“Welcome,” said Goos.
“I’m on another planet,” I told him. The mix of grogginess and jet lag made me feel like half my body was still in Kindle County.
“Drink?” Goos asked.
One of the desk clerks came over to pour a scotch for me, which I asked for as silent acknowledgment of Merriwell, who remained in mind after my talk with Attila. The clerk set down another beer for Goos at the same time, already familiar with his routine.
“Who was your driver?” Goos asked.
He laughed out loud in response to Attila’s name.
“Wanted to hire a few blokes to help out tomorrow,” said Goos, “and everybody says ‘Call Attila.’ Been trying to get hold of him all day.”
“Her, actually.”
Goos stared at the front door, through which Attila had departed.
“Really?” he asked.
“She said you sent her to pick me up, by the way.”
“Did she now? Not as how I reckon. Finally rang a taxi service to go get you.”
“I guess she owns it.”
“Tell you one thing, mate,” said Goos. “We won’t be using her as a translator. Those young folks over there said, ‘You think you’re the king around here, and here you are toting the man’s luggage,’ and he turned it all around so you should be honored. She,” Goos added.
The Blue Lamp had a contemporary appearance, comfortable but not fancy, with dark mahogany trim and white laminate fixtures in the compact spaces. A little breakfast area with a few white tables was visible behind Goos. Over the angled front desk, a large-screen TV displayed a slide show of Bosnian scenes—mountain glades, the Grand Mosque in Sarajevo, and an old Roman castle somewhere near Tuzla. The same images played on a smaller TV screen on the wall beside us.
I had e-mailed Goos over the weekend about the notion of going through NATO to get the US Army’s records. Before leaving The Hague, he had dug up the Status of Forces Agreement that Merry had referred to. Goos read it to me now off his phone.
“‘The receiving and sending States shall assist each other in the carrying out of all necessary investigations into offences,’ blah blah blah, ‘including producing evidence.’ Blah blah blah.”
“That’s pretty good,” I told him. “We can stand in the shoes of the Bosnians to demand the documents.”
Goos nodded. “Course, you lawyers will do what you always do, say none of those words mean what they say. Might be ten years before we’re close as cooee to those papers. But still, good thinking, Boom.”
“It wasn’t my idea,” I said. Given the legal issues, I had been careful about what I put on paper concerning my meeting with Merriwell. Goos straightened when I told him that the guidance about going via NATO had come from the general.
“The other helpful thing I got from him,” I told Goos, “was that he didn’t deny that the Roma in Barupra had assisted the Army somehow in their attempt to capture Kajevic. Attila said the local gossip was that the Gypsies gave the US Kajevic’s location. But I’m having a hard time making sense of that.”
“Because?”
“Well, I reread my file on that whole mess with Kajevic in Doboj on the plane. And I can’t imagine why a bunch of threadbare Gypsies would know more about Laza Kajevic than NATO Intelligence.”
“I believe that’s why they call us investigators, Boom.” Goos smiled.
Like me, Goos was also puzzled by Merriwell’s helpfulness. I shared Attila’s theory that after disgracing himself, Layton Merriwell now had a large stake in clearing himself and his soldiers. Remote from the American press and its obsessions, Goos knew nothing of Merriwell’s affair. I summarized the story and also told him about my dinner with Merriwell, which I characterized as an invitation offered so I could commiserate about the hardships of middle-aged divorce. Apparently I hadn’t said much to Goos before this about the demise of my own marriage, and he responded by looking deep into his pilsner glass for a moment.
“I could never quite reckon on divorce,” he said. “Couldn’t see how it would make anything much better.”
He finished the second half of his beer in a single gulp and lifted a finger to the desk clerk for a refill. Goos had been sitting down here drinking long enough to have acquired his own conversational momentum.
“It’s just the facts, mate,” he said. “Seven billion people on the planet and I wake up with the same one every day? Everybody after a long time is bound to feel stuck. Just a matter of how you react to it.”
I understood that attitude, the fatalistic approach to marriage. Ellen and I had been unable to settle for boredom. Instead it was accompanied on both sides by a relentless, grinding resentment.
“Cobber of mine,” Goos said, “says beer’s a better companion than a woman anyway. Always there. Know how you’ll feel after one or two or five. And how you feel is always better than when you started.”
He smiled equivocally as he pondered that observation, while a ruckus rose up at the door. Esma Czarni, followed by a driver laboring with two large suitcases, arrived at the reception desk. She paid the driver, while one of the young desk clerks, who greeted her by name, welcomed her back and stepped around to help with the bags. Esma had not dressed down for travel. The collar on her Burberry mackintosh was turned up against the chill, and a furry purple scarf was stylishly doubled over her bosom. Her skirt was short to show off her legs in her glossy high-heeled boots.
She summoned an effusive smile as soon as she saw me, and advanced at once.
“Bill!” She delivered Continental kisses, while I reintroduced her to Goos. He took a second to brief us both on the schedule for the morning.
“Are we drinking?” Esma asked, motioning at our glasses with a hand heavy with several gold rings I hadn’t noticed before.
I explained that my scotch had left me close to dizzy and that I was ready to retire.
“Good thought,” she said. “Truth told, I’m rather weary myself. I’ll walk you upstairs.” Goos, as usual, said he was going to stay on for another beer, although he gave me a fleeting look, too quick to read.
My room was on what the Europeans call the first floor, the second to us. In one of those Continental efficiencies that make you embarrassed at our profligacy, the overhead fluorescents were controlled by energy-saving motion detectors, and they sprang on as we ascended, giving us light as we arrived at the corridor that led down to my room. Standing there, we did another second’s worth of business as I asked Esma to question Ferko one more time to see if he had any idea how someone in Barupra might have known where Laza Kajevic was hiding. Then, as I was about to turn away, she cast an appraising look at me.
“I must say, Bill, that I’m rather pleased to see you. You’ve been on my mind.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Esma.”
She averted her dark face slightly and delivered a hooded look from her eyes, large within the dusky shadow, adding a trifling smile. The communication was on the order of something one of my high school teachers liked to say: Don’t kid a kidder.
I waited just a second, then decided, despite my trepidation, that the moment was at hand.
“Esma, I’m as tired as you were the night we met, and not as good as you without sleep. So I’m probably going way out over my skis, and if so, I apologize. But when I was about twenty, I was struck by what seemed to me to be a very sad truth. When I find a woman enormously attractive, other men do as well. Which means you don’t need to hear me repeat what you’ve undoubtedly heard a thousand times.”
She smiled hugely, a glamorous display of large, perfect teeth.
“Some things never become trite, Bill,” she answered.
I smiled as well.
“But nothing can happen here, Esma.” I used my right hand to etch the air between us.
“You’ve become involved?” she asked.
“It’s not that, Esma. You’re an advocate for a client whose claims I’m supposed to objectively assess as the prosecutor in this case.”