Spies of the Balkans

by Alan Furst

  And so, slowly, they began to believe that they had escaped. The wretched hotel in Budapest had been frightening; neither of them had ever been in such a place. But with the appearance of the little gangster Akos—what a character!—a hand had reached out to protect them. Now all they had to do was watch the scenery and talk about the unknown future, a life different from anything they’d ever contemplated, but at least a life. This optimism, however, proved to be unfounded.

  They passed easily through Hungarian customs; then the train stopped in Subotica, the first town in Serbian Yugoslavia, for border control. Ten officers boarded the train and took the Gruens, and many other passengers, into the station. The officers were ferocious—why? Why? What had they done? One or two of the officers spoke some German but they didn’t explain; that was the ancient prerogative of border guards. They gestured violently, shoved the passengers, swore in Serbian, and took all documents away for examination behind the closed doors of the stationmaster’s office. The passengers were forced to stand facing a wall. For more than an hour.

  When the officers returned, they took Frau Gruen and two other women into the office and made them undress, down to their slips, while two men in suits and ties ran their hands over every seam and hem in their clothing, then slit the shoulder pads in their dresses and jackets. But, Frau Gruen realized, Emilia Krebs had saved her, had told them both not to think, even, of sewing jewels or coins or papers or anything in their clothing. And, apparently, the clothing of the other women also hid nothing. As the search proceeded, the women’s eyes met: why are they doing this to us? Later, Frau Gruen learned that her husband and several other men had been subjected to the same treatment. And one man, the passengers thought, had been taken away.

  They weren’t sure. When they were permitted to reboard the train, they gathered in the corridor of the first-class car and, as the engine jerked forward and the station fell away, they argued. Had there not been a fat man with red hair? Perhaps he had simply left the train, perhaps he lived in Subotica. No, one of the passengers didn’t think so; she had spoken with this man, and he’d said he was Polish. Well, yes, perhaps he was, but did that mean he didn’t live in Subotica? As the train made slow progress through a frozen valley, the dispute went on and on. No one claimed to have actually seen him being led away, but somebody said, “That’s the way it’s done!” and again they could not agree. Mysterious disappearance? Public arrest? The passengers had stories to tell, had seen arrests, had heard of disappearances. In time, they returned to their compartments, in accord on only one point: the man was gone.

  Twenty minutes later, a woman came to see the Gruens. She had been taken into the office alone, an afterthought. While she was there, a senior officer, speaking halting German, had attempted to telephone an office in Berlin. In his hand, she said, was a piece of paper with the name Hartmann, and what she thought were passport numbers. “I don’t know your name,” she said, “but I am telling everybody who was searched.” The Gruens were silent; could do no more than stare at her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He never got through. Something wrong with the line, maybe a storm in the north. He shouted and carried on, then the operator got tired of him and cut him off.” After a moment, Herr Gruen, his heart pounding, admitted they were the Hartmanns, and thanked her. Later he wondered, Was that safe? It was surely the decent thing to do but, perhaps, a mistake.

  When the train stopped in Novi Sad, the station before Belgrade, a uniformed police lieutenant opened the door of the Gruens’ compartment, as though searching for an empty seat. When Herr Gruen looked up, the lieutenant made eye contact with him and gestured, a subtle nod of the head, toward the corridor. He waited there until Herr Gruen joined him; then they walked along the car together. He had a friend in Zagreb, he explained, who’d asked him to see “the Hartmanns” safely through the police control in the Belgrade railway station. He knew they would be changing trains there, for the line that ran south to Nis, not far from the Greek border.

  So when they left the train at Belgrade station, the lieutenant accompanied them, spoke briefly to the officers, and the Gruens were waved past. In the station waiting room, he bought a newspaper and sat nearby, keeping an eye on them. When the train for Nis was announced, he followed them along the platform and, once they found seats, paused at the window and gave them a farewell nod.

  The train to Nis was slow and dirty and crowded. There was no first-class car. Across the aisle from the Gruens, a woman was traveling with two rabbits in a crate, and at the far end of the car, a group of soldiers got drunk, sang for a time, then went looking for a fight. To the Gruens, none of this mattered at all—they had traveled deep into the Balkans, now far from central Europe, thus the rabbits, the soldiers, the women in black head scarfs, meant safety, meant refuge.

  In Skoplje, capital of Yugoslavian Macedonia, they sat in the waiting room all night and, in a slow rain that came with the dawn, boarded the train that followed the Vardar River down to the customs station at Gevgelija, then across the border to Greece, at Poly-kastro. At last on Greek soil, in sight of the blue-and-white flag, Frau Gruen broke down and wept. Herr Gruen comforted her as best he could while Greek soldiers, manning machine guns and an antiaircraft cannon, stared at them. Greece was at war, and the border guards were courteous but thorough. As the Gruens walked toward the waiting train, a man in civilian clothes was suddenly by their side. “My name is Costa Zannis,” he said, adding that he was an officer of the Salonika police, would escort them into Salonika, and arrange for their passage to Turkey. Frau Gruen took his hand in both of hers, again close to tears. “I know,” he said gently. “A long journey.” He took his hand back and smiled, saying, “We’d better get on the train.”

  A very old train, that ran to Salonika. Each compartment spanned the width of the car and had its own door to the exterior, where a narrow boardwalk allowed the conductor to move between compartments as he collected tickets. Brass oil lamps flanked the doors and the seats were made of wood, with high curved backs. As the train rattled along, Zannis took a pad and pencil from the pocket of his trench coat. “Forgive me,” he said. “I can see you are exhausted, but I must ask you questions, and you must try to be as accurate as possible.” He turned to a fresh page on the pad. “It is for the others,” he said. “The others who will make this journey.”

  In Berlin, at the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Hauptsturmführer Albert Hauser kept a photograph of his father on his desk. It had been taken in a portrait studio during the Great War, but it looked older than that, like a portrait from the previous century: a rotund, solemn man, sitting at attention on the regal chair provided by the studio. The subject wore a white handlebar mustache, a Prussian-style helmet, and a uniform, for he had been, like Hauser himself, a police officer in the city of Düsseldorf. A good policeman, the elder Hauser, stern and unrelenting and, in much the same way, a good father. Whose son had followed him into the profession.

  Hauser, on a frosty day in mid-January, looked nothing like the photograph. He was heavily, powerfully built, with blunt features, hair worn Prussian-army style: near-shaved on the sides, an inch long on top. Hauser smoked cigars, an old habit from his days as a detective in Düsseldorf, an antidote to the smell of death, sweetish and sickening, that nobody ever got used to. But a policeman’s lot was murder, suicide, and week-old corpses who’d died alone, so Hauser smoked cigars.

  He’d been very good at his job in Düsseldorf, but as his family grew in the mid-1930s he needed more money. “You should come and work for us,” a former colleague told him. “Join the SS, then work for the Gestapo, we are always keen to hire talented men.” Hauser didn’t much care for politics, he liked quiet evenings at home, and membership in the SS seemed to entail quite a bit of marching and singing, attendance at Nazi rallies, and riotous drinking in beer halls. Though none of this appealed to Hauser, he applied to the SS, was welcomed, and discovered that they didn’t insist on marching and singing, they simply wanted his
skills: his ability to discover crime, to investigate, and to hunt down criminals and arrest them. Working for the Gestapo, of course, the criminals were different from those he’d pursued in Düsseldorf. No longer burglars, or thieves, or murderers, they were instead Jews and Communists who broke the political laws of the new Nazi state. Laws that concerned flight and false documents, nonpayment of special taxes levied on Jews, and, in the case of the Communists, agitation and propaganda intended to undermine the state. To Hauser, it didn’t matter; laws were laws—you simply had to learn how they worked—and those who broke them were criminals. Nothing could be simpler. By January of 1941 he’d risen quickly to the rank of Hauptsturmführer, captain, and by his standards was paid very well indeed.

  At nine-thirty that morning he stubbed out his cigar—an expensive cigar, for now he could afford such things—and slipped his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat, an expensive overcoat, so nice and warm. From his office on the third floor, he walked down to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, where his partner, a thin, rather bitter fellow called Matzig, waited behind the wheel of a Mercedes automobile. He had to work with Matzig, formerly a detective in Ulm, but didn’t much care for him, a man who took his membership in the Nazi party quite seriously, reading, in fact studying, certain books and going endlessly to meetings. Oh well, to each his own, and he didn’t see all that much of Matzig, working mostly by himself. But today they were going to make an arrest, a couple called Gruen, a lawyer and his wife, Jews, suspected of affiliation with Communists. His department in the Gestapo had a long list of such people, wealthy Berlin intellectuals for the most part, and was, at a steady pace, arresting and jailing them for interrogation, so that they might be persuaded to confess to their crimes, provide names of others, be tried, and imprisoned.

  Matzig drove cautiously, much too slowly for Hauser’s taste—the little shrimp was irritating in so many little ways—but soon enough they were in the garden district of Dahlem, one of Berlin’s finest neighborhoods, where many on Hauser’s list were resident. Matzig parked the car and, as they walked up the path to the Gruen doorway, Hauser instinctively made sure of his sidearm, a Walther PPK, the smaller version of the standard police pistol. Not that he’d need it. These arrests were easy, you had only to open the back door of the car and the criminals climbed in. Not like the old days: much calmer and, important to a family man like Hauser, much safer.

  Matzig pressed the button by the door and they heard, from within the house, the sound of a chime.

  A FRENCH KING

  STORMS, IN JANUARY. SNOW COVERED THE MOUNTAIN VILLAGES. Down in Salonika, windswept rain came sheeting across the corniche, where the locals staggered along, struggling with their umbrellas and scowling each time a gust hit them. When, after work, Zannis returned to Santaroza Lane, a welcoming Melissa shook off a great spray that decorated the wall of the vestibule and the apartment was filled with the musky aroma of wet dog. Lately, Zannis was often alone there—Tasia Loukas didn’t visit very often. She sensed in him a certain distraction and she was right. For, again and again, his imagination replayed the scene on the street in front of the Club de Salonique. Behind the window of a white Rolls-Royce, a vision, olive skin and golden hair, then, from perfect composure, the smile of an actress.

  Idiot, he called himself. For indulging in such fantasies. But nothing new, he thought. Down through the endless halls of time, forever, there wasn’t a man in the world who hadn’t wanted what he’d never have. “Do you know Vasilou?” he asked Tasia. “And his wife, what’s-her-name?”

  “Demetria, you mean? The goddess?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know him by sight, he doesn’t mix with people like me. What do you want with him?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Not about her. Were you, little boy?”

  “No.”

  “Better not.”

  So, he thought, Demetria.

  And schemed. Absurdly—Oh no, the house is on fire, I’ll have to carry you out. Or, not so absurdly—A cocktail party? I’d love to.

  Meanwhile, much realer schemes absorbed his day, schemes involving the Balkan railways and Turkish documents. As the Gruens left for Istanbul, six new refugees—a couple, a single man, a family of three—appeared at Salonika railway station. For reasons of economy, and because the management was sympathetic, Zannis housed them in the Tobacco Hotel, a weary but functional relic of the nineteenth century. There, gray and exhausted, they tried to recover from long days and nights on the escape route. Tried to recover from the slow brutal succession of torments experienced as Jews living in Nazi Germany. Seven years of it.

  As for the final link in the chain, Ahmet Celebi had had his fill of the indifferent food at the Club de Salonique, and now Zannis dealt exclusively with Madam Urglu, nominally a deputy to the commercial attaché, in fact the Turkish legation’s intelligence officer. An intimidating presence, Madam Urglu, with her opaque, puffy face, her eyeglasses on a chain, and her—well, inquisitive nature. They met at a taverna owned by Greek refugees who’d come to Salonika in the great population exchange, thus called Smyrna Betrayed, where, in the winter damp, Madam Urglu was partial to the fish stew.

  “So,” she said, “this turns out to be an ongoing, um, project. One might as well call it an ‘operation,’ no?”

  “It is,” Zannis said. “Someone has to help these people.”

  “Can they not remain in Salonika?”

  “They would be welcome, this city has always taken in refugees.” Zannis tore a piece of bread in half. “But the Wehrmacht is in Roumania—maybe it won’t stop there.”

  “We hope they don’t go into Bulgaria. That puts them on our border.”

  “Only tourists in Bulgaria, right now,” Zannis said. “Very fit young men, in pairs, with expensive cameras. Tourists with a passion for the ancient Bulgar culture, like airfields, and port facilities.”

  Madam Urglu smiled. “Such finesse,” she said. “Our Teutonic friends.” She retrieved a mussel from her stew, open perhaps a third of the way, stared at it for a moment, then set it beside her bowl. “But at least they’re not in Greece. And the English are doing what they can.” There were now sixty thousand British Commonwealth troops, divisions from Australia and New Zealand, on the island of Crete.

  “We’re grateful,” Zannis said. “But we can’t be sure how Hitler sees it. Provocation? Deterrent? And Mussolini must be screaming at him, because the RAF is bombing the Italians in Albania.”

  “Which we applaud. Unofficially, of course. And it isn’t just a feint, I see they’ve put shore artillery in Salonika.” She gestured with her head toward the waterfront, where long cannon were now facing the Aegean.

  “They have.”

  “One wonders if more is coming.”

  “It’s possible,” Zannis said, preparing for the attack.

  “Perhaps more guns. Or, even, an RAF squadron.”

  “We’d be happy to have them,” Zannis said.

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “I’m not told such things, Madam Urglu. I’m only a policeman.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t go being coy, not with me.”

  “Truly, I don’t know.”

  “But I’m sure you could find out. If you cared to.”

  “Not even that. I expect the military would be informed, but they’re known to be secretive.”

  For just a bare instant, a look of irritation, compressed lips, darkened Madam Urglu’s face. Then she said, “Naturally,” and with some resignation added, “they are. Still, it would be something of an achievement, for me, to learn of such plans. One always wants to do well in one’s job.”

  “And who doesn’t?” Zannis said, meaning no offense taken.

  “You would like to see me do well, wouldn’t you?”

  “You know I would.”

  “Then, maybe sometime, if you should discover …”

  “Understood,” Zannis said. “It’s not impossible.”

  “Ah me,” Ma
dam Urglu said, gently rueful, how the world goes around.

  Zannis smiled, yes, it does. Then he said, “I’ll need six visas, this time.”

  “Six!”

  “Yes, it’s more desperate every day, up north.”

  “My, my. Would five help you?”

  “Madam Urglu, please.”

  “All right then, six. It’s five hundred dollars each. I trust you have the money with you.”

  “It was four apiece, the last time.”

  “I know, but our friend in Istanbul …”

  “Why don’t I give you two thousand, four hundred today, and I’ll make up the remainder at our next meeting.”

  “Oh very well,” she said. “If I must. I’ll send the papers over when they’re ready.”

  “Thank you, Madam Urglu,” Zannis said, meaning it.

  “Of course they could be free,” she said. “It wouldn’t take much. Really. It wouldn’t.”

  Her face softened. She was—Zannis saw it—almost pleading. He nodded, sympathy in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  As to what exactly he knew, he didn’t say. Perhaps that it was a hard machine, national interest, which would in time destroy both of them. She was, without doubt, perfectly aware that he would never spy on his British ally—no? Not that he couldn’t—and Madam Urglu understood precisely his standing in the politics of Salonika—because he could. He’d seen, of all things, a memorandum from the traffic office of the police department. “Interruption of traffic planned to begin on 2 February, for important waterfront construction.” A new municipal garden, perhaps? But he would not, could not, reveal such things, no matter how little it would mean for the Turks to know in advance about the additional armament. They’d see it, eventually. But eventually was the active word. Until then, well, one didn’t spy on a faithful friend, it just wasn’t done.