Nara unfailingly described her husband as insular. My impression was that at the time they married, she found his remoteness a comfortable match for her own reticence, but that compact, and the size of their separate emotional spaces, was starting to trouble her.
I was sympathetic with the problem of having a spouse who felt unreachable at times. In some ways, Nara spoke about her marriage much as I might have talked about mine at the same stage, assuming I would ever have discussed it with the same guileless openness she did. In the long haul, the Logans’ relationship was probably not a good bet. But I would have been petrified if anyone had said as much to me, and I would have regarded the prediction as offensive. Perhaps, like Ellen and me, Nara and Lew would have kids and in that satisfaction mend much of the natural breach between them.
“Marriage is hard, Nara. It’s a little like Churchill’s remark about democracy. It’s a terrible idea, except for the alternatives. At least for most people.”
She’d had more than her usual one beer as the conversation had worn on, and once we were walking home, she reached up to give me a comradely pat on the back.
“You are a good friend to me, Boom. I am very grateful.”
The coverage of the skirmish between the US Defense Department and NATO continued throughout the following week. Because Bosnia was the first actual combat operation NATO had ever engaged in, many questions I would have thought were long resolved had to be decided for the first time. It turned out that most of the records of SFOR—as the Bosnian operation was known at NATO—or digital copies of them, were housed in the NATO archives in Belgium. Although it struck me as one of the idiotic ways the law finds to resolve difficult issues, the physical location of the files was central to the legal analysis, because the Service-Members’ Protection Act applied only within the US.
The political scrambling was also going full speed. The White House and the State Department were taking a different tone than DoD, since the story was not unspooling favorably for the US. References were appearing online to ‘a new My Lai,’ the massacre of five hundred Vietnamese villagers by US forces more than four decades ago, to which Merriwell had referred as a signal event of his days as a newly minted officer. In the ten-second world of broadcast news, the reports were framed as the US Army stonewalling questions our allies wanted answered. The journalists, who by professional bias despised bureaucratic secrecy, were piling on. Badu and Goos were correct: This was working out rather well. The publicity even seemed to light a fire under the Bosnians, who approved our return trip, which would now depend on the convenience of Madame Professor Tchitchikov.
Esma was calling me several times a day but I refused to pick up. Finally, she must have borrowed someone else’s phone.
“May I see you in person to discuss this?” she asked.
Her strategy was laughably transparent. Get me in a room and let the little head think for the big one.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Esma. Once burned, twice wise.”
“Oh please, Bill. Don’t be so fucking dramatic. It was a miscalculation on my part. I thought you would be overjoyed.”
“Esma, principle is clearly far less important to you than it is to me.”
“Bill, don’t condescend. We cannot hash this through on the phone. I can get to The Hague next weekend.”
“Don’t do that, Esma. You’ll be wasting your time.”
I hung up, albeit with more than a small pang. A part of me did not want to accept that this was over, particularly the tonic element Esma had added to my life.
On Friday, a week after our talk on the Plein, Nara announced that she’d taken a few days’ leave and was going to New York.
“That sounds like a smart idea,” I told her.
“I am not very sure of that,” she answered. “Lewis is brilliant about using many different words to say the same thing. He rarely changes his mind.”
“Then try changing yours a little. You’ll never regret giving this your best.”
She stood on tiptoe to deliver a fleeting half hug as she departed.
“Okay, asshole, this is how it’s going to be.” I was in my office at the Court about 3 p.m. the following Wednesday when my personal cell rang.
“Good day to you, too, Rog.”
“Let me tell you right now that if it was up to me, I’d tell you to fuck off. The whole thing with these records will be forgotten next week.”
I chose not to respond.
“The records,” he said, “all the records, will be provided to the NATO Supreme Allied Commander at the time of the alleged incident for his review.”
It took me a second. “Layton Merriwell?”
Rog cleared his throat. “I think that was the guy.”
“Okay, so the supreme commander, whatever his name was, gets the records. Then what?”
“If he chooses, he may meet with you on US soil. And if he gives you any records, that’s his choice, even though it will be a clear violation of the Service-Members’ Protection Act.”
I didn’t get it. “Merry and I get to share a prison cell?”
“There’s no criminal provision in that law, hotshot. And as you already know, Merriwell is in favor of opening the books on all of this. But if any American were to be prosecuted in the future on the basis of any of these documents, he or she could claim that the records were produced in violation of the act and therefore are not competent evidence in any court.”
It was a clever plan, aimed at reducing the risk that any American soldier could be prosecuted on the basis of these documents. I told Roger I’d need to run it up the flagpole here.
“You may as well just say yes now. Because it won’t get any better. You have twenty-four hours before this offer vanishes. The generals will get to someone in Congress by then. If you accept, the State Department, NATO, and the Court will each release their own statements that say the matter has been resolved and not one word more.”
Badu and Akemi agreed with me that this was a pretty good deal for us, assuming Merriwell would make a full breast of the documents. But since he was the one who’d suggested going to NATO in the first place, that seemed largely assured.
I called Rog back to go over a couple of nuances and then agreed.
“Deal,” I told him.
“Let the record reflect that I resent the shit out of this,” Roger said.
“So noted.”
Merriwell called the next day.
“So we meet again,” he said.
“It will be my pleasure. Are we back at the embassy?”
“No, no. We have to meet on American soil in order to preserve any future claim that the Service-Members’ Act has been violated. But the press has gotten interested in me again this week. Any chance we could get together at your house?”
“In Kindle County?” I was about to tell him I didn’t have a home there any longer, but I realized instantly how eager Ellen would be to make the guest house available for a matter that had been mentioned on the front page of the New York Times. And even the most intrepid reporter was unlikely to follow Merry to the Tri-Cities.
As I expected, Ellen was excited by Merriwell’s name, even though I apologized for being unable to explain much about why we were meeting. After comparing calendars, we all agreed that Merry and I would get together at Ellen and Howard’s the following Monday. To further complicate things, the French geologist announced she would be available next week for the only time in months. So I made plans to again ping-pong between the continents, going to the US first and then to Bosnia to meet the professor and Goos.
V.
Trouble
19.
Home Run—May 30–June 1