According to the complaint in the divorce case, Mr. Jahanbani was alleging abandonment, in that Emira had purportedly been absent from the marital home for a decade. She had—probably unwisely—countered with charges of infidelity, alleging her husband sought a divorce only in order to marry a woman from his office who was not yet thirty years old. In response, he had produced evidence of his wife’s frequent affairs, involving several prominent New Yorkers—both male and female—the romances in a couple of cases apparently overlapping. The many trial sessions had apparently had their moments of drama. Emira had been found in contempt a couple of years ago for responding to one of her husband’s insults—in Farsi—by smashing him over his bald head with a folding umbrella, drawing blood. From my research it appeared the case was still nowhere near conclusion.
All of this was stunning, but also somewhat comical, even if part of the joke was at my expense. Nevertheless, I was willing to entertain the thought that Emira might have regarded an alias as a logical step, given the fractiousness of everything surrounding her marriage. Yet my sense of alarm became far sharper when I moved on to searches about the European Roma Alliance. There were organizations with similar names—but that entity simply didn’t seem to exist. The few entries that appeared online were all in conjunction with Esma, who was always referred to as the group’s founder. At last, I phoned what online sources described as the leading Roma advocacy organization, which was based in Paris. I was passed around to several desks, but absolutely no one had heard of Esma’s outfit. The European Roma Alliance pretty clearly was another piece of her fictionalized identity.
I paced around my office. I had cut my emotional connection to Esma fairly quickly. Even recognizing that our physical relationship would always give her a special place in my memory, I had processed in depth that she was no one to rely on. But this. My entire professional life as a lawyer had amounted to extended on-the-job training in making out lies. But Esma’s sexual power had short-circuited my detection systems.
I had learned a dozen years ago that living two lives was neither as unusual as people might think nor as difficult to bring off. I had represented a prominent corporate lawyer, Bill Ross, who for years had left client meetings in order to trade stock in the companies whose mergers he was arranging. His brokerage account was in the name he’d been born with, Boleslaw Rozwadowski, and utilized the Social Security number Boleslaw had been issued before becoming Bill. Knowledgeable and wily, my client had been smart enough to deal in small lots so as not to attract the attention of the SEC. Infuriating as the crime was, I was more intrigued by Bill’s use of the proceeds, which the prosecutors had traced. Bill’s trading profits didn’t go for hookers or drugs or gambling, the standard motives for many white-collar crimes. Instead, Bill sent the money to support a family he had in Poland, and whom he visited once a year. His Polish wife, a girl he’d first impregnated while they were students in gymnasium, still thought he was a house painter in the US. Despite that, and Bill’s spouse and two kids in Kindle County, the Polish wife had no trouble welcoming him back when he finished the three-year prison sentence I negotiated for him.
Observing Bill, I’d realized that the principal requirement in maintaining two identities is chutzpah, and the ancillary ability to keep your lies straight. It was shocking to all of us who knew Bill, but not because the mechanics were particularly intricate. The surprise was much more because maintaining two lives is at odds with the struggle most of us endure to find one true self.
Yet it didn’t take more than about ninety minutes’ research to figure out how Esma had actually pulled this off. Her background—the caravan, the abusive father, Boris with his stiff dick—appeared to have been lifted whole from an autobiography called Gypsy Girl by Aishe Shopati, which had been published about a decade ago to nice reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. There was an online language course, Romaninet, from which she might have mastered the basics of Romany—and a person of her wealth could easily have hired a tutor anyway. Changing the name on her existing British passport took no more preparation than filing a form called a ‘deed poll’ for the cost of ￡36 at the Royal Courts of Justice, which then would have allowed her to get credit cards, bank accounts, and a national ID in Esma’s name. By exercising some care about being photographed, there was little risk that the world of a Manhattan billionairess would ever collide with that of a Roma activist on the Continent.
The mechanics of Esma’s lie were nowhere near as confounding as trying to suss out how far it went. Pondering all her brazen falsehoods on top of Ferko’s, I had to confront a sickening suspicion: The Barupra massacre was simply another invention to glamorize the life of ‘Esma Czarni.’
Friday evening, Goos and his wife invited me for dinner. When he called with the offer, he claimed it was all Fien’s idea, even though he had tried to convince her I wasn’t entitled to yet another free meal.
His condition was much improved. He said he felt fully on track to return to work Monday.
We had a lot to discuss. Complementarity had informed me that the various Bosnian parties had consented to exhuming the Cave, but the president and the registrar were still asking if there was any way to reduce the cost.
“No one even cracked a smile, Goos, when I told them it was a bare-bones budget.”
I knew I’d scored from the speed with which he grabbed his ribs.
We spent some time figuring out if there were costs we could reduce. There was virtually no DNA database on any of the people who had lived in Barupra, so we agreed to dispense with the team of techs to do DNA sampling on-site. Instead, we could preserve the remains until we figured out how to identify the bones. That, however, was no small point, since the skeletons wouldn’t be worth much in court unless we could prove they were those of the Roma residents of Barupra.
I had passed many idle moments reviewing in my head every conversation I’d had with Esma, and I remembered now that she’d told me when we first met at Des Indes that Ferko had agreed to his first interview with her just as she’d been about to go to Kosovo to look for the families of the people who’d fled to Barupra.
“What about relatives?” I asked Goos. “If we can drum up blood relations of the people who went to Barupra, can’t we do DNA profiles of them? And match that against the bones we bring back? If we get common alleles across a broad enough sample, that would be fairly compelling, right?”
Goos liked the idea. Accordingly, it would be his job when he got back to work next week to see if he could use social media and other means to find people—most likely in Kosovo—who claimed shared blood with the Roma in Barupra.
Fien poked her curly head in to announce dinner, but before we sat down to socialize, I needed to tell Goos about Esma.
“Lord, mate! You must have been ready to cark it.”
I admitted I’d been upset.
“Do you think Ferko and Esma made all this up together?” I asked him. “Or were they lying to each other?”
“Mate, who knows? With this investigation, I won’t be saying ‘I’ll be stuffed’ about anything else. We have four hundred people gone walkabout overnight, and photos of them being loaded onto trucks while the Cave was still a hole in the ground. We’re not going to know what to believe until we dig it all up. And if it turns out the Cave is full of gold bars or old parade confetti,” he said, “I’ll just nod my head.”
28.
Kajevic—June 23
At 10 a.m. the following Tuesday, Goos and I presented ourselves at the ICC Detention Centre. It was situated in an old stone castle, converted to a prison by the Dutch long ago, in Scheveningen, the town adjoining The Hague that is, whatever the ironies, on the beach.