I approached the captain. After several minutes, I convinced him that the protocols established between the Court and the Bosnian government required us to work unobserved. Even then, Esma insisted that Ferko would also be unwilling to speak in front of the three laborers, whom we ended up dispatching to Vica Donja, the nearest town, to find a coffee, which you could seemingly obtain on even the remotest mountaintop in Bosnia. Only then did Esma take out her cell to summon Ferko, whom she had called earlier and now had waiting nearby.
He appeared about ten minutes later in a red wreck of a car, an Opel sedan, perhaps from the 1990s, with a rust hole in the front fender and a line of duct tape applied vertically to hold on a rear door. Unfolding himself from the red car, Ferko seemed taller and thinner than I had recalled against the stark landscape, especially next to Esma, who, without her high heels, proved rather short. Esma gripped his arm at the elbow, almost as if she were escorting a prisoner. Ferko had on a pair of plaid pants, the same vest and hat he had worn to testify, and beneath his open winter coat, a large-collared orange shirt. Goos stepped forward to welcome him, but Ferko was still speaking to Esma with wide gestures and Goos, in a purple windbreaker, stopped and peered back at me with something of a vexed look.
At last, Ferko was ready and the four of us tromped across the stones and swales of Barupra as Ferko relived his narrative. He showed us where the lean-to he called a house had stood, about a hundred yards into the camp, and then across the village the outhouse in which he’d hidden when the masked raiders arrived. For whatever reason, I had imagined a wooden structure, but what remained had walls of cinder block, meaning it was the lone structure still standing, even though the roof and door were gone after more than a decade. He then pointed out the spot where Boldo and his son and brother had been slain.
After that, Ferko led us to the back of the camp, overlooking the village, where he’d watched the destruction of his family and everyone he knew. The mine plunged down dramatically below us, a steep drop of several hundred feet. I had never been a fan of heights, and the falloff left me feeling somewhat imperiled, even as I appreciated the majesty of the vista of the surrounding green hills, which wore hats of white at their upper reaches. The wind flapped Ferko’s wide trousers as he gestured to the switchbacks on the gravel road below. Perhaps a quarter of a mile down, a slope of dark coal and lighter-colored rock lazed over what had once been the Cave and was now a secret burial ground. Staring out solemnly, Ferko delivered a single shake of his head.
We hiked back into the former site of the village. Ferko showed us the approximate location where his son and he had concealed themselves following the murders. Finally, he again led us slowly toward the road until reaching a depression where he said he’d buried the bodies of the three men who had been gunned down. He had built a cairn of white rocks to mark the place. It had been kicked over by passersby or playing children, but several stones were still massed there, making him sure this was the spot.
Goos stooped to examine one of the rocks and kept it in his hand. He gave Ferko a surprisingly hard look.
“Long way to drag three bodies,” he said.
As soon as Esma translated, Ferko stomped one of his running shoes on the ground to bolster his point.
“He agrees,” Esma said, “but it was not easy to find a place soft enough to dig.”
Ferko already had taken a few steps back toward the red car that had delivered him.
“How far down are the bodies?” asked Goos.
Esma and Ferko had a bit of an exchange.
“He says he only dug far enough to keep the bodies from being consumed by animals. No more than two feet, probably less. With the wind over ten years, it may not be much more than a foot to the bones.”
Ferko raised a hand weakly then and turned his back on us. Esma walked along with him.
I sidled close to Goos.
“You heard something just as he arrived you didn’t like.”
“Ah yes.” He bowed to the memory. “They were jabbering in Romany, but he used a word or two of Serbo-Croatian for emphasis. Ste obecali. ‘You promised.’ Kept saying that. ‘I want what you promised.’ Better not be that she’s paying him on the side, Boom. His evidence isn’t worth a thing if it’s bought.”
I promised to raise the issue with Esma later. As soon as Ferko was gone, Goos called the diggers back. While he was on his cell with them, another problem suddenly struck me.
“We can’t really just scrape up this ground, can we, Goos? Don’t we need a forensic anthropologist to do this right?”
He’d been half turned from me, to shield his phone from the wind, but he revolved in my direction at an inching pace, his thin mouth slightly parted.
“Mate,” he said at last, “I am a forensic anthropologist.” Ordinarily easygoing, Goos had grown increasingly sour this morning for reasons I did not understand, and now he appeared totally disgusted with me.
I wanted to say the obvious: No one told me. That was true, but we both seemed to recognize a deeper insult, the implication that I’d somehow not taken him seriously enough to find out.
He turned away to await his crew.
In the small hollow that Ferko had brought us to, a few spots of snow remained, latticed with grime. Beside them, the inspiring green sprigs of some early grasses had nosed out of the earth. Goos’s crew arrived with shovels and canvas bags apparently bearing other tools. He unzipped a bag and stepped into white coveralls and donned a surgical cap and plastic gloves. Then he crouched over the low point, studying the spot as if it contained something metaphysical, pushing through the loose earth until he scooped up a handful of dirt, which he deposited in a sealable plastic bag.
I asked what his purpose was.
“So we can check the mix of subsoil and topsoil.” He was still grouchy and answered in a bare grumble. He looked down into the duffel and extracted a small video camera, handing it to me.
“Make yourself useful. Record the dig so nobody can say we planted evidence.”
It took me a while to master the buttons, but Goos got to work at once. He started with a stainless steel T-bar, three feet long and with a pointed end, which he hoisted over his head and then suddenly stabbed into the ground. He called for a measuring tape, which he used to determine the depth of his probe, making a notation in a little spiral notebook he kept in his back pocket. Then he motioned for another tool, as long as the first but with a pair of vertical lips near the bottom. He twisted it into the ground to extract another soil sample, which he levered free with a simple wooden chopstick, like the kind that comes with Chinese carryout. He said nothing to me except for calling out measurements loudly enough for the camera to record them.
Eventually, he had the laborers spread four large blue tarpaulins on all sides of the depression. He gave each worker a small garden spade and demonstrated how to scoop shallowly, depositing the diggings on the tarp. With his chopstick, Goos picked through what they uncovered.
I’d been silent a good twenty minutes, when I finally asked what he was searching for. It still took a second for him to answer.
“Bullet fragments for one thing,” he said. “They slip out of the bodies as they decompose. If we recover any, we’ll want to do ballistics.”
With the small tools, the dig went at a laborious pace, but finally, after another quarter hour, Goos abruptly raised his gloved hand and snapped a halogen light on an elastic band over his forehead. He loosened the ground with a new set of chopsticks, then used a small brush, sweeping decorously until I could see a brownish lump the color of a toadstool. I realized he was excavating a hip bone.