Spies of the Balkans

war, and he’d signed up to fight a filthy enemy, but he would never be one of them, the Joneses and the Wilkinses- they didn’t like him and they never would.

“Once upon a time,” Jones said-glass in hand, he settled back against the chair and crossed his legs-“there was a little man called Henry Byer. You wouldn’t know the name, but if you’d been one of the chaps hanging about in the science labs of Cambridge in the nineteen-twenties, you most certainly would. A physicist, Harry, as he’s called, and brilliant. Studied sound waves and radio beams, very theoretical back then, nobody had the faintest idea such things could be used in war, nobody had ever heard of radio navigation. It helps bombers flying at night, who can find their targets only by use of radio beams, locator beams we’d call them now. Who could have known that a radio beam would become a crucial weapon, could win or lose a war? Now the Germans have their own radio beams but, using the methods that Harry Byer discovered, we can alter them. And the Luftwaffe may know we’re doing it, but they don’t know how. Harry Byer knows how.”

Jones stopped for a drink, then went on. “Anyway, life went well for Harry; a lectureship at Cambridge, where he worked in the physics lab, he married his sweetie, a pretty girl-”

“Smashing girl,” Wilkins said. “Big bosoms.” He indicated the magnitude of the bosoms with his cupped hands.

“Mmm,” Escovil offered, raising his eyebrows in appreciation, one of the boys.

Jones cleared his throat and said, “Yes, well.” Then, “But, in the summer of nineteen thirty-nine, life went sour for the Byer family, because la wife found somebody she liked better. Harry was, how shall I say, unprepossessing physically, you see, very smart certainly, but came the day when very smart just didn’t … compete.

“And, well, still, who cared? But Harry took it badly, oh, very badly indeed. And just about then the first of September comes rolling around and Adolf sends his tanks into Poland. So Harry Byer, in a terrible huff, marches himself down to London and enlists in the RAF. He’ll show the wife what’s what, he’ll go and get himself killed! Hah! There! Take that!”

Something rumbled inside Wilkins which, Escovil figured out a moment later, was laughter.

“Oh, but you know, Escovil, somebody should have cared about this fellow who’s crucial to the war effort. Because Hitler’s got legions of goose-stepping SS goons, but Britain has scientists. And scientists win. You see?”

“I do see,” Escovil said.

“But the aristocrat, who’s supposed to be watching, a very titled aristocrat I might add, who goes to country houses with divinely important people, slips up. Not that he does anything right away, when there’s still time to do something about it, no, either he isn’t told or he ignores it.”

“The latter, I’d say,” Wilkins offered.

“And Arthur’s got it right. Because that class of individual doesn’t make mistakes. They simply go on. No balls-up here, everything is tickety-boo. But, as you might have guessed, everything really isn’t tickety-boo. Now the RAF isn’t going to allow Harry Byer to actually fly an aircraft, good heavens no, but he is something of a gnome, a little runt, and that qualifies him as a tail gunner because he fits in the turret. So off he goes, in his Wellington bomber, dropping incendiaries on Germany, and good for him.”

“Amen,” Escovil said.

“Well, it damn near is amen, as you say, because early in January, Harry’s Wellington is hit by flak over the Ruhr. The pilot makes a valiant effort but it’s no good and the crew bails out over France. Now, luck intervenes. Some of the crew are caught right away, but Harry lands in just the right farmer’s field and the French, perhaps a resistance group, or simply French, take charge of him and smuggle him up to Paris. And there he sits, as they try to make arrangements to get him out of the country.

“Now, just about here, the aristocrat is told what’s become of Harry and gives forth a mighty British roar. And who do you suppose he roars at? To clean up this godawful mess? He roars at us, who else?”

Jones waited. Escovil knew he had been called on to recite, and what came to him was, “And now you’re roaring at me.”

Impertinent. Wilkins said, “We’re not roaring, Francis. Yet.”

“So then, what shall I do?”

“Why, get him out. What else?” Jones said. There was a file folder on the table by Jones’s chair. Jones opened it, withdrew a photograph, and held it out to Escovil, who had to go and retrieve it. When he’d returned to his chair, Jones said, “There he is. Taken when he reached Paris, just to make sure they have who they say they have.”

In the photograph, Harry Byer looked like an owl who’d flown into the side of a barn. Owlish he had always been-hooked beak of a nose, small eyes, pursy little mouth-while the barn wall had left livid bruises by his right eye and the right-hand corner of his mouth. Injured in the airplane? Beaten up? “When was this taken?” he said. He started to rise, intending to return the photograph.

But Jones waved him back down and said, “A week or so after he landed.”

“And how did, um, we come to hear about it?”

“Whoever these people are, they were in contact with an underground cell operating a clandestine radio.”

“Back to London.”

“Back to the French in London.”

“Oh.”

“Quite.”

“You don’t suppose the Germans are in control of them, do you? Waiting to see who shows up?”

“Haven’t a clue.”

Silence. Wilkins had now assumed the same posture, drink in hand, legs crossed, as his colleague. They were, Escovil thought, rather good at waiting. Finally he said, “So you’ll want me to go up there.”

Jones cackled. “Are you daft? Of course not, you’ll send your agent, what’s-his-name, the policeman.”

“Constantine Zannis? He’s not my agent. Who told you that?”

Wilkins leaned forward and said, “Oh damn-it-all of course he is.” He glanced at his watch. “Has been for a while-ten minutes, I’d say, more or less.”

I’d like to be in the room when you tell Zannis that. But Escovil knew there was no point in starting an argument he couldn’t win. “Paris is a long way from here. Why wouldn’t you take Byer out by fishing boat, from the French coast?”

“Option closed,” Jones said. “For the time being. Somebody got himself caught up there and the Germans shut it down. We’ll get it back, in time, but right now you’ll have to use your escape line.”

“It isn’t mine.”

“Now it is.”

Oh piss off. “And why does Zannis have to go?”

“Because Byer will never make it by himself, speaks not a word of any continental language. He can read a scientific journal in German, but he can’t order lunch. And, more important, if he’s caught, we have to be able to show we did everything we could. We have to show we care.”

Escovil suppressed a sigh. “Very well, I’ll ask him.”

“No,” Wilkins said, now quite irritated, “you’ll tell him. ‘Ask him’ indeed.”

Jones said, “Do it any way you like, but keep in mind, Francis, we don’t take no for an answer.” He stood, collected Wilkins’s glass, then Escovil’s, and poured fresh drinks. When he’d resettled himself, he said, “Now,” in a tone of voice that was new to Escovil, and went on to explain how they thought the thing might actually be done. Bastards they were, to the very bone, Escovil thought, but at least, and thank heaven, smart bastards.

27 January. A telephone call from Escovil, early that afternoon. Could they meet? Privately? Zannis’s instinctive reaction was to refuse, courteously or not so courteously, because the word “privately” told the tale: the spies wanted something. And it wasn’t such a good day to ask Zannis anything, because he was miserable. He had waited for a call from Demetria, waited and waited, but it hadn’t come. Five long days had crept by, his heart soaring every time the telephone rang: It’s her! But it never was. Now, he would either have to assume she’d thought better of the whole thing, or was waiting for him-as he’d promised, very nearly threatened-to call her. Meanwhile, the spies were after him. Back in the autumn, in his time with Roxanne, he