title of single worst human being alive.”
She actually smiled for a second, before her black eyes drew down more seriously.
“Because I do not know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“What I would do in wartime—when the world is all topsy and nothing is right. It is easy to be the prosecutor, Boom, and say after the fact, This is what you should have done. That is important to restore order. But to my mind, it also involves a good deal of pretending. I am not sure the rules would be very clear to me if it were kill or be killed.”
I could have followed the lawyerly instinct and argued, especially about Kajevic, who’d created the very atmosphere she thought mitigated his crimes. But hers was a serious answer from a thoughtful person. And her reasons were higher-minded than mine had been for taking on many cases, which, generally speaking, were because crimes intrigued me a lot more than lease foreclosures, the money was great, and these engagements often allowed me to hang out with friends from the US Attorney’s Office, who frequently were representing the codefendants.
“So you’ve signed on?”
She lifted the immense three-ring binders she’d been studying.
“I was out running when I got the call from Bozic,” she said. “I went back to the office for the charging document and some background materials and haven’t been out of this chair in five hours.”
“And how will Lew take it,” I asked, “when you tell him you aren’t moving back to New York?”
Her face fell. “I do not look forward to that conversation. It has been a week since we last spoke. Every argument is expected to end with my apology, and I will not do that this time.”
I began Thursday at Nara’s dentist, who put a temporary cap on my tooth, before I migrated to the Court. Goos and I had agreed to write a single joint report to all of our bosses about the last week and a half. I started the first draft.
In the middle of the afternoon my phone rang.
“Congratulations, Boom.” It took me a second to place Merriwell’s voice. “I wanted to thank you personally. I only wish I’d been there to see it. The world is a far better place today.”
I told him I deserved no thanks, but assured him that the NATO troops he’d once commanded had performed impressively.
“The scuttlebutt says you and your colleague were both very brave,” Merry told me.
As we’d asked, Goos and I had been omitted from the official account of the arrest provided to media outlets. But there was obviously another confidential version circulating for those in the know.
“Goos brought him down,” I said. “Even though Kajevic had a pistol with which he’d shot Colonel Lothar. My act of heroism consisted in lying on the floor of an iron-plated vehicle—in full body armor.”
“I was told you took his pistol.”
“He was half-unconscious and his finger was nowhere near the trigger. And I was scared to death the whole time.” The fact was that the more I thought about the moment I’d grabbed the Glock, the less clear it was in my memory. I remained largely astonished that I’d ever been in that position.
“That proves you’re a reasonable man,” Merry said. “He’s a terrifying human being. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, Boom. It’s carrying on despite it. Hats off. The version I hear is that Kajevic was on his way to escaping when you guys cut him off.”
Afterward, the soldiers had poured compliments on us. They had been frightened that Kajevic would reach the black sedan waiting to speed him back to the monastery. It was true that if Kajevic had actually gotten in that car with the monk who was driving, the aftermath might have been messier. But much as I admired Goos’s quick thinking and his daring in taking on a man who’d already used his weapon, neither of us believed on reflection that there was much danger of Kajevic outrunning several men and women forty years younger than he was. As Goos said in the hours we’d spent on the plane, tirelessly recycling events that probably lasted less than a minute, the only person whose life Goos probably saved was Kajevic’s, since he would have had to have been shot if he turned to fire at the troops pursuing him.
After more demurrers, I decided to take advantage of the situation and pointed out that now that Kajevic was in irons, there was less reason to withhold the intelligence reports from the effort to grab him in 2004.
Merry laughed and told me I still didn’t understand the Department of Defense, but he didn’t stay on the phone much longer.
When I came in Thursday night, Narawanda was dressed for our run, but she greeted me with her hands on her hips.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That you guys were part of capturing Laza.”
I explained that Goos and I deserved little credit and were eager to escape the blame from Kajevic’s malevolent followers.
“As I hear it,” she said, “you were the center of the whole operation.”
I was troubled that word of our roles had already leached into civilian circles. At the ICC, the secret had held for the day, since Badu and Akemi felt it was critical to maintain a separation between our Court and the Yugoslav Tribunal. Nonetheless, there were too many people in the reporting chain for me not to have received some meaningful sideward glances and nods of recognition, even though nothing was offered out loud. I was on the verge of asking Nara, with a little irritation, how it was she’d learned about this, when I realized her source.
“You heard this from your client? He’s arrived in The Hague?”
She shrugged to show she couldn’t breach the wall of confidence.
“How’s his nose?” I asked. I didn’t even try not to smirk.
“Quite swollen. He seems more upset about that than being in jail. He is quite vain.”
“I would never have guessed.”
“But your role in this made for a very odd initial interview. I had to confess I knew you well, both of you. I wish I had had a chance to brief Bozic before your names came up.”
I hadn’t thought of that. From her perspective, I was subjecting her to some kind of conflict by keeping all this to myself. I apologized and asked how Kajevic had reacted to her disclosure. I was afraid it might cost her her role in the case, but she said Kajevic was unconcerned.
“He assumes everyone knows everyone else in The Hague. Bozic actually suggested a formal conflict waiver and Kajevic made light of that and actually scribbled something out himself. But he said to send you his respects and to tell you he would like to meet Goos and you face-to-face someday.”
Nara, predictably, didn’t seem to recognize the chilling import of the message. On the other hand, Kajevic’s inflation of our role conformed to my impression of his grandiosity. He’d assumed he could outwit NATO forever, and would much rather think that he’d been rolled up accidentally by a couple of hapless nincompoops.
In the meantime, my conversation with Merriwell, and the unlikelihood that we’d ever get the intelligence file on the prior effort to arrest Kajevic, sparked a new idea.
“If Mr. Kajevic really wants to see Goos and me, we can interview him for our case. There are a lot of questions he could put to rest for us.”
Nara responded by laughing in my face, albeit in an inoffensive way, with no scorn intended. It was the same thing I would have done if the roles were reversed.
“Bozic will never hear of it. Laza has trouble enough without talking his way into more. But I will pass the request on to both of them, so you can receive a formal no.”
We went off for our run, but the skies opened unexpectedly, as they often do in The Hague, and we ended up at the Mauritshuis, The Hague’s little treasure box of an art museum. The grand seventeenth-century house, built in the classical Dutch manner with a steep tiled roof and an ornamented yellow facade over the brick, is now home to some of the most famous paintings in the world, including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, which are coincidentally displayed in the same tiny room. We’d run past the site often, with Nara chiding me virtually every time about not having visited. With the downpour we’d decided this was the moment, inasmuch as the museum was open late Thursday nights.
I had forgotten Nara’s design background and was impressed by her incisive responses to many of the pieces on display. There were paintings—a Rembrandt portrait of an old man or a Vermeer of a town scene by a waterfront—that moved me intensely with what they held of the sheer force of life. The tiny rooms of the original house had been preserved as show spaces, which lent a secret, intimate feeling to the entire experience, as Nara and I whispered to one another, pressed close in the crowd.
Once we’d circled through twice, returning to several mutual favorites, we retired to the café to wait out the rain, talking at length about the pictures. She had a lot to say about the genius of Rembrandt, who was centuries ahead in his understanding of what we actually see.
We departed at closing, walking along slowly through what had now settled to a delicate mist.
Nara sighed and said, “That was lovely.” She looked up at me, tiny and ever-sincere, the rain shining on her cheeks. “Wasn’t it?”
“It was,” I answered.
We walked home with little more said.
On Friday morning, I found Nara standing over the coffee pot crying. I was astonished, since she ordinarily dealt with her troubles in a contained way and had been quite upbeat since I returned. She wasn’t sobbing, but there was no mistaking her tears.
“Lew?” I asked.
“Everything,” she answered. “My mother is on the way. She’ll land at Schiphol tomorrow morning.” It turned out that Nara’s mother had a blood disorder, well under control, but one that nonetheless required periodic visits with a specialist in Amsterdam. She would see the doctor on Monday. “I realize I have to tell her about Lewis, but I have no idea what to say. I left messages for him today and yesterday, but there has been no response. Is that how a marriage ends? Without even answering the phone?”
I tried to comfort her. Lew was probably giving himself a break, I said. Many marriages resumed after a time-out.
She shook her head decisively. “There is little chance. The Kajevic case will keep me here for years, and I am quite happy to stay. Lewis will never accept that.”
I could have pointed out that it was she, as much as Lew, who had made the critical decision, but she would probably not see it that way. There is surely no human relationship more complicated than marriage, and I knew better than to try to get inside Nara’s.
Instead I asked where her mother would stay. I could see that in her anguish about having to confess the state of things with Lew to her mom, Narawanda hadn’t considered that issue. Being Nara, she just told me the truth, without apology.
“Well, normally she stays here. But I suppose that will not work.” She turned impish, a sideways thought suddenly lightening her mood, while, like a child, she used the back of her hand to smear away her tears. “It would be very cozy with Mum and you and your friend in your bed.”
I did the chivalrous thing and said I’d go to a hotel for the weekend.
“You cannot. This is your home. Mum will be fine at Des Indes.”
“No chance,” I answered. I promised to tidy up tonight and be gone in the morning when they returned from the airport. After a little more Alphonse and Gaston, she accepted.
“This is so kind of you, Boom. I feel terrible tossing you out. Can I pay the hotel bill?”
“Never.”
“Will you at least come for dinner tomorrow night? That would be a huge favor. Mum is a lot for me to handle alone.”
I knew she meant it—Narawanda never employed devices—and I accepted. I paused on my way out of the kitchen with my coffee.
“And I’m no longer seeing my friend, as you call her. That’s been kaput since the day I told you I was put out with her.”
Nara reflected a second.
“I am sorry, truly. You seemed very smitten. I hope that odd scene here had nothing to do with it.”
“Of course not.”
Relieved, Nara smiled in her sly way. “I will never forget the sight of her, just as God made her, except that look-at-me hairdo.”
The hairdo! I was always surprised by the way women saw each other.
“There was never any future,” I said about Esma. “And the present, as I should have known, was much too complicated.”
Nara seemed on the verge of saying more, but she stayed silent and I headed upstairs.
At work on Friday, I endured a round of meetings about how to proceed with our case. The pivotal question was whether we should even continue, since we now had to ascribe virtually no value to Ferko’s potential testimony, even in the unlikely event he could be found. The conversations in the office were earnest and marked by a lot of worthwhile questions, but I was somewhat aggravated the discussions had to take place in layers—first with the division supervisor, then with Akemi added, and finally Badu, too. Each time we all agreed that notwithstanding Ferko, the NATO records, especially the aerial surveillance, left us with no alternative but to exhume the Cave. The bodies were now the only likely source of additional evidence. And as Goos had recognized, having embarrassed the United States on the front page of the Times, we were obliged to confirm the crime. Over this last point, Badu wound his head around sorrowfully and said somewhat churlishly that the leak had been very ill-considered.
The deliberations about the future of our investigation brought back a thought I’d been avoiding: I needed to try again to contact Esma, in case she had an alternative way to reach Ferko. He was likely to have worthwhile information, even though virtually nothing he said could be taken at face value. For example, given his true vocation he was likely to know how the stolen trucks had ended up with Kajevic.
Having failed via all electronic means of communicating with Esma, I reverted to the old-fashioned method and composed a lawyerly letter to her on Court stationery, saying that we had visited Ferko at his house with surprising results, which I felt obliged to discuss with her. The letter went out for overnight delivery, addressed to her chambers in London as well as her temporary dwelling in New York.
When I was in college and law school at Easton and brought home friends, as I’d done with Roger, I was often torn by their reactions to my parents, whom my buddies inevitably judged cultivated and intelligent. I didn’t mind that my friends admired my parents—I did, too—but I was frustrated that they were unable to recognize the emotional tightfistedness that made them so challenging for Marla and me.
Naturally, I saw the same process play out from the other side when Will and Pete brought their pals to our house, where, I could tell, Ellen and I appeared far less eccentric and annoying than the friends had been told to expect. It was another truism I’d adopted in middle age that parents and children always stood in a unique relationship to each other whose full effects were inevitably shuttered to everyone else.
Nonetheless, given Nara’s agitation, I walked toward the apartment from Des Indes on Saturday expecting an awkward evening. It was a wet night, sometimes raining hard. I was in a slicker and hat, while the Dutch, as usual, were carrying on in defiance of the weather. As I strolled through the Plein, hundreds of the locals sat at the lines of outdoor picnic tables, drinking beer and huddled under the cafés’ umbrellas. I realized how much I had come to admire the Dutch, with their happy communal air and their polite determination to ignore small obstacles to doing what they liked.
A block away from the apartment, I stopped in the local wine shop and bought a bottle of burgundy I knew Nara favored. Only when I offered it to her, as I was crossing the threshold, did I remember that alcohol was no way to make an impression on a Muslim woman.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, when I recognized my folly, and asked if I should hide the wine.
“Just leave it in the closet with your coat. I won’t drink in front of her, but I promise, I’ll have several glasses once she’s asleep.” Nara rolled her large eyes, then took me by the elbow to introduce me.
Annisa Darmadi proved to be bright and charming, and quick to laugh. Notwithstanding the dizzy spells that had brought her here to see her doctor, she appeared vital and healthy and, even at seventy, was a virtual look-alike of her daughter, with the same tidy form and dark round-faced handsomeness. Her hijab, which Nara said she wore more often these days, had been forsaken tonight, perhaps for her daughter’s sake.
Mrs. Darmadi had insisted on cooking, as Nara had told me to expect, and she was occupied at the stove preparing several traditional Indonesian dishes. The ingredients were readily available in the Netherlands, with its large Indonesian population, and the mom couldn’t understand why her daughter hadn’t learned to take advantage of that. Having said as much, Mrs. Darmadi shooed Nara away whenever she even looked into the pots.
We sat down not long after I arrived. Mrs. Darmadi was a fabulous chef. There was a soup with coconut milk called soto, a salad with peanut sauce—gado-gado—and a ball of sweet rice surrounded by a pinwheel of grilled beef, whose name I never got. Over dinner, we talked mostly of Jakarta, about which I knew next to nothing, as Mrs. Darmadi brought her daughter up to date on local events. The most interesting thing to emerge in conversation was that Mrs. Darmadi, although considerably younger, was a distant cousin of Lolo Soetoro, the man who became Barack Obama’s stepfather. She spoke of Lolo more approvingly than she did of Obama’s mother, whom Mrs. Darmadi referred to, without elaboration, as “a hippie.”
Throughout the evening, Nara kept following up her mother’s remarks with explanations. This was ostensibly to augment the mom’s middling English. Nara’s amplifications about Indonesian culture were helpful, but very often she tried to temper her mother, who was clearly a woman of strong opinions.
“By ‘hippie’ she merely means unconventional,” said Nara.
I smiled at her and then Mrs. Darmadi and said, “Nara, your mother and I understand each other perfectly,” to which the mom responded with the same brief downstroke of her chin I had seen from her daughter a hundred times. Nara always described herself as ‘sheltered.’ But her mother was far more worldly than the homebound Muslim woman Nara portrayed, and I realized it was the mom’s sharp judgments that had left her daughter feeling hemmed in.
I departed a few minutes before ten. When I opened the front door downstairs, I faced more rain and remembered that I’d left my slicker in the closet. I went back up, knocked several times, and finally used my key to let myself in, calling out “I’m back.” They did not seem to hear me with the tap running and dishes clattering in the kitchen.
As I opened the closet, I overheard fragments of their conversation. During the evening, Mrs. Darmadi had occasionally addressed Nara in Javanese, which her daughter had answered either in English, for my benefit, or Dutch, when she didn’t approve of what her mother was saying. But now the mom had succumbed and they were having a mild quarrel in Dutch. In six months, I had gotten to the point where I could understand more than half of what I heard, although it would be a long time before I dared to speak, since I was befuddled by the grammar. Nonetheless, the mom, as a non-native speaker, talked much more slowly than Nara and thus was easier to track.
The water was turned off for a moment, allowing me to clearly hear Nara’s mother saying, “Nice.” ‘Aardig’ was the word she used, a mild compliment. “That is not what troubles me. It is highly inappropriate for you to be living with a man who is not your husband, let alone one with whom you are so obviously fascinated. You turn to him like a flower to the sun. No wonder you are having difficulties in your marriage.”
“Mother!” Narawanda answered. “Mr. Ten Boom has nothing to do with the problems between Lewis and me. We have been isolated from one another for years.”
The mother answered as mothers do, “Ja, ja,” agreeing but not agreeing at all.
I padded out like a burglar, willing myself to pretend I had heard none of that. It was only when I got back to the front door of the building that I realized I’d forgotten the slicker again. I turned up my collar and headed into the rain.