Spies of the Balkans

“Then good evening.”

Uncle Anastas had a friend-also an emigre Greek, it turned out-who owned an ancient truck, and he picked them up at dawn. A few minutes later they joined a long line of produce trucks, coming back empty after delivery to the Paris produce markets, and the soldiers waved them through the control at the Porte Maillot. Then he headed northwest from Paris on the road that followed the Seine, with signs for DIRECTION ROUEN. A wet, steady snow that morning, from a low sky packed with gray cloud. “We won’t fly today,” Byer said, staring anxiously out the window.

“We may have to wait,” Zannis said. “But I expect we’ll take off.”

“Not in this.” After he spoke, Byer swallowed.

Zannis studied him. What went on? “Everything all right?” he said.

Byer nodded emphatically. Nothing wrong with me.

It was hard to see, the windshield wiper smeared snow and road grime across the window, not much more than that, and the driver leaned forward and squinted, cursing eloquently in Greek. Finally he found the route departementale for La Roche-Guyon, the truck skidding as he made the last-minute turn. The narrow road wound past winter farmland for a long time, then it was Zannis who spotted the stone marker with a number chiseled into it, and the truck drove, in low gear, up a muddy, deeply rutted path. Finally, when they knew they’d taken the wrong turn, they saw an airplane in a plowed field. A compact twin-engine aircraft, a workhorse used for a few passengers or a small load of freight, with a white cross in a red circle insignia behind the cockpit. Swiss markings, Zannis thought. What a clever king. Two men were loading crates into the plane, through a cargo hatch on the underside of the fuselage. “You can walk from here,” the driver said. As he worked at getting the truck turned around, Zannis and Byer trudged across a field, wind-driven snow in their faces. When they neared the plane, one of the men saw them, stopped loading, and waited until they reached him. “You are the passengers?”

“Yes.”

“Bad morning.”

“Will we be able to fly?” Byer said.

“Me?” The man grinned. He had high, sharp cheekbones, hair sheared off close to the scalp, and, Zannis could hear it, a hard Slavic edge to his French. A Russian? A Serb? He wore a leather jacket and a dirty white scarf spotted with oil-a cinema aviator-with a holstered revolver on his hip. “You give us a hand,” he said. “We’ll take off sooner.”

The crates were heavy, MAS 38 stenciled on the rough wooden boards. Zannis wasn’t certain, but he had a pretty good hunch he was loading French machine guns. When they were done, the pilot’s helper headed toward a farmhouse on the horizon. The pilot rubbed his hands and looked up at the sky. “One of you can sit on the crates, the other can use the co-pilot seat.” He led them around the plane, to a door behind the cockpit with a short steel- frame ladder propped against the bottom of the doorway.

Standing at the foot of the ladder, Zannis waited for Byer to climb up. When he didn’t, Zannis said, “Time to go.” He sounded cheerful, but he knew he had trouble.

Byer stood there. He was in a trance, face dead white, eyes closed.

“Harry?”

No answer.

“Let’s go,” Zannis said sharply. No nonsense, please. The pilot was staring at them through the cockpit window.

But Byer was rooted to the earth. Zannis guessed that something had happened to him when the Wellington went down, and now he couldn’t get on the plane.

The pilot’s patience was gone, the engines roared to life and the propellers spun. Zannis tried once more, raising his voice over the noise. “One foot in front of the other, Harry, your way back to England. Think about England, going home.”

Byer never moved. So Zannis took him by the back of the collar and the belt, hauled him up the ladder, and shoved him into the plane. Then he sat him down on a pile of crates. From the cockpit, the pilot called out, “I have a bottle of vodka up here, will that help?”

“No, it’s all right now,” Zannis yelled back, closing the door, pulling a bar down to secure it.

The plane began to bump across the field, gathering speed, then, heavily loaded, it wobbled aloft and climbed into the gray cloud.

Melissa stood on her hind legs, tail wagging furiously, set her great paws on his chest and licked his face. “Yes, yes girl, I’m back, hello, yes.” The welcome from his family was no less enthusiastic-they knew he’d been up to something dangerous and were relieved that he’d returned. A demand that he stay for dinner was gently turned aside; he wanted to go back to his apartment, to his bed, because he wanted to sleep more than he wanted to eat. So he promised he would return the following night and, by the time he let Melissa out the door, his grandmother was already at her sewing machine, working the pedals, restitching the lining of his jacket. As he walked down the hill toward the waterfront, Melissa ran ahead of him, turning from time to time to make sure he hadn’t again vanished, a sickle slice of moon stood low in the night sky, the streets were quiet, it was good to be home.

The flight to Bulgaria had been uneventful. At one point-was it Germany down there? Austria? — a pair of patrolling Messerschmitts came up to have a look at them, then banked and slid away. Perhaps the French king had permission to fly his crates over Germany-from some office, in some building. Perhaps more than one office, perhaps more than one building, perhaps more than one country. Perhaps the French king could do whatever he wanted; it had not been easy for him to find room in his briefcase for the two thousand dollars. Zannis had, in time, accepted the pilot’s invitation to sit in the co-pilot’s seat. From there he watched the passage of the nameless winter land below, the hills and the rivers, and wondered what to do about the crates. Machine guns to Bulgaria? For who? To shoot who? So, say something to Lazareff? Who worked for the Sofia police. Tell them? Tell Bulgaria- the historic enemy of Greece? He’d given his word to the French king, he would keep it. Did that include the crates?

In the end, it didn’t matter.

Because the pilot landed at a military airfield north of Sofia, and a squad of Bulgarian soldiers was waiting to unload the shipment. The officer in charge at the airfield had no idea what to do with unexpected, and unexplained, passengers, and had pretty much decided to hold them at the base and await orders from above. But then, at Zannis’s insistence, he’d made a telephone call to Captain Lazareff, which produced a police car and a driver, who dropped them off at a restaurant in Sofia.

There, over plates of lamb and pilaf, accompanied by a bottle of Mastika, Lazareff and Zannis conversed in German, which excluded Byer, who, now back on solid ground, hardly cared. Lazareff inquired politely about the flight, Zannis responded politely that it had been smooth and easy. Lazareff suggested-still polite, though with a certain tightness at the corners of the mouth-that it would be better if Zannis were to forget he’d seen the plane’s cargo.

“What cargo?”

“You’ll tell your friend there? Whoever he is?”

“What friend?”

“Ha-ha-ha!”

More Mastika, tasting like anise, and lethal.

“By the way,” Lazareff said, “the situation in Roumania is a little worse than the newspapers are letting on. We calculate six hundred and eighty thousand troops, maybe sixty Wehrmacht divisions, artillery, tanks, all of it. They have to be fed, it isn’t cheap, so they’re obviously there for a reason. Probably they’re meant to intimidate us or, if it comes to that, invade. Or maybe they’re there to threaten the Serbs, or maybe Greece. Our response, so far, has been to tell Hitler that we’re not quite ready to sign his pact.”

“Not quite ready?”

“Not quite. We’ve destroyed the bridges over the Danube.”

“That would be a message, I’d think.”

“A tantrum. We’ve seen the materiel, struts and floats, that can be assembled into pontoon bridges.”

“I appreciate your telling me,” Zannis said.

“I expect your generals know all about it,” Lazareff said. “But I think you should know also, Costa, so you can make your own, personal … arrangements. If you see what I mean.”