by Fritz Galt
“How’s the border crossing ahead?” Mick inquired.
“There’s no line,” the boy said, as if he could not conceive of such a thing.
Mick drove out of the small hamlet of whitewashed farmhouses and checked his watch. It was noon. He reached for the short-wave radio. The BBC’s top story was that the Yugoslav President, Miroslav Nikic, had appealed to Europe to intervene in Croatia. Five civilians had just been killed by fighting in Osijek, a Croatian town on the border with Yugoslavia and Hungary. Overnight, seven hundred refugees had escaped into Hungary to join the thousands who had already fled there. Hungary had accused Yugoslav jets of using Hungarian air space to fire at Croatian targets.
All this while, he was driving toward Hungary through Slavonia in the ethnically mixed Osijek region, half a dozen kilometers from the front.
It felt like the radio was shouting, “Go back.” But with borders closing and troops mobilizing, a stronger internal voice said, “This is your only chance to leave.”
Fortunately, he encountered no troops or military equipment. People rode bicycles to and from the bread store, roads were empty of returning guest workers and it looked like the border would be a breeze.
Until the traffic jam. He hadn’t even reached the border town. The roadway was narrow and surrounded by fields of corn. Ahead a line of stopped cars stretched as far as the eye could see. People left their doors open because of the heat. They strolled up and down the road, smoked, talked and even slept under nearby trees.
Mick nosed up to the last car on an otherwise barren, two-lane road and turned off his engine.
Several cars behind, the Lada pulled into line.
Locals walked by, selling coffee, soda, juice and doughnuts. Why had he given up his last dinar?
There was nothing to do but wait. He tilted the seat back and closed his eyes. He awoke once to start the car and advance several places.
From his reclined position, he could watch the sky. But there were no warplanes. The voices around him were calm, even when they discussed the war.
After two and a half hours under the scorching sun, he reached the small border crossing.
The white Lada jumped the line and pulled up under the flimsy structure. That was as far as the Yugoslav secret police could go.
Mick watched the driver step out of the Lada. He wore a long coat of fine black material that clashed with his tattered brown shoes. Mick focused on his features. He would have remembered the long, slender face with the hooked nose had he seen it before.
All the man could do was to stand by his country’s farewell sign and watch the border guards do their job.
Officials were particularly looking for young men trying to escape the draft. They checked passports against the army’s muster roll. But they also looked inside trunks and under seats for stowaways. On the other side of the road, they searched incoming cars for weapons.
A border guard reached into Mick’s window for his passport. He recognized the diplomatic document at once and waved him through.
Could it be that simple?
He inched into Hungary and felt lightheaded. All the hatred and violence and fear embodied in the sinister black-coated figure lurking like a vulture at the border, were confined to the other side of the border, an arbitrary line that cut across fertile fields.
The Hungarian patrol waved him through without inspection. He was free.
Now the traffic jam was heading in the other direction. A kilometer-long line of Yugoslav cars sat waiting to return to Yugoslavia. Most had come to Hungary simply to buy gas, which they carted away in canisters. Because the wait was long, they simply pushed their cars by hand.
He headed into the tranquil land with a nagging sense of remorse. He had left Natalie behind. Was he also abandoning Alec?
He scanned the radio for Hungarian stations, but only found Radio Zagreb announcing further terrorist attacks. The panicked voice from across the border sounded out of place and inappropriate in that idyllic setting.
He zoomed past orderly, painted houses. The pace of rural traffic was leisurely. It mainly consisted of bicycles, archaic tractors, overloaded hay wagons and horses and oxen pulling carts. Lush stands of trees and planted fields shared the gentle waves of earth.
When he checked his mirror, his smile disappeared. Like a faithful dog, the Lada was still there.
At 9 a.m. while preparing to leave for work, Natalie received a phone call. It was the embassy’s administrative Warden System, a telephone network designed to reach the official U.S. citizen community as quickly as possible.
The news was brief.
Young political officer Rich McKenzie told her that the State Department had ordered the departure of all staff and dependents. Buses would depart Belgrade in the next 48 hours.
There would be a meeting at Ed Carrigan’s house that afternoon.
Her first thought was, “Mick, why have you forsaken me?”
Chapter 22
The dim traffic light in Hungary’s capital turned green.
Mick stepped on the gas and cruised quietly along the Danube. Late afternoon traffic in Budapest was mostly buses, Ladas and a surprising number of sleek Audis, BMWs and other symbols of newly acquired wealth.
Sunlight played on the river. The beaches and grounds of Margit Island teemed with activity.
Hotel Danska was a joint Hungarian-Danish venture. Built over one of the city’s numerous hot springs, it offered a state-of-the-art swimming pool and spa. Its rooms, though simple, were tastefully appointed with modern, blond wood furnishings.
Mick threw his window open and surveyed the sparkling river and the distant Buda hills where the Var, the castle district, lay.
He picked up the phone and dialed the hotel operator. “American Embassy, please.”
“One moment.”
Several seconds later, a woman came over the line. “Amerikai Nagykovetseg. Good afternoon.”
He stared at the spot where the embassy lay nestled among the hills. “Connect me with Stephanie Williams.”
Natalie arrived at Ed Carrigan’s house to join the few remaining American officers and their dependents. Her hands felt numb as she held a list that showed her leaving in two days by bus. In those two days, the last Americans would pack up and depart post, never to return.
Ed cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. “The ordered departure has begun for two reasons. One, to make a political statement and secondly, because we were planning to leave anyway.”
“How about security reasons?” Commander Richey asked.
Ed stated that there was no security threat and never had been.
“But everyone knows that could change overnight,” Rich McKenzie pointed out. “If the government or a militia targets Americans or if there’s violence on the streets, we have no safe haven.”
Still, there was more relief than anxiety in the room. After years of embassy drawdown lists and Washington’s requirements under which no one could begin to bid on new jobs and evaluate their prospects for the future, suddenly everyone could make definite plans. Their jobs had been eliminated. They could put their track shoes on.
The sense that they were pawns in a diplomatic game was over.
It was the high point of Bud Winkler’s young administrative career. He would detail Yugoslav staff to pack everyone’s household effects and sell their private vehicles. The embassy would transport pets as soon as practical.
The bus to Budapest would have a bathroom. The General Services section would arrange airplane transportation from there to Washington. Employees would be paid per diem for fifteen days upon arrival.
They would leave with a flourish.
“I’m not up for tennis.” Natalie pushed her reflective sunglasses up her nose.
“Uh, fine.” Gerard leaned over the garden chair and began to zip up his monogrammed gym bag.
She ran her tongue over her teeth. “Care for a swim?”
Thus their
secret rendezvous began.
They entered the pool house at the ambassador’s residence through separate doors. In the hot, stuffy changing room, she stripped before a full-length mirror. Was it her body that turned Mick off? What could she do to turn him on again? She was in shape. She had a nice tan and a trim white rabbit tail.
She sighed and stretched her toes into her pink one-piece.
Outside, the deck tiles were scorching hot. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Gerard was already sipping from a can of Coke, a rare luxury those days. She didn’t want to know how he obtained it. She leaned back in a contoured lounge chair, pulled her shoulder straps down and applied sun block.
There was the distant rhythm of a chopper. Boy, did Mick hate that sound. Much as she wondered how he was doing, it was good that he was leaving the signs of war behind.
Moments later, two JNA helicopters swept down the valley below the residence and zoomed toward the military hospital. More wounded soldiers from the front.
“And they say they aren’t involved in a war,” she said.
“They say a lot of things.”
She turned to size him up. “Okay, big boy.” His body was beautifully bronzed and looked svelte in a Speedo. “Mick made me his conduit while he’s away. What news do you have for me?”
He stared at her over his sunglasses. “My, you are direct.”
“It’s because I hate this crap.”
“I have some names for you.” He set his Coke down and talked to the sky. “The young man Mick found on Gypsy Island works at Agrobanka on Boulevar Revolucija. The bank’s president is Ljubomir Rodic, Zoran Rodic’s father.”
“Ljubomir Rodic, the old man with the bricks by the train station?” She felt her abdomen tensing. “What a creep. Besides, doesn’t ‘Ljubomir’ mean ‘lover of peace?’”
She waited for her anger to subside. But it didn’t. A little anger was better than the alternative: cynicism. A lowlife like Ljubomir wasn’t worth losing one’s soul over.
Gerard went on. “His bank is financing an oil shipment from Ukraine. It will pass through the Iron Gates on the Romanian border in the next two days.”
“I’m not interested in oil or sanctions,” she said. “I just want to find out who killed Dr. Moore.”
“Consider this: Ljubomir had a motive.”
“Huh?”
Gerard explained. Banks like Ljubomir’s were overflowing with foreign currency, obtained illegally from sympathetic sources in other countries. The currency went directly to the government and military to buy oil on the black market. Some of the money was skimmed off for expensive vacation homes in Switzerland, South Africa and Israel.
Mick hadn’t mentioned Ljubomir to her, but she certainly knew of his son, Zoran from Ravanica.
She described to Gerard how, lying shot in the Ravanica parking lot, Father Jovic had fingered Zoran as the person behind stealing the Karta in order to redraw the map of Serbia and Macedonia. “Just why would Zoran be interested in Macedonia? Isn’t oil and banking lucrative enough?”
“Perhaps Zoran is smarter than his father,” Gerard said. “Surely all the skimming will eventually be exposed and the money will dry up.”
Or the sources in Europe would be exposed, as Mick had explained it, and the money would dry up. She could see why Ljubomir would have a beef with Americans who meddled in his business.
“So Macedonia is Zoran’s idea of diversification,” she concluded. “He can turn his paramilitary troops loose down there and make far greater profits taking over real estate and extorting money from firms, factories and farms.”
“You’ve got it.”
She sought out another way to get back at Ljubomir. “Do you think stopping the oil barge might ruin the bank’s credibility?”
“Of course it could. But I wouldn’t want to try stopping it.”
“Nor would I.” She lowered her sunglasses and focused on the young Frenchman. He might not be brave enough to separate a gangster from his fortune, but he did partake in some risky behavior tracking a hood through Belgrade’s red light district. “Was it difficult tracking the man on Gypsy Island?”
“Not at all. I live for new challenges.” He leaned toward her with vigor. “Don’t you know that we French have a lust for these affairs?”
Her gaze roamed idly down his body.
“I wouldn’t know.”
For a moment she wondered if Mick had put Gerard there to tempt her.
Natalie drove to her hairdresser, a Serbian woman whose claim to fame was having worked in Northbrook, Illinois. Natalie didn’t need a trim, but she hadn’t seen her friend in two years and it was her last chance to catch up. If she emerged incognito, so much the better.
“I don’t care what you do, just make me look different.”
Over a lengthy procedure that involved pins and rollers and strange smells and setting and drying, the young woman divulged that she would return to Illinois if she could sell her shop and rent out her house. A big discussion ensued over whether that was wishful thinking, what the visa implications were, etc. When she finally looked at a mirror, Natalie saw a platinum blonde with bangs and a bob.
She didn’t know whether to thank the woman or cry. Nevertheless, she thanked her friend and wished her all the luck in the world.
Afterward, she took a walk down Boulevar Revolucija. Demonstrators had spared that district. Before she realized it, she was standing under Agrobanka. Had demonstrators avoided throwing bricks there because it was Ljubomir Rodic’s bank? Perhaps she was a cynic after all.
There was no sense of urgency or anxiety on the shopping street, only a pervasive gloom. She peered into one shop that sold accordions, flutes, extension cords and fuses. If it wasn’t black market, it wasn’t worth buying.
She passed a solemn group of die-hard Catholics carrying candles around the Plecnik church. She felt vulnerable enough as it was being an American in Belgrade. She couldn’t imagine how it felt to be among the tiny minority of Catholics there.
A car horn tooted.
It was Harry with Tammy and her kids.
“Hey Natalie. That you?” Harry shouted from his window.
She flashed a smile. “You bet.”
“What are you doing here? We’re evacuating the embassy.”
“I know that,” she said.
She just felt like a walk.
The pizzeria was expensive, but it was pizza.
Under a grape trellis on the city’s outskirts, Ivan Lekic and Natalie sat holding glasses of sweet red Vranac. The label still bore the old Communist city name of “Titograd.”
The hardened cheese at the bottom of a Domino’s Pizza box would be more appetizing than what the restaurant was trying to pass off as pizza. Not only were several essential spices missing, but the goat cheese made it nearly unpalatable.
Ivan was staring at her. He twirled a hand around the fringes of his hair. “Why the change? I didn’t recognize you at first.”
This was embarrassing. Was she going to have to explain herself to everyone she knew? She needed a simple explanation for her radical new appearance. “I was tired of my old self.”
He mused over this. “I thought you might be trying to escape.”
Just then a tall, motherly woman came up to the table, and he shut up. She cleared the half-gnawed pizza away and brushed the crumbs over the railing.
Ivan cleared his throat, rocked back and looked far off across the smoggy, noisy valley at the distant wooded hills. Sadness drained all expression out of his face. “Our studio was threatened.”
“So someone was actually listening to your broadcast.”
“Evidently a regular audience has been assigned.”
“Who threatened you?”
“You’ll never believe it,” he said, and sipped at the wine. “It was Bane Djukanovic, the president’s poodle in the Internal Police.”
“He called you directly?”
“It was his very voice on the line. The
sound of it gave me a chill. He was a prisoner in the Seventies, you know.”
“For what?”
“Mutilating women or some such thing. His trademark was burning cigarettes into their hands and feet and faces.”
A spark shot through her spine. It was precisely what had happened to John Moore. She looked across the valley. The landscape was so simple. For a country so backward, it held such unbelievable secrets.
She composed herself. “What did Bane say?”
“He told me that no print or electronic media carried the story, and that I wouldn’t either.”
She drew in her breath. So the MUP was censoring the slaughter story in Macedonia. As she and Mick had seen at Ravanica, Bane’s agents didn’t know about the Karta and, as Mick had explained later, they didn’t know about plans to invade Macedonia. But Bane did.
Ivan stared her straight in the eye, and his eyelids flared with conviction. “The MUP could shut me down.”
“The MUP won’t shut you down.”
“Why not?”
She stared at her blonde reflection in her glass. “Because we’re dealing with two MUPs.”
“Natalie,” he confided in a low voice. “I heard that the military will be observing an amnesty from the draft for the next two weeks. I’m not going to wait and see if they close me down. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Leaving Yugoslavia?”
“For good.”
Natalie finally drove home and began writing change of address cards.
She picked up the phone to call the maid she had rehired and tell her that she was leaving.
The old woman broke down in sobs at hearing the news. Not only was the woman losing a job, but it confirmed everyone’s worst fears: the Americans were leaving town.