Spies of the Balkans

by Alan Furst

  When he’d hung up, Zannis took a piece of paper from his drawer and began to write the first draft of a report to Spiraki. Formerly an Athenian lawyer, Spiraki ran the local office of the Geniki Asphalia, the State Security Bureau. It had changed names several times, becoming the Defense Intelligence Bureau in 1936; then, a few months later, as the Metaxas dictatorship took hold, the General Directorate of Foreign Citizens, but most people still called it “state security.”

  Zannis found Spiraki himself not so easy to deal with. Tall, heavy, balding, somber, with a thick mustache, he was given to light-blue suits, formal language, and cold-eyed stares. He never responded immediately to anything you said, there was always a dead moment before he spoke. On the other hand, he could’ve been worse. His office was supposed to ensure obedience to the dictatorship’s morality laws, forbidding hashish and prostitution, the traditional targets, and they’d tried to go beyond that, prohibiting lewd music, the rembetika—filthy, criminal, passionate, and very dear to Salonika’s heart. But Spiraki didn’t insist, and the police were tolerant. You couldn’t stop these things, not in this city. And, after four hundred years of Turkish occupation, it was unwise to press Greeks too hard.

  The gray sky wouldn’t go away, seagulls circled above the port, their cries doing nothing to disperse the melancholy. Saltiel showed up at eleven, tired and slumped, and he and Zannis tried to finish up the investigation. The clerk at the city hall found the plate number, to her great delight. It belonged to a Renault registered by one K. L. Stacho. Zannis knew who he was, a Bulgarian undertaker, third-generation proprietor of a funeral home that buried Bulgarians, Albanians, Serbs, and Vlachs, who died with sufficient regularity to provide Stacho with a handsome villa in Salonika’s wealthy neighborhood, by the sea east of the city.

  Zannis telephoned and Saltiel drove them out there ten minutes later. Poor Madam Stacho, red-eyed, a balled-up handkerchief clenched in her fist, Zannis felt sorry for her. Her husband had left the house, to take care of some unspecified business, long after midnight. And he never returned. She’d been frantic of course but, at eight in the morning, a neighbor had come knocking at her door to say that Stacho had telephoned and asked her to relay a message: he would not be coming home. Not for a long time. He was well, she was not to worry. Beyond that, Madam Stacho didn’t know a thing.

  So, did Mr. Stacho have German friends?

  Not as far as she knew.

  A camera?

  Well, yes, he did have one, photography was a hobby of his.

  For how long, a hobby. Years?

  No, only a few months.

  And, please, Madam Stacho, excuse us, we’re only doing our job, may we take a look around the house?

  No answer, a wave of the hand, Do what you like, I don’t care any more.

  They did take a look. Rooms crowded with heavy furniture, thick drapes, tiled floors, a frightened maid, but no undertaker in a closet or beneath a bed.

  When they returned to the parlor, Madam Stacho wondered what her husband had done to provoke the interest of the police.

  They couldn’t tell her, but he might have information they needed for an investigation that was currently under way.

  “And that’s all?” she said, obviously brightening.

  “Is that not enough?”

  “When he left, when I learned he wasn’t coming home …”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought it was a woman.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  Now she was very close to beaming, held Zannis’s hand warmly at the door. “Thank you, gentlemen,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Perhaps you would notify us, if he returns; he can clear his name by answering a few questions.”

  Oh definitely, surely, absolutely, no doubt about it.

  In the Skoda, Zannis had Saltiel drive him back to the alley behind the Albala spice warehouse.

  But the umbrella was gone.

  That night, he was supposed to take Roxanne to the movies, a Turkish Western—Slade Visits Wyoming was his attempt at translation—but by the time he reached the Pension Bastasini, the hotel where she lived, he was in another kind of mood. His love affair with Roxanne Brown had gone on for more than a year and had reached that pleasantly intimate plateau where plans were casually made and just as easily changed. “Perhaps the Balthazar,” he suggested. The name of a taverna but it meant much more than that.

  “Then we shan’t be visiting Wyoming? With Effendi Slade?” This in English, but for the Turkish title. Her Greek was close to perfect but she knew how her English voice affected him. Prim, upper-class, clipped, and chilly, a voice perfectly suited to her firm horsewoman’s body, weathered face, mouth barely touched with lipstick.

  “Perhaps we could go later. Or now, if you prefer.”

  “No,” she said. “I prefer depravity.”

  Balthazar, tucked away in a cellar beneath lowlife Vardar Square, wasn’t far away so they walked, protected by her umbrella, a hideous thing with pink polka dots on a green field. Very much a couple; his arm reached around her shoulders—they were just about the same height—hers around his waist. “Is the world being good to you, this week?” he said.

  “Not too bad. The school has a recital coming up this weekend but I refuse to worry about it.” Arriving in Salonika in 1938, by way of expatriate years spent first in southern France, then in Capri, she had purchased the Mount Olympus School of Ballet and, once every eight weeks, the daughters of the city’s bourgeoisie, all shapes and sizes, twirled around the stage to Tchaikovsky. As rendered by a Victrola that ran, in its old age, not as fast as it once did, so the dance was perhaps a little on the stately side, which frankly suited some of the statelier daughters.

  “Am I invited to the recital?” he asked.

  She pressed her cheek against his. “Many things I might ask of you, my dear, but …”

  “Do you perform?”

  “In tights? I think not.”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t wear tights.”

  “That is for you to look at, not the butcher and his wife.”

  Balthazar was delighted to see them and offered a solemn bow. “So pleased,” he said, “it’s been too long,” and led them to a very small, very private room. Filled with ottomans, wool carpets, and low brass tables, the soft, shadowy darkness barely disturbed by a spirit lamp flickering in one corner. Balthazar lit some incense, then prepared two narghilehs, each with a generous lump of ochre-colored hashish. “You will eat later?” he said. “A nice meze?” Small appetizers—eggplant, feta, hummus.

  “Perhaps we will.”

  He well knew they would but didn’t make a point of it, saying only, “As you wish,” and closing the door carefully—their privacy his personal responsibility.

  Music would have been nice and, as it turned out, music there was. If not from Balthazar itself, from the taverna next door, a bouzouki band and a woman singer, muffled by the wall, so just the right volume. They sat on a low loveseat, shoulders and hips touching, and leaned over a worked-brass table. When Zannis inhaled, the water in the narghileh bubbled and took the harsh edge off the hashish so he could hold the smoke in for a long time.

  They were silent for a while, but eventually she said, “Quite nice tonight. The smoke tastes good, like … what? Lemon and lime?”

  “Did you ever eat it?”

  “No.”

  “Best not.”

  “Oh?”

  “Very powerful. It will take you, ah, far away. Far, far away.”

  “I’m rather far away as it is.” After a moment she said, “You see that little lamp in the corner? It reminds me of Aladdin, I believe it might have been in a book I had, as a child.” She stared into the distance, then said, “Do you suppose, if I rubbed it …?”

  “You’d burn your fingers, the genie keeps it hot.”

  “Doesn’t want to come out?”

  “Not in this weather.”

  She giggled. “Not in this weather.” She tossed the tu
be of the narghileh on the table, turned sideways, rested her head on his shoulder, and began to unbutton his shirt. That done, she spread it apart and laid her cheek on his chest—hairless and smooth, with broad, flat plates. Putting her lips against his skin, she said, “You smell good.”

  “I do? I took a bath, maybe it’s the soap.”

  “No, it isn’t soap, it’s something about you, something sweet.”

  For a time they drifted, then, returning from wherever he’d been, he said, “Would you like to sit on my lap?”

  “I always like that.” She stood, hiked up her dress, settled herself on his thighs, leaned her weight against him, and raised her knees, so that, as if by magic, his hand covered her bottom. On the other side of the wall, the singer’s voice grew plaintive. That made them both laugh, as though she could see through the wall. “Can you understand the lyric?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “She’s singing about her flower.”

  “In her garden?”

  He moved her top knee a little and said, “No, this one.” The tips of his index and middle fingers rested on tight cotton. She was, he thought, so very clever, wearing white cotton panties, just right for a proper Englishwoman, but they were cut to provide a snug fit, and the cotton felt very fine, very soft, to his fingers. After a few moments, a breath escaped her; he could feel it and he could almost, but not quite, hear it. Delicately, he moved his fingers, not ambitious, simply savoring the warm reception, and much more pleased than proud.

  On. And on. Until she raised her head and spoke quietly by his ear, in the King’s English: “Let’s have those off, shall we?”

  Later, after Zannis had gone out into the public room and Balthazar had brought them—now famished—the meze, she scooped up some hummus with a triangle of pita bread and said, “Strange, but it just now occurs to me that the ottoman is an extraordinary piece of furniture, ingenious.”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh yes. Because you can, you know, also sit on it.”

  After such a night, going back to work the next day was something like a punishment. Sibylla, the office clerk, always starched and taut, was wound especially tight that morning—neither Saltiel nor Zannis would admit it but they were both afraid of her. She stood straight as a stick, with fair hair set every Wednesday in a warrior’s helmet. And warrior was, at the moment, the very word, for she had come to work in a bad mood and was taking it out on the files.

  Of these, there were two distinct sets. The first lived in a row of wooden filing cabinets in what was called the other room—there were two, with a bathroom in the hall—and included all the various paper that flowed through a government bloodstream: directions from on high, carbons of correspondence, letters from the citizenry, and various oddments, like newspaper clippings, that got themselves into the files and stayed there. Though sometimes—as witness Sibylla’s attack du jour—not forever.

  “Gabi,” she said, holding a paper so that Saltiel could read it, “is this important?”

  Saltiel didn’t want to read it. “Probably not.”

  “A memorandum, from Station Six. It seems to concern the cemetery.”

  “Which one?”

  “The old Turkish one. The subject is ‘Copulation at Night.’”

  “By the living?”

  “If not, keep it,” Zannis said, looking up from his desk. They couldn’t really get Sibylla to laugh, but they never stopped trying.

  Instead, a sigh. What bad boys they were. “Dated 10 September, 1938.”

  “By now, they’re likely done copulating,” Saltiel said. “Get rid of it.”

  The other file was maintained by Zannis, on five-by-eight cards in shoeboxes, and, taken altogether, was a working map of the power centers—and there were many—of Salonika. Thus it included cards for shipowners and bankers, Greek Orthodox prelates, consuls, spies, resident foreigners, journalists, politicians, high-class criminals, and courtesans—anybody who mattered. For an official whose job was to work behind the scenes, it was crucial to keep track of the cast of characters.

  The files, both sets, played a central role in the unnamed office on the Via Egnatia, with support from three typewriters, three telephones, and one more device which, from time to time, would remind them of its presence by ringing a little bell. As it did at that moment, producing a mumbled “Skata,” from Zannis—the Greek equivalent of the French merde—by which he meant now what. The device, on its own private table in the corner, was a Model 15 Siemens teleprinter, and now, all by itself, it began to type, fast and furious, a page rising slowly from a slot above its keyboard. Zannis stood by the table and read the text as it appeared.

  AS PER YOUR QUERY 6 OCTOBER 1940 STOP MAIN BORDER STATIONS REPORT NO RECORD RENAULT MODEL UNKNOWN LICENSE SK 549 ENTERING BULGARIA LAST 48 HOURS STOP NO RECORD GREEK NATIONAL K L. STACHO THIS OFFICE STOP SIGNED LAZAREFF END

  The teleprinter waited, making its thucka-thucka-thucka sound, for thirty seconds, then shut down. Well, Zannis thought, I gave it a try. On a hunch that Stacho had fled up to Bulgaria, he’d had Sibylla send a teletype to his old friend, Ivan Lazareff, in Sofia. If he’d thought that Stacho was spying for Bulgaria—a perfectly reasonable assumption—he wouldn’t have done it, but the undertaker, a Greek citizen of Bulgarian descent, was spying for Germany, or at least for a man carrying German documents, so he’d taken a chance. And why not? He’d known Lazareff for years; they’d had plenty of good times in Greek and Bulgarian bars back when they’d both been detectives. At one time they’d talked on the telephone—mostly in German—but now that Zannis was a police official and Lazareff a chief of detectives, they communicated back and forth by teletype.

  Logically, the purchase of the Siemens equipment should have been animated by some urge for progress, but it wasn’t so. As German power surged in Europe, German corporations drove deep into the Balkans, buying up raw materials at preferential prices and selling—often trading—technology in return. Roumanian wheat moved west; back the other way came Leica cameras, aspirin, harmonicas, and, in some of the police stations in the cities and towns of southern Europe, teletype systems. In many cases, the purchase wasn’t optional, was instead dictated by a very apprehensive foreign policy—we must appease these people, buy the damn machine! And yes, there were stories of hens nesting atop teleprinters in Serbian villages, and no, you really weren’t going to hunt down the goat thief sought by a Roumanian police officer, but the system did work and, soon enough, some Balkan policemen found that it had its uses.

  10 October. Hotel Lux Palace, Salonika.

  Maybe just the war, moving south.

  The end of her cigarette was marked with lipstick, dark red, a color that emphasized her black hair and pale skin. Stunning, Zannis thought, was the word for her. And seductive, future delights suggested in the depths of her glance. And a liar, because she had no intention of going to bed with him or anybody else. She was important, this woman; she would never do such things. She was, however, scared, and not used to it, so she flirted a little with the handsome policeman, because she needed help.

  He was here, in the best suite the best hotel in the city had to offer, at Saltiel’s suggestion. No, request, though put mildly enough. This was a Jewish matter, originating with some pillar of the Sephardic community who knew to reach Zannis by way of Saltiel.

  She ordered coffee, sat Zannis in a brown velvet armchair, turned the chair that went with the escritoire halfway and perched on its edge, facing him. Heels together, posture erect. “Frau Krebs is terribly formal,” she said, her voice in cultured and well-modulated German. “Everybody calls me Emmi, for Emilia.”

  “And I’m Costa, for Constantine. My last name is Zannis. And they are?”

  He referred to two children, the boy seven, he guessed, the girl perhaps nine, in a staged tableau beyond the open bedroom door. They were perfectly dressed, Jewish by their looks, the girl reading a book, the boy coloring with crayons.

  “Nathanial and Paula.” The
girl looked up from her book, smiled at Zannis, then went back to reading—or pretending to read.

  “Attractive children, no doubt you’re proud of them.”

  Silence. She hesitated, a shall-I-lie hesitation that Zannis had seen many times before. She inhaled her cigarette, tapped it above the ashtray, and finally said, “No.”

  “Not proud?” He smiled, of course she meant no such thing.

  “They’re not my children.” Then, regret. “Does it matter?” She was worried that she’d made a mistake.

  “It doesn’t matter, but it is interesting. I’m sure you’ll explain.”

  The waiter arrived, bringing croissants, butter, jam, Greek pastry, and coffee. In ordering, she’d covered all the possibilities. “I thought you might like something to eat.”

  “Maybe later.”

  The tray was set on a table and she tipped the waiter.

  “Two days ago, I arrived at the Turkish border on what used to be called the Orient Express. But we were turned back by a customs officer, so here we are, in Salonika.”

  “A Turkish customs officer?” he said. Then made the classic baksheesh gesture, thumb rubbed across the first two fingers, and raised his eyebrows.

  She appreciated the theatre. “Oh, I tried, but I somehow managed to find the only honest official in the Levant.”

  “For what reason, Emmi, turned back?”

  “Some question about papers.”

  “Are they legitimate?”

  “I thought they were. I was told they were.”

  “By …?”

  “A lawyer in Berlin. I paid him to obtain the right papers, Turkish entry visas, but what I got were—um, cooked up. False papers. That’s what the officer said.”

  “And then you offered a bribe.”

  “I started to but, oh, you should have seen his face. I think he might have put us in prison.”

  Sympathetic, Zannis nodded. “Always best, we think here, to avoid time in Turkish prisons. Emmi, if they’re not your children, whose are they?”

  “A friend’s. An old school friend. A Jewish friend. She can’t get out of Germany; she asked for help, I volunteered to take the children out. To Istanbul—where there are people who will take care of them.”