Blood of Victory

THE EMPRESS OF SZEGED

26 March. Belgrade.

Or so the British cartographers called it. To the local residents it was Beograd, the White City, the capital of Serbia, as it had always been, and not of a place called Yugoslavia, a country which, in 1918, some diplomats made up for them to live in. Still, when that was done, the Serbs were in no shape to object to anything. They’d lost a million and a half people, siding with Britain and France in the Great War, and the Austro-Hungarian army had looted the city. Real, old-fashioned, neoclassical looting-none of this prissy filching of the national art and gold. They took everything. Everything that wasn’t hidden and much that was. Local residents were seen in the street wearing curtains, and carpets. And, ten years later, some of them, going up to see friends in Budapest, were served dinner on their own plates.

Serebin’s train arrived at dawn, a flock of crows rising to a pink sky from the station roof. His departure from Paris had turned into something quite like an escape-effected with the aid of Kacherin, of all people, the world’s worst poet. Because Kacherin, who wrote saccharine verse about his mother, was also Kacherin the emigre taxi driver, and for Serebin, once he declared himself a fugitive, the Gare de Lyon was out of the question — everybody was arrested there. So he gave Anya Zak money to buy him a valise and some clothes to put in it, and Kacherin drove him all the way to Bourges-he’d only asked for Etampes-the demarcation line for the Unoccupied Zone. An unexpectedly useful accomplice, Kacherin, who eased them through checkpoint after checkpoint with a hesitant smile and a nervous laugh. “Missed his train,” Kacherin told the Germans, making a bottle of his fist, thumb out, pinkie raised, and tilting it up to his mouth, while Serebin accommodated the fiction by holding his head in his hands. Oh those Russians.

Thus Kacherin did, in the end, turn out to have talent, it just wasn’t what he wanted it to be. They talked all the way to Bourges-that was at least, Serebin speculated, part of the reason Kacherin agreed to take him. Talked and talked. About poetry, about history, stars, bugs, tarot, Roosevelt. The man had a passion for the minutiae of the world-should he perhaps consider writing about that? No, shut up and be nice, Serebin told himself, an admonition delivered in the voice of his own mother.

Not so good in Belgrade.

The bar at the Srbski Kralj-King of Serbia, the hotel in town-was throbbing, mobbed with every predator in the Balkans, anonymous men with their blondes mixed in among knots of foreign correspondents. Serebin counted four different languages, all in undertones of various volumes, on his way across the room.

“Ah, Serebin, salut. ”

Here you are, at last. Marrano was glad, relieved, to see him. Introduced him to the two pale Serbs, in air force uniform, who shared his table, “Captain Draza and Captain Jovan,” smoking feverishly and radiating conspiracy from every pore. Ranks and first names? This was either sinister or endearing, Serebin couldn’t decide which. Maybe both. Russians and Serbs, Slavs who spoke Slavic languages, could understand each other, and Captain Draza asked him where he’d come from.

“Paris.”

“How can you live there?” They practically spit-living under German occupation was clearly outside their definition of manhood.

“Maybe I can’t.”

“That cocksucker thinks he’s coming down here,” Jovan said.

“He won’t like it,” Draza said.

It was evening by the time Marrano and Serebin walked toward the docks, through mud streets lined by little shacks that served as cafes. Inside, fires glowed in open brick ovens, the patrons laughed, shouted, cursed, and somebody played a mandolin or a balalaika. Where the street curved downhill, Marrano stumbled over a pig on a rope, which gave a single, irritated snort, then went back to rooting in the dirt. Somewhere above them, a woman was singing. Serebin stopped to listen. “Only the moon shines on the heights/And lights up the graves of the soldiers.”

Marrano asked him what it was.

“A Russian army song, ‘The Hills of Manchuria,’ from the 1905 war with Japan.”

“A lot of emigres, here?”

“Thirty-five thousand. From Denikin’s army, and Wrangel’s. Cossacks and doctors and professors, you name it. There was a big IRU chapter in Belgrade but they broke away from the Paris organization. Our politics-you know how that goes.”

Now they could see the docks, where the river Sava met the Danube-lanterns fore and aft on barges and tugs, and their shimmering reflections in the water. A few flood lamps, where work went on at night, a shower of blue sparks from a welder’s torch, red lights on buoys that marked a channel out in the river.

“Peaceful, isn’t it,” Marrano said. “Too bad it won’t last.”

Serebin knew that was true. Another city on fire.

“The Balkans are a problem now, for Herr Hitler. Italian army pushed all the way up into Albania and the Greeks not about to quit fighting. So, he’s got to send a serious force, thirty divisions, say, to calm things down, and they’ve got to go through Yugoslavia to get where they’re going. Which means the Belgrade government had better sign up with the Axis, or else. Right now, Hitler’s at the edge of his patience; ultimatums, bribed ministers, a fifth column-Croatia, and what comes next is invasion. The Yugoslavs know it, and they’ll give in, the government will, but the word at the Srbski Kralj is that the military, particularly the air force, won’t stand for it.”

As they neared the harbor they had to wait while a man came and got his dog, some kind of immense Balkan mastiff, so black he was almost invisible, who stood his ground and growled to let them know they were not allowed to go down his street. “A thousand pardons,” the man said, from the darkness.

“The two captains,” Serebin said. “They’re working for us?”

“For London, technically,” Marrano said. “But the simple answer is yes. There is now a second operation, an alternative plan in case the barges don’t work. In a way, it’s a better idea, but it will require digging and drilling, will require overt cooperation from the Yugoslavs, and it took Hitler to press Belgrade very hard before we got the answer we wanted.”

“What will they do?”

“Take the cliff on the Yugoslav side of the river and drop it in the Danube.”

“By digging and drilling?”

“That’s just to set explosive charges. Once we leave the freight business, we go into mining.”

They circled the harbor on an old wooden catwalk until Marrano found the dock he was looking for. At the far end, past river families cooking over charcoal braziers, past bargeloads of lumber and tar barrels and heavy rope, there was a small machine shop in a rusted tin shed. Inside, a workman at a bench was taking a carburetor apart, dipping each piece in a pan of gasoline to clean it. The shop smelled good to Serebin, oil and burnt iron, scents of the Odessa waterfront.

“Tell him we’re Captain Draza’s friends,” Marrano said.

Serebin translated, and the workman said, “Then you’re welcome here.”

“The magic formula,” Serebin said.

“In some places, yes. Others, I wouldn’t try it.”

“Who are they?”

“Oh, Serbian nationalists. Ultranationalists? Fascists? Anyhow they’re on our side, for the moment, so the name doesn’t matter.”

Beyond politics, Serebin knew exactly who they were. They reminded him of a few of the men who’d served with him in the civil war, and in the Ukraine, during the war with Poland. When you needed somebody to go crawling around in the enemy camp, when you needed somebody to deal with the sniper in the bell tower, it was Draza and Jovan who went. And, not always but surprisingly often, did the job and came back alive. You saw it in their eyes, in the way they carried themselves. They were good at fighting, it was just that simple, and Serebin, the officer Serebin, had quickly learned to tell them apart from the others.

Marrano strolled out to the end of the wharf. “Come and have a look.”

Serebin joined him. Roped to the dock were four barges, riding low in the filthy water, with tarpaulins tied down over high, bulky shapes. Serebin stepped over onto the first in line, put a hand on the canvas, and felt a round iron wall. All that time in Bucharest, this was what they got for it.

“There should be three more,” Marrano said. “Two from Germany, one here in Belgrade, but it looks like the German shipment isn’t coming.”

“What happened?”

“According to Gulian, the honorable gentlemen at the Zollweig factory are having difficulties. They refer, in their wire, to ‘an anomaly in the application for export license.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I would say it means, in German commercial terminology, something akin to fuck you. ”

“They were paid.”

“Oh yes.”

“So it’s robbery. When all the nice language is peeled away, they stole the money.” He paused, then said, “Or, if it isn’t that, it is,” he looked for the right word, “intervention.”

“That’s a possibility. Very, very unappetizing, if true. Polanyi and I spent time on that, in Istanbul.”

“And?”

“Who knows.”

“Well then, four barges will just have to be enough.”

Marrano looked at his watch. “Five, maybe. And, while we’re waiting, let me tell you how we’re going to do this.”

The workman finished his carburetor, drew a shutter down over the entry, snapped a padlock on it, and left for the evening. The weather was warm, it was almost a spring night in the harbor, so Marrano and Serebin sat on the wooden pier and leaned back against the metal shed. Marrano produced a page of typescript and gave Serebin a pad and pencil.

“Here in Belgrade, we’re at kilometer 1170 of the river, which means we’re a hundred and forty kilometers from the high ridge at 1030. The ridge runs for three kilometers, which should be enough-we don’t know how much time it will take to sink these things, but with the weight they’re carrying they’ll go down in a hurry.

“The tug will have to stop at the Roumanian border post-that’s at a village called Bazias, at kilometer 1072. If you leave here at one in the afternoon, figuring a speed of fifteen kilometers an hour, it gets you to Bazias by 7:30. Your papers are in order, and you should be through there in twenty minutes or so. Sometime after 9:45, you pass the pilot station at Moldova Veche, on the Roumanian shore. Supposedly, a pilot must be taken onboard for the passage through the Iron Gates. However, in real life, which is to say Roumanian life, all the big steamers do this, but only some, maybe half, of the tugboats. A pilot would complicate your life, but it isn’t the end of the world, though it might have to be for the pilot if he decides not to be reasonable.

“By this calculation, you come to kilometer 1030-there’s a big granite rock protruding from the water at 1029, it probably has some sort of folkloric nickname-sometime after ten at night. So, when you sight the rock, that’s it. The captain of the tugboat, discovering that one of his barges is sinking and taking the others down with it, now must cut the tow and, as soon as possible, alert the Danube authority.

“But by then, you’ll be long gone. About forty minutes beyond the Stenka ridge, kilometer 1018, the river Berzasca enters the Danube from the north, coming down from the Alibeg mountains, part of the Carpathian range. There’s a village where the rivers meet, and the tug will go a kilometer or so upstream, to a bridge over a logging road. On the bridge will be a Lancia, the Aprilia sedan, horribly dented and scratched, probably the color gray when first purchased or stolen, and it is not impossible that there was, at some point, a fire in the trunk. You may, if you’re like me, spend an idle hour wondering how such a thing could possibly have happened, but cars don’t live soft lives in this country and it remains a speedy and dependable machine. I’ll be driving, and we’ll take the Szechenyi road back to Belgrade. Then we stay here, see what develops on the river, and attend to our mining interests. Any questions?”

“The Szechenyi road?” Serebin knew it by reputation, a narrow track, hewn out of rock in the nineteenth century, at the direction of the Hungarian count who gave it his name.

“It works, I’ve tried it, just hope for dry weather. We use it also in the emergency plan, which has us bypassing Belgrade, crossing Yugoslavia by train-it is very difficult by car-or, in a real emergency, by plane, courtesy of our friends in the Royal Yugoslav Air Force, to a town called Zadar, between Split and Trieste on the Dalmatian coast. There we will be picked up by boat, probably the Nereide but with Polanyi you never know. The contact in Zadar is a florist, in a small street off the central square, called Amari. If you need to signal for help, no matter where you are, wire Helikon Trading with the message Confirm receipt of your letter of 10 March.

“Eventually, you can go back to Paris, or, if they’ve found out who you are and they’re after you, Istanbul. I should add that when Polanyi was told of your meeting at the bar in Paris, it was his feeling that no matter what went on or didn’t, your margin of safety has been compromised and you ought to get out.”

“He’s right,” Serebin said.

“He often is. So then, Istanbul.”

Serebin began to describe his flight from Paris, but the ragged beat of a tugboat engine approached from the mouth of the harbor and he rose and followed Marrano out to the end of the pier. In the glow of the dock light he could read the boat’s name, Empress of Szeged. So, a Hungarian boat. Which, when he thought about it, was no surprise at all. As the tug, towing a heavily loaded barge, slid cleverly up to the dock, Emil Gulian, looking exceptionally out of place in business hat, scarf, and overcoat, appeared at the stern, waved, then tossed Serebin a rope. “Hello there,” he called out. “Good to see you again.”

Serebin secured the line to a heavy bollard, then boarded the tugboat and walked forward to the pilot cabin. The Empress was manned by its owners, a young couple, both wearing the river sailor’s uniform of dark blue shirt and trousers. Zolti, short for Zoltan, was Hungarian, lean and wiry, face weathered by life on the water. Erma, a Viennese, was a few inches taller, broad and fat, with an immense bosom, sleeves rolled back to reveal a pair of meaty arms, and a face that would stop a clock. A peasant face, broad and fleshy, with shrewd, beady eyes, a bulbous nose, and a wide slash of a mouth, anxious to laugh at a world that had laughed at her. All this crowned by ebony hair that had been chopped off with-Serebin thought about a hatchet, but, more likely, a scissors.

To Serebin the couple spoke German, Zolti very little, Erma chattering away, flushed and excited and, every few seconds, licking her lips. Maybe a nervous habit, or maybe, Serebin thought, she’s beginning to feel it.

He certainly was. On the train down to Belgrade, it came to visit and stayed. Ticking away inside him, a knot in the chest, a dry mouth and, earlier that day, lighting a cigarette, he’d burned his palm with a flaring match.

“Are you going ashore?” he asked them.

“No, no,” Erma said. “We stay here.” With a nod of her head she indicated the barges. “On guard.” She picked up a short iron bar by the helmsman’s wheel, gave it a comic shake and closed one eye, as though she were protecting a tray of cookies from naughty children.

Gulian and Marrano were waiting for him on the dock, both with hands thrust in the pockets of their coats. As Serebin descended the ladder, Marrano said, “So?”

“They’ll be fine.”

“Don’t much care for the Nazis, those two,” Gulian said, shaking hands with Serebin. For the brief moment Serebin had seen him in Bucharest, at the Tic Tac Club, he’d been hesitant, retiring, the diffident escort of his nightclub singer girlfriend. Not now. He was younger than Serebin remembered, had a humorous face-a subtle, powerful smile that never went away, and the air of a man almost religiously unimpressed with himself, though that went for the world as well. He was also, Serebin thought, having a very good time-whatever leash he was off, a very good time.

“You’ll be my guests for dinner,” he said.

The last thing Serebin wanted, but Gulian wasn’t someone you said no to. They walked out of the harbor, found a cafe where Gulian made a telephone call-a nasty business, in Belgrade-then went off in a taxi to a small private house not far from the Srbski Kralj. For an elaborate dinner, served by two graceful young women, cooked by a man who kept opening the kitchen door a crack and peering out. Chicken-liver risotto, fillet of a fillet of pork, puree of roasted red peppers with garlic. Platters of it, which were tasted, then sent back to the kitchen, with Gulian calling out, “Magnificent, Dusko!” each time, to spare the feelings of the chef. There were no other customers-they ate at a large table in the dining room-this wasn’t precisely a restaurant, or it was a restaurant only when Gulian, or others like him, wanted it to be. For the finale, Dusko himself presented confitures of fruit doused with Maraschino.

Gulian hadn’t actually intended to come to Belgrade. But, once “those bastards over at the steel mill” began to procrastinate, he’d grabbed his checkbook and jumped on a train. “They were paid what they asked for-that was my mistake,” Gulian said. “When I didn’t bargain, they said to each other, ‘Well, he really wants this thing, let’s see how much.’”

“What did you do?” Serebin asked.

“First of all I showed up. Second of all I yelled-in French, and a few words in German, but they got the idea. And last of all I paid. So…”

A very good host, Gulian; provident, and entertaining. He knew the country, knew its history, and liked to tell stories. “Ever heard of Julius the Nephew, ruler of all Dalmatia?” No, actually, they hadn’t. “The last legitimately appointed Emperor of the West, designated by Rome in the middle of the fifth century. Despite, I should add, the plotting of one Orestes, former secretary to Attila the Hun.”

Well, it took Serebin’s mind off what he had to do. And the stories were good, Gulian a sort of writer manque, delighted by excess and eccentricity. “When the Turkish vizier Kara Mustapha was defeated at Vienna,” he said, over a forkful of risotto, “he could not bear to leave behind his most beloved treasures, especially the two most beautiful beings in his world. So, with tears of sorrow and regret, he had them beheaded, to make sure that the infidels would never possess them: the loveliest of all his wives, and an ostrich.”

After the dessert was taken away, Gulian called for brandy. “To success, gentlemen. And, when all is said and done, death to tyrants.”

One-fifteen in the morning. Serebin back at the harbor, this time by himself. He alerted the tugboat crew to what he was doing, then settled down to wait, lighting Sobranies with cupped hands in the sharp spring breeze. The tied-up tugs and barges bumped against their moorings, and he could hear boat traffic out on the river, up from Roumania or down from Hungary, sometimes a horn, sometimes a bell. Overcast in Belgrade, as always, maybe one or two faint stars in the northern sky. 1:30. 1:45. Serbian time. Dogs barking, up on the hillside. A singing drunk, a car, whining as it worked its way up a long grade.

2:10. The sound he knew as a military engine; overpowered, untuned, and loud. He watched the headlights, bouncing up and down as the vehicle wound its way along the dirt track that served the harbor. It stopped briefly at the end of the dock, then drove onto it, and Serebin felt the pole-built structure sway and quiver as the old wooden boards took the weight. It was, he saw, an open command car, vintage maybe 1920. “Greetings, Ivan,” a voice called out, Ivan being any Russian whose name you didn’t know.

Captain Draza and Captain Jovan, drunk as owls and only an hour late. In light blue officers’ uniforms, leather straps crossed over the tunics. They banged and rattled in their car, then hauled out a wooden crate, which they carried between them with a burlap sack on top.

“It’s the armorers!” Jovan called out. Draza thought that was pretty funny. They dropped the crate at Serebin’s feet. It landed hard, and Jovan said “Oh shit!”

“No, no,” Draza said. “No problem.” Then, to Serebin, “How are you?”

“Good.”

“That’s good.”

He rummaged around in the sack, found a screwdriver, and began prising boards off the top of the crate and tossing them over his shoulder into the water. When the crate was open, he lifted out a black iron cylinder with a ridged top and a shiny steel mechanism bolted into a recessed circle in the center, the whole thing maybe twenty-four inches in diameter, and tossed it to Serebin. The weight was a shock, and Serebin had to make a second grab before he got hold of it.

“Don’t drop him, Ivan,” Draza said.

Better not to. Serebin knew a land mine when he saw it but he’d never actually held one. “Ahh, don’t be like that,” Jovan said to Draza.

“He couldn’t set it off if he wanted to,” Draza said. “Here, give it to me.”

“It’s all right,” Serebin said. He could live without whatever demonstration Draza had in mind. “I’ve seen these before.”

“These?”

“Mines.”

“Oh, mines. Shit, not these. These are Italian. Dug up across the border a month ago, so, very up-to-date.”

“Where did you see mines?” Jovan asked.

“Galicia, Volhynia, Pripet Marshes, Madrid, river Ebro.” We’re all friends here but, if you have a minute, go fuck yourselves.

“Oh, well, all right then.”

“To work,” Draza said, lighting a stubby cigarette.

They stepped onto the first barge, walked around the big turbine until they found a hatch with rope handles on the cover. Draza fought with it, finally broke it free, and handed it to Jovan. “We’ll need a bracket on that.”

Jovan peered into the sack, then groped around inside. “It’s in here?”

“Better be. I put it in.”

Jovan grunted, found a metal bracket with screws in the holes, and went to work.

“Down we go,” Draza said. He grasped the rim of the hatch opening and swung himself inside.

Jovan handed Serebin the sack. “Forgot this,” he said.

Serebin followed Draza, who had turned on a flashlight in the pitch-black interior of the barge. The beam illuminated a few inches of oily water and at least one dead rat. “Drill,” he said to Serebin. Serebin reached into the sack and took out a hand drill. Draza squatted, about twenty feet from the hatch opening, astride a wooden strut that spanned the sides and bottom of the hull, tried to bore vertically to the floor, scraped his knuckles, swore, then drilled in at an angle. “Get me some wire,” he said.

With the cigarette in his lips, squinting through the smoke, he handed the flashlight to Serebin, took the mine in both hands, and lowered it carefully onto the strut. Unrolled a piece of wire, flexed it up and down until it broke, and wired the mine in place. Then, he pinched the steel bar in the center mechanism with thumb and index finger and tried to turn it. But it wouldn’t move. He held his breath, applied pressure, then twisted with all his strength, fingers turning white where they gripped the bar. For long seconds nothing happened. Through clenched teeth he said, “Fucking things,” and shut his eyes. Finally, the bar squeaked and gave him a quarter turn. He let his breath out, swore again, forced the bar around the first thread, unscrewed it the rest of the way and flipped it away into the darkness. Serebin heard the splash. Draza waited another moment, lost his patience, tucked his middle finger under his thumb and flicked it hard against the center of the mine. With a sharp metallic snap, the trigger popped up.

He swayed a little, adjusted his feet, and made himself a long piece of wire. Serebin moved the flashlight closer. “Got a girlfriend?” Draza said.

“Yes.”

“Me too. You should see her.”

Draza wiggled his fingers like a pianist getting ready to perform, then began to wind the wire around and around the trigger. When he was done, he ran the wire down to the base, made one loop, pulled it tight, and handed the rest of the coil to Serebin. “Do not pull on that,” he said.

He stood up, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He’d ripped the skin over his knuckles, and wiped the blood off on the side of his pant leg. “Hey,” he called out to Jovan. “You done?”

Jovan held the hatch cover a few inches above the opening. Draza reached up and wrapped the end of the wire around the bracket on the bottom, and Jovan moved the hatch cover just enough to allow Draza and Serebin to climb back up on the deck. The three of them knelt at the edge of the hatch and Draza fitted the cover back in place. “Now,” he said, “the next time you lift this up is the last time you lift this up. The firing device works by compression-you’ll need a slow, steady pull to force it down. The tugboat captain knows about this?”

“He does.”

“No last-minute inspections, right?”

“I’ll remind him.”

Draza hunted in his pockets, then said, “You have a piece of paper?”

Serebin had the back of a matchbox.

“Write this. 67 Rajkovic, top floor left. Belongs to my cousin, but, if you need to find us…” Draza looked over Serebin’s shoulder as he wrote. “There, that’s it.”

Jovan stepped onto the dock and took another mine from the crate.

“Back to work,” Draza said. “Four more and we’re done.”

4:10 A.M. He could hear the bar at the Srbski Kralj when the doorman let him into the lobby. A hundred people shouting, a fog of cigarette smoke, perhaps a stringed instrument of some kind, twanging desperately away in the middle of it. Serebin went to his room. On the table, a box wrapped in brown paper, and inside, a bottle of wine. Echezeaux-which he knew to be very good Burgundy. No written note required. Good luck, Ilya Aleksandrovich, it meant. Or however that went in Hungarian.

He took off his coat and stretched out on the bed and did not place a call to Trieste. Or, if he did, it was a private call, the kind where you don’t use the telephone. It rained, a spring rain, very gentle and steady, through the last hour of the night, which should have put him to sleep, but it didn’t. What he got instead was a daze-bits and pieces of worry, desire, pointless memory, a descent to the edge of dreams, and back round again.

The rain stopped at dawn, and the sun hung just below the horizon and set the sky on fire, rainclouds lit like dying embers, vast red streaks above the river.

27 March. Pristinate Dunav. An old sign, the paint faded and blistered. In the Serbian view, if you needed a sign to find the Danube harbor-as opposed to the one on the river Sava-you probably didn’t deserve to be there.

One of the longest mornings he’d ever spent, not much to do but wait. He’d gone over to the outdoor market in Sremska street, bought a heavy sweater and corduroy pants and a canvas jacket lined with wool. Stopped at a cafe, read the papers, drank a coffee, went to work.

Almost didn’t. The tugboat crew was ready and waiting. Zolti in a sailor’s heavy jacket, Erma in what looked like an army coat-Greek? Albanian? — anyhow olive green, that fell to her ankles. She wore also a knitted cap, pulled down over her ears. The Empress was ready, she said. All warmed up. So, they shook hands, smiled brave smiles, talked about the weather, then Serebin said, “Well, we might as well,” or something equally exalted, and Erma cast off from the dock. When she returned to the cabin, Zolti shoved the throttle forward, the engine hammered, the deck throbbed beneath Serebin’s feet, and they went absolutely nowhere.

Erma looked at Zolti and said, “Scheisse.’’ A curse at bad luck, but he was included. He rubbed the back of his neck, and tried again. The towlines snapped taut. And that was that.

“We need the current,” Zolti explained. “Once we get out in the river.”

Serebin stood there, no idea what to do. Hungarian spy dies of laughter in Istanbul. Or, maybe, apoplexy. No, laughter.

Erma said a few sharp words, and Zolti took a wrench and left the cabin. They could hear him working, down below, and, after a while, he tapped the wrench against the hull and Erma rammed the throttle lever forward as far as it would go. Engine straining against the load, they pulled away from the dock an inch at a time, then made a long, slow, snail’s journey across the harbor. Zolti reappeared, wiping oil off his hands with a rag. “We need the current, ten kilometers an hour,” he said, apology in his voice.

“We could have left one of the barges behind,” Serebin said.

Erma wagged an index finger. Not the Empress of Szeged.

They turned southeast on the river. Gulls and gray sky. Serebin walked back to the stern, stared at the barges for a time, found a comfortable coil of heavy rope, and sat there, watching the river traffic. A passenger steamer, black-hulled, flying the swastika and moving slowly upstream. A Roumanian tug towing three barges with long, circular steel tanks bolted to their decks. Was this Ploesti oil, making its way up to Germany? He decided to believe it was. On the tug, a line ran from the roof of the pilothouse to a pole on the stern, holding shirts and underpants that flapped in the river wind.

There were fishermen in rowboats off the town of Smederevo. On the shore behind them, a ruined fortress, black and monstrous. Bigger than most, but otherwise the same; burnt stone, weeds in the fighting ports, they guarded every river in Europe and, if you spoke the language, somebody at the local cafe would tell you the name of the king. There was a dog sleeping at the end of a stone jetty, just past the entry of the river Morava, that woke up and watched Serebin as he went past. Then a motor launch caught up with them, flying the Yugoslav flag, and matched its speed to theirs as Zolti and the helmsman held a shouted conversation. They waved good-bye and the launch sped up, disappearing from view around a bend in the river.

Erma came walking back to the stern. “They told us that they’re checking cargo at Bazias,” she said. “The Roumanian border post.”

“How do they know?”

“They have a radio-heard it from friends.”

Serebin wondered what it meant. “Our papers are good,” he said. “A commercial shipment to Giurgiu.”

Erma nodded.

“We’ll just do the normal thing,” Serebin said.

After the village of Dubravica, the river began to narrow, and the banks were different. Not fields now, forest, bare willow and poplar, and flocks of small birds that left the branches and circled in the sky as the boat engines pounded past them. And, on both sides of the river, the land rose, not yet steep, just the first of the Carpathian foothills, the real mountains waiting downriver. Still, it was cold in their shadow and Serebin buttoned his jacket. 4:30. Bazias at 7:30. Erma took over at the wheel and sent Zolti back to the stern with a sandwich, fat sausage on black bread, and a cup of coffee. Serebin didn’t really want it. “She says you should eat something, because later…” He didn’t bother to finish. Serebin drank the coffee.

The wind sharpened as night fell, and Serebin left the open deck. The Empress had a searchlight mounted atop the pilot cabin, which threw a tight yellow circle on the water ahead of the boat. Maybe it kept them from running into the shore, he thought, but not much else-staying afloat more likely depended on a helmsman’s knowledge of the shoals and sandbars. A wooden handle that operated the searchlight was set next to the wheel, and Erma reached over and swept the beam along the bank, turning trees into gray ghosts, and, then, revealing a stone kilometer marker with the number 1090 carved on it. Later on, Serebin watched a forest appear in the middle of the river-an island. Erma spun the wheel to the left and the Empress curved slowly around the shore, their wake breaking white against the tangled tree roots. “Ostrovo island,” she said.

There was a bonfire onshore, sparks rising in the air to the height of the trees, and three men in silhouette who stood watching the flames.

Serebin asked if they were hunters.

“Who knows what they are.”

In the light, jagged granite rocks rose from the river. The boat passed within ten feet of one of them, which towered high above the cabin. Beyond the rocks, a fishing village, dark and silent, small boats tied up to a dock. Erma pointed an index finger at the ceiling, bobbing it up and down for emphasis. “Hear that?” she said.

He had to listen for a moment before he heard it-soft at first, then growing, the low, steady drone of aircraft, a lot of them. He leaned forward and squinted through the cloudy glass of the cabin window, but there was nothing to see. The sound went on and on, rising and falling, for more than a minute. “Luftwaffe,” Erma said. She had to raise her voice so he could hear her.

Was it? They were headed southwest, he thought, which meant Greece, or Yugoslavia-maybe even North Africa. If it was the Luftwaffe, they had to be flying from airfields in northern Roumania. To bomb who? British troops in Greece? “Somebody’s going to get it,” Erma said.

Sometimes the RAF flew over Paris at night, on their way to bomb targets in the Ruhr-steel mills, arms factories. People stopped talking when they heard the sound, and, in a silent cafe or shop, waited until it faded away. Paris. Sad, how doors closed behind you. He stared out at the river. Some people would wonder about him. Not Ulzhen, not Anya Zak, they knew, but others might. Or might not-it was no longer very interesting, when people went away. Marrano had told an odd story, over dinner, about Elsa Karp, Ivan Kostyka’s mistress. She too was gone. Had left London, nobody knew why. There were rumors, Marrano said, as always. Stolen money? A secret lover? Connections with Moscow? Some people said that she’d left England by steamship, a freighter flying the flag of a neutral country. Serebin had wanted to hear more about it, but Gulian started to tell stories about Kostyka. “We’re not so different,” he said. Came from obscurity, both of them, no family, no money, on their own before they were sixteen. Serebin didn’t think they were at all like each other, he knew them both, not well, but he’d…

“Up there,” Erma said.

Serebin could just see lights, shimmering in the haze that rose from rivers in the evening.

“Bazias,” Erma said.

First came a sign marking Roumanian territory-on the north bank of the river. Erma throttled the engine back to its slowest speed, barely making way, letting the tug and its barges drift to a stop, and Zolti threw a line to a Roumanian soldier who made them fast to a thick, wooden post. There were two boats docked on the upriver side of the canal-a Bulgarian tug hauling bargeloads of grain, maybe wheat, and a small river freighter, flying the Soviet flag, likely coming up from a Black Sea port. Two Russian sailors sat on the freighter’s deck, dangling their legs over the side, smoking, and watching people go in and out of the customs post.

Not much more than a weathered board shack with a flag on a pole in the front yard. Erma said, “You must bring all the papers with you.”

Serebin patted the envelope in the pocket of his coat.

It was warm inside the customs shack, a coal stove in one corner, and surprisingly busy. Serebin couldn’t sort them all out-men from the tugboat and the freighter, two or three customs officials, an army officer, trying to make a telephone call-tapping the bar beneath the receiver and waiting for an operator.

One of the customs officials took his feet off a deal table, sat up straight, and beckoned to Serebin and the others. Zolti knew him-said something funny in Hungarian, obviously kidding him. The official grinned, looked at Erma, nodded toward Zolti, and shook his head. Ahh, that guy.

“Hello, Joszi,” Erma said. “Busy night?”

“Who’s your passenger?” the official said, stretching an open hand toward Serebin.

“Business type,” Erma said.

The official took Serebin’s passport, wrote the nationality, name, and number in a ledger, opened a drawer in the table and stared down for a moment, then closed the drawer. “Cargo documents, please,” he said to Serebin. Then, to Erma, “Where you’ve been, darling?”

“Esztergom. Over to Bratislava, in December. Froze our you-know-whats off.”

The official nodded in sympathy as he went through the cargo documents, checking the signed approval stamps franked into the upper corners of each page. “What are you doing with these things?” he said to Serebin.

“Mining iron ore, up near Brasov. There’s a mill going in as well, and a foundry.”

“In Brasov?”

“Near there.”

“Where?”

“Sighisoara.”

“There’s iron ore in Sighisoara?”

“Domnul Gulian is told there is.”

“Oh.” The official looked back down at the documents and found the Marasz-Gulian letterhead. Then he turned halfway around in his chair and called out to the officer trying to make a telephone call. “Captain Visiu?”

The captain, young and rather smart looking, with a carefully clipped mustache, returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. He didn’t slam it down, exactly, but used enough force to produce a single note from the bell.

Zolti, in Hungarian, asked the official a question.

The answer was brief.

“What is it?” Serebin said.

“The army’s checking things, tonight,” Zolti said.

The captain presented himself to Serebin with a military half bow. He carried a large flashlight, and gestured toward the dock. “Shall we go and take a look?” he said, in good French, then followed Serebin out the door.

Zolti undid the sailor’s knot at one corner of the tarpaulin and raised it to reveal the iron wall of the turbine. The thing looked terrible, blistered paint, a savage dent, a large patch of rust shaped like a map of South America. The captain put a finger on it and a large flake fell off.

“We have to buy used,” Serebin said.

“Very old, isn’t it?”

“Nothing our machinists can’t fix.”

The captain paused, but decided not to comment. The three of them walked around the turbine, then, using the dock, moved to the second barge, which held the industrial monster late of the Esztergom Power Authority. Loaded at a dock in Budapest, it appeared to have been torn loose from its concrete base. The captain squatted and ran his flashlight underneath, looking for machine guns or Jews or whatever interested them in Bazias that night. Then he stood up and, when he moved back to let Zolti replace the tarpaulin, his heel landed on the hatch cover, which rocked beneath his weight. He looked down to see what it was, then stepped nimbly aside, as though he were afraid he’d damaged something. “So now, the next,” he said.

He was quite thorough, Serebin thought. Even went up into the pilot cabin and had a look around. When he was done, the three of them returned to the customs post, where the official at the desk stamped their papers.

“Tell me, Joszi,” Erma said, “what’s the army doing up here?”

The official didn’t answer with words, but his face wasn’t hard to read. Endless bullshit. “When you coming back, love?”

Erma thought it over. “A week, maybe, if we can get a cargo in Giurgiu.”

“If?” The official laughed as he handed Serebin his passport. “See you in a week,” he said. Across the room, the captain stood brooding over the telephone, tapping away.

With Zolti at the helm, they moved cautiously down the canal and out onto the river. “How far now?” Serebin asked.

“Maybe forty kilometers,” Erma said. “So, figure something under three hours. The Yugoslavs have a border post at Veliko Gradiste, about an hour from here, but we may not have to stop, we’ll see. Basically, if you’re leaving the country, the Serbs are glad to see you go.”

“Do we stop for a pilot?”

“Normally, we don’t.”

“Good.” Serebin was relieved. “Better not to deal with somebody like that if we don’t have to.”

“We do what we want,” Zolti said. “Pretty much they leave us alone-we’ve been at it for a long time.”

After that, it grew quiet in the cabin. The hills were tight to the shore now and the current ran fast and heavy under the keel, taking them downstream. When the boat swung around a broad shoal at midriver they could hear the rush of the water, churned to white foam by the gravel beneath it. 9:20. Not long now. They saw a single Roumanian tugboat, without a tow, working its way up to Bazias, a high wave riding the bow. “Strong, tonight,” Zolti said, resettling his hands on the wheel, then glancing over his shoulder at the barges.

“…in the arms of Danubio,” Erma said. Her voice suggested the words of a song, recited by somebody who can’t sing.

“Who’s that?”

“The river god.”

An amusing idea-in daylight, on dry land. But this thing, this energy, beneath him deserved a god about as much as anything he’d ever experienced.

9:44. Kilometer 1050.

It was Erma who saw the searchlight.

Behind them somewhere, she said. Only a flicker, then it was gone-just in time for Serebin and Zolti to spin around and search the river astern and ask her if she was really sure about this. Because, when they looked, they couldn’t see it. But there were rock walls for riverbanks now and a slight shift of direction would be enough to conceal anything.

Zolti looked once more, then again. “Can’t be,” he said.

But it was.

And in a little while they could all see it. A strong white beam, growing slowly brighter as it caught up to them.

“How deep is it here?” Serebin asked.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Very deep.”

“Too deep?”

Zolti only now understood what he was getting at. “Do you want to see the chart?”

No, he didn’t need to see anything-these people knew the river. Don’t panic, he told himself. It might be nothing.

It was not, however, nothing. It was, fifteen minutes later, a steel-hulled launch with 177 painted on the bow, a Roumanian flag flying above the stern, and a pair of heavy machine guns, fitted with a curved shield, mounted just forward of the deckhouse. And, in addition, a siren, which wound up and down for a time, to be replaced by an officer with a loud-hailer-the amplified voice of authority intensified as it echoed between the cliffs above the river.

“Empress of Szeged,” it said.

That much Roumanian Serebin could understand, but for what came next he had to ask for translation.

“They’re telling us to pull into the pilot station at Moldova Veche,” Erma said.

“Not for a pilot.”

“No.”

The patrol boat took up station off their stern quarter, which provided a clear field of fire through the gap, some thirty feet, between the tug and the first barge. Zolti pulled a cord fixed to the ceiling above his head, producing two bleats of the boat horn. “That means we’ll do what they want,” he said.

Using the side of her fist, Erma smacked the wooden skirting that ran below the wheel and a panel fell open, revealing a string bag nailed to its back. In the bag, a huge Mannlicher, the Mauser-style pistol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-long barrel, ammunition magazine a box by the trigger guard-which gave off an oily shine in the glare of the searchlight. “Just so you know,” she said to Serebin, pushing the panel back in place.

“What if,” Serebin said, “we went aground. On the Yugoslav side of the river.”

“Aground?” Zolti said. Serebin saw what he meant-off the starboard bow, a granite wall rose from the water.

“And it wouldn’t stop them,” Erma said.

Not much to say, after that. They chugged on through the night toward the pilot station. Inside Serebin, a mixture of rage and sorrow. All that work. And a memory of the river pilot, his red satin smoking jacket and his Marseilles apartment. Betrayed, he’d said. You have to remember where you are. “I’m sorry,” Serebin said quietly.

Erma said “Ach.” In a way that forgave him and damned the world for what it was and, in case he didn’t understand all that, she dropped a rough hand on his shoulder.

The pilot station at Moldova Veche was set up like the customs post-a canal dug out of the bank beside the river, a dock, and a sagging one-story shack with a shed roof. Tied up at the far end of the canal were three or four small motor launches, clearly meant to ferry officials back and forth on the river. On the land side of the shack, a dirt path climbed a wooded hill, probably to the Szechenyi road.

There was a welcoming committee waiting for them on the dock: two Roumanian gendarmes, rural police, both with sidearms. Erma threw a line to one of them, and he secured the tug to an iron post. The barges drifted up behind the Empress and banged into the old tires lashed to the stern-even in the canal, the current on this part of the river was strong. The patrol boat docked behind the last barge, its engine running in neutral, thin smoke, heavy with the smell of gasoline, rising from its exhaust vents.

Inside, the pilot station was bare and functional, lit by two small desk lamps and a wood fire. A desk, a few wooden chairs, charts tacked to the wall, a coal stove. In one corner, staying well out of the way, an official in a simple uniform, probably the station supervisor. Well out of the way, perhaps, in deference to the two civilians in overcoats, one with briefcase, who rose to meet them. Clearly a chief and his assistant, the latter a well-barbered thug, stocky and powerful, a red and black swastika pin prominent on the lapel of his overcoat.

With a wave of the hand, the chief sent Zolti and Erma off to the custody of his assistant and led Serebin to a pair of chairs on the other side of the room. He was tall, with a fringe of gray hair, heavy rimmed glasses, and the face-the snout-of an anteater; long, curved and curious, built to probe. He wore a red, vee-necked sweater under his suit jacket, which served to temper his official demeanor. “Shall we speak German?” he said courteously. He could speak Swahili, if it came to that, or whatever you liked. When Serebin nodded he said, “So then, may I have your passport, please?”

Serebin handed it over, and the man took his time with it, touching his finger to his tongue to turn the pages, saying “Hm,” and again “Hm,” as he read. Followed the Paris representative of Marasz-Gulian on a series of logical business trips-Basel and Brussels, that kind of thing, had a look at the travel and work permits, slid them into the fold of the passport, slapped it against his palm a few times, then, not persuaded one way or the other, gave it back. “Very good,” he said, meaning either very good fake or everything is in order. “But we don’t concern ourselves with documents, this evening.”

Serebin waited to see what came next. The man had slid his chair to a position where he blocked Serebin’s view of the other side of the room, but Serebin could hear Zolti’s voice. Not precisely angry. Argumentative.

“We have here only some administrative difficulties. Not major, but they must be resolved.”

Across the room, Erma. He couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was indignant.

The chief glanced over his shoulder, then returned to Serebin. “My name is Schreiber, I am the second secretary at the legation in Bucharest, and I’ve come up here this evening to inform you that we must, regretfully, impound your shipment to Giurgiu. We will inform Herr Gulian of this action-we trust he will respect our decision. But, in any case, it’s no longer your responsibility.”

“All right,” Serebin said.

“As for yourself, we will take you back to Bucharest, where all this can be worked out. A technicality-I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

“No?”

“No.”

“And the owners of the tugboat?”

From Schreiber, a dismissive shrug. Who cared?

Across the room, a certain metallic rattle, and an anguished cry from Erma. Schreiber grunted with irritation and looked around to see what all the fuss was about.

Serebin heard a pop and, instinctively, both he and Schreiber ducked their heads. Serebin stood up, could now see the assistant, thrashing and moaning on the floor. Beside him, a pair of handcuffs. Erma took two steps, leaned over the man and, with two more pops, put an end to the thrashing and moaning.

Schreiber leaped to his feet, arms flung wide, shouted, “Oh for God’s sake…,” on his way to asking what somebody possibly thought they were doing, but he never got there. A small hole, the size of a coin, appeared in the back of his overcoat, where a shred of fabric now hung by a thread. He sank to his knees and coughed, hand politely over his mouth, then fell on his face, with a soft thud as his forehead hit the brick floor.

The room was dead still. Both gendarmes and the station supervisor were backed against the wall, hands high above their heads, eyes wide with terror. In the middle of it all stood Erma, small pistol in hand, trying to figure out what came next.

Serebin knew. He ran for the door, hit the dock in full stride. On the bow of the patrol boat, outlined in the glare of the searchlight, a Roumanian sailor was shouting at him. Had they heard the shots? Above the noise of their engines? Not possible. But, one of the people who’d been taken off the tugboat was now running back toward it. That couldn’t be right. The sailor went for the holster at his belt and shouted an order, but he didn’t quite have it right, because Serebin wasn’t going back to the tugboat.

He dove over the low gunwale of the first barge he came to-the second from the end, barge four, the one with the Colossus of Esztergom, as luck would have it-and slithered on his stomach toward the hatch on the river side of the barge. The sailor-an officer, Serebin thought-fired at him twice, one round sliced the air above his head, the other hit the turbine and rang it like a bell. Serebin came around the corner, grabbed the rope handles of the hatch cover, and, with the recommended slow, steady pull, removed it.

The next thing he saw was the night sky. He’d been up in the air, he knew, but not for long. Because the next thing he saw was the Colossus, well, half of it anyhow, that had risen about ten feet off the barge and was now on its way back down, on end, still wearing its tarpaulin. It landed on its other half with a magnificent clang, then tilted over into the canal with a splash that sent a wave of water across the dock. Toward the pilot station. Which had lost a corner of itself and modestly lowered half its roof in case somebody tried to look inside.

Serb bastard-did you know? Not a land mine, an antitank mine.

He’d been lucky, he realized. By rights he should be somewhere up on the hill, but he was in business now and he didn’t mean to leave it unfinished. He rolled over the edge of the next barge, barge three, and, using its cargo for cover, crawled to the hatch at the end nearest the tugboat. He took hold of the ropes, pulled, pulled harder, and the hatch cover came free in his hands. He swore, and peered into the depths of the barge’s interior, saw the remnant of wire shining silver in the water, and came fairly close to going down there after it. Actually, very close.

On his way to barge two, he heard the patrol boat coming, engine wide open, searchlight beam moving down the canal. By now the crew had got its machine guns going, and began by raking the cabin of the Empress, splintering wood and shattering glass, the boat swinging on its tie line with the force of the heavy rounds. Serebin smelled burning and looked over his shoulder. The pilot station was on fire-had the blast wave blown the fireplace into the room? By the light of the dancing flames he saw a shadowy figure, running up the hillside through the trees. Zolti? Erma? He didn’t know, but clearly this river was not, at the moment, the best place to be.

He was extremely careful with the hatch cover on barge two, visualizing the wire loop at the base of the mine’s trigger, watching the wire as it depressed the lever, and, in the moment before the explosion, taking back what he’d called Captain Draza. Because the mine had been centered on the barge, the wire run far enough back so that the force of the blast was taken by the underside of the turbine.

And the hull. Because all that remained of the Colossus and its barge were bubbles. And the neighboring barges had been pulled halfway below the water by their towing links when the middle barge sank. He saw no more. Pressed his body between deck and gunwale as the mine went off, then covered his head with his arms as wood and metal rained down from above. He felt the barge begin to sink beneath him. Moved on to the first barge in line.

Somebody saw him.

He heard hunters’ cries from the patrol boat, a long machine gun burst chewed up the deck a foot away, and he ran, then dove for shelter on the dock side of the turbine. Now he couldn’t reach the hatch cover-on the river side of the barge, the large-calibre bullets tore the gunwale apart, and the patrol boat crept forward to try to get a firing angle for its gunner. They were excited, now that they knew where he was and what he was doing. As Serebin, on hands and knees, fled further into the defilade of the turbine, the light probed wildly and the gunner began to fire at the turbine itself, which pinged and rattled and echoed as it was hit, the occasional tracer ricochet sailing off into the night. And some of the rounds, hammered off with great enthusiasm but not all that much precision, ripped through the deck and, he hoped, down through the bottom.

The machine gun stopped abruptly-those long, indulgent bursts were soon enough, he knew, punished with a hiss of compressed air and a mad scramble by the server to feed in a new belt. Serebin looked at his watch, it had stopped at 11:08. Marrano was waiting for him downriver at Berzasca, but he couldn’t move. One step away from the cover of the turbine, and that would be that. The pilot station was burning brighter now, he could hear the crackle of old wood, smoke drifted over the river, and the flames illuminated the dock with orange light. So, no darkness for him.

The officer on the patrol boat now came to his senses. Certainly he’d been on the radio, certainly other boats had been dispatched, and it had certainly occurred to him that he’d better win this little war before they showed up. So, all he needed to do was appoint a few volunteers to board the barge, use the turbine for cover, and attack from both ends. Serebin knew it would come to that and, soon enough, the sound of the patrol boat engine came toward him, as it maneuvered to position itself next to the barge. Now he had to do the one thing he most didn’t want to do.

He turned, saw that the barge had been roped to a cleat, but, when he pushed against the edge of the dock, there was perhaps a foot of clearance. He lay prone on the gunwale, hesitated, finally slid one leg into the water. Bit his lip, then lowered himself the rest of the way. It was like being packed in ice, the cold gripped him so hard he could barely breathe. And then, the patrol boat’s motion in the canal sent a gentle current toward the barge, which pressed against him, and began to squeeze his chest between the hull and the rough slab of timber that framed the dock. He fought it with both hands but it didn’t give, so he had seconds to pull himself up on the gunwale. And into the light, into the view of the patrol boat. Still, better to die that way than to be crushed to death. As he started to climb, the barge moved. Only an inch, but enough. Using his hands, he slid himself along the timber to the edge of the hull, took a breath, went under.

Not more than a few feet to the tug, but cold and black as death. Finally a groping hand found the side of the boat and he hauled himself over the low freeboard and onto the deck. He was exhausted, finished. He lay still for a time, then began to work his hands, which had gone numb and stiff in the freezing water.

When he opened his eyes he saw that the patrol boat had maneuvered itself next to the barge, and, for a bare instant, there was a flicker of motion in the shadow of the turbine. Somebody on the boat began calling out to him- you can surrender, we won’t hurt you, there’s custard for dessert. It was all in Roumanian and he understood not a word of it but he got the general idea. In fact, it was whatever might keep him from hearing the armed sailors as they crawled around on the barge.

Not long until they figured out he wasn’t there, so he slid forward as quickly as he could until he reached the foot of the steps that led up to the pilot cabin. Then he heard pistol shots, and he froze. Next came a shouted conversation between barge and patrol boat, and suddenly the searchlight swept over the water, the other barges, and finally the tugboat. Serebin lay completely still, pinned in the white beam, and waited for the machine gun.

It didn’t come. The searchlight played on the cabin, then moved, slowly now, across the hill above the burning pilot station. Serebin scuttled up the steps and knelt at the foot of the helm. He made a fist and, imitating what Erma had done, hit the board skirting below the wheel. Nothing happened. He tried reaching behind the panel, but it was blocked by a board across the bottom. Again, he pounded. Nothing. Christ, there’s a trick to it. Then he stood, turned his arm parallel to the skirting, and hit it with the side of his fist. And, by means of some fiendish carpenter’s alchemy he could not imagine, it popped open.

The Mannlicher was nice and heavy, he knelt back down and curled around it, shivering, and, with thick, frozen fingers, managed to release the magazine. Loaded. He pushed it back in place with the heel of his hand, heard it lock in place with an emphatic click-the Austrians made good weapons-and worked the slide. The same fool’s demon that had tried to trick him into blowing himself up now suggested it would be a perfectly fine idea to fire from the cabin. But, once again, he stopped just in time. Crawled back to the stern, got as low as he could, lined the barrel sight up with the center of the searchlight, and squeezed the trigger.

But the Austrians’ good weapons didn’t always send the bullets where the sight said they were going-low or high, left or right, he didn’t know. However, all was not lost; the light remained undamaged but, as one of the sailors howled and swore like a man who’s hit his thumb with a hammer, the beam shot straight up into the sky and stayed there. On the patrol boat, all hell broke loose-running shapes, shouted orders. Serebin waited, held his right wrist with his left hand and fought to keep the Mannlicher steady. When, a moment later, the light went back to work, it swung toward the stern of the tugboat. Had they seen the muzzle flare? He fired, shifted the gunsight, tried again, and once more. Then, with one brilliant, white, dazzling, final flash, the light exploded.

Serebin wasted no time. Blood pounding, head down, he sprinted for the bow, leapt onto the dock, and ran up the hill into the night.

It was damp and still in the forest, all wet leaves and bare trees. He climbed quickly, avoiding the path, and made it halfway up the slope when he realized he either had to sit down or fall down. He lowered himself to the ground, braced his back against a tree, wrapped his arms around himself and tried, by force of will, to stop shivering.

Looking through the woods below him, he watched the scene on the river. The roof of the pilot station had now collapsed into the burning walls, the second barge was gone and had taken the third barge down with it. The last barge in line was heeled over on its side, its turbine halfway into the canal. Sinking, he hoped. Why hadn’t he thought to punch a few holes in the things? The patrol boat had tied up to the dock, but its searchlight was still dark, and the officer hadn’t, as far as he could see, sent crewmen up into the forest to look for him.

As the Empress was escorted toward the Moldova Veche station, he’d calculated the distance to the bridge on the Berzasca river as close to twenty-seven kilometers. It would take him all night-maybe well into the morning, to walk that far. Would Marrano still be there? Serebin wasn’t sure. He would stay as long as he could, but the neighborhood wasn’t going to get any friendlier as the night wore on and the Roumanians began to look for him. Still, there was no other choice, it was a long way back to Belgrade. And if Marrano, for whatever reason, was forced to abandon the meeting place, the only alternative left for Serebin was crossing the river into Yugoslavia.

He forced himself to his feet, found a tree-branch walking stick in a tangle of underbrush, and started climbing.

Count Szechenyi’s theory of road building was simple enough: cut a right angle into a mountainside. This made for a winding ledge above steep canyons, shadowed by Carpathian peaks that soared up into the night sky. Was the road in Transylvania? South of there, but not far. Maybe it didn’t have bats, or coachmen driving black-plumed horses-yet, but it had everything else. Fog, that thickened by the hour, the steady wash of the river on the cliffs below, rocky outcrops that hung overhead, at least one owl-and something else he could only imagine, sometimes a deserted valley, and a wind that sighed in the trees, froze him to the bone, and now and then stirred the fog to reveal a crescent slice of pale and waning moon.

Enormous silence. And not a human soul to be seen.

For that much, he was grateful. At one point he stopped to rest, realized that the Mannlicher was getting heavier with every step, opened the magazine to find a single bullet, and threw the gun into the forest below. It did occur to him that an hour of sleep might actually speed him on his way, but he knew better than to do that. Speed you on your way to heaven. So he rose and trudged on, singing quietly to himself as he marched.

All through the hours of the night, he walked. Then, as light touched the eastern sky, he heard a creaking wheel, and the thud of hooves on stone, coming up behind him. He stepped off the road, half-ran, half-slid a little way down the hill, and hid behind a tree until he could see what it was. An oxcart, with high wheels built of thick planks, a man and a woman in the black clothing of Roumanian peasants sitting together on the driver’s seat. Serebin decided to take a chance, and returned to the road.

When the man saw him he pulled on the reins, tipped his battered black hat, the woman beside him moved to make room, and Serebin climbed up next to them. In the cart, a small shape carefully sewn into a sheet. Serebin, in French, offered his sympathies, which, without understanding a word of it, the couple perfectly understood, and the woman thanked him in Roumanian.

This was better than walking, though not all that much faster. The ox plodded steadily along as the gray dawn-farm roosters at it in the distance-turned into a gray morning. The road grew wider as stone turned to dirt, and they passed through a series of mountain villages, sixteenth-century villages-mud, straw, and cow manure. In a narrow valley, a column of mounted soldiers approached from the other direction. Were they searching for fugitives? Serebin didn’t let them get a look at his face, but when the officer at the head of the column saw what was in the cart he removed his hat, and inclined his head toward the couple.

Serebin rode on the oxcart until mid-morning, then they stopped by a path that wound through the fields-to a church, he thought, and a graveyard. Serebin thanked them, and continued on foot.

But not for long. When he saw, in the distance, a pair of bicycle riders, he rushed into the woods, tripped on a root and went sprawling. Then cursed himself for fleeing from phantoms-at the potential cost of a sprained ankle-until he saw that the young men on the bicycles wore the uniform of the national gendarmerie and had rifles slung on their backs. He waited until they passed, returned to the road, but was forced to hide three times in the next hour; first by a big sedan, then by a truck, and last by a band of singing German hikers. That did it. He found a cattle path and followed it to a village where he managed, by greeting an old woman over a stake fence, to buy an apple and a loaf of bread. Then decided not to test his luck any further and found himself a hideout in a willow grove, where he ate the apple and the bread, drank from a brook-the water so cold it made his teeth ache-and settled in to wait for dusk.

He woke suddenly, an hour later, had no idea where he was, returned to consciousness, and still didn’t know where he was. He spent the rest of the day in the willow grove, sometimes dozing, sometimes watching the river, and was back on the road after sunset, now glad of the darkness and the gathering fog. The next village he came to was bigger than the others. It had a street-paved with quarried stone a long, long time ago, and a church-a cross mounted on the dome of an old Turkish mosque.

A small cafe was packed with men in dark suits, Serebin waited for one of them to leave, then tried to ask him the name of the village. It took some effort by both of them, but eventually the man saw the light and cried out, “Ah, Berzasca. Berzasca!” Serebin kept walking. A few minutes later, he found the river, and an arched bridge built of stone block. Not the bridge he was looking for but, at least, the right river.

There was no path to the logging road-Serebin was supposed to have been on the Empress, having unloaded his cargo at the Stenka ridge-so he had to walk beside the river, forcing his way through the high reeds of a flooded marsh, with water above his knees. This took a long time, but he kept at it, and eventually saw a rickety bridge, moss-covered boards nailed across two logs. At the end of the bridge he found a pair of ruts that wound through the trees-probably the logging road and not the worst one he’d ever seen. But no sign of a car, and no sign of Marrano.

Serebin sat on the edge of the bridge and thought about what to do next. Fishing boat down to Constanta? Oxcart, or car, up to Hungary? Try to cross the river? Well, that was a problem. Because one thing they didn’t have in this part of the world was bridges. Not where the river formed a border between nations, they didn’t, and that was the Danube’s fate once it left the plains of Hungary. Not that they hadn’t built bridges, they had, at optimistic moments over the centuries, but then somebody always burned them, so why bother. And, in fact, for pretty much all the recorded history in this part of the world, most of the bridges had been built by conquerors-Romans after Dacian gold, Ottoman Turks, Austrian engineers-and had thereby earned themselves a bad reputation.

So then? He didn’t know. He was tired, and sore, and cold, and that, just then, was all he knew. God, send me a packet of dry Sobranies and a box of matches. Something made him look up and there, at the other end of the bridge, a figure stood in the shadows at the edge of the forest. A sylvan deity, perhaps, but not the common sort-its hands hung casually at its sides, one of them holding a revolver, the other a briefcase. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” Marrano said.

They had to follow the river back to Berzasca-the only other choice was to walk a long way east, where the logging road met the main road. Serebin told his story, Marrano listened thoughtfully, and now and then asked questions, most of which couldn’t be answered. “Certainly,” Serebin said, “they knew we were coming.”

Marrano sighed. “Well, at least we did something. Any idea what happened to the people on the tugboat?”

“They ran, with everyone else, when the first mine went off. They could’ve gone north, into Hungary, or maybe they stole a boat, somewhere downriver. With any luck at all, they got away.”

Pushing the tall reeds aside, they plodded on through the marsh until they reached the village street. “Where’s the car?” Serebin said.

“In an alley. I waited overnight, but when you didn’t show up, I thought I’d better hide it.”

“So,” Serebin said, “that’s that. Now it’s up to the Serbs.”

Marrano stopped for a moment, unbuckled his briefcase, and took out a newspaper. A Roumanian newspaper, from a nearby town, but the headline was easy enough to read, even in the darkness, because the print was quite large. COUP D’ETAT IN YUGOSLAVIA, it said.

“Who?”

“Us.”

“Will it last?”

“Not for long, the Fuehrer’s chewing his carpet.”

“Too bad. What happened?”

“British agents kidnapped Stoyadinovich, Hitler’s man in Belgrade. But then, forty-eight hours later, the government caved in anyhow and signed with the Axis. So, yesterday morning, the coup.”

“Back and forth.”

“Yes.”

“Was it the army?”

“Led by air force officers. Nominally, the country is now run by a seventeen-year-old king.”

They turned down a long alley. In a courtyard at the end, two boys were sitting on the hood of an Aprilia sedan, sharing a cigarette. Marrano spoke to them in Roumanian and gave them some money, clearly more than they expected. One of them asked a question, Marrano smiled and answered briefly.

“What was that about?” Serebin asked, sliding into the passenger seat.

“Could they drive it.”

Marrano started the car, eased back out of the alley, and drove through the village, back toward the Szechenyi road. “We’ll have to avoid the border post,” he said. “By now, they’ve got themselves organized and they’re certainly looking for you.”

The idea of cars, in 1805, did not occur to Count Szechenyi. On the dirt road, the speedometer needle quivered at thirty kilometers an hour but, once they reached the hewed rock, it stayed well below that. And they were soon enough in mountain weather; rising mist, like smoke, and a fine drizzle-the stone cliffs at the edge of the road shining wet and gray in the glow of the headlights. The road was, at least, empty. They worked their way past a single Gypsy wagon, and after that there was nobody.

“How far is it?” Serebin asked.

“To the border? About sixty kilometers.”

Serebin watched the speedometer. “Five hours, maybe.”

“Could be.” Marrano glanced at his watch. “It’s after nine. We’ll want to get rid of the car and take to the fields before dawn.”

They crept along at walking speed, water gathering on the windshield until it began to run in droplets and Marrano turned on the single wiper, producing a blurred semicircle above the dashboard and a rhythmic squeak.

Marrano peered into the darkness, then braked carefully and the car rolled to a stop.

“What is it?”

“A hole.”

Serebin got out of the car and inspected it. “Not bad,” he called out. “But sharp.” He motioned Marrano forward, used hand signals so that the wheels ran on either side of the hole, then took a step back, and another, to make room for the car. Glancing behind him, he saw that the cliff fell away down to the river, black water flecked with white foam.

The Aprilia drove past the hole, Serebin got back in, and they managed a few kilometers without incident, until a doe and her fawn appeared from the brush and the car slid a little as Marrano braked. The deer galloped away from them, then bounded off down the hillside.

1:20. A light in the distance, a suffused glow from somewhere below the road. Marrano turned out the headlights, drove slowly for a few hundred feet, than shut off the ignition and let the car roll to a silent stop. Even before they opened the doors, they could hear the sound of working engines as it rose from the river. They walked up the road and looked over the edge of the hill.

The Moldova Veche pilot station was floodlit by a giant river tug, with crane barges working at either end of the canal, and patrol boats anchored offshore. A few wisps of smoke still rose from the ruined structure, and two German officers stood on the dock, pointing as they talked. The last barge in line was nowhere to be seen, and the Empress had apparently been taken away.

“Turbines in the canal?” Marrano whispered.

Serebin nodded.

“Not so bad-they’re working day and night.”

He was being decent about it, Serebin thought. “Probably won’t stop anybody from going anywhere.”

“No? Well, they’ve got the Germans in here, must mean something.”

They got back in the car. Marrano kept the lights off and drove close to the cliff wall, staying as far as he could from the sight line below them. When they were safely around a curve, he turned the lights back on. “Is it getting narrower, here?”

“A little, maybe.”

The Aprilia climbed for a few minutes, the road swung away from the river, then descended, Marrano pumping the brakes as the sedan whined in first gear. In the sky ahead of them, a white flicker, followed by a zigzag flash against the clouds and a long, low roll of thunder as the rain intensified. “Spring storm,” Marrano said. The wiper squeaked as it cycled back and forth. “Must get that fixed,” he said.

2:00. 2:15. Hard work for Marrano, leaning over the wheel and squinting into the rain, shifting back and forth between second and third gears. The engine didn’t seem to like either one and, as it labored, Serebin watched the needle on the temperature gauge.

“Road’s not meant for cars,” Marrano said.

“Horse and carriage.”

“Yes. Make a note of that, would you. For next time.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

A few minutes later, Marrano said, “What was that?”

The road curved, hanging on the side of a mountain, and he’d seen a light, thought he had, somewhere ahead where, for a moment, a distant section of the road came into view.

“Some kind of light,” Serebin said.

“Another car?”

“Yes, maybe.” But on reflection he didn’t think so. “Was it fire?”

Marrano had to slow down as the road drifted to the left, then narrowed to the width of a single car. “We’re back on the river,” he said. Barely crawling, they approached a sharp corner to the right, then back to the left. On the other side, an army roadblock.

In the flickering light of pitch pine torches driven into crevices in the rock, a squad of soldiers, most of them trying to shelter in a hollow at the foot of the cliff, and a command car with a canvas top, parked against the cliff wall. Marrano managed to get the Aprilia around it with inches to spare, then stopped in front of a barrier-a pole laid across two x-shaped sawhorses made of cut logs.

Marrano unbuckled his briefcase, on the floor by the gearshift, and found what he was after just as an officer, water streaming down his rubber cape, stepped into the headlights and held up a hand.

Marrano rolled down the window. “Yes, sir?”

The officer came around to the driver’s window and peered into the car. He was young and vain and very pleased with himself, stared first at Marrano, then at Serebin, and said, “Passports.”

Marrano took his passport from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to the officer. “He doesn’t have one,” he said casually, nodding at Serebin.

“Why not?”

“He’s coming from the Bucovina. The Russians took it away.”

Serebin got just enough of this-the USSR had occupied the province a few months earlier.

Not an answer the officer expected. “He’ll have to wait, then. You can go ahead.”

“He can’t wait, sir. It’s his wife, she’s giving birth in Belgrade.”

“Too bad.” He looked directly at Serebin and said, “You. Get out of the car.”

“His wife, sir,” Marrano said. “Please, she needs him by her side, she’s not well.”

The officer’s mouth grew sulky. “Get out,” he said, flipping his rain cape aside and resting a hand on the flap of his holster.

Marrano held his fist just below the edge of the window, where only the officer could see it, paused a moment for effect, then uncurled his fingers. Four gold coins gleamed in the torchlight. The officer stared, transfixed. This was a fortune. He reached through the window, took the coins, and put them somewhere beneath his cape. Then he stood up straight. “Now get out,” he said. “Both of you.”

Serebin was watching Marrano’s left foot, where it pressed the clutch pedal against the floorboard. It rose-quickly, but under control-as his other foot stepped on the gas. There was a soft thump-the officer sideswiped by the car, then Marrano drove full speed into the pole. Didn’t work-the sawhorses slid backwards, so Marrano jammed the accelerator to the floor, the engine howled as the tires spun on wet rock, one of the sawhorses tipped on its back and the other disappeared over the edge of the road. The car leaped forward, bouncing over the pole, past a soldier’s white face, his mouth open wide with surprise. Marrano hammered his hand against a knob on the dashboard and the lights went out. Something pinged against the trunk, something else made a spiderweb in the rear window.

Maybe Marrano could see ahead of them, Serebin couldn’t. Only rain and the dark bulk of the cliff flying by on the right. Marrano speed-shifted, lost the road, and Serebin’s side of the car went scraping along the rock. Marrano jerked the wheel, the car fishtailed and slid toward the outer edge of the road, then he took it back the other way, the right front fender caught the cliff, a headlight ring flew up in the air, and the car straightened out.

The road twisted, cornered, switched back on itself, rain streamed across the black windshield. Marrano, hands in a death grip on the wheel, powered through every turn, worked mostly in second gear, slammed his foot on the brake until the rear wheels began to slide, then accelerated out of the skid.

Then, on a long, even climb, the car lit up-a pair of headlights behind them, glaring yellow beams that sparkled on the fractured glass in the back window. Marrano ducked, grabbed Serebin by the shoulder of his jacket and pulled him down. A stone chip hit Serebin’s door and he said, “They’re shooting at us.”

The car swerved violently, Marrano fought the wheel and said, “Tire.” The headlights moved closer, the car wobbled on the flat tire, ground it off, then bounced along on the rim. “It’s over,” Marrano said. They were sideways for a moment, then off again as the back window blew in.

“Now,” Serebin said. “Go ahead.”

Marrano said shit and turned left.

In the air, the silence went on for a long time. Serebin’s mind was empty, or maybe just a name, as though it were the first word of an apology.

Then they hit some saplings, which bowed before they broke, then brush, then earth; then a sudden drop that stood the car on its front end. It stayed there for a moment, canted over in slow motion, and came to rest upside down. Serebin wound up sprawled across the roof, facing the windshield, where two red impact marks pocked the glass. He felt the blood, seeping from his hairline, then smelled gasoline, kicked savagely at the door, which was already open, and slid himself out on the ground. He crawled around the car, found the driver’s side door jammed shut, reached through the broken window, and cranked it up-with the car on its roof-until it was out of the way. Marrano’s foot was caught in the steering wheel, Serebin got him loose, then hauled him out through the open window. This took some time, because only one hand worked, his wrist either broken or sprained.

He could see the lights of the command car, parked up on the road, and he could hear voices. Excited, he thought. Somebody had a flashlight, up there, and tried to find the sedan. “Briefcase,” Marrano said.

“Can you walk?”

Marrano mumbled something he couldn’t hear.

From the opposite shore, thunder, but not close, the storm moving west, the rain a light, steady beat on the river. Serebin leaned into the car and searched for the briefcase, finally found it pinned between the floor and the brake pedal, which had been bent on its side. He took out a small bag of gold coins and slid the revolver in his belt.

Some of the soldiers were now working their way down the hill-the flashlight, masked by a hand, was still clearly visible. Somebody fell, somebody swore, somebody whispered angrily. Serebin drew the revolver and thumbed the safety off. Turned around and took a good long look at the river, perhaps forty feet away. He put the safety back on, got his good hand under Marrano’s arm, and began to drag him toward the water.

Plenty of driftwood logs on the shore, all sizes. Serebin got one of them launched, draped Marrano over it, held on and kicked, carefully keeping his feet well below the surface, until he felt the pull of the current. Back on the hillside, the search party was getting near the car. Serebin hung on to the log by looping his arm around it, kept his good hand on Marrano.

On shore, they’d apparently reached the car, and there was a loud conversation with somebody up on the road. Search the woods. Looking down the river, Serebin saw a low shape ahead of them, some kind of promontory jutting out from the shoreline. It took quite some time to get there, his legs numb and lifeless when he finally beached the log on the sand. Marrano was unconscious, Serebin pulled him a few feet up the slope, then fell. Done. No more he could do. He tried to force himself to get up, couldn’t, passed out.

29 March.

“Good morning to you, sir.”

Logically, there was something in this Balkan opera of a city that could surprise the doorman at the Srbski Kralj but it sure as hell wasn’t Serebin. With four days’ growth of beard, wearing a sheepskin fisherman’s vest one of his rescuers had given him, a bloody rag around his head, his left wrist bound to a stick with fishing line-just good old Mr. Thing in Room 74.

“Good morning,” Serebin said.

“Lovely day.”

“Yes, thank you, it is.”

“Need any help, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

Limping, he got himself up the stairs to the top floor, then down a long hallway. Stained carpets, green walls, the aroma of yesterday’s dinner; all very appealing to Serebin, who was lucky to be alive and knew it. That went for Marrano as well. In the hospital for a day or two but he would live to fight again.

He stopped in front of the door numbered 74. He’d had a key to this door, once upon a time, but it was long gone. Or was it this door? Because, if this was his room, why was somebody laughing inside? Tentatively, he knocked. Then knocked louder and Captain Draza, wearing only undershirt and underpants, threw the door open and gazed at him with surprise and delight. “Say, look at you!”

A fine party, it must have been. Or, perhaps, still was. Captain Jovan, in underpants only but wearing a uniform cap, was sleeping in the room’s easy chair, a bottle between his thighs. The air was thick with black tobacco and White Gardenia, the bed occupied by three young women, one very young, all of them striking, but striking in different ways. Mysterious, Milkmaid, and Ballerina, he named them. Mysterious and Ballerina sound asleep, Milkmaid sitting propped up on pillows, reading the book of Anya Zak’s poetry she’d given him for the train. “Hello,” she said, rather formally, and, an afterthought, pulled the sheet up over her bare breasts.

“Ah, Natalya,” Draza said. What way is that to greet a guest?

Jovan was suddenly awake. “Welcome home,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

The room had been-sifted. Nothing was broken, but everything had been picked up and put down somewhere else. This apparently made it hard for Captain Draza to find what he was looking for but, eventually, beneath a pile of women’s clothes, tunics, and a holstered pistol on a belt, a newspaper was discovered. “Famous guy,” Draza said, handing him the paper and pointing to a headline at the bottom of

the first page: BRITISH SABOTEURS ATTACK RIVER TARGETS

They had put the Moldova Veche pilot station out of commission for ten days to two weeks. Burned down the office, destroying valuable charts and records. And severely damaged a repair ship, when a booby trap blew up while a sunken barge was being craned to the surface.

Draza took the newspaper and read his favorite part aloud. “‘The Axis has been put on notice that the British Lion will strike anywhere, at any time, to disrupt the supply lines of its enemies.’”

Jovan liked hearing that. “To victory,” he said, and drank to it.

“You don’t mind we’re here, do you?” Draza said. “We were waiting for you to come back, so, we thought, what better place to wait?”

“You’re welcome here,” Serebin said. “But I’m going to wash, and then I need to sleep.”

Jovan stumbled out of his chair, caught himself, then stood upright, swaying. “Right here,” he said. “It’s very comfortable.”

“And we’ll be quiet,” Draza said, quietly.

The following morning he stopped at a barbershop for a shave, bought a new jacket, and, feeling better than he had for some time-the cut on his head was healing nicely-went to see Marrano in the hospital. When Serebin showed him the newspaper he laughed, holding his side. “So, success,” he said, “and you’ll notice what it doesn’t say. About German diplomats.”

Serebin had noticed, had become, over the years, something of an expert on what newspapers didn’t say. “Any chance the Yugoslavs will blow up the river?”

“Not now. They’re mobilizing-they’ve had their coup, and they’ll pay for it soon enough. All the foreign journalists are getting out, legations shutting down, arms dealers-that whole crowd, going back wherever they came from. As for us, you’d better get out right away, I’ll follow in a day or two. Our friends in the air force will know the details.”

“Then I’ll see you in Istanbul,” Serebin said.

“Well, somewhere.”

Serebin was glad to go home, wherever that was. He’d slept in the chair, after drinking much of the night with the captains. And their girlfriends. Just looking at them, blithely immodest as they strutted about, smoked cigars, drank and laughed and teased, had done his heart immense good. And before Draza passed out, he’d found it necessary to tell Serebin how sweet these girls were. “Patriots,” he’d said, pretty much the last word before Serebin and Jovan put him to bed.

That was one word for it, but then, early in the morning on the day after he said good-bye to Marrano, it made a lot more sense. Out on a field-an airfield because there were planes parked on the weedy grass, but pasture was what it was-a line of biplanes. “The Yugoslav air force,” Draza said.

Hawker Harts, and Furies, Bristol Bulldogs-with their wings on struts above and below the pilot cockpit, armed with a single machine gun, they were the aircraft of the early 1930s but they looked like they belonged to an earlier time-descendants of the Spads and De Havillands of the 1914 war-and Serebin doubted they could stay long in the air with German Messerschmitts.

“You have others?” Serebin said.

“No. This is what the British sold us, but they’re faster than you think.”

He sent a mechanic off to get Serebin a flying jacket and goggles-he would fly in the cockpit, for gunner or bombardier, behind the pilot.

“You have to fight with what you have,” Draza said. “Anyhow, the same Englishman that sold us the planes helped us with the coup. So, I leave the judgments to others, but that’s the way the world is, right?”

Serebin put on his flying gear and climbed up into the gunner cockpit behind Draza, who turned and handed him a road map of Yugoslavia and Macedonia. “Change of plan,” he said, “you’re going to Thassos.”

“In Greece?”

“Sort of. An island, smugglers’ paradise. The Adriatic’s no good now-too much fighting; Luftwaffe, RAF, Italian navy. It’s crowded.”

The mechanic pulled the blocks from the wheels, then spun the single propeller, which produced coughs and smoke and backfires and, eventually, ignition. The Hawker bumped across the rutted field, lifted with a roar, flew over the Srbski Kralj and waggled its wings, then, bouncing up through the thermals, climbed to five thousand feet and turned south. In a bright blue sky, above fields and forests, sometimes a village. Captain Draza turned halfway around in his seat, shouted “Mobilization,” and pointed off to the east. Extraordinary, to see it from above. At least a thousand carts, drawn by plodding teams of oxen, long columns of infantry, field guns on caissons. Draza turned round again, and, with a broad grin, made the victory sign.

3 April. London. It was a long ride by tube to Drake’s club, on Grosvenor Square, so Josef the waiter always left home early to make sure he wasn’t late to work. Now and then, when his line had been hit the night before, he had to walk, and sometimes, going home after work, he had to make his way through the blackout, or wait in an air raid shelter until the all clear sounded.

Still, he didn’t mind. A cheerful soul, with a game leg and merry eyes, who’d lost his hair in his twenties-“from worrying,” he liked to say-he’d snuck out of Prague in April of ’39, after the Germans marched into the city, and, with wife and baby, somehow made his way to London. The young men who’d worked at the Drake had gone to war, so new service staff had to be hired, but the management was more than pleased with Josef.

Josef with a hard J, to the spruce types who stopped at their club for drinks or dinner. He worked hard at being a good waiter-he’d been a good teacher of mathematics-doing his best meant something to Josef and the club stewards knew it. Now that his wife was pregnant again they let him do all the work he wanted, and often sent him home with a little something extra in a napkin. Life wasn’t easy, with rationing, for a family man.

So they let him work private dinners, which got him home after midnight, but every little bit helped. The private dinner on that April night was given in honor of Sir Ivan Kostyka, and went pretty much like they all did. A dozen gentlemen, and rather elegant, even for Drake’s-Lord this and Colonel that, another known as Pebbles. Josef overheard what was said without really listening to it. Two or three speeches, one of them in a distinctly foreign accent, with words like “appreciation” and “gratitude.” For? Well, Josef didn’t know-the speakers didn’t precisely say, and his English wasn’t all that good anyhow.

He did, however, notice that, like the man with the foreign accent, some of the men were not native to Britain; one with a white goatee, another with a vast stomach and a rumbling laugh. Foreigners like him. Well, not much like him.

Josef had cleared the dessert, and was preparing to serve the port, when Sir Ivan stood and thanked the men at the table for honoring him. He was sincere in this, Josef could see, even moved. One of the men said “Hear, hear,” then they all rose, as if to propose a toast. Josef waited patiently, but it wasn’t exactly a toast. What happened next was unusual, but, he thought, well done, as the spruce types had said more than once during the dinner. Well done because it was from the heart, and they all had the sort of self-confidence that allows men to sing without fussing overmuch about carrying a tune. It was, anyhow, an easy tune to carry:

For he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fellow, for he’s a jolly good fell-ow, which nobody can deny.

Which nobody can deny, which nobody can deny, for he’s a jolly good fell-ell-ow… which nobody can deny!

29 July.

Serebin woke up long after midnight, tried to go back to sleep, then gave up and climbed out of bed. No point tossing and turning-especially on a hot summer night. Summer nights were famously hot in Istanbul but it was more than that. It wasn’t the heat that woke him, he thought, it was a cricket on the terrace, the soft air, the sense of a summer night of life going by.

The floorboards creaked as he walked down the hall to the white room. Plenty of paper and pencils there. He’d never told Marie-Galante that Tamara had meant the room as a writer’s cell, but it had taken her about ten minutes to figure it out. “We’ll put you in here,” she’d said. So, mornings, there he was. It was hard, with war everywhere, to figure out what he ought to say, or who might want to hear it. Still, he kept at it, because he always had.

As for her, she’d done exactly what she said she would, and so they ran away together. Not far, only to Besiktas and the little house above the sea, but, nothing wrong with that. She’d bought new towels and sheets and tablecloths, marshaled the Ukrainian sisters in a magnificent French campaign of waxing and polishing, so that now everything smelled like honey and glowed like gold.

Out on the Bosphorus, a dark ship with a long, white wake, headed up toward the Black Sea. Maybe to Bulgaria or Roumania, he thought, but not much farther, unless it was a supply ship-German, Italian, or neutral. One place it wasn’t going was Odessa. They were fighting there now, the city besieged by Roumanian armies, the defenders wildly outnumbered, but holding on, refusing to surrender. Stories of heroism every day in the newspapers, which they clipped, at the IRU office, and pinned to the bulletin board. Serebin went in from time to time, offering to help out, to do whatever he could. So, a new Harvest, but the emigre writers here weren’t as good as the ones in Paris. Patriotic now-it was Russia fighting, not the USSR, Stalin had said that and everybody believed him. On the Danube, the oil barges moved upriver to Germany, day and night.

They followed the war, Serebin and Marie-Galante, in the newspapers with their morning coffee, on the radio when they had afternoon drinks, and with people they sometimes saw in the evenings. Marie-Galante could not be in the world without invitations. The precise nature of the social chemistry eluded him, but somehow people knew she was there and invited her places, and sometimes she accepted, and so they went.

They had one that evening-he thought it was that evening, he’d have to make sure. Some kind of dinner at the yacht club, a beautiful invitation, on thick, cream-colored stock with an elaborate crest on top. Given by people he’d never heard of, for, apparently, some couple connected with the Norwegian royal family, now in exile in London. What were they doing in Istanbul? Well, what was anybody doing. Waiting, mostly.

In the same post there’d been a note from Polanyi. He hoped they were well, perhaps he would see them at the royal dinner. “Someone I want you to meet,” he’d said. Marie-Galante had stood the invitation on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, which was what she did when something appealed to her, so, clearly, they were going. It was-something to do. Not that they were bored, or anything like that.

He opened the drawer of the table, found a Sobranie and lit it. Turn the light on? Work for a while? No, he wanted only to watch this summer night as it went by. The ship was almost out of sight now, so he stared at the dark water, finished his cigarette, and walked back to the bedroom.

Too warm for a sheet or a blanket. He watched her for a moment as she slept, then lay down carefully on the bed. Wouldn’t want to wake her up. But she slid back against him, her skin silky and cool, even on a hot summer night.

“Where were you?” she said, not really awake.

“Just walking around.”

“Oh ours, mon ours, ” she sighed. “What is to become of us.”

Silence, only the beat of waves at the foot of the cliff.

“No, no,” she said. “ Beside that.”