“Ferko is not my client. I was appointed to assist him for a single hearing, which is now over.”
“If he’s not your client, Esma, why else are you here? And besides, the technicalities don’t change the appearances. You’re far too good a lawyer not to understand what I’m saying.”
As before, the compliment pleased her, if only briefly.
“I’m not sure I see it that way, Bill. I’m as conscious as you of the professional commandments. But I had the thought that we could be good for each other.”
“But not at the moment, Esma. Who we are in this case can’t help being entangled in who we’d be to one another.”
That was the self-deception that Layton Merriwell or Bill Clinton or hundreds of other men had practiced, and the reason people mocked them: The power that proved so seductive to certain women was not actually theirs; it was a gift entrusted to them temporarily and for much different purposes.
But Esma shook her head slightly.
“I don’t come to the same conclusion, Bill. Yes, the professional informs the personal. But there is nothing false about it. Do I misperceive you? I take you as a man who has given up a comfortable life, who has come thousands of miles from home, so he can know that his energies as a person are devoted to making large wrongs right. That is very attractive to me, you’re correct. That kind of conviction is a rarer quality than you think.”
As she spoke, the lights blinked out again. In the shadows, I became suddenly conscious of her perfume, a power scent, full of sweetness and allure, which I had heretofore absorbed merely as part and parcel of her strong sensual presence.
I knew Esma was far too nimble intellectually for me to triumph via argument. I went with trump.
“I can’t, Esma,” I said. I thought I was speaking from principle, but with the words, I experienced, strangely, a sense of my own weakness. I realized again that I was in some way afraid of Esma.
For a second the hotel was still around us, then a door slammed resonantly a floor above.
“Very well, Bill. I shan’t push myself on you.” In the weak light, she stared up at me a second longer, then approached to kiss my cheeks as she had downstairs, a bit more slowly this time. “But I foresee that in the future you will change your mind.”
“‘Foresee’?” The word amused me. “Do you tell fortunes, Esma, like the Gypsy women in their wagons?”
“I am somewhat psychic,” she said. “Most Roma women are. Don’t smile either. That is a truth.”
I nodded rather than disagree.
“Certainly I know minds,” she said. “I know your mind—what you do not care to say or even know you need.” She was utterly serious, without a hint of irony, and quite commanding. “And I foresee that you will have a change of heart.” She had laid her hand on my arm as she was kissing my cheeks, but now removed it.
“Perhaps, Esma. But sadly for me that will be far in the future.”
She turned then, and with her sudden movement, the fluorescents powered on again. In the painful brightness, she offered a gallant little wave and turned away.
I dragged my bags into my room. The door closed solidly behind me, a fatal definiteness to the sound. Alone, recoiling, I felt regretful and forlorn, but opened my case to find what little I would need for sleep.
All my life, my unconscious has expressed itself in song. Habitually I’d find myself humming a tune for reasons I was slow to recognize. Now, as I lifted the stacks of clothing into the dresser drawers, I was tootling a soul ballad Pete had introduced me to a few years back. It took its title from the first line of the chorus that rose up amid big horn flourishes. I da-da-da’d until the words came back to me. It was called “Don’t Make Me Do Wrong.”
10.
Barupra—April 16
At nine in the morning, we arrived on the yellow rock of Barupra. Traveling in caravan, we were led by a line of squat Bosnian police cars that had been waiting for us outside the hotel when we departed. The tubby little captain insisted with great animation that the Bosnian government wanted to do everything possible to assist the Court.
“A pig’s arse ‘assist us,’” said Goos, as soon as we had closed the door to our little Ford.
“What else would they be doing?”
“They’re watching us, buddy. This is still a country with factions within its factions. You have three different national governments here, and every cop will be reporting to somebody else.” Goos shifted gears somewhat emphatically and pointed at me. “A fit job for the lawyer will be to get rid of them. Ferko won’t fancy lairing around in front of coppers.” Esma had already made the same point to me. The loyalties of any single Bosnian policeman were always open to doubt.
The police now led us on what seemed to be the back route out of town. We rose into the hills on residential streets that reminded me of the canyons of West LA. There are rich people everywhere and in Tuzla this seemed to be their hangout. The country roads onto which we eventually emerged doubled back as they ascended, with impressive vistas of the city below occasionally peeking through the trees beginning to leaf. After about twenty minutes, we reached flatlands, still dotted with snow, and buzzed past farms and little whitewashed houses that could have been home to Hansel and Gretel.
On this highland south of Tuzla, the US, after Dayton, set up a base with a network of six camps. Predictably, the US military installations stood at the border between areas controlled by Muslims and Croats on one hand, and on the other, the territory of the Serbian Bosnians that became their autonomous enclave of Republika Srpska. The Army’s air base at Camp Comanche subsumed a former MiG landing strip of the Yugoslav Army, which years later became Tuzla’s civilian airport, where flights arrived on two commercial airlines several mornings a week.
Due east of Comanche, on the other side of the hills, Camp Bedrock had been built on the waste of two adjacent open-pit coal mines. The brown-black slag had been bleached by sun and wind to a color like whole-grain mustard and was piled high to create a rocky prominence looking out over the Tuzla valley in the distance and the Rejka coal mine immediately below. It was the kind of highpoint that armies going back to the Romans had prized, trading stark exposure to the elements for virtual invincibility to ground assault.
The cop cars led us onto the former camp, turning down a rocky dirt road that ran behind the old wire-fenced perimeter, past an old basketball court on which the asphalt was now split by weeds. I got out of the car. This was Barupra.
In the eleven years since the Roma had disappeared, the site had become a town garbage dump, perhaps as a gesture of good riddance. Between the large gray rocks, most of the area was covered by what appeared to be construction waste, especially scraps of shredded plasterboard, amid the usual hardy detritus of dusty bottles, aerosol cans, and of course the ubiquitous and indestructible bright plastic bags that will blow through empty spaces for centuries to come and for which the millennia to follow will curse us.
Aside from Goos and me and the police, there was another small car in the cavalcade, containing three laborers Goos had hired from Attila’s company. Accompanied by her driver from last night, Esma arrived last. She was still dressed like a lady, her lone concession to the landscape a pair of flat-heeled boots.
Once we stopped, all of the police officers left their vehicles to light on their fenders. Goos had it right. They were here to spy.