Spies of the Balkans

suited some of the statelier daughters.

“Am I invited to the recital?” he asked.

She pressed her cheek against his. “Many things I might ask of you, my dear, but …”

“Do you perform?”

“In tights? I think not.”

“Don’t tell me you can’t wear tights.”

“That is for you to look at, not the butcher and his wife.”

Balthazar was delighted to see them and offered a solemn bow. “So pleased,” he said, “it’s been too long,” and led them to a very small, very private room. Filled with ottomans, wool carpets, and low brass tables, the soft, shadowy darkness barely disturbed by a spirit lamp flickering in one corner. Balthazar lit some incense, then prepared two narghilehs, each with a generous lump of ochre-colored hashish. “You will eat later?” he said. “A nice meze?” Small appetizers-eggplant, feta, hummus.

“Perhaps we will.”

He well knew they would but didn’t make a point of it, saying only, “As you wish,” and closing the door carefully-their privacy his personal responsibility.

Music would have been nice and, as it turned out, music there was. If not from Balthazar itself, from the taverna next door, a bouzouki band and a woman singer, muffled by the wall, so just the right volume. They sat on a low loveseat, shoulders and hips touching, and leaned over a worked-brass table. When Zannis inhaled, the water in the narghileh bubbled and took the harsh edge off the hashish so he could hold the smoke in for a long time.

They were silent for a while, but eventually she said, “Quite nice tonight. The smoke tastes good, like … what? Lemon and lime?”

“Did you ever eat it?”

“No.”

“Best not.”

“Oh?”

“Very powerful. It will take you, ah, far away. Far, far away.”

“I’m rather far away as it is.” After a moment she said, “You see that little lamp in the corner? It reminds me of Aladdin, I believe it might have been in a book I had, as a child.” She stared into the distance, then said, “Do you suppose, if I rubbed it …?”

“You’d burn your fingers, the genie keeps it hot.”

“Doesn’t want to come out?”

“Not in this weather.”

She giggled. “Not in this weather.” She tossed the tube of the narghileh on the table, turned sideways, rested her head on his shoulder, and began to unbutton his shirt. That done, she spread it apart and laid her cheek on his chest-hairless and smooth, with broad, flat plates. Putting her lips against his skin, she said, “You smell good.”

“I do? I took a bath, maybe it’s the soap.”

“No, it isn’t soap, it’s something about you, something sweet.”

For a time they drifted, then, returning from wherever he’d been, he said, “Would you like to sit on my lap?”

“I always like that.” She stood, hiked up her dress, settled herself on his thighs, leaned her weight against him, and raised her knees, so that, as if by magic, his hand covered her bottom. On the other side of the wall, the singer’s voice grew plaintive. That made them both laugh, as though she could see through the wall. “Can you understand the lyric?” he said.

She shook her head.

“She’s singing about her flower.”

“In her garden?”

He moved her top knee a little and said, “No, this one.” The tips of his index and middle fingers rested on tight cotton. She was, he thought, so very clever, wearing white cotton panties, just right for a proper Englishwoman, but they were cut to provide a snug fit, and the cotton felt very fine, very soft, to his fingers. After a few moments, a breath escaped her; he could feel it and he could almost, but not quite, hear it. Delicately, he moved his fingers, not ambitious, simply savoring the warm reception, and much more pleased than proud.

On. And on. Until she raised her head and spoke quietly by his ear, in the King’s English: “Let’s have those off, shall we?”

Later, after Zannis had gone out into the public room and Balthazar had brought them-now famished-the meze, she scooped up some hummus with a triangle of pita bread and said, “Strange, but it just now occurs to me that the ottoman is an extraordinary piece of furniture, ingenious.”

“Yes?”

“Oh yes. Because you can, you know, also sit on it.”

After such a night, going back to work the next day was something like a punishment. Sibylla, the office clerk, always starched and taut, was wound especially tight that morning-neither Saltiel nor Zannis would admit it but they were both afraid of her. She stood straight as a stick, with fair hair set every Wednesday in a warrior’s helmet. And warrior was, at the moment, the very word, for she had come to work in a bad mood and was taking it out on the files.

Of these, there were two distinct sets. The first lived in a row of wooden filing cabinets in what was called the other room-there were two, with a bathroom in the hall-and included all the various paper that flowed through a government bloodstream: directions from on high, carbons of correspondence, letters from the citizenry, and various oddments, like newspaper clippings, that got themselves into the files and stayed there. Though sometimes-as witness Sibylla’s attack du jour-not forever.

“Gabi,” she said, holding a paper so that Saltiel could read it, “is this important?”

Saltiel didn’t want to read it. “Probably not.”

“A memorandum, from Station Six. It seems to concern the cemetery.”

“Which one?”

“The old Turkish one. The subject is ‘Copulation at Night.’”

“By the living?”

“If not, keep it,” Zannis said, looking up from his desk. They couldn’t really get Sibylla to laugh, but they never stopped trying.

Instead, a sigh. What bad boys they were. “Dated 10 September, 1938.”

“By now, they’re likely done copulating,” Saltiel said. “Get rid of it.”

The other file was maintained by Zannis, on five-by-eight cards in shoeboxes, and, taken altogether, was a working map of the power centers-and there were many-of Salonika. Thus it included cards for shipowners and bankers, Greek Orthodox prelates, consuls, spies, resident foreigners, journalists, politicians, high-class criminals, and courtesans-anybody who mattered. For an official whose job was to work behind the scenes, it was crucial to keep track of the cast of characters.

The files, both sets, played a central role in the unnamed office on the Via Egnatia, with support from three typewriters, three telephones, and one more device which, from time to time, would remind them of its presence by ringing a little bell. As it did at that moment, producing a mumbled “Skata,” from Zannis- the Greek equivalent of the French merde-by which he meant now what. The device, on its own private table in the corner, was a Model 15 Siemens teleprinter, and now, all by itself, it began to type, fast and furious, a page rising slowly from a slot above its keyboard. Zannis stood by the table and read the text as it appeared.

AS PER YOUR QUERY 6 OCTOBER 1940 STOP MAIN BORDER STATIONS REPORT NO RECORD RENAULT MODEL UNKNOWN LICENSE SK 549 ENTERING BULGARIA LAST 48 HOURS STOP NO RECORD GREEK NATIONAL K L. STACHO THIS OFFICE STOP SIGNED LAZAREFF END

The teleprinter waited, making its thucka-thucka-thucka sound, for thirty seconds, then shut down. Well, Zannis thought, I gave it a try. On a hunch that Stacho had fled up to Bulgaria, he’d had Sibylla send a teletype to his old friend, Ivan Lazareff, in Sofia. If he’d thought that Stacho was spying for Bulgaria-a perfectly reasonable assumption-he wouldn’t have done it, but the undertaker, a Greek citizen of Bulgarian descent, was spying for Germany, or at least for a man carrying German documents, so he’d taken a chance. And why not?