four inches in diameter, and tossed it to Serebin. The weight was a shock, and Serebin had to make a second grab before he got hold of it.
“Don’t drop him, Ivan,” Draza said.
Better not to. Serebin knew a land mine when he saw it but he’d never actually held one. “Ahh, don’t be like that,” Jovan said to Draza.
“He couldn’t set it off if he wanted to,” Draza said. “Here, give it to me.”
“It’s all right,” Serebin said. He could live without whatever demonstration Draza had in mind. “I’ve seen these before.”
“These?”
“Mines.”
“Oh, mines. Shit, not these. These are Italian. Dug up across the border a month ago, so, very up-to- date.”
“Where did you see mines?” Jovan asked.
“Galicia, Volhynia, Pripet Marshes, Madrid, river Ebro.” We’re all friends here but, if you have a minute, go fuck yourselves.
“Oh, well, all right then.”
“To work,” Draza said, lighting a stubby cigarette.
They stepped onto the first barge, walked around the big turbine until they found a hatch with rope handles on the cover. Draza fought with it, finally broke it free, and handed it to Jovan. “We’ll need a bracket on that.”
Jovan peered into the sack, then groped around inside. “It’s in here?”
“Better be. I put it in.”
Jovan grunted, found a metal bracket with screws in the holes, and went to work.
“Down we go,” Draza said. He grasped the rim of the hatch opening and swung himself inside.
Jovan handed Serebin the sack. “Forgot this,” he said.
Serebin followed Draza, who had turned on a flashlight in the pitch-black interior of the barge. The beam illuminated a few inches of oily water and at least one dead rat. “Drill,” he said to Serebin. Serebin reached into the sack and took out a hand drill. Draza squatted, about twenty feet from the hatch opening, astride a wooden strut that spanned the sides and bottom of the hull, tried to bore vertically to the floor, scraped his knuckles, swore, then drilled in at an angle. “Get me some wire,” he said.
With the cigarette in his lips, squinting through the smoke, he handed the flashlight to Serebin, took the mine in both hands, and lowered it carefully onto the strut. Unrolled a piece of wire, flexed it up and down until it broke, and wired the mine in place. Then, he pinched the steel bar in the center mechanism with thumb and index finger and tried to turn it. But it wouldn’t move. He held his breath, applied pressure, then twisted with all his strength, fingers turning white where they gripped the bar. For long seconds nothing happened. Through clenched teeth he said, “Fucking things,” and shut his eyes. Finally, the bar squeaked and gave him a quarter turn. He let his breath out, swore again, forced the bar around the first thread, unscrewed it the rest of the way and flipped it away into the darkness. Serebin heard the splash. Draza waited another moment, lost his patience, tucked his middle finger under his thumb and flicked it hard against the center of the mine. With a sharp metallic snap, the trigger popped up.
He swayed a little, adjusted his feet, and made himself a long piece of wire. Serebin moved the flashlight closer. “Got a girlfriend?” Draza said.
“Yes.”
“Me too. You should see her.”
Draza wiggled his fingers like a pianist getting ready to perform, then began to wind the wire around and around the trigger. When he was done, he ran the wire down to the base, made one loop, pulled it tight, and handed the rest of the coil to Serebin. “Do not pull on that,” he said.
He stood up, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He’d ripped the skin over his knuckles, and wiped the blood off on the side of his pant leg. “Hey,” he called out to Jovan. “You done?”
Jovan held the hatch cover a few inches above the opening. Draza reached up and wrapped the end of the wire around the bracket on the bottom, and Jovan moved the hatch cover just enough to allow Draza and Serebin to climb back up on the deck. The three of them knelt at the edge of the hatch and Draza fitted the cover back in place. “Now,” he said, “the next time you lift this up is the last time you lift this up. The firing device works by compression-you’ll need a slow, steady pull to force it down. The tugboat captain knows about this?”
“He does.”
“No last-minute inspections, right?”
“I’ll remind him.”
Draza hunted in his pockets, then said, “You have a piece of paper?”
Serebin had the back of a matchbox.
“Write this. 67 Rajkovic, top floor left. Belongs to my cousin, but, if you need to find us…” Draza looked over Serebin’s shoulder as he wrote. “There, that’s it.”
Jovan stepped onto the dock and took another mine from the crate.
“Back to work,” Draza said. “Four more and we’re done.”
4:10 A.M. He could hear the bar at the Srbski Kralj when the doorman let him into the lobby. A hundred people shouting, a fog of cigarette smoke, perhaps a stringed instrument of some kind, twanging desperately away in the middle of it. Serebin went to his room. On the table, a box wrapped in brown paper, and inside, a bottle of wine. Echezeaux-which he knew to be very good Burgundy. No written note required. Good luck, Ilya Aleksandrovich, it meant. Or however that went in Hungarian.
He took off his coat and stretched out on the bed and did not place a call to Trieste. Or, if he did, it was a private call, the kind where you don’t use the telephone. It rained, a spring rain, very gentle and steady, through the last hour of the night, which should have put him to sleep, but it didn’t. What he got instead was a daze-bits and pieces of worry, desire, pointless memory, a descent to the edge of dreams, and back round again.
The rain stopped at dawn, and the sun hung just below the horizon and set the sky on fire, rainclouds lit like dying embers, vast red streaks above the river.
27 March. Pristinate Dunav. An old sign, the paint faded and blistered. In the Serbian view, if you needed a sign to find the Danube harbor-as opposed to the one on the river Sava-you probably didn’t deserve to be there.
One of the longest mornings he’d ever spent, not much to do but wait. He’d gone over to the outdoor market in Sremska street, bought a heavy sweater and corduroy pants and a canvas jacket lined with wool. Stopped at a cafe, read the papers, drank a coffee, went to work.
Almost didn’t. The tugboat crew was ready and waiting. Zolti in a sailor’s heavy jacket, Erma in what looked like an army coat-Greek? Albanian? — anyhow olive green, that fell to her ankles. She wore also a knitted cap, pulled down over her ears. The Empress was ready, she said. All warmed up. So, they shook hands, smiled brave smiles, talked about the weather, then Serebin said, “Well, we might as well,” or something equally exalted, and Erma cast off from the dock. When she returned to the cabin, Zolti shoved the throttle forward, the engine hammered, the deck throbbed beneath Serebin’s feet, and they went absolutely nowhere.
Erma looked at Zolti and said, “Scheisse.’’ A curse at bad luck, but he was included. He rubbed the back of his neck, and tried again. The towlines snapped taut. And that was that.
“We need the current,” Zolti explained. “Once we get out in the river.”
Serebin stood there, no idea what to do. Hungarian spy dies of laughter in Istanbul. Or, maybe, apoplexy. No, laughter.
Erma said a few sharp words, and Zolti took a wrench and left the cabin. They could hear him working, down below, and, after a while, he tapped the wrench against the hull and Erma rammed the throttle lever forward as far as it would go. Engine straining against the load, they pulled away from the dock an inch at a time, then made a long, slow, snail’s journey across the harbor. Zolti reappeared, wiping oil off his hands with a rag. “We need the current, ten kilometers an hour,” he said, apology in his voice.
“We could have left one of the barges behind,” Serebin said.
Erma wagged an index finger. Not the Empress of Szeged.
They turned southeast on the river. Gulls and gray sky. Serebin walked back to the stern, stared at the barges for a time, found a comfortable coil of heavy rope, and sat there, watching the river traffic. A passenger
