by Alan Furst
“No. Well, not really.”
“I’m miserable,” she said.
“Demetria?”
“Yes?”
“Get on a train. Tonight. Call, and I’ll be waiting at the station.”
“I want to….”
“Well then?”
“I don’t know what to do.” Now she was crying.
“I love you, Demetria. I think about you, I want you with me. Is there something you want me to say? Promise? Anything.”
“No! It’s beautiful … what you say.”
“And so?”
Now she didn’t speak.
“Please, don’t cry.”
“I can’t help it.” She snuffled. “Forgive me.”
He paused—was there a worse time to say what now had to be said? “There is something I have to tell you.”
“What?” He’d frightened her.
“I’ll be going away, soon, I don’t know when, and not for long. But I’ll leave a key with the neighbor downstairs, I’ll tell her to expect you.”
“Where are you going?”
“It’s for work. A few days, only.”
For a time she was quiet, then she said, in a different voice, “I understand, you can’t say. But, what if you don’t come back?”
“I will, don’t worry about that.”
“Do you have a pencil?”
“Yes.”
“My friend’s number is Athens, 34-412. Her name is Theodora. Telephone her when you return.”
“Three, four? Four, one, two?”
“Yes. You don’t know when you’re leaving?”
“Days, maybe a week, maybe more. It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t? What if the war comes?”
Then you will be safe only with Vasilou. On his white ship. Finally, resignation in his voice, he said, “I don’t know.”
She sighed. “Nobody knows. All they do is talk.” She regretted having asked him a question he couldn’t answer, so now they would be strong together, not like the people who just talked.
“You won’t come here now?”
“Telephone when you return,” she said firmly. “Then I’ll be ready. I’ll be waiting.”
He said he would. He told her again that he loved her, and they hung up.
Zannis looked around the office, Saltiel and Sibylla had their heads down, engrossed in their work.
On 13 March, Hitler again demanded that Yugoslavia sign the Axis pact. They didn’t say no, they said, We’re thinking about it, the “no” of diplomacy. Which might have worked, but for the weather. Spring, the war-fighting season in Europe, was just beginning: once the fields were planted, the men of the countryside would take up their weapons, as they had since the Middle Ages. The March chill receded, the rain in Central Europe and the Balkans was a light rain, a spring rain, a welcome rain. Winter was over, now it was time for action, no more speeches, no more negotiation—certain difficult matters had to be settled, once and for all. Hitler loved that phrase, “once and for all,” and so, on the nineteenth of March, he issued an ultimatum. Do what I say, or you will be bombed and invaded. Costa Zannis paced his bedroom, smoked too much, found it hard to sleep. Yes, he had papers and steamship tickets for his family, but the earliest sailing he’d been able to reserve was on 30 March. Eleven days in the future. Would Hitler wait?
On the afternoon of the twentieth, he stood on the railway platform where passengers were boarding the express to Istanbul and said good-bye to Gabi Saltiel and his wife. As the train rolled out of the station, Zannis watched it go by until the last car disappeared in the distance. He wasn’t alone, there was a line of people, all up and down the platform, who waited until the train was gone.
24 March. Belgrade was quiet that night, people stayed home, or spent long hours in the coffeehouses. In the larger towns, special Serbian police had been assigned to ensure peace and quiet in the streets. The newspaper Politika, the most esteemed journal in the Balkans, and read by diplomats all across Europe, had that morning been forced to print an editorial supporting Yugoslavia’s signature on the Axis pact. Just before midnight, two armoured cars brought Premier Cvetkovic and his foreign minister to Topchidersko railway station so they could board a train to Vienna. There they would sign.
Costa Zannis had arrived in Belgrade that same evening, met by Pavlic and taken to the Hotel Majestic on the Knez Mihailova, the main shopping street in the city. As they drove down the avenue, Zannis saw a huge swastika flag hung from the balcony of a five-story office building. “What’s that?” he said.
“The office of the German Travel Bureau,” Pavlic said. “Getting an early start on the celebration.”
In the Majestic, Zannis stowed a small valise in his room and went downstairs to the hotel bar. There, Pavlic introduced him to a bulky pale-haired Serb called Vlatko—from the spread of his shoulders and neck, every inch a cop. “He’s from the homicide office,” Pavlic said, as the two men shook hands. “And he speaks German.”
They ordered slivovitz, then Vlatko said, “It’s quiet here, but that’s just on the surface. The people are in shock.”
“It won’t last,” Pavlic said.
“No, big trouble tomorrow.” With this he grinned. He took, Zannis realized, great pleasure, a patriot’s pleasure, from the anticipation of big trouble.
Both Pavlic and Vlatko, taking turns, told Zannis the news of the day: a terrific fistfight in the bar of Belgrade’s best hotel, the Srbski Kralj, King of Serbia. Two American foreign correspondents and an Italian woman, their translator, on one side, five Wehrmacht officers—from the German legation—on the other. The Americans ordered whiskies, the Germans ordered schnapps; the Germans demanded to be served first, the barman hesitated. Next, savage insults, tables turned over, broken dishes. The Italian woman had thrown a drink in a German’s face, he hit her on the head, then the New York Times reporter, a good-sized Texan, had fought two of the Germans. “Knocked them down,” Vlatko said, ramming a huge fist into a meaty palm for emphasis. “Out cold. On the floor.” Once again, he grinned.
“And broke his hand,” Pavlic said.
“Both hands, I heard.”
“One hand,” Pavlic said. “I hope we can do without that, tomorrow.”
Vlatko shrugged. “We shall see.”
From his inside pocket, Zannis brought out the sheet of paper Escovil had given him: a typed list of twenty-seven names. He laid it on the table and smoothed out the folds with his hands. “Here it is,” he said. “We have a day to find out the addresses.”
Pavlic and Vlatko put their heads together over the list. Vlatko said, “Who are these people? Military, some of them, I can see that.”
“Not people who get their names in the newspapers,” Zannis said.
“Traitors,” Vlatko said.
“Possible troublemakers, anyhow,” Zannis answered.
“Well, we’ll find them.”
“Tomorrow night,” Zannis said. “When they’re at home. We don’t want to arrest them at staff headquarters, we don’t want gun battles.”
“No, I guess not,” Vlatko said, bringing forward, with some effort, the sensible side of his nature. “Pavlic and I have enlisted fifteen detectives, so we’ll work in groups of three—that should be sufficient. Do these people,” he paused, then said, “form a conspiracy?”
Zannis didn’t think so. “I doubt it,” he said. “The wives won’t warn their husbands’ friends, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Would be best to start at seven—before people go out to restaurants or whatever it is they do.”
“They won’t go out tomorrow night,” Pavlic said. “They’ll stay home with the radio on.”
“We can’t all come here,” Zannis said. “Vlatko, can you have them meet at six? You’ll have to distribute the names this afternoon, so we’ll divide up the names now and make new lists.”
“Where do we take them?”
“There’s a holding cell,” Pavlic said, “at the prefecture near the f
oreign legations, on Milosha Velikog. They’re going to move their prisoners—to make room for ours.”
“Stack them one on the other,” Vlatko said. “Who cares?”
“These people might be needed later,” Zannis said. “We want them out of circulation for a day and a half—for them an anecdote, not a nightmare. We’d put them in a spa, if we could.”
Vlatko looked at him. “You’re very kind, in Salonika.”
“As long as it works, we are. If it doesn’t, then we do it the other way.”
“Really? I guess we think differently, up here.”
A group of men came laughing into the bar, calling for slivovitz. They wore—Pavlic explained in an undertone—the black fur hats of the Chetniks, the ancient Serbian resistance movement, with skull and crossbones insignia on the front.
“They’ve come in from the villages,” Pavlic said. “They’re gathering.”
Back upstairs, Zannis was restless. The street below his window was deserted, the city quiet. No, not quiet, silent, and somehow sinister. Thousands of conversations in darkened rooms, he thought; they could not be heard but they could be felt, as though anger had its own special energy. And this, despite his better, too-well-learned instincts, he found exciting.
At seven the following morning, the telephone rang in his room, no name, no greeting, just an upper-class British voice, clipped and determined.
“Have you everything you need?”
“I do.”
“Tomorrow’s the day. I know you’ll do your best.”
“Count on it,” Zannis said, hoping his English was proper.
“That’s the spirit.”
No way to go back to sleep. He dressed, holstered his Walther, and went downstairs for coffee. When he returned, an envelope had been slid beneath his door: a local phone number, and a few words directing him to maintain contact, using street call boxes or telephones in bars, throughout the following day. Pavlic was going to pick him up at ten and drive him around the city. Until then, he didn’t know what to do with himself so he sat in a chair.
Outside, the people of the city began their day by breaking glass. Big plate-glass windows, from the sound of it, broken, then shattering on the pavement. Accompanied by a chant: Bolje rat, nego pakt! This much Serbo-Croatian he could understand: Better war than the pact! Outside, more glass came crashing down. He could see nothing from his room but, going out into the hall, he found a window at the end of the corridor. Down in the street, students were chanting and breaking store windows. As cars drove by, the drivers honked furiously, waved, and chanted along with the students: “Bolje rat, nego pact!” One of them stopped long enough to tear up a copy of Politika and hurl it into the gutter.
At nine-fifty, Pavlic’s car rolled to the curb in front of the Majestic. Vlatko was sitting in the passenger seat so Zannis climbed in the back where, on the seat beside him, he discovered a pump shotgun with its barrel and stock sawed off to a few inches. As Pavlic drove away, a group of students ran past, waving a Serbian flag. “Brewing up nicely, isn’t it,” Pavlic said.
Vlatko was wearing a hat this morning, with the brim bent down over his eyes, and looked, to Zannis, like a movie gangster. He turned halfway round, rested his elbow on top of the seat and said, “They’re out on the streets, in towns all over Serbia and Montenegro, even Bosnia. We’ve had calls from the local police.”
“They’re trying to stop it?”
From Vlatko, a wolf’s smile. “Are you kidding?”
“Rumors everywhere,” Pavlic said. “Hermann Göring assassinated, mutinies in Bulgarian army units, even a ghost—a Serbian hero of the past appeared at Kalemegdan fortress.”
“True!” Vlatko shouted.
“Well I’ll tell you what is true,” Pavlic said. “At least I think it is. Prince Peter, Prince Paul’s seventeen-year-old cousin, has supposedly returned from exile. Which means he’ll be crowned as king, and the regency is over, which is what the royalists have wanted for years, and not just them.”
Zannis liked especially the ghost; whoever was spreading the rumors knew what he was doing. Ten minutes later, Vlatko said, disgust in his voice, “Look at that, will you? Never seen that in Belgrade.” He meant two SS officers in their black uniforms, strolling up the street in the center of the sidewalk. As Zannis watched, two men coming from the opposite direction had to swing wide to avoid them, because they weren’t moving for anybody. Pavlic took his foot off the gas and the car slowed down as they all stared at the SS men, who decided not to notice them.
They drove around for an hour, locating the addresses that made up their share of the list. Two of the men lived in the same apartment building, two others had villas in the wealthy district north of the city, by the Danube—in Serbia called the Duna. Heading for the prefecture with the holding cell, they drove up the avenue past the foreign legations. The Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian legations, in honor of the newly signed pact, were all flying the red-and-black swastika flag. “Does that do to you what it does to me?” Pavlic said.
“It does,” Zannis said.
Vlatko stared out the side window. “Wait until tomorrow, you bastards.”
As they neared the prefecture, Zannis said, “If Prince Peter becomes king, who will run the government?”
“Whoever he is,” Vlatko said, “he’d better be a war leader.”
Zannis, hoping against hope, said, “You don’t think Hitler will accept a new government? A neutral government?”
Vlatko shook his head and said to Pavlic, “A real dreamer, your friend from Salonika.”
At the prefecture, the detectives had been listening to the radio and told Vlatko and Pavlic the news.
“What’s happened?” Zannis said.
“It’s what hasn’t happened that’s got them excited,” Pavlic said. “Cvetkovic was supposed to give a speech at ten, but it was delayed until noon. Now it’s been delayed again. Until six this evening.”
“When it will be canceled,” Vlatko said.
“Why do you think so?” Zannis said.
“I know. In my Serbian bones, I know it will be canceled.”
And, at six that evening, it was.
7:22 P.M. A warm and breezy night, spring in the air. Pavlic pulled up in front of a villa; the lights were on, a well-polished Vauxhall sedan parked in the street. “They’re home,” Pavlic said.
“You don’t want this, do you?” Zannis said, nodding toward the shotgun.
“No, leave it. It won’t be necessary.”
There was no doorbell to be seen, so Vlatko knocked on the door. They waited, but nobody appeared, so he knocked again. Nothing. Now he hammered on the door and, twenty seconds later, it flew open.
To reveal one of the largest men Zannis had ever seen. He towered above them, broad and thick, a handsome man with blond hair gone gray and murder in his eye. He wore a silk dressing gown over pajamas—perhaps hurriedly donned because half the collar was turned under—and his face was flushed pink. As he gazed down at them, a woman’s voice, a very angry voice, yelled from upstairs. The giant ignored her and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“General Kabyla?” Pavlic said.
“Yes. So?”
Again the voice from upstairs. Kabyla shouted something and the voice stopped.
“We have orders to take you to the prefecture,” Pavlic said. Zannis didn’t get all of it but followed as best he could.
“From who?”
“Orders.”
“Fuck you,” said the general. “I’m busy.”
Vlatko drew an automatic pistol and held it at his side. “Turn around,” he said, producing a pair of handcuffs from his jacket pocket.
“I’m under arrest? Me?”
“Call it what you like,” Pavlic said, no longer patient.
As the general turned around and extended his hands, he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
In answer Vlatko snapped the handcuffs closed, took the general by the elbow, and guided him
toward the door. Where he stopped, then shouted over his shoulder so his voice would carry upstairs, “Stay right there, my duckling, I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
At the prefecture, there were already three men behind bars. Two of them, disconsolate, sat slumped on a bench suspended from the wall by chains. A third was wearing most of a formal outfit—the white shirt, black bow tie, cummerbund, and trousers with suspenders, but no jacket. He was a stiff, compact man with a pencil mustache and stopped pacing the cell when a policeman slid the grilled door open. As Vlatko unshackled the general, the man in evening wear took a few steps toward them and said, “We’ll find out who you are, you know, and we will settle with you.”
Vlatko shoved the general into the cell, then took a step toward the man who’d threatened him but Pavlic grabbed his arm. “Forget it,” he said.
The man in evening wear glowered at them. “You can bet we won’t.”
“Say another word and we’ll throw you in the fucking river,” Vlatko said.
The man turned and walked away, joining the other two on the bench.
By ten-thirty they were sitting in the bar at the Majestic, having rounded up the other three men on their list, stowing all three in the back of the car, where one of them had to sit on another’s lap to make room for Zannis. When the man complained, his dignity offended, Vlatko offered to put him in the trunk and he shut up. On the way to the prefecture the overloaded car crawled along the Milosha Velikog, where Pavlic had to stop twice, tires squealing, when armoured cars came roaring out of side streets and cut them off.
Throughout the next few hours, until well after midnight, detectives showed up at the bar to report on the evening’s work, while Zannis and Pavlic kept score on the master list. Around one in the morning it was over, they had twenty-two of the twenty-seven men in the holding cell at the prefecture. Two of the named subjects didn’t exist, according to the detectives—no trace in police or city records of their names. A third had escaped, having run out a back door and, as the story was told, “simply vanished, he’s hiding out there somewhere but we hunted for an hour and couldn’t find him.” A fourth was said, by a woman living at the house, to have been in Vienna for two years, and a search had revealed nothing—no men’s clothing. The last wasn’t home. The detectives had broken into his apartment and looked for him, but he wasn’t there. The neighbors shrugged, they didn’t know anything. One of the detectives had remained, in case he came home, and would stay until the morning.
