A private ambulance was summoned, so Goos could lie flat on the trip to Tuzla airport. Andersen, now in uniform, drove me back to the Blue Lamp, where I packed up Goos’s room and my own. When I returned to the airfield, a NATO plane had landed. Goos was already aboard on a paramedic’s rolling stretcher, and in very good spirits, particularly when he didn’t try to move.
We were flown a couple of hours to the NATO air base at Geilenkirchen in Germany near the Dutch border. From there, General Moen had arranged for another ambulance to take us the remaining two hours to The Hague.
When we arrived outside the little condo Goos had bought years ago, he insisted, with considerable effort, on getting to his feet. I understood this was for the benefit of his wife and his older daughter, who’d rushed down from Brussels. The wife, a thickish figure with wavy blonde hair, and the daughter, a mess of tattoos, took over to help him make a halting entry to the building. He took a single step at a time, resting a second before the next effort. His wife never stopped talking a mile a minute in Flemish.
It was midnight when I slipped into my flat. I was stunned to find Nara, in her black running tights, still awake. She was curled in an easy chair in the living room as she read under a shell lamp that provided the only light in the apartment. On sight, she instinctively moved toward me and brought her small hand to my face, where the bruise along my chin and jawline had turned green and yellow.
“Oh my,” she said.
“Looks worse than it feels.”
I dropped my bag and fell onto the sofa. Now that I was back, I was suddenly so exhausted that it felt as if even my bones could give way.
“A business thing ended up getting physical,” I explained. “Goos was with me. He’s worse off. But he’s mending.”
For many reasons, starting with our continuing safety, Goos and I had agreed to keep our role in Kajevic’s capture a vaulted secret. I changed the subject to Nara.
“New York wasn’t good?”
“I was in town three days and saw Lewis for all of an hour. We had a furious argument in the hotel lobby and never spoke again while I was there.” Her tone in relaying this was characteristically odd—she was surprisingly light, as if the entire trip had been a passing annoyance. On the whole, she seemed upbeat, and in a second I understood why. “Laza Kajevic was arrested today,” she announced. “It must be huge news in Bosnia.”
“All I heard about,” I said.
“He has a private defense lawyer from Belgrade, Bojan Bozic, but I worked with Bozic on General Lojpur’s case, and he always promised me I would be senior trial counsel with him if Laza was captured. He will file the papers tomorrow asking for a joint appointment.” Her face was ripe with the cute childish light of unsuppressed pride. We both knew as lawyers that it was one of those cases you’d be going to dinner on for the rest of your life.
“Congratulations.” I lifted my palm for a genial high five. But I found myself peering at her afterward. There was a lot about this woman I did not understand, because we tended not to talk much about work, given our roles laboring on opposite sides. Yet with Nara, because of her frequently unfiltered responses, I knew I could speak my mind.
“And it won’t bother you to defend a monster like this? The camps and executions, the systematic rapes?” In a way, this was a completely galling question coming from me, given the big-league cruds who often had been my clients. Over the years, I had seemed to specialize in ego-drunk CEOs, men in all cases, who’d looted their companies with no more hesitation than they would have exhibited in picking up the loose change from their sock drawers, and who frequently exhibited a variety of loutish behavior toward women. I believed in the mantra that everyone deserved a defense, but I had resolved long ago that the defense didn’t necessarily have to be provided by me. Mob clients, for example, were always on my personal Do Not Call list. The unprovoked and conscienceless violence on which their business was erected was too much for me.
“I don’t mean to sound like some boor at a cocktail party,” I said, “asking how you can stand up for such awful people. But Laza Kajevic is probably a finalist for the title of single worst human being alive.”
She actually smiled for a second, before her black eyes drew down more seriously.
“Because I do not know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“What I would do in wartime—when the world is all topsy and nothing is right. It is easy to be the prosecutor, Boom, and say after the fact, This is what you should have done. That is important to restore order. But to my mind, it also involves a good deal of pretending. I am not sure the rules would be very clear to me if it were kill or be killed.”
I could have followed the lawyerly instinct and argued, especially about Kajevic, who’d created the very atmosphere she thought mitigated his crimes. But hers was a serious answer from a thoughtful person. And her reasons were higher-minded than mine had been for taking on many cases, which, generally speaking, were because crimes intrigued me a lot more than lease foreclosures, the money was great, and these engagements often allowed me to hang out with friends from the US Attorney’s Office, who frequently were representing the codefendants.
“So you’ve signed on?”
She lifted the immense three-ring binders she’d been studying.
“I was out running when I got the call from Bozic,” she said. “I went back to the office for the charging document and some background materials and haven’t been out of this chair in five hours.”
“And how will Lew take it,” I asked, “when you tell him you aren’t moving back to New York?”
Her face fell. “I do not look forward to that conversation. It has been a week since we last spoke. Every argument is expected to end with my apology, and I will not do that this time.”
I began Thursday at Nara’s dentist, who put a temporary cap on my tooth, before I migrated to the Court. Goos and I had agreed to write a single joint report to all of our bosses about the last week and a half. I started the first draft.
In the middle of the afternoon my phone rang.
“Congratulations, Boom.” It took me a second to place Merriwell’s voice. “I wanted to thank you personally. I only wish I’d been there to see it. The world is a far better place today.”
I told him I deserved no thanks, but assured him that the NATO troops he’d once commanded had performed impressively.
“The scuttlebutt says you and your colleague were both very brave,” Merry told me.
As we’d asked, Goos and I had been omitted from the official account of the arrest provided to media outlets. But there was obviously another confidential version circulating for those in the know.
“Goos brought him down,” I said. “Even though Kajevic had a pistol with which he’d shot Colonel Lothar. My act of heroism consisted in lying on the floor of an iron-plated vehicle—in full body armor.”
“I was told you took his pistol.”
“He was half-unconscious and his finger was nowhere near the trigger. And I was scared to death the whole time.” The fact was that the more I thought about the moment I’d grabbed the Glock, the less clear it was in my memory. I remained largely astonished that I’d ever been in that position.