Testimony (Kindle County Legal Thriller #10)
Scott Turow
For Adriane
Prologue
5 March 2015
“There were men,” said the witness. He was lean and dark, the color of an acorn, and seated beside his lawyer at the small table reserved for testimony, he appeared as tense as a sprinter on the starting line.
“How many men?” I said.
“Eighteen?” he asked himself. “More. Twenty? Twenty,” he agreed.
The witness’s name was Ferko Rincic, but in the records of the International Criminal Court, he would be identified solely as Witness 1. To protect him, a shade closed off the spectators’ section in the large courtroom, and electronically distorted versions of Ferko’s voice and image were being transmitted to the few onlookers, as well as over the Internet. Standing several feet away at the prosecutor’s table, I had just commenced my examination with the customary preliminaries: Ferko’s age—thirty-eight, he said, although he looked far older—and where he lived on April 27, 2004, which was the place they called Barupra in Bosnia.
“And about Barupra,” I said. “Did anyone share your house with you?”
Ferko was still turning to the right at the sound of the translator’s voice in his headphones.
“My woman. Three daughters. And my son.”
“How many children in all did you have?”
“Six. But two daughters, they already had men and lived with their families.”
I picked up a tiny photo, creased and forlorn with wear.
“And did you provide me with an old photograph of your family when you arrived this morning?”
Rincic agreed. I announced that the photo would be marked as Exhibit P38.
“Thirty-eight?” asked Judge Gautam, who was presiding. She was one of three judges on the bench, all watching impassively in their black robes, resplendent with cuffs and sashes of royal blue. Following the Continental custom, the same odd white linen cravat I also wore, called a ‘jabot,’ was tied beneath their chins.
“Now let me call your attention to the computer screen in front of you. Is that photo there, P38, a fair resemblance to how your family looked on April 27, 2004?”
“Daughter third, she was already much taller. Taller still than her mother.”
“But is that generally how you all appeared back then, you and your wife and those of your children still at home?”
He peered at the monitor again, his expression shrinking in stages to some form of resignation before at last saying yes.
I began another question, but Rincic suddenly stood up behind the witness table and waved at me, remonstrating in Romany, words the translator was too surprised to bother with. It took me an instant, therefore, to realize he was concerned about his photo. Esma Czarni, the English barrister who had initially brought Ferko’s complaint here to the International Criminal Court, rose beside him, drawing her torrents of dark hair close enough to briefly obscure Ferko while she sought to calm him. In the meantime, I asked the deputy registrar to return the old snapshot. When she had, Ferko studied it another second, holding it in both hands, before sliding the picture into his shirt pocket and resuming his place next to Esma.
“And in P38, is that your house directly behind you?”
He nodded, and Judge Gautam asked him to answer out loud, so the court reporter could record his response.
“And what about these other structures in the background?” I asked. “Who lived in those houses?” ‘House’ was generous. The dwellings shown were no better than lean-tos, each jerry-rigged from whatever the residents of Barupra had salvaged. Timbers or old iron posts had been forced into the ground and then draped most commonly with blue canvas tarpaulins or plastic sheeting. There were also chunks of building materials, especially pieces of old roofs, which had been scavenged from the wreckage of nearby houses destroyed in the Bosnian War. That war had been over for nine years in 2004, but there was still no shortage of debris, because no one knew which sites had been booby-trapped or mined.
“The People,” answered Ferko, about his neighbors.
“And is the word in Romany for ‘the People’ ‘Roma’?”
He nodded again.
“And to be clear for the record, a more vulgar word in English for the Roma is ‘Gypsies’?”
“‘Gypsy,’” Ferko repeated with a decisive nod. That might well have been the only word of English he knew.
“Well, we’ll say ‘Roma.’ Was it only Roma who lived in Barupra?”
“Yes, all Roma.”
“How many persons approximately?”
“Four hundred about.”
“And now let me ask you to look again at the computer screen. This will be Exhibit P46, Your Honors. Is that roughly how the village of Barupra appeared during the time you lived there?”
Esma had secured a couple of photos of Barupra and the surrounding area, taken in 2000 by one of the international aid agencies. The picture I was displaying showed the camp from a distance, a collection of ragged dwellings clinging together at the edge of a forbidding drop-off.
“And how long had you and the other Roma lived there?”
Ferko seesawed his head. “Five years?”
“And where had you and your family and the other people in Barupra—where had you been before that, if you can say?”
“Kosovo. We ran from there, 1999.”
“Because of the Kosovo War?”
“Because of the Albanians,” he answered with another dismal wobble of his head.
“So let us return then to the late hours of 27 April, 2004. About twenty men appeared in the Roma refugee camp at Barupra in Bosnia, correct?” We waited again for the laborious process of translation to unfold a floor above the courtroom, where the interpreters were positioned behind a window. My questions were transformed first from English to French—the International Criminal Court’s other official language—and then by a second translator into Romany, the Roma’s own tongue. The answer came back the same way, like a wave rippling off the shore, finally reaching me in the female translator’s plummy British accent. This time, though, the process was short-circuited.
“Va,” answered Rincic in Romany as soon as he heard the question in his language, adding an emphatic nod. We all understood that.
“And what nature of men were they?” I asked. “Did they appear to have any profession?”
“Chetniks.”
“And please describe to the Court what you mean by that word.”
I leaned down to Goos, the tall red-faced investigator assigned to the case, who was seated next to me at the foremost prosecutor’s desk.
“What the hell is a Chetnik?” I whispered. Up until that moment I had thought I was doing fairly well, having been on the job all of three days. There was nothing here I was familiar with—the courtroom, my colleagues, or the rigmarole of the International Criminal Court with its air of grave formality. The black robe I wore and the little doily of a tie beneath my chin made me feel as if I were in a high school play. This was also the first time in my life I had examined my own witness without the opportunity to speak to him in advance. I had first met Ferko Rincic in the corridor, only seconds before Esma escorted him into the courtroom. He had gripped the hand I offered merely by the fingertips in a mood of obvious distrust. I did not need anyone to tell me he would rather not have been here.
“They are supposed to be soldiers,” said Ferko of the Chetniks. “Mostly they are just killers.”
By now, Goos had inscribed his own note concerning the Chetniks in his uneven script on the pad between us: “Serb paramilitaries.”