I returned to The Hague Thursday. Friday morning, as I approached the entrance to the Court, I was astounded to see Roger, in his twenty-year-old suit, a narrow-brimmed felt hat protecting him from the sun. I bounded up the last step to hug him.
“What the hell?” I asked. “What brings you here?”
“You, actually. I’ve been flying all night. Can we have a cup of coffee?”
It was easier to go back under the concrete underpass of the Sprinter to Voorburg than to try to get Roger approved as a guest at the Court, where the security team required at least a day’s notice of any visitor. As we walked over, we exchanged briefings on our families. Rog was going to have them all together at the Eastern Shore for the Fourth. I smiled imagining Roger pottering around out there in his über-WASP attire, displaying his skinny legs in lime shorts, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and penny loafers without socks.
Once we were on some old wood-slatted folding chairs outside a café, Roger got down to business.
“You sort of interrupted my holiday plans,” Rog said. Today was a federal holiday in the US.
“Me?”
The wind ruffled the red feather in his hatband, and he had to keep his fingers on the brim to keep the chapeau from blowing away.
“There’s a story circulating that you didn’t find any bodies in Bosnia.”
I looked at him for a second.
“Rog, aren’t you guys embarrassed about keeping an eye on me? Go protect the embassy in Benghazi or something. I’m not worth this kind of trouble.”
“There are people in the Pentagon who think you’ve been a lot of trouble. That massacre story in the Times left them spitting whenever they hear your name.”
“I told you—”
“Right, it wasn’t you. Spare me. Anyway, there are plenty of them who think turnabout is fair play. They want to tip the Times that you didn’t find any bodies.”
I shrugged. “They’re entitled to the follow-up. The exhumation was a public event.”
“But they want to wipe out the original story. I mean, punish it. The narrative they’re pushing is that a prosecutor, eager to return to the limelight, starts sleeping with the Chief Allegator and checks his judgment at the door, doing her bidding instead of smelling out pure bullshit. I wanted you to hear this.”
My fingertips were ice cold. There was no point asking where the Pentagon people were coming up with these details. I’d just chided Roger for the way the spooks had kept an eye on me. He’d started referring to Esma as my girlfriend a couple of months back.
“Once fucking is part of a news story, Boom, there’s not much room for nuance. You know that. They’ll throw you under the bus at the Court, I imagine. Fire you. I know I got you into this. And you meant to do the right thing. Instead, you’re going to go home in disgrace. I’m really sorry, Boom. I mean it.”
Esma had played serpent and I’d bitten the apple. It would get worse when the reporters caught wind of the fact that she was actually playing make-believe. They’d give me the trophy as World’s Biggest Idiot.
You always think you don’t care what people say about you, until it’s something like this. Attila had told me that about Merriwell. I finally uttered a deep sigh.
“It doesn’t sound like there’s much I can do,” I said, “except warn the press people at the Court and then hand Badu my resignation.”
Roger let his fingers come off the hat.
“Well, wait. Wait. What are the chances that I could go back to these guys and say, ‘You don’t need to do anything. The Court’s going to announce this week that it’s closed its investigation, acknowledging that there was no massacre.’ Is there any chance of that?”
I considered a second.
“We can’t say there was no massacre,” I told Roger.
He made a face. “You know there was no massacre. I’ve told you from the git-go there was no massacre.”
“I still don’t know for certain there wasn’t a massacre. All I know is that the allegation about four hundred people being buried in that coal mine is completely unfounded.”
“And there is no evidence of a massacre.”
I weighed that one. Four hundred people gone overnight, but last seen being loaded into trucks by the US Army, didn’t quite qualify in my mind as ‘no evidence.’
“We’d have to massage that a little,” I said.
“Well, let’s get the client on the table and do the massage right now and give him a happy ending. I’ve got to get back to these guys with something definitive. Or they’re going to strip you naked in public, Boom, and laugh at your pecker.”
I grimaced a bit but managed a laugh. Roger was always colorful. I tried to get out the lawyer’s toolkit to think about how we could lay our scalpel on the words. Roger was waiting with his lips rumpled. Looking at him, not changed all that much by the years, I recalled our last conversation, when he was furious at me and I had recognized that our friendship, durable as it had been, was marooned for a while on neutral ground while we both had jobs to do.
But with that memory there was abruptly a dawning of some kind, accompanied by a small bloodrush as thought labored toward solid form. And then I saw it, the way you suddenly make out a form in the dark: Roger wasn’t here to protect me, no matter how clever the posturing or how blunt the appeal to my self-interest. He was here to kill the case.
But what did that mean? Were the Roma in a trench somewhere else with American rounds in their heads? Or was there another secret my government wanted to keep? I went with instinct.
“So our press release would say nothing about the arms we found?”
We hadn’t spoken a word yet about the weapons. I wanted to see if Roger would bother feigning surprise.
“I don’t know exactly what the fuck you found, but it’s beside the point, isn’t it? There aren’t any bodies. No?”
“No bodies,” I said. “But whoever was watching us, Rog”—and I realized that his source was almost certainly within NATO—“had to have told you we found a large arms cache there.”
“What’s the diff, Boom?”
“Well, Rog, those guns we found, they all had NATO markings. Was that a surprise to you? That we found weapons in the Cave?”
“It was a big surprise.”
“And no idea how they got there?”
“Nothing definitive. And I couldn’t care less at this point. I just need DoD off my back.”
I had it now. It was what Kajevic had said. Of all the people in the world, we’d gotten the truth from Laza fucking Kajevic.
“Well, Rog, here’s the thing. I have the feeling those weapons are of great concern to you. And if it’s not how they got there that bothers you, then it has to be where they came from. So I’m wondering—actually I’m suddenly pretty sure: They were part of five hundred thousand arms that were supposed to be shipped in April 2004 from Bosnia to Iraq.”
Roger, my friend, always had a very short fuse. His nostrils flared and his color changed.
“Where did you hear about that? From Attila, that blabbermouth? I’ll tell you right now, she’s not going to have a security clearance by the end of the day.” He used a nasty word about her.
“It wasn’t Attila,” I said. “I’ve gotten nothing from her but the company line.”
“Then who?”
“Then what? What’s such a big deal about five hundred thousand guns, Rog, that it has to remain classified eleven years later? That you’re ready to fly all night to keep me from finding out?”
He stared, with that screwed-up intense face Merry had imitated the first time I met him.
“You’re playing mumbly-peg with a two-foot sword,” Roger said.
“Any press release about what we didn’t find in the Cave that also includes what we did find—those small arms—that’s a disaster for you, isn’t it? Because some intrepid reporter will ask how those weapons fell into Roma hands and then—this is the big one—what happened to the five hundred thousand or so other guns headed for Iraq. The investigation you don’t want us to do gets done by the New York Times instead. And I’ll be curious about the answers.” I looked across the table. “You’re bluffing, Rog.”