jutting out from the shoreline. It took quite some time to get there, his legs numb and lifeless when he finally beached the log on the sand. Marrano was unconscious, Serebin pulled him a few feet up the slope, then fell. Done. No more he could do. He tried to force himself to get up, couldn’t, passed out.
29 March.
“Good morning to you, sir.”
Logically, there was something in this Balkan opera of a city that could surprise the doorman at the Srbski Kralj but it sure as hell wasn’t Serebin. With four days’ growth of beard, wearing a sheepskin fisherman’s vest one of his rescuers had given him, a bloody rag around his head, his left wrist bound to a stick with fishing line-just good old Mr. Thing in Room 74.
“Good morning,” Serebin said.
“Lovely day.”
“Yes, thank you, it is.”
“Need any help, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
Limping, he got himself up the stairs to the top floor, then down a long hallway. Stained carpets, green walls, the aroma of yesterday’s dinner; all very appealing to Serebin, who was lucky to be alive and knew it. That went for Marrano as well. In the hospital for a day or two but he would live to fight again.
He stopped in front of the door numbered 74. He’d had a key to this door, once upon a time, but it was long gone. Or was it this door? Because, if this was his room, why was somebody laughing inside? Tentatively, he knocked. Then knocked louder and Captain Draza, wearing only undershirt and underpants, threw the door open and gazed at him with surprise and delight. “Say, look at you!”
A fine party, it must have been. Or, perhaps, still was. Captain Jovan, in underpants only but wearing a uniform cap, was sleeping in the room’s easy chair, a bottle between his thighs. The air was thick with black tobacco and White Gardenia, the bed occupied by three young women, one very young, all of them striking, but striking in different ways. Mysterious, Milkmaid, and Ballerina, he named them. Mysterious and Ballerina sound asleep, Milkmaid sitting propped up on pillows, reading the book of Anya Zak’s poetry she’d given him for the train. “Hello,” she said, rather formally, and, an afterthought, pulled the sheet up over her bare breasts.
“Ah, Natalya,” Draza said. What way is that to greet a guest?
Jovan was suddenly awake. “Welcome home,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
The room had been-sifted. Nothing was broken, but everything had been picked up and put down somewhere else. This apparently made it hard for Captain Draza to find what he was looking for but, eventually, beneath a pile of women’s clothes, tunics, and a holstered pistol on a belt, a newspaper was discovered. “Famous guy,” Draza said, handing him the paper and pointing to a headline at the bottom of
the first page: BRITISH SABOTEURS ATTACK RIVER TARGETS
They had put the Moldova Veche pilot station out of commission for ten days to two weeks. Burned down the office, destroying valuable charts and records. And severely damaged a repair ship, when a booby trap blew up while a sunken barge was being craned to the surface.
Draza took the newspaper and read his favorite part aloud. “‘The Axis has been put on notice that the British Lion will strike anywhere, at any time, to disrupt the supply lines of its enemies.’”
Jovan liked hearing that. “To victory,” he said, and drank to it.
“You don’t mind we’re here, do you?” Draza said. “We were waiting for you to come back, so, we thought, what better place to wait?”
“You’re welcome here,” Serebin said. “But I’m going to wash, and then I need to sleep.”
Jovan stumbled out of his chair, caught himself, then stood upright, swaying. “Right here,” he said. “It’s very comfortable.”
“And we’ll be quiet,” Draza said, quietly.
The following morning he stopped at a barbershop for a shave, bought a new jacket, and, feeling better than he had for some time-the cut on his head was healing nicely-went to see Marrano in the hospital. When Serebin showed him the newspaper he laughed, holding his side. “So, success,” he said, “and you’ll notice what it doesn’t say. About German diplomats.”
Serebin had noticed, had become, over the years, something of an expert on what newspapers didn’t say. “Any chance the Yugoslavs will blow up the river?”
“Not now. They’re mobilizing-they’ve had their coup, and they’ll pay for it soon enough. All the foreign journalists are getting out, legations shutting down, arms dealers-that whole crowd, going back wherever they came from. As for us, you’d better get out right away, I’ll follow in a day or two. Our friends in the air force will know the details.”
“Then I’ll see you in Istanbul,” Serebin said.
“Well, somewhere.”
Serebin was glad to go home, wherever that was. He’d slept in the chair, after drinking much of the night with the captains. And their girlfriends. Just looking at them, blithely immodest as they strutted about, smoked cigars, drank and laughed and teased, had done his heart immense good. And before Draza passed out, he’d found it necessary to tell Serebin how sweet these girls were. “Patriots,” he’d said, pretty much the last word before Serebin and Jovan put him to bed.
That was one word for it, but then, early in the morning on the day after he said good-bye to Marrano, it made a lot more sense. Out on a field-an airfield because there were planes parked on the weedy grass, but pasture was what it was-a line of biplanes. “The Yugoslav air force,” Draza said.
Hawker Harts, and Furies, Bristol Bulldogs-with their wings on struts above and below the pilot cockpit, armed with a single machine gun, they were the aircraft of the early 1930s but they looked like they belonged to an earlier time-descendants of the Spads and De Havillands of the 1914 war-and Serebin doubted they could stay long in the air with German Messerschmitts.
“You have others?” Serebin said.
“No. This is what the British sold us, but they’re faster than you think.”
He sent a mechanic off to get Serebin a flying jacket and goggles-he would fly in the cockpit, for gunner or bombardier, behind the pilot.
“You have to fight with what you have,” Draza said. “Anyhow, the same Englishman that sold us the planes helped us with the coup. So, I leave the judgments to others, but that’s the way the world is, right?”
Serebin put on his flying gear and climbed up into the gunner cockpit behind Draza, who turned and handed him a road map of Yugoslavia and Macedonia. “Change of plan,” he said, “you’re going to Thassos.”
“In Greece?”
“Sort of. An island, smugglers’ paradise. The Adriatic’s no good now-too much fighting; Luftwaffe, RAF, Italian navy. It’s crowded.”
The mechanic pulled the blocks from the wheels, then spun the single propeller, which produced coughs and smoke and backfires and, eventually, ignition. The Hawker bumped across the rutted field, lifted with a roar, flew over the Srbski Kralj and waggled its wings, then, bouncing up through the thermals, climbed to five thousand feet and turned south. In a bright blue sky, above fields and forests, sometimes a village. Captain Draza turned halfway around in his seat, shouted “Mobilization,” and pointed off to the east. Extraordinary, to see it from above. At least a thousand carts, drawn by plodding teams of oxen, long columns of infantry, field guns on caissons. Draza turned round again, and, with a broad grin, made the victory sign.
3 April. London. It was a long ride by tube to Drake’s club, on Grosvenor Square, so Josef the waiter always left home early to make sure he wasn’t late to work. Now and then, when his line had been hit the night before, he had to walk, and sometimes, going home after work, he had to make his way through the blackout, or wait in an air raid shelter until the all clear sounded.
Still, he didn’t mind. A cheerful soul, with a game leg and merry eyes, who’d lost his hair in his twenties-“from worrying,” he liked to say-he’d snuck out of Prague in April of ’39, after the Germans marched into the city, and, with wife and baby, somehow made his way to London. The young men who’d worked at the Drake had gone to war, so new service staff had to be hired, but the management was more than pleased with Josef.
Josef with a hard J, to the spruce types who stopped at their club for drinks or dinner. He worked hard at being a good waiter-he’d been a good teacher of mathematics-doing his best meant something to Josef and the
