wrapped in rags but who was sitting on a metal table, stoically enduring his checkup. Again, Marie and the doctor exchanged words, while we stood there trying our best not to appear like a bunch of pathetic Peeping Toms in the midst of these suffering people and those who ministered to their horrors.
Marie again turned to us. “This man was swept up by the Serb police about three weeks ago. They imprisoned him with about two hundred other men for about fourteen days. Then they began taking them out, one by one, for interrogation. He said that for several days he could hear the sounds of horrible screams before his turn came. He was led into the basement of the police station. The walls were covered with blood, and a pile of body parts, fingers and toes, had been swept into a corner. He said that nobody cut anything off him. He was lucky, he said. They took heavy metal truncheons and beat him for an hour or two. He says he knew nothing. They knew after the first few minutes that he knew nothing, but they kept beating him anyway.”
As Marie spoke, our eyes were fixed on the old man, who coughed a few times, and we could see blood drip through his fingers every time he tried to cover his mouth.
“The doctor says it’s a miracle he made it out alive. He and the other prisoners were finally taken out to the woods. A machine gun was set up and the bodies began falling all around him. He grabbed his stomach as though he had been shot and flung himself backward, landing among a bunch of bodies, then used his hands to scoop some of their blood onto himself. When the Serbs came through and began killing the wounded, he fooled them. He crawled off after it became dark, then walked for three days until he arrived here.”
She then led us out of the tent, and we paused before the next tent. In a matter-of-fact tone she said, “The old man won’t last another two days. He has severe internal bleeding. His left arm is broken in at least three places, there is a hole in his lungs, and there is a very good chance a kidney is burst.”
“What will you do with him?” I stupidly asked.
“We will move him into a tent we reserve for the dying. We will give him morphine shots and try to make his death as pleasant as possible. He has a fever of 41 degrees, probably because of internal infections. He knows he is dying. He suffered terribly to come this far so he could die with his own people.”
“What about the little girl?” Morrow asked.
Again matter-of-factly, she said, “We have a rape counselor, but that girl would require years of intensive treatment with real professionals to heal. Girls raised in such rustic circumstances mature much faster than in our societies, so there’s a possibility she’s pregnant, too. At least we can do something about that. Her mother asked us to examine her and perform an abortion if there’s a fetus.”
And so it went for the next hour as we wandered through tent after tent, dropping in on one godawful case after another, and I have to confess that I felt like some kind of a shameful voyeur, spying on these people’s miseries and horrors.
Marie then walked us back outside the medical compound, said she had to return to her duties, and profusely thanked us for coming. My mouth almost dropped when she thanked us.
We all piled back into the humvee, and Willis asked, “Anything more you’d like to see?”
The three of us looked at one another, and we all kind of blushed, since none of us felt all that proud of ourselves at that very moment. Willis seemed to sense that and told the driver to take us back to the compound.
“You said you get used to this,” Morrow said to Willis. “How long does that take?”
“Forever,” he said with a very wooden smile.
“She’s a very impressive woman, isn’t she?” Morrow asked, watching Marie’s back retreating down the dusty street.
Willis said, “I worked with her in Mogadishu and Bosnia. She’s been doin’ this twenty years. You’d think that someday she’d just go home and put a shotgun to her head.”
“She must feel proud about all the lives she’s saving,” Morrow replied.
“Not actually. When you get flooded with refugees like this, all you can do is triage. You know, separate the ones you can save from the ones you can’t. The ones you end up thinking about are the ones you toss on a trash heap, like that old man.”
Sometimes you meet someone who just makes you feel really tiny and selfish, and Marie was one of those people. I also have to admit that after seeing that little girl and that old man, I wasn’t feeling real sympathetic to the Serbs right at that moment. The whole flight back to Tuzla the three of us hardly said a word.
Chapter 8
Imelda and her assistants waltzed in carrying trays of eggs, bacon, and shit-on-a-shingle. Again, she looked primed for battle, her little body tensed and coiled, her eyes expectantly awaiting a challenge from Delbert or Morrow or both. Neither said a word. They exchanged brittle looks, then picked up their knives and forks and immediately began eating off the trays, listless and indifferent. Imelda watched them through narrowed, distrustful eyes, just sure this was some kind of slick new tactic cooked up by the pair. She didn’t get it. After an afternoon at Camp Alpha, even the most chauvinistic health nut knew it would be cosmically wrong to complain about a little too much cholesterol.
When the English first came to Ireland, they built this real deep trench around the castle in Dublin where they established their rule. That trench was called the Pale. The Irish, back then, were a real wild and barbaric people, and the English, who always were known to be pretty snobbish and condescending, used to sit inside that castle and describe the unruly, irascible ways of the Irish as being “Beyond the Pale.” Well, we’d just gotten a long, hard glimpse of things that went way beyond the pale.
I had lain awake nearly the whole night, unable to sleep while an old man was dying from the wounds of a brutally senseless beating and a little girl with cold eyes was reliving nightmares inside her head and dying in her own silent, tortured way. From the dark circles under Delbert’s and Morrow’s bleary eyes, I guessed they’d had the same nocturnal visitors.
Imelda finally mumbled some unintelligible curse, which I knew from experience was sort of her version of a victory grunt, then stomped out of the room, headed off, I was sure, to terrorize somebody, somewhere. She just had a biological need to start every day by dancing on somebody’s forehead.
Delbert, Morrow, and I at least now had some kind of moral compass to begin this investigation. Murder, in a situation like this, wasn’t likely to be the result of an evil or reckless impulse. Back in America there were lots of folks who murdered just to see what it felt like, or as revenge for a nasty childhood, or because of some dark vision they saw on TV or read on the Internet or heard in the lyrics of a rap song. But when nine American soldiers did a heinous deed in a place such as this, their motives were likely to be grounded in far sturdier stuff. We still had no precise idea what those motives were, but now we at least knew something about the environment in which they were concocted.
“I think it’s time to take a trip to Italy to visit our prisoners. I think we’re ready to start interrogating the suspects,” I announced.
Morrow’s beautiful eyes got crinkly at the corners. “How do you want to approach it?”
“I haven’t really made up my mind,” I admitted in a rare burst of uncertainty.
Delbert perked up for the first time since I’d met him, apparently sparked by my rare lack of resolve.
“I’d start with the three senior guys first,” he boldly suggested.
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because it seems likely the leaders of the team made the decisions.”
“Would they be most likely to spill their guts, though?”
“I think there’s only one way to find out,” Delbert said.
“He’s right,” Morrow chimed in. “The big point in question is motive. We’ll only get that from the leaders.”
This was too much for me to resist. I said, “That would be a huge mistake.”
There was a sigh from Morrow. “I thought you didn’t have a plan.”
“I changed my mind. I do. I thought we’d jointly interrogate Sanchez, then split up.”
“Okay,” Delbert said, seemingly resigned to the fact that nearly anything he suggested was destined to be spurned.
