Spies of the Balkans: A Novel

by Alan Furst

  "Yes, Sofia."

  "That would be best," Zannis said.

  "Very well." He held out a hand, creamy and fat, palm up, and said, "So then ..."

  Zannis had removed the money from his jacket lining and put the thick wad of bills in the pocket of his coat; now he counted out two thousand dollars in fifty-dollar bills. The man next to him, the French king, stowed the money in a leather briefcase, probing first to make room for it. Then he gave Zannis directions: the name of a village, how to identify the road that led to an airstrip, and a time. "All memorized?" he asked Zannis.

  "Yes, I won't forget."

  "When you describe your adventures in France, as no doubt you will have to, I would take it as a personal favor that you remain silent about this particular chapter, about me. Do I have your word?"

  "You have it."

  "Do you keep your word?"

  "I do."

  "Then good evening."

  Uncle Anastas had a friend--also an emigre Greek, it turned out--who owned an ancient truck, and he picked them up at dawn. A few minutes later they joined a long line of produce trucks, coming back empty after delivery to the Paris produce markets, and the soldiers waved them through the control at the Porte Maillot. Then he headed northwest from Paris on the road that followed the Seine, with signs for DIRECTION ROUEN. A wet, steady snow that morning, from a low sky packed with gray cloud. "We won't fly today," Byer said, staring anxiously out the window.

  "We may have to wait," Zannis said. "But I expect we'll take off."

  "Not in this." After he spoke, Byer swallowed.

  Zannis studied him. What went on? "Everything all right?" he said.

  Byer nodded emphatically. Nothing wrong with me.

  It was hard to see, the windshield wiper smeared snow and road grime across the window, not much more than that, and the driver leaned forward and squinted, cursing eloquently in Greek. Finally he found the route departementale for La Roche-Guyon, the truck skidding as he made the last-minute turn. The narrow road wound past winter farmland for a long time, then it was Zannis who spotted the stone marker with a number chiseled into it, and the truck drove, in low gear, up a muddy, deeply rutted path. Finally, when they knew they'd taken the wrong turn, they saw an airplane in a plowed field. A compact twin-engine aircraft, a workhorse used for a few passengers or a small load of freight, with a white cross in a red circle insignia behind the cockpit. Swiss markings, Zannis thought. What a clever king. Two men were loading crates into the plane, through a cargo hatch on the underside of the fuselage. "You can walk from here," the driver said. As he worked at getting the truck turned around, Zannis and Byer trudged across a field, wind-driven snow in their faces. When they neared the plane, one of the men saw them, stopped loading, and waited until they reached him. "You are the passengers?"

  "Yes."

  "Bad morning."

  "Will we be able to fly?" Byer said.

  "Me?" The man grinned. He had high, sharp cheekbones, hair sheared off close to the scalp, and, Zannis could hear it, a hard Slavic edge to his French. A Russian? A Serb? He wore a leather jacket and a dirty white scarf spotted with oil--a cinema aviator--with a holstered revolver on his hip. "You give us a hand," he said. "We'll take off sooner."

  The crates were heavy, MAS 38 stenciled on the rough wooden boards. Zannis wasn't certain, but he had a pretty good hunch he was loading French machine guns. When they were done, the pilot's helper headed toward a farmhouse on the horizon. The pilot rubbed his hands and looked up at the sky. "One of you can sit on the crates, the other can use the co-pilot seat." He led them around the plane, to a door behind the cockpit with a short steel-frame ladder propped against the bottom of the doorway.

  Standing at the foot of the ladder, Zannis waited for Byer to climb up. When he didn't, Zannis said, "Time to go." He sounded cheerful, but he knew he had trouble.

  Byer stood there. He was in a trance, face dead white, eyes closed.

  "Harry?"

  No answer.

  "Let's go," Zannis said sharply. No nonsense, please. The pilot was staring at them through the cockpit window.

  But Byer was rooted to the earth. Zannis guessed that something had happened to him when the Wellington went down, and now he couldn't get on the plane.

  The pilot's patience was gone, the engines roared to life and the propellers spun. Zannis tried once more, raising his voice over the noise. "One foot in front of the other, Harry, your way back to England. Think about England, going home."

  Byer never moved. So Zannis took him by the back of the collar and the belt, hauled him up the ladder, and shoved him into the plane. Then he sat him down on a pile of crates. From the cockpit, the pilot called out, "I have a bottle of vodka up here, will that help?"

  "No, it's all right now," Zannis yelled back, closing the door, pulling a bar down to secure it.

  The plane began to bump across the field, gathering speed, then, heavily loaded, it wobbled aloft and climbed into the gray cloud.

  Melissa stood on her hind legs, tail wagging furiously, set her great paws on his chest and licked his face. "Yes, yes girl, I'm back, hello, yes." The welcome from his family was no less enthusiastic--they knew he'd been up to something dangerous and were relieved that he'd returned. A demand that he stay for dinner was gently turned aside; he wanted to go back to his apartment, to his bed, because he wanted to sleep more than he wanted to eat. So he promised he would return the following night and, by the time he let Melissa out the door, his grandmother was already at her sewing machine, working the pedals, restitching the lining of his jacket. As he walked down the hill toward the waterfront, Melissa ran ahead of him, turning from time to time to make sure he hadn't again vanished, a sickle slice of moon stood low in the night sky, the streets were quiet, it was good to be home.

  The flight to Bulgaria had been uneventful. At one point--was it Germany down there? Austria?--a pair of patrolling Messerschmitts came up to have a look at them, then banked and slid away. Perhaps the French king had permission to fly his crates over Germany--from some office, in some building. Perhaps more than one office, perhaps more than one building, perhaps more than one country. Perhaps the French king could do whatever he wanted; it had not been easy for him to find room in his briefcase for the two thousand dollars. Zannis had, in time, accepted the pilot's invitation to sit in the co-pilot's seat. From there he watched the passage of the nameless winter land below, the hills and the rivers, and wondered what to do about the crates. Machine guns to Bulgaria? For who? To shoot who? So, say something to Lazareff? Who worked for the Sofia police. Tell them? Tell Bulgaria--the historic enemy of Greece? He'd given his word to the French king, he would keep it. Did that include the crates?

  In the end, it didn't matter.

  Because the pilot landed at a military airfield north of Sofia, and a squad of Bulgarian soldiers was waiting to unload the shipment. The officer in charge at the airfield had no idea what to do with unexpected, and unexplained, passengers, and had pretty much decided to hold them at the base and await orders from above. But then, at Zannis's insistence, he'd made a telephone call to Captain Lazareff, which produced a police car and a driver, who dropped them off at a restaurant in Sofia.

  There, over plates of lamb and pilaf, accompanied by a bottle of Mastika, Lazareff and Zannis conversed in German, which excluded Byer, who, now back on solid ground, hardly cared. Lazareff inquired politely about the flight, Zannis responded politely that it had been smooth and easy. Lazareff suggested--still polite, though with a certain tightness at the corners of the mouth--that it would be better if Zannis were to forget he'd seen the plane's cargo.

  "What cargo?"

  "You'll tell your friend there? Whoever he is?"

  "What friend?"

  "Ha-ha-ha!"

  More Mastika, tasting like anise, and lethal.

  "By the way," Lazareff said, "the situation in Roumania is a little worse than the newspapers are letting on. We calculate six hundred and eighty thousan
d troops, maybe sixty Wehrmacht divisions, artillery, tanks, all of it. They have to be fed, it isn't cheap, so they're obviously there for a reason. Probably they're meant to intimidate us or, if it comes to that, invade. Or maybe they're there to threaten the Serbs, or maybe Greece. Our response, so far, has been to tell Hitler that we're not quite ready to sign his pact."

  "Not quite ready?"

  "Not quite. We've destroyed the bridges over the Danube."

  "That would be a message, I'd think."

  "A tantrum. We've seen the materiel, struts and floats, that can be assembled into pontoon bridges."

  "I appreciate your telling me," Zannis said.

  "I expect your generals know all about it," Lazareff said. "But I think you should know also, Costa, so you can make your own, personal ... arrangements. If you see what I mean."

  From there, they'd moved to lunchtime conversation. And by midafternoon, after Zannis had telephoned Escovil, and with exit visas provided by Lazareff, Zannis and Byer were on the train to Salonika. At six-thirty in the evening, Byer was delivered to Escovil at the Pension Bastasini. "How did you get here so quickly?" Escovil said, accusation in his voice.

  "It's a long story," Zannis said. "For another time."

  "You didn't travel on the trains," Escovil said. It wasn't a question.

  "You were watching, weren't you."

  "Of course. So we'll want you to explain."

  "Later," Zannis said. "I'm going to see my family." He was exhausted, at the last available edge of patience. Escovil knew what came next, so left it there and, a brief taxi ride later, Melissa came to the door to greet the returning hero.

  Back at his apartment, the hero was exhausted--threw the mail on the kitchen table, washed his hands, and flopped down on the bed. But then, his mind charged with the images of the past few days, he realized he was not going to be able to sleep any time soon, so took off his shoes and socks and covered himself with a blanket. He tried to return to Inspector Maigret, waiting on his night table, but memories of the real Paris intruded and the book lay open on his chest while he brooded about them. Uncle Anastas was a shining example of survival, even prosperity, in an occupied city, but that was Anastas, who could deal with anything. So could he, come to that, but his family couldn't. According to Lazareff, time was growing short, the Balkans would be overrun, and Zannis had to make plans to save his family. Where could they go? How, once he became involved in resistance and likely in hiding, would he support them? The Germans would eventually figure out who had shot their SS officer, would they dare to come after him in Greece? Maybe not, but they would be looking for him the day they entered the city.

  For these problems he had no solutions, so tried Maigret again but couldn't concentrate--Madame Cavard was who? Time was running short--so why was he alone on this bed? What was Demetria doing? In bed herself? In bed with Vasilou? What a bastard, the bully he'd heard on the telephone. So, there was also Demetria to save. What if he telephoned ...?

  He woke with a start, then turned off the lamp. While he'd slept, Maigret had disappeared. No, there he was, under the blanket.

  ESCAPE FROM SALONIKA

  10 FEBRUARY, 1941.

  Well before dawn, Costa Zannis woke from a night of bizarre and frightening dreams. He lay there with his eyes open, supremely grateful that none of it was real and so, fearing that further horrors awaited him if he went back to sleep, forced himself to get out of bed. He washed, dressed for work, let Melissa out the door, and walked down to the waterfront corniche, to a kafeneion that stayed open all night for the stevedores and sailors of the port. There he drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and stared out the window, where the sky was streaked with red cloud as the sun, coming up over the Aegean, lit the whitecaps in the bay and the snow on Mount Olympus in the distance. The fishing caiques were headed out to sea, attended by flocks of seagulls, their cries sharp in the morning silence.

  The kafeneion was quiet, only the sleepy waiter, a fiftyish prostitute with dyed-red hair, and a man dressed in merchant seaman's sweater and wool watch cap. Zannis took a morning paper from the counter and looked at the headlines: somebody had taken a potshot at the mayor, the bullet punching a hole in his briefcase and coming to rest in the sheaves of official paper packed inside.

  The prostitute was watching Zannis as he read and said, "Terrible thing."

  Zannis mumbled an assent--it was too early in the morning to talk, and, once he went to work, a full day's talking lay ahead of him.

  Turning to the seaman, she said, "Don't you think? Shooting at a mayor?"

  The man raised his hands and shrugged; he did not understand Greek.

  "Always something here," the waiter said. "They never catch them, people like that."

  But, Zannis found when he reached the office, they already had. Sort of. "What they say in the papers"--Saltiel had his feet up on the desk, his jacket over the back of the chair--"is that he was shot at, yesterday morning, while getting into his car. True, as far as it goes. But the detective who questioned the mayor told me that he was getting into the backseat, because he has a driver, and his left foot was up on the floorboard as he bent over to go through the door, with his briefcase in his left hand, swung slightly behind him. Try it, Costa, and you'll see what went on."

  "What?"

  "The way the detective sees it, somebody tried to shoot him in the backside."

  "A warning?"

  "More like a lesson. I talked to some people, especially the mayor's secretary, who knows all, and what happened is that the mayor's wife caught him in bed with his girlfriend and made him cut her loose. Girlfriend doesn't like it--she thought she was the one and only--so she goes out and hires somebody to pop him one in the ass. Or maybe she did it herself. She's nobody to fool with, according to the secretary."

  "The mayor never turned around? Never saw anybody?"

  "At the time they thought, the mayor and the driver, they'd heard a car backfire. Or at least that's what they told the detectives." Saltiel raised his eyebrows. "According to the mayor, he didn't realize he'd been shot at until he got to his desk and opened the briefcase. The bullet stopped right in the middle of Papadopoulos v. City of Salonika."

  "So, case closed," Zannis said.

  "Not around here, it isn't. The mayor can't have that in the newspapers, so the investigation is transferred to this office and we're supposed to question a few Communists, or Macedonian terrorists, or whatever we can think up. At least tell the press we're doing it."

  "Maybe a disappointed office seeker," Zannis said.

  "Yes, that's good. Or a lunatic."

  "Well, we're not going hunting for lunatics, but somebody better talk to the girlfriend and tell her not to try that again."

  "Somebody?" Saltiel said.

  "All right, Gabi, get me a telephone number."

  There was more that had gone on in his absence. Saltiel opened his desk drawer and handed Zannis a message from Emilia Krebs. In ochre letters above the lines of the typed commercial paragraphs she said that three men and two women would be leaving Berlin on the eleventh of February, adding that she had no knowledge of the man seen on the platform of the Skoplje railway station. The secret writing was far more legible than what Zannis had been able to produce. "Who heated the letter?" he asked Saltiel.

  "Sibylla. I never used an iron in my life."

  "Well done, Sibylla," Zannis said. "Did you send the teletypes?"

  "I did," Sibylla said. "They were confirmed, and I made copies for you."

  "Thank you," Zannis said. "And I mean it."

  "Oh, you're welcome," she said, both surprised and pleased that Zannis was so grateful. "I'll do the next one too, if you like."

  As Saltiel returned to his desk, Zannis prepared to telephone Demetria's house. He'd almost done it the night before, because the time he'd spent in Paris--the Germans, the shooting, the escape--had had its effect on him. On the flight to Sofia he'd thought, in fact told himself, your time is running out, and more than onc
e. Now he was going to reach for her, any way he could, and to hell with the consequences. But, as his hand moved toward the telephone, it rang.

  "Yes? Hello?"

  "Hello. I'm calling from the Bastasini."

  Escovil. "And?"

  "I understand you were tired last night, but I would like to talk to you, as soon as possible." Escovil was trying to sound casual, but his voice was strained and tense.

  "I can't, right now," Zannis said, cold as ice. "I'm busy."

  The line hissed. "Some people I know are very, concerned."

  "Why? They got what they wanted."

  "They'd like to know--the details."

  "Ask him."

  "Um, he isn't sure how it worked. So they're, well, anxious to hear your story. And this would be better in person, not on the telephone."

  Instead of attacking Escovil, because the urge to do that was very powerful, Zannis took a deep breath. "You know where I am."

  "Yes."

  "I'll see you downstairs, in the vestibule, in ten minutes. There's something I have to do first, so you may have to wait for me."

  When Escovil answered, it sounded as though he were reading a sentence he'd written out beforehand. "Actually, my friends would like to meet you. To thank you. In person."

  "Come over here in ten minutes, and come alone. Understood?"

  Escovil hesitated, then said, "I'm on my way."

  Zannis hung up, but didn't leave the receiver on the cradle long enough for a dial tone, so had to do it again.

  A maid answered.

  "Is Madam Vasilou there?"

  "Gone away." This was a different maid; she barely spoke Greek.

  "What do you mean, 'gone away'?"

  She tried harder, raising her voice. "They gone."

  "Where did they go?"

  "Gone away," the maid said, and hung up.

  Zannis made himself wait ten minutes, then walked down the stairs. He couldn't believe what had happened; where were they? Had they left the country? He wanted to break something. And here, on top of it all, was Escovil. Who hadn't put on a coat, had instead looped a woolen scarf around his neck, stuffed the ends inside his buttoned jacket, and turned the collar up. With the addition of brown leather gloves, he looked like a country squire going up to London on an autumn day.