Spies of the Balkans: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  The officer thought it over. "No, it would just be the two of us in a room. And, when our friend arrives, he'll see the Gestapo vehicles and drive away."

  "I think we'd better do something now," Zannis said. He put on his trench coat and grabbed the handle of his small valise.

  "Good luck," the officer said. He shook Zannis's hand, and the aristocrat kissed him on both cheeks and said, "Be careful."

  "Let's go, Harry," Zannis said.

  In the dark lobby at the foot of the staircase, the night clerk snored on, dead to the world. Zannis shook him by the shoulder and he woke with a start and said, "What ... what do you want?" His breath smelled of sour wine.

  "Is there a garage in this hotel?"

  "Yes."

  "What's in there?"

  "A car, belongs to the guy who owns the hotel. He can't drive it--the Bosch tried to confiscate private cars, so some people hid them."

  "Is the car locked?"

  The clerk sat up straight. "Say, what do you think--" Zannis drew the Walther and showed it to the clerk, who said, "Oh," then, "The key's in the office, in the desk."

  Zannis gestured with the Walther and the clerk stood up, went into the office behind the reception desk, and searched in the bottom drawer until he found car keys on a ring.

  "And next," Zannis said, "I'll want the key for the back door."

  "On a nail, just next to you."

  "Harry?"

  Byer came around the desk; Zannis gave him the key. "Run this upstairs. Tell them to open the back door and get out right away."

  Byer hurried off and Zannis turned back to the clerk. "The shutter over the garage doorway, it's locked?"

  "Of course."

  "From inside? Is there an entry from the hotel?"

  "No, it has a lock at the bottom, you have to go out to the sidewalk."

  "Get the key."

  Muttering under his breath, the clerk searched the middle drawer, threw pens, a rubber stamp, an ink pad, and miscellaneous papers on the desk. At last he found the key, and started to hand it to Zannis, who waved him off. "Is there gas in the car?" Zannis said.

  "Yes."

  "Battery connected? Tires still on?"

  "I charge the battery twice a week, late at night. The boss wants it ready to drive."

  "He does? Why?"

  "The hell would I know? Maybe he wants to go somewhere."

  Zannis heard Byer, running down the stairs, likely waking every guest in the hotel. This will not work, Zannis thought. There was no way he could get this man back to Salonika. A moment later, Byer, breathing hard, arrived at the reception. "They said thank you."

  "Now it's time," Zannis said to the clerk, "for you to go outside, unlock the shutter, and roll it up."

  "Me?"

  "You see anybody else?"

  "Why can't your pal do it?"

  Zannis rapped him on the shoulder blade with the barrel of the Walther, just hard enough.

  The clerk mumbled something Zannis was not meant to hear and said, "All right, whatever you want."

  Keeping Byer behind him in the darkened lobby, Zannis unlocked the hotel door and watched as the clerk went out the door and turned left, toward the shuttered garage. Across the street, the Citroen idled, but Zannis could see only dim shapes behind the steamed-up windows.

  The clerk came quickly through the door. "Done," he said. "That Citroen out there, are they ...?"

  "Go back to sleep," Zannis said.

  "What about the boss's car?"

  "Send me a bill," Zannis said. "After the war." He turned to Byer. "Ready, Harry? We're not going to run, we're going to walk quickly. You get in the back and lie on the floor."

  "Why?" Byer's eyes were wide.

  "Just in case," Zannis said.

  Keeping Byer on his left--the side away from the Citroen--and the gun in his hand in his coat pocket, Zannis walked through the hotel door. The shutter was rolled up to reveal an old Peugeot sedan, the metal rims around the headlights spotted with rust. He thought he might get away with it: the SS officer hadn't seen him in his trench coat, the seductive Didi wasn't with him, and the people in the Citroen wouldn't be able to see much of anything through the cloudy windows.

  On the first try, wrong key--trunk key, of course--then the driver's door opened, Zannis unlocked the back door, and Byer, as ordered, lay flat on the floor. As Zannis settled behind the wheel, the driver's door of the Citroen swung open and the baby-faced SS he'd seen at the brasserie started to get out, then turned his head as though somebody in the backseat had spoken to him. Zannis searched for the starter button, found it, and pressed it with his thumb. Nothing. Betrayed. By night-clerk malice, or by an old car on a damp night, it came to the same thing.

  "What's going on?" Byer said.

  Zannis pressed again.

  Now the other SS officer climbed out of the Citroen. From the Peugeot's engine, a single, rather discreet, cough. The SS man heading for the garage wasn't in a hurry. A little unsteady on his feet, he kept one hand out of sight behind his leg. Zannis held the button down, which produced a second cough, another, and one more. Then the engine grumbled and came to life. Zannis shoved the clutch pedal to the floor and put the car in what he thought was first gear. It wasn't. As the clutch pedal came up, the Peugeot stalled. The SS man, now ten feet away, was amused and shook his head--a world populated by fools, what was one to do?

  The starter worked once again and this time Zannis found first gear and gave the engine as much gas as he dared. The SS man's hand came out from behind his leg, Luger pistol held casually, barrel facing down. He changed direction in order to block the Peugeot and held up his other hand--the amiable traffic cop. Zannis slammed on the brake, the Peugeot lurched to a stop and then, looking sheepish and embarrassed, he cranked the window down. He had almost hit a German officer, what was wrong with him?

  The SS man smiled, that's better, and, obviously very drunk from the way he walked, approached the driver's side of the car. He was just starting to bend over so he could have a word with the driver when Zannis shot him in the face. He staggered backward, his hat fell off, blood ran from his nostrils, and Zannis fired twice more; the first clipping off the top of his ear, the second in the right eyebrow. That did it, and he collapsed.

  Zannis hit the gas pedal, first gear howling. As he swung into the street, the baby-faced SS scrambled out of the Citroen. Idiot. Zannis snapped off two shots but the car was moving and he didn't think he'd hit him. Or maybe he had, because the last Zannis saw of him he was limping back to his car. Just as, in the rearview mirror, Zannis saw the two puffy blondes take off like rabbits, high-heeled shoes in hand, running for their lives down the dark street. Go fuck Germans and see where it gets you, Zannis said to himself.

  From the back, Byer said, "What happened? What happened?"

  Zannis didn't answer. Finally put the Peugeot into second gear--he could smell burning clutch--then third, and turned hard right into a side street, then right again, so that he was now headed north, toward the Porte de Clignancourt.

  Slowly, Zannis worked his way through the back streets, which angled off the main boulevards, so, a series of diagonals. But Zannis couldn't have gone much faster if he'd had to--the untaped headlights were turned off, and it was hard to see in the blacked-out city. After ten minutes of driving, he stopped the Peugeot so Byer could move to the passenger seat and Zannis told him the details. Byer took it well enough; after everything he'd been through since the Wellington went down, this was but one more nightmare. As Zannis again drove north, he heard the high-low sirens in the distance, converging on the hotel, but he was well away from it. A few blocks on he passed a pair of French policemen, in their long winter capes, pedaling easily on their bicycles. One of them gave him a sour look, and Zannis wondered if Paris was under curfew, often the case in occupied cities. He didn't know but, if it was, it was a German curfew, and the policemen couldn't be bothered to stop him.

  Of course that would change, violently, in the mor
ning. The Gestapo and the French Surete would turn Paris upside down, looking for him--they'd have a good description--and for the Peugeot. Maybe, he thought, he should have tied the clerk to a chair, evidence that the man wasn't complicit in the crime, but he hadn't thought of it and he'd been intent on escaping from the hotel. In any event, the escape south by railway was no longer possible, he'd have to find another way to get out of the country.

  He reached Saint-Ouen soon enough, wondering if Laurette, his lover when he'd lived here, was still in the apartment they'd shared. It didn't matter if she was; he couldn't go anywhere near her. Moments later, at the edge of Saint-Ouen, he entered the vast flea market, a labyrinth, endless twisting lanes lined by shuttered stalls. Clignancourt didn't precisely have borders, it faded away to the north in a maze of alleys and storage sheds, and here Zannis found an open courtyard behind a workshop with boarded-up windows. He parked the car and lit a cigarette. Dawn was still hours away, and ten in the morning farther yet. He was very tired, nothing more than that, and, in time, both he and Byer dozed, woke up, and dozed again.

  10:15 A.M. Zannis left Byer in the Peugeot and made his way to stall number fifty-five of the section known as Serpette. The market was nearly deserted, many of the stalls unopened, only a few shoppers wandering listlessly among the aisles, past old chinaware, old clothes, old maps and books, antlers for the wall above the fireplace, a collapsible opera hat. You had to be clever here, to find that priceless object, its value unknown to the owner of the booth, then you had to bargain hard to get the meagre price lower, so the antiquaire never suspected you were cheating him out of a fortune. Day in, day out, year in, year out, the devious customers carried off their treasures, displayed them in their parlors, and boasted to their friends.

  Zannis was relieved to find his uncle, seeing him from behind as he sat with two friends, playing cards on a mahogany tabletop held up by three upended fruit crates. Zannis's heart lifted--that bald pate, freckled and scarred, with its fringe of wiry gray hair, could belong to no one else. "Anastas?"

  His uncle turned, his eyes widened with disbelief, then he shouted, "Constantine!," rose to his feet, and embraced his nephew. Strong as an ox, Uncle Anastas, who held him tight while Zannis felt, on his cheek, tears from his uncle's eyes. "Oh my God, I thought I'd never see you again," Anastas said. Then took him by the arms, stepped back, stared at him lovingly, and said, "Constantine, my own nephew, what the fuck are you doing here?"

  "A long story, uncle."

  "My brother's son," Anastas said to his friends. "Look at him."

  "A handsome boy," one of them said, in Greek.

  "Are you still playing, Anastas?" said the other.

  "I fold my cards," Anastas said, wiping his eyes.

  Uncle Anastas wanted to show him off at the antiquaires' cafe but Zannis told him, as gently as he could, that they should close the booth and speak inside, so Anastas shooed his friends off, lowered the shutter over the front of the stall, then went to the cafe and returned carrying coffees spiked with Calvados. Zannis had meanwhile discovered--lying on a demilune table artfully coated with dust--a copy of that morning's Le Matin. On the front page a headline: SS MAJOR SHOT BY JEWISH GANGSTERS!

  His uncle, having had time to think things over on his walk to the cafe, was good and worried by the time he returned. He waited one sip of coffee, then said, "You better tell me the story, Constantine."

  Zannis held up the newspaper.

  "Skata! You're not a Jew."

  "Not a gangster either."

  Anastas switched on a lamp with a colored-glass shade, read the first few sentences of the article, then said, "Well, it's in the Zannis blood. I got my first Turk when I was sixteen. A gendarme, but only a corporal, not a major."

  "I remember the story," Zannis said.

  Anastas put the paper down and looked puzzled. "But tell me something, why did you have to come all the way to Paris to do this thing? You could've waited, you know, they'll be in Greece soon enough."

  "I came up here to rescue an Englishman, Uncle Anastas."

  "Oh, I see. You're involved in ... secret work?"

  "Yes."

  "Bad business, dear nephew, they kill people who do that."

  "I know. But what happened last night was accidental--we were supposed to leave here quietly. Now we're stuck."

  "Oh, 'stuck' I don't know. All sorts of people in hiding here, waiting for the war to end, waiting for the Americans to stop sitting on their asses and do something."

  "I can't wait, uncle. I have to get out, and I have to get my Englishman out."

  Anastas thought it over, finally said, "Not easy."

  "No, it isn't."

  "But not impossible. Do you have any money?"

  "Plenty. Grandma sewed it in the lining of my jacket."

  "Because that's what it takes. And if you don't have enough--"

  "No, uncle, I have a lot. In dollars."

  "Dollars! Skata, I haven't seen dollars in a long time. How much, hundreds?"

  "Thousands."

  "Constantine!"

  "It's the war, uncle. Everything's expensive."

  "Still, you must be very important. I mean, thousands."

  "The English do not want this man captured."

  From outside the stall, a low two-note whistle. Zannis could see, in the space between the bottom of the shutter and the ground, a pair of shoes, which then moved away. "What goes on?" he said.

  "Police." He tugged the little chain on the lamp, darkening the stall, then rested an elbow on his knee and rubbed the corners of his mouth with thumb and index finger. "What to do with you," he said. "Where have you hidden your Englishman?"

  Zannis described the building and the courtyard.

  "He'll be safe there, but not for long. When these clowns go away, you'll bring him to my apartment."

  "Thank you, Anastas," Zannis said.

  "What the hell, you're family. And maybe I have one idea."

  "Which is?"

  "I know somebody."

  "Always good, to know somebody."

  "You'd better," Anastas said. "Otherwise ..."

  *

  In the apartment, Zannis and Byer settled down to wait. Byer would sleep on a chaise longue, Zannis on a tasseled couch. And, later that morning, one of Anastas's card-playing friends took a can of blue paint and a license plate over to the courtyard where they'd hidden the Peugeot. He then drove the newly painted car to a nearby village, parked it on a mud flat by the river, and took a train back to Paris. "I suspect it was gone before I got on the train," he told Anastas. "Into a barn until the war ends."

  "Harder than I thought," Anastas said at dinner. His French wife had prepared steaks, with spinach and onions sauteed in oil, and they drank a very good red wine in unlabeled bottles. "The man I know ...?" Anastas paused to chew his steak, then took a sip of the wine. "Well, he had to go to a man he knows." Anastas met his nephew's eyes, making sure he understood the magnitude of such an event. "So prepare to pay, nephew."

  "When do I meet him?" Zannis said.

  "After midnight, two-thirty. A car will come for you."

  Byer looked up from his plate and said, "Thank you, madame, for this wonderful dinner."

  "You are welcome," she said. "It is in your honor, monsieur, and Constantine's. To wish you safe journey." She smiled, warm and affectionate. If the occupation had affected her, there was no evidence that Zannis could see.

  "We drink to that," Anastas said. And they did.

  2:30 A.M. The glossy black automobile was surely worth a fortune, Zannis had never seen one like it and had no idea what it was. It rolled to a stop in front of Anastas's apartment building in Saint-Ouen, the back door swung open, and Zannis climbed in. The interior smelled like expensive leather. The driver turned to face him, holding him with his eyes for a long moment, likely making sure Zannis knew who he was dealing with. He knew. He recognized the breed: confident young men to whom killing came easily and smart enough to profit from it. The
n the driver rested his hands on the wheel but the car never moved, simply sat there, the huge engine purring softly.

  Zannis had known corrupt men of every sort, high and low, over the years he'd been with the police, but the friend of the friend, sitting next to him, was something new. He looked, Zannis thought, like a French king; prosperously stout, with fair, wavy hair parted to one side, creamy skin, a prominent nose, and a pouch that sagged beneath his chin. "I'm told you wish to leave France," he said, his voice deep and used to command.

  "That's right."

  "The price, for two individuals, is two thousand dollars. Have you the money with you?"

  "Yes."

  "I believe you are the man who shot a German officer. Did you do this because you have a hatred of Germans?"

  "No. My friend was lying on the floor of the car, the officer would have seen him, so I had to do it. Why do you want to know?"

  "To inform certain people--the people who need to know things. They don't care what is done, they simply require information."

  "Germans?"

  The man was amused. "Please," he said, not unkindly. Then, "It doesn't matter, does it?" It was as though he enjoyed innocence, found Zannis so, and instinctively liked him. "Now," he said, "there are two ways for you to leave France. The first choice is a freight train controlled by Communist railway workers. Traveling in this way you may go to Germany, Italy, or Spain. However, once you've crossed the border--there will be no inspection of papers--you are on your own. Hopefully, you've made arrangements that will allow you to proceed from one of those countries."

  "I haven't."

  "I see. In that case, you may wish to travel by airplane."

  "By airplane?" Zannis was incredulous.

  "Yes, why not? Are you reluctant to fly?"

  "Just ... surprised."

  The man's shrug was barely detectable. "If you wish to leave tomorrow, and for you that might not be a bad idea, the plane is going to ..." He leaned forward, toward the driver, and said, "Leon?"

  "Sofia."