“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.”