“That proves you’re a reasonable man,” Merry said. “He’s a terrifying human being. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, Boom. It’s carrying on despite it. Hats off. The version I hear is that Kajevic was on his way to escaping when you guys cut him off.”
Afterward, the soldiers had poured compliments on us. They had been frightened that Kajevic would reach the black sedan waiting to speed him back to the monastery. It was true that if Kajevic had actually gotten in that car with the monk who was driving, the aftermath might have been messier. But much as I admired Goos’s quick thinking and his daring in taking on a man who’d already used his weapon, neither of us believed on reflection that there was much danger of Kajevic outrunning several men and women forty years younger than he was. As Goos said in the hours we’d spent on the plane, tirelessly recycling events that probably lasted less than a minute, the only person whose life Goos probably saved was Kajevic’s, since he would have had to have been shot if he turned to fire at the troops pursuing him.
After more demurrers, I decided to take advantage of the situation and pointed out that now that Kajevic was in irons, there was less reason to withhold the intelligence reports from the effort to grab him in 2004.
Merry laughed and told me I still didn’t understand the Department of Defense, but he didn’t stay on the phone much longer.
When I came in Thursday night, Narawanda was dressed for our run, but she greeted me with her hands on her hips.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“That you guys were part of capturing Laza.”
I explained that Goos and I deserved little credit and were eager to escape the blame from Kajevic’s malevolent followers.
“As I hear it,” she said, “you were the center of the whole operation.”
I was troubled that word of our roles had already leached into civilian circles. At the ICC, the secret had held for the day, since Badu and Akemi felt it was critical to maintain a separation between our Court and the Yugoslav Tribunal. Nonetheless, there were too many people in the reporting chain for me not to have received some meaningful sideward glances and nods of recognition, even though nothing was offered out loud. I was on the verge of asking Nara, with a little irritation, how it was she’d learned about this, when I realized her source.
“You heard this from your client? He’s arrived in The Hague?”
She shrugged to show she couldn’t breach the wall of confidence.
“How’s his nose?” I asked. I didn’t even try not to smirk.
“Quite swollen. He seems more upset about that than being in jail. He is quite vain.”
“I would never have guessed.”
“But your role in this made for a very odd initial interview. I had to confess I knew you well, both of you. I wish I had had a chance to brief Bozic before your names came up.”
I hadn’t thought of that. From her perspective, I was subjecting her to some kind of conflict by keeping all this to myself. I apologized and asked how Kajevic had reacted to her disclosure. I was afraid it might cost her her role in the case, but she said Kajevic was unconcerned.
“He assumes everyone knows everyone else in The Hague. Bozic actually suggested a formal conflict waiver and Kajevic made light of that and actually scribbled something out himself. But he said to send you his respects and to tell you he would like to meet Goos and you face-to-face someday.”
Nara, predictably, didn’t seem to recognize the chilling import of the message. On the other hand, Kajevic’s inflation of our role conformed to my impression of his grandiosity. He’d assumed he could outwit NATO forever, and would much rather think that he’d been rolled up accidentally by a couple of hapless nincompoops.
In the meantime, my conversation with Merriwell, and the unlikelihood that we’d ever get the intelligence file on the prior effort to arrest Kajevic, sparked a new idea.
“If Mr. Kajevic really wants to see Goos and me, we can interview him for our case. There are a lot of questions he could put to rest for us.”
Nara responded by laughing in my face, albeit in an inoffensive way, with no scorn intended. It was the same thing I would have done if the roles were reversed.
“Bozic will never hear of it. Laza has trouble enough without talking his way into more. But I will pass the request on to both of them, so you can receive a formal no.”
We went off for our run, but the skies opened unexpectedly, as they often do in The Hague, and we ended up at the Mauritshuis, The Hague’s little treasure box of an art museum. The grand seventeenth-century house, built in the classical Dutch manner with a steep tiled roof and an ornamented yellow facade over the brick, is now home to some of the most famous paintings in the world, including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, which are coincidentally displayed in the same tiny room. We’d run past the site often, with Nara chiding me virtually every time about not having visited. With the downpour we’d decided this was the moment, inasmuch as the museum was open late Thursday nights.
I had forgotten Nara’s design background and was impressed by her incisive responses to many of the pieces on display. There were paintings—a Rembrandt portrait of an old man or a Vermeer of a town scene by a waterfront—that moved me intensely with what they held of the sheer force of life. The tiny rooms of the original house had been preserved as show spaces, which lent a secret, intimate feeling to the entire experience, as Nara and I whispered to one another, pressed close in the crowd.
Once we’d circled through twice, returning to several mutual favorites, we retired to the café to wait out the rain, talking at length about the pictures. She had a lot to say about the genius of Rembrandt, who was centuries ahead in his understanding of what we actually see.
We departed at closing, walking along slowly through what had now settled to a delicate mist.
Nara sighed and said, “That was lovely.” She looked up at me, tiny and ever-sincere, the rain shining on her cheeks. “Wasn’t it?”
“It was,” I answered.
We walked home with little more said.
On Friday morning, I found Nara standing over the coffee pot crying. I was astonished, since she ordinarily dealt with her troubles in a contained way and had been quite upbeat since I returned. She wasn’t sobbing, but there was no mistaking her tears.
“Lew?” I asked.
“Everything,” she answered. “My mother is on the way. She’ll land at Schiphol tomorrow morning.” It turned out that Nara’s mother had a blood disorder, well under control, but one that nonetheless required periodic visits with a specialist in Amsterdam. She would see the doctor on Monday. “I realize I have to tell her about Lewis, but I have no idea what to say. I left messages for him today and yesterday, but there has been no response. Is that how a marriage ends? Without even answering the phone?”
I tried to comfort her. Lew was probably giving himself a break, I said. Many marriages resumed after a time-out.
She shook her head decisively. “There is little chance. The Kajevic case will keep me here for years, and I am quite happy to stay. Lewis will never accept that.”
I could have pointed out that it was she, as much as Lew, who had made the critical decision, but she would probably not see it that way. There is surely no human relationship more complicated than marriage, and I knew better than to try to get inside Nara’s.
Instead I asked where her mother would stay. I could see that in her anguish about having to confess the state of things with Lew to her mom, Narawanda hadn’t considered that issue. Being Nara, she just told me the truth, without apology.
“Well, normally she stays here. But I suppose that will not work.” She turned impish, a sideways thought suddenly lightening her mood, while, like a child, she used the back of her hand to smear away her tears. “It would be very cozy with Mum and you and your friend in your bed.”
I did the chivalrous thing and said I’d go to a hotel for the weekend.