Estoril

by Dejan Tiago-Stankovic

  ‘Have you got a sample?’

  ‘No, I saw it just for a second; it wasn’t for me. He’ll communicate with me like that only when I get to America.’

  Jarvis stopped to think for a moment.

  ‘Nothing then. When you get it, report it to our people over there. I’ll check with London and let you know what they think – whether you should share it with the Americans or not. They’ll probably say yes, but I don’t want to be the one to take the decision.’ Jarvis started jotting something down in his notebook. ‘What do you say it’s called, micro?’

  ‘Microdot. Mikropunkt.’

  ‘All right... Is that it for today?’ At the end of every meeting, after they had gone through all the items on the agenda, Jarvis would pour each of them a glass of Scotch, but it was not time for that yet.

  ‘No. There’s one more thing,’ said Tricycle.

  ‘What now?’ He never knew what to expect from this agent. Anything was possible. He had already said he needed some special equipment that was crucial for his assignment. It might be champagne or caviar, a Cambridge University tie or ring, box tickets for the opera.

  ‘Listen... I know it sounds crazy... but... I’ve got a feeling the Japanese are planning to attack America.’

  Jarvis was pretty dubious.

  ‘When you say America, you mean the United States?’

  ‘Exactly. The United States. To be precise, Hawaii.’

  It sounded to Jarvis like another one of Tricycle’s jokes. A very stupid joke.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Nobody. They just told me that while I’m in America I’ll probably have to go to Hawaii.’

  ‘Maybe your imagination is working overtime? Or you’re gullible?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They mentioned Hawaii and the American fleet several times.’

  ‘That still doesn’t prove anything. And where did you get the idea that it’s the Japanese?’

  Intuition is extremely important in intelligence work, but even so, big decisions cannot be made on the basis of intuition, and all Tricycle had to offer was: I’ve got a feeling something incredible is going to happen.

  ‘Take my word for it.’ That was the best he could do.

  The source, though nobody was supposed to know, was credible. It was an Abwehr agent, an old school friend, a German who had brought him into the whole business in the first place. If you ever wanted to know how Tricycle wound up in this predicament, perhaps now is the time to tell you.

  The British agent Tricycle, the German agent Ivan, or Duško Popov when he was just a Belgrade playboy, once went to study in Freiburg. The choice fell on the German university because by 1935 his father, who had sent his sons to English and French boarding schools, had already developed strong business ties with the Third Reich. His factories were delivering fabric to the Hugo Boss clothing company near Stuttgart, which supplied the German army with uniforms. It was a huge, steadily expanding operation, and Mr Popov felt that it would be smart to send his lawyer son to Germany for graduate study because it would allow him to improve his language skills and develop useful contacts. Duško was naturally sociable and resourceful and in Freiburg he soon found kindred company. He became inseparable from his classmate Johann ‘Johnny’ Jebsen. If Duško was a rich spoiled brat, then Johnny was that times ten. For almost two years, the two of them went on wild drinking sprees, drove fast cars and bedded women, until one day the Gestapo arrested Duško. He found a logical reason for his arrest: he had allegedly run afoul of a German officer over a girl. But that did not sound entirely credible because he would not have been kept in solitude for six days just because of a woman. His release required the intervention of the then Yugoslav Prime Minister and the head of Hugo Boss. Duško was deported from Germany.

  Johnny and Duško met again in Belgrade at the end of 1939, when the British and Germans were already at war and Yugoslavia was still maintaining its neutrality. Johnny told his friend that he had been drafted but that thanks to his father’s connections he had not been sent to the front; he had been assigned instead to military intelligence, to the Abwehr. Johnny invited Duško to work for the Germans, saying it was an easy job for big money. The idea was that Duško, being a citizen of a neutral country, would go to England and collect information for the Abwehr.

  Of all the citizens of all the neutral countries in the world, why Duško? There were two reasons. First, because Johnny remembered that at the beginning of their friendship Duško had told him how he had been sailing with the Duke of Kent and had bedded the wives of some eminent aristocrats in London. Duško had indeed once been on the Duke of Kent’s yacht in Dubrovnik, where they had shaken hands and exchanged a few words. The bit about sleeping with women of the aristocracy was much closer to the truth. He had exaggerated somewhat when telling Jebsen about it, and Jebsen had embellished the story still further when passing it on to his bosses in military intelligence, which immediately grabbed their interest. Second, the Germans had few agents in Britain at the time. They had sent several dozen that year, some in rubber boats, others dropped by parachute, but they were all quickly captured. So the German spymasters liked the idea of having a well-connected man in England who could enter the country through regular channels and move around freely.

  Popov accepted the offer in principle but spent that night thinking about it. The next day he reported to the consular section of the British embassy in Belgrade, told the local intelligence officer everything and offered his services as a counter-intelligence agent. Jarvis knew all this because it was written in black and white in the file he had received from London.

  It is not clear if Jebsen, codenamed Artist in the reports, knew about Popov’s double role, but even if he did, Popov never told anybody. Jarvis, on the other hand, knew from intercepted communications that Artist was watching Tricycle’s back at the Abwehr, but he did not know why. What MI6 did not know, and it explains why Tricycle protected his source so staunchly, was that the two men met often. Even the Germans did not know about all their meetings. The last time had been just a few days earlier when Jebsen had secretly come to Duško’s hotel room in the dead of night. No one will never know why and how he got there, but the fact is they sat for hours in the bathroom talking, letting the water run in the sink to muffle the sound in case anyone was listening. Although both the British and the Germans kept an eye on each other, neither could have dreamed of such an encounter taking place.

  It was during that secret meeting between the two old friends that Artist, maybe deliberately or perhaps under the influence of alcohol and Moroccan tobacco, told him that the Japanese had asked the Germans to send somebody to Hawaii because they were probably going to bomb the US fleet in Pearl Harbor and it would attract too much attention if they sent over a Japanese person. Von Karstoff implicitly confirmed this information by instructing him to go to Hawaii. His loyalty to Jebsen did not allow Duško to name him as his source. Jebsen was not just his best friend and protector at work, he was also crucial to the survival of his family in occupied Belgrade. When the war broke out he had helped them get out of Croatia, had made sure they had whatever they needed under the occupation and that nobody touched them. For all these reasons, when they asked him who his source was, Tricycle could only say:

  ‘Take my word for it.’

  ‘Sorry, my friend, but that sounds too much like speculation. There’s no room here for “I think” or “I feel”. What we need is “I read” or “I saw” or “so and so told me”. We’re talking about something big here,’ said his handler.

  ‘All right. I heard it from a highly reliable source,’ Tricycle conceded.

  ‘And what reliable source is that?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Tricycle shook his head. Pushing him was obviously pointless.

  Jarvis stopped to think for a minute.

  ‘I doubt that anybody will take you seriously just because you say so. Still, you go and tell the Yanks about it and I’ll brief London, even though I don’t th
ink our people will be very interested.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘What can I say? First of all, it doesn’t seem credible, and even if true...’ and here Jarvis stopped.

  Popov waited a few seconds before finishing Jarvis’s sentence for him:

  ‘...it would force Roosevelt to hurry up and take sides.’

  *

  Nobody heard this conversation. No minutes were taken. Nobody saw Popov enter or leave. In other words, the meeting never took place. Two or three days later, Tricycle was on a seaplane, flying via the Azores and the Bahamas to New York.

  LIKE A JEWEL LOST IN THE DARK

  An homage to the poet

  When you are in a foreign country, where it is hard to find somebody to share your troubles with, friendships are forged quickly and easily. Refugees, the dispirited, the subservient, fraternize and make friends with anybody who comes up to talk to them.

  Miloš Crnjanski and his wife Vida, née Ružić, had been here for more than three months now. They lived from day to day, had withdrawn into themselves and were in constant fear of never being able to return home. So as not to forget, Miloš wrote in his diary:

  The majority of people in Estoril are Jews fleeing from the Germans and looking to leave Europe. They are rich, but difficult and sickly. When they hear me speaking German they come over and we sit on a bench and talk. They tell me how they were robbed on their travels, and console themselves with the thought that if the Germans enter Spain, the British fleet will come to rescue us. The mixed couples among them are touching; they never leave each other’s side. Often the husband is Jewish and the wife Christian, or the other way round. These couples walk in the park with a tired, heavy tread or sit in the hotel in silence.

  We have become particularly friendly with a couple from Vienna. They are clearly very wealthy but they haven’t smiled once. The man is tall, well proportioned, elegant; the woman is tired, with wrinkles on her face and the vestiges of great beauty in her bearing.

  The man, who was younger, more talkative and less preoccupied with their fate than she, had joined Miloš for a swim in the sea. While the husbands were in the water the wives sat at the top of the beach; Vida was reading and the Viennese woman was reclining in the deck chair, her green eyes silently staring straight ahead from under her big straw hat.

  Far out in the distance, the white-crested waves were travelling towards them across the grey, impenetrable sea. They slid into the cove in an array of thin, curved arches. The closer a wave got to the shore, the higher it rose until, just within reach of the shore where the shallows begin, it reared up into a translucent, straight wall of green and then, as the sun copper-coated the surface of the rising water, it came crashing down on itself and dissolved into a thick milky foam. Attenuated, bubbling, it would not stop here. It continued to crawl towards the beach, evermore slowly, as far as it could go, until it lost its last ounce of strength, gave up, and began to retreat to where it came from, pulling with it the pebbles that rustled like drizzle on a tin roof. Little white stones rolled back and forth, back and forth in the sand, following the rhythm of the waves that come and go, come and go...

  Standing at the line of the tide, where the sand was dry on this particular day, were the two friends who had just come out of the sea: the Austrian, lanky and fair, his movements smooth, and Crnjanski, forever restless, on the short side, wiry and sunburned. They were drying off in the late afternoon sun.

  ‘The water is freezing, but invigorating. Makes you feel regenerated, liberated,’ said Miloš, stamping his feet. The Austrian merely nodded.

  ‘Do you know when you’ll be leaving this place? And for where?’ Miloš knew that this was what was on his friend’s mind right now.

  ‘We don’t know yet. I’m trying to persuade her to come to Africa. I even bought tickets for the ship. The climate there is mild, good for one’s health, and you can live well, comfortably. We could grow old in Mozambique. We wouldn’t be alone. There’s a colony of Europeans there, they must have somebody there who is at least a little like us. We’d probably develop a circle of friends,’ said the Austrian.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to go... She says we’ve done enough traipsing around; we’ve been in Dubrovnik, in Italy, in France, in Spain, and now, after six months in Portugal, she’s had enough. She doesn’t want to move again. She says she doesn’t have the strength.’

  ‘What does she think would be the best thing to do?’

  ‘She always used to know what she wanted, and I just followed. Now all she knows is what she doesn’t want. She won’t listen to me...’

  ‘Does she have any solution to offer?’

  ‘No... Well, that’s not true, she does... She suggests that we commit suicide.’

  ‘Ah, women. They’re like actresses; they always want a sentimental death...’

  The mention of death left them thinking and shut them up for a moment. The Viennese was the first to break the silence.

  ‘She’s aged a lot and life with her isn’t fun anymore... She cries every morning, I almost think she enjoys her grief. That’s why I walk by her side without smiling, but without sadness either.’

  Miloš was quiet. What was there to say? He looked at the gulls. They were flying over the water and floating in the sun’s reflection on the endlessly flat sea.

  ‘If I didn’t leave her before, I’m not about to do so now,’ the Viennese went on, as if in self-justification.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, we don’t know what fate has in store for us either, nor do I plan to leave my Vida,’ said Miloš, trying to lighten the conversation at least a little.

  ‘In all honesty... My biggest regret is for myself,’ the Austrian said.

  Again, Miloš could find nothing to say. Such hard, honest confessions were always draining, and left one with a heavy heart.

  Gusts of wind swirled grains of sand across the shore, bringing in little clouds of sea foam, and carrying away some of their words, as if they were tiny boats. They had to strain to both talk and listen. Tired, drunk on the sea air, they fell silent. Miloš gazed at the beach.

  Sitting on the sand not far from each other were two families. One was German: husband, wife, nanny and three small children. The parents were basking in the sun and the children, like children everywhere, were rolling half-naked in the sand. Away from the water, the eldest was busily building sandcastles and digging deep trenches. His structures would be short-lived. They would disappear in the course of the night, when the tide came in and flooded the beach. When the sun rose over Estoril the following day, instead of their sandcastles and the human footprints and the three-toed traces of seagulls that punctuated the beach, there would be a pink surface unmarked by a single crease, like a tightly made army cot.

  Sitting a few steps away was a blond, pretty child; he looked as if he would never grow up. You could tell from his clothes that he was Jewish. Barefoot but in a suit with rolled-up trouser legs, he both walked and talked softly. He was not alone; he was playing with a little yellow dog that looked like a fox.

  It was as if neither group noticed the other. They avoided any contact with each other, including the children. Even the dog, an irrational creature that enjoyed attention no matter where it came from, did not leave the boy’s side and had eyes only for him.

  Across from them, a bit further on, close to the waves, was a group of Englishwomen. They had come to this way station from all over Europe and Asia, hoping to be sent home. Whoever won this war, and its end was nowhere in sight, it was not going to be them. These women were already defeated. Some of them had lost their home and family, most of them had lost sleep and their peace of mind. Some would tell whoever was willing to listen to them how they had seen the Japanese rape, stab and kill. They made do with living in a foreign country with the modest help they received from their embassy. They wandered around, waiting, never knowing how long this agony would last, with no one to call their own. Among them were childre
n, mostly the sons and daughters of officers of the British colonial army travelling from overseas territories to their homeland, which few remembered and where many of them had never set foot. Most of the children did not know where their families were, or even if they were still alive, if they were safe, if their fathers were at the front, or if their mothers were interned in camps in some malaria-infested tropical country.

  One of them, a woman he knew from the beach, came up to Crnjanski to say hello before stepping into the water. She was young, an officer’s daughter, homeless, inconsolable. She did not cry, the English do not shed tears easily, but she so pined for her family that her eyes were full of suppressed sorrow. Yet now here she was, regenerated by the sea, jumping in the waves, shrieking with the cold, calling out to her friends, urging them to come into the water with her. Happy and smiling, she could forget, if only for a moment, that she did not know if she was all alone in the world or not.

  Miloš spoke first, half-talking to his Viennese companion, half-putting his own thoughts in order.

  ‘You know, I think all these people around us are no longer living beings, they are shadows of themselves... helpless, weak... sad...’

  The man from Vienna looked at him askance. Miloš proceeded to explain.

  ‘I was talking to a German colonel yesterday, you must have noticed him, a big man with the bearing of a gentleman, he is attached to their military mission here... He is from Hamburg; before the war he was a professor of literature at the university and spent his summers in Abbazia, so he knows a few words of our language. We strolled along the beach. I came across the broken wing of a seagull in the sand. He asked me how I was. I said: “What can I say? Nobody likes living like a refugee. I’d like to go home, but I’ve got nowhere to go.” He asked me how my people were. I told him: “My people are all groans and graves,” but that was not enough for him. I told him with a heavy heart what people fleeing the war had told me about what was happening in my country: about the destroyed capital city, the deaths, the crimes against civilians, the reprisals, the gangs of men slaughtering people, the bloody fratricidal war... As I was talking, he kept waving his hand dismissively and mumbling: “Nein, nein, nein,” then switching to our language and saying “Ne, ne”. He refused to believe it and did his best to show that he was not to blame, that if anyone was to blame it had to be somebody else, maybe life itself, but not him; he was not an animal. He asked me to join him for a cup of tea, but I couldn’t accept his invitation. I was afraid that if the English saw me with him they might withhold my entrance visa. Otherwise, I would have accepted.’