“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.
Author’s Note
So how much of this is true? Every novelist wants to answer that question the same way: All of it—and none.