“And why is it you’re still here?” I asked. “Your wife?”
“Nope. Met my wife here, but she’s a hell of a lot happier in the US. I gotta go home to see her, isn’t that somethin? Why I’m still here is cause the US Army had hired thousands of Bosnian civilians. Speak English. Clean records. Security clearances. And best, most of them are Muslims, which means they know the rules in Islamic countries. So after the US withdrew, I basically set up an employment agency. I supply Bosnian workers for US military support operations all over the Mideast. Iraq, Afghanistan. Kuwait, Saudi. My people make a good buck and so do I. They work for a year, come back, fuck the wife and buy a house or a car, and then take another assignment. I had four thousand people on my payroll at one point; still more than fifteen hundred. And in the meantime, I bought all the vehicles CoroDyn had no more use for in Bosnia and I rent them out. Like I said, I’m rich, man.”
“And you stay in touch with General Merriwell?”
“Try. Merry was never one of those generals who didn’t know the names of his NCOs. He give me a call two weeks ago about this massacre bullshit, when he was deciding whether to talk to you, and I phoned him back today to hear how it went. And he says he thinks we should be helping you out. That’s all I need to know. I’ll tell you this about Layton Merriwell. I’d lay down my life for the motherfucker. How many generals you think there were in the US Army that’d look at a bull dyke cross-dressing half-breed and say, ‘That’s one fuckin smart soldier, I got her back’? I’m here in Bosnia livin like a king, I got a wife at home in a goddamn mansion, and I owe it all to Merry. So he says help you, here I am.”
I laughed again, enjoying Attila, who seemed to equate speaking with pageantry. I thought she might give me an honest answer to one persistent riddle.
“And why is Merriwell doing that? Trying to help? Do you understand?”
“Well, he didn’t say nothin to explain, but I kinda think I get it. You know, one day everybody from the president of the US on down is suckin your dick and sayin you’re the greatest military commander since Eisenhower, and then all the sudden it’s a headline that you’re this dogbreath jerk that wouldn’t be welcome in most alleys. Try telling yourself you don’t care what people think of you then. So Merry—this is how I figure—Merry is all about his reputation as a commander. Okay, he stuck his pecker in a meat grinder, and everybody laughs instead of salutes when he walks by, but what he’s thinking is, History’s on my side. Eventually, it won’t be about who he was fucking, but the way he led our troops. But not if there’s this story going around that NATO’s first-ever combat operation included burying four hundred people alive in a coal mine. Then he’s just a flat-ass fuckin failure.”
Attila’s theory about Merriwell seemed fairly convincing, although the desire for historical redemption could almost as easily lead the general to lie. But assuming Attila was correct, it made even more remarkable what Merriwell had said to me a few nights back—that when it came to Jamie St. John, he would do it all again.
I asked if Attila had known the major.
“Jamie? Sure. You knew Merriwell, you knew her. She was all the time as close behind him as a fart. Smart, nice shape, no beauty queen. Really good soldier. And always treated me with respect. She was a real person. And Merriwell and her, man, they had it going on. You would have needed the Jaws of Life to extract him from that pussy. He was gettin it like he’d never gotten it before. And good for him, too. Why die wondering, you know?”
Why, indeed. The Jaws of Life had never had to be applied to me, at least not at any time in my memory. I doubted I was better off for that.
“You hungry anyway?” Attila asked. “There won’t be anything open by the time we get to Tuzla. Nice city, but not exactly Manhattan.”
We stopped at a roadside place Attila knew for cevapi, which occupied the same space in the Bosnian diet as a hamburger in the US. They were highly seasoned little logs of ground lamb and beef, served like a gyros on pita with onions and sauce. I enjoyed the cevapi a great deal, but not the trip to the squat toilet in the restaurant, which immediately ensued. There is nothing like the plumbing fixtures to remind you that you’re not in Kansas anymore.
By the time we were back in the car, night was full upon us. In the dark, this part of Bosnia, which I could see only in outline, seemed to resemble Colorado, with mountains of fir trees and A-frame houses, steep-roofed to shed the snow. I was starting to fight sleep, as I still needed to spend some time with Goos once we got to Tuzla. In order to stay awake, I wanted to keep Attila talking, which did not seem like much of a task.
“You mentioned a while ago the ‘bullshit’ I’m investigating.”
“That wasn’t personal, you know. It’s just bullshit.”
“What is?”
“That Americans had anything to do with killing Gypsies.”
“And what about the Roma being massacred? Do you believe that happened?”
“Well, they’re sure as shit gone. You know, with several thousand locals as employees, I heard all kinda stories. As soon as folks noticed that Barupra was a ghost town, the rumor started in that Kajevic got some old Arkans to bury those Gypsies alive. That bunch, the Tigers, they’d seal Granny in a cave if Kajevic said so.”
“And when was it you began hearing that?”
“Shit, I don’t know for sure. When did this supposedly happen? Spring 2004? By late summer, then. Maybe the fall.”
“And why would Kajevic kill four hundred Roma?”
Attila glanced over from the wheel with a telltale smile.
“You’re asking what folks were sayin, right? Cause this security clearance I got is very dear to me. I lose it, and I go back to Kentucky to shovel horse poop and do everything else on the honey-do list. Whatever I know from work, which ain’t much, I couldn’t tell you.”
“Understood. Just what you heard from the locals.”
“They was sayin it was the Roma who tipped the Army about where Kajevic was.”
I took just a second with that, so I didn’t lose my inquisitorial pace. But this pretty clearly was the fact Merriwell had been circling around.
“And how did the Roma know that?”
“Like I said. If I knew and I told ya, I’d have to poison your next cevapi.” She smiled broadly. “But don’t you have some big fuckin secret witness who supposedly was there? Ask him.”
The problem was that Ferko—at least according to Esma—knew nothing about any Roma involvement with Kajevic.
“And Kajevic,” I said. “He would really kill four hundred people for revenge? Women? Children?”
Attila just snorted.
“The guy’s been on the loose fifteen years now. You think that’s just because he’s got the right camouflage gear? He’s made it so if he walks into a supermarket in downtown Sarajevo, everybody turns to face the wall and acts like it would be worse than staring at Jehovah. Killing four hundred people, that’s as good as putting up a billboard that says, Talk and die.”
I said to Attila, “General Merriwell believes there is no way a massacre like that could have happened without American forces knowing.”
Attila responded by making the raspberries.
“Generals,” she said. “I mean, even that general. Sometimes they’d drink their own piss and think it was lemonade.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“But in April 2004,” I asked, “you were working around the American base, if I understand?”
“Every damn day.”
“And at that point—not in the summer, but in the spring—you never heard any Americans talk about the Roma disappearing from Barupra?”
“Not as how I recall.” I took a second to mull on that, and Attila looked over again from the wheel. “You don’t believe me?”