“Lignite—the soft coal—is what she calls ‘a tertiary rock,’ which because of its softness normally lies at five to ten degrees to an incline. The Cave was formed for just that reason, because the coal sank below the Cretaceous rock that surrounded it. But the incline here, composed mostly of exploded lignite, is angled at thirty degrees, meaning that what we are seeing is not a natural formation.”
As Goos spoke, Madame Tchitchikov did an accompanying pantomime, rushing her hands through the air to illustrate the explosion and the various angles of repose, which, in her demonstration, involved laying her head on her hands like a sleeping child. Her enthusiasm was charming.
The professor had brought two graduate students with her. Before she was ready to visit the gravesite, she wanted them to assist her with photographs and various measurements, employing portable surveyors’ instruments, both a transit and a compass. While they were busying themselves, Goos and I walked back to the top.
In the rear seat of Goos’s rental car, I showed him the papers Merry had turned over. The photographs, especially those from the air, naturally drew Goos’s attention. On the flight here, I’d gone over the index card–type records from the base infirmary and had found that two soldiers had sought medical attention the next day, one for a human bite, the second for a “poss maxillary fracture due to rifle butt.” Their names and service numbers had been blacked out, but not their unit: Both were assigned to the 205th Intelligence Brigade, Charlie Company, Second Platoon, the unit in which each member had been on leave on April 28, 2004.
“What did the general say to all this?”
“He was basically in denial. You’ve seen it before, Goos. He’d call himself an agnostic, so he didn’t look like an idiot, but if the moment came, he’d want last rites. He believes in his troops.”
Goos considered that, a hand scratching away at his bearded chin.
“Could be he knows more than he’s told you,” Goos said.
“I’m sure he does. On many topics. But he seemed flabbergasted by the pictures.”
“Must say,” said Goos, “I’m very surprised he handed these materials over. I’d have thought once they got a look, they’d’ve just told us to bugger off.”
“I assume, Goos, they agreed to produce the records before they knew what they showed. Don’t forget a lot of this was in Brussels.”
After another half hour, the professor and her students were ready to move up to the grave. Since Goos had exhumed the remains last month, the local police had stood guard over the site, and there was a single officer on watch today. Goos had driven steel stakes into the ground to hold down heavy plastic sheeting across the opening, and the police had surrounded that with yellow tape. The first thing the professor asked was to remove all of it.
Once that was done, she got down on her belly and hung her head over the edge of the trench. After putting on a plastic glove, she scooped up some of the soil and let it run through her fingers. Then she probed the wall of the opening with a pencil point.
Still lying there, Professor Tchitchikov gave her head a decisive shake and said to Goos, “Ce n’est pas authentique.”
I spoke enough French to understand that. “What the hell?” I said to Goos, but he held up a hand to listen to her. He nodded for quite some time before again giving me his attention.
“So here is what our Sofia says. Normally, exhuming a grave more than a decade old, you expect stratifications in the soil. But what I found here and sent to her for analysis was a mixture of subsoil and surface soil that made her think the grave had been dug—or dug up—more recently.”
“You got that right, Goos.”
He nodded. “You recall, I then sent Sofia some of our skeletal remains, so she could examine them. As bones decompose, certain trace elements from the surrounding soil more or less merge into them. And what she found ingrained in those bones is of a completely different mineral composition than the fireclay and sandstone of this grave. Magnesium and iron, especially, you’d expect to find in higher concentrations, if the bones had been laying here.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, Boom, I reckon this is what’s called in the trade a ‘secondary grave.’ We saw plenty of that with the Yugoslav Tribunal as the armies tried to clear out the mass burial sites before we got to them. Same idea here, only in reverse. Those bones back at NFI, the ones that I dug up here, they were moved from somewhere else. You remember our strange bullets and our DNA contamination? Well, there’s your explanation. This grave has been staged, more or less for our consumption.”
I struggled to make sense of that and, after a second, argued with him.
“Those three men, they share a Y chromosome. There are bullet holes in those bones consistent with Zastavas. And we’ve just looked together at visual evidence of those people being loaded onto trucks.”
“Yay. All true. But those bones we have weren’t buried here, Boom. Simple as that. Remember, I was questioning Ferko about dragging three bodies all this way? There’s plenty of loose lignite down below. He could have mounded over the corpses where they lay to keep the animals away from them, if that was all he was trying to accomplish.”
“Then why are they here?”
“Closer to the road, I imagine. Once they brought the remains back, they had no desire to go gallivanting over the rocks. But those skeletons haven’t been laying here very long, because the local soils haven’t leached into the bones.”
“Ferko was lying?” I asked Goos.
“Mate, according to the tale he tells, he was the only soul who knew where those bodies were buried. So unless he buried them, dug them up, and moved them somewhere else for a decade and then reburied the bones here again in the last six months, yay, he was lying.”
“Fuck,” I said. I was already weighing the implications for the case. This was far more serious than shorting Esma about Kajevic’s threat. I couldn’t count the number of trials I had been involved in as a prosecutor in which the major witnesses had told substantial lies, but with enough evidentiary backup on the big points that we won convictions anyway. Jurors were rarely perplexed when a scumbag witness acted like a scumbag. But I’d been warned that at the ICC, the atmosphere of moral purity also prevailed in the courtroom. I asked Goos what he thought the damage might be.
“’Uge,” he answered, and told me in a state of revived bitterness about one of his cases at the Yugoslav Tribunal. With enormous effort, they’d developed an insider witness who had worked as a guard at a Croatian-run concentration camp. For whatever reason, the man had kept a diary, and the written record was intricately corroborated.
“Even when the bastard wrote down it was raining, weather records confirmed him. But after the war, he became a drug dealer, and we had to turn over reports that he’d used his thirteen-year-old daughter as a courier to deliver cocaine. Once the judges heard that, they wouldn’t even let him finish giving evidence. And tell me the truth, Boom. You remember the part in scripture where the Virgin Mary helped perpetrate mass murder?” He was about to head back down to the professor and asked the last question over his shoulder. He answered his own question with a grunt. “Cause that’s who these damn judges seem to expect our witnesses to be.”
I sat in the rental car stewing while Goos was aiding Tchitchikov with the rest of her soil sampling around the grave. When Goos returned half an hour later, I said, “Let’s find Ferko. We need to know what the hell is going on with him.”
Goos eyed me, rubbing his hand over his chin. He was not inclined. Ferko was a protected witness and under Court rules, investigators could not contact him directly; that fell to the Victims and Witnesses section.
“I’m not wasting another three months,” I said, “doing the Dance of the Seven Veils with Victims and Witnesses just to see if Ferko picks up the phone when they call. We’re here. Let’s find him.”
“And where would that be, Boom?”
“We know he lives within an hour of here, because Esma was able to whistle him in when we left Tuzla. Remember?”