I asked Goos to direct the witnesses back to the entry of the Chetniks into the village close to midnight on April 27. In the interval, another person, Dilfo, had intruded onto the screen. He was an old man, rotund, with a face like a potato. He was Florica’s father-in-law and the father of Ion and Prako, Florica’s husband. All three began talking and Goos held them up at times to translate.
“These Chetniks are very well organized. First thing Ion and Dilfo see is they encircle Boldo’s house. And there’s a commander outside who speaks good Serbo-Croatian using an electronic megaphone to tell Boldo to come out with his hands up. And Boldo instead comes flying out with a Zastava and they gunned him down when he was not more than four steps from his door. Commanding officer fired first, and then there were shots from each side.”
Goos and Ion conversed for a while in Serbo-Croatian.
“Ion says anyone who knew Boldo would know he wasn’t gonna be raising his hands. It all happened very fast. Boldo goes down. Then the son runs out and grabs his father’s AK and another soldier shoots him. Then the brother arrives, screaming that Boldo never talked to the Americans and how can you kill him? They try to disarm the brother, pretty much like Ferko testified, but the brother, Refke, he gets shot, too. I mean, I heard about forty different versions of this part of the story in the last couple days, Boom. None of them tell it quite the same.”
“The usual,” I said. Few humans cultivated skills of cool observation while they were watching people get killed.
“In the meantime, the Chetniks go house to house, rousting everyone. The Roma are all begging for their lives to start, assuming this is Kajevic come to kill them, but the Chetnik on the megaphone is saying, ‘You’re safe, you’re going back to Kosovo.’ The soldiers search everybody and take the cell phones from the few of them who owned such back then. And load the Roma on the trucks at gunpoint. No one is fighting now that Boldo and his kin have been shot.”
Dilfo, in the center of the picture, suddenly propelled his hands in the air.
“The explosion?” I asked.
“Exactly,” says Goos. “Last truck is maybe eight hundred meters out of town when they hear the explosion down below.” Goos translated Dilfo directly for a moment.
“‘We are in the trucks about eight hours until we arrive in Mitrovica. Seeing what we’ve come back to, the People are crying and carrying on. And the Chetnik commander, who’s still wearing the balaclava, gets on top of the truck and says in Serbo-Croatian, “We brought you here for your own good. Because sooner or later Kajevic and his Tigers would have killed every last one of you. He’s sworn a curse on the whole village of Barupra.”’ Roma, you know, Boom, they put a lot of stock in curses. And they heard the Bosnian soldiers deliver Kajevic’s threat anyway.
“The commander goes on: ‘No one can know you are here. That’s why we took your cell phones. As far as Kajevic is concerned, you’re all dead back in that Cave, and it’s up to you to leave him thinking that way. Some of you will want to let your kin know you’re alive. But you can’t. If Kajevic finds out that the people of Barupra live, he will hunt you down. Every last one of you.’
“Most of them, of course, Boom, they’re with their families anyway, they don’t have a lot of people back in Bosnia to tell. The Big Man, new one after Boldo, goes around and has a heart-to-heart with every family. Everyone signs on: ‘Barupra’ is a word none of them will ever speak. They don’t like telling the non-Roma—”
“The gadje?”
“Right. They don’t like telling the gadje their secrets anyway.”
“And do they know who these men in balaclavas are?”
Goos asked, which caused the three of them to talk over each other and quarrel among themselves.
“They argue to this day,” said Goos.
“I can see.”
“Some people think they were Kajevic’s Tigers who were pretending not to be. Or some other paramilitary, like the Scorpions, doing the Tigers’ dirty work. Boldo’s family is sure of that, that they came to kill Boldo.” Florica interjected something and Goos nodded. “Florica, she says the Chetniks had NATO papers to get across the border to Kosovo. She was peeking out of the truck. So perhaps they were Germans or French.”
“But the people on the trucks recognized nobody?”
“One,” Ion answered in English.
“The Chetnik commander,” said Goos. “Some people say this Chetnik was a man. But people like Ion say otherwise.”
Ion looked into the camera.
“Atee-la,” Ion said.
“Attila? In person?” I asked.
“Yay, Attila. Look close at the photos I sent. Dinky-di, I say. That’s Attila.”
“Shooting Boldo, right?”
“That’s my guess.”
Goos thanked the three witnesses and let them go on their ways. Then he took a seat so his face filled up the whole screen.
Largely as an act of intellectual discipline, I tried to figure out if we had any kind of case left. The Roma clearly had been forced to return to Kosovo at gunpoint, although it was hard to calculate whether they or I would be more reluctant to see any of them near a witness stand.
“You know, Goos, forced migration is designated as a war crime in our governing statute.”
“Well, you tell me, Boom. Is it a forced relocation if you bring people back home? Especially to save their lives?”
I was at that hinge point where a lot of good prosecutors become bad prosecutors, trying to justify months or years of hard work and bad assumptions by hammering the facts into the shape of an established crime.
“We’re done,” I said. “Agree?”
“Carked for sure, mate.”
“I still have a plane reservation to Cincinnati in the morning.”
“For?”
“I’m going to try to find Attila. She’s got a horse farm in northern Kentucky. Remember the pictures?”
“To what point, Boom?”
“Well, there’s a lot we don’t know. Like who put up Ferko to lying through his teeth? Why did Boldo say Attila told him to steal those guns? Mostly, I want to look Attila in the eye and tell her I don’t care for the way she blew smoke up our ass.”
We talked a little more. Nara had texted while I was on with Goos, and I was anxious to speak to her.
“Make sure you send me a selfie,” Goos said, “when you get to Attila’s. Not being a larrikin. Just so there’s proof of your last whereabouts. There’s more to Attila than we reckoned.”
That sounded extreme, but I agreed.
At that moment, Dilfo wandered back into the picture to deliver some parting thought to Goos.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Wants us to get them out of Kosovo. All the People. Says Kajevic made them prisoners here for a dozen years. Now they deserve to go someplace better.” Goos looked into the camera and added, “Some place they’re welcome.”
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” Nara said when she picked up.
“Should I read you the phone book?”
“I was thinking of something like, I love you.”
I obliged.
“I talked to Lewis. He will be here in an hour.”
“Any clues about his state of mind?”
“He said that he was reconsidering everything.” She took a second. “I told him about you.”
“Was he upset?”
“Very. But I didn’t want him to walk in not knowing.”
Overall I saw her point.
“And what about your state of mind?” I asked, even though I was certain she’d know nothing for real until her husband was standing in front of her, in the home they had shared.
“I am trying to follow your advice and consider everything. But I do not believe that is how people make choices in these situations. As if it was a decision tree. Falling in love is not easy, Boom. Certainly not for me. If you say to almost every person on earth, Would you like to live with love or without love, what do you think they would say? People don’t choose against love, Boom.”
She was a smart girl. But that misstated her choice. Seeing Lewis, if he said the right things, she might feel something else, a rekindling of whatever brought them together to start.
Nara said, “But I have thought a lot about what I said the other night. About you giving me away?”
“And?”
“I think I am correct. You want me to walk away—”