The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by David Quammen

  He gave me the whole history-and-geography-of-Moldavia spiel himself, Barry says, and I’ve never been able to forget it, though for all I know he was actually born in Minsk.

  During that week when the Bolsheviks held Kishinev, Barry says, his father was executed. According to one of the versions. Put up against a stone wall and shot. Very unceremoniously. For being a kulak—which was not even accurate. Case of mistaken identity. That’s what the FBI heard from Djevdjevich, as I remember. To the Warren Commission, who had his FBI file right there in front of them for reference, he claimed that his father lived to a happy old age in Bucharest. To me, Barry says, he explained that his father had almost been shot in 1918 but was saved at the last minute by a friendly commissar the old man had known in Odessa.

  “Jesus,” says Kessler.

  “Right. And he knew perfectly well that we were helpless to verify or refute this stuff. He just kept talking. Inventing or remembering, who knows. Maybe it was some sort of game.”

  If you accept the commissar part, says Barry, then the next bit follows rather plausibly: the young Alex was sent off to Kiev for his secondary education, showed promise in math and mechanics, and graduated to a cadetship in the Red Army Engineers. After a year he was transferred to the Academy of the Air Fleet, in Moscow, an elite school and a rare opportunity for a Moldavian kid (some would say, a highly unlikely opportunity, Barry inserts), where they taught him among other things how to fly. The trainer he learned on was an old Sopwith Pup, captured on the ground during the Civil War and still in good repair, notwithstanding the difficulty of getting spare parts. He was assigned to a reconnaissance aviation squadron; he got further training, a little, in aerial photography. Then he logged a good many hours over the Polish border, in a newer Soviet biplane that was more powerful but more stupid to the touch—so he described it, says Barry—than that old Sopwith. I don’t recall the name of the Soviet plane, says Barry.

  “Don’t apologize,” says Kessler.

  That version was in the FBI file, Barry explains. It came not from Djevdjevich himself, but from a friend he made in Newport soon after arriving in this country, who claimed that Djevdjevich had told him the story one night over dinner. The leading alternative version was that he had learned to fly from a British instructor in Greece, during the early 1930s. On an old Sopwith Pup.

  The FBI asked him about this particular discrepancy during one of their many follow-ups. Djevdjevich asserted with no loss of aplomb that the Newport friend’s memory was simply mistaken. He had never been near any flying school in Moscow, he told the Bureau. The Warren Commission, in their turn, never asked. When I asked, says Barry, he told me that the Kiev-Moscow version was quite correct, yes, he had most certainly attended the Academy of the Air Fleet and was proud of it—but that in 1942, as a recent immigrant, confused by his situation, he had been afraid to admit those facts to the FBI. The Greece business had been a lie, was what he told me. The foolish lie of a scared young man.

  “How old was he then? When the FBI was grilling him.”

  “The first time?”

  “The first time.”

  “Twenty-nine,” says Barry. “Or twenty-six. Depending on which birth date you use.”

  From Greece—according to the lie as recorded in FBI records—from Greece he had gone to Spain in 1936, and flew as a reconnaissance pilot for the Loyalist forces during the siege of Madrid. Another of the FBI’s third-party informants had disputed that. No, if he flew in the Spanish war at all, said this unnamed source, it would almost certainly have been for the Fascists—an allegation that may have been founded merely in casual spite, but which cost Djevdjevich some trouble and put the Bureau to considerable extra work, since the point of the whole inquiry at that time was to check on suspicions that Djevdjevich might have Nazi contacts. The FBI decided no, that he wasn’t a Nazi agent. At least, probably not.

  On the other hand what he told me, says Barry, was that he had learned all of his Spanish in South America. That he had never fought at Madrid nor had anything to do with the Spanish war. “In those days, Mr. Koontz . . .”—it was a measure of the charm again, Barry explains, that he could say this kind of thing without sounding crass or cynical—“in those days, as in these, I was less interested in politics than in making a little money.” Then a smile. I believed him, God help me, says Barry. A limited belief, in the verity of that particular statement. He dressed well, he drove a Chrysler. You could see he enjoyed having money. That wasn’t in question. But I wanted to know a lot more, says Barry, about his particular brand of private enterprise.

  “Wait a minute. We’re in Spain, we’re in Greece, now we’re in South America,” says Kessler. “How did he get out of Russia?”

  “He walked.”

  “From Moscow? That’s quite a feat. Even for a man with charm.”

  “No, of course not. From Moldavia.”

  “Ah, Moldavia. Land of mystery. All right, tell me about it, please.”

  “He was home in Kishinev on leave, so goes the story. The purges had begun. He was terrified by what Stalin was doing to the officer corps of the Army. He decided he wouldn’t go back.”

  “A deserter. He would have been shot if they’d caught him, right?”

  “It seems like he would have, yes. But he expected that or worse if he stayed. So goes the story. He walked west to the Prut River and hitched a ride on a barge. Got off on the Romanian bank, then hiked again, over the mountains. It was he and his father together, actually. The old man was a physical specimen, matching him stride for stride over a pass through the Carpathians. Fortunately it was summer. So goes the story.”

  “I thought his father had been shot.”

  “Not in this version,” says Barry. “That’s the other version. This is the version where his father winds up in Bucharest, chasing rich widows.”

  There is a little gap now, Barry warns. In all of the versions. Somehow 1936 becomes 1938. Somehow an ocean gets crossed. In autumn of 1938 we find him in Bogotá and Barranquilla, bouncing between the two cities, first as a pilot and then as deputy managing director of a down-at-heels Colombian airline known as SCADTA. At least, on the surface it was Colombian. The company was registered in Bogotá. Actually by then, though, it was owned mainly by Juan Trippe of Pan Am, and run for him by a bunch of Germans.

  “Scatta?” Kessler says.

  “SCAD-TA,” Barry corrects him. “An acronym. Standing for, let me see, Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aéreos. It had the mail contract from the Colombian government, plus a bit of passenger traffic. How’s your drink?”

  Kessler looks. “Empty,” he says.

  Barry raises himself, teetering across the room to pour Kessler a refill. Neither of them bothers to mention ice.

  “Alemana,” says Kessler. “Nineteen thirty-eight.”

  “Right. Very good. That was part of the problem Djevdjevich had to face later on. This SCADTA outfit was practically a training academy for the Luftwaffe. It was run by a man named Peter Paul von Bauer, an Austrian, who had gotten himself into hock to Berlin before Pan American bought controlling interest. The planes were German. Most of the pilots were German. The airport managers, the mechanics, the radio men were German. Our State Department was working up to a case of serious bad nerves over the whole situation. They realized how easy it would be for a few SCADTA pilots one day to fly a surprise bombing raid on the Panama Canal. Or on the big Shell refineries on the island of Curaçao. Meanwhile, amid all those Germans were a Colombian figurehead president to satisfy the regulations in Bogotá, and one guy on a Yugoslav passport, named Alex Djevdjevich.”

  “What was his story this time?”

  “That he had come in, all innocent, by way of Pan Am. That his presence there in the late 1930s represented one step toward de-Germanizing the SCADTA staff, which was precisely what the State Department had been whining for. In fact he made a very persuasi
ve argument along those lines. Then in a reckless moment he went too far, telling the FBI that he had known Juan Trippe at Yale. But the dates didn’t work on that one. Furthermore, Trippe denied it. No, no, Djevdjevich said a bit later, the FBI fellow had misunderstood him. It was his older brother who had been acquainted with Mr. Trippe—and with Henry Luce too, by the way—during their years at Yale. Alex himself had merely met Trippe one time, at a lawn party in Newport. Turned out that Juan Trippe remembered the party, or such a party, if not his encounter with Djevdjevich. And so the story held, more or less.”

  Kessler smiles crookedly. “Here’s to charm.”

  Barry raises his glass also.

  Whether or not he knew Trippe socially, whether or not he lied about it, didn’t seem to matter back then in the thirties, says Barry. Djevdjevich was on the rise regardless. By 1939 he was clear of SCADTA and working for Pan Am itself, out of the Mexico City office.

  “As a pilot?”

  “No. Not a pilot. Some sort of management or promotional job. He traveled a lot to other capitals in Latin America. Met with government officials. Pan Am was still trying to win the concessions for some new South American routes. Mail and passenger. That was Djevdjevich’s role, evidently.”

  “Grease. Bagman.”

  “No. I don’t know. But there was never a hint of scandal over whatever he did down there for Pan Am.”

  “Never a hint, Judas. How boring for poor Alex.”

  In July of 1940 he made his first landfall in the United States, Barry says. Traveling still on the Yugoslav passport, he arrived by plane at New York and was granted resident alien status, as an employee of Pan American. He continued to make trips down to South America, apparently doing the same sort of work as before. For a year, he continued. Then he quit or was fired or—

  “Hold on, Barry,” says Kessler. “I’m getting too drunk, I missed something somewhere. Yugoslav passport, you said.”

  “Yugoslav.”

  “When was Moldavia annexed by Yugoslavia?”

  “Never. Nowhere near.”

  “Then where did he get the passport?”

  “At the Yugoslav Embassy in Amsterdam,” Barry says. Kessler only stares at him. Barry repeats: “It was issued in Amsterdam. Sometime in 1937.”

  “Explain.”

  “I can’t,” says Barry. He shakes his head. “That was one of the things I planned to ask him about on the second afternoon.”

  He was fired or quit or for some reason parted ways with Pan Am, and now begins what I suppose you could think of as the gigolo period, says Barry. He had no job. He had no personal savings to speak of. He had no other source of income—none that he was ever willing to talk about, anyway. He spent the summer season of 1941 in Newport and most of the winter either in New York or down on Cape Hatteras, where some friends of his had an extra house. That’s exactly the way he phrased it to the FBI, by the way, Barry says: Some friends of his had an extra house. I wonder what the Romanian word is for chutzpah. In any case, unemployment seems to have been no very great hardship. He worked on his tan. He dined out on his accent. He cultivated his poolside manner, we can assume. Later on he would claim that in the year following Pearl Harbor—this is roughly a quote, Barry says—he began “investigating investment opportunities in the travel business.” For that, Barry says, you could read: “Found an heiress, and married her.” She was eighteen years old and came from one of the most formidable new families in Charleston, South Carolina, only daughter of a man who owned hotels in Charleston, St. Simons, St. Augustine, and Palm Beach. Her old man was a parvenu then but I suspect the family name would sound resonant by now, Barry says, if you knew Charleston society. Djevdjevich referred to her as Sissy. Sissy’s hosteler father was a great fan of the new son-in-law, evidently—while the marriage lasted, at least—having been won over by Djevdjevich’s nice European style and the fact that he knew wines and forks and allowed the old man to beat him, narrowly, at golf.

  “Golf?” says Kessler. “Where did the son of a bitch learn to play golf?”

  Also Djevdjevich may have concocted a phony Romanian barony, Barry says. Told me he just couldn’t remember, honestly, whether it was this father-in-law or the next one on whose behalf he had awarded himself a modest notional title. The marriage to Sissy lasted ten months. She divorced him. There were no children. Our Alex does not seem to have been especially heartsick over the split, though no doubt he regretted losing custody of those hotels.

  “He told me: ‘Sissy was a troubled girl. Very gorgeous. Sweet, sometimes. But hysterical.’ That was all,” Barry says. “Who knows what it meant.”

  Kessler nods. Who, indeed.

  In June of 1942 he was arrested for the first time.

  This was the incident that got the FBI interested, Barry says. He was detained by Army MPs outside of Dayton, Ohio, for taking photographs near a perimeter fence of Wright Field at the very moment a B-29 Super-fortress had been taxiing for takeoff in the background. The B-29 was not yet an operational plane, this was only a prototype being tested at Wright, and the Army Air Force was sensitive. Djevdjevich claimed that it had been an innocent misunderstanding. His camera was just a cheap Kodak. He had made no effort to conceal himself. In the foreground of all his snapshots was an attractive seventeen-year-old girl whom he had met in a Dayton restaurant three days before. She was wearing a sun dress in the photographs, posing gaily; the B-29 was only distantly visible beyond her bare shoulder, hardly more than a gray shape, and not in every frame. Djevdjevich apologized for alarming the U.S. Army but stood firmly upon his innocence. They had been having a picnic, he explained. In a cattail swamp? asked the FBI. No, no, it had been damp perhaps, but certainly no swamp, according to Djevdjevich. He was held for two days at the county jail before being released. Part of his difficulty in getting the FBI to believe him stemmed from the fact that he had been carrying two wallets, with two distinct sets of identification. In his hip pocket was “Alex Djevdjevich,” a twenty-nine-year-old Yugoslav with resident alien status. In his jacket pocket was “George Hadas,” a naturalized Greek-American whose physical description also matched the bearer perfectly. But George Hadas was simply a friend of his, Djevdjevich explained, who had mislaid his wallet in Djevdjevich’s car. He was carrying it until it could be returned safely to George.

  After his release in Dayton, Barry says, the FBI did a full investigation of Djevdjevich’s background and current activities that went on for most of six months. Djevdjevich had two other sessions with them himself, in New York, answering questions about SCADTA and Peter Paul von Bauer and the siege of Madrid. During one of those sessions Djevdjevich declared that he was not only pure of Nazi taint but rabidly anti-Nazi, owing partly to the fact that he himself had some Jewish blood. This was news to everyone else whom the FBI visited.

  Nevertheless his former father-in-law gave a supportive account of his character. Various acquaintances from Newport society spoke glowingly of him, evidently under the misapprehension that this FBI check must be preliminary to some sort of high diplomatic appointment. Officials at Pan Am had nothing bad to say. No charges were filed.

  God knows why a draft board hadn’t nailed him by this time, Barry says. As a resident alien, healthy and male, he was certainly eligible. Just more of that magical Djevdjevich immunity, evidently.

  In 1943 he applied to the OSS, through their Washington headquarters, as a prospective liaison agent to the Yugoslav resistance. He was willing to parachute in or be infiltrated by submarine. Or if it were more convenient, he told them, he could walk in from Romania. He had come to the OSS on a referral by one of the Newport crowd, who knew General Donovan from having been a client of his law firm, so the recruiters listened carefully to Alex Djevdjevich, and they were tempted by what they heard. He could fly any sort of plane. He spoke fluent Serbian, as well as German. He also happened to be an excellent marksman, having won several European trapsho
oting competitions.

  “Oh come on,” says Kessler.

  He was young and fit and single. He was a patriotic American—though admittedly not yet a citizen—and eager to be part of the war effort. Equally important, he declared himself apolitical with regard to the internal Yugoslav factions: he had no prior association either with Mijailović’s group of guerrillas or with Tito’s. He didn’t care which of them controlled a postwar Yugoslavia, Djevdjevich said; he merely wanted the Nazis out. That was the right thing to say. Gears had already meshed and begun turning, toward his formal recruitment and a crash program of training that would have put him in the sky over Yugoslavia within three months, when the OSS screeners received his FBI file. He was rejected. Politely but unambivalently.

  Later the same year he applied to the OSS again, this time through their station in Cairo, which served as field headquarters for all operations into southern Europe.

  “Cairo.”

  “Cairo,” Barry confirms.