In Attila’s office, I had seen the pictures of her place in northern Kentucky, but in the height of summer, the farm and the surrounding landscape had a lushness and serenity that photography could never reflect. She lived about an hour from the Cincinnati airport, halfway to Louisville, outside of Carrollton. The site overlooked a tranquil stretch of the Ohio River, closely resembling the River Kindle beside which I’d passed much of my life, a bluish satin ribbon between the low green hills. Following GPS to the address I’d received from Merriwell’s assistant, I found myself at a call box beside yet another set of gold-tipped iron gates.
A woman answered, her accent distinct even as she said hello, and I gave my name, adding I was a friend of Attila’s. I was prepared to be refused—She’s not home, She’s busy, She’s sick, She doesn’t know you, Go way—but the motorized gates swung open, and I proceeded up a drive of fancy French pavers a good quarter of a mile. The house, all white stone but with Georgian looks in the grand McMansion style, was at the top of a knob behind several acres of velvety lawn, amid areas of deep woods.
Attila’s beautiful wife, a stately-looking woman even in her jeans, made her leisurely way from the house to greet me. She had straight black hair, shining like ravens’ wings, halfway down her back, and blue eyes that stood out from fifty feet.
I left the car and introduced myself. She was Valeria.
“Attila at store,” she said. “Back soon.” She sounded Russian or Polish, and not long from the boat. “You funny name. Remember from Attila.”
She offered coffee while I waited, and showed me in, past the stout oak doors at the entry, which were tooled with a coat of arms that I’m sure had nothing to do with Attila or her. The sleek kitchen, with its marble counters and appliances hidden in the sycamore cabinetry, was straight from a design magazine, and rivaled the luxe features I’d seen at Ellen and Howard’s.
Valeria produced a cup of coffee from a chrome device across the room, then seated herself on a black leather stool on one side of the counter and pointed me to another. The air grew a little thicker as I tried to figure out how to start a conversation.
“How did you meet Attila?” I asked.
She smiled thinly. “Bought me,” she said.
It had to be the accent, I figured.
“I’m sorry, but I thought you said she bought you.”
Valeria managed a grimly ironic smile. The story, even as she struggled with language, was riveting. Valeria was from Tiraspol in Moldova, where the post-Communist transition to a market economy had created a desperate time of cascading inflation, no work, and little food.
“Woman, Taja, say ‘Come Italy, be waitress.’” Taja took Valeria’s passport, supposedly in order to obtain Italian work permits. But once Taja had possession of the document, Valeria, along with four other girls, was forced at knifepoint into a horse van, in which they were driven for hours. Eventually, they found themselves on a small boat, making a nighttime passage into Bosnia. There she and approximately twenty other young women were taken to a barn and at gunpoint instructed to remove all their clothing. After inspection, they were sold. The woman who bought Valeria owned a club near Tuzla.
“Very mean, this woman. All the time she say her sons, ‘Bitter, bitter.’” Beat her, I realized. “Still hear when sleep.”
The first time Valeria was told to have sex with a patron, she refused. As it turned out, the bar owner had a customer who paid well for the right to be the first to beat and rape each of the women.
“We live four girls in room behind bar. This also place for meet with customers. Smells? Dirty rubbers on floor. Never wash sheets. Sleep six hours maybe. One time each day food, but four, five man. And she, boss lady, she say, ‘Escape? You got no work paper. I call police, they take you jail.’”
Valeria was told that after six months the debt she supposedly owed the club owner for the cost of bringing her here would be considered repaid and her passport returned. Instead, as the date approached, the owner informed Valeria that she had a new boss, who’d paid 3,000 deutsche marks for her.
“Was Attila. Seen before around bar. Was man, I’m thinking.” She again briefly deployed her taut smile. “Attila take me her house. Give me clothes, food. Say, ‘You want leave, leave. But you so beautiful, I cry.’ I say, ‘Okay, few days.’ Attila good. Very good. Very kind. Love very much. Here now, have everything.” She raised her long hands toward the kitchen and heaven above.
I pondered the obvious question, but after you screwed to stay alive, I would imagine tenderness made a big impression.
“Do you have friends here?”
“Some. Church. But Skype now all day with Moldova. Attila say, ‘How you learn English, talk all day Romanian?’ Understand English good. But can’t speak.”
I told her about my struggles with Dutch in the last several months. The front door slammed then.
“Hey, baby, who’s here?” Attila sang. She sounded lighthearted, but hung on the threshold when she saw me.
“Boom,” she said. She approached very slowly and shook my hand without the usual vigor. Her odd complexion was sunburned and her fashion sense had not improved. She wore plastic flip-flops, jeans cinched with a rope, and a T-shirt that did a good job of obscuring any sign of gender. “What the fuck you doin here, man?”
“I wanted to ask you some questions.”
“I thought you guys couldn’t investigate in the US.”
I had already guessed why Attila had headed for home so suddenly.
“We can’t,” I said. “This is for my own sake.”
“Just you and me?”
“I’ll tell Goos.”
“That’s all? Like it never happened? I just don’t want to get my dumb half-black, half-Hungarian ass in any deep roughage.”
“Did you do something wrong, Attila?”
“Well, fuck yeah, I did. You probably know that by now, don’t you, Boom?”
I wasn’t ready to give her any clues.
“I know you gave me a pretty good line,” I said.
“Not really,” she answered. “Mostly it was about what I didn’t say. I like you, Boom. I told you all along those Gypsies weren’t dead.”
“But you didn’t tell me you hid them.”
I had her with that. She didn’t stir for a second as she watched me.
“It was that fuckin GPS, wasn’t it?” She meant the one transponder that had briefly showed up on the aerial photographs. “Tell me true, Boom. Do I need to get myself a damn lawyer?”
“Look, Attila. If I report what you tell me, either at the Court or to anybody in the US, I’m the one who’ll end up in trouble, because I have no permission to be here asking questions.”
She considered whether that was good enough. I threw down my ace.
“I spoke with Merry yesterday.”
“Huh,” she said, then went to what proved to be a refrigerated drawer in the huge central island and poured an ice tea in a mason jar. After making another for me, she led me outside to the screened porch. The air was thick here, far more humid than I’d felt in a while, but a breeze rose off the river, and there was a lovely view of the serene water idling below. We were high enough that the birds and dragonflies zagged over the trees at eye level.
I told her some of what I’d discovered: the light arms, Iraq.
“I have lots of questions,” I said. “But maybe we should start with a simple one. How the hell did a bunch of Gypsies end up with guns to sell to Kajevic?”
“Who told you that?”
“Is it untrue?”
“Fuck no, it ain’t untrue. I’m just tryin to figure how you found out is all. You’re good, Boom. You and Goos. You’re good at your job.”
“I’m too old for you to tell me how pretty I am, Attila. How about just letting me hear the whole story.”
She looked at her mug, while using her nail-bitten index finger to draw a figure in the moisture gathered on the glass. Her gaze was still there as she said, “You know, I ain’t a bad person, Boom. I’m really not. I was tryin to do right by everybody. You’ll see that’s so. Sometimes you just get deeper and deeper in shit.”
I nodded, but hesitated to provide any spoken comfort. I’d heard a lot of similar excuses in my law office.
“You know,” she said, “Merry takes the blame for this whole arms-to-Iraq thing, but I’m still believin it was your buddy Roger’s idea. Whoever, it was purely fugazi, man. All this top-secret crap. The whole operation was run on the intelligence side with private contractors. Our armed forces never touched those weapons, probably so they’d have deniability.
“And don’t you know, two days after the first transport takes off for Iraq I’m getting all these freaked-out calls from the Green Zone in Baghdad about where in the hell did the weapons go? And it’s not two weeks before a telex arrives from Army Intelligence. They’re recovering assault rifles from Al Qaeda in Iraq, which have either the serial numbers we’d recorded or our laser engraving, usually both. You know, the Iraqis tried to torch off the identifiers before they sold the firearms, but they were as good at that as they were anything else.
“Okay. So bad enough we sent 200,000 small arms to Iraq to kill Americans, but no more than two weeks later, right after I start hearing about where these weapons are endin up, Roger calls me to say we’ve got to send a second shipment, 300,000 more. And I’m like, Fuck you, I’m not in business to kill US soldiers, or Canadian soldiers or British soldiers or anybody else on my side. And he’s like, You don’t understand shit about what’s goin down here. It’s bedlam. We need to reestablish the police and the military, and if 50,000 guns walk away, then that’s what happens. And besides, did you ever hear about following fucking orders? I can replace your worthless ass with one phone call.” Attila paused to wag her chin. “Hate that prick,” she said.
“I thought you were explaining how the Roma got the guns they sold Kajevic.”
“I am.”
“How’s that?”
“Cause there was a bunch of Gypsy drivers standing around in my office when I got that last call from Roger.”
“Why were they in your office?”
“Payday. Those Roma don’t know from bank accounts, so I had to give them their wages in cash. And Boom, I’m a big boy—how I run my company, I’m the only one who handles large amounts of currency. Just fact.”
“And who exactly was there with you when you had that argument with Roger?”
Attila lifted her face and squinted at me.
“Have you got that jackass Ferko in your pocket?”
“Attila, just answer me.”
She pouted briefly.
“Well, I argued like that with Roger more than once, and I can’t say who-all was there for sure, but it must have been six, seven of them. Boldo. Ferko, I imagine, and Boldo’s dumb brother, Refke, cause they was almost always with Boldo. Three or four others who’d driven that week.”
“Remind me about Boldo. How did you know him?”
“Boldo? You go on the Internet and you Google ‘anus,’ there’s gonna be a great big picture of Boldo right there. He’d been in Dubrava prison in Kosovo up until maybe a month before the Roma got torched out in Mitrovica in ’99.”
“What was he in prison for?”
Attila shrugged. “How I heard, he sliced up some guy in a bar. Maybe it was thievin. He was a real thief. Anyway, NATO bombed the prison and the Serbians overran it and let the non-Muslims go. So Boldo was with the whole Gypsy mob when they came to Bosnia. And pretty much the Big Man there. Over time, Boldo got into chop-shoppin, and stealin cars, too.”
“And you employed him anyway?”
“That’s why I hired that whole lot, Boom. Do I want them rippin my trucks? I had them on payroll so they’d leave my shit alone. Plus that kept anybody else from boostin my equipment, seein as how Boldo was the main place you’d go to move it. I mean,” said Attila, peeking at me, “it’s business.”
“And how many of them were in this group?”
“There was maybe ten in all I’d see from time to time.”
“Names?”
Attila scratched her chin and looked upward to recall. She came up with about six names, Ion among them.
“All right,” I said. “So we’re in your office. You get a call and you and Roger have this intense argument while these Gypsy drivers are standing around waiting to be paid.”
“Right. And when I get off the phone, I just lose my shit. I mean it’s a real and total hissy fit. I’m rattling on in English, throwing shit at the wall, while these guys are just starin with no clue. ‘Fuck me if I’m gonna send guns to Iraq to arm Al Qaeda, even for Layton fuckin Merriwell. Fuck me if I’m gonna let the fuckin Iraqis steal this shit that thousands of NATO soldiers have risked their lives to collect. Fuck me, fuck me. If I had any real stones, I’d steal those fuckin guns myself and send them someplace where they wouldn’t be shootin Americans.’ I went on and on how Merriwell had lost his mind. Only I forgot one thing, Boom.”
“Which was?”
“Boldo spoke English. He was the only one. The rest of them didn’t even speak Bosnian well. But Boldo, he understood every word.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah, ouch,” said Attila. “Like there goes my clearance if anyone hears I was so loose with all that classified shit. I mean, Boom, I told you a long time ago: I talk too much. I’ve been stepping on my dick like that my whole life. I just always think I’m so fuckin entertaining.” She stopped with her narrow shoulders drawn and seemed to reflect for a second about herself.
“Any rate, I finally done like I was told and pooled another 300,000 or so light arms. And the last transport is about to fly off for Iraq from Comanche. We actually held it for a couple hours waitin for the final convoy, and these Gypsy so-and-so’s drag in tellin this tale bout how six of the trucks got hot-wired overnight and are gone. I didn’t think all that much of it at first. I wanted to get the planes off the ground. I telexed Roger and everybody else in Iraq, and we reported this to the Bosnian police and the NATO criminal investigators.
“But a day later, it ain’t sittin right with me. I looked at the reports that were taken from Boldo and Ferko and the rest of the crew, and they hadn’t even bothered to match out their stories. No two of them said the same about where they were overnight, or what the bad guys looked like, or even how the six that had their trucks stole got back to Barupra.
“So I go tearin off for the refugee camp to find Boldo. I come the back way into the valley and I hike up to the Cave, and you know what I see? Merry’s weapons. Thousands of them. Zastavas. And ammo. Mortars and RPGs.
“Boldo comes down like he’s a king and we really got into it. And the jagoff, you know what he says? ‘You told me to steal these guns. All these guys heard you.’
“And I’m like, ‘If I tell you to go fuck yourself right now, are you gonna do that, too?’
“And he’s like, ‘I’ll give you half what I get. I think I already have a customer for some of this.’
“And I’m like, ‘You numbnuts moron, you may know all about stealing cars, but you don’t know shit about this stuff. These weapons are marked. You try sellin them and the first guy who gets caught with one, he’ll be giving law enforcement your name faster than he says his own. NATO will be up your rectum with a router and a flashlight. You’re going straight back to prison.’ All of which was true.
“But Boldo hears all this, and smiles and says, ‘Yeah, but you said to steal ’em.’
“He was screwin with me, naturally. But he wasn’t stupid. If I turned in Boldo to the Bosnians or NATO, he would repeat everything he overheard on the phone, about Al Qaeda and the Iraqis and Merriwell, and say I was the one who decided to steal a few weapons to do what little I could to stop that. So the upshot would be I’d end up fuckin Merriwell, I’d lose my job and my clearance, and I’d have to deal with Boldo and his gang lyin on me.”
I lifted a finger to interrupt.
“But you didn’t tell him to steal the guns, right, Attila?”
She bolted back from the table.
“Fuck, Boom.” She scowled at me.
“Is the answer no?”
“No. The answer is Fuck No. Never. You don’t believe that, do you?” In her vulnerable moments, Attila was easy to read and she clearly was wounded, but I still took a second to be certain about what I thought.
“I don’t,” I said then. I reminded her where she was in the story, which was her confrontation with Boldo outside the Cave. Attila’s narrow shoulders trembled with a sigh before she plunged back in.
“So okay, gotta make lemonade out of lemons, right? I tell Boldo, ‘Fuckjob, you bury these guns right here. Right in the Cave. That’s the last you or me or anyone else ever sees of them.’ As for the trucks, that’s more trouble than it’s worth, if they turn up again. So I say to Boldo, ‘This is all you’re gettin out of this. You can chop these trucks and sell the parts. But you assholes are done driving for me. That’s over.’
“I actually stand there for a while to watch Boldo start piecing out the first vehicle.
“Anyway, no more than three days later, I get a message on my cell from Ferko, who’s just about wettin himself he’s so scared. He literally wants to meet in a cellar and makes me swear on the lives of the children I don’t have, that I’ll never let any of this bounce back on him. Apparently, Boldo encountered some scumbag kid in one of the sex clubs outside Tuzla and agreed to sell him two trucks and a hundred AKs, and Boldo sent Ferko and a couple others to deliver the shit in Doboj.
“But the guys who received the equipment, every single one of them had the Arkan tattoo—it’s a roaring tiger—right on their hands. And more than one is laughin about how ‘the president’ loves that he got these weapons off the Americans. And the kid is some kind of relative to Kajevic and keeps talking about ‘Laza.’ And I mean, Ferko, he ain’t no intellect, but he’s a survivor.
“Ferko goes runnin back to Boldo and says, ‘I think we just sold shit to Kajevic,’ and Boldo laughs in his face. ‘Who cares? NATO and the Americans won’t know anything about this. They haven’t caught Kajevic for ten years and there’s barely any of them left to catch him now.’
“Now Ferko, there’s a lot here he don’t like. First off, he don’t like Boldo. Nobody does. He especially don’t like Kajevic, who killed lots of Gypsies. And he don’t like losin his job with me either, since I pay better than Boldo. But worst of all, what he really don’t care for is gettin caught. Because he knows that if the Bosnians ever get wind that he had to do with sellin weapons to Kajevic, they will peel the flesh off him one square inch at a time and fill each wound with that famous Tuzla salt. No exaggeration. None at all. And thanks to Boldo, he, Ferko, is the guy everybody in Doboj saw deliverin that shit.”
“So you got Ferko to tell Army Intelligence about Kajevic?”
“No, Boom, I went to Intelligence. Was me. I said, ‘I have this Gypsy driver who swears some of them sold some black-market shit to these guys hiding out in Doboj and he’s sure it’s Kajevic.’
“Of course, Intelligence, they’re like, ‘Well, we gotta talk to him,’ and I’m like, ‘Negative on that. Gypsies don’t rat out Gypsies. The Roma won’t just drown this bird in Lake Pannonica. They’ll excommunicate his whole family.’ Which is true by the way. ‘Here’s the coordinates,’ I tell them. ‘Do a surveillance and see for yourselves.’”
“But you didn’t mention the weapons Ferko delivered?”
“Never. I said the guy I heard this from was a car thief, and that’s all I know. I was tryin to cover Ferko. And Merry. Even that prick Roger. And me. If they balled up Boldo, he’d blame it all on me. After all, I’m a fuckin white man.”
“So to speak.”
She smiled. “So to speak.” She took a second to raise her thumb to her teeth. The determination with which she bit and tore at herself was not pleasant to watch. “But, Boom, honest to God, it never dawned on me that Intelligence wouldn’t realize Kajevic and his Tigers were armed to the teeth. How fuckin stupid do you have to be to know an arms convoy has gone missin thirty kilometers away and not wonder if Kajevic got some of that shit? But it’s the military, Boom. One hand don’t know about the other. The NATO guys who are looking for my trucks have decided it was jihadis who stole them. And to this day, I don’t know why. Some hot tip they had.
“So Kajevic was waitin for Special Forces with firepower they flat-ass never figured on. We got four dead Americans and eight more in various states of blown-to-shit, and I’m in deeper now than I could ever imagine.
“And within a week, it gets worse. First, Kajevic has sent word that he’s shootin every Roma in Barupra, and Ferko is givin me that I gotta protect him and them.
“And Intelligence, they are just beside themselves. They don’t need nobody to tell them they screwed the pooch, and they’re tryin to figure how. And they come back on me sayin, ‘No bullshit now, we gotta talk to your source.’
“So instead, after about a day I tell them the truth. Sort of. I say, ‘I looked a little harder, and them damn Gypsies spun me. They stole weapons from that convoy and sold them to Kajevic and they still have thousands more. And now, because my guy did the right thing and told me about Kajevic, him and his Tigers want to come back and wipe out the whole camp.’
“And of course, the Intelligence guys at first, they’re saying, ‘Sounds like a good idea, fuck those fuckers anyway. We sure as shit ain’t gonna protect a bunch of people who sold out our troops.’
“I’m like, ‘Understood, only we got some very big problems here. Which are gonna undermine our whole mission in this country. First, if those guns the Roma stole get sold to the Tigers or the Scorpions or some other paramilitary, who knows what hell they’ll raise? Or who gets killed or wounded tryin to disarm them? Maybe those Gypsy fuckers do what NATO thought and deliver those weapons to a bunch of jihadis who send them to Hezbollah. Or imagine Kajevic actually does go into Barupra and kills them all. How does all this peacekeeping shit look after that? There ain’t no happy ending here. We gotta do something and we gotta do it quick.’
“And the guys I’m talkin to, they say, ‘Well, we’ll take this to HQ,’ and I’m like, ‘You kick this upstairs and they’ll all pull their puds for a week, and somethin bad will happen in the meanwhile.’ Merry had just left and the new NATO commanders, they were still scoutin around for the latrines.
“Naturally, the intel guys ask, ‘Well, you got a better idea?’ And I do. ‘Let’s get rid of the weapons and get rid of the Gypsies, too,’ I say. ‘Take the fuckers back to where they came from. We’ll let my guy—’”
“Your guy is Ferko?”
“Exactly. Let my guy stay here and say these masked men came in there and killed the rest of them.
“And you know, Boom, it wasn’t such a bad plan. It had to be a vigilante kind of thing, cause no one in command would ever sign off on it. But it was no lack of volunteers from Intelligence.
“So here I am finally directing an armed operation. Everybody had creds as CoroDyn civilian employees, and typed orders from NATO to cross the border. We timed it so Ferko and his sons and sons-in-laws were the sentries that night. We drove in from the back, on the mine side, and glided down into the valley, then secured the Cave and double-timed up into the village on foot. I knew Boldo would be sleepin with an AK, literally, so we surrounded his dumpy little hut to start. But Boldo, man, Boldo wasn’t hearin this Hands-up shit.”
“Who shot him?” I asked.
“Me. First, at least. I didn’t wait long neither when I saw that assault rifle in his hands. Twenty years in the Army, Boom, and I never shot at anything but a target before that. I probably could have waited another second, probably. I mean, I hated the fucker. But still. I don’t know. But once the bullets start flyin, people get nervous.” She peeked up at me. “This combat shit is way overrated,” she said. She reflected a second on that.
“And you know, once one guy pulls the trigger, everybody wants to. And that’s how that poor boy got shot. By some lame-ass kid not much older than him. And Boom, I just stood there thinkin, Okay, now, you’re the one who figures everything out, figure out how you’re gonna make this good. It just didn’t seem possible there wasn’t some way to turn around something that took just a skinny little part of a second.” Attila shook her head for a long time.
“What about the brother?”
“He was the same kind of jerk as Boldo. He wouldn’t let his damn life get saved. So there he goes, too.
“Joke is, the rest of it after that went down totally excellent—movin the Roma out, blowin the Cave. We had them in Kosovo and were back before Taps. And the Roma all took that stuff about Kajevic looking for them as gospel.”
“And Ferko’s reward for snitching was that he stayed and took over Boldo’s business?” I asked.
“Right. Somebody had to stick around to say, This is what happened. We needed the word to go out that the Roma were dead and gone.”
“And Ferko wasn’t worried about Kajevic?”
“You kiddin? He’d start to whimper whenever he heard Kajevic’s name. I wanted him to say Kajevic’s Tigers killed all the Roma, but Ferko was afraid to draw that kind of fire. Kajevic got what he wanted anyway. The Roma were gone. He probably thought the US had buried all them in the Cave.”
“I believe he did.”
“So it was what it was, sad and all: The Roma were gone and so were the arms Boldo stole. Until 2007 when your Gypsy honey showed up and said she’d heard these terrible rumors about a massacre and wanted an international investigation. I told Ferko just to blow her off, which he did several times, but then she says she’s got this idea about building up a circumstantial case, going to Mitrovica to find the relatives of the people in Barupra so they, the relatives, can say the Barupra people haven’t been heard from by any of their kin for years now. Well, that just sucks. If she starts in walkin round Mitrovica, jabberin in Romany, sooner or later she’ll know the whole damn story. And she’s no ordinary Gypsy.”
“Hardly,” I said.
“She’s going to start in demanding records and raisin hell in the newspapers. I called Roger.”
“You were back on speaking terms?”
“Not really. But he wasn’t about to ignore my call.”
“And what did you want from Roger?”
“I thought maybe he could get the Kosovars to keep her outta the country. Which he couldn’t. At least, that’s what he said.”
“And did you tell Roger then that the Roma from Barupra were alive?”
Attila stared down, pinching her thighs as she was thinking.
“I started, but he didn’t want to hear any of that. He told me the Gypsies were my problem. But he didn’t mince no words that what happened with the shit we sent to Iraq still had a top-secret classification. People were talkin about Merry bein president, so all the ins and outs with those weapons, who stole what when, would get a lot of attention that would probably sink us all if reporters or the GAO got hold of it.
“So we couldn’t let Esma get to Kosovo. I told Ferko, ‘You gotta talk to her and convince her everybody in Barupra is dead.’”
“What was in it for Ferko?”
“Well, I paid him for one thing. But there wasn’t anything he’d done he wanted to go braggin about neither—waylaying a convoy of weapons, or sellin to Kajevic, or tippin me off? There was plenty he needed to hide. So best for everybody if she bought that story.”
Attila had been pretty shy about looking at me, but she faced me now, as she continued fingering the mason jar.
“So, okay. Do I sound like just the biggest dick so far?”
“Keep talking, Attila. I’ll tell you what I think when I’ve heard the whole story.”
Attila caught sight of one of her dogs outside doing something naughty and she got up to yell at the pooch. Through the screens, the black dog came into view, slinking off in shame.
“Can I jump ahead a little?” I said, when Attila again sat in her wrought-iron chair. “I understand that you didn’t want Esma going to Kosovo. But why in the hell did Ferko have to testify in my case?”
“I told him not to. There was nothin to gain from that. Nothin. But, you know, over time, man, he got to be sort of fascinated with the Gypsy lady. Real interested in makin her happy. He never quite said so, but I was pretty convinced she was lickin his lollipop now and then, when there was something she wanted.”
Goos had overheard Ferko saying to Esma in Barupra, ‘I want what you promised.’ I thought I had her figured out the other day in Manhattan, but with Esma you never got to the bottom. In bed, she lied to no one. She could make Ferko—or Akemi—or me believe what she needed to, because she could abandon herself to it. That was one of the great advantages of having a personality without real boundaries. She was compelling, as Merry said. The sociopaths always were.
Attila said, “I told the dumbfuck, ‘If you’re really gonna testify, you better do it well. You get up there and lose your shit, we’re all in deep—including your people back in Kosovo. Kajevic will have a team of Tigers on the first train if he knows they’re all alive. You better do just like she tells you.’ Seems like he enjoyed all the rehearsing.” Attila rolled her lips into her mouth to suppress a lurid little smile. “Still and all, I can’t believe folks were dumb enough to believe a Gypsy.”
“Like me, you mean.”
“Your dick believed him,” Attila said. I was inclined to quarrel, but there was no point.
“Did Ferko actually bury Boldo and his relatives in Barupra?”
“Nope. We carried those bodies with us to Kosovo. Boldo’s people, you know, they were the only ones we were afraid wouldn’t stick with the program. But they were terrified. They knew Kajevic would be lookin to kill them first. And I gave Ferko money to send them every month, sayin it was their cut of the business. When your investigation started, Ferko found a couple grave robbers to bring the bodies back to Barupra.”
“And who reburied them?”
“Ferko. He wanted me to help, but I’m like, ‘This is on you, dude. This is all because you wanna testify.’”
“And he tossed a couple of rounds in there to make it look good?” I asked.
Attila’s murky eyes rose to the ceiling.
“I think I told him to do that.” She nodded, and bit again on her fingernails. She was bleeding from one of the cuticles. “So whatta you say, Boom? Am I just this big douche who got away with all kinds of stuff? I really was tryin to do good every step of the way. I was. But there were seven people dead in Bosnia inside of a month on account of me and those bang-bangs, and eight more wounded. And I know it. I really do. I ain’t proud or anything. I fucked up. I think about it all the time. But I ain’t a bad person, Boom. I’m really not.”
Attila liked to present herself as a hard case, but her tiny eyes were welling as they searched me for my appraisal.
I had heard this declaration—I’m not bad—in some form from many clients over the years, and I often used the preacher’s piety about not judging any person by his worst acts. But Attila was speaking from a deeper place of need. She had been told much of her early life that there was something wrong with her, and she wanted my comfort.
But justice is supposed to be unsparing. She’d empowered me to pronounce judgment and I was going to do it.
“First, Attila, you can wrap yourself in the flag and talk about the troops in Iraq and protecting Merry and Roger, but this was about you, first and foremost. Your security classification. Your company. Your money. I know all that means a lot to you, and I understand why. But that’s no excuse.”
She chucked her head around, seemingly agreeing. I wasn’t sure she really thought I was right, but she wasn’t going to argue.
“Second, I don’t buy that you were surprised you ended up having to kill Boldo. I think you went to Barupra expecting that. You knew Boldo would believe the Tigers were there for him, and that he’d be better off making them shoot him, rather than getting captured and tortured.”
Attila rubber-mouthed a second. This time she shook her head.
“If he’d have come out with his hands up, Boom, he’d be fat and happy in Kosovo, stealin whatever he could. But I wasn’t gonna count to three and see how many of us he could kill. The AK was loaded, Boom. You sayin you wouldn’t have shot him?”
“No, I’d have shot him, too. But I’d have realized when I hatched this plan that it probably was going to involve killing a man, and I hope I would have thought twice about the whole escapade for that reason. I know Boldo was an asshole, Attila. But generally speaking, that’s not a crime punishable by death. Let alone for two more people who were basically blameless.”
She looked down at the table like a second grader. I had the feeling my evaluation had taken her by surprise.
“And third, and most important to me, Attila, very few of the people in Barupra had done anything to deserve getting deported at gunpoint. NATO could have guarded that camp from Kajevic. But you wanted to get the Gypsies and what they knew the hell out of Bosnia to keep them silent. So the Roma are getting lead poisoning in Kosovo for two reasons: First to cover your ass. And second to give a bunch of Intelligence guys, who were sore and ashamed that they hadn’t figured on Kajevic being heavily armed, a chance to take out their sorrows on somebody else. And the Gypsies have always been useful for that purpose.”
“I fucked up, Boom. Like I said. I’m not really askin you to forgive me.”
“I don’t forgive you, Attila. You’re walking away from this with no punishment. That’s as much comfort as you’re going to get from me. I won’t pat you on the back and say you can just forget about it now.”
We locked eyes at that point, a long look, until she suddenly rose in her herky-jerky way and fled the table.
I stood to look at the river and the bluff. The dogs, both black labs, were chasing around in the yard. I could see a far-off pasture with a fence where several horses, Appaloosas, were standing around, flicking their tails at the flies. I enjoyed the full air and the richness of summer for a minute or so, then I followed Attila into the huge kitchen, where I found her with her back to me and her arms around her wife, who was a good head taller.
I stood a moment, then said, “You have a good woman, Attila.”
She started nodding, while she picked up a paper napkin from the counter, using it to wipe her nose and eyes. When she turned my way, her face was bright red.
“We can agree about that, Boom. Good woman’s hard to find. Hope you have some better luck. I warned you about the Gypsy lady, didn’t I?”
“That you did.”
Attila invited me to stay for dinner but I meant what I had said. I wasn’t going to sit at her table and pretend nothing was wrong. I sent more than one person to the penitentiary whom I ended up liking for their honesty or their humor, or even because they were at core far better people than they’d been in a weak moment when they’d given in to impulse or the influence of someone else. And I liked Attila. And felt for her. And accepted that things had gotten away from her. But she’d wreaked havoc in many lives.
I kissed Valeria good-bye. Attila saw me out and we shook hands beside my rental car in her driveway.
“Where you go from here?” Attila asked.
The question startled me, because I realized only now how hard I’d been avoiding it. I still had no long-term answer. I could feel a pit starting to open in my chest, a bit of it nerves, but most of it absence.
“I’m taking my sons to a ball game tomorrow. After that, I’d prefer to return to The Hague,” I said. “I like the Court. I believe in what they do. But I’m not sure the stars are in the right place for me to go back.”
I could see Attila’s inner busybody calculating, but she seemed to recognize that we were no longer on a footing where she was free to ask.
“Hope it all works out,” she said. She gave me another brooding look, still yearning for the forgiveness she wasn’t going to get from me, then slapped my shoulder and headed back inside.
When that beautiful front door of hers slammed, I more or less slid into the emotional sinkhole that had begun to trickle open inside me a second before. I had arrived at that moment I’d feared a few months ago in The Hague, confronting the reality that my extended efforts at renewal had gotten me nowhere. I was approaching fifty-five years old and had done my level best to give myself a chance to be happy. I’d tried to do the right things and figure out what mattered. But here I was. The bad guys, whoever they were, weren’t getting punished. The people of Barupra were suffering in Kosovo. And I was still without a home. What the hell, anyway?
I touched the auto’s start button beside the wheel, but my phone, in my shirt pocket, began to vibrate. My heart spurted and I was suddenly high with hope.
It was Nara.