Spies of the Balkans: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  Now for the hard part. He stayed home through the early evening, going out only after the bell in the town hall rang midnight. When he reached the school, the street was empty, though there were lights shining in the windows on both floors. But he had no intention of going in there, there wasn't a bluff in the world that would get him past all those soldiers. No, for the Behars of the world there was only the drainpipe, at a corner toward the back of the building. He knew these pipes, fixed together in flanged sections, the flanges extending from the curve every three feet or so, he'd climbed them many times in his stealthy life. First, shoes off--the soles worn so thin and smooth he'd get no traction at all. He had no socks, so he climbed barefoot, his toes pressed against the flange, his fingers pulling him up to the next level.

  In a few minutes he was on the roof. He crouched down, keeping his silhouette below the sight line from the street, and crawled over to the chimney. Yes, here was the wire. He wanted to touch it, this ribbon of metal worth a thousand drachma, but he had no idea what it might be for; perhaps it was charged with some mysterious form of electrical current and would burn his fingers with its magic. It was certainly a secret wire--that much he'd sensed in the voice of the foreigner--so, leave it alone. He took off his jacket and shirt, unwound the sheet, and laid it flat on the roof.

  What if the wind ... He searched the dark rooftop, looking for weight, but found only some loose stucco where a crack ran along one corner. He pried up a few pieces, not very heavy, and distributed them at the corners of the sheet. They would have to do. Below him, on the second floor of the school, he could hear voices, a laugh, another voice, another laugh. He scuttled back to the drainpipe, descended to the ground, put on his shoes, and, feeling better than he'd felt in a long time, walked home. What did it mean, the sheet on the roof? He didn't know, he didn't care, he knew only what it meant to him.

  The following morning he hurried off to the barbershop. In the back room, Pappou was cold and frightening. "Is it done? Whatever it is--done properly?" Behar said yes. Pappou sat still, his eyes boring into Behar's soul, then he picked up the telephone and made a brief call. Asked for somebody with a Greek name, waited, finally said, "You can have your hair cut any time you want, the barber is waiting for you." That was all. The foreigner appeared ten minutes later, and Pappou went out into the shop.

  The foreigner asked where he'd found the wire; Behar told him. "Maybe I'll go up to the roof myself," he said. "What will I see?"

  "A big white sheet, sir."

  "Flat?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Behar." A pause. "If you ever, ever, tell anybody about this, we will know. Understand?" With a slow, meticulous grace he drew an index finger across his throat, a gesture so eloquently performed that Behar thought he could actually see the knife. "Understand?" the foreigner said again, raising his eyebrows.

  A frightened Behar nodded emphatically. He understood all too well. The foreigner held his eyes for a time, then reached into his pocket and counted out seven one-hundred-drachma notes.

  *

  28 November. For Costa Zannis, it began as a normal day, but then it changed. He was standing next to the captain in the school's narrow cloakroom, which, with the addition of a teacher's desk, had been turned into what passed for a liaison office. Pavlic was just about to join them, it was the most common moment imaginable; pleasant morning, daily chore, quiet talk. Zannis and the captain were looking down at a hand-drawn map, with elevations noted on lines indicating terrain, of some hilltop in Albania.

  Then the captain grabbed his upper arm. A grip like a vise--sudden, instinctive.

  Zannis started to speak--"What ..."--but the captain waved him into silence and stood frozen and alert, his head cocked like a listening dog. In the distance, Zannis heard a drone, aircraft engines, coming toward them. Coming low, not like the usual sound, high above. The captain let him go and ran out the door, Zannis followed. From the north, two planes were approaching, one slightly above the other. The captain hurried back into the school and grabbed the Bren gun that stood, resting on its stock, in one corner of the entry hall. The windows rattled as the planes roared over the rooftop and the captain took off toward the street, Zannis right behind him. But the captain shouted for him to stay inside, Zannis followed orders, and stopped in the doorway, so lived.

  In front of the school, the captain searched the sky, swinging the Bren left and right. The sound of the planes' engines faded--going somewhere else. But that was a false hope, because the volume rose sharply as they circled back toward the school. The captain faced them and raised the Bren, the muzzle flashed, a few spent shells tumbled to the ground, then machine guns fired in the distance, the captain staggered, fought for his balance, and sank to his knees.

  What happened next was unclear. Zannis never heard an explosion, the world went black, and when his senses returned he found he was lying on his stomach and struggling to breathe. He forced his eyes open, saw nothing but gray dust cut by a bar of sunlight, tried to move, couldn't, and reached behind him to discover that he was pinned to the floor by a beam that had fallen across the backs of his legs. In panic, he fought free of a terrible weight. Then he smelled fire, his heart hammered, and he somehow stood up. Get out. He tried, but his first step--it was then he discovered his shoe was gone--landed on something soft. Covered with gray dust, a body lying face down. Somebody ran past him, Zannis could see he was shouting but heard nothing. He turned back to the body. Let it burn? He couldn't. He grabbed the feet, and, as he pulled, the body gave a violent spasm. Now he saw that one of the legs was bleeding, so he took the other leg which, as he hauled, turned the body over and he saw it was Pavlic.

  As he pulled Pavlic's body toward the entry, there was a grinding roar and the rear section of the second story came crashing down onto the first floor. Zannis heaved again, Pavlic's body moved. He could see an orange flicker now and then, and could feel heat on the skin of his face. Was Pavlic alive? He peered down, found his vision blurred, realized his glasses weren't there, and was suddenly infuriated. He almost wanted--for an instant a scared ten-year-old--to look for them, almost, then understood he was in shock and his mind wasn't quite working. He took a deep breath, which burned in his chest and made him cough, steadied himself, and dragged the body out of the building, the back of Pavlic's head bouncing down the steps that led to the doorway. Immediately there was someone by his side, a woman he recognized, who worked in the post office across from the school. "Easy with him," she said. "Easy, easy, I think he's still alive." She circled Zannis and took Pavlic under the arms and slid him across the pavement.

  With one bare foot, and unable to see very much of anything, he headed back toward the school. As he entered the building, a reservist came crawling out of the doorway, and Zannis realized there were still people alive inside. But the smoke blinded him completely and the heat physically forced him backward. In the street, he sat down and held his head in his hands. Not far from him, he saw what he thought were the captain's boots, heels apart, toes pointing in. Zannis looked away, tried to rub his ankle, and discovered his hand was wet. Blood was running from beneath his trouser cuff, across the top of his foot, and into the gray powder that covered the street. Very well, he would go to the hospital but, when he tried to stand, he couldn't, so he sat there, holding his head, in front of the burning school.

  He wasn't hurt so much. They told him that later, in a dentist's office where the lightly wounded had been taken because the town clinic--there was no hospital in Trikkala--was reserved for the badly injured. The reservists lay on the floor of the reception area, the dentist had tried to make them comfortable by putting the pillows of his waiting room couch under their heads. Zannis could hear out of one ear now, a wound in his leg had been stitched up, and there was something wrong with his left wrist. He kept opening and closing his hand, trying to make it better, but motion only made the pain worse.

  As dusk fell, he realized he was tired of being wounded and decided to seek out whate
ver remained of his unit. In the street, people noticed him, likely because a nurse had cut off the leg of his trousers. Zannis met their eyes and smiled--oh well--but the people looked sorrowful and shook their heads. Not so much at a soldier with a bare leg and one shoe. At the bombing of their school and the men who'd been killed, at how war had come to their town.

  And it wasn't done with them. And they knew it.

  Two days later, Zannis went to the clinic to see Pavlic. Some of the wounded lay on mattresses on the floor, but Pavlic had one of the beds, a wad of gauze bandage taped to one side of his face. He brightened when he saw Zannis, now fully dressed. After they shook hands he thanked Zannis for coming. "It is very boring here," he said, then thanked him also, as he put it, "for everything else."

  Zannis simply made a dismissive gesture: we don't have to talk about it.

  "I know," Pavlic said. "But even so, thanks."

  "Here," Zannis said. He handed Pavlic three packs of cigarettes, a box of matches, the morning newspaper from Athens, and two magazines. German magazines. Pavlic held one of them up to admire it; Brunhilde, naked, full-breasted and thickly bushed, had been photographed in the act of serving a volleyball. Pavlic said, "Modern Nudist. Thanks, I'll share these."

  "You should see what we have in Salonika."

  "I can imagine. What becomes of you now?"

  "Back home, so they tell me. I've lost the hearing in one ear. And they say I might get a little medal if there are any left. And you?"

  "A concussion, cuts and bruises." He shrugged. "I have to stay for a few days, then I'm ordered back to Zagreb. I suspect they don't think what I was doing was so important. They'd rather I keep the police cars running."

  "Marko," Zannis said. Something in his voice made Pavlic attentive. "I want to ask you to do something."

  "Go ahead."

  Zannis paused, then said, "We have Jews coming into Salonika now. Fugitives from Germany, in flight. At least some of them have disappeared on the way. Where I don't know."

  "I thought they went to the port of Constanta."

  "Some of them do," Zannis said.

  "But the way things are going in Roumania these days, it may be easier for them to get away if they try from Greece."

  "As long as I'm there, it will be. And we have more ships, and more smugglers. For Europe, it's like slipping out the back door." After a moment, he said, "What do you think about it, this flight?"

  Pavlic said, "I don't know," then hesitated, finally adding, "God help them, I guess that's the way I'd put it."

  "Would you help them?"

  For a time, Pavlic didn't answer. He was still holding the nudist magazine. "Costa, the truth is I never thought about--about something like that. I don't know if I ..., no, that's not true, I could, of course I could. Not by myself, maybe, but I, I have friends."

  Zannis said, "Because--" but Pavlic cut him off. "I don't know about you, but I saw this coming. Not what you're talking about, exactly, but something like it. That was in 'thirty-eight, September. When Chamberlain made a separate peace with Hitler. I remember very well, I thought, So much for Czechoslovakia, who's next? It's going to be our turn, sooner or later. So, what do I do if we're occupied? Nothing?" The word produced, from Pavlic, the thin smile of a man who's been told a bad joke.

  "Well," he went on, "'nothing' doesn't exist, not for the police. When somebody takes your country, you help them or you fight them. Because they will come after you; they'll ask, they'll order: 'Find this man, this house, this organization. You're from Zagreb--or Budapest, or Salonika--you know your way around; give us a hand.' And if you obey them, or if you obey them during the day and don't do something else at night, then--"

  "Then?"

  For a moment, Pavlic was silent. Finally he said, "How to put it? You're ruined. Dishonored. You won't ever be the same again."

  "Not everybody thinks that way, Marko. There are some who will be eager to work for them."

  "I know, you can't change human nature. But there are those who will resist. It goes back in time forever, how conquerors and the conquered deal with each other. So everyone--well, maybe not everyone, but everyone like you and me--will have to take sides."

  "I guess I have," Zannis said, as though he almost wished he hadn't.

  "How would you do it, Berlin to Vienna? Cross into Hungary, then down through Yugoslavia into Greece? That's by rail, of course. If you went city to city you'd have to transit Roumania, I mean Budapest to Bucharest, and if you did that you'd better have some dependable contacts, Costa, or a lot--and I mean a lot--of money. And even then it's not a sure thing, you know; the way life goes these days, if you buy somebody they're just liable to turn around and sell you to somebody else."

  "Better to stay west of Roumania," Zannis said. "The rail line goes down through Nis and into Salonika. Or even go from Nis into Bulgaria. I have a friend in Sofia I think I can count on."

  "You don't know?"

  "You never know."

  "How do we communicate? Telephone?" He meant that it was beneath consideration.

  "Does your office have a teletype machine?"

  "Oh yes, accursed fucking thing. The Germans wished it on us--never shuts up, awful."

  "That's how. Something like, 'We're looking for Mr. X, we think he's coming into Zagreb railway station on the eleven-thirty from Budapest.' Then a description. And if somebody taps into the line, so what? We're looking for a criminal."

  Pavlic's expression was speculative: could this work? Then, slowly, he nodded, more to himself than to Zannis. "Not bad," he said. "Pretty good."

  "But, I have to say this, dangerous."

  "Of course it is. But so is crossing the street."

  "Do you know your teletype number?"

  Pavlic stared, then said, "No idea. So much for conspiracy." Then he added, "Actually, a typist works the thing."

  "I know mine," Zannis said. "Could I borrow that for a moment?"

  Pavlic handed over the Modern Nudist. Zannis took a pencil from the pocket of his tunic and flipped to the last page, where a group of naked men and women, arms around one another's shoulders, were smiling into the camera below the legend SUNSHINE CHUMS, DUSSELDORF. Zannis wrote 811305 SAGR. "The letters are for Salonika, Greece. You use the rotary dial on the machine. After it connects, the machine will type the initials for 'who are you' and you type the 'answer-back,' your number." He returned the magazine to Pavlic. "Perhaps you shouldn't share this."

  "Does the message move on a telephone line?"

  "Telegraph. Through the post office in Athens."

  "I think I'd better have the typist teach me how to do it."

  "Someone you trust?"

  Pavlic thought it over and said, "No."

  Pushing a cart with a squeaky wheel, a nurse was moving down the aisle between the beds. "Here's lunch," Pavlic said.

  Zannis rose to leave. "We ought to talk about this some more, while we have the chance."

  "Come back tonight," Pavlic said. "I'm not going anywhere."

  7 December, Salonika. Zannis wasn't sorry to be home, but he wasn't all that happy about it either. This he kept hidden; why ruin the family pleasure? His mother was very tender with him, his grandmother cooked everything she thought he liked, and, wherever he went that first week, room to room or outdoors, Melissa stayed by his side--she wasn't going to let him escape again. As for his brother, Ari, he had exciting news, which he saved during the first joyous minutes of homecoming, only to be upstaged by his mother. "And Ari has a job!" she said. With so many men away at the fighting, there was work for anybody who wanted to work, and Ari had been hired as a conductor on the tram line.

  And, he insisted, this was something his big brother had to see for himself. So Zannis had ridden the Number Four trolley out to Ano Toumba and let his pride show--sidelong glances from Ari made certain Zannis's smile was still in place--as Ari collected tickets and punched them with a silver-colored device. He was extremely conscientious and took his time, making sure to
get it right. Inevitably, some of the passengers were rushed and irritable, but they sensed that Ari was one of those delicate souls who require a bit of compassion--was this a national trait? Zannis suspected it might be--and hardly anybody barked at him.

  So Zannis returned to daily life, but a certain restless discomfort would not leave him. Able to hear out of only one ear, he was occasionally startled by sudden sounds, and he found that to be humiliating. A feeling in no way ameliorated by the fact that, just before he returned to Salonika, the Greek army had managed to find him a little medal, which he refused to wear, being disinclined to answer questions about how he came to have it. And, worst of all, he felt the absence of a love affair, felt it in the lack of commonplace affection, felt it while eating alone in restaurants, but felt it most keenly in bed, or out of bed but thinking about bed, or, in truth, all the time. In the chaos that followed the bombing of the Trikkala school, whatever goddess had charge of his mortality had brushed her lips across his cheek and this had, he guessed, affected that part of him where desire lived. Or maybe it was just the war.

  On the evening of the seventh, Vangelis threw him a welcome-home party. Almost all were people Zannis knew, if, in some cases, only distantly. Gabi Saltiel, grayer and wearier than ever, was still driving an ambulance at night but traded shifts with another driver and brought his wife to the party. Sibylla, her helmet of hair highly lacquered for the occasion, was accompanied by her husband, who worked as a bookkeeper at one of the hotels. There were a couple of detectives, a shipping broker, a criminal lawyer, a prosecutor, two ballet teachers he'd met through Roxanne, an economics professor from the university, even a former girlfriend, Tasia Loukas, who worked at the Salonika city hall.

  Tasia--for Anastasia--showed up late and held both his hands while he got a good strong whiff of some very sultry perfume. She was small and lively, dressed exclusively in black, had thick black hair, strong black eyebrows, and dark eyes--fierce dark eyes--that challenged the world from behind eyeglasses with gray-tinted lenses. Did Vangelis have something in mind for him when he invited Tasia? Zannis wondered. He'd had two brief, fiery love affairs with her, the first six years earlier, the second a few months before he'd met Roxanne. Very free, Tasia, and determined to remain so. "I'll never marry," she'd once told him. "For the truth is, I like to go with a woman from time to time--I get something from a woman I can never get with a man." She'd meant that to be provocative, he thought, but he wasn't especially provoked and had let her know that he didn't particularly care. And he truly didn't. "It's exciting," she'd said. "Especially when it must be kept a secret." A flicker of remembrance had lit her face as she spoke, accompanied by a most deliciously wicked smile, as though she were smiling, once again, at the first moment of the remembered conquest.