“But I need to talk to you about something quite important,” she said. She looked grave.
I prepared myself, realizing her mother had persuaded her I should move. I had already started looking at ads and stopping at real estate agents’ windows to see what was posted, but I’d hoped to stay put until after we had exhumed the Cave, when I’d have a clearer idea of my future in The Hague. Nonetheless, I resolved to accept her decision with grace.
Instead, she said, “Laza wants to talk to you.”
I was a second. “Kajevic?”
“I must tell you the truth. Bozic has warned him several times not to do it. And I have repeated that and challenged Laza to explain why this serves his interests at all. And I will keep trying to change his mind. But so far he insists. He is rather strong-willed.”
“I imagine.”
“Even so, Bojan wants full immunity from the ICC and an ironclad confidentiality agreement, so that nothing Laza says can be used against him in any court. Bozic will be here tomorrow for a hearing and wants to discuss this with you.”
Those terms—exactly what I would have demanded as defense lawyer—did not figure to be challenging, especially since Bozic had all the negotiating power. I would need permission from Badu and Akemi, but they were likely to agree.
I wanted to tell Goos about this development before anyone else. He was spending the week at home, still convalescing, but I headed to his condo on Tuesday morning. His wife remained here. Fien was naturally warm and lively and kissed me on both cheeks when I arrived, which I took as a sign that Goos had spoken well of me. But we could not say much to one another since her English was every bit as poor as my Flemish. The apartment was darker than I expected and crowded, full of family photos and figurines and too much heavy walnut furniture. It was often a shock to see the dwelling space of the people you worked with, since it was frequently a venue for attitudes they would never display on the job. My guess was that Goos was comfortable here because it resembled the way Fien had decorated their house just outside Brussels and that she’d initially set her hand to this place, too. But all that implied a level of dependence between them that he seldom acknowledged with a beer in his hand.
Goos was still flat on his back, but his color was excellent. He insisted on taking a chair for our conversation, although he accepted my help getting there.
“You might be better off lying down for this,” I said. “We have a chance to interview Laza Kajevic.” I outlined the few details I had.
“I’ll be stuffed,” he said. “Stuffed. What’s in this for Kajevic, Boom?”
I’d only started trying to figure that out.
“The truth, Goos, is that he’ll be in prison until he dies. He can do whatever the hell he likes.” That, of course, included lying his ass off when we spoke to him, for whatever malicious fun he’d get from it. We’d have to be wary.
Nonetheless, Goos smiled at me with a breadth I’d seldom seen outside the barroom.
“We are having some times with this case, mate, aren’t we?”
Late Tuesday, I journeyed across town to meet personally with Bojan Bozic, who was in The Hague from Belgrade for a short hearing in Kajevic’s case. We’d all agreed that Nara would make introductions and thereafter step out of the negotiations over the ground rules for the interview.
The Yugoslav Tribunal had a far plainer home than the ICC, at a site near the World Forum, where the UN flag waved outside the court. The interior resembled an old high school, and the quarters for the defense lawyers, about which Nara occasionally grumbled, were uninviting—a couple of large linoleum-floored rooms with a few desks and bulletin boards and three or four aged computers, the kind of space where you might expect to find the teachers’ aides eating lunch.
It turned out, when I arrived, that Nara and Bozic had been held late in court, completing the examination of a witness who would be finishing his prison term shortly and might thereafter be unavailable. The man’s testimony related to a point of jurisdiction on Kajevic’s case, although only a few counts among the hundreds lodged against him. Another of the staff defense counsel showed my ICC credentials to the security person at the courtroom door, and I was permitted to take a seat in the spectators’ section, behind a glass wall, while I waited for the hearing to conclude.
Although the Yugoslav Tribunal was very much the mother of the ICC, the ICTY had been established as a temporary court, and even twenty years later the courtrooms were far smaller and less grand than ours. The floor plan with the lawyers’ desks and the judicial and registrars’ benches was identical, with the same outcropping of black computer monitors at every seat, but the space, in what appeared to be a converted classroom, was far more confined. Here the judges’ sleeves were trimmed in crimson, but Nara, who was cross-examining the witness, was in the same black robe and white lace bib we wore across town. Bozic and Kajevic, in a suit, sat at the defense table with their backs to me, while three prosecutors were making notes at another arced desk a few feet away.
I hadn’t thought much about the fact that Narawanda had risen to the role of co-counsel in a huge case and must have been reasonably good in court. The woman I knew, odd and a little bit timid, did not seem to have the makings of a stereotypical trial lawyer, but in some ways neither did I, often accused of bringing a somewhat taciturn outward manner to court. The truth is that every effective trial attorney develops a style of her own, just like good painters and singers and pitchers, one that often involves capitalizing on idiosyncrasies. Nara’s manner was to confront the witness in her own blankly earnest way, a sort of law-time Columbo routine in which her pose was to keep putting questions, not because the witness was lying, but due rather to her being foreign and dense. It was revealing to me to see her like this, because the laser light of a cleverness she otherwise kept to herself peeked out so clearly here in the courtroom.
The issue, so far as I could discern, was that Kajevic had not been in the former Yugoslavia on the dates he was alleged to have committed the crimes charged in these four counts. In the US this was called an alibi and became an issue of fact at trial, but at the ICTY it was the subject of a preliminary motion contesting the court’s power to try Kajevic on these specific charges. Apparently Nara and Bozic had come forward with hotel receipts and other records showing Kajevic was actually in Paris at the time of the alleged offense, but the prosecution had chosen to present the witness rather than drop the counts. It was instantly apparent that the prosecutors were so incensed about Kajevic’s evildoing and his years on the run that they were unwilling to concede anything to him or his lawyers. I knew that frame of mind and had learned the hard way that it was toxic. Good defense counsel would only add to the prosecutors’ frustrations at trial, goading them into angry blunders.
The man at the witness desk was a former colonel in the Bosnian Serb Army who had apparently lessened his punishment by blaming Kajevic for everything. He had the rumpled look that many of the former soldiers seemed to try to affect, sitting at the witness table in an ill-fitting suit of a strange shade of powder blue, unshaved, his tie askew. His demeanor—uncomfortably reminiscent of Ferko’s—was of a simple man too feckless to do other than follow orders.
“You say you went to Banja Luka to see my client?” Nara took a moment in which she blinked at the colonel several times with no other expression.
“That is true.”
“Did you ever leave the former Yugoslavia in 1992 or 1993?”
“I was an officer and we were in combat.”
“You are saying no?”
“No.”
“You were never in Paris in those years?”
“It was war. We were not taking Parisian vacations.”
“And do you recall, Colonel, where you started when you traveled to see my client?”
“Not really, no.”
“Were you driven there?”