by Fritz Galt
“I think I will visit my ailing grandfather in Skopje.”
“Forget your deda. Stay with me.”
She pulled away from his fine-boned fingers, and he let her go.
“You will come back before our troops march into Macedonia,” he said. “There may be some bloodshed.”
“Of course. I’d rather be here when it happens. If it ever happens.” She picked up a light sweater and draped it over her shoulders.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I promise you there will be blood.”
He reached out to touch her again, but she rebuffed him gently.
“Take care,” he said.
She threw him a wan smile, then stepped out the door and left.
Chapter 18
The morning broke gray and chilly in Belgrade as Alec waited with his outsized suitcase in the cemetery overlooking the city.
Dragana would deliver the Karta to him. Then he would leave the country.
A wet air mass had descended from the Julian Alps in Slovenia and rushed across the fertile Hungarian plain. It now swept down the Danube and hurled against the hills that formed the leading edge of the Balkan Peninsula.
He felt torn between two worlds, like a traveler halfway to his destination.
Separated from Belgrade by the Sava River, the town of Zemun where he stood had been on the very fringe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The sharp division between the Austrians and Ottomans meant that for hundreds of years there was no passage allowed between Zemun and the dusty Turkish garrison town that the Austrians called Weissenburg, or White City.
Some headstones bore Catholic crucifixes whereas others were carved into Orthodox crosses. It had taken two World Wars for the indigenous Slavs to finally throw off the yoke of foreign rule to both the north and south.
From somewhere deep in the graveyard, he heard a small kitten’s anguished meow.
Directly below him, his lover marched up the stairs that switched back and forth up the hill. An oversized gym bag slowed her progress. At last Dragana stood, overheated, before him.
He grabbed the bag and set it on the ground beside him. He took her in his arms and hugged her tight. He wanted to hide her, to protect her, to shield her from the winds of history that were sweeping through their lives.
But she was holding onto him just as tightly. At last she pulled away. A wretched look darkened her face. “Do you have to go?”
“You know I do.” He cupped her face in his hands.
“I’ve left him.”
He frowned. “Where can you go? You need him as much as he needs you.”
She didn’t look at him. “I wanted to go with you.”
“You know you can’t.” He picked up the portfolio and turned to walk through the cemetery.
She followed him quietly for some time. She was swallowing hard.
“Then I will go back to Macedonia,” she said at last, “where my grandparents live.”
He stopped walking. “In case something happens, can you write down their name and address?” He pulled out a pen and paper and shoved them into her hands.
“In case of what?” Her eyes were searching his.
“The unexpected.”
Her tears spattered the paper as she wrote.
They ventured further into the cemetery and came upon the tiny kitten. She was so young that her eyes had not yet opened. She lay stiff in the grass, crying mechanically, all her strength sapped. An army of ants crawled through her fur and bit at her eyelids.
“So you are still Zoran’s foot soldier?” she said.
“I have to be.” He stamped at the ground to frighten the ants away. They only clung tighter to the kitten.
“I don’t think he knows what he’s doing,” she said.
“Like I said before, we just have to trust him.”
“I saw your brother,” she said.
Alec had just seen him, too. “Where did you see him?”
“He barged in on Zoran. He held a gun to my head.”
“Did he know you?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Does he know Zoran?”
“He does now.”
Alec allowed a smile. “He sure works fast. What did he want?”
She pointed to the portfolio under his arm. “He knows about Karta.”
“How much does he know?”
“Zoran told him it’s going to Szentendre to be redrawn.”
“Crap. Now Mick knows.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go there.”
Alec thought about it. If he didn’t bring the Karta to Szentendre, Zoran would find out soon enough. He might piece together that Dragana informed him that Mick would be there. Then they would all be in trouble.
“Sasha,” she said. “I’m telling you it’s time to forget about Zoran.”
“I can’t. And you’re committed to this, too. I’m not stopping now.”
They reached the trail that led down to the railway station.
“I’ve got to go,” he said.
“Will you tell me good-bye?”
“You know me,” he said, and forced a smile. “I never say good-bye.”
“I don’t want to see you again unless you truly want me.”
Before turning away, he registered the openly defiant expression on her heart-shaped face. It was what he loved most about her.
Bernie Fletcher, freshly ousted from Belgrade and newly installed at a comfortable desk job in the Directorate of Operations, stood at the elevator reviewing a decoded message from Mick. The chief wasn’t going to like this.
Tucking the pages back into a red “Top Secret” file folder, he stepped into the elevator. He punched the top-most button and rode straight past Lance Pickett’s office to the office of the Director of the CIA.
“We just received a message from Mick Pierce in Belgrade.”
Bernie stood alone in Hugh Gutman’s doorway.
“It looks like the situation is flaring up in the Balkans.”
“What’s wrong this time?” Gutman asked, not taking his eyes off the half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza in his hands.
“He reports that the army’s mobilizing in Serbia.”
“Hold on a moment.” Gutman swung around and faced Bernie. “Give me a thumbnail on the situation over there.” He glared at a wall map of Europe.
“Well, recent elections went smoothly in Eastern Slavonia.” He checked Gutman’s face for any sign of recognition.
He had stopped chewing.
Bernie started over. “Yugoslavia used to be one large country, right?”
“That I know.”
“Now it’s broken up into five different countries: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and what’s left of Yugoslavia, namely Serbia and Montenegro.”
“Okay. Spare me the geography lesson.” He took another bite of the pizza.
“Bosnians have their own country. Croats have theirs. And Serbs are hemmed in on their own little plot of land to the east. With all the fighting, ethnic cleansing and refugees, there’s always some imbalance in the Balkans. Serb troops have come home to regroup. Croats have driven Serb civilians out of Croatia and Bosnia. So now it looks like Serbia’s ready to explode.”
“Explode how?” Gutman scratched his belly.
“Explode over its borders. They’ve never had a revolution in their own country. They attack others instead.”
“Like where?”
Bernie remembered a recent paper produced by the Directorate of Intelligence, the think-tank half of the CIA. “Right now, our analysts at DI are putting their money on Eastern Slavonia, which is the eastern part of Croatia, but Mick Pierce is betting they will attack Macedonia instead.”
“All right, I heard about the elections in Croatia. And the demonstrations in Belgrade are all over TV.” He gestured at CNN playing in the corner of his office. “But what the hell is Macedonia all about?”
“Macedonia is this little outcropping of mountains north of Greece that people hav
e fought over for centuries.”
“Why?”
“Everybody wants it: the Greeks, the Turks, the Albanians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs. It’s like a pack of hungry wolves trying to rip off a piece off raw meat.”
Gutman burped. “Like I said. Who cares? What’s it got? Oil, gas, gold?”
“None of that. It just sits there on the corner of everyone’s map, like Sarajevo did before triggering the First World War.”
“That’s why we’ve got NATO now. So everybody in the alliance can keep their borders straight. What evidence does Mick have that it will be Macedonia?”
“Mick found a warlord who is redrawing Serbia’s ancient borders on a national relic, kind of like re-writing our Declaration of Independence. He says the warlord intends to spearhead an incursion into Macedonia.”
“Warlords. Everyone’s got ’em down there,” Gutman said. “You elect ’em, give ’em a fancy title like Mr. President or His Excellency and still they maraud around like bands of outlaws.”
“Only on a larger scale.”
“Yeah, well, the scale ain’t big enough to interest the United States of America. You go tell Mick to stop working overtime, cut his losses, get his brother out of there and come home. Do you have another assignment for him?”
“We’re thinking about Taiwan, sir.”
“Taiwan? We don’t even have relations with Taiwan.”
“Er, exactly, sir.”
“Just tell him to keep his nose clean and come home.”
In Belgrade’s central railway station, broomsticks held each train in place. At the end of the tracks, a station worker had jabbed a wooden broom handle between each engine’s front wheels to secure it.
Alec sighed. If only sanctions hadn’t shut the airport down, he would be in Budapest in less than an hour.
Families sat on the dusty concrete train platforms. They spread out orange-colored squash and deep red watermelon slices for sale. Beside them were all that they owned: bags of clothes and loosely wrapped photos in frames. They waited for trains that often arrived bulging full of passengers and half a day late.
The sky hung low over the panoply of nationalities. Some were Romanians traveling from market to market and selling hand-sewn lace and Russian furs. Some were Bosnian Serbs displaced by war. Some were colorfully clad Gypsy women. They went from person to person begging in their obscure language, babies squirming in their arms. Some were transiting the big city and coming from or going to outlying Serbian and Montenegrin villages. He alone scanned the crowd to take it all in. Each was busy with their life.
Finally, the Sofia-Warsaw express pulled into the station. Incredibly, it was only an hour and a half late, although on the wrong track. He gathered up his suitcase and artist’s portfolio and scrambled with the others around to another platform.
The train sucked up its new passengers like an overstuffed vacuum cleaner. He found a steel side plate that read “Warsaw First Class” and climbed aboard. He searched for and finally found an empty compartment and jammed everything onto the overhead rack.
People murmured in the next cabin. Others stood in the corridor and hung out open windows to smoke cigarettes. Rain threatened to fall.
An hour passed and the train had yet to leave. Cautiously, he left his cabin to explore the rest of the car. There was a bathroom at one end. At the other end, he found a small room reserved for the conductor.
Back in his cabin, he manipulated the red velour seat. It slid forward and the back tilted down to form a bed. He returned it to the upright position and sat down. On the opposite wall, a faded black-and-white photograph captured a train entering a mountain tunnel.
They seemed destined to wait all day. He watched uniformed station officials brush off pesky passengers, check shipping papers and stroll in and out of an “Employees Only” door. He saw no policemen or soldiers combing through the passenger cars. There seemed to be no particular reason for the delay. It was just a routine stop at one of the five countries along the way.
Then he heard a distant groan followed by couplings catching. They were gliding past the platform. People leaned out the windows to wave good-bye.
Dark clouds cast a threatening shadow over the city.
They crossed a black suspension bridge that spanned the Sava River at one end of Gypsy Island. He took in the wide river, the enormous heating plant, vacant fields and the train yards as they swept by. It reminded him of a scene from an Emile Zola novel set in late 19th-Century industrial France.
He couldn’t hang excitedly out the window like the others, so he lapsed into a stupor. The image of Dragana was ever-present in his mind. He still felt the softness of her cheeks. He could smell her hair. He could feel the pressure of her legs wrapped around him. He had to respect her last words, “I don’t want to see you again, unless you want me.”
Cold mist splattered his face. He pushed the window knobs upward until the window was fully shut. He didn’t want to see Dragana in that city again. If they met again, it would be in another, better place.
Would she be the same person in a different setting, or had he fallen in love with the way her bohemian life defied the repressive weight of outdated socialism, filial piety and the omnipotent state?
Would her dark, penetrating eyes fade away in a sea of competing lovely faces in the West? He didn’t know.
Chapter 19
Mick had just slammed a service ace to even up the tennis match with Gerard Vaillant, the French diplomat, when the heavens opened
“Let’s sweep the lines,” he called in the musty smell of new rainfall.
They bundled up their rackets and reached for a pair of brooms. Red dust exploded under pellets of rain as they bent over and carefully traced the white plastic lines nailed into the clay.
Then they jogged off the court at the American Ambassador’s residence, ran through a curtain of rain down garden steps, and aimed for an awning by the swimming pool.
“Mon dieu the rain is cold,” Gerard said, and toweled the droplets off his expensive haircut.
“I’m bitten raw by mosquitoes.”
With the rain shower only intensifying, Mick dragged a wrought iron chair under the awning and sat down wearily. Gerard bounced up and down on his toes to keep his calf muscles limber.
An oversized American flag still hung off the mansion’s front balustrade, even though the U.S. had recalled its ambassador at the height of the Croatian War.
A caretaker gardening crew pushed their mowers out of the rain. A glass booth by the locked front gate steamed up with a guard’s breath.
“What does the future hold for this place?” Gerard wondered aloud.
“It’s up to the people,” Mick said.
“But what do people live for?”
“A fire to stay warm. Food to keep hunger at bay.”
“Doesn’t the common man have a higher vision?”
Mick looked at his friend. Gerard knew Yugoslavia as well as anyone. Why was he asking these questions? “What do you think?”
Gerard looked beyond the swimming pool. “Oh, I suppose the average man might sense that he’s part of a great migration toward the sea.”
“Even if that means butchering every Muslim who stands in his way?’”
“That’s their past whispering in their ears,” Gerard said. “This poor country has become fond of their bitter memories. It makes them whole. It transfers blame onto everyone but themselves for the plight they’re in.”
Mick thought about it. “But there’s more to it than bad history or unlucky geography. This country is a mean, tough political arena, where nothing is sacred in one’s quest for power. These self-proclaimed saviors of society are playing the populace like a fiddle. They have no more scruples than the toughest gangsters in Chicago during Prohibition. They just stir up the national sense of victimhood for their own ends.”
“That’s undeniably true.”
“But I’m not going to get caught up in chicken-and-egg arguments,” M
ick said. “Right now, my goal is simple. I want to find whoever killed Doc Moore.”
In the waning days of diplomacy in Belgrade, Dr. John Moore had become the de facto physician for all the friendly embassies.
“Do you have any leads?” Gerard asked.
“At first I thought it was the MUP, but now I’m not so sure.”
After all, the man in the gabardine suit had called in his own protection, and it wasn’t the secret police. The young man had set a gunman loose on Mick, and in the same way, maybe he had sensed that Sandy and Tyrone were a threat and called in reinforcements to neutralize them.
“Would you like to help me out?”
“Certainly.”
Mick looked at his fit and eager friend. If anybody was up to the task, it was Gerard. “I need you to trace a young hood. I need to know his name and the bank that supplies him with German marks.”
“This is for John?” Gerard said.
“And his family.”
“Where do I start?”
“You’ll find the guy on Gypsy Island. He’s hard to miss.”
“I’m here to see Bane Djukanovic,” Dragana told the beefy receptionist at the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
“One moment, please.” The man grabbed his telephone and dialed an extension.
She puffed on a cigarette and took a moment to look over the small lobby. Rain washed against windows of the dimly lit headquarters. A stack of government-printed magazines lay by a light blue vinyl couch. The topmost picture showed a sex kitten posing in a see-through raincoat. What had the government turned into?
The man stood and opened a metal door behind him. Footsteps echoed from the hallway. A security guard emerged and looked at her.
She took a last drag, smashed the stub in an ashtray and turned to follow the man.
A distant, steamed-up window served to illuminate the long hallway while empty light sockets decorated the ceiling. They passed several unmarked doors. She heard no groans or screams coming from within, but she wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe the secret police had cut back on electric shocks to save on power.