Protocol for a Kidnapping

by Ross Thomas

  “You’ve been here a long time, I understand,” I said.

  “Since forty-eight,” he said. “It was as soon as I could get back in. We got married then.”

  “Have you been back to the States since?”

  “No, but I got a kid over there now, my oldest boy. He’s going to Brown on a scholarship.” He paused to drain his slivovica in a quick gulp. “Tavro told you about me being with the Partisans, didn’t he?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “They parachuted me in. September of forty-four.”

  “OSS?”

  His eyes narrowed slightly, some, but not much. “Yeah, OSS. I was a radio man, but the radio got busted in the drop so they handed me a machine gun instead. That’s what I did until it was over. I met Roza here Christmas Day, 1944.” His wife brightened and smiled at the sound of her name. She sat in a straight-backed chair, her feet barely touching the floor, and sipped her coffee and plum brandy, politely following the conversation with her eyes, if not with her ears.

  “Where’d you know Tavro?” I said.

  “U šume—in the woods,” Jones said. “He was Rankovic’s dog robber. We got to know each other pretty well and we’ve kept in touch over the years. We’ve gone hunting some together. He was with me when I got that wolf up there.”

  “He told you I’m getting him out,” I said.

  Jones gave me a long, level stare before he replied. “He told me that you were going to try.”

  “He says he’s afraid of being killed.”

  Once again Jones was silent before he made his comment, as if he had only so many phrases to spend and he didn’t want to part with any of them carelessly. “He’s a Serb,” he said finally.

  “What’s that mean?”

  Jones turned his heavy head toward his wife and spoke to her in Serbo-Croatian. She smiled, nodded, gathered up our glasses and cups on the tray, and headed toward the rear of the house. The cat jumped off Jones’s lap and followed her, its tail a moving exclamation mark. “She’s a Serb, too,” Jones said. “If I asked her how were things in town today, she might say fine, and let it go at that, or she might take the rest of the afternoon to tell me, part of the time laughing about what happened and part of the time crying, even if she did no more than buy some thread. But if she’s in the mood, she can make buying a spool of thread a hell of an adventure that’s full of all sorts of meaning. If she’s in the mood and most of the time, being a Serb, she is. Tavro’s like that.”

  “You mean he’s not in any danger?”

  “I mean he’s a Serb and if he thinks he’s in danger of being killed, he likes to talk about it. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t. I think he is, but then I’m just a construction worker.”

  “Why?”

  “You mean why do I think he’s in danger?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You follow the politics here closely?”

  “Some.”

  “You remember in sixty-six when they were talking about a public trial for Rankovic?”

  “Yes.”

  “But nothing came of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know why?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, one, it would be like putting the American Secretary of State on trial. What’s his name—uh—”

  “Rogers.”

  “Rogers, yeah. I keep thinking Rusk, but it’s Rogers now. But it would be like putting Rusk or Rogers on trial for treason. That’s one. Now suppose Rusk or Rogers was not only Secretary of State, but also head of the FBI and the CIA combined. What if he was that?”

  “I thought Rankovic was vice-president.”

  “He was, but what the hell does an American vice-president do?”

  “You’re right.”

  “So what if it was like I said?”

  “It would scare Congress silly,” I said.

  “Especially if it was brought out that the Secretary of State had bugged not only the White House, but also the offices and homes of the entire cabinet and had it fixed up so that he could listen in on all their phone calls from his own bedroom.”

  “Is that what the setup was?”

  “The big shots live out in a fancy Belgrade suburb called Dedinje. Rankovic lived at twenty-five Uzicka Street. The telephone system was rigged so that he was tapped into any house that had a lower number than his. Tito’s address is fifteen Uzicka. Hell, there was even a tap on the phone in Tito’s bedroom. It was all in the papers. So they kicked Rankovic out of the party, fired him as vice-president and head of the UDBA, but refused to give him a public trial. Guess why?”

  “He might embarrass somebody.”

  “Enough to fill a graveyard. Everything they accused Rankovic of doing, they’d done, too, and that means kickbacks, importing cars tax free and then selling them, letting the government pay for their fancy villas, operating private gambling joints, even using convict labor. You name it. Rankovic had the goods on them and when he wasn’t monitoring those phones, guess who was?”

  “Tavro,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And he know all the dirt.”

  “Most of it anyway.”

  “So somebody’s scared that he’ll talk.”

  “They should be.”

  “But it all happened in 1966,” I said.

  Jones took his time to remove a cigarette from a leather case. He looked at it, rolled it in his fingers, and then lit it with a match. “Tito was born in 1892,” he said. “How much longer you give him?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “It’s a nice job,” Jones said, “and a lot of people want it. Now if you thought you might be in line for it, and there was somebody around who might know something that would embarrass you, you might just make a wish that this person would disappear.”

  And if a certain government had this information, I thought, and used it discreetly and wisely, it could help determine who would, or would not, head the pecking order in Yugoslavia once its uncontested leader was no longer Josip Broz Tito. Of course, things would fell apart if this same information were to be prematurely spread across the front page of a large American newspaper that just happened to be owned by the U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia. If that danger threatened, you just might do something to prevent it. You might even kidnap your own ambassador.

  I suddenly realized that Jones was looking at me expectantly. “I said do you want another drink?” he said.

  “No thanks.”

  “I’ll get word to Tavro.”

  I rose. “Any idea of where I can get a cab?”

  He shook his head. “Not much chance around here and I haven’t got a phone. I’ll walk you to the bus.”

  I smiled and said good-bye to Mrs. Jones as her husband slipped into a heavy gray overcoat. He said something to her in Serbo-Croatian and she nodded and smiled at me and said, “Good-bye.” It may have been the only English she knew.

  “You ever think of going back to the States?” I said as we walked down the narrow street.

  “Not much,” Jones said. “She has her family here and I don’t have anyone but a brother, so it doesn’t make much sense. But it was rough at first.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They didn’t know what to make of me. They must have had me followed for two years. There was a hell of a mess about work permits and so on. I’m just lucky that I own half a farm in Nebraska or we might have starved. My brother sent me my share. Finally, Tavro got Rankovic to put a stop to it. They just think I’m the nutty American now.”

  “You like it here, huh?”

  He smiled at me. It was a curious smile, tinged with a kind of sad pride. “I like my wife and you can’t beat the fishing,” he said. “But it wasn’t all my idea.”

  We crossed the street and turned left. “Whose was it?”

  “You can catch the bus here,” he said. “It’ll take you to the Trg Republike and you can catch a cab or walk from there.”

  “Whos
e idea was it?” I said again.

  He looked at me and then cleared his throat magnificently in true Yugoslav fashion and spat in the gutter. “Washington’s,” he said. “I’m supposed to be a sleeper. You know what a sleeper is?”

  I told him that I did and he nodded. “Yeah, I thought that you might. Well, that was twenty-three years ago and I was young then. But I’m older now and since I haven’t heard a word in all that time you might just tell them something for me if you ever get the chance when you’re back in Washington.”

  “What?”

  “Tell them not to wake me up.” He nodded brusquely, turned, and walked off down the street.

  15

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK THAT afternoon I was knocking on the door of Anton Pernik’s apartment under the expectant gaze of one of the plainclothes guards who was far more interested in getting a look at Gordana Panić than he was in me.

  He gave her his best smile when she opened the door, but she didn’t smile back. She looked at me for a long moment and said, “Come in, Mr. St. Ives. You’re just in time.”

  I followed her into the sitting room. She turned to survey it and then pointed at the large chair where her grandfather had held forth when I’d been there the first time.

  “Sit there,” she said, “it’s comfortable. I’ll get us some brandy.”

  She disappeared through a door and I looked around the room and it seemed much the same. The pictures of the men with their high collars and their slicked-back hair were still on the walls. The books were still behind the glass doors of their cases.

  If anything had changed, it was Gordana. She had on a different dress, a dark red one that was shorter than the one she’d worn previously; but anyone can wear a new dress. Not everyone can wear a new mood that is so pronounced that it manifests a noticeably different personality.

  When she came back with the brandy I said, “How is your grandfather?”

  She didn’t answer until she served the drinks and was sitting in a straight-backed chair next to mine, the same one she had sat in during my other visit. I had to turn slightly to see her. She looked at me over the rim of her glass. “He’s been detained,” she said.

  “Will he be back soon?” I said.

  “No,” she said, “not soon.”

  “I’ve heard from the kidnappers,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said and drained her brandy. Her answer wasn’t quite what I expected.

  “They want to exchange Killingsworth tomorrow night. In a place near Sarajevo.”

  “I think I would like another brandy,” she said. “Would you care for one?”

  “Why not?” I said and watched her move across the room. There seemed to be a difference in the way she walked, but it could have been the shorter dress. Maybe it was the brandy. I looked around the room again and I knew how it had changed. Nothing had been added, but something had been taken away. All the religious artifacts—the crosses, the paintings of Jesus and Mary, a carved ivory representation of the crucifixion, agonizing in its detail, and a number of other religious oils were gone, leaving pale outlines of where they had hung against the darker wallpaper.

  When Gordana came back with the brandy, I said, “I see you’ve moved some things around. Are you thinking of taking them with you?”

  She looked around the room, sipped her brandy, and nodded vaguely, “I moved them,” she said, adding, “to a more appropriate room.” Once more she looked at me over the rim of her glass. “Are you a religious person, Mr. St. Ives?”

  “Not terribly,” I said. “Hardly at all, in fact.”

  “Are you an atheist like Tito?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you are not a Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “If someone asked what your nationality was, what would you say?”

  I looked at her. She had finished her second glass of brandy and she was smiling at me. It was a mischievous smile, but the look in her eyes was more than that. It was wicked.

  “I’d say. American, I guess. Or United States citizen.

  “But you have fifty states. Would you not say New Yorker or California-uh-an? Is that right?”

  “That’s right, but I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t even say Ohioan, although that’s where I was born.”

  “If you asked anyone in this country what they were, they would say Serb or Croat or Slovene or Montenegrin. I think Gospodin Tito is our only true Yugoslav, but then he’s only half Croat. His mother was a Slovene.”

  “What would you call yourself?” I said.

  “I would call myself Gospodjica Gordana,” she said, rising. She twirled and her red skirt twirled with her, giving me a fine full view of what I was sure were the world’s most beautiful legs. “Citizen Gordana,” she said, holding her glass aloft, “citizen of the world.”

  “Nice,” I said, referring to her legs, but indicating the plum brandy.

  “Would you like some more?”

  “What are we celebrating?” I said.

  She put her glass down and grasped the two arms of my chair and leaned forward until her face was close to mine. Very close. A quick glance down assured me that she, too, had joined the no-bra league. I had a hard time deciding where to rest my eyes, but finally decided on her face which was lovely and interesting and, after all, very close to mine. It would have been impolite not to.

  “We are celebrating, Gospodin St. Ives, me!”

  Well, there wasn’t anything else to do so I did it. I kissed her. She knew how to do it. Her tongue darted into my mouth, seeking, caressing, a warm, wet determined explorer. I soon found that she wore nothing under her dress and that her skin was as smooth and delightful to touch as it was to look at. Her hands got busy too and then we were naked on the floor and all over each other, feverishly probing, tasting, and demanding from each other. Nobody gave very much; it was all take, and at that particular time and place it was the way we both wanted it and so that’s what we did. And then she gave a half scream, cutting it off by sinking her teeth into my shoulder as her hips arched high and hard into mine and her nails raked my back. She shuddered violently, once, twice, and then she was pounding her body against mine again and gasping, shuddering once again, but less violently, and then subsiding slowly, quietly.

  We lay there on the Oriental rugs, thinking our own thoughts. I memorized a pattern in one of the rugs. She ran her fingers down the side of my neck. I propped myself up on my elbows and studied her. There was a warm, sexual glow about Gordana that made her indescribably beautiful, but that’s all. Earlier that day, I had looked at another girl who had that same glow, but who was not nearly so beautiful, not half, who had hair that flopped around over a pert, saucy face and I had felt something, tenderness, affection, care. Something. I found myself feeling only admiration for Gordana, which isn’t a hell of a lot of emotion.

  “I am not in love with you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “And you are not in love with me.”

  “That’s good. That makes it simpler.”

  “How?”

  “Do you think I am a little girl?”

  “No.”

  “Amfred did until I taught him otherwise.”

  “Are you in love with him?” I said.

  “With Amfred? With Ambassador Killingsworth?” She smiled mockingly. “He is married.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “He is old.”

  “He’s fifty and he’s rich.”

  “I like him. He is a foolish man, but I like him.”

  “Better than Arso Stepinac who’s not so foolish and not so old and not nearly so rich?”

  “Arso,” she said. “He wanted to be engaged, but how could I be engaged to the Church and to him, too? But I agreed. It was to be a secret. He promised.”

  “Tell me about Killingsworth.”

  “Poor Amfred. He is so clumsy. But nice—like a big, clumsy, friendly dog.”

  “I assume that your grandfather doesn
’t know anything about either Killingsworth or Stepinac.”

  “Or St. Ives?” she said.

  “Or St. Ives.”

  “Or a number of others,” she said and stretched, thrusting herself against me. “You are very good.” She giggled. “I cannot say in the bed so I will say on the floor. You are very good on the floor, Gospodin St. Ives.”

  “Why gospodin?” I said. “Why not comrade?”

  “I am not a Communist,” she said, “but, should the necessity arise—” She shrugged prettily. She did everything prettily and so far she was the prettiest liar I’d ever met.

  “What happened to your engagement to Stepinac?”

  “He became jealous. So I tore it off. Tore is not right, is it?”

  “Broke,” I said, suffering a bad case of déjà vu.

  “Yes, I broke it off. He wrote me many letters. Passionate ones.” She rolled her eyes naughtily. “One could not believe that a man who says he is of the police could be so passionate. There were so many letters that even Grandfather grew suspicious.”

  “Where is your grandfather?” I said. “Or have I asked that before?”

  “He is detained,” she said and closed her eyes and drew me down to her again, snuggling up against me.

  “Where?” I said, propping myself back up on an elbow.

  “Do you think I’m attractive?” she said.

  “You know what I think.”

  “Would I be attractive in New York? Or Washington?”

  “Anywhere.”

  She sighed deeply and snuggled some more. “It would have been so nice in New York, I think. Yes, I would prefer New York. I am tired of living in a capital. Or perhaps I shall become a nun after all,” she said.

  “Isn’t that the plan?”

  She smiled, more to herself than to me. “That is the plan. My engagement to the Church. Such a long engagement. I could not wait.” She pushed me away gently. “But now it doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t?” I said.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing matters because it’s all over.”