“Prepare for paradise,” she answered.
The sight of Esma languorously approaching me was always arousing and quickly took me beyond what I had thought were the physical limitations of middle age. But her appeal was far more than corporeal. Years before, I had represented a stripper who worked under the stage name of Lotta Lust and who’d neglected to file federal income tax returns for more than twenty years. There was nothing unusual about Stella’s—her real name—appearance, but she’d been in high demand onstage for two decades. It was all about self-confidence, she claimed. ‘A girl who believes that every guy she meets is dying to fuck her is almost always right.’ Esma made me feel every time that she was bestowing a gift as precious as the secret of alchemy.
Because Goos was returning to Belgium from Tuzla, Esma and I stayed two extra nights at the Blue Lamp, departing Sunday morning. For the first forty-eight hours, I never put on a stitch, relishing that freedom, too. On Friday, Esma got hungry before me and ran out to the cevapi place across the street to bring sandwiches back for both of us. While I was waiting for her, I lay still on the bed, enjoying the momentary solitude and taking stock. My entire body still felt like a force field in which the voltage center was my dick, and I was gripped by an intense desiccated thirst that seemed to be the product of coming so often. But I did not want to move. Instead, I exulted in having so thoroughly escaped restraint, even while the ghosts of the Bosnian dead, the rapes, the broilings, and the unhindered savagery seemed to dance darkly somewhere within my joy.
I reached The Hague late Sunday afternoon. When I entered the apartment, there was a suitcase in the middle of the living room, and without trying to snoop, I saw Lew Logan’s name on the tag. I recalled that my landlady had said that my trip abroad was conveniently timed, since her husband was set to visit, meaning they’d have their house to themselves. I went to the refrigerator for water and heard a consistent rapping overhead. It took a second to realize that it was their headboard, knocking on the wall. Standing a little longer, I thought I could make out Narawanda Logan’s low wail. I listened another second, smiling at them and myself. I intended to go out for a long dinner to give them their privacy, but Esma had exhausted me. I lay down for a nap and woke up about five on Monday morning.
My encounters with my landlady had been as isolated as she had promised, due in part to the apartment’s floor plan. The lower level contained a small kitchen and a good-size living and dining area. From there, you went up three steps to the lone full bath. Off that landing, two separate facing staircases ascended, each leading to one of the two bedrooms.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I got up for my 6 a.m. calls with my sons, I would potter toward the kitchen to make coffee and would find Mrs. Logan in the living room, contorted in some yoga pose. She was dressed all in black, in clingy yoga pants and a loose top, very tiny but notably well formed and also unexpectedly graceful. On the weekends, or when she made an early return from work, Narawanda ran. She’d come in dripping and winded, in another all-black outfit, with the addition of a stocking cap and mittens. I was often reading in the living room, but she breezed by with only a muted “Hello.” I mentioned once that I’d been a runner myself until shin splints had stopped me several months ago, but I received no more than a courteous nod as she continued to the stairs. Overall, her social affect was slightly off-center, which was more or less what Goos had told me to expect.
When I came down to the kitchen that Monday, after my return from Bosnia, Mrs. Logan was in her yoga clothes, staring down the electric kettle so she could have her tea before getting on to her morning routine. Her husband’s luggage was gone.
I expected her to be in the same flushed tonic mood in which I’d awakened, but she was abstracted. She greeted me politely—“Welcome back. Good trip?”—but she was in one of those morning funks in which some people start the day, and she moved off in silence to begin her exercise.
I headed into the office early, prepared for a backlog of paperwork. By the afternoon, Goos and I sat on either side of my pedestal desk planning our document request to NATO. We felt specifics would be the best wedge against the Court’s natural inclination to avoid controversy.
Goos’s time with the Yugoslav Tribunal had given him a good idea of what might be available, and he’d drafted his own list.
“Armies don’t really exist to fight,” he told me. “They are there to make records. Everything must be documented.”
His top item was duty rosters and related records like mess reports. I understood his logic—a large group on leave might be our ‘Chetniks,’ playing dress-up on their free time. But I didn’t think that would get us very far, given the basic obstacle.
“Under American law, we can’t go interview any of those guys, Goos, assuming they’re home by now.”
“Yay-ay,” he said, employing that exaggerated Australian version of ‘Yeah,’ “but we can check Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, Boom. Been looking over the posts about Eagle Base for some time. Quite a bit, actually, but not much that’s interesting to us. But with names, mate, we can search up those former soldiers and try some questions from here. No law against that, and you can’t believe what these young people will sometimes disclose over the Internet, stuff you’d never get face-to-face.”
I comprehended only now why Goos had been glued to his computer the day we met.
The second request on his draft list was for truck logs and fuel depot records. I understood that we’d want to see if any heavy vehicles had left the base in the middle of the night, but I wasn’t clear why he was also asking for mechanics’ reports and requisitions for spare parts.
“Driving around in that coal mine in the dark, Boom, a truckie could have broken an axle or damaged a wheel pretty easy.”
Next, he’d listed day-of records from the camps’ infirmaries and sick bays.
“Aren’t going to bully four hundred people onto trucks without somebody throwing a punch at a soldier, or an old gal setting her fingernails to somebody’s face, maybe a couple troops getting bashed by a flying rock after the explosion.”
I agreed. Ferko had said one of the soldiers was hit with a rifle stock while they were trying to subdue Boldo’s brother.
The fourth item would never have occurred to me, given my limited knowledge of our military: aerial surveillance records.
“NATO had planes all over the place, Boom, and spy satellites, trying to make sure there were no troop movements by any side. Frightening the detail they get from outer space.”
Goos had a number of other excellent ideas. In combat gear, US troops apparently wore blue GPS transponders that were designed to ping and thus prevent friendly-fire incidents. We decided to ask for all GPS records that might show US troops in or around Barupra on April 27, 2004. NATO Intelligence had probably also recorded all cell phone use and IP addresses registered in the area.
On a separate line, Goos had next written, ‘Pictures.’
“Pictures?” I asked.
“Daily photographs. Parade shots. Formations. Can see who’s missing, maybe hurt. This was near the end of the US presence. Cameras were probably snapping full-time for auld lang syne.”