by Fritz Galt
The guard stopped before the last door. “In here.”
Dragana entered what was a smoke-filled office.
“Come in,” Bane said. He gracefully pivoted his burly frame around his desk. “You’re Zoran’s friend.”
“That’s right. Dragana Alexandrov.” She shook his hand.
The man’s eyes took a leisurely trip from her miniskirt down the length of her legs and up again. “How can I help you?” He sat on the edge of his desk and leaned forward for the best possible angle between her lapels.
“Care for a smoke?” He smacked a cigarette out of a pack.
She didn’t recognize the brand. “Contraband?”
She let him light it for her, his fleshy fist millimeters from her cheek.
She took a puff and leaned back. The aroma was sweet and mild.
He lit one for himself and exhaled toward the ceiling.
“Did Zoran send you?”
“No, it was my idea. You’re the only one I know who can help Serbia in this situation.”
“Tell me the problem,” he said.
“The problem is Zoran. He doesn’t understand the public. He thinks by redrawing Karta to expand Serbia’s borders, we’ll gain pride and win international support in invading Macedonia. I think Serbs need more incentive than that to go to war. Somehow, we need to feel threatened first.”
“The map is his only weapon?”
“I don’t know what else he has planned, but that’s the key to his invasion.”
Bane stretched his short legs to the ground, pulled up his belt and crossed to the window where large raindrops smacked against the pane. “I think you’re right, but how can we get Zoran to change his mind?”
“We can change the map for him. Right now it’s on its way to a forger in Hungary. If we get to the forger in time, he can shrink Serbia’s borders in such a way that it looks like Macedonia is cutting a piece out of Serbia.”
The man’s heavy head nodded to the beat of some internal rhythm. When he turned around, his shirt was half unbuttoned, gray hairs spilling out. A gold cross hung around his neck and swung free as he leaned on her chair. Their cigarettes nearly met.
“You know how I like to reward good ideas?” he breathed through cracked lips.
It wasn’t until the train pulled out of Novi Sad, capital of the fertile Vulvodynia region of Serbia, and turned north that Alec began to smell trouble.
They were clicking along at a brisk pace, flat green fields fanning out in all directions.
He had been trying to read a travel book’s description of Budapest. Although he had visited a friend there shortly before coming to Yugoslavia, he only knew the tourist parts of the city. He knew the inside of her apartment much better.
Through a gap in the door, he noticed increased activity in the corridor. A conductor told those who were lingering there to go back to their compartments, and the drone of voices gradually reduced.
Alec’s door suddenly slid open, and in staggered an older man in a crumpled gray suit. Rocking with the train, he hauled in a large suitcase. Alec had to help him lift it onto the overhead rack, where it sat next to the carefully wrapped Karta.
The man thanked him in Serbian.
He was a small man with a strong Sandjak accent. Sandjak was a remote part of Serbia between Bosnia and Kosovo, where most Muslim towns had been methodically erased from the map. The man breathed heavily and took a discreet glance into the corridor.
“Is there a problem?” Alec asked.
“Police,” the man said. “They got on the train at Novi Sad and are working their way forward.”
Just then several men in uniform rushed past. One carried a ladder.
Another slid their door open. “Pasos.” Passports.
The officer flipped through the Sandjak man’s passport and identity booklet, but studied Alec’s with more care. It was an American passport with a student visa.
He turned to read the cover of Alec’s guidebook. “Budimpesta?”
“Da.” Yes.
“Ti mozes govoriti srpski.” You can speak Serbian.
“A little,” Alec shifted to English.
“Ti si mlad.” You are young.
Alec pretended not to understand.
“Will you come back to me?”
“No.”
“Then I cancel visa.” He opened the box at his waist.
“I’d rather keep the visa,” Alec said.
“Then you will come back?”
“I don’t know.”
The man flipped to other entries stamped in the passport. At last he snapped it shut and handed it back.
“Good-bye and good luck.” Who knew where he picked up his English.
When the door slammed shut, Alec whispered to his compartment mate, “Why are police checking papers?”
“They are looking for someone.”
Sure enough, at the next stop, several policemen jumped off and led a band of youths away.
“Evading the draft,” the man whispered.
Alec had come uncomfortably close to the policeman mistaking him for a draft dodger. He had to take care not to speak Serbian in public again.
He got a full impression of the dire state of affairs in Yugoslavia when he went to the bathroom. Inside the filthy room, a ceiling panel hung loose over the sink. Above that was a narrow crawl space.
He returned to the cabin and drew the door closed. “They were over the bathroom sink. Go and have a look.”
The man grinned and left to investigate.
That was the chance Alec had been waiting for. He jumped to his feet and hefted the man’s suitcase onto the opposite seat. Then he sprang the latches open.
He pulled the outside window down and began to throw the man’s clothes onto the tracks. When he had made a large enough apace for it, he placed the entire portfolio in the man’s suitcase. All the while, he kept a foot pressed up against the cabin door.
He heard footsteps in the corridor.
He latched the suitcase shut and set it back on the rack.
When the door opened, Alec was leaning out the window with mist in his face.
The man entered and took his seat, a big grin on his face.
Alec shut the window and sat down. “Did you see what a small space they hid in?”
The man shrugged. “It was worth a try.”
If Mick was going to play tennis, Natalie resolved to get something of her own done after not working all weekend.
By 7 a.m., she was out of the house and riding to work in Ed Carrigan’s armor-plated Chevrolet Caprice. A tired young Serb guard just finishing his patrol for the night took the wheel.
By 9:00 she had read all the previous night’s cable traffic and met with Ed to discuss Social Security payments to the laid-off employees.
By 11:00, she had edited and released the State Department’s daily Wireless File for local news consumption, arranged a meeting with American reporters, and drafted a one-sentence report on the local media’s coverage of the previous day’s demonstrations. “There was no coverage.”
By 12:30, she finished monitoring the midday television news. There officially was no demonstration.
At 1:15, dripping wet American reporters filed into a small round-table conference room in the Information Section of the embassy. They were anxious to get off-the-record remarks of western diplomats for the next morning’s news.
The normal ragtag assortment of local stringers had been joined by some fairly intimidating media personalities. Recent arrivals included major newspaper columnists, along with foreign correspondents from CNN and the BBC and the beloved woman from PBS who had long reported exclusively from Italy and the splintered Yugoslavia.
Natalie’s job was to interpret the events of the day. She added little hard intelligence to what had already been reported. Instead, she brought background and perspective to the story.
The journalists liked to quote “an unnamed government official” saying something that would support their take on a st
ory. And she usually had plenty of tidbits to offer.
The Arab-looking reporter from Reuters veered from the discussion of demonstrations to the Macedonian issue. He held up a waterlogged poster with the words “Revenge Serbian Victims in Macedonia.”
The other reporters looked shocked, as if blindsided by the story.
Natalie had seen the crudely photocopied posters taped to light poles around town.
“Do you have any news on the mass killing of Serbs in Kumanovo, Macedonia?” the reporter asked.
Her mind raced forward and backward through various potential avenues of response. She couldn’t afford to substantiate such a potentially volatile story, though classified cables from the American Embassy in Skopje had verified that the report was true. And she had seen in Ravanica the number of refugees flowing north from the border. Certainly, she wasn’t going to report on the assassination attempt she had witnessed on the Serbian Patriarch. For some reason, the attach on Savic had never made it into the news. Ultimately, since she had received no press guidance on the issue from Washington, there was nothing she could say.
“I have nothing for you on that one.”
“Does this mean that you haven’t yet received a detailed report?”
“We can’t confirm that it happened,” she said.
“So you’ve heard the reports.”
“They’re only reports. Look at it this way. If I said that it happened and we know that it happened, I still wouldn’t discuss it. It would be a sensitive issue and discussing it would be outside the realm of American interests.”
“Then is it a story we should investigate?”
The briefing was getting out of hand.
“Why hasn’t the Serbian press responded?” another pressman asked. “My local sources never mentioned it.”
“Is the President of Yugoslavia trying to focus attention on Eastern Slavonia and away from other trouble spots?”
“Have you seen any indication that Serbia will retaliate?”
“Listen, guys,” Natalie said. “In this country, you can analyze anything to death. As often is the case, lies and rumors abound whenever there’s no reliable news source. If you see your job as reporting facts, then I advise you to stick to hard facts. As I said, this embassy has no information on this issue, and we don’t want to encourage unsubstantiated stories. Now I’m happy to move on if you have another topic.”
Much as it was her job to warn reporters of potentially misrepresented news, she had no clear guidance on how to handle the Macedonia issue. And from her recent experience, that story was behind everything happening on the streets.
“Are there other things you won’t discuss with us?” the irked Reuters man asked. “Suppose you tell us what those topics are, and we’ll go elsewhere for the information.”
“Hey guys,” she said. “I don’t want to have to lie to you. I don’t want to be put in that position. That’s why I reserve the right to say, ‘no comment’ on certain subjects. On other subjects, I’ll tell you whatever crap you want to hear. Fair enough?”
The reporters sat back sullenly, rubbing their jaws, and doodling in their notebooks.
“I know darn well that ‘no comment’ sounds like ‘I know something, but I’m not gonna tell you,’” she said. “I want you to know that, although it may mean that, it can also mean that the U.S. Embassy doesn’t discuss that subject for good reason.”
“You won’t discuss unsubstantiated rumors in general, or you won’t discuss the killing of Serbs in Macedonia?”
“We won’t discuss the story of the killing of Serbs in Macedonia. Now, are there any other unsubstantiated rumors you’d like to talk about?”
The journalists laughed.
She sighed with relief. She wouldn’t lose them. They’d be back the next day.
The train came to a halt at Subotica, the last stop in Yugoslavia before continuing into Hungary.
Waiting for passport control to come through the train, the man from Sandjak fell asleep, but Alec fidgeted in his seat.
A full hour passed. He glanced around the empty train yard. Buses carried passengers into Hungary. Why couldn’t the train? Didn’t people have schedules to keep?
Finally, passport control arrived at his compartment.
A stout, gray-haired official looked at his passport. “American?” he said in surprise.
“Yes.”
“Are you escaping?” The country was rife with rumors that America was evacuating the embassy in preparation for bombing Belgrade.
His cabin mate leaned forward with interest.
“No,” Alec said. “Not escaping.”
“Are you returning?”
“Maybe.”
The official looked at his single piece of luggage, a gym bag, overhead. “One moment.” He left and shut the door behind him.
Alec watched him tear something out of the passport, then extend a hand through the doorway.
Alec grabbed the passport and flipped to the back. The page that had been stamped with his Yugoslav visa was ripped out.
He looked at his fellow passenger, a man with a suitcase and a strong Sandjak accent. “Aren’t you getting off here?”
“No,” he said with a wink. “I’m escaping.”
When the train finally lurched out of Subotica, a glimmer of sunshine filtered through the high, gray ceiling of clouds.
Alec watched Yugoslav officials hop off.
The train didn’t travel far. A short span of no-man’s land, once marked by barbed wire, was now cultivated with corn. The train stopped before the dreary Szeged railway station.
They were in Hungary.
An enormous burden, like a physical weight, had been lifted off Alec’s shoulders. This may once have been the bad old Eastern Bloc, beyond Checkpoint Charlie. Now it felt like returning to civilization.
The Hungarian border procedure was no quicker than the Yugoslav process. But he was more willing to wait.
He looked back at the storm clouds rushing over the vast plain into Serbia. It felt as if he had stepped out of a vortex. And he was beyond the reach of the madman who stirred the cauldron of history.
Chapter 20
“Harry, I’ve got a Frenchman tailing a Serb with German marks,” Mick said as he and the econ officer sat down at the conference table.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’d slipped a cog.”
Mick explained. “Gerard from the French Embassy is tracking the man who bought your dinars at Gypsy Island.”
Harry scratched his thinning hair. “Will he get us the name of the bank that’s buying the oil?”
“That’s the plan, and I’m sure he will. Maybe he’ll even lead us to Doc’s killers.”
“Don’t you get the feeling we’re chasing shadows?” Harry said.
“Yes, but those shadows eventually connect to people. As do these clothes.”
He leaned across the conference table and handed Harry his shirt and trousers. The clean and pressed smell made the highly secure room seem more like a dry cleaner.
But Mick’s mind was on his mission. Sure he wanted to find John’s killer, but he also needed to follow the trail of the map, which he knew would lead to Alec. “Do you remember the Macedonia issue I told you about in your car? It involved a map, the Karta.”
“Sure I remember.”
“I got instructions from Langley,” Mick said, recalling his most recent conversation with Bernie Fletcher. “They told me to lay off the Karta case and come home. We have no support on that.”
“Something tells me you’ll find a way.”
“According to Zoran, the Karta’s heading to Hungary,” Mick said. “Maybe I will leave here as Langley suggests.”
“Who’s really running the Karta operation? Zoran or the Church?”
“Seems like Zoran is using the Church.”
“Who’s behind Zoran?”
Mick considered the question. “Whoever’s supporting Zoran, it’s not the secret police.
That night on Gypsy Island, the MUP agent had no clue that Zoran was involved with the missing map.”
Harry sat back. “You’d expect the secret police to be more on the ball than that, if not directly involved. They seem to pull most of the strings in this country. I wonder if someone in the government is going rogue, and you’ve alerted the MUP.”
“Some official is also covering up the killings in Macedonia.”
“Just like Langley telling you to lay off the case.”
“Strange.” Mick stared at him. It felt like discussing Macedonia led to an eerie vacuum.
“Taking this one step further,” Harry said. “If someone in the government is helping Zoran, wouldn’t the secret police give the operation a wide berth?”
“Maybe they just don’t like people running operations behind their backs. The MUP likes to project the image that they’re in control. After all, if you combine the dirt they’ve gathered on the church and Macedonia with their files on all the officials that the UN War Crimes Tribunal is trying to subpoena, you can see the power they wield in the government.”
“So who is really in control of the MUP?”
“You know the names and faces. The president has installed his closest friends at the top positions at the Interior Ministry.”
“The head, Vlada, is a blundering old fart with all the finesse of a bulldog,” Harry said. “The deputy, Bane, is a puppy dog looking for a political handout. I don’t think either has any respect in the ministry.”
“So who is running the ministry?”
“Maybe nobody.”
Mick let out his breath. “This Karta thing might bring the MUP’s agents into direct conflict with the president’s appointees. If it does, more power to them.”
Harry stood up. “We’d better bring Ed in on this.”
“No.” Mick’s heart began to race. “If he connects Alec to a plot to invade Macedonia, he’ll pull us all out of here.”
Harry sat down slowly. “This is bigger than Alec. This is about who is running this country. It’s about war. You and I can’t decide these things alone. Washington needs to be in on it. Either we clue Ed in, or we drop it.”