“Might be he was just staying nearby temporarily.”
That was possible, but there wasn’t much to lose except the time. The day we went to Lijce, Attila had told me there was another Roma town in the vicinity. I couldn’t imagine Ferko choosing to reside away from the People. One of the laborers said this second town, Vo Selo, was about forty kilometers due east, well into the Bosnian Serb enclave, Republika Srpska, near the Drina River. The drive would take about an hour.
Goos shrugged and said to me, “You’re the lawyer.”
We took off in the rental car, another little Ford, navigating by cell phone GPS. It was about 1 p.m. The main roads were surprisingly navigable, given what I’d heard about winter drives that were sometimes impossible because of potholes and landslides. With the spring sunlight luminous on the high clouds, we both relaxed. For me, sidestepping the Court’s iron-headed rules made our trip feel a little like a high school lark.
Once we reached the river, we turned north. As Goos was negotiating a switchback, an immense structure suddenly loomed over us. It appeared so abruptly it seemed like a magic castle, with proportions to match. Erected atop a mountain of gray rock perhaps a thousand feet high, the building, on first impression, seemed to be a fort built to command the river. Then I noticed that the roof’s highpoints were Byzantine domes topped with Orthodox crosses.
“What the hell,” I said to Goos.
“If you’ve got data reception on your mobile,” said Goos, “check the Internet.”
“It’s a monastery,” I told Goos after a few minutes of poking around, “first built with the permission of the Ottomans in 1566 on the remains of an old church by the Hrabren family.” Within its gargantuan stone walls, the monastery had been a world of its own for centuries, with a winery, guest quarters, a library, and a seminary. Like so many other places, it was also a relic of the region’s dismal history. In 1942, the Croatians had raided, tortured the monks, and thrown them into a pit in which they had all slowly died of infection and starvation while the Ustase—the Croatian version of Chetniks—burned most of the buildings to the ground. The monastery was rebuilt, only to be torched again by the Croatians in 1992, as Yugoslavia fell apart. This time the Croatians plundered the treasury and burned all the books, including irreplaceable sixteenth-and seventeenth-century manuscripts. The monastery had risen yet again after the Bosnian war as a stubborn testimonial to the Serbs’ dedication to their faith.
“Take a look?” I asked Goos. It was time for lunch anyway.
The town beneath the monastery, Madovic, was small, with cobbled streets built for horse traffic, but it did not have the dusty, depleted look of other little places we had passed through. The merchants seemed to have prospered, supplying the many goods the monks did not produce on their own. While we waited a few minutes for a table in the busiest restaurant, it became apparent that Madovic was also a regional medical center. A three-story hospital stood at the other end of the long main street, and nurses and doctors in their long white coats comprised at least half the clientele who were eating.
Across the way, not long after we sat down, three monks passed by in long brown rassas, as the Orthodox cassocks are called. Bird’s-nest beards drooped down their chests, almost reaching the wooden crosses suspended on prayer ropes from their necks. Each monk carried a long shepherd’s crook and wore the same exotic cylindrical headdress, a little like a brimless stovepipe hat. They moved in slow, matched paces as they made silent pilgrimage back from the hospital where presumably they had prayed with the sick. I surreptitiously snapped photos and a quick video, in order to e-mail them to my boys, who had implied last weekend that I existed in a state of moral degradation because I’d ventured to a place as exotic as Bosnia without filling Instagram and Facebook with dozens of images. I tried to explain that a criminal investigator generally did not make a visual record of his doings, no matter how many likes I might have attracted. But for this scene I was willing to make a brief exception. I put the phone down when I thought I saw the nearest monk’s eyes shift toward me.
Once we were done with lunch—I was yet to get a bad meal in Bosnia—we strolled up and down the main street, just to see what we could and to take a couple of photos of the colossal monastery overhead. It was close to 2:30 when we returned to the car.
As we did, a police officer appeared from the corner behind us. He might have been waiting. In any event, it was clear to me, as he lectured Goos, that the cop was maintaining that we had parked in the wrong place. I walked a few steps while Goos was engaged, but saw nothing that could have been a sign. Traffic shakedowns of tourists were routine in Bosnia, according to Goos, and with my back turned, I located a twenty KM bill in my wallet, a little over ten bucks, which I suspected would be adequate.
The cop was very young, still with acne, and it was possible he was just one of those overeager newbies familiar to police forces all over the world. He was in the police summer dress: blue pants, white hat, white blouse with epaulets, and a white belt that included a holster, so his pistol was also clothed in white, making it all the more noticeable. Goos appeared to be humbling himself appropriately, apologizing for our innocent error, but the cop remained grave, subjecting Goos to surly questions. Ultimately, Goos produced our letter of introduction from the Bosnian government, which explained we were emissaries of the Court. The cop read it over several times, seemingly unconvinced, and then instructed Goos to hold it open between his hands while the policeman took out his old toad-size cell phone and snapped a photo. With that, he walked off without my money.
“What do you think that was about?” I asked Goos, when we were again headed to Vo Selo, the Roma town.
“No idea. I suspect he’s going to call someone just to be sure the letter’s authentic.”
“I thought he was looking for money.”
“I as well. Kept waiting for him to come the raw prawn, as they usually do, how he would pay the fine for us so we could be on our way.”
Vo Selo turned out to be no more than another fifteen minutes up the road. As we reached the outskirts, Goos rolled down his window and asked a dark fellow, Roma by his looks, if he knew Ferko Rincic.
The man responded by laughing. He waved over his shoulder toward a hill and, according to Goos, said we couldn’t miss it. He shouted something else as we pulled away.
“‘Mind the dogs,’” Goos said, when I asked for a translation.
“Dogs?”
“He said ‘dogs.’”
That made sense. If Ferko lived in fear of retaliation by the people who’d massacred everyone in Barupra, he would want security of some kind.
On the other side of the hill was the town, which appeared even poorer than Lijce. Most of the dwellings were like the shack of the disagreeable old woman I’d talked to, a room or two with grab-bag exteriors—corrugated metal or stucco, but most often mud and twigs. I also saw at least one family huddling in the discarded portion of an old concrete viaduct, and several living only under tarps suspended between a few trees. The lone exception to the prevailing poverty was a house that loomed over Vo Selo almost as dramatically as the monastery we’d just left. It looked a little like a castle, but built not just with palatial grandiosity but also monumental bad taste. There were nine separate turrets, each with a balcony from which, in most instances, the laundry hung. Even from a distance, we could see that scenes had been painted on the stucco walls, and that the top roofs were festooned with animal sculptures, dogs and frogs, atop a gilt railing.
“The mayor’s house?” Goos asked.