Esquire, December 1997

Radovan Karadzic is on the phone. He is wounded and in search of a little understanding.



"Why does America hate me?" he pleads. "What did I do wrong?"

The fugitive Bosnian Serb leader, indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague in 1995 for genocide in the war that killed two hundred thousand people, sounds tired, with just a touch of whine, some manufactured outrage, and real fear in his toast-master's voice. His English is pretty good.

"How can they call me the worst war criminal in the world?" Things have gotten way out of hand. It's all a terrible misunderstanding. Others are to blame.

"I was a moderate!" he cries. "We didn't kill any prisoners of war!"

He never imagined that this day would come, and now he wants to meet somewhere and set things straight.

"I'm not in charge. I wasn't in charge then. I'm not a magician; I can't make more than a million

people follow me. I can't stop them from committing acts of violence.

"Uugghh!" he groans, exasperated. "Where can I get a fair trial? They are spitting on me in America."

"He's got smoker's foot," Bosko's young wife says as her husband, a former New York City gangster, spurs our puny car around a dark mountain curve. We're on a road somewhere in Yugoslavia, slewing on thin tires downward toward an isolated border crossing into Bosnia, toward the town of Pale and Radovan Karadzic, whose thugs in the secret police are waiting for us on the other side.

Smoker's foot?

"His feet are numb. The doctor says that if Bosko doesn't stop smoking, they'll have to cut them off." She turns toward me in the backseat, her blond hair cascading onto my hand. "Promise me you'll keep him from smoking."

Our driver, Bosko Radonjich, fifty-four, a squat bear of a man with thick black hair and a mad, triumphant smile, is a fugitive from American justice. He is wanted by the FBI for fixing the jury in the 1987-racketeering and murder trial of his close friend John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime family. Bosko, through a Serb, was also a boss of the Westies, the murderous Irish gang that served as enforcers for the Gambino family and controlled a good chunk of New York's West Side in the 1980s. Bosko fled the United Stets in 1990, just weeks before Gotti and several associates were indicted again.

The Serbian mafia that Bosko currently runs out of Belgrade has won him certain privileges and some very powerful friends. During the Bosnian war, he provided Karadzic and the deadly Serb paramilitary with millions of dollars in cash and weaponry and became one of Karadzic's close advisers. Now Bosko has a secret plan to save Karadzic, the man he describes as "my angel, my saint," but time is running out. He's afraid that it might be too late already. Tim Buckholz, an ex-U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, is squeezed in beside me on the backseat. Seventeen years on covert missions for your government. Now he's a freelancer and considers Bosko his friend.

Buckholz doesn't look military. His hair is sandy, his face kind, almost innocent. In 1978, when he was eighteen, he was an army medic assigned to bag bodies in Guyana after the Jonestown mass suicide. The Special Forces sent him to school to knock the military out of his gait and speech. He specialized in counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and close-quarters combat.

I am here to talk to Karadzic, who, until very recently, was the least sought, most wanted war criminal in the world. Why does a psychiatrist wake up one morning and decide it's time to kill his neighbors? And how has he managed to keep the world at bay? Two weeks ago, NATO came calling, and a British team killed indicted war criminal and Karadzic crony Simo Drljaca, the police chef of Prijedor, in a botched snatch attempt. The White House had given the green light, and another indicted war criminal was successfully captured the same day. Just days before, Karadzic was breezing through NATO checkpoints in his Mercedes.

I am also here because I happened to meet Tim a couple of years ago at the Pub, a netherlounge of military spooks, conspiracists, and soldiers for hire, just outside Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Tim invited me to Belgrade to meet Bosko, who wants to broker a meeting with Karadzic. The last time Bosko escorted an American to visit Karadzic was when Jimmy Carter came to negotiate a cease-fire during the Bosnian war. This time, Bosko wants to prove again that he's an international fixer, and he seems to think that my story will give Karadzic a new reputation.

At the border, the three of us get out of Bosko's Honda. It is 3:30 A.M., pitch-black, and the early August air is damp and chilly. Bosko's wife, Sabrina, turns around and heads back into Yugoslavia. Their car has Florida license plates. "I could have FUCK USA on my license plate, but I don't, because I love America," Bosko growls in his gravelly Serbo-New Yorker accent. "Even though the cocksuckers betrayed me."

Bosko steps gingerly. "Damn, my feet hurt." His hand is on my elbow, steering me toward the crossing. Up ahead is a guard shack is illuminated by a milky, fluorescent light. Tim walks behind us, covering our backs.

Two armed Yugoslav guards step toward us. They each, in turn, hug Bosko and kiss him on both cheeks. Tim and I produce our American passports. Bosko, wearing tennis shoes with no socks, shiny sweatpants, and a jacket with BOSS emblazoned across the front, never bothers to show his papers.

We walk across the border toward a Volkswagen Golf idling in the darkness. We are now inside the self-declared Republika Srpska, an "ethnically cleansed" area the size of Vermont that is home to nine hundred thousand Serbs. To a nationalist like Bosko, this land, blood-soaked by war, is Palestine. He has dreamed his whole life of a Serbian state independent of Yugoslavia.

Tim has stood on this border before. In 1994, when the Serbs were winning the Bosnian war and when Yugoslavia was trying to convince the world that it wasn't helping them do it, the United Nations Security Council hired independent contractors like Tim to monitor this very crossing. Only medical supplies, food, and used clothing were allowed through. Unless, of course, you were a VIP or a smuggler.

That's when Tim and Bosko first came to an understanding. Along with a handful of other ex-Special Forces soldiers on the same detail, Tim became sort of an honorary Serb nationalist. As an unpaid favor to Bosko, in his spare time he helped train several bodyguards for Karadzic, who was just being isolated by the West as the Maximum Villain of the war. "It was standard executive-protection training," Tim says. "Route planning, countersurveillance, that kind of thing."

Did they follow your advice?

Tim raises an eyebrow. "He hasn't been caught yet." At the end of his last stay here, in July 1995, Tim was asked to leave Yugoslavia, having been informed by the U.S. State Department that his safety could no longer be guaranteed.

Why not?

"Because of my association with Bosko. The chief of the mission asked, 'Do you know who you're dealing with? This is the man who fixed the Gotti trial. He's been convicted of blowing up embassies in America. He was involved in Jimmy Hoffa's murder.' "

Tim's response: Cool.

As we head down a winding mountain road into the strange new country of Srpska, we are being tailed.

"Friend or foe?" Tim asks, checking the headlights behind us.

"Friend," Bosko affirms. Earlier that night, at Club Boss, his mountain casino an hour from the border, Bosko told me that we'd be escorted by a "war criminal" into the Serb enclave. "They hate Americans down there," Bosko said. "Nobody is safe. I'll need to go with you."

When I asked Bosko the name of our resort, he traced a finger down the middle of his face and across his lips—the mob sign meaning silence.

In the aftermath of a war with mass murderers on all sides, men who committed unspeakable atrocities, that any one man's name could inspire such caution, even in someone like Bosko, chilled the room.

In the escort car behind us now is that faceless, nameless war criminal. He is providing us safe passage into the darkness of Srpska.

Dogs, yelping wildly, race our car into the sleeping town of Visegrad, where we see in the beam of our headlights the face of Karadzic. Blown up poster-size, it is pasted on every shopwindow. His silver hair, usually an unruly bouffant, has been combed; the cleft in his chin looks the size of a bullet hole. In red, under each of these color portraits, are the words DON'T TOUCH HIM! Karadzic is hiding out somewhere in this country, protected by his most trusted soldiers, surrounded by mines and antiaircraft weapons. Bosko says that Karadzic has ten different hideouts. Eight thousand American soldiers are currently in Bosnia, the largest continent in a NATO force of thirty-one thousand. Even though Washington denies it, Tim believes that an American snatch team has been training secretly since the spring to bring him in. Karadzic has instructed his guards to shoot him rather than allow him to be captured.

Visegard, a garrison of hard-line Serbs, was one of the first towns to be cleansed of its Muslims. Fourteen thousand just vanished, deported or executed in the summer of 1992. A laboratory of killing, Bosko calls it. My homework, he calls it. He doesn't say what he means by that, but he knows this town. Visegrad is where he went to school as a boy.

Our driver turns down an alley and stops at a bar called Cafe 10. A half dozen men, mostly former soldiers and paramilitary men, step out of the darkness. Each one greets Bosko with an embrace and a kiss.

It's 4:00 A.M., but they have kept the lights burning for us. Inside, we crowd into a corner booth. Our driver pulls out his wallet. I see the flicker of his secret-police badge. No one uses names, and it is understood that we are not to ask. The bartender opens a bottle of slivovitz, the local homemade plum brandy. Tim, who is not much of a drinker, figures it's 400 proof. Even Bosko must hammer his chest with every swallow.

After three shots, Bosko throws a heavy arm around me. "You'll put in a good word for me with our friends in Virginia when you return," he says.

"You know, Bosko," I answer carefully, "the CIA no longer recruits journalists or priests."

Still, he slides the bottle of slivovitz over me to consecrate the moment. "You are the voice of America," he says, pulling me closer. "You can help the Doctor. My angel is getting bad advice. It's my advice he needs. I know the double game. America is after him, but these fuckers here are ready to kill Americans if they try it. We need to convince America that Radovan Karadzic is the only hope for stability in this whole fucking godforsaken country. We need to show the whole world the good man he is."

Bosko raises his glass. "Somebody put dirt on the Doctor," he says. "We've got to make the Doctor clean. You put in a good word for me and make me clean, too."

It's almost dawn, and Bosko Radonjich, John Gotti's fixer, wants to mediate this grave international crisis. He wants to save Karadzic. He wants to save American lives. But most of all, he wants to save himself. He wants to go home to New York, where he lived in a $5 million townhouse on the East Side and drove a Rolls-Royce Corniche. He misses his "work" for the CIA, and he surely doesn't want to be here if the war breaks out again.

The Serbs at the table seem not to comprehend Bosko's agenda. They are soldiers in a lost war, unready to concede defeat, willing to kill again, expecting to kill again. They sit now with their arms draped easily over one another's shoulders, their young faces spent and teeth broken.

"If they try to snatch Karadzic, that is war," says a young Serb quietly, not a hint of bravado in his voice. "We will kill every soldier we see. We will pile American bodies to the sky. We'll start with you if we have to."

At daybreak, having killed only two bottles of slivovitz, we leave the bar. Mist is rising off the Drina River, which runs through the heart of Visegrad. A massive stone bridge, built in 1510 by Turks during the days of the Ottoman Empire, spans the river's jade water. At one end of the bridge is Bosko's old school.

"Don't let the beauty fool you," Bosko says as we drive over the bridge. So many Muslims—he calls them Turks—were executed on this stone bridge during the war that the Drina turned red. And I now see in the hills beyond the bridge what had been hidden from view in the night.

"Them is all the houses of Turks," Bosko says sleepily. Each charred house is a tombstone. We pass hundreds in the hills above the Drina.

Tim, seated again beside me in the backseat, checks for the tail car, but the faceless war criminal is no longer behind us. Bosko snores in the front seat as our driver races at drunken speeds toward our rendezvous with Karadzic.

In the mountain village of Pale, the seat of Karadzic's power, the Minister of Fear plants three kisses on Bosko, Serbian style, one on each cheek and then back to the first. As head of the Republic of Srpska secret police, Dragan Kijac is one of the most feared men in the country.

Bosko introduces Tim and then me. "This is Daniel. He was with me and the Irish in New York," he says, lying.

"So you want to see Dr. Karadzic? If only you had come a few days earlier," the minister says, stiffing us fast. " Now even I cannot know where he is."

The minister, who looks a bit like Bobby Kennedy, is saying something else to me in Serbo-Croatian.

"He wants to know," Bosko translates, "how big is the circulation of your magazine?" His final words to me before this meeting had been "Lie, lie, lie—everything is a double game."

"Seven million," I answer.

The Minister of Fear, who I suspect speaks perfect English, raises his eyebrows, impressed. But then I falter. "Well, uh, actually, it's a couple million, if you count, like, people who, you know, pick it up in bus . . ."

I don't dare look up. I can feel Bosko's glare, his disappointment. "And he'll appear on TV," he says confidently, stepping in. "CNN, CBS, all the networks. He's the greatest writer about postwar countries. He is the voice of America."

The Minister of Fear shakes his head. A period of awkward silence follows. Tim, who has been sitting quietly nearby, playing the role of my bodyguard, reaches for his business card. In America, Tim is a partner in Spartan Security out of Mamers, North Carolina. Recently, his firm, made up of a couple of other ex-Special Forces buddies, bought a $45,000 copier and added "International" to its name. Now Tim is after high-stakes contracts. The first proposal Spartan printed on the new copier is entitled "Current Training Programs Available to Serb People."

"Right now, America is arming your enemies," he tells the Minister of Fear. "Hell, former associates of mine are training the Muslims and Croats with $100 million from the United States. When the American troops leave here next summer, you're going to be slaughtered. It'll be Serb season." For Tim, it's an avalanche of words. It's his Hail Mary pass, a way to save me and sign up a client. Tim's prospectus offers "cutting-edge hostage-rescue and surgical-strike operations" and proposes training for "worst-case scenarios."

With forty thousand police on his payroll, the largest armed force in the Republic of Srpska, the minister perks up.

"I live one step away from treason," Tim winks.

The Minister of Fear directs us to a ruin of a hotel at the top of the mountain, Hotel Paranoia, where we are to await further instructions.

At twilight, we settle into a room. Tim opens a window. Outside, NATO helicopters are flying patterns over Pale. And higher up, Tim figures, there are at least four satellites watching this area.

Bosko hunches down in front of me. I've been kicking myself since we left the Minister of Fear. "So you fuck up," he says. "Forget about it."

The phone rings and Bosko answers, switching between Serbo-Croatian and English. "That was Karadzic," Bosko says, hanging up. Former U.S. assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke is touring Bosnia, trying to salvage his Dayton Peace Accord, and he is making Karadzic's life hell. Our meeting has been postponed. "But he's got a package for you," Bosko says. "Something he wants you to advise him on. He'll call you next week at the casino."

Bosko is in pain. "You have to help me," he says. There is fear in his eyes. He's very worried about his feet. He wants to be healthy for our meetings with Karadzic. We are now in Zlatibor, a spa on the Yugoslavian side of the mountains. He's been getting therapy for his feet here all summer.

"The capillaries have all collapsed," his doctor tells him as Bosko pulls of his shoes and stretches out on the bed, his feet naked. A nurse hooks Bosko up to a machine that sends electric pulses into his feet. "He's only fifty-four years old," says the doctor, shaking her head. "We don't amputate the feet here. They do that in Belgrade."

Bosko's feet are numb, swollen, and blue. But he is in good cheer, and the staff of women, all wearing white, brighten when they see him. He introduces me. "This is Danny. He's writing the screenplay about my life. He knows things about me I forgot."

After these treatments, we wrap ourselves in towels and head into the Truth Sauna, where no lies can be told. He's not talking of Bosnia, but of New York and the mob. "When Eddie came back from Attica," Bosko says, "he put a cock on the bar. Somebody's fucking cock he had cut off. 'Anybody who be a stool pigeon,' " he says, affecting an Irish brogue, " 'will be like this." That's what Eddie says. Shit, the Irish were good killers."

Bosko believes that if we understand New York mobs, we'll understand Bosnia. Maybe even the world. It's his Hell's Kitchen school of diplomacy. "America is the Boss of Bosses," Bosko says. "The Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are three rival gangs—no matter who started the damn thing, everyone has spilled blood. When you have a turf war like this, you separate the gangs. That's why Dayton won't work. You don't ask them to live together. Not after boundaries have been set in fresh blood."

Bosko is not one to offer up his own history easily, but in these Truth Saunas, I hear of his relationship with death, a relationship that started early, with the killing of his father, who was shot by communist police when Bosko was a toddler. Soon after, his brother was imprisoned for his anticommunist beliefs, and then one day came a knock at the door. Bosko and his older sister were home when the secret police entered. The two agents wore black trench coats; they had pistols. They were in the basement, scraping the walls. "They were looking for a radio transmitter, a channel to America. I was just a kid. I didn't' know what they meant. I thought maybe behind our wall there was a long tunnel across the ocean." Finding nothing, the police pistol-whipped Bosko's sister. Two days later, she died from a blood clot. Whenever he needs fuel to fight, Bosko remembers that scene.

When he was twenty-seven, he fled to America. "Without America, the world is shit, do you understand?" he says. "Without that dream, without that beautiful fucking Constitution." Granted political asylum, he arrived in Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen, in 1970 and joined New York's Serbian underground, becoming an explosives expert. In 1979, Bosko pleaded guilty to bombing the Yugoslav consulate in Chicago and served three years in Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania. He got out of jail in 1982 and soon after took over the Westies. "If you're a freedom fighter," he says, " you have to love the Irish."

After the sauna, Bosko cannonballs into the swimming pool. Suddenly, out of nowhere, his former high school teacher arrives poolside with two glasses and a guitar, pours us slivovitz, and, in honor of Bosko's American patriotism, strums "When the Saints Go Marching In."

At his Casino the next evening, Bosko sits near the piano and plays host to a constant parade of customs officials, Serbian film stars, military judges, basketball stars, cops, and war criminals. All come to pay homage and to seek favors of the man they call Boss. A young Serb, returning from South of Africa, unfurls the gist of a zebra skin.

Tonight, Bosko cooks spaghetti for twenty. Before dinner, he makes everyone watch Getting Gotti, a video that tells the story of how Bosko's jury tampering kept the crime boss from going to prison in 1987. "The actor playing me looks like Boris Fucking Yeltsin," he complains.

Three weeks after Bosko left America in 1990, Gotti was arrested again. Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, the number-two man in the organization, later turned state's evidence. Gotti was eventually convicted of ordering the murder of Paul Castellano, his former boss in the Gambino family, and was sent away for life without parole.

Gravano also testified that Bosko had paid $60,000 to a member of Gotti's first jury, a man named George Pape. Pape had been an usher at Bosko's wedding, had testified on Bosko's behalf in his Chicago trial, and had visited him in prison. "There were people in high places who knew that he was my best friend," Bosko says. "Somebody wanted Pape on that jury, just like somebody wants Karadzic in power. One man does not hold off the superpowers of the world unless someone wants him to remain in power."

Belmondo, one of Bosko's self-named errand boys, joins us for dinner. He has a pistol in his waistband and the swagger of a young thug on the make. Also slurping spaghetti at our table is a man with a pronounced underbite who is known as Mr. Fun. A former police chef and bamboo-furniture executive, Mr. Fun always wears a suit and will cross a room to light a lady's cigarette. For laughs, he slaps his face like Curly and stuffs his necktie into his mouth. On the Hague list of indictments, he is murderer number seventy-four. I have a copy of the list. Mr. Fun circles his name for me.

When Karadzic finally phones, a waiter whispers the news into Bosko's ear. Bosko waves me through swinging doors into the casino's back room.

"I knew Daniel back in New York," Bosko lies into the receiver. "He was with Mr. Gotti. He's a journalist now—on TV, in the magazines. You must tell them you're a friend of America, that you are anticommunist you whole life. It's only in America that you could get a fair trial."

He hands me the phone: "Say hello to Dr. Karadzic."

This is strange. Somewhere, the most wanted man in the world has found the comfort to chat on the phone. I look at the receiver for a moment. "Hello?"

"I was sorry I didn't have the pleasure of seeing you in Pale," he tells me. No satellites could scramble the energy out of that voice. "I've been having a few security problems."

He asks about the package he sent: "You read my blue book. What did you think?"

His gift had been an advance copy of The Case of Dr. Radovan Karadzic, a defense written on his behalf. In the literature of shifting responsibility, it is a masterpiece. Truly the thinking of a psychiatrist, a man whose specialties were depression and paranoia, a man who once hypnotized the entire Sarajevo soccer team. "Dr. Karadzic, I wonder what's not in the book. In order to indict you, The Hague must have strong evidence."

"They arrested two Serbs, took them to The Hague, and then had to send them home," he says. "They had the wrong men. And another one they sent home for lack of evidence. The Hague is a political institution. They respond to pressure. They make mistakes."

A number of legal scholars had told me that the second indictment against Karadzic, for the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, in which as many as eight thousand Muslim civilian men were executed, will be very difficult to prove. In his book Karadzic is eager to implicate Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Yugoslavia, for devising and carrying out the military plan that led to the genocide, No wonder he is afraid for his life. The threat he poses to Milosevic, or any of the other leaders America has kept off the Hague list, could earn him a bullet from anyone. Even his own people.

He says he wants to meet but explains that he can't appear to grant an interview.

"He says I can't talk."

Who says?

"Richard Holbrooke."

"Is the promising you something if you stay quiet?"

There is silence on the other end.

"Do you trust him?"

Bosko is whispering into my other ear. Tell him you're a psychiatrist, too. Tim has told me that every syllable of this conversation is being sifted somewhere, analyzed. Somewhere, an analyst can hear the fear in Karadzic's voice. Even on the phone, I can feel it in his breath. This is a man counting his days.

Recalling that he likes chess, I suggest a game. "The loser goes to The Hague," I say.

He laughs. "I'm very good at chess."

Finally, he says, "If you wanted to do a fact-finding mission . . ."

Yes, I say, yes, a fact-finding mission sounds perfect.

"That wouldn't be regarded as an interview."

Absolutely not. There's a real distinction.

"When we meet, you can ask me anything. You, of course, can't say that you were here."

This is Bosnia, and everything is a double game. It was all a matter of language, of finally detecting the nuance of what he was driving toward.

I pass the phone back to Bosko. Karadzic tells him, "We will have to blindfold Daniel, and he'll have to walk deep into the mountains."

"He'll go naked if that's what it takes," Bosko tells him as he hangs up.

We can't tell the Minister of Fear about this, Bosko says, turning to me. "It would make trouble." This means we have no guarantee of safe passage across the territory. In fact, now we have to evade the secret police.

Tim opts to stay behind. "By now, they'll have checked up on me," he says. "My background is just too suspicious. If they think we're a snatch team, we're all dead."

He kindly instructs me on what to expect from Karadzic's security detail. "They'll most likely put a hood on you. They'll remove your watch, electronics, anything where a transmitter can be squirreled away. And they'll make you change clothes. They'll be worried about magic dust. The KGB used to use a kind of radioactive dust when they were trailing people in Washington."

I'm a little worried and don't quite know what to say. I have gotten used to Tim watch my back. "It's in their best interest for you to come out alive," he says, punching my arm. "Just don't do anything stupid."

Bosko and I hit the road again that night, leaving the casino at 2:00 A.M. Karadzic's voice compels us forward. Belmondo, the wiry thug who during the war was in the deadliest Serb paramilitary, is riding shotgun. We're in a black jeep, heading back into Srpska. "This is a black operation," Bosko says. "Nobody can know we're going in."

Again we arrive at Hotel Paranoia, following Karadzic's instructions. I am trapped with Bosko and Belmondo in a room with orange bedspreads. Karadzic will contact us with the next move. From our window, I watch refugees picking mushrooms on the ski slope.

The next day, we don't venture from our room, wary of alerting the Minister of Fear that we are here. Bosko is lying supine, with his feet up on a pillow. An arm covers his eyes, and he is moaning in pain as he drifts in and out of sleep. It is more than either Belmondo or I can bear. Something must be done. We flip a coin. I lose.

"I'm going to try to put some life back in these dogs," I tell Bosko. Back at the casino, during off-hours, I had seen a Serb bartender take out a bottle of slivovitz, the good stuff, and pour it over Bosko's feet before he began to massage them. My technique is not so inventive. I drape a white towel over Bosko's feet. He winces at first as I dig my thumbs into the ball of his foot, but then he begins to relax. "When I was a boy, I had a dog named Jack," he says. "One day, a cop asks me the dog's name. I tell him, you know, 'It's Jack.' The copy says, 'That's a fucking capitalist name.' He takes out his pistol. He shoots Jack."

And with that Bosko's eyes roll back and he is snoring. Belmondo and I wait a few minutes, and then, despite Bosko's warning to stay out of sight, we head to the hotel bar, dying for a drink. We order and look up to see that seated not twenty feet away, with a blond at his side, is the Minister of Fear. He has a wary smile and lifts his hand slightly. Belmondo orders a drink for the minister, who, leaving his date behind, walks over and joins us. He speaks smugly in Serbo-Croatian. "He is sorry that your interview with the Doctor is not possible," Belmondo translates. "Please call again in a year." The minister sniffs, downs his drink, and returns to his table.

Belmondo and I finish our drinks. It's over. Upstairs, we lie in the dark, listening to Bosko snore. Neither of us wants to wake up and deliver the awful news.

So you fuck up. Those are Bosko's first words in the morning, said with a devil's smile. Forget about it. No one knows about our meeting except us and Karadzic. Bosco says he's sure. "I hear his voice. Only me. And you."

At the gates of Karadzic's compound later that day, Bosko and I are surrounded by soldiers, all heavily armed and wearing bulletproof vests. A guard asks for identification. "My cock is the only identification you'll ever need!" Bosko thunders.

The guard retreats into his shack and dials the rotary phone. When he comes out again, his hands are up in apology. And now a hand is gently on each of our backs, ushering us in. Karadzic's compound is the Famos truck factory. Inside, everyone is on high alert. But no one has taken away my backpack yet. No naked trek through the mountains. No magic dust. We're walking in. We're escorted past another guard station and then upstairs and down a hall to the end office. Karadzic's office. A very familiar photo of him is on the wall. His secretary hands me a document She says it was drafted last night by Dr. Karadzic himself. Reading it, I am at first puzzled:

COMMITMENT

I, Daniel Scott Voll, herein confirm that I have made a commitment concerning my visit to the Republic of Srpska, as follows:

I have been in a "fact of finding mission" in the Republic of Srpska.

During the visit, I have met Dr. Radovan Karadzic under strict conditions that he give me only some knowledge useful for my mission, and that under no conditions can I quote him, or publish any kind of interview, because he forbids to be interviewed, or considered to be interviewed.

I have made this commitment with my full moral and material responsibility.

This was the double game at its best. Even I had to wonder, upon signing it, if I had perhaps already met Karadzic. "Do we get to see him now?" I ask, looking into Karadzic's office. "Come back next Tuesday," I am told. Bosko takes a copy of the letter from Karadzic's secretary, rolls it up, and walks out, holding it as if he were the Statue of Liberty. He's one step closer to his dream. Brokering peace. Winning a get-out-of-jail-free card. Me, I want this business over with.

Sick with a hacking cough and a fever a few nights later, I fear I am becoming as toxic as this place. "I know just what you need," Bosko says, and off we go, driving hours through the rainy night to Belgrade for the after-midnight floor show at Club Lotus, a red-velvet den of iniquity on the Danube. The place was an SS bordello during World War II. Bosko owns it now.

The Exhibitionist is dancing in the cage, doing her striptease. In an effort to cure my fever, Bosko orders snifters of warm cognac, and after I've had a couple, he offers his apartment upstairs for the night. He'll sleep elsewhere, he says.

At 4:00 a.m., sleeping fitfully, I hear a key turn in the door. Footfalls cross the floor. And then a hand on my shoulder, touching me lightly. Now a hand on my face.

I turn over, disoriented, and then I see these legs, beautiful, long legs, dancer's legs, sheathed in black silk. The Exhibitionist. A finger against my lips. In this light, away from the stage, I see the circles, like bruises, under her eyes. He kisses my cheeks, kneels beside me.

"I'm your bodyguard."

"I don't need a bodyguard."

"Bosko says you do."

"Did Bosko send you?"

"I told him I wanted to come and see you."

"But he gave you the key."

"Yes. And he told me not to fall in love or he would kill me." Now both her hands are touching my face. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. She lies on top of me.

"I had a boyfriend once before the war," she says quietly. Her mouth is on my lips, my neck. And then her head is resting on my chest. Her mother, she tells me, is a Serb, her father a Croat. Her Serb boyfriend was killed during the war. Her brother fought for the Croats. She'd worked as an interpreter for the UN before she started dancing for Bosko. "He is my protector, my daddy." And then she adds softly, "Be careful of Bosko."

"Do not underestimate how dangerous this world is," Bosko says the next day as we stroll through downtown Belgrade, trailed by his male bodyguard. "We are surrounded by killers."

Bosko is waiting for the details of last night. I can see it in his sly smile. He likes to get folks dirty. He once got a rival gangster in New York addicted to cocaine, took him right out of the picture. He likes to control his world. But when I remain silent, he takes a different tack. "You're a good boy," he says. "I taught you well."

I stop walking. He wanted to set me up. "Fuck you, Bosko. I'm not going to play your game anymore. I'll go to Karadzic myself. Or I'll go home."

He shrugs. Lights a cigarette. Squints.

"Bosko, what did you mean that Visegrad was your homework?"

"It's a joke. Like when I say, 'I want a donkey to fuck you.' It's a joke."

I'm sick of jokes. This morning, my editor in New York faxed me a newspaper article about a killer names Lukic from Visegrad. According to the article, Lukic is responsible for killing more Muslims with his bare hands than any other individual in the war. Lukic has been so well protected that no journalist has ever seen him.

"Bosko, do you know Milan Lukic?"

He stops, waves his bodyguard away. For a moment, he's off-balance.

"It's no good to say his name out loud. Them's killers."

"Do you know him?"

"Sure, I know him. So do you. Lukic arranged for your safety the first night we crossed into Bosnia."

"What?" Now I am off-balance.

"He is the one I called to make sure you would be safe. He was in the tail car," Bosko says. "You sat with him on our last trip across the border. At the café in Visegrad. He bought you coffee. You liked him." Bosko grits his teeth; a cloud passes over his eyes. "Don't fuck up, Daniel. You are here for Karadzic, not Milan."

He pauses, lights another cigarette. He is shaking his head, watching me. "I do things wrong, yes. Maybe I killed. Maybe I did other things. But Karadzic is honest. I know devil. He is inside me. But Karadzic is angel to my people.

"But he was president during the entire war," I say. "His own blue book shows that he had command control. And what about Srebrenica? If a mob boss orders a hit, he's still guilty of murder, even if he didn't pull the trigger."

"He didn't know all the killings would happen."

"How do you know?"

"I know goddamnit!"

On the night before we are to meet Karadzic, American troops storm the Minister of Fear's police barracks in several towns along the Bosnian border. Crowds are retaliating with stones and firebombs. Tim calls from America, worried. Don't go back to Srpska, he warns.

Bosko composes a fax to Karadzic, telling him that we have information vital to his safety and that he must still meet with us. The double game. "It's the only way to get his attention," Bosko says.

An hour later, at Bosko's apartment above Club Lotus, the phone rings. It's Karadzic.

"It's a very bad time," Karadzic says before hanging up. "This is not a safe phone. Be in Pale tomorrow. My office will make the arrangement."

"We're going to need some protection down there," Bosko says to me. "They're handing out long guns."

I am Bosko's hostage. For the first time, I feel like I am in trouble.

The jeep has been making a clanking sound since we left Belgrade. I have ignored it, but now, on a dangerous mountain road, Bosko makes me pull over. Almost all the lug nuts have been sheared off our wheels. "Sabatoge," Bosko says. "Because of you. I saved your life."

As we approach Pale, Bosko's sources report that Italian troops, who control this NATO sector, have a snatch team on the ground, ready to move on Karadzic. Everyone is on snatch alert. We turn a corner and face the cannon of a tank. Armored personnel carriers and UN trucks with whip antennae are parked on overlooks.

We are invited inside Karadzic's compound for dinner, which is served in a private salon by waiters in black tie. Brandy is poured. Our hosts for the evening are Karadzic's Ministers of Rationalization and Denial. "If they storm the compound, we'll give you a gun," one says, smiling. "You'll have to shoot the Italians."

"Dr. Karadzic sends his apologies," says the Minister of Denial. He is unavailable and has asked me to provide you whatever help you need." The rumor is that Karadzic has fled to another country, at least temporarily.

Bosko lectures the ministers in English. Their strategy is all wrong. "He's charged with genocide—you can't rationalize genocide! You can't hide from that charge!" he yells. "He's got to show his face to America! Show his heart! It can make him clean!"

The Ministers of Rationalization and Denial trade nervous glances.

The Yugoslav border guard asks me to step away from the jeep. My visa has expired. I cannot leave Srpska. Bosko shrugs. It's dark. "It's Friday night. It might take me a couple days to get you out. I'll start making some calls in the morning. Belmondo will stay behind with you."

As we get into a border guard's car for the complimentary ride back into Visegrad, Belmondo turns to me: "You're chief, I'm security."

Milan Lukic sits on the terrace of his café, which commands a view of downtown. He is surrounded by cops. "Milan trusts no one," Belmondo as we climb the stairs. "We must let him know we're here."

The last time they met, Lukic kissed Belmondo on both cheeks. Now he gives him only a slight nod. Wearing shirtsleeves, jeans, tennis shoes, the Butcher of Visegrad doesn't look remarkable. He is in his thirties, tall, with an athletic build, just a little fleshy under the chin. He runs his hand through his hair. The cops talk in whispers.

Belmondo is very nervous. Without Bosko, the rules have changed. Whatever his own killing tally, he is no match for this crowd. During the cleansing, Lukic walked these streets with a megaphone, exhorting, "Rise up, Serb brothers. Kill the Muslims." He killed thousands. Most of his work was done on the bridge. Daily, he would herd groups of Muslims there, garrote or shoot them, and laugh maniacally. So many bodies were swept downriver that the dam clogged. He incinerated hundreds more inside their houses. Lukic is not on the published Hague list; investigators may never even reach Visegrad. Hhis terror was not limited to this town. At Srebrenica, survivors remember Lukic requesting refugee Muslims from Visegrad.

Now Lukic walks over, taps Belmondo on the shoulder, directs him inside, where they sit alone. I hear anger in Lukic's voice. He wants to know why Belmondo has brought this American back here. When Belmondo comes out, he puts a hand on my shoulder and says quietly, "We must go, Friendo." I risk a last look at Lukic. He nods his head, smiles, and shows his teeth. They are discolored, pushed slightly inward, shark's teeth.

We take a room at a hotel in the hills above the town. Filled with amputees, mostly war veterans here for therapy in natural sulfur pools, this is Hotel Sorrow. On a terrace a few hundred yards downhill, accompanied by an accordion, an aging blond sings Serb nationalist songs. We join them, and Belmondo begins downing drinks. "I am not a quisling," he keeps repeating. "I was in the underground. I spend seven years fighting for this country. What the fuck do I have to show for it?" The blond singer comes to our table, and Belmondo gives her a hundred deutsche marks to keep her singing.

A circle of veterans joins us. All seems lost to them but the words to these melancholy war songs. A man with bushy red hair tilts his head back like a hungry bird and sings, his voice barely audible. Another man puts his hand on my shoulder before we leave and says, "Please give my heart to Dr. Karadzic."

Belmondo is smashed and tries to pick up the hotel receptionist. He tells her that during the war, he once killed four Muslims upriver and then returned to this hotel to sleep.

A few hours later, he knocks on my door, appearing sober. He tells me he is afraid Lukic will come in the night and kill us. "Much paranoia" Belmondo says. "Milan much paranoia." Neither of us has slept. "We can walk across the border," he offers. "You and me. I know a secret route along the river. I know it from the war." Yes, I say. I want to leave. I don't want to die in Hotel Sorrow.

Back at Bosko's casino in the mountains of Yugoslavia, I am packing to leave. "Always he has been in the company of killers," his wife, Sabrina, says. "In New York, forget about it, they were all killers. When I met Bosko, he thought I was a spy. Sabrina was born in Zagreb. "Isn't it strange, Super Serb marries a Croat?"

They met at the Women's National Republican Club across from Rockefeller Center in New York, where Bosko had an office. She was a concert pianist, spoke six languages, and modeled on the side. After Bosko fled America, she sold their townhouse and followed him here. "I felt sorry for him," she says.

I apologize for keeping Bosko away on the night of their tenth anniversary. "During the war," she said, "he would be gone for weeks."

Doing what?

"Operations. He was training. I had my own work." Sabrina points to a hotel up on the hill. "During the war, I ran the casino up there. Some nights, I had $250,000 in my pocket, and I'd carry three pistols. The town was full of soldiers then." She pauses. She is struggling with something. "Daniel, the night before Srebrenica, Bosko and I had two hundred soldiers locked in the casino, all of them wearing black masks. Nobody in town could know they were here. They left in the night. There were buses and bulldozers." She gets quiet, looks away. "It was awful."

Then she hands me a photo of a magnificent rottweiler. "The dog is a trophy from Srebrenica. I got her as a gift." I am just beginning to comprehend what she has told me: This place had been a staging area for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II. "Only five living creatures were left when it was over. The dog was one of them." She looks at the picture, and her face brightens. "Isn't she beautiful?"

My bus to the airport departs from Uzice, the town where Bosko was born and spent his childhood and where his family was killed. As we stand at the station, he looks at me grimly. His grand plan has failed in every respect. When I last spoke to Karadzic, Bosko's angel sounded to me like an unsaved man, a man trying desperately to compose some contemporary version of the Nuremburg defense, a man signing off as the world closed in.

Bosko stands facing me now and looks himself to be unsaved. He couldn't save Gotti, can't save Karadzic, won't be able to save himself. As we were escaping Visegrad, Belmondo told me a few things. He said that Bosko is furious that I came to know of his familiarity and ease with such a prolific killer as Milan Lukic. Bosko meant to show me one thing, but instead he showed me another. By introducing me to this world of killers, he knows that he has made Karadzic frighteningly comprehensible. And he fears that I'm actually not CIA, as he had continued to believe, and that there's a chance my handlers at Langley won't come through with that new, clean passport that shows how much the United States of America appreciates his work and his devotion and all of that mob unpleasantness in New York City is a thing of the past. Come on home, Bosko.

For such an intimidating, exuberant, even winning figure, Bosko seems, like his country to be completely lost. He knows that when the war breaks out again, it will be Serb season, just as Tim said. And they will never be able to kill enough to keep that from happening. The look in his eyes says, Get me out of here. He has a request before I board my bus. He reaches into his pocket, and as he does, he says, "You'll put in a good word. Tell them I'm ready to go to work again." He hands me six unsmiling passport photos of himself, taken this morning. And six copies of his signature on a neatly folded sheet of white paper.

As always, his feet are hurting him, as if just standing on this ground is killing him. "You can make me clean," he says. "Make me clean."

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