I had her with that. She didn’t stir for a second as she watched me.
“It was that fuckin GPS, wasn’t it?” She meant the one transponder that had briefly showed up on the aerial photographs. “Tell me true, Boom. Do I need to get myself a damn lawyer?”
“Look, Attila. If I report what you tell me, either at the Court or to anybody in the US, I’m the one who’ll end up in trouble, because I have no permission to be here asking questions.”
She considered whether that was good enough. I threw down my ace.
“I spoke with Merry yesterday.”
“Huh,” she said, then went to what proved to be a refrigerated drawer in the huge central island and poured an ice tea in a mason jar. After making another for me, she led me outside to the screened porch. The air was thick here, far more humid than I’d felt in a while, but a breeze rose off the river, and there was a lovely view of the serene water idling below. We were high enough that the birds and dragonflies zagged over the trees at eye level.
I told her some of what I’d discovered: the light arms, Iraq.
“I have lots of questions,” I said. “But maybe we should start with a simple one. How the hell did a bunch of Gypsies end up with guns to sell to Kajevic?”
“Who told you that?”
“Is it untrue?”
“Fuck no, it ain’t untrue. I’m just tryin to figure how you found out is all. You’re good, Boom. You and Goos. You’re good at your job.”
“I’m too old for you to tell me how pretty I am, Attila. How about just letting me hear the whole story.”
She looked at her mug, while using her nail-bitten index finger to draw a figure in the moisture gathered on the glass. Her gaze was still there as she said, “You know, I ain’t a bad person, Boom. I’m really not. I was tryin to do right by everybody. You’ll see that’s so. Sometimes you just get deeper and deeper in shit.”
I nodded, but hesitated to provide any spoken comfort. I’d heard a lot of similar excuses in my law office.
“You know,” she said, “Merry takes the blame for this whole arms-to-Iraq thing, but I’m still believin it was your buddy Roger’s idea. Whoever, it was purely fugazi, man. All this top-secret crap. The whole operation was run on the intelligence side with private contractors. Our armed forces never touched those weapons, probably so they’d have deniability.
“And don’t you know, two days after the first transport takes off for Iraq I’m getting all these freaked-out calls from the Green Zone in Baghdad about where in the hell did the weapons go? And it’s not two weeks before a telex arrives from Army Intelligence. They’re recovering assault rifles from Al Qaeda in Iraq, which have either the serial numbers we’d recorded or our laser engraving, usually both. You know, the Iraqis tried to torch off the identifiers before they sold the firearms, but they were as good at that as they were anything else.
“Okay. So bad enough we sent 200,000 small arms to Iraq to kill Americans, but no more than two weeks later, right after I start hearing about where these weapons are endin up, Roger calls me to say we’ve got to send a second shipment, 300,000 more. And I’m like, Fuck you, I’m not in business to kill US soldiers, or Canadian soldiers or British soldiers or anybody else on my side. And he’s like, You don’t understand shit about what’s goin down here. It’s bedlam. We need to reestablish the police and the military, and if 50,000 guns walk away, then that’s what happens. And besides, did you ever hear about following fucking orders? I can replace your worthless ass with one phone call.” Attila paused to wag her chin. “Hate that prick,” she said.
“I thought you were explaining how the Roma got the guns they sold Kajevic.”
“I am.”
“How’s that?”
“Cause there was a bunch of Gypsy drivers standing around in my office when I got that last call from Roger.”
“Why were they in your office?”
“Payday. Those Roma don’t know from bank accounts, so I had to give them their wages in cash. And Boom, I’m a big boy—how I run my company, I’m the only one who handles large amounts of currency. Just fact.”
“And who exactly was there with you when you had that argument with Roger?”
Attila lifted her face and squinted at me.
“Have you got that jackass Ferko in your pocket?”
“Attila, just answer me.”
She pouted briefly.
“Well, I argued like that with Roger more than once, and I can’t say who-all was there for sure, but it must have been six, seven of them. Boldo. Ferko, I imagine, and Boldo’s dumb brother, Refke, cause they was almost always with Boldo. Three or four others who’d driven that week.”
“Remind me about Boldo. How did you know him?”
“Boldo? You go on the Internet and you Google ‘anus,’ there’s gonna be a great big picture of Boldo right there. He’d been in Dubrava prison in Kosovo up until maybe a month before the Roma got torched out in Mitrovica in ’99.”
“What was he in prison for?”
Attila shrugged. “How I heard, he sliced up some guy in a bar. Maybe it was thievin. He was a real thief. Anyway, NATO bombed the prison and the Serbians overran it and let the non-Muslims go. So Boldo was with the whole Gypsy mob when they came to Bosnia. And pretty much the Big Man there. Over time, Boldo got into chop-shoppin, and stealin cars, too.”
“And you employed him anyway?”
“That’s why I hired that whole lot, Boom. Do I want them rippin my trucks? I had them on payroll so they’d leave my shit alone. Plus that kept anybody else from boostin my equipment, seein as how Boldo was the main place you’d go to move it. I mean,” said Attila, peeking at me, “it’s business.”
“And how many of them were in this group?”
“There was maybe ten in all I’d see from time to time.”
“Names?”
Attila scratched her chin and looked upward to recall. She came up with about six names, Ion among them.
“All right,” I said. “So we’re in your office. You get a call and you and Roger have this intense argument while these Gypsy drivers are standing around waiting to be paid.”
“Right. And when I get off the phone, I just lose my shit. I mean it’s a real and total hissy fit. I’m rattling on in English, throwing shit at the wall, while these guys are just starin with no clue. ‘Fuck me if I’m gonna send guns to Iraq to arm Al Qaeda, even for Layton fuckin Merriwell. Fuck me if I’m gonna let the fuckin Iraqis steal this shit that thousands of NATO soldiers have risked their lives to collect. Fuck me, fuck me. If I had any real stones, I’d steal those fuckin guns myself and send them someplace where they wouldn’t be shootin Americans.’ I went on and on how Merriwell had lost his mind. Only I forgot one thing, Boom.”
“Which was?”
“Boldo spoke English. He was the only one. The rest of them didn’t even speak Bosnian well. But Boldo, he understood every word.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah, ouch,” said Attila. “Like there goes my clearance if anyone hears I was so loose with all that classified shit. I mean, Boom, I told you a long time ago: I talk too much. I’ve been stepping on my dick like that my whole life. I just always think I’m so fuckin entertaining.” She stopped with her narrow shoulders drawn and seemed to reflect for a second about herself.