I had never thought about that issue in much depth. Instead I’d more or less answered by action. In my dating life, I’d been unattracted to women with young children, or those whose biological clock could be heard ticking.
So now, in her bed, with Nara pasted to my side in the sweat we had generated, I shone the light on myself: Could I be a father again at fifty-five? That didn’t seem to be too late for movie stars and CEOs. I knew at least one man back home in Kindle County, the Prosecuting Attorney, Tommy Molto, who’d married at fifty-two and then had a family, and he seemed like a tulip blooming midwinter in a greenhouse, even though he’d once told me that with his worn looks, he was often mistaken for his sons’ grandfather.
But Tommy did not have grown children who would be completely disoriented by this decision, especially Pete, who was not all that far from starting a family of his own. Nor had Tommy, in the crudest terms, been there and done that. At first blush, having kids at my age seemed to be one of those acts like Icarus’s as he flew too close to the sun. It felt as if I’d be trying to live twice.
“I need to think,” I said. “We both do.”
“We do,” she answered and pulled herself even closer.
On Monday morning, Goos and I worked together on a joint report about the exhumation of the Cave. In Bosnia, we had felt merely befuddled, because we still had no idea where the people who’d lived in Barupra had gone. But here we had to confront our institutional responsibilities. The plain fact was that we had consumed a lot of the Court’s resources on allegations that were unfounded. At this stage, it was a blessing that Ferko’s testimony had been presented in public and that three judges had voted to authorize the investigation. But now what? Our conclusion, after noodling together for a while, was that because we still did not know if a war crime had been perpetrated, we were obliged to do some limited follow-up, even if continuing meant conducting what amounted to a four-hundred-head missing persons investigation.
A few hours later, in the waning hours of the afternoon, Goos entered my office and closed the door, a standard sign that something was up. The jolly air that he generally brought with him, and which had been much in evidence this morning after bringing Fien back to The Hague, had evaporated. He appeared, if anything, upset.
My first thought was that Roger had carried through on his threat.
“Is my name in print?” I hadn’t told Goos yet about my meeting with Roger, which had seemed embarrassing to me for many reasons, particularly because Goos knew I counted Rog as a friend.
“How’s that?” he said.
“I didn’t tell you I nearly resigned on Friday.”
As I related what happened, Goos tilted his head like the RCA dog looking into the bell of the Victrola. He didn’t get it.
“You know, Goos, I probably need to think about quitting anyway. Sooner or later that story about Esma and me is going to come out around here. And people will say that’s why we believed Ferko and got into this whole investigation. I’ll be the scapegoat.”
“No, you won’t. The Pre-Trial Chamber approved the investigation. And that story about Esma and you? No one will even follow up.” He took the other chair in front of my desk and looked up at my blank walls as if there was actually something there. His lips were bunched and his mouth moved a couple of times on the verge of words.
“Just say it, Goos.”
“Well, if you believe the wags, you weren’t the first person at the Court to root her.”
By now, with Esma, nothing surprised me.
“And who was before me?”
“Akemi. Last fall. Suspect that’s why the investigation got approved, even with the Americans braying and carrying on.”
“Akemi?”
“So they say. I don’t have color photos. Quite the furphy hereabouts, but one never knows. Didn’t bother me ever. Investigation should have been approved a long time ago.”
Despite Esma’s denials, I would never have bet much that I wasn’t part of a parade—and the fact that women were also marching along had been reported in my readings about her divorce. The part that bothered me most was seeing ever more clearly that I—and poor Akemi—had been a means to an end.
“And what became of the happy couple?” I asked.
“Story is Esma called it quits and broke Akemi’s heart. Suspect that’s her way.”
That would explain why Esma was upset when I pulled the plug. She regarded it as her imperial right to exit the stage first.
Goos was still hunched, watching me with evident unease. My instinct was to to ask why he hadn’t said something before, but I recognized that was stupid. Half the people on earth had probably told someone they cared about, ‘She isn’t going to be good for you,’ and the number of times those warnings hadn’t backfired was a lot smaller.
“And no drum from your mate about what happened to those five hundred thousand weapons?” Goos asked about Roger.
“No info,” I said. “I’d love to find out.”
“Not our business to investigate that, though, is it?”
“No,” I said. “Our business was to investigate the massacre of four hundred people who were supposedly buried in the Cave and who’re now AWOL.”
“Yay,” he said, “but I’ve got some good oil on that. Was that I’d come over to tell you.”
He put several screenshots from Facebook on my desk.
“Am I supposed to read this?” I asked.
“Not that you’ll enjoy it much.”
“Goos, this is in Serbo-Croatian.”
“Right, right, right,” he said and spanned his forehead with his hand. “Should I translate?” he asked.
“I’ll take the gist.”
“Remember our makeshift DNA database?”
“You mean to identify the relatives of all those people we thought we’d find in the Cave?”
“Right. So I put out a request on Facebook: Love to hear from blood relations of the folks who lived in Barupra from 1999 to 2004. Here’s two girls, both of them new to Facebook, saying they were born in Barupra.”
“Born there? And where are they living now?”
“Mitrovica, Kosovo. It’s where the Barupra lot came from, mate. One, the fifteen-year-old, she’s answered my messages today a couple of times. Says she and her friends, how they grew up, parents were such that you couldn’t even say the word ‘Barupra’ out loud. Not in the whole camp where they are. Plenty of her friends don’t even know they were born there. And I mean, Boom, I’ve tried ‘Barupra’ before on the net. YouTube. Facebook. Crime Stoppers. Whatnot. And nary a word from anyone saying they ever lived there.”
“So what changed?”
“Figure I better go there and ask, don’t you think?”
“But these girls, they’re saying their parents lived in Barupra, too? And other people in this camp she’s in now. Right? That’s the implication, isn’t it?”
“That’s the implication, Boom. Sounds like after all this, our Roma just went home.”
The Investigative Fallacy is assuming facts you want to believe. Goos and I had been trained to take nothing for granted. But the unquestioned disappearance of four hundred people, as well as Ferko’s testimony, had somehow never allowed either of us to consider the alternative that they had all simply moved away. There were reasons for what we believed. The Roma had departed with no word to their few friends or relations in the area, not then and not in the last eleven years. And beyond that, they had no means of transportation for four hundred people. Unless, I realized suddenly, the US Army had arrived in the middle of the night with dozens of trucks to carry them home.
32.
Home?—July 6–7
I came in from work on Monday, after my meeting with Goos, in a sour mood. I was prepared to tell Nara that I didn’t feel like running, but I could see at once that she had troubles of her own.
“You should never try a career playing poker,” I told her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re not very good at hiding it when you’re worried.”
“Truly? People always tell me that I am so difficult to read.”
I would have said the same thing months ago. It was a plus, I supposed, that to me she was now transparent.
She motioned me to the sofa, so we were sitting side by side, and she touched my hand in her prim way.