Spies of the Balkans

“It’s expensive, no?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think I’m rich, but I have a lot of money. He gave me money, I saved it. And there’s more.”

“More?”

“I’ll show you.” She went to her suitcase and returned with a slim elongated package-heavy oilcloth wound tight and secured with a waxed cord. “A gift from Vasilou,” she said. “He used to go up to the monasteries and buy things from the monks.” Carefully, she unwound the oilcloth, then burlap sacking, and held up a parchment scroll wrapped around a spindle. Very delicately, she extended the parchment. “See? It’s a royal decree, from Byzantium.”

The writing was strange; Zannis couldn’t read it. At the bottom, a series of flourishes that glittered in the lamplight.

“The emperor’s signature,” she said. “Basil II. When the emperor signed a decree, it was sprinkled with gold dust and ground cinnabar, that’s why it sparkles.”

Zannis peered at it. “Well, if you’re going to sign a decree … Seems like we’ve lost something in the modern government service.”

She smiled, carefully rewrapping the scroll. “Vasilou had a professor at the university read it. It orders a water system-for some city that no longer exists.”

As she returned the package to her suitcase, Zannis laid his head back against the sofa and, for a moment, closed his eyes. Then she said, “Very well, that does it.”

She turned out the lamp and they undressed, she down to bra and panties while he, following her example, stayed in his underwear. She took his hand and led him to the bed, they crawled under the covers-exquisitely soft and fluffy in there-held each other, and fell asleep. For an hour. Then he woke, because she had unbuttoned the front of his underpants and was holding him in her hand.

Later, they really slept. And the next thing he knew she’d woken him by kissing him on the forehead. “What time is it?” she said, urgency in her voice.

He reached a hand toward the night table, found his watch, put on his glasses, and said, “Eight minutes after six.”

“Something I want to see, so don’t go back to sleep.”

They waited until six-thirty; then she led him to the window. From here-standing naked, side by side and holding hands-they could look out over the span of the harbor. Down at the dock, the white ship sounded its horn, two blasts, and moved slowly out into the Aegean. “There it goes,” she said.

They put it off-a certain conversation, the inevitable conversation. Were very determined to leave it in the future, because they meant to have as much of this love affair as they could. So they made love in the late afternoon-first one kind of seduction, then another-decided to see every movie in Salonika, and ate everything in sight. A taverna he knew, one she knew, why hold back? Not now, they wouldn’t, and money no longer mattered. They ate spiced whipped feta, they ate calamari stuffed with cheese, they ate grilled octopus and grilled eggplant and mussels with rice pilaf and creamy thick yogurt with honey. Zannis didn’t go to the office on the first day, he just didn’t, and then he did it again. They walked along the sea, over to the amusement park in the Beschinar Gardens and rode the Ferris wheel. Of course, being out in the streets, there were traps laid for them: newspaper headlines in thick black print, posted on the kiosks. Reflexively, he started to comment on one of them but she put a finger to his lips and her eyes were fierce. So much warrior in Demetria, it surprised him. They weren’t so different.

Finally, after two lost days, he went to the Via Egnatia on the third of April. No more than a raised eyebrow from Sibylla. “A certain Englishman has been frantic to reach you,” she told him. “He called and called and then, yesterday morning, he showed up here. Escovil, is that the name? Anyhow, he had a valise with him, and he left you an envelope. On your desk.”

Zannis sat in his chair and stared at it, an oversize yellow envelope, thick paper, you couldn’t buy a more expensive envelope than that, he thought. Still, fancy as it was, only a paper envelope, and, with thumbs and forefingers, you could rip it in half. Sibylla was busy typing something, clackety-clack, what the hell had she found to do as the world came to an end? In his mind, he saw himself as he tore the envelope in two; then he opened it. A single sheet of notepaper, the message handwritten in Greek. “This is for 5 April; you won’t be able to travel after that.” No signature. And what was “this”? The hand of the gods, Zannis said to himself. Because it was a steamship ticket for, of all ships, the Bakir out of Galata, Istanbul, the same tramp steamer that had brought a German spy to Salonika last October. A Turkish ship, the ship of a neutral nation, thus safe from German submarines and bound, at 2100 hours on 5 April, for Alexandria, Egypt.

So now they would have to have the conversation. Zannis, the ticket folded up in the inside pocket of his jacket, walked slowly, as slowly as he could, back to the Lux Palace. It just wasn’t far enough away, not at that moment it wasn’t, and, too soon, he rode the ancient grilled elevator to the sixth floor. At his knock, Demetria swept the door wide and gestured with the hand of a stage magician. Presto! Believe your eyes if you can! She had bought at least two dozen vases, no, more, and filled each of them with flowers, red and yellow, white and blue, anemones, roses, carnations, an entire flower stall it seemed. The air was dense with aroma. “I took two hotel porters to the market,” she said. “And I could have used another. We staggered.”

Enchanting. Well, it was. He touched a finger to the steamship ticket in his pocket, but he couldn’t show it to her now-not when she’d done all this. Demetria circled around him and slid his jacket down his arms. “Come sit with me on the sofa,” she said. “And behold! Demetria’s garden.”

4 April. 7:20 A.M.

Half awake, he reached out for her-he would stroke her awake, and he would do more than that. But he found only a warm place on her side of the bed, so opened one eye halfway. She was all business, getting dressed. “Where are you going?”

“To St. Cyril’s, to the eight o’clock mass.”

“Oh.”

Soon he watched her go out the door, then fell back to a morning doze. But fifteen minutes later, she reappeared, looking grim and disappointed. “What happened?” he said.

“Jammed. Packed solid. I couldn’t even get in the door.”

Finally, at mid-morning, as they lazed around the suite, it was time. He’d let it go for a day, but now the moment had come; she would have only that day and the next-the Bakir was due to sail at nine in the evening-to prepare to leave. She was reading in an easy chair by the window-they’d found other uses for that chair-and he retrieved the ticket from his jacket and laid it on the table by her side.

“What’s that, Costa?”

“Your steamship ticket.”

She was silent for a time, then said, “When?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“What makes you think I’ll use it?”

“You must, Demetria.”

“Oh? And you?”

“I have to stay.”

She stared at the ticket. “I guess I knew it would be this way.”

“What did you intend to do, if the war came here?”

“Stay in Salonika. Even if we lose, and the Germans take the city, it won’t be so bad. They say Paris isn’t bad.”

“This isn’t Paris. To the Germans, it’s closer to Warsaw, and Warsaw is very bad. No food. No coal. But that isn’t the worst of it. You are a very beautiful and desirable woman. When you walk down the street, every man turns his head, and such women are like … like treasure, to an occupying army, and they take treasure.”

“I can dye my hair.”

From Zannis, a very rueful half-smile: as though that would matter.

She thought for a time, started to say something, thought better of it, then changed her mind again. “I thought you would protect me.” From Vasilou, from the world.