The Schirmer Inheritance

by Eric Ambler

  “There is no doubt at all, Mr. Carey,” he said, “that the andartes did often kill their prisoners. I am not saying that they did it simply because they hated the enemy or because they had a taste for killing, you understand. It is difficult to see what else they could have done much of the time. A guerrilla band of thirty men or less is in no position to guard and feed the people it takes. Besides, Macedonia is in the Balkan tradition, and there the killing of an enemy can seem of small importance.”

  “But why take prisoners? Why not kill them at once?”

  “Usually they were taken for questioning.”

  “If you were in my position, how would you go about establishing the death of this man?”

  “Well, as you know where the ambush took place, you might try getting in touch with some of the andartes who were operating in that area. They might remember the incident. But I think I should say that you may find it difficult to persuade them to refresh their memories. Was it an ELAS band, do you know, or an EDES?”

  “EDES?”

  “The Greek initials stand for the National Democratic Liberation Army-the anti-Communist andartes. ELAS were the Communist andartes — the National Popular Liberation Army. In the Vodena area it would most likely be ELAS.”

  “Does it matter which it was?”

  “It matters a great deal. There have been three years of civil war in Greece, you must remember. Now that the rebellion is over, those who fought on the Communist side are not easy to find. Some are dead, some in prison, some in hiding still. Many are refugees in Albania and Bulgaria. As things are, you would probably find it difficult to get in touch with ELAS men. It is complex.”

  “Yes, it sounds it. What real chance would there be, do you think, of my finding out what I want to know?”

  Monsieur Hagen shrugged. “Often in such matters I have seen chance operate so strangely that I no longer try to estimate it. How important is your business, Mr. Carey?”

  “There’s a good deal of money at stake.”

  The other sighed. “So many things could have happened. You know, there were hundreds of men reported ‘missing, believed killed’ who had simply deserted. Salonika had plenty of German deserters towards the end of 1944.”

  “Plenty?”

  “Oh yes, of course. ELAS recruited most of them. There were many Germans fighting for the Greek Communists around Christmas 1944.”

  “Do you mean to say that in late 1944 a German soldier could go about in Greece without getting killed?”

  A pale smile drifted across Monsieur Hagen’s mournful face. “In Salonika you could see German soldiers sitting in the cafes and walking about the streets.”

  “In uniform?”

  “Yes, or part uniform. It was a curious situation. During the war the Communists in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria had agreed to create a new Macedonian state. It was all part of a larger Russian plan for a Balkan Communist Federation. Well, the moment the Germans had gone, a force called the Macedonian Group of Divisions of ELAS took over Salonika and prepared to put the plan into execution. They didn’t care any more about Germans. They had a new enemy to fight-the lawful Greek government. What they wanted to fight with were trained soldiers. It was Vafiades who had the idea of recruiting German deserters. He was the ELAS commander in Salonika then.”

  “Can’t I get in touch with this Vafiades?” George asked.

  He saw Miss Kolin stare at him. An expression of anxious perplexity came over Monsieur Hagen’s face.

  “I’m afraid that would be a little difficult, Mr. Carey.”

  “Why? Is he dead?”

  “Well, there seems to be some doubt as to just what has happened to him.” Monsieur Hagen seemed to be choosing his words. “The last we heard of him directly was in 1948. He then told a group of foreign journalists that, as head of the Provisional Democratic Government of Free Greece, he proposed to establish a capital on Greek soil. That was just about the time his army captured Karpenissi, I believe.”

  George looked blankly at Miss Kolin.

  “Markos Vafiades called himself General Markos,” she murmured. “He commanded the Greek Communist rebel army in the civil war.”

  “Oh, I see.” George felt himself reddening. “I told you I didn’t know anything about the Greek set-up,” he said. “I’m afraid this kind of name-dropping misses with me.”

  Monsieur Hagen smiled. “Of course, Mr. Carey. We are closer to these things here. Vafiades was a Turkish-born Greek, a tobacco worker before the war. He was a Communist of many years’ standing and had been to prison on that account. No doubt he had a respect for revolutionary tradition. When the Communists gave him command of the rebel army he decided to be known simply as Markos. It has only two syllables and is more dramatic. If the rebels had won he might have become as big a man as Tito. As it was, if you will forgive the comparison, he had something in common with your General Lee. He won his battles but lost the war. And for the same kind of reasons. For Lee, the loss of Vicksburg and Atlanta, especially Atlanta, meant the destruction of his lines of communication. For Markos, also faced by superior numbers, the closing of the Yugoslav frontier had the same sort of effect. As long as the Communists of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania helped him, he was in a strong position. By retiring across those frontiers, he was able to break off any action that looked like developing unfavourably. Then, behind the frontier, he could regroup and reorganize in safety, gather reinforcements, and appear again with deadly effect on a weakly held sector of the government front. When Tito quarrelled with Stalin and withdrew his support of the Macedonian plan, he cut Markos’s lateral lines of communication in two. Greece owes much to Tito.”

  “But wouldn’t Markos have been beaten in the end anyway?”

  Monsieur Hagen made a doubtful face. “Maybe. British and American aid did much. I do not dispute that. The Greek army and air force were completely transformed. But the denial of the Yugoslav frontier to Markos made it possible to use that power quickly and decisively. In January 1949, after over two years’ fighting, the Markos forces were in possession of Naoussa, a big industrial town only eighty miles from Salonika itself. Nine months later they were beaten. All that was left was a pocket of resistance on Mount Grammos, near the Albanian frontier.”

  “I see.” George smiled. “Well, there doesn’t seem to be much likelihood of my being able to talk to General Vafiades, does there?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Carey.”

  “And even if I could, there wouldn’t be much sense in my asking him about a German Sergeant who got caught in an ambush in ’44.”

  Monsieur Hagen bowed his head politely. “None.”

  “So let me get it straight, sir. In 1944 the guerrillas- andartes you call them, do you? — the andartes killed some Germans and recruited others. Is that right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “So that if the German soldier I’m interested in managed to get away alive after that ambush, it would not be fantastic to give him a fifty-fifty chance of staying alive?”

  “Not at all fantastic. Very reasonable.”

  “I see. Thanks.”

  Two days later George and Miss Kolin were in Greece.

  7

  “Forty-five thousand killed, including three thousand five hundred civilians murdered by the rebels and seven hundred blown up by their mines. Twice as many wounded. Eleven thousand houses destroyed. Seven hundred thousand persons driven from their homes in rebel areas. Twenty-eight thousand forcibly removed to Communist countries. Seven thousand villages looted. That is what Markos and his friends cost Greece.”

  Colonel Chrysantos paused and, leaning back in his swivel chair, smiled bitterly at George and Miss Kolin. It was an effective pose. He was a very handsome man with keen, dark eyes. “And I have heard it said by the British and the Americans,” he added, “that we have been too firm with our Communists. Too firm!” He threw up his long, thin hands.

  George murmured vaguely. He knew that the Colonel’s ideas of wha
t constituted firmness were very different from his own and that a discussion of them would not be profitable. Monsieur Hagen, the Red Cross man, who had given him the letter of introduction to Colonel Chrysantos, had made the position clear. The Colonel was a desirable acquaintance only in so far as he was a senior officer in the Salonika branch of Greek military intelligence, who could lay his hands on the kind of information George needed. He was not a person towards whom it was possible to have very friendly feelings.

  “Do these casualty figures include the rebels, Colonel?” he asked.

  “Of the killed, yes. Twenty-eight of the forty-five thousand were rebels. About their wounded we have naturally no accurate figures; but in addition to those we killed, we captured thirteen thousand, and twenty-seven thousand more surrendered.”

  “Do you have lists of the names?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Would it be possible to see if the name of this German is on one of those lists?”

  “Of course. But you know we did not take more than a handful of Germans.”

  “Still it might be worth trying, though, as I say, I don’t even know yet if the man survived the ambush.”

  “Ah, yes. Now we come to that. The 24th of October ’44 was the date of the ambush, you say, and it was near a petrol point at Vodena. The andartes might have come from the Florina area, I think. We shall see. So!”

  He pressed a button on his desk and a young Lieutenant with horn-rimmed glasses came in. The Colonel spoke sharply in his own language for nearly half a minute. When he stopped, the Lieutenant uttered a monosyllable and went out.

  As the door shut, the Colonel relaxed. “A good boy, that,” he said. “You Westerners sometimes pride yourselves that we cannot be efficient, but you will see-like that!” He snapped his fingers, smiled seductively at Miss Kolin and then glanced at George to see if he minded having his girl smiled at in that way.

  Miss Kolin merely raised her eyebrows. The Colonel passed round cigarettes.

  George found the situation entertaining. The Colonel’s curiosity about the nature of the relationship between his visitors had been evident from the first. The woman was attractive; the man looked passably virile; it was absurd to suppose that they could travel about together on business without also taking advantage of the association for their pleasure. Yet, of course, the man was an Anglo-Saxon and so one could not be sure. In the absence of any positive evidence as to whether the pair were lovers or not the Colonel was beginning to probe for some. He would try again in a moment or two. Meanwhile, back to business.

  The Colonel smoothed his tunic down. “This German of yours, Mr. Carey-was he an Alsatian?”

  “No, he came from Cologne.”

  “Many of the deserters were Alsatian. You know, some of them hated the Germans as much as we did.”

  “Ah, yes? Were you in Greece during the war, Colonel?”

  “Sometimes. At the beginning, yes. Later I was with the British. In their raiding forces. It was a type of Commando, you understand. That was a happy time.”

  “Happy?”

  “Were you not a soldier, Mr. Carey?”

  “I was a bomber pilot. I don’t remember ever feeling particularly happy about it.”

  “Ah, no-but the air is different from soldiering. You do not see the enemy you kill. A machine war. Impersonal.”

  “It was personal enough for me,” George said; but the remark went unheard. There was the light of reminiscence in the Colonel’s eyes.

  “You missed much in the air, Mr. Carey,” he said dreamily. “I remember once, for example…”

  He was off.

  He had taken part, it seemed, in numerous British raids on German garrisons on Greek territory. He went on to describe in great detail what he obviously felt to be some of his more amusing experiences. Judging by the relish with which he recalled them, he had indeed had a happy time.

  “… splashed his brains over the wall with a burst from a Bren gun… put my knife low in his belly and ripped it open to the ribs… the grenades killed all of them in the room except one, so I dropped him out of the window… ran away without their trousers, so we could see what to shoot at… tried to come out of the house to surrender, but he was slow on his feet and the phosphorus grenade set him alight like a torch… I let him have a burst from the Schmeisser and nearly cut him in two…”

  He spoke rapidly, smiling all the time and gesturing gracefully. Occasionally he broke into French. George made little attempt to follow. It did not matter, for the Colonel’s whole attention now was concentrated on Miss Kolin. She was wearing her faintly patronizing smile, but there was something more in her expression besides-a look of pleasure. If you had been watching the pair of them without knowing what was being said, George thought, you might have supposed that the handsome Colonel was entertaining her with a witty piece of cocktail-party gossip. It was rather disconcerting.

  The Lieutenant came back into the room with a tattered folder of papers under his arm. The Colonel stopped instantly and sat up straight in his chair to receive the folder. He looked through it sternly as the Lieutenant made his report. Once he rapped out a question and received an answer which appeared to satisfy him. Finally he nodded and the Lieutenant went out. The Colonel relaxed again and smirked complacently.

  “It will take time to check the lists of prisoners,” he said, “but, as I hoped, we have some other information. Whether it will be of help to you or not, I cannot say.” He glanced down at the bundle of torn and greasy papers before him. “This ambush you mention was most likely one of several operations undertaken in that week by an ELAS band based in the hills above Florina. There were thirty-four men, most of them from Florina and the villages about there. The leader was a Communist named Phengaros. He came from Larisa. A German army truck was destroyed in the action. Does that sound like the case you know of?”

  George nodded. “That’s it. There were three trucks. The first hit a mine. Does it say anything about any prisoners?”

  “Prisoners would not be reported, Mr. Carey. Fortunately, however, you can ask.”

  “Ask whom?”

  “Phengaros.” The Colonel grinned. “He was captured in ’48. We have him under lock and key.”

  “Still?”

  “Oh, he was released under an amnesty, but he is back now. He is a Party member, Mr. Carey, and a dangerous one. A brave man, perhaps, and a good one for killing Germans, but such politicals do not change their ways. You are lucky he has not long ago been shot.”

  “I was wondering why he wasn’t.”

  “One could not shoot all of these rebels,” the Colonel said with a shrug. “We are not Germans or Russkis. Besides, your friends in Geneva would not have liked it.”

  “Where can I see this man?”

  “Here in Salonika. I shall have to speak to the commandant of the prison. Do you know your Consul here?”

  “Not yet, but I have a letter to him from our Legation in Athens.”

  “Ah, good. I will tell the commandant that you are a friend of the American Minister. That should be sufficient.”

  “What exactly is this man Phengaros in prison for?”

  The Colonel referred to the folder. “Jewel robbery, Mr. Carey.”

  “I thought you said he was a political prisoner.”

  “In America, Mr. Carey, your criminals are all capitalists. Here in these times they are occasionally Communists. Men like Phengaros do not steal for themselves, but for the Party funds. Of course, if we catch them they go to the criminal prison. They cannot be sent to the islands as politicals. They have made some big coups lately. It is quite traditional. Even the great Stalin robbed a bank for the Party funds when he was a young man. Of course, there are some of these bandits from the hills who only pretend to rob for the Party, and keep what they get for themselves. They are clever and dangerous and the police do not catch them. But Phengaros is not of that kind. He is a simple, deluded fanatic of the type that always gets caught.”

 
“When can I see him?”

  “Tomorrow perhaps. We shall see.” He pressed the button again for the Lieutenant. “Tell me,” he said, “are you and Madame by chance without an engagement this evening? I should so much like to show you our city.”

  Twenty minutes later George and Miss Kolin left the building and came again into the heat and glare of a Salonika afternoon. George’s excuse that he had a long report to write that evening had been accepted with ready understanding. Miss Kolin had seemed to have rather more difficulty in evading the Colonel’s hospitality. The conversation, however, had been conducted in Greek and George had understood nothing of it.

  They crossed to the shade on the other side of the street.

  “How did you manage to get out of it?” he asked as they turned towards the hotel.

  “I explained that my stomach was upset by the food and the flies and that I should probably be sick all night.”

  George laughed.

  “I spoke the truth.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you think you ought to see a doctor?”

  “It will pass off. You have no stomach trouble yet?”

  “No.”

  “It will come later. This is a bad place for the stomach when one is not used to it.”

  “Miss Kolin,” George said after a while, “what did you really think of Colonel Chrysantos?”

  “What can one think of such a man?”

  “You didn’t like him? He was very helpful and obliging.”

  “Yes, no doubt. It soothes his vanity to be helpful. There is only one thing that pleases me about that Colonel.”

  “Oh?”

  She walked on several paces in silence. Then she spoke quietly, so quietly that he only just heard what she said.

  “He knows how to deal with Germans, Mr. Carey.”

  It was at that moment that George received the first intimations of coming discomfort in his stomach and intestines. At that moment, also, he forgot about Colonel Chrysantos and Germans.

  “I begin to see what you mean about the food and the flies,” he remarked as they turned the corner by the hotel. “I think, if you don’t mind, that we’ll call in at a drugstore.”