by Alan Furst
“Here in Belgrade, we’re at kilometer 1170 of the river, which means we’re a hundred and forty kilometers from the high ridge at 1030. The ridge runs for three kilometers, which should be enough—we don’t know how much time it will take to sink these things, but with the weight they’re carrying they’ll go down in a hurry.
“The tug will have to stop at the Roumanian border post—that’s at a village called Bazias, at kilometer 1072. If you leave here at one in the afternoon, figuring a speed of fifteen kilometers an hour, it gets you to Bazias by 7:30. Your papers are in order, and you should be through there in twenty minutes or so. Sometime after 9:45, you pass the pilot station at Moldova Veche, on the Roumanian shore. Supposedly, a pilot must be taken onboard for the passage through the Iron Gates. However, in real life, which is to say Roumanian life, all the big steamers do this, but only some, maybe half, of the tugboats. A pilot would complicate your life, but it isn’t the end of the world, though it might have to be for the pilot if he decides not to be reasonable.
“By this calculation, you come to kilometer 1030—there’s a big granite rock protruding from the water at 1029, it probably has some sort of folkloric nickname—sometime after ten at night. So, when you sight the rock, that’s it. The captain of the tugboat, discovering that one of his barges is sinking and taking the others down with it, now must cut the tow and, as soon as possible, alert the Danube authority.
“But by then, you’ll be long gone. About forty minutes beyond the Stenka ridge, kilometer 1018, the river Berzasca enters the Danube from the north, coming down from the Alibeg mountains, part of the Carpathian range. There’s a village where the rivers meet, and the tug will go a kilometer or so upstream, to a bridge over a logging road. On the bridge will be a Lancia, the Aprilia sedan, horribly dented and scratched, probably the color gray when first purchased or stolen, and it is not impossible that there was, at some point, a fire in the trunk. You may, if you’re like me, spend an idle hour wondering how such a thing could possibly have happened, but cars don’t live soft lives in this country and it remains a speedy and dependable machine. I’ll be driving, and we’ll take the Szechenyi road back to Belgrade. Then we stay here, see what develops on the river, and attend to our mining interests. Any questions?”
“The Szechenyi road?” Serebin knew it by reputation, a narrow track, hewn out of rock in the nineteenth century, at the direction of the Hungarian count who gave it his name.
“It works, I’ve tried it, just hope for dry weather. We use it also in the emergency plan, which has us bypassing Belgrade, crossing Yugoslavia by train—it is very difficult by car—or, in a real emergency, by plane, courtesy of our friends in the Royal Yugoslav Air Force, to a town called Zadar, between Split and Trieste on the Dalmatian coast. There we will be picked up by boat, probably the Néréide but with Polanyi you never know. The contact in Zadar is a florist, in a small street off the central square, called Amari. If you need to signal for help, no matter where you are, wire Helikon Trading with the message Confirm receipt of your letter of 10 March.
“Eventually, you can go back to Paris, or, if they’ve found out who you are and they’re after you, Istanbul. I should add that when Polanyi was told of your meeting at the bar in Paris, it was his feeling that no matter what went on or didn’t, your margin of safety has been compromised and you ought to get out.”
“He’s right,” Serebin said.
“He often is. So then, Istanbul.”
Serebin began to describe his flight from Paris, but the ragged beat of a tugboat engine approached from the mouth of the harbor and he rose and followed Marrano out to the end of the pier. In the glow of the dock light he could read the boat’s name, Empress of Szeged. So, a Hungarian boat. Which, when he thought about it, was no surprise at all. As the tug, towing a heavily loaded barge, slid cleverly up to the dock, Emil Gulian, looking exceptionally out of place in business hat, scarf, and overcoat, appeared at the stern, waved, then tossed Serebin a rope. “Hello there,” he called out. “Good to see you again.”
Serebin secured the line to a heavy bollard, then boarded the tugboat and walked forward to the pilot cabin. The Empress was manned by its owners, a young couple, both wearing the river sailor’s uniform of dark blue shirt and trousers. Zolti, short for Zoltan, was Hungarian, lean and wiry, face weathered by life on the water. Erma, a Viennese, was a few inches taller, broad and fat, with an immense bosom, sleeves rolled back to reveal a pair of meaty arms, and a face that would stop a clock. A peasant face, broad and fleshy, with shrewd, beady eyes, a bulbous nose, and a wide slash of a mouth, anxious to laugh at a world that had laughed at her. All this crowned by ebony hair that had been chopped off with—Serebin thought about a hatchet, but, more likely, a scissors.
To Serebin the couple spoke German, Zolti very little, Erma chattering away, flushed and excited and, every few seconds, licking her lips. Maybe a nervous habit, or maybe, Serebin thought, she’s beginning to feel it.
He certainly was. On the train down to Belgrade, it came to visit and stayed. Ticking away inside him, a knot in the chest, a dry mouth and, earlier that day, lighting a cigarette, he’d burned his palm with a flaring match.
“Are you going ashore?” he asked them.
“No, no,” Erma said. “We stay here.” With a nod of her head she indicated the barges. “On guard.” She picked up a short iron bar by the helmsman’s wheel, gave it a comic shake and closed one eye, as though she were protecting a tray of cookies from naughty children.
Gulian and Marrano were waiting for him on the dock, both with hands thrust in the pockets of their coats. As Serebin descended the ladder, Marrano said, “So?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“Don’t much care for the Nazis, those two,” Gulian said, shaking hands with Serebin. For the brief moment Serebin had seen him in Bucharest, at the Tic Tac Club, he’d been hesitant, retiring, the diffident escort of his nightclub singer girlfriend. Not now. He was younger than Serebin remembered, had a humorous face—a subtle, powerful smile that never went away, and the air of a man almost religiously unimpressed with himself, though that went for the world as well. He was also, Serebin thought, having a very good time—whatever leash he was off, a very good time.
“You’ll be my guests for dinner,” he said.
The last thing Serebin wanted, but Gulian wasn’t someone you said no to. They walked out of the harbor, found a café where Gulian made a telephone call—a nasty business, in Belgrade—then went off in a taxi to a small private house not far from the Srbski Kralj. For an elaborate dinner, served by two graceful young women, cooked by a man who kept opening the kitchen door a crack and peering out. Chicken-liver risotto, fillet of a fillet of pork, puree of roasted red peppers with garlic. Platters of it, which were tasted, then sent back to the kitchen, with Gulian calling out, “Magnificent, Dusko!” each time, to spare the feelings of the chef. There were no other customers—they ate at a large table in the dining room—this wasn’t precisely a restaurant, or it was a restaurant only when Gulian, or others like him, wanted it to be. For the finale, Dusko himself presented confitures of fruit doused with Maraschino.
Gulian hadn’t actually intended to come to Belgrade. But, once “those bastards over at the steel mill” began to procrastinate, he’d grabbed his checkbook and jumped on a train. “They were paid what they asked for—that was my mistake,” Gulian said. “When I didn’t bargain, they said to each other, ‘Well, he really wants this thing, let’s see how much.’”
“What did you do?” Serebin asked.
“First of all I showed up. Second of all I yelled—in French, and a few words in German, but they got the idea. And last of all I paid. So...”
A very good host, Gulian; provident, and entertaining. He knew the country, knew its history, and liked to tell stories. “Ever heard of Julius the Nephew, ruler of all Dalmatia?” No, actually, they hadn’t. “The last legitimately appointed Emperor of the West, designated by Rome in the middle of the
fifth century. Despite, I should add, the plotting of one Orestes, former secretary to Attila the Hun.”
Well, it took Serebin’s mind off what he had to do. And the stories were good, Gulian a sort of writer manqué, delighted by excess and eccentricity. “When the Turkish vizier Kara Mustapha was defeated at Vienna,” he said, over a forkful of risotto, “he could not bear to leave behind his most beloved treasures, especially the two most beautiful beings in his world. So, with tears of sorrow and regret, he had them beheaded, to make sure that the infidels would never possess them: the loveliest of all his wives, and an ostrich.”
After the dessert was taken away, Gulian called for brandy. “To success, gentlemen. And, when all is said and done, death to tyrants.”
One-fifteen in the morning. Serebin back at the harbor, this time by himself. He alerted the tugboat crew to what he was doing, then settled down to wait, lighting Sobranies with cupped hands in the sharp spring breeze. The tied-up tugs and barges bumped against their moorings, and he could hear boat traffic out on the river, up from Roumania or down from Hungary, sometimes a horn, sometimes a bell. Overcast in Belgrade, as always, maybe one or two faint stars in the northern sky. 1:30. 1:45. Serbian time. Dogs barking, up on the hillside. A singing drunk, a car, whining as it worked its way up a long grade.
2:10. The sound he knew as a military engine; overpowered, untuned, and loud. He watched the headlights, bouncing up and down as the vehicle wound its way along the dirt track that served the harbor. It stopped briefly at the end of the dock, then drove onto it, and Serebin felt the pole-built structure sway and quiver as the old wooden boards took the weight. It was, he saw, an open command car, vintage maybe 1920. “Greetings, Ivan,” a voice called out, Ivan being any Russian whose name you didn’t know.
Captain Draza and Captain Jovan, drunk as owls and only an hour late. In light blue officers’ uniforms, leather straps crossed over the tunics. They banged and rattled in their car, then hauled out a wooden crate, which they carried between them with a burlap sack on top.
“It’s the armorers!” Jovan called out. Draza thought that was pretty funny. They dropped the crate at Serebin’s feet. It landed hard, and Jovan said “Oh shit!”
“No, no,” Draza said. “No problem.” Then, to Serebin, “How are you?”
“Good.”
“That’s good.”
He rummaged around in the sack, found a screwdriver, and began prising boards off the top of the crate and tossing them over his shoulder into the water. When the crate was open, he lifted out a black iron cylinder with a ridged top and a shiny steel mechanism bolted into a recessed circle in the center, the whole thing maybe twenty-four inches in diameter, and tossed it to Serebin. The weight was a shock, and Serebin had to make a second grab before he got hold of it.
“Don’t drop him, Ivan,” Draza said.
Better not to. Serebin knew a land mine when he saw it but he’d never actually held one. “Ahh, don’t be like that,” Jovan said to Draza.
“He couldn’t set it off if he wanted to,” Draza said. “Here, give it to me.”
“It’s all right,” Serebin said. He could live without whatever demonstration Draza had in mind. “I’ve seen these before.”
“These?”
“Mines.”
“Oh, mines. Shit, not these. These are Italian. Dug up across the border a month ago, so, very up-to-date.”
“Where did you see mines?” Jovan asked.
“Galicia, Volhynia, Pripet Marshes, Madrid, river Ebro.” We’re all friends here but, if you have a minute, go fuck yourselves.
“Oh, well, all right then.”
“To work,” Draza said, lighting a stubby cigarette.
They stepped onto the first barge, walked around the big turbine until they found a hatch with rope handles on the cover. Draza fought with it, finally broke it free, and handed it to Jovan. “We’ll need a bracket on that.”
Jovan peered into the sack, then groped around inside. “It’s in here?”
“Better be. I put it in.”
Jovan grunted, found a metal bracket with screws in the holes, and went to work.
“Down we go,” Draza said. He grasped the rim of the hatch opening and swung himself inside.
Jovan handed Serebin the sack. “Forgot this,” he said.
Serebin followed Draza, who had turned on a flashlight in the pitch-black interior of the barge. The beam illuminated a few inches of oily water and at least one dead rat. “Drill,” he said to Serebin. Serebin reached into the sack and took out a hand drill. Draza squatted, about twenty feet from the hatch opening, astride a wooden strut that spanned the sides and bottom of the hull, tried to bore vertically to the floor, scraped his knuckles, swore, then drilled in at an angle. “Get me some wire,” he said.
With the cigarette in his lips, squinting through the smoke, he handed the flashlight to Serebin, took the mine in both hands, and lowered it carefully onto the strut. Unrolled a piece of wire, flexed it up and down until it broke, and wired the mine in place. Then, he pinched the steel bar in the center mechanism with thumb and index finger and tried to turn it. But it wouldn’t move. He held his breath, applied pressure, then twisted with all his strength, fingers turning white where they gripped the bar. For long seconds nothing happened. Through clenched teeth he said, “Fucking things,” and shut his eyes. Finally, the bar squeaked and gave him a quarter turn. He let his breath out, swore again, forced the bar around the first thread, unscrewed it the rest of the way and flipped it away into the darkness. Serebin heard the splash. Draza waited another moment, lost his patience, tucked his middle finger under his thumb and flicked it hard against the center of the mine. With a sharp metallic snap, the trigger popped up.
He swayed a little, adjusted his feet, and made himself a long piece of wire. Serebin moved the flashlight closer. “Got a girlfriend?” Draza said.
“Yes.”
“Me too. You should see her.”
Draza wiggled his fingers like a pianist getting ready to perform, then began to wind the wire around and around the trigger. When he was done, he ran the wire down to the base, made one loop, pulled it tight, and handed the rest of the coil to Serebin. “Do not pull on that,” he said.
He stood up, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He’d ripped the skin over his knuckles, and wiped the blood off on the side of his pant leg. “Hey,” he called out to Jovan. “You done?”
Jovan held the hatch cover a few inches above the opening. Draza reached up and wrapped the end of the wire around the bracket on the bottom, and Jovan moved the hatch cover just enough to allow Draza and Serebin to climb back up on the deck. The three of them knelt at the edge of the hatch and Draza fitted the cover back in place. “Now,” he said, “the next time you lift this up is the last time you lift this up. The firing device works by compression—you’ll need a slow, steady pull to force it down. The tugboat captain knows about this?”
“He does.”
“No last-minute inspections, right?”
“I’ll remind him.”
Draza hunted in his pockets, then said, “You have a piece of paper?”
Serebin had the back of a matchbox.
“Write this. 67 Rajkovic, top floor left. Belongs to my cousin, but, if you need to find us...” Draza looked over Serebin’s shoulder as he wrote. “There, that’s it.”
Jovan stepped onto the dock and took another mine from the crate.
“Back to work,” Draza said. “Four more and we’re done.”
4:10 A.M. He could hear the bar at the Srbski Kralj when the doorman let him into the lobby. A hundred people shouting, a fog of cigarette smoke, perhaps a stringed instrument of some kind, twanging desperately away in the middle of it. Serebin went to his room. On the table, a box wrapped in brown paper, and inside, a bottle of wine. Echézeaux—which he knew to be very good Burgundy. No written note required. Good luck, Ilya Aleksandrovich, it meant. Or however that went in Hungarian.
>
He took off his coat and stretched out on the bed and did not place a call to Trieste. Or, if he did, it was a private call, the kind where you don’t use the telephone. It rained, a spring rain, very gentle and steady, through the last hour of the night, which should have put him to sleep, but it didn’t. What he got instead was a daze—bits and pieces of worry, desire, pointless memory, a descent to the edge of dreams, and back round again.
The rain stopped at dawn, and the sun hung just below the horizon and set the sky on fire, rainclouds lit like dying embers, vast red streaks above the river.
27 March. Pristinate Dunav. An old sign, the paint faded and blistered. In the Serbian view, if you needed a sign to find the Danube harbor—as opposed to the one on the river Sava—you probably didn’t deserve to be there.
One of the longest mornings he’d ever spent, not much to do but wait. He’d gone over to the outdoor market in Sremska street, bought a heavy sweater and corduroy pants and a canvas jacket lined with wool. Stopped at a café, read the papers, drank a coffee, went to work.
Almost didn’t. The tugboat crew was ready and waiting. Zolti in a sailor’s heavy jacket, Erma in what looked like an army coat—Greek? Albanian?—anyhow olive green, that fell to her ankles. She wore also a knitted cap, pulled down over her ears. The Empress was ready, she said. All warmed up. So, they shook hands, smiled brave smiles, talked about the weather, then Serebin said, “Well, we might as well,” or something equally exalted, and Erma cast off from the dock. When she returned to the cabin, Zolti shoved the throttle forward, the engine hammered, the deck throbbed beneath Serebin’s feet, and they went absolutely nowhere.
Erma looked at Zolti and said, “Scheisse.’’ A curse at bad luck, but he was included. He rubbed the back of his neck, and tried again. The towlines snapped taut. And that was that.