“They claimed to have no information about you, Esma.”
“That’s just Kayla, the receptionist,” she said lightly. “She’s protective of everyone’s privacy.” I was startled for a second, then suddenly comprehended her strategy. Assuming I remained none the wiser, she was continuing to pretend she was the lawyer in the Jahanbani case rather than the client. “And what is it that you need to know, Bill?”
I was wrathful, but personal rebukes would predictably end our conversation. My priority had to be learning what I could about Ferko and her arrangements with him.
“Do you know anything concerning Ferko’s current whereabouts?” I asked.
“I don’t, Bill. And I don’t believe I would tell you if I did. We both know that’s information he doesn’t want shared. And he’s quite put out with you at the moment, as well as me, I might add.”
“You’ve spoken to him?”
“Once. A few weeks ago. After one of your round of messages asking to see him, I rang him. Or tried. When I found his line out of service, I used a number I had for his son. Ferko was quite angry. He thinks you led Laza Kajevic’s Tigers to him. Said they cuffed him about and asked questions concerning Goos and you. Is that possible?”
“It was quite inadvertent,” I said, although Ferko’s answers had probably ended up saving our lives.
“But you accosted Ferko at home?”
“We did.”
“Well, that’s very much against the rules of your Court, Bill. I’m not surprised he wants nothing to do with you. He was promised that would never occur.”
I made no response. I was not going to take instruction from Esma about ethics.
“So you’re saying you never even saw his house?” I asked.
She tossed around her head and laughed.
“Never. I had not so much as an address for him. I promised him from the start that I would keep no records that would allow anyone to locate him and punish him for giving evidence. When we met, I reached him by mobile and arranged to see him most often at my hotel.” That was how Ferko could perpetrate this hoax. As I’d realized, the very nature of being a protected witness meant no one ever investigated the basic claims he’d made about himself.
“Do you care to know what we found, Esma?”
Accepting that Esma was a studied composition at all times, her surprise, as I described what Goos and I had discovered in Vo Selo, appeared genuine. As she listened, she drew her chin back and pulled her face aside, finally looking behind to find a seat on a stone bench along the wall.
“This is all very strange,” she said. “Are you suggesting he was playing a part?”
“More or less.”
“How awful,” she answered. Then she gave her face a quick little shake to show she didn’t quite accept what I was saying. “But you corroborated his testimony. I was there to see the bones in Boldo’s grave.”
From a seat at the other end of the bench, I offered an outline of what Madame Professor Tchitchikov had concluded concerning the soil in the grave and what the forensics had shown about the bullets Goos recovered.
“But to what end?” Esma asked. “What gain is there to Ferko in planting bullets or claiming his wife is dead when she is alive?” Those were the right questions—even though the logical answers seemed to involve Esma. “I can’t make sense of any of this,” she said. “We know there was an explosion. We know four hundred people from Barupra disappeared without a trace.”
“We exhumed the Cave last week, Esma.”
“Finding what?”
“No bodies.”
Esma’s features were reduced by incomprehension.
“They are buried somewhere else?” she asked.
“No, Esma. What proof was there ever that four hundred people are dead, aside from Ferko’s word? Nothing he said is true. In fact, we now believe that a number of the Roma who were living in Barupra at that time are in Kosovo.”
“Kos-ovo?” She laid one finger on her chin. As I had known her, Esma did not often appear entirely puzzled. She usually had her own goals in mind at every moment, and a strategy for achieving them. “What on earth would impel Ferko to make up such a thing?”
That remained the pivotal question. I gave her my best guess.
“The only alternative that really makes sense to me is that you put him up to it. Paid him perhaps. All for the good of the Roma cause.”
“Me?” She recoiled so far that she nearly rolled off the stone bench. Sharp anger was also not something I’d witnessed often from Esma. What she’d pulled off required mad skills as an actress, but even so, she was doing a superior job of appearing startled, uncomprehending and now indignant. “Me? What good is it to the Roma cause, as you put it, to trot out such an elaborate lie when it is bound to be ultimately exposed? Really, Bill. I know I disappointed you at one moment, but I am not completely daft. Or entirely disingenuous.”
I dragged a hand down my face. I was ready.
“Well, it doesn’t surprise you, does it, Esma, that someone would tell elaborate lies and live them out for years, for whatever gratification it offers?”
“I should say I’m very much surprised. Even more so than you, Bill. I’ve believed all of this about Ferko for nearly a decade.”
I held a beat.
“Have you ever heard of a woman from a Persian exile family whose maiden name is Emira Zandi?”
She jolted visibly again. Her eyes were wide and still and she’d drawn her shoulders around herself protectively. Despite her makeup, I thought there had been a change in her color. Most telling, all her wondrous brio was gone, replaced by the flickering arrival of an expression that was the rarest of all the new looks that had come over her in the last few minutes. She was scared.
“Not really,” she said. “And what would that have to do with Ferko?”
“Well, Emira Zandi bears a startling resemblance to you, Mrs. Jahanbani.”
She waited for a thought. Her mouth twitched over words.
“Mrs. Who?”
“You’re a liar,” I said. “And a gigantic crackpot. You could spare me some trouble, not that you would care about that, if you told me why Ferko and you cooked this up?”
I had suddenly given her a handhold, something relatively genuine to hang on to again: angry denial.
“I cooked up nothing with Ferko. I persuaded him to give evidence to your Court, Bill, which required some cajoling. But that is because I so wholeheartedly believed him.”
“And weeping over that photograph of his family, Esma.” I could still call her nothing else. “Whose idea was that?”
She nodded several times, as if building up inertia to make a concession.
“Yes, I suggested he bring a photo to court, Bill. And I surely told him that it was not worth the anxiety and effort of taking the stand if he did not do his utmost to be sincere. But I did not instruct him to cry crocodile tears. I prepared him, Bill, as you have prepared hundreds of your clients over the years when they were about to go under oath.”
It was an essential part of advocacy to rehearse your witnesses to be effective on the stand. Yet there were limits, admittedly subtle ones at times. Yet I never told anybody who was dry-eyed that it would be a good idea to cry.
“Again, Bill, I had nothing to gain by any of the lies you say Ferko was telling.”
“Except to call attention to the plight of the Roma.”
“The plight of the Roma is painfully obvious on its own. Their suffering, which has gone on for centuries, is not a pretense. And I am not pretending either.”
“I have no doubts about the miseries of the Roma. But I will never believe anything you say.”
She stared, calculating and doing her best to appear not calculating at all.