Spies of the Balkans

by Alan Furst

  By the second week in November, Greek forces had crossed the Albanian border and taken the important town of Koritsa, several small villages, and the port of Santi Quaranta, which meant that Greece’s British ally could resupply the advance more efficiently. At the beginning of the war, they’d had to bring their ships into the port of Piraeus. Also, on Tuesday of that week, Zannis’s Yugoslav counterpart showed up. He was accompanied by a corporal who carried, along with his knapsack, a metal suitcase of the sort used to transport a wireless/telegraph. The two of them stood there, dripping on the tiles just inside the doorway of the school.

  “Let’s go find a taverna,” Zannis said to the officer. “Your corporal can get himself settled in upstairs.”

  Zannis led the way toward the main square, a waterproof groundcloth draped over his head and shoulders. The reservists had discovered that their overcoats, once soaked, never dried out, so they used what was available and walked around Trikkala looking like monks in green cowls.

  “I’m called Pavlic,” the officer said. “Captain Pavlic. Reserve captain, anyhow.”

  “Costa Zannis. Lieutenant Zannis, officially.”

  They shook hands awkwardly as they walked. Zannis thought Pavlic was a few years older than he was, with a weatherbeaten face, sand-colored hair, and narrow eyes with deep crow’s-feet at the corners, as though he’d spent his life at sea, perpetually on watch.

  “Your Greek is very good,” Zannis said.

  “It should be. I grew up down here, in Volos; my mother was half Greek and my father worked for her family. I guess that’s why I got this job.” They walked for a time, then Pavlic said, “Sorry I’m so late, by the way. I was on a British freighter and we broke down—had to go into port for repairs.”

  “You didn’t miss anything, not too much happens around here.”

  “Still, I’m supposed to report in, every day. We have another officer in Janina, and there’s a big hat, a colonel, at your General Staff headquarters in Athens. It’s all a formality, of course, unless we mobilize. And, believe me, we won’t do any such thing.”

  In the taverna, rough plank tables were crowded with local men and reservists, the air was dense with cigarette smoke and the smell of spilled retsina, and a fire of damp grapevine prunings crackled and sputtered on a clay hearth. It didn’t provide much heat but it was a very loud fire, and comforting in its way. The boy who served drinks saw them standing there, rushed over and said, “Find a place to sit,” but there was no table available so they stood at the bar. Zannis ordered two retsinas. “The retsina is good here,” he said. “Local.” When the drinks came, Zannis raised his glass. “To your health.”

  “And to yours.” When he’d had a sip, Pavlic said, “You’re right, it is good. Where are you from?”

  “Salonika. I’m a policeman there.”

  “No!”

  “Don’t like the police?”

  “Hell, it isn’t that, I’m one also.”

  “You are? Really? Where?”

  “Zagreb.”

  “Skata! A coincidence?”

  “Maybe your General Staff did it on purpose.”

  “Oh, yes, of course you’re right. You can trust a policeman.”

  From Pavlic, a wry smile. “Most of the time,” he said.

  Zannis laughed. “We do what we have to, it’s true,” he said. “Are you a detective, in Zagreb?”

  “I was, for twenty years, and I expect you know all about that. But now, the last year or so, I’m in charge of the cars, the motor pool.”

  “Your preference?”

  “Not at all. It was a, how should I put this, it was a political transfer. The people who run the department, the commissioner and his friends at city hall, were reached.”

  “Reached.” Such things happened all the time, but Zannis couldn’t stop himself from being shocked when he heard about it. “Bribed?”

  “No, not bribed. Intimidated? Persuaded? Who knows, I don’t. What happened was that I didn’t hold back, in fact worked extra hard, investigating certain crimes. Crimes committed by the Ustashi—Croatian fascists, and great friends with Mussolini; they take money from him. Maybe you’re aware of that.”

  “I’m not. But it’s no surprise.”

  “Of course they consider themselves patriots, fighters in the struggle for Croatian independence—they sing about it, in the bars—but in fact they’re terrorists, Balkan Nazis. And when it was reported that they’d beaten somebody up, or burned his house down, or murdered him in front of his family—their favored method, by the way—I went after them. I hunted them down. Not that they stayed in jail, they didn’t, but it was a matter of honor for me. And not just me. There were plenty of us.”

  Zannis’s face showed what he felt: disgust. “Still,” he said, after a moment, “it could have been worse.”

  “That’s true. I’m lucky to be alive. But you know how it goes—you can’t take that into account, not when you do what we do.”

  “No, you can’t. At least I can’t. I’m a fatalist, I guess.” Zannis drank the last of his retsina, caught the eye of the woman behind the bar, raised his empty glass and wiggled it. The woman quickly brought two more. Pavlic started to pay but Zannis beat him to it, tossing coins on the bar. “I’m the host,” he said. “Here in scenic Trikkala.”

  “All right. My turn next time.” Pavlic raised his glass to Zannis, drank some retsina, reached into the inside pocket of his uniform tunic, and brought out a packet of cigarettes. “Do you smoke? Try one of these.”

  On the packet, a bearded sailor looked out through a life preserver. “Players,” Zannis said. “English?”

  “Yes. I got them on the freighter.” Pavlic lit their cigarettes with a steel lighter. “What do you do, in Salonika?”

  “I run a small office where we take care of … special cases. We deal with the rich and powerful, foreigners, diplomats—whatever’s a little too sensitive for the regular detectives. I report to the commissioner, who’s been a good friend to me, for a long time.”

  “Lucky.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you have something similar to the Ustashi: the IMRO—they used to work together, if I have my history right. What is it, Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization?”

  “It is. And founded in Salonika, back in the last century. They’re Slavic Macedonians, Bulgarians mostly, who think they’re going to have a separate Macedonia. But, thank heaven, they’ve been quiet for a few years.”

  “More luck—especially for your Salonika Jews. Because our Jews, in Zagreb, are right at the top of the Ustashi list. They’d like to get rid of the Serbs, and the Croat politicians who oppose them, but they really have it in for the Jews. If the Ustashi ever took control of the city, well …”

  Zannis heard the words our Jews as though Pavlic had emphasized them. For some reason, a fleeting image of Emilia Krebs crossed his mind. “That won’t happen in Salonika,” he said. “Not with IMRO, not with anybody.”

  “It’s a damn shame, what’s being done to them, up in Germany. And the police just stand there and watch.” Pavlic’s face showed anger, his policeman’s heart offended by the idea of criminals allowed to do whatever they wanted. “Politics,” he said, as though the word were an oath.

  For a time they stood in silence, sipping their retsinas, and smoked their English cigarettes. Then Pavlic nodded toward the window and said, “Here’s some good news, anyhow.”

  Through the cloudy glass, past the dead flies on the windowsill, Zannis saw that the wet street in front of the tavern was steaming. “At last,” he said. “It’s been raining for days.”

  Pavlic stubbed out his cigarette, making ready to leave the taverna. “Once my corporal gets his wireless running, I’ll let them know up in Belgrade: ‘Pavlic reporting. The sun’s come out.’”

  Zannis smiled as he followed Pavlic through the door. The captain stopped for a moment and closed his eyes as he raised his face to the sun. “By the way,” he said, “I’m called Ma
rko.”

  “Costa,” Zannis said. And they headed back to the school.

  The officers did their best to keep the reservists busy—calisthenics, marching drills, whatever they could think up—but the soldiers were there to wait until they were needed, waiting was their job, and so time passed very slowly. At night, as the chill of the schoolroom floor rose through his blanket, Zannis found it hard to sleep. He thought about Roxanne, reliving some of their warmer moments together: the way her face looked at climax; times when she’d thought something up that particularly, spontaneously, excited her. Or maybe such ideas came to her when she was by herself, lost in fantasy, and she tried them out when she got the chance. That was true of him, likely true of her as well. A lot of love got made when lovers were apart, he thought.

  But, with snoring men on either side of him, fantasy of this sort led nowhere. Instead, his mind drifted back to recent life in Salonika, which now seemed remote and distant. He sometimes recalled the German agent; more often Emilia Krebs and the two children. But, most often, the Rosenblum sisters he’d heard about during the frantic, disrupted telephone call from Switzerland. Unmarried sisters, he guessed: older, librarians. Helpless, vulnerable, trying to make their way through some dark night in Budapest, or wherever they’d been caught. No ability whatever to deal with clandestine life, with border patrols, police raids, informers, or conscientious fascist citizens who knew a Jew when they saw one, no matter the quality of their false papers.

  Could he have helped them? How? He was absolutely sure that Emilia Krebs would not stop what she was doing—Germany was now the very essence of hell; continuous torment, no escape. And so her fugitives would be taken by the machine built to hunt them down. Again and again. This thought reached a very sore place inside him, and he could not stop thinking it.

  The military population of Trikkala began to thin out as reservists were sent up to the fighting to replace the dead and wounded. Pavlic and Zannis worked together, Zannis receiving situation reports from the captain and handing them on to Pavlic for translation and transmission to the Yugoslav General Staff. Now and then Pavlic wanted to know more, and now and then Zannis went to the captain and requested more, and now and then clarification or expansion was provided. Mostly the reports included the daily numbers—enemy dead, wounded, and captured—and names—villages, rivers, and positions, taken or abandoned—as the Greek infantry labored over the snow-covered mountains of Albania. The Yugoslavs read the reports, but their support wasn’t needed, and so they did nothing. What help the Greeks had came from their British ally.

  A senior officer, for example, who appeared with a truck one morning, a truck stacked with wooden crates. Almost a stage presence, this officer, who stood ramrod straight, had a splendid cavalry mustache, and lacked only the monocle. Some forty reservists, Zannis among them, were organized to move the truck’s cargo up to a village a few miles behind the front lines. The reservists stood in front of the school while the British officer addressed them in classical Greek—as though Shakespeare were making a speech to a platoon of East London sappers. But nobody smiled.

  “Men,” the officer said, at a volume meant for the parade ground, “these crates are important. They hold antitank rifles, fifty-five-calibre weapons with tripods that are fired by a single soldier, like Bren guns. The square crates contain antitank rounds, and you will take turns carrying them, because the ammunition is heavy.”

  There were two trucks for the reservists, and they managed to drive some way north on the rutted dirt roads, but with altitude the snow deepened and soon enough they were spending more time pushing their vehicles than driving them. So, unload the crates, and start walking. Which was hard work, in the snow. Zannis sweated, then shivered as the sweat dried in the icy chill of the mountain air. One reservist sprained an ankle, another had pains in the chest; none of them were really in fighting shape.

  When darkness fell, Zannis rolled up in his blanket and groundcloth and slept in the snow. The wind sighed through the trees all night long and when the cold woke him up he heard wolves in the distance. In the morning he was exhausted and needed force of will to keep going. Spyro, the former pharmacist, said, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this”; then he re-gripped the rope handle at his end of the crate and the two of them plodded forward. High above them, an eagle circled in the gray sky.

  They reached the village late in the afternoon, where men from the forward positions would take the antitank rifles the rest of the way. When the small cluster of houses came into view, the dogs appeared—Melissa’s cousins, Zannis thought—barking and threatening until a piercing whistle sent them trotting back home. When the column reached the center of the village, the reservists went silent. The village well, which might have been there for a thousand years, was no more—some of the stonework remained, shattered and blackened, but that was all. And the houses on either side of the well were in ruins. “A bomb,” the villagers said. They’d seen the planes above them; one of them descended toward the village and dropped a bomb. They’d watched it as it tumbled from the plane. It had killed two women, a child, and a goat, and blown up their well. “Why?” the villagers asked. “Why did they do this to us?”

  At the end of October, when war came to Trikkala, Behar saw it as an opportunity. He was Albanian, his family had lived in Trikkala since the time of the Ottoman Turks, but he was no less Albanian for that. Age twenty-five when the war began, Behar had been a thief since the age of fourteen. Not that he was very good at it, he wasn’t. As a teenager he’d spent a few months in the local jail for stealing a radio and, later on, a year in prison for trying to sell stolen tires, on behalf of a man called Pappou. The name meant grampa, a nickname, not so much because he was old and gray, but because he’d been a criminal for a long time and people were afraid of him so he could call himself whatever he liked. Sometimes Pappou, just like a grampa, would help out his little Trikkala “family”: give them something to sell and let them keep some of the money. Thus, for Behar, better to stay on the good side of Pappou.

  With the war, and the soldiers crowding into Trikkala, Behar thought he would prosper. These people came from cities in the south; to Behar they looked rich, and rich people spent lavishly—perhaps they’d like a nice girl to keep them warm, or maybe a little hashish. They were, it was said, going to free Albania from the Italians, but Behar had never been to Albania and couldn’t have cared less who ruled there. No, what mattered to Behar was that these people might want things or, if they didn’t, could be separated from what they had: wristwatches, for example, or rifles. One way or the other, Behar knew they were meant to put money in his empty pockets.

  But the soldiers weren’t such easy targets, they were always together, they didn’t pass out drunk in an alley—at least not in the alleys where he searched for them—and they went to the brothel for their girls. After a few days, Behar began to despair, war was not going to turn out to be much of an opportunity at all.

  But then, in the second week of the war, Pappou came to his rescue. Behar lived in a shack at the edge of the city, with his mother and two sisters. They never had enough wood for the stove, so they froze during the winter and waited anxiously for spring. He was lying on his cot one afternoon when a boy came with a message: he was to go and see Pappou the following day. Two o’clock, the boy said, at the barbershop Pappou owned, where he did business in the back room.

  Behar was excited. He walked to the edge of Trikkala to find his eldest brother, who owned a razor, and there scraped his face. Painful, using the icy water, because his brother was not so prosperous as to own soap. Behar made sure he got to the barbershop on time. He wore his grimy old suit, the only clothing he had, but he’d combed his hair and settled his short-brimmed cap at just the proper angle, down over his left eye. It was the best he could do. On the way to the shop he looked at himself in the glass of a display window; scrawny and hunched, hands in pockets, not such a bad face, he thought, though they’d broken his nose when he
’d tried to steal food in the prison.

  To Behar, the barbershop was a land of enchantment, where polished mirrors reflected white tile, where the air was warmed—by a nickel-plated drum that heated towels with steam, and scented—by the luxurious, sugary smell of rosewater, used to perfume the customers when they were done being barbered. There were two men in the chairs when Behar arrived, one with his face swathed in a towel, apparently asleep, though the cigar in his dangling hand was still smoking, the other in the midst of a haircut. The barber, as he snipped, spoke to his customer in a low, soothing voice. The weather might change, or maybe not.

  When Behar entered the back room, Pappou, sitting at a table, spread his arms in welcome. “Behar! Here you are, right on time! Good boy.” Sitting across from Pappou was a man who simply smiled and nodded. His friend here, Pappou explained, was not from Trikkala and needed a reliable fellow for a simple little job. Which he would explain in a minute. Again, the man nodded. “It will pay you very well,” Pappou said, “if you are careful and do exactly as you’re told. Can you do that, my boy?” With great enthusiasm, Behar said he could. Then, to his considerable surprise, Pappou stood up, left the room, and closed the door behind him. Outside, Pappou could be heard as he joked with the barbers, so he wasn’t listening at the door.

  The man leaned forward and asked Behar a few questions. He was, from the way he spoke, a foreigner. Clean-shaven, thick-lipped, and prosperously jowly, he had a tight smile that Behar found, for no reason he could think of, rather chilling, and eyes that did not smile at all. The questions were not complicated. Where did he live? Did he like Trikkala? Was he treated well here? Behar answered with monosyllables, accompanied by what he hoped was an endearing smile. And did he, the foreigner wanted to know, wish to make a thousand drachma? Behar gasped. The foreigner’s smile broadened—that was a good answer.