“Me? I think so. My father, too. My mother, no. She had a dream a few years ago that my sister called her. So she hopes.” Sinfi’s eyes now were pooling.
Before we left, Esma removed her purple scarf, the object of such lavish admiration here, and wrapped it around the baby. As we said good-bye, Sinfi took a step over her threshold to squint at me in the strong sun that had just emerged from the clouds.
“You are going to find who murdered them?” she asked.
“I will try.”
“They should be punished,” she said to me. “Even Roma should not be treated like that.”
12.
Still a Gypsy
So you guys hungry or what?” Attila asked, as we departed from Lijce. “Kind of a cool place, a couple miles on.”
It was past four and none of us had eaten since breakfast. Attila stopped at a huge roadside inn erected on a hillside, a series of rustic buildings that could have passed as a dude ranch, enlarged A-frames with shake roofs and cedar sides decorated with old wagon wheels. To enhance the inn’s appeal to tourists, the lowest level featured reconstructions of Bosnian life one hundred years ago. In one stall, a wax dummy in vest and fez sorted through a sack of seeds.
On the second floor, we entered an open-air pine dining room, noticeably upscale. Waiters in formal vests and bow ties showed us to a windowside table overlooking another lovely mountain stream one hundred feet below, from which a romantic, rushing burble arose.
Attila, unsurprisingly, was a grand host. She ordered a white wine from Slovenia, although it turned out she didn’t drink. Her focus was on a huge appetizer plate of mild Bosnian cheeses and dried meats, a local delicacy, all accompanied by an unusual brown bread assembled from dozens of layers of thin leaves, a little like the crust of a strudel. While we relaxed, Attila smoked cigarettes without apology and Esma mooched a couple, explaining that she indulged only on the Continent while she drank.
Attila had just ordered the entrée when Esma excused herself for a moment. As soon as she was gone, Attila hunched forward confidentially. She was such a large personality that I was already accustomed to ignoring her odd look, with that big ball of kinky brownish hair, her uneven freckly complexion, her slight shoulders strangely squared, and her pale skinny arms poking from the same short-sleeved button-down shirt she was wearing when she picked me up at the airport yesterday.
“So whatta you think, Boom?” Attila asked. “Looks like Kajevic, right?”
“Maybe. I’m a long way from conclusions, Attila.”
“You ask me,” said Attila, “a guy sends a messenger boy to say he’s gonna kill a whole bunch of you fuckers and they’re all dead a week or two later, I got a prime suspect. No?”
“Sure. But it’s not the only possibility. What did you make of the lady who thought the Bosnians killed the Roma because they wanted the base back?”
“I thought she was as full of shit as the rest of them—everybody but the last gal. The US had withdrawn. That camp went back to government ownership. If the Bosnians wanted the Roma out, all they had to do was move in with bulldozers. No cause for a massacre.”
I sipped my wine, thinking how I wanted to approach the next subject. I had been meaning all day to get a second alone with Attila.
“And I’m not ready to declare the US Army above suspicion either.”
As I expected, Attila made a face. “And how do you get to that?”
“Well, Tobar confirmed something that I’ve heard for weeks now, that a few guys in Barupra were car thieves. As a matter of fact, you told me yesterday that you fired your Roma drivers when they disappeared with some of your trucks. Do I remember correctly?”
“Too true.” Attila nodded with her whole upper body.
Last night, I had awoken around 3 a.m., not unusual for me when I was contending with jet lag. I found my heart constricted by some dreamtime reconstruction of my encounter in the corridor with Esma. I had remembered the red nails as her hand rested on my arm, but the dream culminated in agitation and regret, although, as happens so often, once I was up I couldn’t recall the events I was sorry for. Eventually, when I settled myself and began to doze, my mind went to our case. It was then, halfway back to sleep, that I made a connection that had been nagging at me since I sat with Goos in the bar.
“Now,” I said to Attila, “you told me that all the trucks that NATO used in Bosnia were yours. CoroDyn’s. Right?”
“Basically. The operational vehicles were under Transportation Corps command, but they all came out of my pools.”
“Okay,” I said. “On the plane, I reread my files about that attempt to arrest Kajevic in Doboj. Most press reports said Kajevic fled in trucks stolen from the US Army. The first time I saw that, I thought that meant that Kajevic and his Tigers hot-wired the vehicles Special Forces had shown up in. But the whole ambush was too well planned to involve an improvised escape. So what I realized—actually in the middle of the night—was that Kajevic already had those trucks.”
I’d seized Attila’s full attention now. Her thin, unshaped brows were drawn down toward her small eyes.
“Which means,” I said, “that the vehicles Kajevic took off in were stolen from you and CoroDyn. Correct?”
Attila’s lips squeezed around before she spoke.
“I told you, Boom. I like you and all, but I’m not fucking up my security clearance.”
“It can’t be a secret who those trucks belonged to, Attila. They had to be identified so the Bosnian police could look for them.”
She shrugged.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “It was Roma from Barupra who stole those trucks from you and sold them to Kajevic. Right?”
Attila was looking down at the table. When her eyes rose, she reached for another cigarette.
“Boom, you ever talk too much?” she asked, with the flame hovering over her Zippo.
“Occasionally.”
“Me?” Attila said. “I been doing that my whole life. Shit comes sailin out of my mouth and I’m like, What the fuck did you go and say that for? And, Boom, I really don’t know the answer. I just get caught up in things.”
I wasn’t going to be distracted by her retrospective regrets.
I said, “But that’s how the Roma knew where Kajevic and his people were hiding. And that’s why they were able to give his location to Army Intelligence.”
“I’m not here to lie to you, Boom. But I gotta be a lot more careful what I say.”
“Well, maybe you want to respond to this, Attila. If the Roma told me where Kajevic was hiding, and I went there and got ambushed, I’d be mad, maybe killing mad, especially when I realized they had sold him the trucks he escaped in. It might have felt to me like one huge double cross.”
Attila shook her head decisively.
“That’s not how it went down.”
“How did it?”
“I can’t mess on myself, Boom. I know I ran my mouth, and with a smart guy like you, one thing leads to another. But I can’t say no more. Only thing is, you heard that lady was telling you Kajevic swore he was gonna kill those Gypsies.”
Attila’s phone, which she’d set on the wooden table, started buzzing again, vibrating hard enough that I thought for a second it might fly through the window. She smacked her hand down on the cell as it was skittering away and she answered. I would have bet that Attila rang herself to avoid more questions, but the device had been right in front of me and I could hear a voice speaking Serbo-Croatian on the other end.
“Fuck,” said Attila when she was done. She stood up. “Gotta bounce. I need to find five guys who speak Pashto and get them on the way to Kabul by twenty hundred hours tomorrow. And the problem, Boom, is that anybody who speaks Pashto has worked in Afghanistan. And anybody who’s worked in Afghanistan would rather get buttfucked than go back. This’ll cost me. Be makin calls all night.”