by Ross Thomas
There wasn’t much further conversation, especially after I got us lost twice. I kept checking the rear window for possible tails, but there seemed to be none. The night had grown much colder and it looked as if it might snow again. We spotted only an occasional pedestrian, bundled up against the cold and hurrying for home, as we threaded deeply into Belgrade’s working-class residential district. It was nearly midnight before I found the narrow street that I was looking for. It looked almost deserted except for a dim light that burned in one house.
“We should not come here,” Tavro said, looking around at the street.
“Stop at the corner,” I told Wisdom. I turned in the seat to face Tavro. “Why not?” I said.
“It is not safe.”
“It’s safer than anyplace else I can think of,” I said. “I don’t know of any hotel that would check us in without a lifted eyebrow and a quick call to the police.”
“I must protest it,” Tavro said in the stubborn tone of a man not much accustomed to opposition. “It is far too dangerous.”
“Whose house is it?” Knight asked.
“An American’s,” I said.
“Bill Jones?” Wisdom said.
“Yes.”
“What’s he got to do with us?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We have to stay out of sight from now until nine tomorrow night when we meet the kidnappers in Sarajevo. We haven’t got anyplace to go and the cops are probably looking for us. They’ll be looking for us in earnest when they discover that Pernik’s dead and if we’re unlucky, that won’t be too long from now.”
“What will you ask of Jones?” Tavro said.
“I’m not going to ask him to take us in,” I said. “I’m just going to ask him if he knows where we can hole up until there’s some traffic on the road to Sarajevo.”
“He will not like it,” Tavro said.
“You’d better come with me,” I said. “Maybe you can encourage him to like it.”
We got out of the car and approached Jones’s house. His was the only light on in the street which was utterly quiet except for the sound of the wind. I knocked at the door. Jones opened it a scant four inches and peered out at me. He continued to look at me for several moments before he said, “What do you want, St. Ives?”
“Tavro’s with me,” I said. “We need to talk to you.”
“It’s late,” he said.
“It won’t take long.”
He opened the door wide enough for us to enter and we followed him into the sitting room. He turned on a light. He wore pajamas and a dark gray dressing gown. On his feet were a pair of old slippers. “This isn’t smart,” he said.
“That is what I told him,” Tavro said.
“We need a place to stay until early morning,” I said.
Jones shook his head. “Not here.”
“I don’t mean here,” I said. “There’s six of us. We have to hole up.”
“Six of you?” he said. “What the hell is it, a convention?”
“It is lack of planning,” Tavro said and started to say something else until he caught my look.
Jones sank into the plum-colored chair and looked at the head of the wolf on the wall. “Remember when we got that wolf?” he said to Tavro.
“I remember.”
“Nine years ago, wasn’t it?”
“Nine or ten.”
“I happened to be looking at it today.”
“Why?” Tavro said.
“My wife wants me to move it out of the sitting room. So I was looking at it. Close. Guess what I found.”
“I don’t know.”
“A bug.” Jones reached into the pocket of his dressing gown and tossed something to Tavro who caught it and then dropped it. He picked it up and looked at it curiously.
“You removed it?” he asked.
“Sure I removed it. I was going to ask you about it when I saw you.”
Tavro looked at it closely. “It is a new model,” he said. “I am not familiar with it.”
“When did you find it?” I said.
“This afternoon, right after I got through talking to you.”
“It might not have been too wise to have removed it,” Tavro said.
Jones looked at him and nodded. “There’re a couple of other things that might not be too wise that I’ve wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Now that St. Ives is here, I know we’d better talk about them.”
“What about someplace that we can hole up?” I said.
Jones gave me a cold look. “You in a hurry?”
“I’m in a hurry,” I said.
“If you’ll listen a minute, you might not be in a hurry to go anywhere.” He turned back to Tavro who, like me, was still standing. “What I want to talk about is—”
The woman’s scream interrupted him. It came from the rear of the house. Jones was on his feet and moving fast toward a closed door when we heard the flat, sharp sound of a single shot. Jones jerked the door open and the tortoiseshell cat scampered into the room, its tail swollen double by fear and excitement. Two men followed the cat into the room. Both carried automatics. They were young and one had brown hair and brown eyes and a new-looking scar on his left cheek. The other one was blond with blue eyes. The one with the scar on his cheek shot Jones twice through the chest. Then he turned the gun on me and I watched his finger with a kind of paralyzed fascination as he tried to make up his mind whether to pull the trigger. Instead, he looked at the blond with the blue eyes who had his automatic pointed at Tavro. The blond man shook his head. They motioned us toward the corner near the tile stove. The brown-haired one knelt by Jones and went through the three pockets of the dead man’s dressing gown. When he didn’t find what he was looking for he shook his head at the blond man who snapped something at Tavro who held out his right hand, palm up. In it lay the bugging device. The blond man took it and put it away in a pocket.
They both backed toward the door that led to the rear of the house. The blond one went through first. The one with the brown hair hesitated, as if still trying to decide whether to shoot. After a moment, he decided not to and backed from the room, slamming the door after him. Neither Tavro nor I said anything until we heard another door close, far back in the house.
“They’ve gone,” Tavro said.
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
“I wonder if Jones did.”
“The woman who screamed,” Tavro said.
“His wife?”
“Probably.”
“We’d better see,” I said.
We went through the door that led from the sitting room and down a hall. The first room on the left was the kitchen. It had a door that led to a small yard that faced on an alley. The first room on the right was a bedroom. I went in followed by Tavro. Mrs. Jones, her gray hair spread over a pillow, lay in a large double bed, the covers down to her waist. She was naked except for the hole under her left breast. The two tabby cats sat at the foot of the bed and stared at her with yellow eyes.
“Children?” I said.
Tavro shook his head. “They are away at school. The oldest boy is in America.”
“What did Jones want to talk to you about?” I said.
Tavro turned his mouth down at the corners, making his face more fishlike than ever. “I do not know,” he said.
“No idea?”
“I can only speculate,” he said.
“Well?”
“It may have been about my attempt to leave the country.”
“Why didn’t he talk to you about it earlier?”
“You mean today?” Tavro said.
“Yes.”
He turned from the dead woman. “I do not know.”
“Why would they want the listening device?”
“I would assume that they are not only the killers, but also the listeners. The police would find the device overly interesting.”
“I wonder if t
hose two knew?” I said.
“Knew what?”
“What Jones wanted to talk to you about.”
Tavro looked more gloomy than ever as he paused at the sitting room door that led to the street. “I haven’t been thinking about that,” he said. “I have been thinking of something else.”
“What?”
“Those two who killed our friend Jones and his wife.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been wondering why they didn’t kill us.”
21
THERE ARE TWO ROADS to Sarajevo and after I was through telling them that Jones was dead, we took the shorter one which goes through Ub, Valjevo, Titovo Uzice, and Visegrad.
There wasn’t much conversation as we left Belgrade. Arrie, sitting next to me, was silent for the most part, answering anything I said with monosyllables or just grunts when possible. Wisdom swore at the road and the Yugoslav bureau of public highways, if there was one. In the rear Gordana slept with her head on Knight’s shoulder. Jovan Tavro stared out of the window, as if trying to memorize sights that he would never see again. It began to snow.
Traffic was light except for the trailer trucks, usually pulling tandems, that traveled in fast caravans as they headed for the town where only a little more than a century ago camels from Constantinople and beyond came down with bad colds because of the altitude. Sarajevo had been a major terminal on the caravan routes from the east. Now its chief fame rested on the assassination on St. Vitus Day in 1914 of an Austrian archduke and his morganatic wife by a teenager who got a lot of the blame for touching off World War I. If you took a long view of history, you could also blame Gavrilo Princip for World War II and any other conflict that’s popped up since then—even, by stretching a point, for the one in Vietnam. It’s something to think about and that’s what I did as we drove through the snow that fell in wide, wet flakes, cutting visibility to less than thirty yards.
“The chauffeur that the archduke had took the wrong turn,” I said. “Let’s hope that you don’t.”
“What chauffeur?” Wisdom said.
“The one who was driving Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie,” I said. “In 1914.”
“In Sarajevo,” Wisdom said. “Bad security there. Worse than Dallas.”
“Anyway, there had already been one attempt on his life in Sarajevo that day so they changed the route. But nobody told the car ahead of the one that the archduke was in so when it turned up a side street the man driving the archduke got confused and came to a dead stop until somebody straightened things out for him. He stopped right in front of Gavrilo Princip who had a revolver in his pocket. Princip shot Franz Ferdinand in the heart and when Sophie threw herself across her husband, she caught the second bullet. The Austrians took a dim view of all this and blamed the Serbs and so started World War I.”
“What happened to Princip?”
“There was a law that nobody under twenty-one could be hanged in the Austrian empire. They tried him, convicted him, and threw him in jail. He died there.”
“What happened to the chauffeur?” Wisdom said.
“I don’t know.”
By the time we passed Valjevo, the snow plows were out, trying to keep the road open. I switched places with Wisdom, cleaned off the rear window, and we started out again as the snow continued to fall, packed on the road now. Driving got tricky. I was dubious of going much over fifty kilometers an hour so we crept along, the Mercedes’ lights revealing a lot of snow and an occasional road sign which said that the next town of any size was Titovo Uzice.
“What’s Titovo Uzice like?” I said, twisting my head to look at Tavro.
“It’s a place of much liveliness,” he said, adding, “and little else. We had our first headquarters there in 1941, but the Germans drove us out. For every soldier they lost they killed as many as three hundred Serbian hostages.”
“Anyplace we could stay?” I said. “We aren’t going to make it much farther in this snow.”
“I may know of such a place,” Tavro said and I left it at that.
It was nearly three A.M. when we crept into Titovo Uzice and followed the highway markers to the town square that boasts a two-story-high statue of its namesake. That night it looked something like the abominable snowman. On Tavro’s recommendation, we stopped at the Palace Hotel which was just across from the park. Taking Arrie along in case I needed an interpreter, I woke up the night clerk. He was in his thirties and willing to discuss our problem at length, but that still left him with just 120 beds and they were all full. Completely.
“Ask if he has any suggestions,” I said.
“I already did. He said no.”
As we turned to leave, the night clerk called us back. He looked apologetic and with much spreading of the hands and a number of elaborate, don’t blame me shrugs he went into a long description. When he was through, Arrie turned to me and said, “He says that he has heard of a place that sometimes takes in travelers. He won’t swear to its quality nor recommend its accommodations because he himself has never set foot in it, but he has heard that it exists.”
“What is it,” I said, “the local whorehouse?”
She asked him that and he looked shocked at first, then reddened, and finally shook his head vigorously. Arrie asked him another question and he answered her with a brief, prim sentence.
She turned to me. “I’ve got a general idea of how to get there,” she said.
“How far?”
“About a mile.”
It was less than a mile and it was off the highway on a side street where the snow was now about ten inches deep. When I stopped the Mercedes I had the feeling that we weren’t going any farther that night even if we tried. It was a three-story building of gray stone that looked to be about fifty years old. It sat back from the street thirty feet or so surrounded by some tall trees that bowed beneath their frostings of snow. At one time the building might have been an elementary school or the headquarters for some regional government office. Even at night it had that grim look of utilitarian officialdom about it, but the modest green neon sign, written in Roman script, proclaimed it to be the Ritz Hotel.
“It’s the town whorehouse,” Wisdom said.
“The clerk at the Palace said no. We asked him.”
“I do not remember it,” Tavro said, “but I have not been here in several years.”
“You want to go with us this time, Park?” I said and Wisdom said he would go anyplace if there were the chance of a bed. There was no bell so we banged on the door and after three or four minutes it was opened by a middle-aged man in a red wool bathrobe. He invited us in and hurried behind the registry desk where he took up his official position.
“Deutsche?” he said.
“Nein,” I said. “Americanische.”
“Very good,” he said. “I can the English speak.”
“There are six of us,” I said, eyeing the keys in the rack behind the desk. Only four of the twenty-four of them seemed to be missing. “We would like rooms for the night and part of tomorrow.”
“Six rooms?” he said. “That is many.”
“Five will do nicely,” I said. “My wife and I will share one, of course.” I put my arm around Arrie and gave her a hug. She gave me a strange look.
“But six rooms available I have,” he said. “It is the slow season.”
“Five,” I said firmly.
“If I said four, could I bunk in with Gordana?” Wisdom said.
“Five rooms,” I said.
He started taking keys down from the rack. “If you will wait until I my clothes put on, I will with your luggage help,” he said, getting all the verbs nicely tucked away at the ends of his phrase and sentence. Maybe he thought in Serbian, translated it into German, and then into English.
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “My chauffeur here will see to it.”
Wisdom touched two fingers of his right hand to his forehead and snapped, “Right away, sir, and shall I take the car for servicing?”
“That won’t be necessary. Just see to the others.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“May I sign for myself and my guests?” I said.
“Of course,” he said and slid the forms across to me.
“Our passports are in our luggage,” I said, “but we’ll send them down or show them to you in the morning.”
He nodded and said that the morning would be just fine so I signed in Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Davis of Jackson, Mississippi, Mr. J. W. Booth, Washington, D.C., Mr. Wiley Post of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Miss Belle Starr of Winchester, Virginia, and for Tavro, I signed Lou Adamic, Hollywood, California. I also insisted on paying in advance.
When Wisdom came back with the rest of our carload, but without any luggage, he got a strange look from the proprietor. I told him that my chauffeur informed me that the trunk was frozen and that we would have to wait until morning to open it, but in the meantime we were anxious to be shown to our rooms. I also told each of them the names I’d used to sign us in.
Arrie and I were the last to be shown to our room and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t eaten since lunch and that I was starving. I asked the proprietor if there were any kind of food available and he said that there was some alaška čorba left over from dinner and that he would even join me in a bowl. He invited us to meet him in the dining room.
“What’s alaška čorba?”
“Fish soup,” Arrie said. “Yesterday was Friday.”
Our room was just a room with a bed, a couple of chairs, a table, and sink with no stopper. Arrie fished in her purse and brought out a large cork. “Here,” she said, “I’m never without it. I’ve also got one toothbrush which I’ll share with you, if you don’t mind my dirty mouth.”
“I haven’t so far,” I said.
She took off her coat and put it on a hook. There was no closet “Who was Bill Jones?” she said.
“One of yours supposedly.”
“What do you mean?”
“He said he was a sleeper, but if he told me that, he had a loose mouth, although he didn’t seem the kind who would. You never heard of him?”
“Never.”
“He came back in forty-eight after the war and lived here ever since.”
“That took some doing in forty-eight if what I’ve heard is right,” she said.