The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  But no one stopped us in Vienna and we picked up tourist visas without any trouble at Zagreb airport, when we got there the following afternoon. Ironically, the only hotel with three rooms available was the Palace, where Eleanor had fallen under the tram. It was still there – a staid old turn-of-the-century building, facing out over some fine public gardens right in the middle of the city. And the trams were still there, too – possibly the very same pre-war coaches: little blue trams clanging up and down in the sunlight of the long green avenue outside.

  The women had rooms in the back. But mine was in the front, like a tree house, perched high up on the top floor, looking directly out onto a tremendous cage of summer green – a double line of huge plane trees that almost touched my window. Beyond was a bandstand, fountains and heroic statuary in the middle of the leafy gardens, with a long row of tall dark nineteenth-century apartment blocks looming up on the other side.

  The hotel itself was from the same belle-epoque period – when Zagreb was ‘Little Vienna’, last civilised outpost of the Hapsburgs before the crude horrors of the Balkans proper took over. But the interior of the building had been partly and hideously redecorated in a selection of modern plastic veneers; the gilded cherubs and mirrors had gone, my room smelt of some choking floor polish and the hot water was no more than a rusty dribble in the bathroom.

  But the view from the high window made up for everything – over the trees, across to the sun-flecked square, the city beginning to revive, it seemed, with a slight coolness, after the desperate heat of the afternoon. Up to my left there was a hill which I could just see the top of, cream and terra cotta roofs poking out steeply over the town, with two needle-like cathedral spires to one side, mica embedded in the slates, so that one roof shone like a mirror in the slanting light. And beyond the hill, a mountain just visible – with thunder clouds, I saw now, rolling in over it from the north: the first rain of the summer, I thought.

  There was an oppressive stillness in the air below me, I noticed then, and soon the bruised skies began to tumble in over the city. And suddenly, after the endless heat of the past months, I wanted to be out in the open when the rain came – out and about like any tourist in a new place, letting the water fall over me and the thunder crack, cleansing the frustration and violence of the past days.

  I left the hotel, skipped between the blue trams and into the park, and as I got to the line of trees on the other side the first peal of thunder echoed round the dry gardens and drops of rain fell delicately on the wilting herbaceous borders. In a few minutes the whole city went very black as the rain came, the leafy streets emptied and the plane trees started to weep. I moved along beneath them to the top of the park by the old apartment blocks where soon, in the watery onslaught, the peeling stucco fell in dirty chunks into the gutters.

  The dark storm swept along the roads in vicious little eddies of warm damp, raindrops as large and bright as pearls hammered on the cobblestones. And I was happy in it, running before the weather, released at last from care.

  But I was too carefree. I should have seen the two men following me earlier – and with a head start I might have dropped them entirely. I’d been in the mouth of a shopping arcade at the top of the park, sheltering from the downpour, when I saw them moving towards me for the second time. And I had to run then, out into the storm and across a main street.

  And I ran fast – and appropriately, as others did, escaping the storm. But soon the only others I saw, braving the weather in a similar gallop, were my pursuers. I set off madly, turning into a collection of little streets beyond the park, dodging great rivers of water flooding the gutters and puddles moving like tides, running further into a city where I knew no roads, where one turning might liberate me while another could end in a blank wall.

  By the time I found some cover under the broad umbrellas of the little flower-market I was soaked. Old women in head-scarves and great billowing black skirts were tidying up for the day, nursing bunches of carnations and roses back into cellophane wrappers – waiting for the storm to die, as was a surrounding crowd, pressing together about the trestle tables, a damp crush of commuters, smelling heavily of salami and garlic which killed the remnants of all the fresh blooms.

  It was difficult to hide amongst them, so tightly bunched were they in the middle of the tiny square, with a small baroque church at one end. And so I had circled right round to the far side of the market – before I saw one of the men coming at me, from the opposite side, holding his hat in the wind, blinded by the rain. I pressed hard in among the tables then, stooping down among the commuters. He hadn’t seen me. I managed to push my way right through the market eventually and out by the church, immediately in front of me now. I made for it, jumping the steps two at a time, pushing open the side door into a dark, baroque interior. Several old women knelt on the bare stone at the back but there was nowhere to hide – apart from the few confessional boxes along one wall.

  And it was in one of these that they got me in the end, one of the men pushing the grill aside violently, where a priest might be, and facing me with a gun – while his companion waited outside the curtain.

  ‘Milicija,’ the taller one said, keeping his gun on me while his colleague frisked me, taking my little revolver away. Then they led me from the church and out into the storm again.

  The police station was back in the middle of town, next the park, housed in a gracious nineteenth-century apartment block, now given over to harsher matters, the other entrances all down the street severely bricked up. I was pushed through a crowded hallway full of damp petitioners and grudging authority – a few desk sergeants, peeping through small windows, intent on minding their own business. There was that sour, acid smell of an animal cage – an air of bureaucratic delay and ready injustice that I remembered so well from my years in Durham Jail. I was angry. Though in a way I had expected it: luck couldn’t hold forever and we’d all had a long run of it.

  But at least I wasn’t delayed. I was taken upstairs at once and into an anteroom in front of the building, giving out onto the park: an office of some importance, with a male secretary picking his way delicately about a new electric typewriter. The man picked a phone up and almost at once another small, agile fellow seemed to jump into the room through some large double doors. He looked very young, though in his forties perhaps, not typically Balkan at all, but with rather fuzzy, partly fair hair neatly parted at one side with rimless specs over narrowly placed eyes, dressed most smartly in a lightweight Windsor check and pointed shoes. He gestured me inside casually, as though he knew me, a doctor vaguely welcoming a patient.

  It wasn’t an office but a long conference room, with a glass-topped table, old sofas down one wall and a large photo-portrait of Tito in profile like a Roman emperor.

  The secretary handed my little revolver to the man, closing the doors behind him.

  ‘Gospodin Marlow?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Yes – I speak English. But I thought you would speak Serbo-Croat – being sent all the way here specially. Sit down, please.’ He fingered Lindsay’s revolver delicately, opening it, sniffing the empty chambers. The thunder cracked overhead, more faintly now. The room was dark and badly lit – an old salon, it must have been – a high gilded ceiling with mock electric candles set in antique wall brackets.

  ‘Fired quite soon. Quite recently.’ The man corrected himself. ‘Not normal issue, is it? Since when are British Intelligence using this?’ He looked at me with quizzical interest, peering at me through his specs, quite close, like a careful scientist, as though here was an interesting case indeed.

  ‘I’m not with British Intelligence.’ I wiped my face with a hanky. The thunder broke again, much further away over the city. The storm was dying. The man went over to the better light by the window, looking down the barrel of the gun. ‘Strange weapon.’ He rubbed the ivory handle, then examined the silver chasing. ‘An antique.’ He turned to me quizzically again.


  ‘I told you. It’s not an official gun. It belongs to the friends of mine I came here with. At the Palace Hotel –’

  ‘Yes, yes. We know about all of you. The Phillips. The family of Lindsay Phillips, I assume.’ He put the gun down on the table and leant towards me. ‘And you are Marlow. Peter Marlow, also with British Intelligence,’ he added punctiliously.

  ‘No, I’m not. We’ve just been looking for this man Phillips. He was with Intelligence.’

  ‘Yes. We know about him. We’ve been waiting for him. He was to come here. But he never did. Not yet – unless he did it – clandestine? How do you –?’

  ‘Lindsay Phillips? To come here? How do you know? You’re looking for him too?’

  The man didn’t reply. He just went on gazing at me carefully, his calm blue eyes magnified in the glasses. The thunder disappeared completely in the distance. The rain had stopped, and now a shaft of sunlight suddenly brightened the gloomy room.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked. But again there was no reply. Just that steady inquisitive stare. He picked the gun up again. It glinted now – like a pretty thing in the light.

  At last he spoke. ‘No. Perhaps you are not with British Intelligence.’ His tone was deeply considered. ‘You would have a proper gun – not this toy. And you would be alone, not with this man’s family.’ He walked back to the window. ‘I do not understand it yet. But we will. We will.’ He turned. ‘Tell me, who were you shooting at – with this?’ He held the gun up.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘But it has been fired – recently.’

  ‘It came from Scotland. It belongs to Lindsay Phillips. Someone must have fired it up there.’

  The man sighed, sat down and opened a file on the table. ‘But you have needed a gun, yes? On your travels.’ He looked at a typewritten sheet. ‘First we were warned to expect this Gospodin Phillips – chief of your Department Nine: the “Slavs and Soviets” is it not? He did not come. Then we learnt that you would come instead. And it is so. That is good. You are here.’ He looked up smiling.

  ‘Warned? But I had no idea I was coming here – until yesterday. Who could have warned you?’

  ‘No, no! You go too fast.’ The man shook his head, ‘I am still thinking.’ And he was, furrowing his brow like a caricature of someone thinking, looking again into the file.

  ‘Let me explain,’ I said, feeling he was a sympathetic listener and that I could help him out. ‘I was with British Intelligence. But only as a clerk, no more. I left it over ten years ago. The Phillipses are old friends of mine. I agreed to help them find Lindsay Phillips, entirely as a private matter …’ And then I decided to explain the whole affair to him. Why not? There was nothing to lose. And I did so with very few omissions. I told him about Pottinger, too – how I was sure that we’d been led on by this man, by the KGB in fact, down through Europe, in a wild-goose chase after a man who had never been kidnapped by any Croatian terrorist group at all.

  And now my man took an extreme interest in my story and I could sense he believed me. ‘So each time,’ I said, ‘we were led on by these letters. But not here. That was entirely my idea. You see, Lindsay Phillips once lived in Zagreb, with his first wife, in the thirties. And she was killed here, so they say, under a tram opposite the Palace Hotel. But I don’t think she was killed …’ And I ended my tale with an account of Eleanor and Zlatko Rabernak, and how I’d thought that Lindsay might have come back here to rejoin his first wife.

  ‘So how,’ I said finally, ‘could you have known I was coming here?’

  The man went over to the double doors. He spoke to the clerk outside. I heard the name ‘Rabernak’. When he returned his bemused indecisiveness was gone. He was brisk, businesslike – a man at a board meeting who had got the agreed losses out of the way and could now concentrate on the potential profits.

  ‘I would not have believed you,’ he said. ‘But, yes: what you say fits very well … with,’ he glanced at the file again. ‘With our other investigation.’ He took up another fatter file. ‘A few weeks ago we arrested one of our own men here – a very important man. The Chief, in fact, of our Croatian Milicija. We had thought for some time he was with the Soviets; then we were able to prove it. It was from him that we took our information about Lindsay Phillips – and yourself: that one or other would come here. You were then to be arrested, charged, exposed. It was part of a plan he – and his friends in Moscow – had to show that Western Intelligence was interfering in our internal affairs, so that they could promote a new hard-line, pro-Soviet policy in the country – and eventually replace President Tito with one of their own men. He was waiting for you – our chief of police: to take you.

  ‘But!’ The man waved his hands ambitiously in the air. ‘But we took him first – this old man. We have trouble from every side, do you see?’ he went on confidingly. ‘From the old men here who are still with Moscow – the Stalinists! And the other old men abroad who are still with Hitler and Pavelič.’ He shook his head, almost mournfully. ‘Too many old men who will not let us alone. So you see – we are on our guard!’

  The phone rang just then on the table and he spoke rapidly for a minute in Serbo-Croat. Then he turned to me. ‘We have no immediate record of any man called Rabernak in the city. Perhaps before the war only –’

  ‘He had an antique shop here then, yes.’

  ‘Ah, there are few such shops here now. The war.’ He gestured again, less confidently this time. ‘But we can check maybe with the old files. However, they are nearly all lost too – in the war.’ The man was off-hand now. ‘But for the moment – what are you to do here?’

  ‘This Scots woman – Eleanor Phillips: I wanted to see if she was still alive.’

  ‘I do not follow you there. She was killed by tram you said.’

  ‘Yes. And buried here apparently – in some big cemetery on a hill.’

  ‘Mirogoj, yes.’

  ‘But I don’t think she was killed. You see, her husband, this Lindsay Phillips – I’m almost certain he was a double all his life: he was with the KGB in fact, like Philby and the others we had in our intelligence service –’

  ‘You say Phillips is with Moscow?’ The man leant forward now – intently, suddenly interested again.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then perhaps his wife was too – this woman you are looking for?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘She was certainly very left-wing before the war.’

  ‘But how could she be here, an English woman, even if she was alive?’

  ‘I told you: she married this Zlatko Rabernak, I think: secretly, in Vienna. Then they came back to live here – or so his relations in Vienna think. No one has heard from him since. So they may not have survived the war.’

  ‘They may have changed their names, of course.’ He was vaguely excited now, my man, dreaming of some intelligence coup, his eyes alert, dancing behind the thick lenses. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘we know for certain there are several others with Moscow – living here in Zagreb right now. “Deep cover illegals” you call them?’ I nodded. ‘Yugoslavs,’ he continued, ‘living and working here. And some, we know, who have been with the Soviets maybe since before the war. Other old people,’ he added distastefully. ‘I wonder maybe if this Rabernak and his wife are like this?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ There was silence in the long room. The sunlight blazed in now, a golden evening fire slanting over the huge trees in the park. ‘I should let my friends know,’ I said. ‘In the hotel. They’ll be anxious.’ I looked out over the city.

  ‘Yes.’ The man stood up and went over to the window again. ‘Yes,’ he said again slowly, gazing out at the moist trees and the glittering, rain-washed roofs and steeples rising on the hill away to the right above them.

  ‘Lindsay Phillips once lived in a house here,’ I said. ‘Above the city, in some park. With trees. Cherry trees –’

  ‘Tuškanac, for sure. The diplomatic area.’

  ‘I wondered if they might be living there, if they were
here at all.’

  ‘Unlikely. It’s nearly all diplomatic there. Consulates, Residencies, members of the government here. Too exposed for an agent.’ He turned to me now. He was authoritative, businesslike once more. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘We will help you look for this woman.’

  ‘She may be dead, of course. I could be quite wrong.’

  ‘Indeed. But that is easy to prove. She was buried in Mirogoj?’

  ‘In some big cemetery here.’

  ‘There is only one such. You have her name – at that time? And the date?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then they will have the records up there. They will not have gone in the war. So it is simple. We can dig her up.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, alarmed at this precipitous, slightly macabre enthusiasm. ‘I don’t know,’ I went on. ‘Maybe –’

  ‘No, no! It is the answer. “No stone unturned” as you say. And I may assure you the need is urgent: it is our chief concern right now – to find these Soviet cominformists here. These agents and sympathisers. If we do not, Moscow may easily take us when Tito is gone.’

  So I gave him the details about Eleanor and he came over to me afterwards, offering his hand. ‘Good. We will work together. Go back to your hotel. I will make arrangements with the cemetery. Perhaps this evening … And perhaps we can trace this Rabernak from before the war. My name is Stolačka. Brigade Commander Pedar Stolačka.’

  I shook his hand. ‘Pedar – Peter? My name too.’

  ‘Good. Good – we will work together. And I will keep this for the moment.’ He picked up the little silver revolver. Then he paused for a moment at the doorway. ‘Tell me – we are not so foolish: who were you shooting at?’

  ‘At Pottinger,’ I said, admitting it, glad to be involved at last with someone whose interest in the truth appeared at least as great as mine. ‘A little fracas with the KGB in Vienna.’