Spies of the Balkans

by Alan Furst

  Zannis was enraged. He feared Tellos would see it and covered his face with his hands. What evil fate contrived to take from him the thing he wanted most in the world?

  Tellos rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. “I know,” he said. “This man saved Greece, and now he’s gone.”

  30 January. There were no riots. The Metaxas government had never been popular; surely half the population would have preferred a republic, long championed by the noble voice of Greek democracy, Venizelos. But Venizelos had died in exile in 1936, while Metaxas, dictator though he was, had led the country well in war. Now King George II had named one Alexandros Koryzis, a former governor of the Bank of Greece, as the new prime minister. Hardly anyone had ever heard of him. Therefore, no marching in the streets. Instead, melancholy and silence. Poor Greece, no luck at all, why did fate treat them so badly?

  Zannis might have had similar feelings, but there was barely room in his wretched heart for emotion about the national politics, for he had to go to Paris the following day and, if the operation went wrong, he would never again see Demetria. It tore at him, this loss. If only they’d been able to meet, if only they’d made love. Two stolen hours, was that too much to ask? So it seemed—their hours together stolen in turn by a bizarre twist of destiny: a man got tonsillitis. Zannis couldn’t stop brooding, angry and sad at the same moment.

  But then he had to, because he had difficulties beyond this, and these he’d brought on himself. He knew he would be away for at least ten days, and during that time it was more than likely that a letter from Emilia Krebs would arrive at the office. And so he had no choice but to designate Gabi Saltiel—and Sibylla, she could no longer be excluded—as his deputies in running the Salonika end of the escape line. Saltiel never said a harsh word, but Zannis could tell his feelings were hurt—why hadn’t he been trusted from the beginning? As for Sibylla, feelings didn’t enter into it, she was simply intent on getting everything right.

  Not all that easy. “You melt six Panadon in a glass of water and use a clean pen with a sharp point.” And the rest of it: the iron, the lawyer’s address in Berlin, the teletype numbers for the detectives in Zagreb and Budapest. “You can depend on us, chief,” Sibylla said. And, Zannis realized, she meant it.

  That done, Zannis’s eye inevitably fell on the telephone. He didn’t dare. Umm, maybe he did. Oh no he didn’t! Oh but yes, he did. Vasilou would still be in Athens, and Zannis just could not bear to leave the woman he loved, perhaps forever, with no more than an unanswered knock on a door.

  Very slowly, tempting fate but unable to stop, he worked the dial with his index finger, running each number around to the end. But then, at last, good fortune: it was Demetria who picked up the receiver. He spoke quickly, in case she had to hang up. “I’m sorry, I was taken away to a meeting. Because of Metaxas.”

  “I see,” she said, voice breathy and tentative; the call had frightened her. “Perhaps … I could try … next week?” Then, her mind now working quickly, she added, “For another fitting.”

  From the background: “Now who the hell is that?”

  Skata, Vasilou!

  “It’s the seamstress, dear.”

  “Well, make it snappy. I’m expecting a call.”

  “Yes, dear, just a minute.”

  “Oh lord,” Zannis said, “I didn’t realize …”

  “The hem is just too long, so—”

  “I’ll be away, for ten days. I’ll call you.”

  The sound of approaching footsteps. “Can’t hang up?” Vasilou shouted. “Then let me show you how it’s done!” The footsteps grew louder.

  “I have to say good-bye.” Her voice wobbled. “But, please—”

  The receiver was slammed down.

  At Gestapo headquarters, on the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in Berlin, Hauptsturmführer Albert Hauser studied a long list of names typed on yellow paper. When a name caught his attention, he riffled through a metal tray of five-by-eight cards, where, in alphabetical order, information about each of the names was recorded. If that was insufficient, he had dossiers for most of the names, dossiers filled with pages of information obtained from surveillance, paid informants, denunciations, and interrogation. The yellow list was a sort of Who’s Who of dissidents in Berlin, all suspected—some more than suspected—of activity against the interests of the Reich. Rather loosely defined, those interests; thus it wasn’t difficult to say the wrong thing, to know the wrong person, to own the wrong book. Welcome to the list!

  So then, A to Z, six and a half pages long. Some of the names had a mark next to them, Hauser’s symbolic note to himself: question mark, exclamation point—you didn’t want that!—asterisk, and others, even an X—the last, for instance, beside a couple whose names appeared early in the D section. This couple was believed, after coming under pressure from the Gestapo, to have committed suicide, but, Hauser thought, committed suicide in an irritating way, so that their bodies would not be identified when found. Spiteful, wasn’t it. To go to some distant city and manage the business in some little hotel room, having first burned one’s identity papers. Defiant even in death and, really, very annoying.

  He turned the page. Beside the name GRUEN, two entries for man and wife, two question marks. On what had been meant to be their final day of freedom, missing. Fled? Fled where? One word used by these people—Jews, Communists, even aristocrats—was submerge. It meant hiding in an apartment, sharing a friend’s food obtained with ration coupons, rarely if ever going outside, and then only with borrowed or false identification.

  Others, like the couple D, killed themselves. Still others contrived to flee the country—into Switzerland, if they were lucky. Or, sometimes, to the unoccupied zone of France, where the Vichy police agencies were dedicated to catching them, but not always. The trouble with the unoccupied zone, the southern part of the country, was that fugitives might make their way to Marseille. And, once in Marseille, with some money to spend, one could do just about anything. That’s how it is, Hauser thought, with port cities, like Naples. Or Odessa—even under the rule of the ruthless NKVD, for so Hauser thought of them. Where else? Hauser’s inner eye wandered over an imaginary map of Europe. Constanta, in Roumania? A long way to go, for a fugitive. Equally Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast.

  Go to work, lazybones, Hauser told himself, stop woolgathering. Where were these Gruens? He rose and walked over to the wall, where large sheets of brown paper showed diagrams of relations between the dissidents. Solid lines, dotted lines, some in red pencil: who met with who, who worked with who, who telephoned who, and on and on. Hauser located the circle containing the name GRUEN and traced the radiating lines with his index finger. Popular, weren’t they. Here was, for example, the circled name of KREBS. And who was that?

  He returned to his list and flipped over to the Ks: KREBS, EMILIA, and KREBS, HUGO. The latter was marked with a triangle, which meant, in Hauser’s system, something like uh-oh. Now to the three-by-five cards. Yes, there it was, definitely worth a triangle; this Krebs was a colonel on the Oberkommando Wehrmacht, the General Staff, and not to be pestered. Scheisse! You had to be careful in this work. You had to be on your toes! Or you’d wind up in Warsaw, God forbid. Still, he wondered, and had a look at KREBS, EMILIA. Close and longtime friend of the Gruens, neighbor in Dahlem, Jew. Hunh, look at that. This Colonel Krebs must be powerful indeed to have a Jewish wife and get away with it.

  He was distracted from this line of thinking by two taps on the door and the entry of the department’s chief clerk: tall, fading blond, and middle-aged. Something of a dragon, Traudl, with her stiff hair and stiff manner, but smart, and relentless in her commitment to the job. No surprise there, at one time she’d worked for some of the better—mostly Jewish, alas—law firms in the city. Then, with Hitler’s ascension, she’d seen the light and come to work for the Gestapo. “Hauptsturmführer Hauser?” she said. “Pardon the intrusion, but I have brought your morning coffee.”

  “Thank you, Traudl.” He set the steami
ng cup on his desk.

  “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “No, thank you,” Hauser said. “I’ll be going out for a bit.”

  He took a sip of the coffee. Real coffee, and strong—oh, the little pleasures of this job. He returned to his paperwork, drumming his fingers on the yellow list. So, who wants to see the Gestapo today? But he already knew that, some tiny clicker in his brain had decided to go out to Emilia Krebs’s house. That wasn’t pestering the husband, was it? No, certainly not, he would never know about it, because she would never know about it. Just a little spur-of-the-moment surveillance. Just a look-see.

  Hauser picked up his phone and dialed a two-digit number, which connected him with the office of Untersturmführer, Lieutenant, Matzig, his partner. “Matzi?”

  “Yes, Albert?”

  “Let’s go for a little ride, I need some air.”

  “I’ll bring the car around,” Matzig said.

  So, yet another ride out to Dahlem. Lord, this neighborhood was a dissident nest! But, in the end, there wasn’t much to see. Hauser and Matzig sat in the front seat, talking idly from time to time, waiting, the principal activity of the investigative life. The winter darkness came early, a light snow began to fall, and eventually the colonel came home from work, dropped off at his door by a Wehrmacht car. The colonel disappeared into his house and, though the two officers waited another hour, that was it for the day.

  They tried earlier the following day, waited longer, and were rewarded with a view of the Krebses going out for dinner. Thus Hauser and Matzig got to wait outside Horcher’s while the couple dined. No fun at all, visiting the best restaurants in Berlin, but not a morsel of food. After dinner, the couple went home. Matzig drove the Mercedes to their chosen vantage point, Hauser lit a cigar and said, “Let’s go home, Matzi. We’ll give it one more day, tomorrow.” All he could afford, really, because like any job you had to show your bosses some success, some production, and there was nothing yet to warrant even the most diffident interview.

  But then there was. Patience paid off, at least sometimes, because just after five on the third day, the lovely Emilia Krebs, in sober gray coat and wide-brim gray hat, briefcase in hand, left her house, walked quickly down the path that led to the sidewalk, and turned left, toward downtown Berlin. As she passed the low hedge that bordered her property, here came a fellow in a dark overcoat: half-bald, heavy, wearing glasses—some sort of intellectual, from the look of him. For the length of a block, he matched her pace. Hauser and Matzig exchanged a look; then, no discussion required, Matzig turned on the ignition, put the car in gear, and drove past Emilia Krebs to a side street with a view of the nearest tram stop.

  She arrived soon after, followed by the man in the dark overcoat. They stood at a distance from each other, mixed in with a few other people, all waiting for the trolley. Five minutes later it appeared, bell ringing, and rolled to a stop. Emilia Krebs and the others climbed on, but the man in the overcoat stayed where he was and, once the trolley moved away, he turned and walked back the way he’d come.

  “Did you see what I saw?” Hauser said.

  “A trailer, you think?” The function of a trailer, in clandestine practice, was to make sure the person ahead wasn’t being followed.

  “What else?”

  6 February. Paris. Occupied Paris: triste and broken, cold and damp, the swastika everywhere. Following the operational plan, Zannis played the role of a Greek detective in Paris, come to escort a prisoner back to Salonika. In trench coat and well-worn blue suit, heavy shapeless black shoes, and holstered pistol on his belt, he took a taxi to the commercial hotel Escovil had named—on a little street near the Gare du Nord—and slept all afternoon, recovering from days of train travel. Then, around eight in the evening, he ventured forth, found a taxi, and went off in search of Parisian food and Parisian sex. So, if anybody was watching, that’s what they saw.

  He left the taxi at the Place de la Bastille, found the proper café on the second try, and the woman right away. She was, according to plan, reading Le Soir, the evening tabloid, and marking the classified ads with a pencil.

  “Excuse me,” Zannis said, “are you waiting for Émile?” He hadn’t been in France since the time he’d worked as a Parisian antiquaire, more than ten years earlier, but the language, though halting and awkward, was still there.

  “I’m waiting for my grandfather,” she said, completing the identification protocol. Then, looking at her watch, added, “We’d better be on our way. You shall call me Didi.”

  Didi! Good God. For whoever she was—and she’d given Didi her best effort: neckline much too low, “diamond” earrings, scarlet lipstick—this woman had never been picked up in a café, she’d never met a woman who’d been picked up in a café. What was she, a baroness? Possible, Zannis thought: narrow head, small ears, thin nostrils, aristocratic tilt to the chin. Didi? Oh fuck, these people are going to get me killed.

  “Off we go, honey,” Zannis said, with a coarse grin, a nod toward the door, and a proffered arm.

  The aristocrat almost flinched. Then she recovered, stood, took his arm, pressed it to her champagne cup of a noble breast, and off they went—circling the Place Bastille, heading for a brasserie down a side street. Zannis took a deep breath. These people were brave, were resisting the Occupation, were putting their lives in jeopardy. They were, he told himself, doing the best they could.

  So the Greek detective, in case anybody was watching—and there was no way to know whether they were or not—had found a girl for the evening and would now take her out for dinner. The restaurant was called the Brasserie Heininger, a man in an apron and a fisherman’s waterproof hat was shucking oysters on a bed of shaved ice by the entryway.

  When Zannis opened the door, the interior hit him hard—much fancier than any place he’d been to when he’d lived in Paris. The brasserie was fiercely Belle Epoque: red plush banquettes, polished brass, and vast gold-framed mirrors lining the walls, the waiters in muttonchop whiskers, the conversation loud and manic, the smoky air scented by perfume and grilled sausage. And, as the maître d’ led them to a table—that sexy slut Didi had reserved ahead—Zannis saw what looked to him like half the officer class of occupied Paris, much of it in Wehrmacht gray, with, just to set off the visual composition, a sprinkling of SS black. As they wove their way among the tables, the aristocrat crushed Zannis’s arm against her breast so hard he wondered why it didn’t hurt her, or maybe she was so scared she didn’t notice. At last they were seated, side by side on a banquette at a table where the number 14 was written on a card supported by a little brass stand. The aristocrat settled close to him, then took a deep breath.

  “You’re all right?” Zannis said.

  She nodded, gratitude in her eyes.

  “Good girl,” he said. “Didi.”

  She gave him a conspiratorial smile; the waiter brought menus in golden script. “Here one takes the choucroute garnie,” she said. “And order champagne.”

  Sauerkraut? Oh no, not with the way his stomach felt. On the surface, Zannis showed a certain insouciant confidence, but every muscle in his body was strung tight; he was ready to shoot his way out of this restaurant but not at all prepared for sauerkraut. “Maybe they have a fish,” he said.

  “Nobody orders that.”

  He searched the menu. “Shellfish,” he said.

  “If you like.”

  He looked up for a moment, then said, “What the hell is that? Behind your shoulder, in the mirror.”

  “It’s very famous,” she said. “A memorial to a Bulgarian waiter, slain here a few years ago.”

  “It’s a bullet hole.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “They don’t fix it? Back where I come from, they have them fixed the next day.”

  “Not here.”

  The waiter returned. “’Sieur et ’dame?”

  Zannis ordered the seafood platter, which he would try to eat, followed by the choucroute, which he would not, and a bottle o
f champagne. As the waiter hurried off, Zannis discovered his neighbors in the adjacent booth: two SS officers with French girlfriends; puffy and blond, green eyeshadow, pouty lips. One of the SS men looked like a precocious child, with baby skin, a low forehead, and eyeglasses in tortoiseshell frames. The other—Zannis understood immediately who he was, what he was—turned to face him, rested an elbow on the plush divider, and said, “Bonsoir, mon ami.” The set of his face and the sparkle in his eyes suggested a view of the world best described by the word droll, but, Zannis saw, he was a certain kind of smart and sophisticated German who’d found, in the black uniform and death’s-head insignia, a way to indulge a taste for evil.

  “Bonsoir,” Zannis said.

  “Your girl’s a real looker.” He moved his head to get a better view of Didi, said, “Hello, gorgeous,” with a sly smile and waggled his fingers by way of a waved greeting. The aristocrat glanced at him, then looked down. The SS officer, at that stage of inebriation where he loved the world, said, “Aww, don’t be shy, gorgeous.”

  Zannis turned back and began to make conversation. “Had much snow this winter?”

  From behind him: “Hey! I was talking to you!”

  Zannis faced him and said, “Yes?”

  “You Frenchmen can be very rude, you know.”

  “I’m not French,” Zannis said. Maybe the SS officer wouldn’t figure it out but the girlfriends certainly would.

  “No? What are you?”

  “I’m from Greece.”

  The officer spoke to his friends. “Say, here’s a Greek!” Then, to Zannis, “What brings you to Paris, Nick?”

  Zannis couldn’t stop it: a hard stare that said Shut your fucking mouth before I shut it for you. Then, making sure his voice was soft, he said, “I’m a detective, I’m here to bring back a murderer.”

  “Oh,” the officer said. “I see. Well, we’re friendly types, you know, and we were wondering what you were doing after dinner.”