I was asleep early, but left my phone on, hoping to hear from Nara. We’d been exchanging voice mails, but still hadn’t connected. As I was leaving The Hague, she appeared just a little uneasy that I was going to see Esma, although her discomfort was minor compared to my apprehensions about her visit with Lew. Near 4 a.m., my phone pinged and I roused myself and turned on the light, sitting at the edge of the bed with my hands on my thighs while I tried to remind myself where I was.
The text was from Goos. He’d positioned himself at an Internet café and wondered if we could speak by Skype. He’d attached several photos of the people he’d interviewed in the last couple of days.
His image swam a bit on the screen and shattered into uneven lines before it cohered. We ended up starting with a rundown on my conversation with Merriwell.
“Think we’re lucky he’s taken a liking to you, Boom.”
“Maybe. He knows I’m reluctant to burn Roger. But I think he was afraid not to tell me the truth.”
Like me, Goos could see how Merry and Roger would be left holding the bag if the Iraqi weapons shipments became a subject of public discussion. Even if they ended up pointing fingers at the White House to save themselves, it would make a grim end to their public careers, with no guaranteed outcome.
Eventually, we turned to the results of Goos’s efforts in Kosovo.
“Talked to about forty people in the last two days,” Goos said. “Some by themselves, some in groups. Have a couple folks standing by, if you’ve a mind to ask questions yourself.”
“What’s the executive summary before we do that?”
“Making it very skinny, the 386 souls who used to live in Barupra arrived here on April 28, 2004.”
“And here is Mitrovica? The refugee camp where the locals tried to burn them out in 1999?”
“Right you are, Boom. Not much more popular now hereabouts, I’d say. A hundred thousand or so Roma in Kosovo back then and ninety thousand ended up as refugees. Usual story. Everybody hates them.”
I was experiencing some difficulty sorting out my reactions. I was supposed to be happy these people were still alive.
“And what happened to them once they got to Mitrovica?”
“Well, I sent you photos, but here, this café is just across the street.”
He swung his laptop around. What I saw was not much better than Barupra, shacks with corrugated tin roofs, sided in canvas or bare planks. As in Barupra, there were dwellings under blue tarps and, in one case, the old drab tenting of the UN relief agency. Clothing hung on wash lines, and as always there were piles of metal refuse everywhere. The place was deep in mud.
“The reason there was still room in the old camp here,” Goos said, “was there’d been a lot of whinging that folks were getting sick. Turns out it’s right down the hill from a lead mine. Place was finally closed a few years back. But there’s still thirty, forty of the Roma from Barupra squatting here.”
“What about lead poisoning?”
“What about it? There’s dead kids, blind kids, kids with all manner of problems. Some of the grown-ups have got nerve conditions. But there’s nowhere else to go. Most from Barupra are over in a better camp, former UN barracks, little white buildings. And a lot have fallen back in with the Roma community in town, the Mahalla. But aren’t a lot of them here, Boom, wherever they’re living, that’ve got a piece of piss for a life—it’s all damn hard.”
“No happy endings for the Roma?”
“Not in this movie.”
On my tablet, I navigated to the photos Goos had sent: kids in cheap dirty clothes, most of them in short pants, as seemed to be the custom without regard to the season. The adults had the insular weathered look I’d seen before. They wore Crocs and no socks and polyester jackets and surplus T-shirts with ridiculous slogans that had caused the garments to go unsold until the Roma bought them for pennies. The sight was starting to have a disheartening familiarity.
“Was it easy getting them to talk?”
“Not easy. The younger ones were better. A couple months back, before Kajevic was captured, I’d have had Buckley’s chance with any of them.” That was more or less what I’d pieced together with Merriwell.
“How it turned out, Boom, I was a bit tin-arsed.” He meant he’d been lucky. “Recollect Sinfi from Lijce, the other Roma town? You told me all about her.”
I wouldn’t forget Sinfi soon. She was the thin beautiful young woman who first informed us about Kajevic’s threats, while holding her nine-month-old on her hip.
“I was having a squizz around the camp here,” Goos said, “when I saw this sheila and thought to myself, Must be she’s Sinfi’s sister.” He had to be referring to the withered arm. “So I asked her, you know. Turned out I was right. I lent her my mobile to call Lijce. No one here’s got international service. Happy times, Boom. Tears of joy. I was everybody’s mate after that. Only thing was the lot of them wanted to be double sure Kajevic was in irons. Had a couple NATO photos to show them.”
“So you’re the big man on campus?”
“Could say. You know, Boom, I suspect some of them are looking to have a lend of us. Just their way. They’ll stick their hands out soon enough. Reparations? Whatever they can get. You understand, Boom. They’re poor.”
I didn’t need to tell Goos how to steer around that: Make no promises but, on the other hand, don’t tell them now that their hopes were unrealistic. It was almost impossible to deal with the Roma without screwing them over in some way.
“So here’s our man Ion.” Lacking directorial skills, Goos forgot to re-aim the camera, which I assumed was in his laptop, perched in turn on a café table. But eventually Ion was at Goos’s side. Ion was chunky, with a full face and wiry black hair and brown as an old penny. He was a good-natured sort, smiling often, despite his dentition, in which his two front teeth appeared to be alone in his upper gum. The sight of him took me all the way back to childhood and a puppet called Ollie, a dragon with a single tooth that overlapped his lower lip.
Ion spoke quickly in Serbo-Croatian and also knew a few words of English, since he was another former CoroDyn employee. But Goos frequently held him up so he could translate for me.
Ion had worked on Boldo’s crew and drove regularly for Attila and CoroDyn. In mid-March 2004, he was deployed on several convoys, picking up stores of weapons at various facilities around Bosnia and delivering them to Camp Comanche for what I now knew was air transport to Iraq. The final convoy did not follow the pattern.
“They went down toward Mostar and picked up the load of weapons, twelve trucks, but when they got back toward Tuzla, Boldo suddenly tells half of them, Ion included, to take the arms and the trucks to Barupra. Boldo had them steer these rigs down that road to the Cave in the middle of the night, which didn’t make any of these blokes especially content, but Boldo is mean as cat’s piss. In the morning, Ion and a dozen of them from the village unloaded the weapons from the trucks. Boldo is strutting around, grinning like a shot fox, saying how he had a customer for some of this.”
“Was this new?” I said. “Did Boldo deal in stolen guns regularly?”
“Boldo,” Goos told me, after he’d asked, “was pretty good at boosting cars and chopping them. But weapons, so far as Ion knew, that was a new lurk for Boldo.”
Goos and Ion again chatted for a minute. In the afternoon, after all the arms were unloaded, Boldo and Ion and the other drivers were taken back to where the rest of the convoy had waited. Then they proceeded to Commanche, where Boldo reported the hijacking. The next day, the men working for Boldo warehoused the weapons in the Cave.
“Ion was up top of the ridge for a rest when he sees a car raising dust across the valley. Looked like a jet with a vapor trail, doing 150 kilometers at least.”
Ion was a vivid storyteller like so many other Roma. He was in the midst of rolling himself a cigarette but was able to do a pantomime illustrating the speed of the car, even while Ion held the unsealed paper, lined with tobacco, in his other hand.
“Sedan parks in front of the Cave, and even on top, Ion can hear Attila screaming, cross as a frog in a sack. ‘Where’s Boldo? Where’s Boldo?’
“Boldo comes sauntering down and Attila gets up in his grill. Quite the blue.”
Ion made a shooting gesture.
“What’s that?” I asked.