I asked the obvious—how he’d ended up a cop.
“Well, you know, I was the typical layabout kid,” he said. “But good at school. So I stayed with it. I fancied anthropology, until I was most of the way through with it and realized I was actually rather keen on police work—truth be told, probably because I’d met up with a few too many cops on a professional basis. Not to say I was any kind of hoon—‘hooligan,’ you’d say. Just got myself into a little bingle now and then when I was rotten with my mates and had an overnight stay at government expense. But I reckoned that a good officer can make a lot of difference. Had an adviser at Antwerp who said, ‘Well, with forensic anthropology, you can probably catch on with a police force.’
“Which I did. You know, my Belgium, that’s a pretty orderly place, not even two hundred murders a year and not many bodies to dig up. But still, it got me into homicide. And I was good with it. Found a pretty girl, became a right civilized bloke. But when the Yugoslav Tribunal was established, I thought, There’s a place to fully use my skills.”
“And what did your skills tell you about that grave in Barupra?”
“Got some bones in a bag, if that’s what you mean.”
“How’d they look?”
“Seemed right. Three males, two older than the last.”
“You can tell gender and age?”
“Hip size and certain bone formations in the pelvis. And bone density. I’ll be more certain with my microscope.”
“And what about the bullets you were looking for?” I asked.
“A couple. We’ll get the ballistics done back home.”
“Is there a good crime lab there?”
“Netherlands Forensic Institute? Top notch.”
“Okay. We look at the bones, we look at the bullets, then what’s next?”
“Well, we should put our heads together on some document requests for our friends at NATO, assuming you can square that with Akemi and Badu. And I’d like to come back here with a geologist. Worked with a professor at Nantes who’s very good. Madame Professor Tchitchikov. Love to know if she can tell us how recent that landslide at the Cave is. And I’d want her to have a Captain Cook at that grave for Boldo and them.” Goos said the Bosnian cops had returned at the end of the day and, eager to be able to say they’d done something, had been happy to surround the area he’d excavated with evidence tape. They promised to keep an eye.
“I don’t know enough about the formations around here,” Goos said, when I asked what he wanted Professor Tchitchikov to examine at the gravesite. “Seemed pretty soft if the burial was a decade ago. To my eye, looked to be a mix of topsoil and subsoil there. But you know, that’s not my spécialité,” he said, using the French word.
“But what’s the potential significance of a mix of soils?”
“Might mean somebody had been digging in that grave a lot more recently than ten years ago.”
“Grave robbers?”
“Possible. Curious locals most likely. Probably kids. But could also be someone wanting a squizz at what we’d be finding.”
“You concerned that was Ferko?”
“He still seems a little dodgy to me, but that wasn’t my first thought.”
“The bones were where he said, Goos.”
He nodded, taking my point, then asked about my trip to Lijce. Like me, he was struck by what Sinfi had to say. But the moment when I seemed to have impressed him, probably for the first time, was when I unspooled my deductions about the trucks Kajevic had escaped in, and the possibility that the Americans might have suspected a double cross once the Roma’s information led them into an ambush.
“Attila didn’t want to own up about the trucks,” I said, “but I think she’s trying to cover for the American troops. She understands the implications, but she sings from Merriwell’s songbook and insists the Americans would never have done it.”
“Say this,” said Goos, “those American kids I met when I first started coming round Bosnia in ’97, they were a cut above. The Russians, the Turks, sometimes you wondered what prison they went to for army recruiting. They were bartering starving young girls food for their families in exchange for sex. But the American lot, those men and women were well disciplined, well trained. Played football and rock music with the local kids and handed out candy. Hard to see them taking a hand in a mass slaughter.”
“Group psychology is a funny thing,” I answered. I had prosecuted dozens of men and women, corporate executives and commodities traders and government officials, most with a lifelong pattern of blameless behavior, who’d then taken bribes or falsified records or cheated their customers, all offering the same timeworn excuse when they got caught: Everybody else was doing it. The most striking example to me, which I shared with Goos, was a friend of mine from the high school football team, Rocky Whittle, who was indicted while I was US Attorney. Rocky had spent years accepting small payoffs so he could maintain the confidence of the sixty other plumbing inspectors he worked with who all took a great deal more money than he had. Rocky’s fundamental decency remained so clear to me decades later that, after recusing myself from the case, I testified as a character witness at his sentencing.
“But there’s a limit, Boom. Right? A few dollars in the pocket, or holding on to your job, that’s not mass murder. You give me your stories, I’ll give you one of mine. Been in mind of it all day. Enough to make me regret coming back here.”
He drained his glass in preparation, and I again waved to the desk clerk, who brought another.
“Was a witness I had for the Yugoslav Tribunal,” Goos said after a considerable silence, “woman name of Abasa Mensur. Muslim. She lived across the river in Sarajevo, on what all the sudden became the Serbian side. So the Chetniks storm into her house. This is just a few days after her husband was killed at the front a few blocks away. And with the Serbs, after a while you’d know this part without my telling you. They raped her—raped her while her children watched. Whole squad. Then when they were done with her, they started in raping her eleven-year-old daughter. Then just for kicks, they grab the three-month-old baby, Boom, and put the child in the oven, and turned on the broiler while they held guns on all of them. And the baby screams and screams, while one soldier or another is rooting the eleven-year-old. Then finally the crying stops, and when they took that poor little thing out, they laugh and hand it over to the mother and tell her, ‘This is what a grilled pig looks like.’ A Muslim woman.
“And God love her, Boom, Abasa, she came to The Hague and gave evidence and pointed to the captain who had been in charge. And Boom, I’m a hard-hearted policeman, I seen bad, I know what people can be like, but I sat in the courtroom with tears streaming down my face. And the captain, that man, if you could call his like a man, that man, thank God, is rotting in a prison cell. But of course, there’s eleven others who were with him we didn’t even bother trying to catch. Some of those blokes, after Dayton, they must have gone home and had babies of their own. And what did they think, Boom, when they held those children? How is it that every one of them just didn’t go put a bullet through his brain?