by Ross Thomas
Arrie Tonzi sat up front with the embassy driver and pointed out a few sights, but she really didn’t have her heart in it. When we pulled up at the Metropol, I asked her to join us in a drink, but she shook her head no and said that she had to get back to the embassy.
“Change your mind about the drink,” Wisdom urged.
She smiled and shook her head. “Some other time,” she said.
“It is Miss Tonzi, isn’t it?” he said.
“Miss Tonzi, twenty-six, a maiden lady of uncertain prospects.”
“If only you’d forget your pride and let me help you!” Wisdom said or cried, I guess, with an appropriate gesture.
“He is sort of cute, if a little pudgy,” she said to Knight.
Knight put his hands on her shoulders and stared down at her. “There’s something wrong with his glands, but here in Belgrade there’s a doctor who may be able to help. Still, over the years there have been many doctors, and if this treatment fails, well—”
“Jesus,” she said to me. “Does it go on like this all the time?”
“Only when they’ve got an audience.”
“You can check in and get up to your rooms by yourselves, can’t you?”
“I think we can manage.”
“It’s going to be fun, I can tell.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said.
Arrie Tonzi had a pretty little face with a mouth that kept going in and out of an uncertain smile, eyes that were too large one moment and squinted up into smiling arcs the next, a fair complexion that probably tanned well in summer, and a good enough figure which you could see most of if you peeped, and she didn’t seem to care much if you did. I suppose she was one of the first volunteers in the no-bra movement. She stood now in what seemed to be her favorite stance, her legs planted a little widely apart, her fists on her hips, trying to make her 102 or 103 pounds look tough and aggressive and not missing the desired effect by more than a couple of miles. She wanted to say something and she wasn’t quite sure how she should say it but she was damned sure going to say it anyhow.
“Is what you’re going to do going to be dangerous? I mean getting the ambassador back?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. If it were going to be dangerous, they probably would have sent somebody else.”
“Well—” She stopped and then started over again. “Well, I mean, if it is going to be dangerous and you need some help, well, what I mean is you can—oh, hell, I know it sounds corny, but goddamn it, St. Ives, you can call on me.”
“Thanks, Arrie. I appreciate that. I really do.”
She looked at me carefully. “Like shit you do,” she said and turned and walked back to the embassy car.
We made it up to our rooms without any trouble and I was lying down, testing the bed, when the phone rang. There was no one I wanted to talk to, not Knight or Wisdom or Arrie Tonzi or Artur Bjelo or Anton Pernik or Amfred Killingsworth, especially not Amfred Killingsworth, but I picked up the phone on its third double ring and answered it anyway.
“Mr. St. Ives?” It was a man’s voice, accented, a little muffled.
“Yes,” I said.
“Jovan Tavro here.”
“All right,” I said. “You name it, where and when?”
“Good,” he said. “You are quick—no nonsense. I like that.”
“Fine,” I said. “Name it.”
“The Café Nemoguće,” he said. “It’s near the Central Station. Nemoguće means ‘impossible’ in English. That is funny, is it not?” and he laughed harshly to let me know that he at least thought so.
“Very,” I said. “What time?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Any recognition?”
“Order some plejescavitsa,” he said. “An American eating plejescavitsa should be recognizable enough.”
“I can’t even pronounce it,” I said, but he had already hung up.
9
I TOOK A 1939 Plymouth taxi to the Central Station and walked from there. With sign language, a smattering of German, and a few phrases of French, I was directed north along Gavrila Principa past Kamenica Street and then left on a street that dead-ended into a triangular-shaped park that seemed to be about three blocks from the Sava River.
The wind blew in from the river, cold and wet. There was hardly any traffic and the pedestrians looked as if they were in a hurry to get home to a glass of something warm. The Café Nemoguće had been allotted an impossibly narrow slice of the ground floor of a new office building, grudgingly it seemed, and on fair days there was room on the sidewalk to set out the half-dozen tables and their chairs which were now neatly stacked near the entrance. I suppose the café got its name from its narrow width, which was no more than nine feet, but inside it seemed to run back forever.
I chose a table near the door and the newspaper rack. The café was neither crowded nor empty and most of the customers seemed deeply involved in their conversation which they carried on in voices loud enough for me to overhear or perhaps even join if I could have spoken the language.
I’ve never tried to pass for a native in any European country, not even in London where, if you keep your mouth shut, you might have a fifty-fifty chance. But in the rest of Europe, unless you’ve lived there long enough to get a haircut and buy some clothes off the peg, you might as well have “Donated by U.S.A.” stamped right across your forehead. It’s in the walk maybe, or the shape of the butt, or perhaps the facial expression, but almost anyone can spot Americans in Europe, even if they keep their mouths shut and even if they’re alone, although neither happens very often.
So it was no surprise when the waiter welcomed me in English to his country, city, neighborhood, and café and then asked in German how things were going back in the States and how long I’d been in Yugoslavia and then switched to Serbo-Croatian to ask what I wanted to eat (at least he kept pointing at the menu) and then nodded his melancholy agreement when I told him that I’d try the plejescavitsa.
“Und ein Schnapps, ja?” he said, back in German again, and I agreed that ein Schnapps was just what I needed so he brought me a large thimbleful of slivovica which is a plum brandy of about 140 proof whose warming qualities were so reassuring that I promptly called for another round.
The plejescavitsa turned out to be a dozen balls of well-seasoned ground meat—beef, veal and pork, I think—with some odd bits of lamb and sweet pepper that had been spitted and grilled. It was quite good, as was the salad that came with it, and the combined culinary success seemed to call for another slivovica. I was halfway through it when the man with the face like an unhappy carp sat down at my table. I smiled and nodded at him and started to ask if he’d care for a drink, but before I could speak, he said, “We can talk here as well as anyplace. I’m Tavro.”
“You care for anything?” I said.
“Coffee.”
I ordered two coffees from the waiter who nodded familiarly at Tavro as if he were a regular customer. The coffee was a Turkish legacy, sweet and thick and black, and Tavro sipped his noisily.
“You know anyone called Bjelo who looks something like me but who’s about ten years younger?”
“No,” Tavro said. “Why do you ask?”
“I keep running into him. I thought he might be interested in you.”
Tavro wagged his thick head from side to side. “Nobody has much official interest in me now except for the pair that keeps me under surveillance. But since I make it a point to be here every night, they no longer come inside but sleep in their car instead.”
“Have you tried this before?” I said.
“To leave? No. I’ve had no reason to.”
“But you have one now?”
Tavro was somewhere in his late fifties, not tall but big-boned and wide, except for his shoulders which seemed curiously narrow until I realized that his thick neck made them appear that way. The neck was corded with heavy muscles and tendons that gave it a fluted appearance, something like a sturdy Doric column. His head was
not much wider than his neck, dished in shape, and it turned carefully and slowly as if it were kept up there with the aid of a brace. It was a peculiarly Slavic face with high cheekbones that planed out from the curved nose which beaked toward the wide, petty mouth. It was a hard, mean, ugly face and I wondered how much of it Tavro was responsible for.
“Is your task to interrogate me, Mr. St. Ives, or to help me get across the border?”
“When I think I need to ask questions, I will, so I’ll ask another one right now. Which border? You’ve got seven of them.”
“Not the Albanian, of course,” he said.
“No.”
“And I despise Hungarians, which eliminates that. The Greeks are still impossible, the Rumanians inhospitable, and I never did trust a Bulgar, so that leaves either Italy or Austria, doesn’t it?”
“Either one?”
“Either one.”
“All right,” I said.
“When?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“How?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Tavro folded his big-knuckled hands on the table. The hair on their backs was black and white and matched the thick, shortcropped covering on his head. His eyebrows, however, were still a fierce, bristly black and the pale blue eyes that glared out at me from beneath them shone not with tears, but with a contempt so intense that it glistened.
“Do you work for your government, Mr. St. Ives?”
“No.”
“You are an entrepreneur, a free agent of sorts?”
“Of sorts.”
“Then there is none that I can complain to?”
“None I can think of, unless you want to try the ambassador, but I understand he’s pretty busy right now.”
“That fool.”
“You tried him, didn’t you?”
“It was a mistake. He offered much in exchange for what I gave him, but returned nothing.”
“He’s like that,” I said.
“Do you know him?”
“I know him.”
“Do you think there is a chance that his kidnappers might kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would be convenient, if they did.”
“Convenient for whom?” I said.
He shrugged. “For mankind, let’s say.”
I nodded. “When I come up with a scheme to get you out, how do I get in touch?”
“Thank you for saying when and not if,” Tavro said and took a small notebook from his dark, boxlike coat, wrote something down, tore out a page, and handed it to me. There was an address and a name; the name was Bill Jones.
“Bill Jones?” I said.
He nodded, smiling and chuckling nastily, much as he had done over the phone when he found the name of the café amusing. “He is a countryman of yours and an old friend of mine. We were together during the war. Afterwards, because of a girl, my friend Bill Jones came back and now here he lives.” He pronounced Jones as if it began with a Y, but that’s what happens to the J in Yugoslavia.
“What’s he do?” I said.
Tavro shrugged. “He has done what any man must do to earn his living. He has driven a lorry and laid bricks and carpentered and dug ditches and repaired machinery. He is a man who can use his hands but who has never worked in a factory. And to my knowledge he has never worked long at anything, but still he has raised a family.”
“What’s he do when he’s not working?” I said.
“He fishes and when he’s not fishing, he hunts. And when he’s doing neither, he sits in the café and drinks his brandy and reads his newspaper and gossips with the rest. He is not an intellectual, Mr. St. Ives. He is just a man who fought well during the war, liked the country in which he fought, and who returned to live and work in it. And if he did not work too hard or make too great a contribution, what does that matter?”
“Not much,” I said.
“Do you find it strange that an American would do this?”
“I’d find it strange if many did it, but not one.”
“He has no politics. If you wish to get a message to me, leave it with him.”
“It’ll probably be a few days,” I said.
“It must be no longer than that.”
“You’re in a hurry?”
Tavro produced a cigarette and carefully turned it in his big fingers before lighting it. “I assume that you know who I was at one time and what post I held?”
I nodded. “Confidential assistant to the head of your secret police. I don’t remember what they call it.”
“They call it the UDBA,” he said. “I was accused, whether justly or unjustly is of no matter now, along with Vice-President Rankovic and removed from my post. For the past several years I have done little. I have read a great deal, something I never had time for before, and I have raised some fine flowers—do you care for flowers, Mr. St. Ives, for roses, especially?”
“Roses are fine,” I said.
“I have been exceptionally fortunate with mine. But to continue, I have lived these past few years, except for the surveillance which is now only cursory, much as a man in exile might live. I have few friends, none of them in government. My family is scattered, my wife is dead. So I thought that I had been forgotten, as a deposed politician should be. I was mistaken.”
“How?”
“There are those who want the information I have. At first they tried to persuade me. I refused. Then they threatened me and—” He spread his hands. “I believed them.”
“So you went to see Killingsworth,” I said.
“Yes. A fatuous man, but still shrewd enough not to offer me help unless I first gave him the information—one hundred and two pages of it.”
“And then he got kidnapped,” I said.
“Yes,” Tavro said, nodding a little cynically. “Kidnapped. Convenient wasn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “How long do you think you have?”
“Before what?”
“Before whoever wants you to give them that information carries out their threat—whatever it is.”
“The threat, Mr. St. Ives, is that they will kill me. I have every reason to believe them.”
I nodded. “All right. How long do you have?”
He shrugged. “Five days, possibly six.” He gestured almost apologetically. “There is no set deadline.”
“That’s still cutting it thin,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. St. Ives, it is. You have only a few hours to come up with a successful plan. However, there is one consolation.”
“What?”
He rose, leaned toward me over the table, and smiled unpleasantly. It may have been the only way he could smile. “If the plan that you devise in these next few days and hours fails,” he said, “it is entirely possible that you will have several years of solitude to determine why it did. Laku noc.”
10
AT EIGHT THE NEXT morning there was a call from Arrie Tonzi who said that she was downstairs with a mumbled name who was the embassy’s press or public affairs attaché and that they were on their way up. I immediately ordered coffee and then went into the bathroom and by the time I came out they were knocking at the door.
“You’re early, aren’t you?” I said as she came in wearing a blue dress whose skirt was even shorter than the one she’d worn the day before. I noticed that she still dragged the long suede coat.
“Not really,” she said, picking out a chair and crossing her legs before she sank into it. “The normal Yugoslav workday is seven till two. Philip St. Ives, Gordon Lehmann. Gordon’s the public affairs attaché.”
I shook hands with a middling-tall man in his late twenties whose shy, pleasant face looked far too honest for him ever to do well in public relations. “I’ve got fifty reporters in town yelling for a statement and I haven’t got anything to tell them,” he said. “All we can get out of Washington is to check with you.”
“They’ve got the ransom demand, haven’t t
hey?” I said.
“They’ve already milked that dry. They want to talk to the go-between.”
“Can’t they get something out of Anton Pernik?”
“He won’t talk to them. Or at least that’s what the four government cops who’re guarding his apartment say.”
“Have they issued any statement?”
“The government?”
I nodded and Lehmann said, “Only a new version about how for humanitarian reasons and to maintain the excellent relations that they enjoy with the U.S. government they will release Pernik from protective custody et cetera and so on.”
“You’d better throw them a fish.”
“How?” he said.
I turned to Arrie Tonzi. “What time’s my appointment with the guy at the Ministry of Interior?”
“With Bartak? At eleven.”
I looked at Lehmann. “Why don’t you set up a press conference for me here at the hotel at half past noon?”
“You really want to talk to them?” he said and I was sure then that his honesty would forever bar him from the big time which might be too bad for the country, if not for him.
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to talk to them, but I’ll have to eventually and I’d rather choose the time than have a couple of them pop up from behind the hedgerow just as I’m handing Pernik over for the ambassador.”
He nodded and then asked, “Have you heard from the kidnappers?”
“We’d also better get the rules straight,” I said. “If I hear from the kidnappers, I may or may not decide to tell you about it. It depends entirely on what kind of proposal they make. This is going to be a tricky exchange because it involves not only three persons, but also a million dollars. When I accepted this assignment in Washington, I was assured that I would be in full charge. If I still am, then I’ll have to run it my way.”
It was a pompous little speech full of lies and distortions, with only a kernel or two of truth, and I was sorry that I had to feed it to Lehmann who seemed like a decent enough person, the kind who should be teaching journalism at some state university, but it contained a lot of what I was going to give the press so I had to see how well it went down. It went down so well that I thought Lehmann might lick his lips for more.
