“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.’