“And ‘back channel’ means Olivier and you?”
“It means we’ve been the messenger boys between our bosses. But after weeks of discussion, everyone seems to believe that the best option would be if the ICC investigation was led by a senior American prosecutor.”
“Sort of a special prosecutor?”
“Sort of. But no formal title like that. It has to be the right person. Not a patsy. Somebody they respect and we respect. For us, that means a quality guy whose reputation is bulletproof when some yahoo in Congress wants to foment a world crisis just because there’s an inquiry occurring at the ICC.”
“And that’s me?” I said, with genuine incredulity. “The man with built-in body armor?”
“You still have a lot of fans on both sides of the aisle in DC, Boom.”
That was an exaggeration for the sake of flattery. I’d gotten along well with the Attorney General during her prior stint as deputy AG and also had a college friend who was now a Republican senator from Kentucky.
“Rog, have I read about this case?”
“Not really. The major papers haven’t tumbled to it. Couple items in the blogosphere. The Roma advocates, they’ve tried to gin something up, but the massacre is old news, and so far you can’t name a bad guy, so it doesn’t make good copy. All fine with us.”
“And how long will this investigation last?”
He tossed up a hand to show he couldn’t say, but acknowledged that such matters often moved slowly.
“But because of that,” he said, “cases over there are like buses. People get on and off. Whenever you’re fed up, you can leave.”
I laid a finger across my lips to think.
“Wait,” Roger said. “I haven’t even sold the Dutch part. I thought you’d love the whole Roots thing. You’ve never spent any real time in the Netherlands, right?”
“No,” I said, “my folks never wanted to go back.” I had yet to tell Roger the larger, more complicated story of my heritage. Now, however, was not the moment.
Instead, I sat back in my big leather desk chair, doing my best to be lawyerly, calculating all the angles and scrutinizing Roger. The competitive side of our relationship meant he’d never fully reveal what he was up to. But as a friend of decades, he knew I’d find the job intriguing. Even after I’d announced my retirement here, I’d sensed I was not done with the law. I didn’t think practice mixed well with capitalism, but I still liked what lawyers did and was immediately attracted to the idea of plying a trade I knew overseas.
“Look, Rog. We’ll ignore the fact that you’re selling a job you have no right to offer. Olivier and his people will have to speak up for themselves. But it’s obvious you want to replace one friend of yours with another. So I’m not even going to dial The Hague unless you look at me and say that I’ll be doing this straight up, chips fall where they may.”
Roger sat forward again and let me see his soft eyes deep within the sad little pouches of aging flesh.
“Wherever Jesus flings ’em,” he said.
2.
The Hague—2 March 2015
By the end of January, after many calls with Olivier, often two or three a day, I had accepted a formal job offer from the International Criminal Court. It required another month to wind things up in Kindle County—rent my condo, store my stuff—and to square things with Willem and Piet, my sons. (Ellen and I had given our boys Dutch names, thinking it would inspire my parents to educate the boys about their heritage. That hope proved misplaced, and my sons had started calling themselves Will and Pete by the time they entered first grade.) Now both seemed disconcerted by the prospect of my departure, which frustrated me privately. For the last several years, while my sons worked out their anger with me for ending my marriage, they had acted like it was a form of forced labor to share my company for a meal every couple of weeks.
On Sunday, March 1, I boarded an overnight flight to Schiphol, Amsterdam’s international airport. I was several days ahead of my original schedule, because the Pre-Trial Chamber had unexpectedly ordered the Office of the Prosecutor to present Ferko’s testimony later that week. At Schiphol, I found the Intercity, the blue-and-yellow fast train that connects Holland’s major cities. An hour later, I was sitting in The Hague’s central square, the Plein, absorbing the morning pace of Dutch life and trying to quell my jet lag with coffee and what passed for daylight.
Once I was in the Netherlands, I began to understand why their transcendent painters, say Rembrandt or Vermeer, were obsessed with light and shadow. The winter gloom was even worse than in Kindle County, which I always described as like living under a pot lid. On the day I arrived, the wind blustered through a sky of dun scraps.
Despite the weather, The Hague struck me as an elegant dowager of a town with a cheerful cosmopolitan air. In its old center, stout brown-brick buildings, with their steep slate roofs and brightly trimmed windows, dated back centuries and created a feeling akin to heavy wool. Across the open stretches of the Plein, beyond the ever-present bicyclers, I saw an old palace, the Ridderzaal, whose pointed turrets like witches’ hats were vaguely reminiscent of Disneyland. I rolled my suitcase a block and stopped on a bridge to watch the ice-skaters whiz along on a canal below, their heavy scarves flying behind them as they braved the ice despite the temperature in the low 40s. I loved the place on sight.
Eventually, I took a taxi to the chain hotel the ICC uses to stash visitors, where the cramped lobby seemed to aspire to a youthful affect with overhead accent lights of optic lime and mauve. Upstairs, in a room smaller than some high-end refrigerators, I called Olivier to reconfirm our meeting at the Court, then opened my case and started shaking out my suits.
As I learned in time, one of the defining characteristics of the Dutch was that they adhere proudly to what others might regard as eccentricities. Thus, I found that in a country about the size of Maryland, two cities shared the traditional functions of a capital. Amsterdam played that role by law. But The Hague had long been the seat of government. While Amsterdam was a renowned commercial center, in The Hague the main business was, basically, idealism. About 150 different international entities were situated there, including various organs of the UN and the European Union, and scads of international NGOs: the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the African Diaspora Policy Centre. High-minded stuff like that. The city was also home to more than a hundred embassies and consulates. As a result, perhaps as many as an eighth of the one million inhabitants in The Hague’s metro area were expats. English was spoken virtually everywhere as a second language.
Over time, The Hague’s status as a unique international center had led to a new growth industry—global justice. Nine different independent international tribunals operated there. The International Court of Justice, just to name one, was where countries sued each other. The newest additions were criminal courts, established in recent decades by the United Nations to prosecute atrocities in different wars—Cambodia, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Rwanda. When I arrived, all of these tribunals, even those that were decades old, were still working on prosecutions, offering silent tribute to the unwillingness of any bureaucracy to go out of business.