“That was something,” I said.
“That was something,” he agreed. “Thought we were cactus, mate, for sure.” He told me about his closest brush before that, which had come while he was a police trainee in Brussels. He’d been called on a domestic—the male was Russian, which was unsurprising since they had a track record of raising hands against their women—but when the wife let Goos in, the guy grabbed Goos from behind and put a butcher’s knife to his throat. The stink of alcohol was all over the room. Fortunately, the woman started to go off on her man again, and he released Goos so he could charge her. Goos brought him down with his truncheon.
“I pissed myself when they had us kneeling there,” I told Goos. I knew he had to have noticed, so I wasn’t confessing much. “But it ended up being a good thing, because it brought me into myself.”
“What did you think of?” Goos asked.
I explained about my father. The most shocking part to me was how angry I was at him.
I asked Goos what had been in his mind.
“Ah,” he answered. “Wife, kids a little. Mostly, buddy, I couldn’t believe I’d been so daft as to come back to Bosnia.”
“Are you going to quit?” I asked. From someone else, the question might have suggested cowardice, but we both knew this was only a matter of logic.
“Don’t know,” Goos answered. “Need to get back and have a long think. One thing for sure, though, mate. We can’t go barracking around here without real protection. We’ll need the army if we come back. Badu will have to get on the blower and make that happen.”
“Are we coming back?”
“Well, we’re going to have to exhume the Cave, aren’t we? Ferko’s word is no good. And it’s been blasted all over the front page of the New York Times that we suspicion a massacre. So the only way to know if that’s so is to look for the bodies.”
He was right.
We were still at the table at about 1:30, when Attila breezed in, wheeling my suitcase. She’d sent two of her people to Vo Selo, where they’d picked up the rental car, which was now parked outside. Neither of us had even thought about the vehicle, and we thanked her at length. From under her arm, Attila withdrew an envelope and threw it on the table before making herself a coffee, too. She was wearing her usual rumpled jeans and the old pinstriped short-sleeved shirt. Attila could have vastly improved her fashion presence with a trip to Goodwill.
“What’s the report from the medical corps?” she asked.
Except for needing a dentist, and not being able to drink coffee on my right side because of my teeth, I was pretty good. Goos would require a few days.
Attila had told us yesterday she had a close friend on the police force, a lieutenant she’d trust with anything, and with our permission, Attila had gone to the station to have a word with Dalija. The lieutenant had made a few calls in Attila’s presence. In a town down the road from Vo Selo, two officers had reported that their car and uniforms had been taken from them at gunpoint the day before yesterday.
“That bag of asses,” said Goos. “Steal a police car in a small town where everybody knows everyone’s business? A fine way to get beaten with a pipe. No chance that happened.”
“You guessed last night that Ferko had financial arrangements with the local cops, didn’t you?” I asked.
Attila smiled at that idea.
“I’m sure they shake him down. But nobody’s gonna take orders from Ferko. You’d have to have had the numbnuts work for you to understand.”
“Well, he was clever enough to steal your trucks, wasn’t he?” Goos asked.
“He was playin follow-the-leader. Another Gypsy from Barupra, kind of the Big Man there, Boldo Mirga—he was the only one with the stones to do that.”
I looked to Goos, who was playing coy and avoided my eye.
“Okay,” I said. “And tell us how this truckjacking went down. I’m not sure we’ve ever heard the whole story.”
Attila hesitated. “Man, I got to be careful here.”
“Attila, those were NATO vehicles. If you want, I can send another letter to Brussels tomorrow asking for your records and their interview notes with you. That was all before the Kajevic thing. It can’t be classified.”
Attila pondered.
“You know, it ain’t all that much to tell,” she said. “The US was leaving, and Merry wanted to send a bunch more of the military equipment NATO had collected to Iraq. So I sent trucks and drivers down near Mostar to pick some of it up.”
“When was this exactly?”
Attila lifted her chin to think. “Late March 2004?” That would have been two weeks before the Kajevic thing in Doboj, and a month before the people in Barupra disappeared. “In those days, the roads were still crap. I mean you’d be drivin and come to a shell crater and need to build your own bridge with railroad ties you carried with. So it was a long trip, most of a day, and what with the roads, I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t drive back in the dark. But there was no sign of all of them by noon the next day. About Taps, Boldo and Ferko and the rest of them come strollin in, sayin while they were bivouacked some gang hot-wired six of the trucks and made off with them. The drivers were all Gypsies and they didn’t even have their stories straight. I fired them just about on the spot.”
“And what happened when it turned out that Kajevic got away in a couple of those trucks, the ones Boldo and Ferko stole?”
“Well, no one knew that for sure at first. It was most of a week after Doboj before the getaway trucks were recovered out in the country.”
“But what did those guys have to say for themselves then?”
“Boldo? Testicles of titanium. He just stayed with his story. Must have been the carjackers who sold the trucks to Kajevic.”
“And who were they telling that fairy tale to? Bosnian police? NATO?”
“NATO MPs and the Bosnians.”
“And did the law enforcement guys believe that?”
“Boom, I keep tellin you: Ain’t no one who takes a Gypsy’s word. Thing is, the only way to completely disprove what they were puttin out there would be with Kajevic and them. Nobody’d ever tell you Boldo was stupid.”
“And is there any chance Boldo’s story might have been true—that someone else stole the trucks and sold them to Kajevic and his Tigers?”
“Chance? Sure. The part that didn’t never make sense was Boldo dealing with Kajevic. You heard Tobar in Lijce. That’s mongoose and cobra. Gypsies hated Kajevic and Kajevic, he’d rather sit down to a meal with a snake and a rat than deal with the Roma.”
“And when was the next time you saw Boldo and Ferko?” I asked. Goos’s eyes quickly passed my way. He approved of me truth-testing Attila.
“Never. I’d sooner crap bricks than talk to any of them and they knew it. Steal my fuckin trucks? I’ve told you before. It wasn’t until August or September I heard this shit about all the Roma bein gone.”
There was a lot of news here, and almost all of it was confusing. One thing was clear, though. If we could ever crowbar the truth out of Ferko, we’d be on a much better footing, even though I’d require an armored vehicle and a box of Depends before heading off to that interview.
“Do you think you could get a phone number for Ferko?” I asked Attila.
“Not if he had any idea it was for me,” Attila said. “But I can gumshoe around.”
I finally picked up the envelope Attila had thrown on the table and asked about the contents.
“Truck logs from April 26 to 28, 2004.”
“Showing?”
“Nothing. No convoys out of either pool.”
I was about to tell her she was wrong, that her trucks were on film, when Goos’s blue eyes flicked up in warning. Clearly Merriwell hadn’t shared anything about the NATO material with Attila. As he maintained, Merry was keeping his distance and letting us do our jobs.
“Who made the records of vehicle deployments?” asked Goos.
“My people.”
Goos nodded and calculated, yet said nothing, but Attila read something in his response.
“Nobody took my trucks without my say-so,” she said.