White Eagles Over Serbia

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Will you go as far as Belgrade. Not into the mountains, please. Just spend a week or two there and see what you can pick up. I shan’t worry if you find nothing. The whole place is under the blanket.”

  “How would I go?”

  “The War Office is sending out a civilian accountant to inspect their establishment there. His visa has been cleared. You could go as Mr. Judson if you wished, and stay for a week or so.”

  “All right,” said Methuen without any marked enthusiasm. “It’s a thankless task. Hated by the reds and blacks, distrusted by the Embassy.…”

  “Above all, no dicing with death,” said Dombey, picking his nose. “Don’t take chances.”

  “What does the Ambassador think?”

  “He is livid with rage. But the Secretary of State is for us this time so he can’t actually stop you.”

  “When do I start?”

  “When can you?”

  “I want a week. I shall ask Boris for a brief on the territory. You won’t mind?”

  “People don’t read files any more,” said Dombrey plaintively. “They always go and see Boris.”

  “He should be on your staff really.”

  “If there were any justice in the world he should have my job,” said Dombey. “But he prefers to make wigs.”

  “He’s a good deal more rational than either of us.”

  “Yes,” said Dombey sadly. “Yes.”

  “I’m getting old,” said Methuen suddenly, standing up. “I can’t think why having once retired I shouldn’t end my days in the south of France or somewhere nice. Why keep on like this?”

  “You would die of boredom.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And by the way, if you don’t like this job you have only to turn it down and I’ll assign someone else.”

  “Who else?” said Methuen not without some pardonable contempt. “Is there anyone who knows that part of Serbia as well as I do?”

  “Let us not become boastful,” said Dombey, and he took from his pocket a roll of galley proofs covered in erasures and blotches, and spread them before him gloatingly. “At least if I retired I should have a consuming interest to keep me sane.” (He was the proud author of a monograph entitled “Aberrations of the Chalk-Hill Blue Lysandra Coridon”.)

  “Butterflies,” said Methuen contemptuously. “I’ll bring you back some butterflies to knock your eye out. You should see them in those mountains, settling in clouds along the rivers.”

  “Remember,” said Dombey sternly. “No mountains. No rivers. You are not to go wandering off or I shall get hell from the Foreign Office.

  “The Foreign Office!”

  To his surprise Methuen found himself feeling all of a sudden extremely youthful and spry. He recognized the familiar feeling of heightened life which succeeded every fresh call to adventure.

  “Damme if I don’t walk over and see Boris now,” he said, and he was already walking briskly across towards Covent Garden before he realized how skilfully Dombey had baited the hook for him; he was probably sitting up there in his office now, smiling, clasping and unclasping his great hands. Methuen felt the idea of Yugoslavia skidding upon the surface of his mind like a trout-fly, tracing its embroidery of ripples. He had risen right out of the water. “I shall certainly take my trout-rod,” he muttered as he marched along. “Whatever Dombey says.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Boris the Wig-maker

  Boris Pasquin’s little shop was locked when Methuen reached it, but there was a light at the back of the building so he rattled the letter-box loudly and shouted “Boris” through it. The little theatrical wig-maker very seldom left the premises and there was a good chance that he was in the great rambling workshop at the back busily engaged in polishing a stone or playing patience.

  In the gloom the crammed shelves of the showroom guarded their mysterious treasures—enough to delight the heart of a magpie or a child, for Boris combined his wig-making business with that of a general dealer in everything from precious stones to playing-cards. He himself was fond of saying that there were two hubs of the Empire, one official and one unofficial. The official hub was of course Piccadilly; the unofficial was Boris Pasquin’s little shop in Covent Garden. This was something more than a flight of fancy for the range of Boris’s interests did extend to practically every country in the Commonwealth.

  While he had the kind of talent which goes to make millionaires he preferred to deal in small ranges of rare objects which delighted his imagination more than they profited his pocket. Shelves of china; Japanese fans; Byzantine metalwork from the marts of Salonika and Athens; statuettes smuggled from the “digs” of Egypt; hand-painted playing-cards from Smyrna; pages of illuminated manuscripts from the monasteries of the Levant; lovely corals from the Red Sea; dried herbs from China; chess-men carved in wood and ivory by Burmese prisoners. The visitors to his little shop were legion, though they were never men of title or importance. Lascars from the liners brought him precious stones and carvings picked up in the ports of the East; scholars and collectors in the humbler walks of life traded him ancient coins against gems or manuscripts. But no visitor ever escaped sharing a black coffee with him in the work-room at the back of the shop, and these business conversations enabled him to pick up a mass of miscellaneous information about foreign countries which was of the utmost interest to Dombey’s little band of enthusiasts in SOq.

  Boris was a Galician Jew who had emigrated to London in the early twenties and had rapidly established himself in business as a wig-maker; but his range of interests was too large to be confined, and he rapidly expanded his business in a hundred unorthodox directions. He had also in the past performed several difficult and dangerous missions for the organization to which Methuen belonged, though he never accepted a bounty for them. He would explain gravely that the security of British citizenship was a bounty freely bestowed upon him which he felt that he could never repay. To take money for his services to the Crown was more than he could bear. “What I do, I do because I am proud to be accepted in the British family,” he would say, his hand on his heart.

  Many had been the attempts to coax him into SOq, but he valued his independence too much to become a full member of an organization so exacting in its demands upon his time. He remained nevertheless an unofficial ally of the brotherhood his usefulness growing with the years; he had become almost an institution, and there was hardly an operator who would undertake a mission to a little-known country without first asking Boris to offer him a brief. Methuen was no exception to the rule.

  “Boris,” he called again, and putting his ear to the flap of the letter-box was relieved to hear the familiar shuffling step of the wig-maker as he crossed the dark floor to the light-switch. The light came on and Boris stood there staring at him through the glass like a small and rather soiled penguin. His black beard was uncombed and he fumbled with the pince-nez which always dangled round his waist on a length of string. He got Methuen into focus at last and smiled. “Methuen!” he said. “Welcome back,” drawing the stiff bolts of the door, and repeating “Welcome back”. He locked the door carefully behind his visitor and led the way to the back of the shop. The great work-room was brightly lit, and full of the smell of coffee which simmered in a pot on the gas-stove.

  Methuen looked around him with amused interest. “What have you got here?” he said. Boris rummaged in a cupboard for a cup and saucer. A large silver wig stood upon a wooden pedestal obviously half-finished; next to it, offering a grotesque contrast, were two shrunken human heads in bottles. “Peruvian,” said Boris. “They came in yesterday. One is all that remains of Atahualpa, the Indian who started the revolution years ago, remember?” “My God,” said Methuen, “one of these days someone is going to stroll in to you with my head in a bottle. You won’t turn a hair.”

  Boris looked shocked. “I should be upsetted to see my friend in a bottle,” he said severely. Sometimes he found it a little difficult to appreciate the English sense of humour. “I a
m selling these to the Science Museum,” he added irrelevantly. “But my dear, my darling,” he went on in a burst of enthusiasm, “wait till Dombey sees what I have for him.” From a shelf he reached down two large cases of beautiful moths, neatly pinned to corks and classified. “Such beautiful things!”

  They chatted for a while until the coffee-pouring ritual was at an end and they sat facing one another across the workbench. Then, idly fiddling with the little lapidary’s wheel which stood near him, Methuen disclosed his plans. Boris put his hand to the side of his head and moved his face from side to side repeating “Aie! Aie” very thoughtfully. “It is most difficult,” he said. “I have good informations from a currency smuggler. Most difficult. The countryside is ruined. People starve. And you want to run around Serbia like a tourist with a fishing-rod.”

  Methuen felt rather slighted by this description of himself. “Not exactly a tourist,” he said. “I want to know how I could live for a short while, say a week, in this territory which I know like the back of my hand.”

  “You must look like a Serb.”

  “What must I wear?”

  “I will tell you.”

  As usual Boris’s information was copious and exact. In a series of brilliant and exact strokes he built up a Serbian peasant: baggy woollen trousers tucked into heavy leather riding-boots; greasy fur cap; woollen cape. Methuen for his part wrote out a list of the equipment he intended to carry: a thermos, a pistol and ammunition, a solid fuel stove, matches, a trout-rod. (“He is mad,” said Boris to the ceiling. “A trout-rod of all things!”) But he could not help smiling. “I will find you”, he said, “a three-quarter length duffle jacket and build you in poacher’s pockets. Up here a pistol sling,” he slapped his left collar-bone. “You will clink about like the men-at-arms in Drury Lane.”

  But already he was entering into the spirit of the thing. Money, for example, was little use. Communism had so debased currency that Methuen would be better advised to carry a few needles and some pack-thread. He could always buy eatables from the peasants with these. If he could fish without getting caught he might live mostly on trout; but he must beware of the police patrols. Nor could he count upon the peasantry to help him, for they had been reduced to a state of cowed subjection by the policy of collectivization and the police terror. They would immediately disown an unknown man living in their midst. “That is just it,” said Methuen. “There are only a few scattered villages in this area. It is all mountains, Boris, completely cut off. I lived once for a month in a cave there without seeing a soul.”

  Boris shook his head doubtfully. “It is a most difficult thing,” he said. Nevertheless he set his mind wholeheartedly at Methuen’s service, examining every aspect of the problem carefully and in detail. Their conversation lasted long into the night and when Methuen at last said good night and turned away down the dark streets in the direction of his club he felt as if he had just returned from a week spent in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Lying in bed in the dark he heard the ripple of the torrents, still mushy with spring snow; saw the twinkle of trout in the dark gulleys and fents of the Studenitsa river. And fragment by fragment recaptured the details of those two lost summers which he spent once with a Serbian friend, climbing the dizzy escarpment near the Janko Stone, or swimming in the black pools of water by the rocky river.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Further Preparation

  It was in one of these mountain-pools that he discovered the Mother and Father of Trout, an enormous and insolent brute, loitering among the shallows like a beadle in a church; he doubted if his slender line would take him, but as the shallows offered no impediment in the shape of rocks and reeds he thought that he might manage to play the beast until he tired of it. His fly dropped upon that black and polished surface like a kiss, and languidly the great trout rose to it.… Methuen woke to the rattle of his alarm-clock on the table by his bed. He yawned and sat up. It was ten o’clock and the grey sky foretold a day of drizzle which made the thought of Yugoslavia all the more inviting as a prospect. He shaved slowly while he waited for his breakfast, still mentally playing the great fish, letting him race to the end of the pool until he felt the nylon line stretched to breaking-point.… But there was an infinity of work and planning which stretched between him and that placid trout-stream in the hills.

  With difficulty he addressed his mind to the tasks in hand. First he rang Dombey and said: “I’m on.” Dombey pretended to show surprise. “I didn’t think you would be,” he said and laughed when Methuen swore at him. “You will proceed,” he added, putting on a throaty accent, as of a duty clerk, “on the seventeenth instant by Orient Express. Travel department will have your papers by this afternoon. I have already signalled Belgrade that you are going. You should see some of the signals I’ve got back in the last few days about the project.”

  “I’d like to,” said Methuen grimly.

  In fact he did, spending the morning quietly with the index files on Yugoslavia, studying the telegrams and despatches about the country composed by the little staff of specialists in the Chancery of the Belgrade Embassy there. He looked up Sir John Monmouth in the Foreign Office list and was disappointed to find nothing beyond the bare list of his appointments; he was, however, mixing it up with Who’s Who which raised his spirits somewhat by listing fishing among the more absorbing of the Ambassador’s hobbies.

  That afternoon he spent shopping at the Army and Navy Stores, filling out the little green invoice he had been given, and marking up his purchases to Foreign Office Special Orders Department. He treated himself to a new sleeping-bag, made of fine kapok-stuffed quilting, and a supply of fishing-line which he put on the same expense account. He was beginning to feel absurdly light-hearted. This feeling, he realized, would gradually disappear as he neared the theatre of operations. That evening he treated himself to a dinner at Scott’s and a theatre, and when he reached his club surprised himself by staying up till past midnight reading a travel-book. He was normally an early bird. But soon these civilized pleasures would be out of his reach and he wanted to enjoy them to the full.

  The following morning he walked in the grey bedrizzled streets, drinking in the smells of London, to the river. In the armoury at Millbank he presented his service order and was allowed to play about with pistols of every calibre and shape. Henslowe, the artificer, followed him about benevolently, showing him his wares with absurd pride. “You never turned in that Luger you borrowed, Colonel Methuen,” he said reproachfully. “I have to answer for it to the War Office.” Methuen apologized. “It’s lying in a swamp somewhere,” he explained, and was immediately given an elaborate form to fill up with a description of how the weapon had been lost. “Just put L on D (lost on duty),” said Henslowe sorrowfully. “Now you say you want one with a silencer.”

  “Small,” said Methuen. “Pocketable.”

  “There’s a new point three eight,” said Henslowe regretfully, but with the air of a haberdasher finding the right size of neck and wrist for a man of unusual shape. “Only for heaven’s sake bring it back! You see,” he added, “it’s still on the experimental list. First time they’ve fitted a silencer of this pattern to a point three eight. It’s a sweet weapon, werry sweet.” He pronounced the word “weepon”. He found the pistol in question and pressed it upon his visitor, holding it by the barrel. It was small but ugly looking. “The balance is not all it might be, sir. But it’s a werry sweet weapon.”

  They tried it downstairs on the miniature range. “It’ll do me very well,” said Methuen. “I must say it hardly makes any noise at all.”

  “Just a large sniff, sir. Like a man with a cold.”

  “Send it to me,” said Methuen, and Henslowe inclined his head sorrowfully with the air of a man who is glad to serve, but who feels that he is in danger of losing a much-cherished possession. “You won’t leave it in a swamp, will you, sir?” Methuen promised faithfully not to. “It’s hard when we get so few nice things these days.”

  “I know.” />
  On his way to the Shop he could not resist a last look round the Tate Gallery with its harvest of rippling canvases bathed in the cold grey light of a London sky.

  Dombey was sitting in his office dictating from a sheaf of papers into the mouthpiece of his dictaphone. “Come in,” he said, switching off, as Methuen put his head round the door. “Come in and tell me all the news.”

  “Everything is in order. I came to give you an ultimatum: if I go to Yugoslavia I’m damn well going into the mountains to fish. If you want me to stay in Belgrade then the trip is off, and you can find someone else.”

  A crooked smile spread itself over Dombey’s countenance. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I should never stand in the way of a trouter. Never.”

  “Well, so long as that is understood.”

  “You are a free agent. If you think that you want to investigate the place where Peter met his death … who am I to say you nay?”

  Methuen strode off down the corridor to the despatch-room and arranged for his parcel of effects to be delivered to the Foreign Office bag-room. They would be sent on to him under seal, while he himself was to travel in the character of the innocent Judson, the army accountant. That gave him an idea. He rang Dombey. “This man Judson,” he said. “Hist,” said Dombey. “Not on the phone. Come to my office.” Methuen returned to find his chief glaring indignantly at a minute written in the round feminine hand of the Chief Secretary. “In the past seven days,” he read out, “we have monitored all phone conversations in the SOq building. Out of a hundred conversations ten concerned confidential matters. This must stop.” He sighed. “It is perfectly intolerable. We are back in the Middle Ages. We have to use the phone for something … what were you asking?”

  “Judson,” said Methuen. “What does he look like?”

  “Like an accident. Adenoids. Spots, Flat feet. Constipation. Colds. Heavy underwear. Horn-rimmed spectacles.”