Spies of the Balkans

stood at the bar. Zannis ordered two retsinas. “The retsina is good here,” he said. “Local.” When the drinks came, Zannis raised his glass. “To your health.”

“And to yours.” When he’d had a sip, Pavlic said, “You’re right, it is good. Where are you from?”

“Salonika. I’m a policeman there.”

“No!”

“Don’t like the police?”

“Hell, it isn’t that, I’m one also.”

“You are? Really? Where?”

“Zagreb.”

“Skata! A coincidence?”

“Maybe your General Staff did it on purpose.”

“Oh, yes, of course you’re right. You can trust a policeman.”

From Pavlic, a wry smile. “Most of the time,” he said.

Zannis laughed. “We do what we have to, it’s true,” he said. “Are you a detective, in Zagreb?”

“I was, for twenty years, and I expect you know all about that. But now, the last year or so, I’m in charge of the cars, the motor pool.”

“Your preference?”

“Not at all. It was a, how should I put this, it was a political transfer. The people who run the department, the commissioner and his friends at city hall, were reached.”

“Reached.” Such things happened all the time, but Zannis couldn’t stop himself from being shocked when he heard about it. “Bribed?”

“No, not bribed. Intimidated? Persuaded? Who knows, I don’t. What happened was that I didn’t hold back, in fact worked extra hard, investigating certain crimes. Crimes committed by the Ustashi-Croatian fascists, and great friends with Mussolini; they take money from him. Maybe you’re aware of that.”

“I’m not. But it’s no surprise.”

“Of course they consider themselves patriots, fighters in the struggle for Croatian independence-they sing about it, in the bars-but in fact they’re terrorists, Balkan Nazis. And when it was reported that they’d beaten somebody up, or burned his house down, or murdered him in front of his family-their favored method, by the way-I went after them. I hunted them down. Not that they stayed in jail, they didn’t, but it was a matter of honor for me. And not just me. There were plenty of us.”

Zannis’s face showed what he felt: disgust. “Still,” he said, after a moment, “it could have been worse.”

“That’s true. I’m lucky to be alive. But you know how it goes-you can’t take that into account, not when you do what we do.”

“No, you can’t. At least I can’t. I’m a fatalist, I guess.” Zannis drank the last of his retsina, caught the eye of the woman behind the bar, raised his empty glass and wiggled it. The woman quickly brought two more. Pavlic started to pay but Zannis beat him to it, tossing coins on the bar. “I’m the host,” he said. “Here in scenic Trikkala.”

“All right. My turn next time.” Pavlic raised his glass to Zannis, drank some retsina, reached into the inside pocket of his uniform tunic, and brought out a packet of cigarettes. “Do you smoke? Try one of these.”

On the packet, a bearded sailor looked out through a life preserver. “Players,” Zannis said. “English?”

“Yes. I got them on the freighter.” Pavlic lit their cigarettes with a steel lighter. “What do you do, in Salonika?”

“I run a small office where we take care of … special cases. We deal with the rich and powerful, foreigners, diplomats-whatever’s a little too sensitive for the regular detectives. I report to the commissioner, who’s been a good friend to me, for a long time.”

“Lucky.”

“Yes.”

“But you have something similar to the Ustashi: the IMRO-they used to work together, if I have my history right. What is it, Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization?”

“It is. And founded in Salonika, back in the last century. They’re Slavic Macedonians, Bulgarians mostly, who think they’re going to have a separate Macedonia. But, thank heaven, they’ve been quiet for a few years.”

“More luck-especially for your Salonika Jews. Because our Jews, in Zagreb, are right at the top of the Ustashi list. They’d like to get rid of the Serbs, and the Croat politicians who oppose them, but they really have it in for the Jews. If the Ustashi ever took control of the city, well …”

Zannis heard the words our Jews as though Pavlic had emphasized them. For some reason, a fleeting image of Emilia Krebs crossed his mind. “That won’t happen in Salonika,” he said. “Not with IMRO, not with anybody.”

“It’s a damn shame, what’s being done to them, up in Germany. And the police just stand there and watch.” Pavlic’s face showed anger, his policeman’s heart offended by the idea of criminals allowed to do whatever they wanted. “Politics,” he said, as though the word were an oath.

For a time they stood in silence, sipping their retsinas, and smoked their English cigarettes. Then Pavlic nodded toward the window and said, “Here’s some good news, anyhow.”

Through the cloudy glass, past the dead flies on the windowsill, Zannis saw that the wet street in front of the tavern was steaming. “At last,” he said. “It’s been raining for days.”

Pavlic stubbed out his cigarette, making ready to leave the taverna. “Once my corporal gets his wireless running, I’ll let them know up in Belgrade: ‘Pavlic reporting. The sun’s come out.’”

Zannis smiled as he followed Pavlic through the door. The captain stopped for a moment and closed his eyes as he raised his face to the sun. “By the way,” he said, “I’m called Marko.”

“Costa,” Zannis said. And they headed back to the school.

The officers did their best to keep the reservists busy-calisthenics, marching drills, whatever they could think up-but the soldiers were there to wait until they were needed, waiting was their job, and so time passed very slowly. At night, as the chill of the schoolroom floor rose through his blanket, Zannis found it hard to sleep. He thought about Roxanne, reliving some of their warmer moments together: the way her face looked at climax; times when she’d thought something up that particularly, spontaneously, excited her. Or maybe such ideas came to her when she was by herself, lost in fantasy, and she tried them out when she got the chance. That was true of him, likely true of her as well. A lot of love got made when lovers were apart, he thought.

But, with snoring men on either side of him, fantasy of this sort led nowhere. Instead, his mind drifted back to recent life in Salonika, which now seemed remote and distant. He sometimes recalled the German agent; more often Emilia Krebs and the two children. But, most often, the Rosenblum sisters he’d heard about during the frantic, disrupted telephone call from Switzerland. Unmarried sisters, he guessed: older, librarians. Helpless, vulnerable, trying to make their way through some dark night in Budapest, or wherever they’d been caught. No ability whatever to deal with clandestine life, with border patrols, police raids, informers, or conscientious fascist citizens who knew a Jew when they saw one, no matter the quality of their false papers.

Could he have helped them? How? He was absolutely sure that Emilia Krebs would not stop what she was doing-Germany was now the very essence of hell; continuous torment, no escape. And so her fugitives would be taken by the machine built to hunt them down. Again and again. This thought reached a very sore place inside him, and he could not stop thinking it.

The military population of Trikkala began to thin out as reservists were sent up to the fighting to replace the dead and wounded. Pavlic and Zannis worked together, Zannis receiving situation reports from the captain and handing them on to Pavlic for translation and transmission to the Yugoslav General Staff. Now and then Pavlic wanted to know more, and now and then Zannis went to the captain and requested more, and now and then clarification or expansion was provided. Mostly the reports included the daily numbers-enemy dead, wounded, and captured-and names-villages, rivers, and positions, taken or abandoned-as the Greek infantry labored over the snow-covered mountains of Albania. The Yugoslavs read the reports, but their support wasn’t needed, and so they did nothing. What help the Greeks had came from their British ally.

A senior officer, for example, who appeared with a truck one morning, a truck stacked with wooden crates. Almost a stage presence, this officer, who stood ramrod straight, had a splendid cavalry mustache, and lacked only the monocle. Some forty reservists, Zannis among them, were organized to move the truck’s cargo up to a village a few miles behind the front lines. The reservists stood in front of the school while the British officer addressed them