FOR POLICE (August 5, 2011)

A couple of years ago I wrote everything I knew about people who stood to gain from the golf (and polo) scam with land in government hands. I started with the highest authorities in Zagreb and ended with those in Motovun, all of whom I knew personally. Counting about four-hundred words, the text got its own file. Entitled “For Police,” it is still on the desktop of one of my computers. “If anything happens to me,” I concluded, “all these people should be investigated by the police, for they all stood to gain from the golf (and polo) scam.” For some reason, I just opened the file and read the entire text. Curious about the date when it was written, for there was no date anywhere in the text itself, I checked the file information provided by my computer. As it turns out, it was written on July 18, 2009, and it was never modified. That must have been the date when I was most anxious about my safety in Croatia. Still curious about this particular date, I checked my Residua website. And I was quite pleased to discover that I had written a list of the best search words concerning the golf (and polo) scam only a day later (“The Right Words,” July 19, 2009). Of course, some of the people on that list appear in my file intended for the police. To my chagrin, only one of them is in jail two years later.