Spies of the Balkans

“Oh no, not up there. You won’t last long by yourself.”

“So then, gangs? That the word? Like the Sicilians?”

“Yes, sir.”

“With names?”

Sami Pal thought it over, either preparing to lie or honestly uncertain, Zannis wasn’t sure which. Finally he said, “Sometimes we use the-um, that is, sometimes they use the name of a leader.”

This errant pronoun we interested Zannis. One end of a string, perhaps, that could be carefully pulled until it led somewhere, maybe stolen merchandise or prostitutes traveling between the two cities. And not years ago, this week. But the clue was of interest only to Zannis the detective, not to Zannis the operator of a clandestine network. So he said, “And which one did you belong to, Sami? Back in the days when you lived up there?”

Sami Pal looked down at the desk. Whatever he was, he wasn’t a rat, an informer. Zannis’s first instinct was to show anger, but he suppressed it. “He won’t be investigated if you tell me his name, Sami. You have my word on that.”

Sami Pal took a breath, looked up, and said, “Gypsy Gus.”

“Who?”

“Gypsy Gus. You don’t know Gypsy Gus?”

“Why would I? He’s a Gypsy?”

Sami Pal laughed. “No, no. He left Hungary, when he was young, and became a wrestler, a famous wrestler, in America, captain, in Chicago. I thought maybe you would know who he was, he was famous.”

“Then what’s his real name?”

After a moment Sami Pal said, “Gustav Husar.”

Zannis repeated the name, silently, until he felt he’d memorized it. He was not going to write anything down in front of Sami Pal, not yet. “Tell me, what do they do, Husar and his friends.”

“The usual things. Loan money, protect the neighborhood merchants, help somebody to sell something they don’t need.”

Zannis had a hard time not laughing at the way Sami Pal thought about crime. Boy scouts.

“That’s the way it used to be, anyhow.” In the good old days.

“And now?”

“There’s bad blood now. Didn’t use to be like that, everybody kept to their own part of town, everybody minded their own business. But then, about three years ago, some of the, well, what you call gangs got friendly with a few individuals on the police force, maybe money changed hands, and the idea was to help certain people and maybe hurt some other people. It was after Hitler took over in Germany, sir, we had the same thing in Budapest, guys in uniforms, marching in the streets. There were some people in the city who liked what Hitler said, who thought that was the way life should go in Hungary. But not my crowd, captain, not my crowd.”

“Why not, Sami? Why not your crowd?”

“Well, we were always over in Pest, across the river from the snobs in Buda. Pest is for the working class, see? And when the politics came in, that’s the way we had to go. We’re not reds, never, like the Russians, but we couldn’t let these other guys get away with it. That meant fighting. Because if the workers were just having a drink somewhere, and here came some guys with iron bars, looking to cause trouble, we helped out. Maybe one of our guys had a gun, and he knew how to use it, understand?”

Gold! But Zannis merely nodded. “What about the Jews, in Budapest?”

Sami shrugged. “What about them?”

“What does … your crowd, think about them?”

“Who cares? There was one who used to work with us, he’s in jail now, but it didn’t matter to anybody, what he was.” After a pause, Sami Pal said, “We knew he was a Jew, but he didn’t have sidelocks or a beard or anything, he didn’t wear a hat.”

Zannis drummed his fingers on the desk. Would it work? “This Gypsy Gus, Gustav Husar,” he said. “He looks like a Gypsy?”

“No, sir.” Sami Pal grinned at the idea. “They made him a Gypsy because he came from Hungary, he’s got the photographs. Big mustache, like an organ-grinder, a gold hoop in his ear, and he wore a fancy sort of a shirt, and that little hat. You know, captain, Gypsy Gus.”

“And where would I find him, if I went to Budapest?”

Sami Pal froze. In his mind’s eye, he saw his old boss taken by the police-guns drawn, handcuffs out-and all because it was Sami Pal who’d sold him to the cops in Salonika.

Zannis read him perfectly. With hand flat, palm turned toward the desk, he made the gesture that meant calm down. And softened his voice. “Remember my promise, Sami? I meant it. Nobody’s going to do anything to your friend, I only want to talk to him. Not about a crime, I don’t care what he’s done, I need his help, nothing more. You know the sign on your door, in Vardar Square? It says CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES? Well, now you’ve had one.” He paused to let that sink in, then continued. “And I mean confidential, Sami, secret, forever, between you and me. You don’t go blabbing to your girlfriends, you don’t go playing the big shot about your friend on the police force. Understand?”

“Yes, sir. I have your promise.” He sounded like a schoolboy.

“And …?”

“It’s called Ilka’s Bar. When Gypsy Gus was a strong man in the circus, in Esztergom, before he went to Chicago, Ilka was his, um, assistant, on the stage, with a little skirt.”

Now Zannis set pad and pencil on the desk in front of Sami Pal. “Write it down for me, Sami, so I don’t forget. The name of the bar and the address.”

“I can only write in Hungarian, captain.”

“Then do that.”

Zannis waited patiently while Sami Pal carved the letters, one at a time, onto the paper. “Takes me a minute,” Sami said. “I don’t know the address, I only know it’s under the Szechenyi Bridge, the chain bridge, on the Pest side, in an alley off Zrinyi Street. There’s no sign, but everybody knows Ilka’s Bar.”

“And how does it work? You leave a message at the bar?”

“No, the bar is his … office, I guess you’d call it. But don’t show up until the afternoon, captain. Gypsy Gus likes to sleep late.”

11 December. Now for the hard part. He had to tell Vangelis. He could do what he meant to do behind the back of the entire world-all but Vangelis. Zannis telephoned, then walked up to the office in the central police headquarters on the same square as the municipal building. Vangelis was as always: shaggy white hair, shaggy white mustache stained yellow by nicotine because he’d smoked his way through a long and eventful life, and more and more mischief in his face, in his eyes and in the set of his mouth, as time went by- I know the world, what a joke. Vangelis had coffee brought from a kafeneion, and they both lit Papastratos No. 1 cigarettes.

They spent a few minutes on health and family. “Your brother makes a wonderful tram conductor, doesn’t he?” Vangelis said, his pleasure in this change of fortune producing a particularly beatific, St. Vangelis smile. Which vanished when he said, “The mayor is still telephoning me about his niece, Costa. The lost parakeet?”

Zannis shook his head. “Write another report? That we’re still looking?”

“Anything, please, to get that idiot off my back.”

Zannis said he would write the report, then told Vangelis what he was going to do. No names, no specifics, just that he intended to help some of the fugitives moving through the Balkans, and to that end he might be spending a day or two in Budapest.

Vangelis didn’t react. Or perhaps his reaction was that he didn’t react. He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down and said, “A long time, the train to Budapest. If it’s better for you not to be away from your work for so long, perhaps you ought to fly. The planes are flying again, for the moment.”

“I don’t think I have the money for airplanes.”

“Oh. Well. If that’s all it is.” He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and brought out a checkbook. As