Goos and I both took a second to search our notes, then I came to my feet. Goos, Kajevic, and Bozic followed.
“May I ask a question of you gentlemen?” said Kajevic, as we faced each other.
“You may ask, of course,” I said. “If we can, we’ll answer.”
“When you came first to Madovic, you were there for what reason?”
“Lunch,” I said.
Kajevic continued to study me with formidable intensity. He wanted to know if he’d been betrayed, if our supposed search for Ferko was a ruse. These days he could probably not fully trust anyone’s loyalty. That question, I realized—and his desire to exact further revenge—was probably his ultimate motive in sitting down with us.
“We had no idea you were there,” I said. “And no mandate to look for you.”
“I see.”
“And if your goons hadn’t kidnapped us, we would have had no reason to reexamine every minute of the day to figure out why that had happened.”
A philosophical look overtook Kajevic. “It was an understandable response by those men. They have served me well. They did not recognize the difference between the courts in The Hague. I, naturally, did. I had read about your investigation.” Still staring at me without relent, Kajevic now added a more generous smile. “You have me to thank that you are still alive. But as happens so often, mercy was a mistake. I would not be here if those men had done what they meant to.”
There was plenty of room for debate about that. At the time, Kajevic took the better bet that we’d continue to think the kidnappers were working for Ferko. Killing us, on the other hand, would have brought in Europol and the Bosnian Army in numbers and would have forced Kajevic to flee the monastery. Like General Moen, I suspected that he had nowhere to go. And I also wondered if assassinating investigators who weren’t really looking for him would have been costly to his alliances, especially among local police. Mercy, therefore, had had no role in his calculations. Self-aggrandizement, however, was second nature to him.
“I am sure,” said Kajevic, “you are each quite pleased with yourselves.”
“It was all accidental, President Kajevic. We both know that.”
“I don’t credit your modesty,” said Kajevic. “It was your great moment. You will boast about capturing me for the rest of your lives. I was very curious to have some time with each of you. And I am grateful to have done so.” He looked back and forth toward Goos and me, taller than both of us. Again, he smiled bleakly. “Because I have seen there is nothing great about either of you.” He extended his hand to Goos. “You are a drunk,” he said, before turning to me. “And you are a very ordinary man who wets his pants at the prospect of dying.”
Predictable. He could not let us depart without inflicting some harm. Whatever causes Laza Kajevic claimed, the flag he actually sailed under would always be sadism.
I peered at him with his hand outstretched in mockery.
“And you are the very face of evil, President Kajevic,” I said. “Who will be punished every remaining day of your life.”
He laughed. “Five hundred years from now, an entire people will still sing my name. They will read poems of love and gratitude to me every day. You, on the other hand, Mr. Ten Boom, will be so long forgotten that it will be as if your name had never been uttered at all.” Kajevic waved his chin at the guard. “See them out,” he said.
As soon as we were back in the sun, Goos announced that he needed a drink. He made up for it at nighttime, but Goos didn’t touch a drop during work hours, and I understood his request as a sign of distress. I was willing to join him.
We picked up our bikes and walked with them a couple of blocks to a place where there were outdoor tables and umbrellas. Goos was in a dark mood, sunk in himself, until he had downed half the beer the waitress brought.
“So what about it?” he asked. “We believe him?”
It was essential to Kajevic’s compelling persona that in his presence you tended to accept every word he uttered. In reality, Kajevic could have been practicing his own reprisals by blaming the Americans for actions that, in the end, he’d not merely threatened but actually carried out. But his revelation about the guns made his account feel convincing, and I told Goos that. His opinion was the same.
“But this still has a rough feel to me, mate. The Americans have spent the last eleven years hiding the facts about those guns. Damned embarrassing to lose your troops with weapons taken out of your very hands, but it’s required a lot of energy to keep that secret so long.”
“You think there’s more to it?” I asked.
“Something else,” he said, “yay.”
“A massacre by troops gone rogue?”
“Could be.”
We speculated a second longer. At this stage, there was one certainty: Almost no one we’d talked to had been completely transparent.
“Let’s go dig up that fucking cave,” said Goos. He wrestled down his tie as a sign of resolve. “The bones won’t lie.”
I was with him. Goos motioned for another beer.
“And what about him?” asked Goos after a moment. “What do you make of him?” It conceded something not worth denying about the largeness of Kajevic’s character that it was unnecessary even to use his name. I had noticed earlier in my life, especially after meeting people who were regarded as ‘legends,’ that what is called charisma, this outsize attractive power, was often rooted in madness. We experienced these people as extraordinary because deep psychic disturbances prevented them from observing the same boundaries the rest of us had learned to adhere to.
I was not surprised therefore that even half an hour later and far from the prison, Goos and I were both still oscillating from the interview. In our professional lives, as cop and prosecutor and defense lawyer, we’d each been through hundreds of encounters with criminals. Yet today we’d heard none of the standard guff—‘It didn’t happen that way,’ ‘The other guy did it,’ even ‘I was just following orders.’ Instead, Kajevic essentially rejected our entire moral order in favor of his religion of power.
“There will always be ones like him, won’t there?” Goos asked.
“Sure.” I nodded. “The brilliant charismatic crackpot who gets his hands on the levers of power and exults in mayhem? There will always be people like him.”
“So what’s the point then?” said Goos. He leaned toward me, bringing his whole body over his glass. By Goos’s laid-back standards, he was quite intent. “Since I came up to The Hague, people in the courts always talk about deterrence: We’ll put the likes of Kajevic in prison and that will be a deterrent to the next madman. Does that make any sense to you, Boom? Does it really?”
I understood his mood now. It had been a rough few weeks and it led to a bleak conclusion. We had no answers in our own case, and it didn’t matter anyway, because there was some flaw in the human DNA that would always spawn miscreants like this who’d crawl out of the muck.
“Deterrence?” I asked. “Maybe I believe in it at the margins. But I don’t think some guy in South Sudan with a machete, who’s whacking off limbs in order to force dozens of people to jump off a ten-story building, is going to stop all the sudden, thinking, Wait, I could end up in the dock at the ICC. You know, after the years I’ve spent prosecuting and defending people, I’ve pretty much concluded that crimes, whether it’s genocide or petty theft, get committed for the same reason.”
“Which is?”
“The asshole thinks he’ll get away with it. They all convince themselves they’ll never get caught, no matter how ridiculous that is.”
Goos uttered a croaky laugh, which a second ago had seemed entirely beyond him, while a hand crept down unconsciously to rub at his ribs. I’d spoken the fundamental truth of the trenches.
“So why are you here, Boom? Why come do this?”
Despite all our time together, we’d been guys and never quite gotten to this conversation.