Spies of the Balkans

ESCAPE FROM SALONIKA

10 February, 1941.

Well before dawn, Costa Zannis woke from a night of bizarre and frightening dreams. He lay there with his eyes open, supremely grateful that none of it was real and so, fearing that further horrors awaited him if he went back to sleep, forced himself to get out of bed. He washed, dressed for work, let Melissa out the door, and walked down to the waterfront corniche, to a kafeneion that stayed open all night for the stevedores and sailors of the port. There he drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and stared out the window, where the sky was streaked with red cloud as the sun, coming up over the Aegean, lit the whitecaps in the bay and the snow on Mount Olympus in the distance. The fishing caiques were headed out to sea, attended by flocks of seagulls, their cries sharp in the morning silence.

The kafeneion was quiet, only the sleepy waiter, a fiftyish prostitute with dyed-red hair, and a man dressed in merchant seaman’s sweater and wool watch cap. Zannis took a morning paper from the counter and looked at the headlines: somebody had taken a potshot at the mayor, the bullet punching a hole in his briefcase and coming to rest in the sheaves of official paper packed inside.

The prostitute was watching Zannis as he read and said, “Terrible thing.”

Zannis mumbled an assent-it was too early in the morning to talk, and, once he went to work, a full day’s talking lay ahead of him.

Turning to the seaman, she said, “Don’t you think? Shooting at a mayor?”

The man raised his hands and shrugged; he did not understand Greek.

“Always something here,” the waiter said. “They never catch them, people like that.”

But, Zannis found when he reached the office, they already had. Sort of. “What they say in the papers”-Saltiel had his feet up on the desk, his jacket over the back of the chair-“is that he was shot at, yesterday morning, while getting into his car. True, as far as it goes. But the detective who questioned the mayor told me that he was getting into the backseat, because he has a driver, and his left foot was up on the floorboard as he bent over to go through the door, with his briefcase in his left hand, swung slightly behind him. Try it, Costa, and you’ll see what went on.”

“What?”

“The way the detective sees it, somebody tried to shoot him in the backside.”

“A warning?”

“More like a lesson. I talked to some people, especially the mayor’s secretary, who knows all, and what happened is that the mayor’s wife caught him in bed with his girlfriend and made him cut her loose. Girlfriend doesn’t like it-she thought she was the one and only-so she goes out and hires somebody to pop him one in the ass. Or maybe she did it herself. She’s nobody to fool with, according to the secretary.”

“The mayor never turned around? Never saw anybody?”

“At the time they thought, the mayor and the driver, they’d heard a car backfire. Or at least that’s what they told the detectives.” Saltiel raised his eyebrows. “According to the mayor, he didn’t realize he’d been shot at until he got to his desk and opened the briefcase. The bullet stopped right in the middle of Papadopoulos v. City of Salonika.”

“So, case closed,” Zannis said.

“Not around here, it isn’t. The mayor can’t have that in the newspapers, so the investigation is transferred to this office and we’re supposed to question a few Communists, or Macedonian terrorists, or whatever we can think up. At least tell the press we’re doing it.”

“Maybe a disappointed office seeker,” Zannis said.

“Yes, that’s good. Or a lunatic.”

“Well, we’re not going hunting for lunatics, but somebody better talk to the girlfriend and tell her not to try that again.”

“Somebody?” Saltiel said.

“All right, Gabi, get me a telephone number.”

There was more that had gone on in his absence. Saltiel opened his desk drawer and handed Zannis a message from Emilia Krebs. In ochre letters above the lines of the typed commercial paragraphs she said that three men and two women would be leaving Berlin on the eleventh of February, adding that she had no knowledge of the man seen on the platform of the Skoplje railway station. The secret writing was far more legible than what Zannis had been able to produce. “Who heated the letter?” he asked Saltiel.

“Sibylla. I never used an iron in my life.”

“Well done, Sibylla,” Zannis said. “Did you send the teletypes?”

“I did,” Sibylla said. “They were confirmed, and I made copies for you.”

“Thank you,” Zannis said. “And I mean it.”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” she said, both surprised and pleased that Zannis was so grateful. “I’ll do the next one too, if you like.”

As Saltiel returned to his desk, Zannis prepared to telephone Demetria’s house. He’d almost done it the night before, because the time he’d spent in Paris-the Germans, the shooting, the escape-had had its effect on him. On the flight to Sofia he’d thought, in fact told himself, your time is running out, and more than once. Now he was going to reach for her, any way he could, and to hell with the consequences. But, as his hand moved toward the telephone, it rang.

“Yes? Hello?”

“Hello. I’m calling from the Bastasini.”

Escovil. “And?”

“I understand you were tired last night, but I would like to talk to you, as soon as possible.” Escovil was trying to sound casual, but his voice was strained and tense.

“I can’t, right now,” Zannis said, cold as ice. “I’m busy.”

The line hissed. “Some people I know are very, concerned.”

“Why? They got what they wanted.”

“They’d like to know-the details.”

“Ask him.”

“Um, he isn’t sure how it worked. So they’re, well, anxious to hear your story. And this would be better in person, not on the telephone.”

Instead of attacking Escovil, because the urge to do that was very powerful, Zannis took a deep breath. “You know where I am.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you downstairs, in the vestibule, in ten minutes. There’s something I have to do first, so you may have to wait for me.”

When Escovil answered, it sounded as though he were reading a sentence he’d written out beforehand. “Actually, my friends would like to meet you. To thank you. In person.”

“Come over here in ten minutes, and come alone. Understood?”

Escovil hesitated, then said, “I’m on my way.”

Zannis hung up, but didn’t leave the receiver on the cradle long enough for a dial tone, so had to do it again.

A maid answered.

“Is Madam Vasilou there?”

“Gone away.” This was a different maid; she barely spoke Greek.

“What do you mean, ‘gone away’?”

She tried harder, raising her voice. “They gone.”

“Where did they go?”

“Gone away,” the maid said, and hung up.

Zannis made himself wait ten minutes, then walked down the stairs. He couldn’t believe what had happened; where were they? Had they left the country? He wanted to break something. And here, on top of it all, was Escovil. Who hadn’t put on a coat, had instead looped a woolen scarf around his neck, stuffed the ends inside his buttoned jacket, and turned the collar up. With the addition of brown leather gloves, he looked like a country squire going up to London on an autumn day.

If Escovil was already anxious about the meeting, the expression on Zannis’s face did nothing to reassure him. “I hurried straight over,” he said.

“What do you want from me?” Zannis said.

“Byer told us you flew from Paris to Sofia. How did you manage that?” After a moment he added, “The people I work for would like to know how you did it.” It isn’t me.

“I was helped by some friends in Paris, people I met when I lived there.”

“And they are …?”

“Friends in Paris. And now, let me ask you something. Who had the idea that I should go to a restaurant? Because I’m sure Byer told you what happened.”

Escovil hesitated. “A senior person, in London, felt you should act like a visitor. The original idea was the Eiffel Tower, but the time didn’t work. So, a brasserie.”

“Very clever,” Zannis said. “Except that it wasn’t.”

“We need to know about the airplane,” Escovil said, desperation in his voice. “It could be very important, very important.”

“Well, you know as much as I’m going to tell you. I understand what your people want, they want to be able to use what I used, any spy service would, but they’ll have to find their own way.”

“Would you at least meet with them?”

Zannis stared at Escovil. “No,” he said.

A muscle ticked in Escovil’s cheek. He half-turned toward the door, then turned back to face Zannis. “I’m serving in a war, Zannis. And so are you, no matter whether you like it or not.” He reached the door in two strides and, over his shoulder, said, “I’d think about that if I were you.”

It was just after six when Zannis got back to Santaroza Lane. As he took Melissa’s butcher scraps from his tiny refrigerator, he saw the mail he’d tossed on the table when he’d come home the night before. He fed Melissa, then, looking for anything commonplace to make him feel, if not better, at least occupied, he began to look through the pile of envelopes. A few bills, an invitation to a formal party, a letter. No return address. Inside, a single sheet of paper:

5 February

C.

We have left Salonika and gone to Athens. I have said my mother is ill and I had to come here, to Kalamaria, to take care of her. She has a telephone, 65-245. I don’t know how long I can stay here, and I don’t know where you are. I hope you read this in time.

D.

He called immediately and was out the door minutes later. Kalamaria wasn’t far away, maybe ten miles south, down the peninsula. Out on the corniche he found a taxi and paid the driver extravagantly to take him to the village, where, Demetria had told him, there was only one hotel, the Hotel Angelina. He arrived at seven-ten and took a room. The hotel was barely open, in February, but a boy led him up to Room 3-likely their finest, since Zannis was their only guest-and lit a small oil heater in the corner. It produced a loud pop and a flash, and the boy swore as he jumped aside, but the thing worked and, ten minutes later, the room began to warm up.

The Hotel Angelina was on the bay and the room had one large window that faced west, over the sea. Not so bad, the room. Whitewashed stucco walls, a narrow bed with a winter blanket, a lamp on a night table, a wooden chair, and an armoire with two hangers. Zannis hung his trench coat and jacket on one, and left the other for his guest. He tried sitting in the chair, then lay on the bed, set his glasses on the night table, and waited. There were rain squalls on the bay that night, accompanied by a gusting wind that sighed and moaned and rattled the window. Eight o’clock came and went. Eight-fifteen. Where was she? Eight-twenty.

Two light knocks on the door.

When he opened it, there she was. Beautiful, yes, but unsmiling and, he sensed, maybe a little scared. He’d planned to embrace her-finally, at last! — but something told him not to, so he rested a light hand on her shoulder and guided her into the room. “Hello, Demetria,” said the passionate lover. “May I take your coat?” She nodded. He could smell her perfume on the collar as as he hung it up in the armoire.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she wore a heavy slate-colored wool sweater and skirt, with thick black cotton stockings and lace-up shoes. “Oh lord,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

“You can sit down,” she said.

He was standing there, hesitant, and as tense as she was. “I can go downstairs. Maybe there’s some retsina, or wine.”

She brightened. “Whatever they have. It’s cold in here.”

He went downstairs. The hotel didn’t exactly have a bar; a shelf with bottles stood above a square plank table. The door by the table was ajar, Zannis could hear a radio. “Hello?” he said. When the woman who had rented him the room came out, he bought a bottle of retsina and she gave him two cloudy glasses, then said, “Good night, sir.”

Demetria was sitting exactly where he’d left her, rubbing her hands.

“What a night,” Zannis said. He poured retsina into the glasses and gave her one. When he sat by her side, the bed sagged beneath them.

Demetria laughed. “Ah, Kalamaria.”

“Did you live here? As a child?”

“No, my mother came here after my father died. Returned. It was her home village.”

“Is she actually ill?”

“Oh no, not her. Never. Not that I can remember.”

“You told her, ah, what you’re doing?”

From Demetria, a tight smile. “She knows, Mama does. Knows her daughter.”

They clinked their glasses together and drank. The retsina was strong.

“Not so bad,” Zannis said.

“No, not bad at all. A good idea.” She put her glass on the floor and rubbed her hands, trying to get warm.

“Shall we get drunk and forget our woes?”

“Not that drunk.”

When she again picked up her glass, Zannis saw that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. And she’d pulled her hair back with an elaborate silver clip.

“I called your house, this morning,” he said. “I came home last night but I didn’t see your letter until just before I called you.”

“I knew … I knew you would call. I mean, I knew you would call to the house in Salonika, so I telephoned, from Athens. Nobody answered….” She put her glass on the floor, rubbed her hands and said, “My hands are so cold.” You dumb ox.

“Give them to me.” He held her hands, which weren’t all that cold, and said, “You’re right. They need to be warmed up.” He took her left hand in both of his and rubbed the back, then the palm.

After a time she said, just the faintest trace of a hitch in her voice, “That’s better.” With her free hand, she drank some retsina, then put her glass back on the floor.

“Now the other. You were saying?”

“That I called, from Athens….”

He worked on her hand, his skin stroking hers. “And?”

She leaned toward him a little. “And you … weren’t home.”

“No.” He noticed that the dark shade of lipstick she wore flattered her olive skin. “No … I wasn’t.”

“So I wrote it.” She was closer now.

He took both her hands, meaning to move her toward him but she was, somehow, already there. “I did get it.”

“I know.” Her face was very close to his, so she spoke very softly. “You said.”

He pressed his lips against hers, which moved. After a time he said, “So …” They kissed again, he put a hand on her back, she put a hand on his. With his lips an inch away from her mouth he whispered, “… I telephoned.” The wool of her sweater was rough against his hand as it went up and down.

It was awkward, sitting side by side, but they managed, until he could feel her breasts against him. When she tilted her head, her lips lay across his, and she spread them apart, so that his tongue could touch hers. Involuntarily, he shivered.

He knelt on the floor and began to untie the laces of her shoes. As he worked at one of the knots, she ran her fingers through his hair, then down the side of his face. “Can you do it?”

The knot came undone.

They had set the hard pillows against the iron railing at the foot of the bed in order to see out the window, where, across the bay, a lightning storm raged over Mount Olympus. The mountain was famous for that. Almost always, in bad weather, forked white bolts lit the clouds above the summit-which meant that Zeus was angry, according to the ancient Greeks. Zannis was anything but. Demetria lay sideways against him, the silver clip cold where it rested on his shoulder.

When he’d finished with her shoes, he had returned to her side and taken the hem of her sweater in his hands but she held them still and said, her voice low and warm, “Let me do this for you.” Then she stood, turned off the lamp, and undressed. It wasn’t overly theatrical; she might have been alone, before a mirror, and took her time because she always did. Nonetheless, it was a kind of performance, for she clearly liked being watched. Carefully, she folded her clothing and laid each piece on the chair, using it as-a prop? She wore very fancy silk panties over a garter belt and, after she’d slid them down, she turned partly away from him and braced her foot on the chair in order to remove her stocking. From this perspective, her bottom was fuller, as it curved, than promised when she’d leaned against the back of a sofa. And the angled form of a woman in that position suggested a seductive painting, though it was a natural, a logical, way to go about removing a stocking.

Was it not?

When she’d laid the garter belt on top of her clothes, she stood there a moment, head canted to one side. So, here is what you shall have. Was it what he’d hoped for? She was heavier, sturdier, than the naked Demetria of his imagination, with small breasts, small areolae, erect nipples.

Demetria may have taken time to undress, Zannis most certainly did not. He shed his clothes, took her in his arms and drew her close, savoring the feel of skin on skin. And here, pressed between them, was an emphatic answer to her silent question. Until that evening, Zannis had been in a way ambivalent; for in his heart a tender passion, which he thought of as love, had warred with the most base desire. But tender passion, as it turned out, would have to wait. And he was only half to blame. Maybe less.

And so?

Lightning flickered in the distance and, when a squall passed over the Hotel Angelina, wind-blown rain surged against the window. “You could, you know”-Zannis spoke the words slowly-“never go back to Athens.”

She didn’t answer, and he couldn’t see her face, but she nestled against him, which meant no and he knew it.

“No?” he said, making sure.

“It is …,” she said, suppressing the too soon, then started over. “It would be very sudden.”

“You have to go back?”

“Don’t,” she said.

He didn’t. But, even so, she rolled away from him and lay on her stomach with her chin on her hands. He stroked her back, a deep cleft in the center. “Can you stay until the morning?”

“Well, I’m surely not going anywhere now.”

“Is it a long walk? To your mother’s house?”

“Not far. It’s on the water, just around the bay. One of those stucco villas.”

“Oh?”

“‘Oh?’” she said, imitating him. “Yes, my love, now you know.”

“Know what?”

“That she could never afford such a thing. Nor could I. And you should see where my sister lives, in Monastir.”

“Oh.”

“You think I’m paid for, like … I won’t say the word.”

“That isn’t true.”

She shrugged.

“So he’s rich, so what?”

“That barely describes it. He buys French paintings, and Byzantine manuscripts, and carved emeralds. He spends money like water, on anything that takes his fancy. Have you noticed a small white ship, practically new, that stays docked in Salonika? I think it was an English ship, one of those that carried mail and passengers to the Orient. Anyhow it sits there, with a full crew on board, ready to go at an hour’s notice. ‘In case,’ as he puts it, ‘things go badly here.’ Then we will all sail away to safety.”

“Not a yacht?”

“The yacht is in Athens, in Piraeus. Not meant for an ocean in winter.”

“You will leave with him, if ‘things go badly’?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.” She thought for a time. “Perhaps I won’t be invited, when the day comes. He has a girlfriend lately, seventeen years old, and he hasn’t been … interested in me for a while. So, when I return, I don’t want you to think that I …” She left it there.

Zannis sighed and settled down next to her, in time laying his leg across the backs of her knees and stroking her in a different way. She turned her head so that their faces were close together. “I get the feeling you’re not ready to go to sleep.”

“Not yet.”

11 February. The rains continued. Hanging from a clothes tree in the corner of the office, three coats dripped water onto the floor. When Zannis reached his desk, a note from Saltiel-a name, a telephone number-awaited him. “This would be the mayor’s girlfriend?”

“It would.” Saltiel was not only amused, he was anticipating the performance.

“Hello? Madam Karras?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Zannis, I’m with the Salonika police department.”

“Yes?” The way she said it meant What could you want with me?

“I have a favor to ask of you, Madam Karras.”

“What favor?”

“That you refrain, in the future, from shooting at the mayor. Please.”

“What?”

“You heard me. We know you did it, or hired somebody to do it, and if I can’t be sure you’ll never try it again, I’m going to have you arrested.”

“How dare you! What did you say your name was?”

“Zannis. Z-a-n-n-i-s.”

“You can’t just-”

“I can,” he said, interrupting her. “The detectives investigated the incident and they know how it came about and so, instead of taking you to jail, I’m telephoning you. It is a courtesy, Madam Karras. Please believe me.”

“Really? And where was courtesy when I needed it? Some people, I won’t mention any names, need to be taught a lesson, in courtesy.”

“Madam Karras, I’m looking at your photograph.” He wasn’t. “And I can see that you’re an extremely attractive woman. Surely men, many men, are drawn to you. But, Madam Karras, allow me to suggest that the path to romance will be smoother if you don’t shoot your lover in the behind.”

Madam Karras cackled. “Just tell me that bastard didn’t have it coming.”

“I can’t tell you that. All I can tell you is to leave him alone.”

“Well …”

“Please?”

“You’re not a bad sort, Zannis. Are you married?”

“With five children. Will you take this call to heart?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“No, dear, make a decision. The handcuffs are waiting.”

“Oh all right.”

“Thank you. It’s the smart thing to do.”

Zannis hung up. Saltiel was laughing to himself, and shaking his head.

12 February. Berlin was glazed with ice that morning, perhaps the worst of the tricks winter played on the Prussian city. At Gestapo headquarters on the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Hauptsturmfuhrer Albert Hauser was trying to figure out what to do about Emilia Krebs. His list of names was shrinking: some of the suspects had been arrested, success for Hauser, yet some had disappeared, failure for Hauser. That couldn’t continue, or he really would wind up in Poland, the Hell of German security cosmology. But he couldn’t touch her. He worked, alas, for a moron, there was no other way to put it. The joke about Nazi racial theory said that the ideal superman of the master race would be as blond as Hitler, as lean as Goring, and as tall as Goebbels. But the joke was only a joke, and his superior, an SS major, was there because he was truly blond, tall, and lean. And a moron. He didn’t think like a policeman, he thought like a Nazi: politics, ideology, was, to him, everything. And in that ideology rank meant power, and power ruled supreme.

Hauser had gone to see him, to discuss the Krebs case, but the meeting hadn’t lasted long. “This man Krebs is a Wehrmacht colonel!” he’d thundered. “Do you wish to see me crushed?”

Hauser wished precisely that, but there was no hope any time soon. Still, brave fellow, he wondered if he might not have the most private, the most genial, the most diffident conversation with Emilia Krebs. Where? Certainly not in his office. Neutral ground? Not bad, but impossible. To the dinners and parties of her social circle, Hauser was not invited. And they did not yet have an agent inside her circle who could find a way to get him there. Down the hall, another Gestapo officer was working on the recruitment of a weak and venal member of the group-they were everywhere, but one had to fish them out-as an informant, but he wasn’t yet theirs. So, no parties. That left the Krebs home, in Dahlem.

Alarm bells went off in Hauser’s mind. “Darling, the Gestapo came to see me today.” What? To my house? To my home? The home of the important Colonel Krebs? Of the Wehrmacht? An organization that didn’t care for the Nazis and loathed the SS. No, a simple telephone call from Krebs, going upward into the lofty heaven of the General Staff, and Hauser would be shooting Poles until they shot him. Those people were crazy, there was absolutely no dealing with them. So, better not to offend Colonel Krebs.

However …

… if the Krebs woman was involved with an escape operation, and Hauser pretty much knew she was, would the husband not be aware of it? And, Hauser reasoned, if he was, would his first instinct not be to protect her? How would he do that? By calling attention to the fact that the Gestapo considered her a ‘person of interest’? Or, maybe, by hushing the whole thing up? And how would he do that? By telling her to end it. Stop what you’re doing, or our whole lives will come crashing down around us.

Hauser, in the midst of speculation, usually looked out the window, but that morning the glass was coated with frost and he found himself staring instead at the photograph of his father, the mustached Dusseldorf policeman, that stood on his desk. So, Papa, what is the safest way for Albert? Papa knew. The list! True. What mattered was the list. It couldn’t keep shrinking because, if it did, so much for Hauser. Safer, in the long run, to have a chat with the Krebs woman.

Who should he be? He would dress a little for the country, a hand-knit sweater under a jacket with leather buttons. A pipe? He’d never smoked a pipe in his life but how hard could it be to learn? No, Albert! A policeman with a Prussian haircut, sheared close on the sides-smoking a pipe? And then, clumsy with the thing, he’d likely burn a hole in the colonel’s carpet.

And the colonel wouldn’t like that. But, on the other hand, he couldn’t dislike what he didn’t know about. In fact, Hauser thought, if the meeting was properly managed there was at least a chance that she wouldn’t tell him! Simply stop what she was doing in order to protect her husband. And oh how perfect that would be.

Therefore, no pipe.

But maybe eyeglasses.

Hauser walked down two flights of stairs to a department where objects of disguise were available. Not much used, this department. True men of the Gestapo did not deign to disguise themselves, they showed up in pairs or threes and hammered on the door. Here is the state!

But not always. The clerk who maintained the department found him a pair of steel-framed eyeglasses with clear lenses. Hauser looked in the mirror: yes, here was a softer, more reflective version of himself. Frau Krebs, I am Hauptsturmfuhrer-no, I am Herr Hauser. Please pardon the intrusion. I won’t keep you long.

In Salonika, in the morning papers and on the radio, the news was like a drum, a marching drum, a war drum. On the tenth of February, Britain severed diplomatic ties with Roumania, because the government had allowed Germany to concentrate numerous divisions of the Wehrmacht, munitions, and fuel, within its borders. And this, according to the British, constituted an expeditionary force.

Then, on the fifteenth of February, it was reported that Hitler met with certain Yugoslav heads of ministries at his alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden, known as the Eagle’s Nest. Accompanied by a photograph, of course. Here was the eagle himself, surrounded by snowy peaks, shaking hands with a Yugoslav minister. Note the position of the minister’s head-is he bowing? Or has he simply inclined his head? And what, please, was the difference? The ministers had been informed that their country would have to comply with certain provisions of the Axis pact, whether they signed it or not. To wit: increased economic cooperation with Germany-sell us what we want, we’ll name the price-permission for the transit of German men and arms through Yugoslavia, and passivity in the event of a German occupation of Bulgaria.

What wasn’t in the newspapers: BULGARIA CALLS FOR GENERAL MOBILIZATION! And what, on the sixteenth of February, was: BULGARIA SIGNS NON-AGGRESSION PACT WITH TURKEY! Over his morning coffee, Zannis read a quote from the agreement about the two countries’ intention “to continue their policy of confidence toward each other, which policy assures the security of peace and quiet in the Balkans in a most difficult moment, through mutual consideration of their security.” Which meant: When Bulgaria invades Greece, Turkey will not join the fighting. If Bulgaria invades Greece? The Salonika journalist didn’t think so. Neither did Zannis. And the phrase “peace and quiet in the Balkans” did not originate with either Bulgarian or Turkish diplomats, it was Hitler’s phrase.

So, now everybody knew.

Three days later, on the nineteenth of February, some time after ten in the evening, Costa Zannis lay stretched out on his bed, trying not to think about Demetria. A restless reader, he’d put Inspector Maigret aside in favor of a novel by the Greek writer Kostykas, a lurid tale of love and murder on one of the islands south of the coast. A yacht anchors off a fishing village, an English aristocrat falls in love with a local fisherman. So, who killed Lady Edwina? He didn’t care. Staring blankly at the page, he returned to the night at the hotel, watching Demetria as she slept, the goddess at rest, sleep having returned her face to the composure he’d seen in the backseat of the Rolls-Royce. But she wasn’t at all as he’d thought-now he knew her for an avid and eager lover, without any inhibitions whatsoever. In the past, he’d viewed fellatio as a kind of favor, performed when a woman liked a man to the extent that she would do it to please him. Hah! Not true. He had been simultaneously excited and astonished as he’d watched her, as she’d raised her eyes, pausing for an instant, to meet his. Such recollections were not conducive to reading, and he was about to put the book aside when the telephone rang. It was her!

“Hello,” he said, his voice reaching for tenderness in a single word.

“Costa …?”

Not her. Some other woman.

“It’s me, Roxanne.”

Roxanne? Why now? The ballet school, the love affair, the sudden departure on a small plane-it seemed a long time ago, and over forever, but apparently not. “Why are you calling?”

“I must speak with you, Costa. Please don’t hang up.”

“Where are you?”

“Nearby. I can be at your apartment in a few minutes.”

“Well ….” How to say no?

“We can’t talk on the telephone. What I have to say is, private.” She meant secret. “See you right away,” she said, and hung up.

Now what? But, in a general way, he knew. The newspaper stories told the tale: when the political tides shifted, certain deepwater creatures swam to the surface.

A few minutes later he heard a car. A black sedan, he saw out the window, which rolled to a stop in front of his building, there was barely room for it in Santaroza Lane. As the car’s headlights went dark, a figure emerged from the passenger seat. Zannis headed for the stairs, Melissa watching him, to answer the knock at the street door.

Only a few months since he’d seen her, but she was not the same. Well dressed, as usual, with a horsewoman’s lean body and weathered skin, but had there always been so many gray strands in her hair? And now her eyes were shadowed with fatigue. As they faced each other in the doorway, she offered him a forced smile and touched his arm with a gloved hand. Over her shoulder, he could see that the driver of the sedan had his face turned away.

In the apartment, she kept her raincoat on as they sat at the kitchen table. Zannis lit a cigarette and said, “Would you like something to drink?”

“No, thanks. You’re looking well.”

“So are you.”

“Forgive the sudden visit, will you?”

“Doesn’t matter. I think I ought to let you know right away that I won’t tell you any more about what went on in Paris than I told Escovil. I don’t betray friends; it’s that simple.”

“We don’t care, not now we don’t; you can keep your secrets. Have you been reading the newspapers?”

He nodded.

“The situation is worse than what’s written. Bulgaria will sign the pact, some time in the next two weeks. They’ve asked Moscow for help but, to turn the Bulgarian expression around, Uncle Ivan will not be coming up the river. Not this time, he won’t. And, when that’s done, Yugoslavia is next. The regent, Prince Paul, doesn’t care; he stays in Florence and collects art. The real power is in the hands of the premier, Cvetkovic, who is sympathetic to the Nazis, and he will also sign. Then it’s your turn.”

“Not much we can do about it,” Zannis said.

“Unless …”

“Unless?”

She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “There is some reason to hope there will be a coup d’etat in Belgrade.”

Zannis was startled and he showed it-such a possibility had never occurred to him.

“A last chance to stop Hitler in the Balkans,” she said.

“Will it stop him?”

“He may not want to fight the Serbs-most of Croatia will side with Hitler, their way out of the Yugoslav state.”

Zannis wanted to believe it. “The Serbs fight hard.”

“Yes. And Hitler knows it. In the Great War, German armies tore Serbia to pieces; people on the street in Belgrade were wearing window curtains, because the German soldiers stole everything. The Serbs remember-they remember who hurts them. So, for the Wehrmacht, it’s a trap.”

“And Greece?”

“I don’t know. But if Hitler doesn’t want war in the Balkans, and the Greek army withdraws from Albania …”

From Zannis, a grim smile. “You don’t understand us.”

“We do try,” she said, very British in the way she put it. “We understand this much, anyhow, Greeks don’t quit. Which is why I’m here, because the same spirit might lead you to help us, in Belgrade.”

“Us,” Zannis said. “So then, your operation.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that, but we can help. And, if the Serbs mean to do it, we must help.”

“And I’m to be part of this?”

“Yes.”

Zannis crushed his cigarette out in the ashtray. “Why me? How the hell did I ever become so … desirable?”

“You were always desirable, dear.” She smiled briefly, a real one this time. Then it vanished. “But you are desirable in other ways. You can be depended on, for one, and you have real courage, for another.”

“Why are you here, Roxanne? I mean you, and not Francis Escovil?”

“He does the best he can but he’s an amateur. I’m a professional.”

“For a long time?”

“Yes. Forever, really.”

Zannis sighed. There was no way to refuse. “Well then, since you’re a professional, perhaps you could be more specific.”

“We know you have friends in the Yugoslav police, and we will need to control certain elements in the army General Staff, not for long, forty-eight hours, but they can’t be allowed to get in our way.”

Zannis was puzzled. “Isn’t it always the army that stages the coup?”

“Air force.” She paused, then said, “There are more particulars, names and so forth, but first make certain of your friends, then contact Escovil and you’ll be told the rest. You won’t know the exact day, so you’ll have to move quickly when we’re ready.” She looked at her watch, then, as she stood, she raised a small leather shoulder bag from her lap and Zannis saw that it sagged, as though it carried something heavy. What was in there? A gun? “I have to say good night now,” she said. “My evening continues.”

He walked her as far as the top of the stairway. “Tell me one more thing,” he said. “When you came to Salonika, was it me you were after? A target? A recruit? It doesn’t matter now, you can tell me, I won’t be angry.”

She stopped, two steps below him, and said, “No, what I told you at the airfield was the truth-I was in Salonika for something else. Then I met you and what happened, happened.” She stayed where she was, and when at last she spoke her voice was barely audible and her eyes were cast down. “I was in love with you.”

As she hurried down the stairs, Zannis returned to his kitchen and lit another cigarette. In the street below, an engine started, lights went on, and the sedan drove away.

1 March. Zannis and Saltiel went to lunch at Smyrna Betrayed and ate the grilled octopus, which was particularly sweet and succulent that afternoon. Always, a radio played by the cash register at the bar, local music, bouzouki songs, an undercurrent to the noisy lunch crowd. Zannis hardly noticed the radio but then, as the waiter came to take away their plates, he did. Because-first at the bar, next at the nearby tables, finally everywhere in the room-people stopped talking. The restaurant was now dead silent, and the barman reached over and turned up the volume. It was a news broadcast. King Boris of Bulgaria had signed the Axis pact; German troops were moving across the Danube on pontoon bridges constructed during the last week in February. The Wehrmacht was not there as an occupying force, King Boris had stated, because Bulgaria was now an ally of Germany. They were there to assure stability “elsewhere in the Balkans.” Then the radio station returned to playing music.

But the taverna was not as it had been. Conversation was subdued, and many of the customers signaled for a check, paid, and went out the door. Some of them hadn’t finished their lunch. “Well, that’s that,” Saltiel said.

“When are you leaving, Gabi? Are you, leaving?”

“My wife and I, yes,” Saltiel said. “Is your offer, of Turkish visas, still possible?”

“It is. What about your kids?”

“My sons talked it over, got their money out of the bank, and now they have Spanish citizenship. It was expensive, in the end I had to help, but they did it. So they can go and live in Spain, though they have no idea how they will support their families, or they can remain here, because they believe they’ll be safe, as Spanish citizens, if the Germans show up.”

Zannis nodded-that he understood, not that he agreed-and started to speak, but Saltiel raised his hands and said, “Don’t bother, Costa. They’ve made their decision.”

“I’ll go to the legation this afternoon,” Zannis said.

“What about your family?”

“That’s next.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Saltiel said.

They paid the check and returned to the Via Egnatia. At the office, Zannis draped his jacket over his chair and prepared to work but then, recalling something he’d meant to do for a while, went back down the five flights of stairs. On the ground floor he passed beneath the staircase to a door that opened onto a small courtyard. Yes, it was as he remembered: six metal drums for the garbage. Two of them had been in use for a long time and their sides had rusted through in places, so there would be a flow of air, just in case you wanted to burn something.

Late that afternoon, the bell on the teletype rang and, as Zannis, Saltiel, and Sibylla turned to watch it, the keys clattered, the yellow paper unrolled, and a message appeared. It was from Pavlic, in Zagreb. Zannis had been worrying about him over the last few days because he’d sent Pavlic a teletype-in their coded way requesting a meeting-the morning after Roxanne said, “Make certain of your friends,” but there had been no answer. Now Pavlic explained, saying he’d received the previous communication but had been unable to respond until their machine was repaired. However, as he put it: PER YOUR REQUEST OF 23 FEBRUARY WILL ALERT LOCAL AUTHORITIES TO APPREHEND SUBJECT PANOS AT ARRIVAL NIS RAILWAY STATION 22:05 HOURS ON 4 MARCH

Zannis had only inquired if they could meet, but Pavlic had sensed the import of Zannis’s query and set a time for the meeting. Nis was seven hours by rail from Zagreb and four hours from Salonika, but this business had to be done in person.

At six o’clock, on the evening of the first of March, Zannis joined the jostling crowd at a newspaper kiosk and eventually managed to buy an evening edition. In the five hours since he’d heard the report on the taverna radio, the situation had changed: armoured Wehrmacht divisions were said to be moving south, to take up positions on the Greek border. Well, as Saltiel had put it, that was that, and Zannis could no longer postpone telling his family they would have to leave Salonika. Newspaper in hand, he went looking for a taxi.

As the driver wound his way through the old Turkish quarter, past walled courtyards and ancient fountains, Zannis rehearsed what he would say, but there was no way to soften the blow. Still, in the event, it was not as bad as he’d feared. His mother insisted on feeding him, and then he explained what had to be done. The family must go to Alexandria, and go soon. There was a large Greek community in the city and he would give his mother enough money to secure an apartment in that quarter where, as he put it, “there are Greek shops and Orthodox churches and our language is spoken everywhere.”

However, he would soon enough be fighting in the mountains of Macedonia, and he would not be able to send them any more money. He didn’t say the word charity because, at that moment, he couldn’t bear to. His mother, silent in the face of new and frightening difficulties, responded with a stoic nod, and Ari, who could not hide what he felt, was close to tears. But his grandmother, whose relatives had fought the Turks for decades, simply walked over to the table where she kept the sewing machine, removed its cloth cover, and said, “As long as we have this, my beloved Constantine, we shall not go hungry.” And then, moved by his grandmother’s example, Ari said, “I will find something, Costa. There’s always something. Perhaps they have tram cars in Alexandria.” Zannis, swept by emotion, looked away and did not answer. When he’d steadied himself, he said, “I will take you to the Egyptian legation tomorrow, so you will have the proper papers, and then I will buy the steamship tickets. After that, you should probably begin to pack.”

Back at Santaroza Lane, as he stroked Melissa’s great, noble head, his voice was gentle. “Well, my good girl, you will be going on a sea voyage.”

Melissa wagged her tail. And I love you too.

There was yet one more soul he cared for, but, once again that day, no letter in his mailbox, and the telephone, no matter how hard he stared at it, was silent.

4 March.

Nis was an ancient city, a crossroads on the trade routes that went back to Roman times. A certain darkness in this place-as the Turks had built a White Tower to frighten their subjects in Salonika, here, in the nineteenth century, they had built a tower of skulls, employing as construction material the severed heads of Serbian rebels.

The station buffet was closed, an old woman on her knees was attempting, with brush and bucket, to remove the day’s-the month’s, the century’s-grime from what had once been a floor of tiny white octagonal tiles. Zannis, his train an hour late getting in, found Pavlic sitting on a wooden bench, next to a couple guarding a burlap sack. Pavlic was wearing a suit and tie but was otherwise as Zannis remembered him: brush-cut, sand-colored hair; sharp crow’s-feet at the corners of narrow, watchful eyes. He looked up from his newspaper, then stood and said, “Let’s go somewhere else, I’m getting a little weary of this.” He nodded toward the burlap sack from which, as he gestured, there came a single emphatic cluck.

Seeking privacy, they walked out to the empty platform; no more trains were running that night, some of the people in the crowded station were waiting for the morning departures, others were there because they had nowhere else to go. On the platform, Zannis and Pavlic found a wooden handcart that would serve as a bench. They were, without saying much, pleased to see each other; the closer war came, the more conspiracy was a powerful form of friendship. They chatted for a time-the fugitive Jews coming from Berlin, the Germans in Bulgaria-then Zannis said, “I’ve heard that if the Cvetkovic government signs the pact, it may be overthrown.”

“So they say. In every coffeehouse and bar. ‘Pretty soon we’ll kick those bastards out!’ They’ve been saying it for ten years, maybe more.”

“It’s the British, saying it this time.”

Pavlic took a moment to think that over. There had to be a good reason Zannis put him on a train for seven hours, now here it was. “You mean it might actually happen.”

“I do, and, when it does, if it does, they want me to work with them. And I’m asked to organize a group of police to help. Detectives, I would think,” Zannis said.

“Like me,” Pavlic said.

“Yes.”

“And like my friends in Belgrade.”

“Them too.”

“Which British are we talking about? Diplomats?”

“Spies.”

“I see,” Pavlic said.

Zannis shrugged. “That’s who showed up.”

Pavlic was quiet for a time, then he said, “I might as well help out, if I can. No matter what I do, things won’t stay the same here. If Cvetkovic signs, there’s a good chance we’ll have a guerrilla war in Serbia. Not in Croatia-the Ustashi have been taking money from Mussolini for years, because they want Croatia to be an independent state, an ally of Rome. But the Serbs won’t be governed from Berlin. As soon as Hitler starts to push them around-tries to send the army into Greece, for example-they’ll fight. It will start in the cities and spread to the villages. Assassination, bombing, the traditional Black Hand style.”

“And your friends in Belgrade?”

“They’re Serbs. They’re going to be caught up in whatever happens, but if we get rid of Cvetkovic and his cronies, we might get a few months of peace. What passes for it these days, anyhow-threats, ultimatums, the occasional murder. And, you know, Costa, with time anything can happen. America joins the war, Germany invades Russia, Hitler is assassinated, or who knows what. They’ll take the gamble, my friends will, I think, but I’ve got to tell them what they’re supposed to do.”

“Our job is to make sure that certain elements of the General Staff are kept quiet. Not for long, forty-eight hours.”

“Why would they resist?”

“Cvetkovic allies? Maybe reached by German money? You can’t be sure, down here, about motives. And all it takes, like Sarajevo in nineteen-fourteen, is one determined man with a pistol.”

“How much time do I have?”

“It could happen any day now. In a way, it’s up to Cvetkovic … he might decide not to sign.”

“He will, Costa. Under pressure, he’ll give in.” Pavlic looked at his watch, got down from the cart, and brushed off the seat of his pants. “I think we’d better find somewhere we can get rooms for the night, before they lock the hotels. We’ll talk on the way.”

When he reached Salonika, the following afternoon, Zannis stopped by the Pension Bastasini and told Escovil that his friends in Belgrade would agree to join the operation. Escovil was clearly relieved; one of many things he had to do was now accomplished. Maybe too many things, Zannis thought-he could smell alcohol on Escovil’s breath. “We’ll be in contact,” he told Zannis. What they had to do now was wait.

Back in his office, Zannis made a telephone call to Vangelis, then walked over to see him.

“You may as well close the door,” Vangelis said, a St. Vangelis glint in his eye. He was very much a ruler of the civic kingdom that afternoon, in his splendid office with a view of the harbor: his shirt crisp and white, his tie made of gold silk, his suit perfectly tailored. “Thank you for taking care of our esteemed mayor,” he said. “And, by the way, the lovebirds are back together, all is forgiven.” This was accompanied by a mischievous flick of the eyebrows. “So then, what’s going on with you?”

“I will have to go away for a few days, commissioner, some time soon, but I don’t know exactly when.”

“Again,” Vangelis said.

Zannis nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, apology in his voice. “Again.”

Vangelis frowned. “Saltiel will take care of the office?”

“He will.”

“What are you doing, Costa? Does your escape line need tending?”

“No, sir, this time it’s … a British operation.”

Vangelis shook his head: what’s the world coming to? “So now I’ve got a secret service running on the Via Egnatia, is that it?” But he was only acting his part, stern commissioner, and suddenly he tired of it-perhaps he slumped a little, behind his grand desk-because he knew precisely what the world was coming to. “Oh fuck it all, Costa, you better do whatever you want, and you better do it quickly.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“It’s probably what you should be doing, that sort of thing, though I don’t like admitting it. What’s the matter with me?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“I wish you were right, but you’re not. Anyhow, you should likely go back to work, as long as you can, and I’ll just say farewell.”

The word puzzled Zannis who, having been dismissed, rose slowly from his chair.

“What I mean to say, is, well, may God watch over you, Costa.”

“Over us all, sir.”

“Yes, of course,” Vangelis said.

Somebody was certainly watching over something. Zannis eagerly checked his mailbox when he got home, but what he was looking for wasn’t there. Instead, an official letter from the Royal Hellenic Army, informing Lieutenant Zannis, Constantine, that he was as of this date relieved of active duty in the event of a call-up of reserve units, by reason of “medical condition.” Signed by a colonel. What was this? Zannis read it again. Not, he thought, an error. Rather, it was as though he’d been moved a square on an invisible board by an unseen hand, because he had no medical condition. On the seventh of March, sixty thousand British Commonwealth troops, mostly Australian and New Zealand divisions, disembarked from troop ships at various Greek ports. In Salonika, they were welcomed with flowers and cheers. Help had arrived. And, Zannis thought as the troops marched along the corniche, any nation that would do that might do all sorts of extraordinary things.

Finally, she telephoned.

The call came to the office, late in the afternoon. “I’m at a friend’s house, in Athens,” she said. To Zannis she sounded defeated, weary and sad.

“I was wondering,” Zannis said. “What happened to you.”

“I was afraid of that. Maybe you thought I … didn’t care.”

“No. Well, not really.”

“I’m miserable,” she said.

“Demetria?”

“Yes?”

“Get on a train. Tonight. Call, and I’ll be waiting at the station.”

“I want to….”

“Well then?”

“I don’t know what to do.” Now she was crying.

“I love you, Demetria. I think about you, I want you with me. Is there something you want me to say? Promise? Anything.”

“No! It’s beautiful … what you say.”

“And so?”

Now she didn’t speak.

“Please, don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it.” She snuffled. “Forgive me.”

He paused-was there a worse time to say what now had to be said? “There is something I have to tell you.”

“What?” He’d frightened her.

“I’ll be going away, soon, I don’t know when, and not for long. But I’ll leave a key with the neighbor downstairs, I’ll tell her to expect you.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s for work. A few days, only.”

For a time she was quiet, then she said, in a different voice, “I understand, you can’t say. But, what if you don’t come back?”

“I will, don’t worry about that.”

“Do you have a pencil?”

“Yes.”

“My friend’s number is Athens, 34-412. Her name is Theodora. Telephone her when you return.”

“Three, four? Four, one, two?”

“Yes. You don’t know when you’re leaving?”

“Days, maybe a week, maybe more. It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t? What if the war comes?”

Then you will be safe only with Vasilou. On his white ship. Finally, resignation in his voice, he said, “I don’t know.”

She sighed. “Nobody knows. All they do is talk.” She regretted having asked him a question he couldn’t answer, so now they would be strong together, not like the people who just talked.

“You won’t come here now?”

“Telephone when you return,” she said firmly. “Then I’ll be ready. I’ll be waiting.”

He said he would. He told her again that he loved her, and they hung up.

Zannis looked around the office, Saltiel and Sibylla had their heads down, engrossed in their work.

On 13 March, Hitler again demanded that Yugoslavia sign the Axis pact. They didn’t say no, they said, We’re thinking about it, the “no” of diplomacy. Which might have worked, but for the weather. Spring, the war-fighting season in Europe, was just beginning: once the fields were planted, the men of the countryside would take up their weapons, as they had since the Middle Ages. The March chill receded, the rain in Central Europe and the Balkans was a light rain, a spring rain, a welcome rain. Winter was over, now it was time for action, no more speeches, no more negotiation-certain difficult matters had to be settled, once and for all. Hitler loved that phrase, “once and for all,” and so, on the nineteenth of March, he issued an ultimatum. Do what I say, or you will be bombed and invaded. Costa Zannis paced his bedroom, smoked too much, found it hard to sleep. Yes, he had papers and steamship tickets for his family, but the earliest sailing he’d been able to reserve was on 30 March. Eleven days in the future. Would Hitler wait?

On the afternoon of the twentieth, he stood on the railway platform where passengers were boarding the express to Istanbul and said good-bye to Gabi Saltiel and his wife. As the train rolled out of the station, Zannis watched it go by until the last car disappeared in the distance. He wasn’t alone, there was a line of people, all up and down the platform, who waited until the train was gone.

24 March.

Belgrade was quiet that night, people stayed home, or spent long hours in the coffeehouses. In the larger towns, special Serbian police had been assigned to ensure peace and quiet in the streets. The newspaper Politika, the most esteemed journal in the Balkans, and read by diplomats all across Europe, had that morning been forced to print an editorial supporting Yugoslavia’s signature on the Axis pact. Just before midnight, two armoured cars brought Premier Cvetkovic and his foreign minister to Topchidersko railway station so they could board a train to Vienna. There they would sign.

Costa Zannis had arrived in Belgrade that same evening, met by Pavlic and taken to the Hotel Majestic on the Knez Mihailova, the main shopping street in the city. As they drove down the avenue, Zannis saw a huge swastika flag hung from the balcony of a five-story office building. “What’s that?” he said.

“The office of the German Travel Bureau,” Pavlic said. “Getting an early start on the celebration.”

In the Majestic, Zannis stowed a small valise in his room and went downstairs to the hotel bar. There, Pavlic introduced him to a bulky pale-haired Serb called Vlatko-from the spread of his shoulders and neck, every inch a cop. “He’s from the homicide office,” Pavlic said, as the two men shook hands. “And he speaks German.”

They ordered slivovitz, then Vlatko said, “It’s quiet here, but that’s just on the surface. The people are in shock.”

“It won’t last,” Pavlic said.

“No, big trouble tomorrow.” With this he grinned. He took, Zannis realized, great pleasure, a patriot’s pleasure, from the anticipation of big trouble.

Both Pavlic and Vlatko, taking turns, told Zannis the news of the day: a terrific fistfight in the bar of Belgrade’s best hotel, the Srbski Kralj, King of Serbia. Two American foreign correspondents and an Italian woman, their translator, on one side, five Wehrmacht officers-from the German legation-on the other. The Americans ordered whiskies, the Germans ordered schnapps; the Germans demanded to be served first, the barman hesitated. Next, savage insults, tables turned over, broken dishes. The Italian woman had thrown a drink in a German’s face, he hit her on the head, then the New York Times reporter, a good-sized Texan, had fought two of the Germans. “Knocked them down,” Vlatko said, ramming a huge fist into a meaty palm for emphasis. “Out cold. On the floor.” Once again, he grinned.

“And broke his hand,” Pavlic said.

“Both hands, I heard.”

“One hand,” Pavlic said. “I hope we can do without that, tomorrow.”

Vlatko shrugged. “We shall see.”

From his inside pocket, Zannis brought out the sheet of paper Escovil had given him: a typed list of twenty-seven names. He laid it on the table and smoothed out the folds with his hands. “Here it is,” he said. “We have a day to find out the addresses.”

Pavlic and Vlatko put their heads together over the list. Vlatko said, “Who are these people? Military, some of them, I can see that.”

“Not people who get their names in the newspapers,” Zannis said.

“Traitors,” Vlatko said.

“Possible troublemakers, anyhow,” Zannis answered.

“Well, we’ll find them.”

“Tomorrow night,” Zannis said. “When they’re at home. We don’t want to arrest them at staff headquarters, we don’t want gun battles.”

“No, I guess not,” Vlatko said, bringing forward, with some effort, the sensible side of his nature. “Pavlic and I have enlisted fifteen detectives, so we’ll work in groups of three-that should be sufficient. Do these people,” he paused, then said, “form a conspiracy?”

Zannis didn’t think so. “I doubt it,” he said. “The wives won’t warn their husbands’ friends, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Would be best to start at seven-before people go out to restaurants or whatever it is they do.”

“They won’t go out tomorrow night,” Pavlic said. “They’ll stay home with the radio on.”

“We can’t all come here,” Zannis said. “Vlatko, can you have them meet at six? You’ll have to distribute the names this afternoon, so we’ll divide up the names now and make new lists.”

“Where do we take them?”

“There’s a holding cell,” Pavlic said, “at the prefecture near the foreign legations, on Milosha Velikog. They’re going to move their prisoners-to make room for ours.”

“Stack them one on the other,” Vlatko said. “Who cares?”

“These people might be needed later,” Zannis said. “We want them out of circulation for a day and a half-for them an anecdote, not a nightmare. We’d put them in a spa, if we could.”

Vlatko looked at him. “You’re very kind, in Salonika.”

“As long as it works, we are. If it doesn’t, then we do it the other way.”

“Really? I guess we think differently, up here.”

A group of men came laughing into the bar, calling for slivovitz. They wore-Pavlic explained in an undertone-the black fur hats of the Chetniks, the ancient Serbian resistance movement, with skull and crossbones insignia on the front.

“They’ve come in from the villages,” Pavlic said. “They’re gathering.”

Back upstairs, Zannis was restless. The street below his window was deserted, the city quiet. No, not quiet, silent, and somehow sinister. Thousands of conversations in darkened rooms, he thought; they could not be heard but they could be felt, as though anger had its own special energy. And this, despite his better, too-well-learned instincts, he found exciting.

At seven the following morning, the telephone rang in his room, no name, no greeting, just an upper-class British voice, clipped and determined.

“Have you everything you need?”

“I do.”

“Tomorrow’s the day. I know you’ll do your best.”

“Count on it,” Zannis said, hoping his English was proper.

“That’s the spirit.”

No way to go back to sleep. He dressed, holstered his Walther, and went downstairs for coffee. When he returned, an envelope had been slid beneath his door: a local phone number, and a few words directing him to maintain contact, using street call boxes or telephones in bars, throughout the following day. Pavlic was going to pick him up at ten and drive him around the city. Until then, he didn’t know what to do with himself so he sat in a chair.

Outside, the people of the city began their day by breaking glass. Big plate-glass windows, from the sound of it, broken, then shattering on the pavement. Accompanied by a chant: Bolje rat, nego pakt! This much Serbo-Croatian he could understand: Better war than the pact! Outside, more glass came crashing down. He could see nothing from his room but, going out into the hall, he found a window at the end of the corridor. Down in the street, students were chanting and breaking store windows. As cars drove by, the drivers honked furiously, waved, and chanted along with the students: “Bolje rat, nego pact!” One of them stopped long enough to tear up a copy of Politika and hurl it into the gutter.

At nine-fifty, Pavlic’s car rolled to the curb in front of the Majestic. Vlatko was sitting in the passenger seat so Zannis climbed in the back where, on the seat beside him, he discovered a pump shotgun with its barrel and stock sawed off to a few inches. As Pavlic drove away, a group of students ran past, waving a Serbian flag. “Brewing up nicely, isn’t it,” Pavlic said.

Vlatko was wearing a hat this morning, with the brim bent down over his eyes, and looked, to Zannis, like a movie gangster. He turned halfway round, rested his elbow on top of the seat and said, “They’re out on the streets, in towns all over Serbia and Montenegro, even Bosnia. We’ve had calls from the local police.”

“They’re trying to stop it?”

From Vlatko, a wolf’s smile. “Are you kidding?”

“Rumors everywhere,” Pavlic said. “Hermann Goring assassinated, mutinies in Bulgarian army units, even a ghost-a Serbian hero of the past appeared at Kalemegdan fortress.”

“True!” Vlatko shouted.

“Well I’ll tell you what is true,” Pavlic said. “At least I think it is. Prince Peter, Prince Paul’s seventeen-year-old cousin, has supposedly returned from exile. Which means he’ll be crowned as king, and the regency is over, which is what the royalists have wanted for years, and not just them.”

Zannis liked especially the ghost; whoever was spreading the rumors knew what he was doing. Ten minutes later, Vlatko said, disgust in his voice, “Look at that, will you? Never seen that in Belgrade.” He meant two SS officers in their black uniforms, strolling up the street in the center of the sidewalk. As Zannis watched, two men coming from the opposite direction had to swing wide to avoid them, because they weren’t moving for anybody. Pavlic took his foot off the gas and the car slowed down as they all stared at the SS men, who decided not to notice them.

They drove around for an hour, locating the addresses that made up their share of the list. Two of the men lived in the same apartment building, two others had villas in the wealthy district north of the city, by the Danube-in Serbia called the Duna. Heading for the prefecture with the holding cell, they drove up the avenue past the foreign legations. The Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian legations, in honor of the newly signed pact, were all flying the red-and-black swastika flag. “Does that do to you what it does to me?” Pavlic said.

“It does,” Zannis said.

Vlatko stared out the side window. “Wait until tomorrow, you bastards.”

As they neared the prefecture, Zannis said, “If Prince Peter becomes king, who will run the government?”

“Whoever he is,” Vlatko said, “he’d better be a war leader.”

Zannis, hoping against hope, said, “You don’t think Hitler will accept a new government? A neutral government?”

Vlatko shook his head and said to Pavlic, “A real dreamer, your friend from Salonika.”

At the prefecture, the detectives had been listening to the radio and told Vlatko and Pavlic the news.

“What’s happened?” Zannis said.

“It’s what hasn’t happened that’s got them excited,” Pavlic said. “Cvetkovic was supposed to give a speech at ten, but it was delayed until noon. Now it’s been delayed again. Until six this evening.”

“When it will be canceled,” Vlatko said.

“Why do you think so?” Zannis said.

“I know. In my Serbian bones, I know it will be canceled.”

And, at six that evening, it was.

7:22 P.M.

A warm and breezy night, spring in the air. Pavlic pulled up in front of a villa; the lights were on, a well-polished Vauxhall sedan parked in the street. “They’re home,” Pavlic said.

“You don’t want this, do you?” Zannis said, nodding toward the shotgun.

“No, leave it. It won’t be necessary.”

There was no doorbell to be seen, so Vlatko knocked on the door. They waited, but nobody appeared, so he knocked again. Nothing. Now he hammered on the door and, twenty seconds later, it flew open.

To reveal one of the largest men Zannis had ever seen. He towered above them, broad and thick, a handsome man with blond hair gone gray and murder in his eye. He wore a silk dressing gown over pajamas-perhaps hurriedly donned because half the collar was turned under-and his face was flushed pink. As he gazed down at them, a woman’s voice, a very angry voice, yelled from upstairs. The giant ignored her and said, “Who the hell are you?”

“General Kabyla?” Pavlic said.

“Yes. So?”

Again the voice from upstairs. Kabyla shouted something and the voice stopped.

“We have orders to take you to the prefecture,” Pavlic said. Zannis didn’t get all of it but followed as best he could.

“From who?”

“Orders.”

“Fuck you,” said the general. “I’m busy.”

Vlatko drew an automatic pistol and held it at his side. “Turn around,” he said, producing a pair of handcuffs from his jacket pocket.

“I’m under arrest? Me?”

“Call it what you like,” Pavlic said, no longer patient.

As the general turned around and extended his hands, he said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

In answer Vlatko snapped the handcuffs closed, took the general by the elbow, and guided him toward the door. Where he stopped, then shouted over his shoulder so his voice would carry upstairs, “Stay right there, my duckling, I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

At the prefecture, there were already three men behind bars. Two of them, disconsolate, sat slumped on a bench suspended from the wall by chains. A third was wearing most of a formal outfit-the white shirt, black bow tie, cummerbund, and trousers with suspenders, but no jacket. He was a stiff, compact man with a pencil mustache and stopped pacing the cell when a policeman slid the grilled door open. As Vlatko unshackled the general, the man in evening wear took a few steps toward them and said, “We’ll find out who you are, you know, and we will settle with you.”

Vlatko shoved the general into the cell, then took a step toward the man who’d threatened him but Pavlic grabbed his arm. “Forget it,” he said.

The man in evening wear glowered at them. “You can bet we won’t.”

“Say another word and we’ll throw you in the fucking river,” Vlatko said.

The man turned and walked away, joining the other two on the bench.

By ten-thirty they were sitting in the bar at the Majestic, having rounded up the other three men on their list, stowing all three in the back of the car, where one of them had to sit on another’s lap to make room for Zannis. When the man complained, his dignity offended, Vlatko offered to put him in the trunk and he shut up. On the way to the prefecture the overloaded car crawled along the Milosha Velikog, where Pavlic had to stop twice, tires squealing, when armoured cars came roaring out of side streets and cut them off.

Throughout the next few hours, until well after midnight, detectives showed up at the bar to report on the evening’s work, while Zannis and Pavlic kept score on the master list. Around one in the morning it was over, they had twenty-two of the twenty-seven men in the holding cell at the prefecture. Two of the named subjects didn’t exist, according to the detectives-no trace in police or city records of their names. A third had escaped, having run out a back door and, as the story was told, “simply vanished, he’s hiding out there somewhere but we hunted for an hour and couldn’t find him.” A fourth was said, by a woman living at the house, to have been in Vienna for two years, and a search had revealed nothing-no men’s clothing. The last wasn’t home. The detectives had broken into his apartment and looked for him, but he wasn’t there. The neighbors shrugged, they didn’t know anything. One of the detectives had remained, in case he came home, and would stay until the morning.

There had, of course, been a few problems. One of the subjects, having gone for a pistol in a desk drawer, had been knocked senseless. Several bribes had been offered, and there’d been a number of arguments and threats. One of the detectives had been bitten by a dog, another had been scratched on the face. “By his woman,” the detective said, “so we arrested her, and now she’s in with the rest of them.” On two occasions, Pavlic was asked, “What will become of these people?”

“According to the plan, they are to be released in a day or so,” Pavlic said, and left it at that.

Many of the detectives stayed at the bar; this was an important night in the national history and they wanted to savor their part in it. Zannis encouraged them to eat and drink whatever they liked-the hotel kitchen produced roast chickens, the slivovitz flowed freely-as the money provided for the operation would easily cover the bill. At two in the morning, while the celebration raged around him, Zannis used the telephone at the bar and called the number he’d been given. A woman’s voice answered on the first ring. “Yes? Who’s speaking?” Her voice had a foreign accent but Zannis couldn’t place it.

“This is Zannis. We have twenty-two of twenty-seven. Locked up in prefecture.”

“Names, please.”

Zannis worked his way down the list.

“Wait,” she broke in. “You say Szemmer doesn’t exist?”

“No record. He is Serbian?” Zannis had wondered about the name.

“A Slovene. And he does exist. He is very dangerous.”

“They couldn’t find him. You know where to look, I’ll go myself.”

“No. Captain Franko Szemmer, that’s all we know.”

“Maybe, an office?”

“Where are you?”

“The bar, at the Hotel Majestic.”

“If I can find something, you’ll be contacted.”

After the telephone call, Zannis decided to go outside for a time, have a smoke, look at the stars, try to calm down. The front door was locked but the bolt turned easily and Zannis stepped out onto the sidewalk.

Half a block away, up at the cross street, somebody else had the same idea, on a tense night in Belgrade, and Zannis saw the red dot of a cigarette. There was one difference, between Zannis and his fellow star-gazer, the latter was sitting on the turret of a tank, its long gun pointing down the Knez Mihailova.

Zannis finished his cigarette and returned to the bar. “Maybe bad news,” he said. “There’s a tank out there.”

Pavlic swore, a nearby detective noticed the exchange and asked if something had gone wrong. Pavlic told him. “It could be,” he said, “that Cvetkovic has called out the army.”

Very quickly, the word spread. “If that’s true,” one of the detectives said, “we’re in for it.” He rose, went outside to see for himself, then came back looking more than worried. He spoke rapidly, Pavlic telling Zannis what he’d said. “I think we’d better find the back door.” As most of the detectives left, a heavy engine went rumbling past the hotel and the floor trembled. Zannis went to the door, then said, “Another one. Now they’ve got the street blocked off.”

Vlatko stood up, finished his drink, and said, “I’m going to find out what’s going on.” A few minutes later he returned. “They won’t talk to me,” he said. “Just told me not to ask questions.”

Zannis called the telephone number. When the woman answered, he said, “There are tanks here, blocking Knez Mihailova.”

“I will see,” said the woman, who took the telephone number, and hung up.

Out in the lobby of the hotel, by the overstuffed chairs and potted rubber trees, a large Philco radio stood on a table. Pavlic turned it on and searched for a station, but all he got was a low, buzzing drone.

Zannis stayed up until four-fifteen, waiting by the telephone, but it didn’t ring. The hell with it, he thought, and decided to go to bed. The faithful Vlatko, the last of the Serbian detectives in the bar, wished him a good night, and headed for a kitchen door that led to a back alley.

26 March. 7:30 A.M. Zannis had taken off his shoes, set his eyeglasses and Walther on the night table, and dozed. The roar of engines and rattle of tank treads woke him again and again, and finally he just gave up. He wouldn’t desert his post, but if the army had been called out that was the end of the coup d’etat, and he’d have to slip away somehow and make his way back to Salonika. Soon enough, somebody would discover the Cvetkovic loyalists at the prefecture and then, he hadn’t a doubt in the world, they would enlist their own thugs and come looking for him. So, no trains. Perhaps, he thought, he could steal a car. He would, at least, propose the idea to Pavlic, whose problem was severely worse than his own; he might well have to leave the country. Skata! Well, they had tried, and now he would have company on the run. Where to go? East to Bulgaria was closer than south to Greece, but he well remembered the swastika flag flown by the Bulgarian legation. Would Lazareff help them? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe, more than wouldn’t, couldn’t.

He walked down the corridor and knocked on Pavlic’s door. Pavlic answered immediately, wearing only his underwear, and holding his own Walther PPK by his side. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Well, good morning. Any news?”

“No. We’ll have to run for it, I’m afraid. Marko, I-” He’d started to apologize, but Pavlic waved him off.

“Don’t bother. I knew what I was getting into. Let’s try to find out what’s going on, at least, before we take off.”

He waited while Pavlic shaved-very much his own inclination at difficult moments. If you were going to face danger, even death, better to shave. After Pavlic got dressed, they went downstairs together and found the lobby deserted; no guests, no clerk, eerie silence. Pavlic unlocked the hotel door and they took a walk up the street. The tank crews were sitting on their machines, waiting for orders, content to relax while they had the opportunity.

Pavlic talked to the soldiers, his Serbo-Croatian much too fast for Zannis to follow. Brave sonofabitch, he really laid into them. Finally the sergeant commander got tired of him, sauntered off, and returned with an officer. Pavlic’s tone now altered-serious and straightforward, as though saying, come now, we’re fellow countrymen, you shouldn’t keep me in the dark. But, no luck. The officer spoke briefly, then walked away, back toward a wall of sandbags stacked across a doorway-the barrel of a machine gun poking out of a space that left it room to traverse.

“Well, what did he say?”

Pavlic’s face was alight. More than a smile-the cat had not only eaten the canary, he’d drunk up a pitcher of cream and got laid in the bargain. So, there was a joke all right, but Pavlic wasn’t ready to share it. “He didn’t say much, only that it would all be cleared up as the day went on.”

Zannis was puzzled; one certain detail had provoked his curiosity. “Tell me,” he said. “Why was the officer wearing a blue uniform?”

Pavlic jerked his head back toward the hotel and, as they began to walk, he put an arm around Zannis’s shoulders. “He wore a blue uniform, my friend, because he is in the air force.”

As instructed, Zannis left as soon as he could-the first train out at midday. But they made slow progress; stopped for a herd of sheep crossing the track, stopped because of overheating after a climb up a long grade, slowed to a crawl in a sudden snowstorm, stopped for no apparent reason at a town on the river Morava, somewhere north of Nis, the name on the station not to be found on the timetable. It was the fault of the engineer, someone said; who had halted the train for a visit with his girlfriend. Late at night, Zannis arrived in Nis, where the train that was to take him south was long gone.

At two-thirty on the afternoon of 27 March, he was again under way, headed for Skoplje. On this train he discovered-wedged into a space beside the seat where it blocked a savage draft-a Greek newspaper, printed early that morning. A new government in Yugoslavia! A coup led by General Simovich and the officer corps of the air force, joined by an army tank brigade. Being a Greek newspaper, it spoke from the heart: the people of this proud Balkan nation were “defiant,” they had “defied the Nazis,” and would continue to “defy” them-the journalist couldn’t get enough of it! “Hitler denied a victory,” “fury in Berlin,” “a defeat for Fascism,” Yugoslav “bravery,” “determination,” and, here it came again, “defiance.”

On the front page, a grainy photograph: a street packed with marching Serbs, their mouths open in song, some carrying flags and banners, others with pictures, taken down from walls and mantelpieces, of Prince Peter. Whose radio speech from the afternoon of the twenty-sixth was excerpted in a separate story on page two: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes! In this moment so grave for our people, I have decided to take the royal power into my own hands…. The Regents have resigned…. I have charged General Simovich with the formation of a new government…. The army and the navy are at my orders….

The newspaper story carried supportive statements from American and British politicians. The Americans were passionate and blunt, while the British, as was their custom, were rather more reserved.

*

That same day, in Berlin, the newspapers wrote about Yugoslav “criminals and opportunists,” claiming that ethnic German minorities in northern Serbia and the Banat region were being attacked by Serbian bandits: their houses burned down, their shops looted, their women raped. This was handwriting on the wall. Because such falsehoods had by now become a kind of code: used first in Poland, then in Czechoslovakia, as pretexts for invasion. So the fate of Yugoslavia was that morning already in preparation, and stated openly, for all to see.

One of the people who saw it was Emilia Krebs. She had done no more than skim the newspaper, being occupied with the departure of yet one more friend who had come to the attention of the Gestapo. This was a tall gray-haired woman of Polish descent, the eminent ethnologist and university professor known simply as Ostrova. You know he studied with Ostrova. We went to a lecture by Ostrova. But now, eminence had failed her, and her situation had become perilous. Thus, by eight-thirty, Emilia Krebs had served rolls and coffee, handed Ostrova a set of false documents, and wished her safe journey. Surely the news that morning was disquieting, and they’d talked it over. Yes, there would be war in the Balkans, but not yet. Maybe in a week, they thought. “So I’d better leave today,” Ostrova said and, if the Hungarians had been forced to close the border, she would find a way through the countryside. The two women embraced, and a determined Ostrova set out for the train to Vienna.

Twenty minutes later, Emilia Krebs was having a second cup of coffee when she heard the chime of the doorbell. Now who could be calling at this hour? Likely one of her fellow conspirators, she guessed, properly afraid to trust the telephone.

However, when she opened the door she faced a man she knew she’d never seen before. Heavily built, with a Prussian haircut, he wore steel-rimmed eyeglasses and looked, she thought, something like a mathematics teacher at a military academy. But he wasn’t that. He announced himself as “Herr Albert Hauser,” but, as it turned out, he wasn’t that either, not quite. What he was, he revealed as he sat on her couch, was Hauptsturmfuhrer Albert Hauser, of, as he put it, “the Geheime Staatspolizei.” An official title, the secret state police, simply one more government organization. But in Germany it was common usage to abbreviate this title, which came out “Gestapo.”

“Oh, that name, it’s become so …,” he said, hunting for a polite word but not finding one, and instead finishing, “… you know what I mean, Frau Krebs.”

She did.

“I called because I was wondering if you could shed some light on the whereabouts of a certain couple. Herr and Frau Gruen?”

Ah yes, she’d known them.

“Good friends of yours?”

Acquaintances.

“Well, it was reported to the local police that they’d disappeared, back in December this was, and when the detectives made no progress, it became my … concern.”

Not case, she thought. Concern. This Gestapo man seemed quite the gentle soul. Perhaps one could be, umm, forthcoming with him.

In a pig’s eye.

Emilia’s hands lay modestly folded in her lap, because she didn’t want Hauser to see that they were trembling.

“Unfortunately,” Hauser said, “I must consider the possibility that they met with foul play. They haven’t been seen since then, and there’s no record of their having-emigrated.”

They ran for their lives, you Nazi filth. No, she hadn’t heard that they’d emigrated, but still, they might’ve done so. Could the records be at fault?

“Our records, Frau Krebs?”

“Yes, Hauptsturmfuhrer. Yours.”

“I would doubt that.”

Very well. In that case, there was little she could add.

“Please, Frau Krebs, do not misunderstand the nature of this inquiry. We both know that the Gruens were … of the Jewish faith. But, even so, our security institutions are responsible for the protection of all our German citizens, no matter what people say.”

What people say. Do you mean that you are Jew murderers and should roast in hell for all eternity-that sort of thing? “Yes, I’m aware of what people say, Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer. Some people.”

“What can we do, meine Frau?”

You poor thing.

It went on, but not for long, and Hauser’s exterior never showed the slightest fissure-he was, certainly, beyond courteous. Still, there he was, in her living room, the coffee cup of the fugitive Ostrova sitting on the kitchen counter. He hadn’t come in uniform, with three fellow officers, he hadn’t kicked down the door, he hadn’t smacked her face. Yet, nonetheless, there he was. And, as he prepared to leave, her hands shook so hard she had to clasp them behind her back.

“I wish you a good day, Frau Krebs. I hope I have not intruded.”

He closed the door behind him, it clicked shut, she called an office at the General Staff headquarters, and Hugo was home twenty minutes later. It was the worst conversation they ever had. Because they had to part. She was obviously a suspect, so obviously under surveillance but, as long as he stayed where he was, she was safe, she could leave Germany. If they were to attempt to leave together, they would both be arrested.

She took the train to Frankfurt that afternoon. Was she watched? Impossible to know, but she assumed she was. At the grand house in which she’d been raised, she spoke with her grandfather, and together they made their plans. If, he said, it was time for her to leave, then it was also time for him. Since the rise of Hitler in 1933 he’d hoped for the sort of catastrophe that always, sooner or later, brought such people down, but it hadn’t happened. Instead, triumph followed triumph. So now came the moment to abandon such folly, as Emilia’s grandfather put it, “and leave these people to their madness.” The next morning, with a single telephone call, he procured exit visas for a week-long vacation in Basel. He did not have to visit an office, he simply sent a clerk over for the papers. “The general’s aide asked that I convey the general’s warmest wishes for a pleasant stay in Switzerland,” said the clerk, as he handed Adler a manila envelope. No more than expected, from this general, for Adler had made him a very wealthy general indeed.

It was a long drive, ten hours, from Frankfurt to the Swiss border, but Emilia Krebs and her grandfather were comfortable in the luxurious Mercedes automobile. The cook, saddened because she suspected she would never see them again, had made up a large packet of sandwiches, smoked liverwurst and breast of chicken, and filled a large thermos with coffee. The cook knew what they knew: that even traveling in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, and looking like powerful and protected people, it was better not to stop. There were Nazi luminaries everywhere along the way and when they drank, which was often, they were liable to forget their manners. The chauffeur drove steadily through the gusty March weather, Emilia Krebs and her grandfather watched the towns go by and, even though the glass partition assured them privacy, only conversed now and then.

“How many did you save, Emmi?” the elder Adler asked.

“I believe it was forty, at least that. We lost one man who was arrested at the Hungarian border, we never learned why, and a pair of sisters, the Rosenblum sisters, who simply vanished. They were librarians, older women; God only knows what happened to them. But that was in the early days, we managed better later on.”

“I am proud of you, Emmi, do you know that? Forty people.”

“We did our best,” she said.

And then, for a time, they did not speak, lost in their own thoughts. Emilia didn’t cry, mostly she didn’t, she held it in, and kept a handkerchief in her hand for the occasional lapse. Her grandfather was, in his way, also brokenhearted. Seven hundred years of family history in Germany, gone. Finally he said, some minutes later, “It was the honorable thing to do.”

She nodded, in effect thanking him for kind words. But we pay a price for honor, she thought.

So now she paid, so did her husband, so did her grandfather, and, for that matter, so would the Yugoslavs, and the Greeks. Such a cruel price. Was it always thus? Perhaps, it was something she couldn’t calculate, life had somehow grown darker, at times it did. Perhaps that was what people meant by the phrase the world is coming apart. But mostly you couldn’t question what they meant, because mostly they said it to themselves.

Hours later, they reached the Swiss border. The German customs officer glanced at their papers, put two fingers to the brim of his cap, and waved them through. The Swiss officer, as the striped barrier bar was lowered behind them, did much the same. And then they drove on, a few minutes more, into the city of Basel.

29 March. There was little to do in the office-only Sibylla and Zannis there now, and Saltiel’s bare desk, his photographs gone. The telephone rang now and then, the Salonika detective units continuing to work because they might as well, while they were waiting. Zannis read the newspaper as long as he could stand it, then threw it in the wastebasket. German troop formations moving south, diplomats said this and that; now it was only a matter of time.

“What will you do, Sibylla, when we close the office? Do you need help? With anything?”

“I’ve made my arrangements, chief.”

“Yes?”

“I have a job, as a bookkeeper, at the hotel where my husband works. Nice people, the couple that own the place.”

“And if the Germans question you?”

“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but, if they should, I don’t know anything, I was just a secretary. And there’s a chance they’ll never know I was here. The owners said they would backdate the employment records, if I wanted them to.”

“Will you do that?”

“Maybe. I haven’t decided.” After a moment she said, “I don’t know what you have in mind, but, whatever that might be, if you need somebody to help out you only have to ask.”

“Thank you, Sibylla.”

Zannis sat out the day, then went up to see his family at six. This he dreaded, and found what he’d known he would: the chaos of departure. The open suitcases, piles of clothing that were never going to fit, a blackened pot that sat on the table, waiting for a miracle. In the middle of all this, his mother was cooking a lamb roast. “We have a lot to give away,” she said.

“Why not just leave it here?”

“It will be stolen.”

“Oh, you can’t be sure of that.”

His mother didn’t answer.

“The Naxos sails at one-thirty,” he said. “We’ll go an hour early.”

“Well, we have packing to do in the morning. The bedding….”

Zannis found the retsina and poured himself a generous portion. “One for me too, Constantine,” his grandmother said, staring at a ladle, then putting it aside.

The following morning, he telephoned Sibylla and told her he wouldn’t be in the office until later, maybe two o’clock. Then he set out for the central market, Melissa rambling along with him, for the errand he couldn’t face but now had to. After hunting through the goods in several stalls, he bought a khaki pouch with a shoulder strap, possibly meant for ammunition, from some army in the city’s history. Returning home, he went to the kitchen, washed Melissa’s dinner and water bowls, wrapped them in newspaper, settled them in the pouch, and added her leash; she might just have to wear it. Then he went into the other room, but Melissa wasn’t there.

The door to the apartment stood open. He only locked it at night, its latch hadn’t worked for years, Melissa could push it open with her head. Oh no. Hoping against hope, he looked under the bed. No dog. “Melissa? Melissa!”

She knew. Strange mountain beast, she knew what it meant-her only possessions packed up in a khaki pouch.

Zannis trotted down the stairs. He’d thought this through-there was no possibility she could stay with him. Fighting in the mountain villages meant near starvation-crops burned, houses destroyed-and the animals, even beloved animals, didn’t survive it. Out on Santaroza Lane, he called her name, again and again, but there was only morning silence.

He set out on her daily route, finding no help along the way because the street was deserted. He went as far as the corniche, then worked back toward the top of the lane, past the fountain, searching every alley and looking at his watch. By now, he was supposed to be with the family. Where had she gone? Finally he turned into the alley where a neighbor kept her chicken coop and, at the very end, there she was. Lying on her stomach, head resting on crossed paws, looking as miserably sad as any dog he’d ever seen. He squatted by her side and stroked her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You know you’re going away, don’t you. Well, good girl, it has to be. Now you have to take care of the family.” When he stood up, so did she, and walked back to the apartment, head carried low, close to his side. Facing the inevitable.

He arrived at the house in the Turkish quarter after eleven and shooed the family along in the last hectic stages of packing-God only knew what would be forgotten. He made sure that his mother put a packet of money in a safe place-the envelope pinned to the inside of her coat. Made Ari responsible for Melissa’s traveling bag, looping the strap over his shoulder. Secured his grandmother’s valise with a length of cord. And found a taxi.

By twelve-thirty they reached the dock; the Naxos already had steam up. Spreading out from the foot of the gangway, a great mob of people, some two hundred of them. And loud-babies wailing, people arguing and swearing, or shouting to friends. He maneuvered the family toward the gangway, then settled in to wait until they would be permitted to board. The tickets! Frantically he patted his clothing, eventually discovering he’d moved them to a safer pocket. Now a few harassed customs officials appeared and tried to form the mob, hauling trunks and suitcases and bags, into a line. But, clearly, that wasn’t going to work.

Suddenly, gunfire.

The rhythmic thump of Bofors cannon. Amid screams, as people dove to the ground, Zannis searched the horizon. Far above the puffs of exploding shells in a blue sky, a small aircraft, perhaps a German reconnaissance plane. Some officer at the antiaircraft battery down the bay had evidently spotted the insignia with his binoculars and given the order to fire. No chance of hitting it, not at that altitude. And the plane didn’t evade, simply circled the city, then turned out to sea and disappeared into the haze. From the crowd, more than a few cheers. An old man, standing near Zannis, said, “Where is our air force?”

The gunfire had certainly affected the passengers on the wharf. What had been an unruly mob now formed itself into a long line, leading to a wooden table and two customs officers sitting on folding chairs. When it came the turn of the Zannis family, he hugged and kissed them all, knelt and embraced Melissa, now miraculously wearing her leash, and, taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes, watched their blurred forms wave good-bye as they climbed the gangway.

In the office, a telegram awaited him, sent from Basel.

HAD TO GO AWAY STOP BUSINESS CLOSED

STOP MAY GOD WATCH OVER YOU STOP

SIGNED FRIEND FROM BERLIN

“At least she’s safe,” Sibylla said. “And I suppose the operation couldn’t go on forever.”

“No, I guess it couldn’t. Maybe someone else might have taken over, but with war coming in Yugoslavia that won’t be possible.”

“She did what she could,” Sibylla said.

“Yes,” Zannis said. “She did.”

Next he went off to the Bank of Commerce and Deposit on Victoros Hougo Street. He’d paid for the family steamship tickets with his own money, but he wasn’t going to abandon the secret fund-money was crucial to resistance. He was, however, not the only person in town that afternoon clearing his account. There were fourteen people ahead of him on line-all waiting for the bank officer who handled “special accounts.”

The man was not holding up well; he seemed to Zannis pale and anxious. “I regret, sir, there are no dollars, not any more. Maybe tomorrow, we might have some, but I wouldn’t wait, if I were you.”

“No British money? Gold sovereigns?”

The man closed his eyes and shook his head. “No, sir. Not for weeks. Gold is very desirable now.”

“What do you have left?”

“Drachmas, of course. Spanish pesetas, and Swiss francs.”

“Swiss francs,” Zannis said.

The officer, having set the account’s file card down before him, went into the vault and returned with a metal drawer that held packets of Swiss francs, a pin forced through the corner of each stack of one hundred. “Do you have a briefcase, sir?”

Zannis produced it and, recalling the French king in the back of his royal automobile, slid the packets into the case.

When he returned to the office, he found a message to telephone a detective in the second district. “Costa Zannis,” he said. “You telephoned?”

“Somebody threw a brick through the window of the German legation,” the detective said. “Would that be something for your office?”

“Did you talk to them?”

“Yes. I went over there and wrote up a report. The consul was in a real fury.”

“He was, was he.”

“Oh yes. Red in the face, sputtering.”

Zannis laughed. “First good news today.”

“I guess that means you don’t care.”

“Well, I can’t help him.”

“You should’ve seen it,” the detective said. “It was really wonderful.”

Eventually, Zannis had to return to Santaroza Lane; he had nowhere else to go. Spring was heavy in the air that afternoon, and the two old women had their kitchen chairs out, gossiping in the last of the sunshine. As always they were pleased to see him. One of them said, “By the way, your telephone’s been ringing most of the afternoon.”

“It has?”

“Somebody’s been trying to reach you.”

Zannis hurried upstairs. The apartment was very still without Melissa. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited, but the phone didn’t ring for another forty minutes. “Yes? Hello?”

“Finally! It’s me, Costa.” Demetria, her voice strong and sweet.

“Where are you?” The connection was suspiciously clear.

“Not far. I’m in Salonika.”

“You’ve come home?” he said.

“No, that’s finished.” She paused, then said, “I’m at the Lux Palace, in 601, the suite on the top floor.”

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

It turned out to be the same suite where he’d first met Emilia Krebs. When Demetria opened the door, they stared at each other for a long moment. Well, now it’s happened, I hope you meant it. He rested his hands on her shoulders, wanting a good long look at her, his prize. She was wearing the bronze silk blouse and pearl necklace she’d had on the first time he’d seen her, in the back of the Rolls-Royce. Finally she raised her face, and he touched his lips to her smile.

“Well then,” she said. “Maybe you should come inside.”

She gestured to the sofa, sat down at the other end, then moved closer. For a time they didn’t speak, their alliance settling on them amid the ambient sounds from the open window-seagulls, car horns, voices in the street. At last he said, “Was it very bad?”

“Bad enough,” she said. “I’m going to call down for something to drink, what would you like?”

“French wine? Champagne?”

As she went to the telephone, he watched her walk. Not that she overdid it, but she knew his eyes were following her. After she’d ordered champagne, she returned to the sofa. “I guess I could have done that while you were on the way but then I didn’t know if you’d want a room service waiter … knocking on the door …”

“We have time,” he said. “What a luxury that is.”

She looked into his eyes, excited to be with him, in love with him, and put a warm hand atop his. But she did this instead of responding to what he’d said. Because there wasn’t very much time, she just didn’t have the heart to say it. “Yes,” she said. “A luxury.”

His eye fell on an open suitcase that stood on a luggage rack. “Is that all you brought?”

“Oh no, there’s more in the baggage room. You should see what I brought. That’s why I waited until we came back to Salonika. Then I told him.”

“How did he take it?”

“He was ice cold. He knew, I think. Either in his mean little heart, sensed I wasn’t with him any more, or his spies told him what was going on.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No, he’s too busy settling his affairs before he leaves, to think about revenge.”

“He’s going to America?”

She nodded. “I would’ve liked to see it, but-”

A knock on the door. “Room service.”

They drank the champagne, touching glasses in a silent toast. Zannis poured a second, then a third, and the effect was powerful. Darkness gathered outside the window, the last drifts of sunlit cloud low on the horizon. Demetria said it was beautiful, then she yawned. “Oh God, forgive me-I couldn’t help it.”

“You’re tired, I’m not surprised, and the champagne …”

“I’m exhausted.”

“Me too. A very difficult day, until you called.”

“Maybe we should sleep.”

“Why not? We’ll stay here tonight, then-”

“Oh we can stay as long as we like.”

“It’s expensive, no?”

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

“More?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 April. 7:20 A.M.

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

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

“Oh.”

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

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

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

“What’s that, Costa?”

“Your steamship ticket.”

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

“Tomorrow night.”

“What makes you think I’ll use it?”

“You must, Demetria.”

“Oh? And you?”

“I have to stay.”

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

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

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

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

“I can dye my hair.”

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

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

“I would try, but …” He left it there, then said, “And they will come after me, they have a score to settle with me, and these people settle their scores. So I will work against them, but I believe I’ll have to go up to one of the mountain villages and fight from there. Not right away, the war could go on for six months, maybe more. Look what we did with the Italians.”

“These are not Italians, Costa.”

“No, they’re not. So …” He nodded toward the ticket. “It isn’t forever. I’ll find you, we’ll be together again, no matter what it takes.”

“I love you, Costa, with all my heart I love you, but I am Greek, and I know what goes on when we fight in the mountains.” She reached out and gripped his hand. “As God wills,” she said, “but I can only hope, to see you again.” She looked away from him, out the window, then down at the floor. Finally, her eyes turned back to his. “I won’t resist,” she said quietly. “I’ll go, go to”-she squinted at the ticket-“to Alexandria. Not Istanbul?”

“The ship is going to Alexandria.”

“Won’t I need a visa?”

“Too late. The Egyptians will give you one when you land; you’ll have to pay for that but they’ll do it.”

She nodded, then let go of him and covered her eyes with her hands, as though she were very tired. “Just fuck this horrible world,” she said.

And then, it all came apart.

They decided that Demetria would repack for the voyage: take what was valuable, then bring the rest out to the house in Kalamaria and say good-bye to her mother. Meanwhile, Zannis had several things to do, and they agreed to meet back at the hotel at three.

Zannis went first to his apartment, to retrieve the Walther-better to carry it, now. The weather had turned to gray skies and drizzling rain, so the ladies were not out on their kitchen chairs, but one of them must have been watching at her window. Upstairs, he wandered around the apartment, coming slowly to understand that all was not as it should be. Had he been robbed? He didn’t think so; he could find nothing missing. Still, the door to the armoire was ajar, had he left it like that? Usually he didn’t. He tried to remember, but that night was a blur; he’d hurried away when Demetria called, so … But then, a chair was pushed up close to the table-a neat and proper position for a chair, but not its usual place.

As he poked around, he heard a hesitant knock at the door. It was one of his neighbors. He asked her in, but she remained on the landing and said, “I just wanted to tell you that some friends of yours came to see you yesterday.”

“They did?”

“Yes. Two men, well dressed; they didn’t look like thieves. We saw them go into the house, and my friend on the first floor wasn’t home, so they must have been … waiting for you. That’s what we decided.”

“How long were they here?”

“An hour? Maybe a little less.”

“Any idea who they were?”

“No, not really. I don’t think they were Greek, though.”

“You … overheard them speak?”

“It’s not that, they didn’t say anything, just … something about them. I’m probably wrong, perhaps they came from Athens.”

Zannis thanked her, then retrieved his Walther and ammunition and headed for the Via Egnatia. They’re already here, he thought. And I must be high on their list.

At the office, he hung up his coat and left his umbrella open so it would dry. Then he said, “I think today’s the day, Sibylla. For getting rid of the files.”

She agreed. “It’s any time now, the Yugoslavs have mobilized.”

“I haven’t seen the papers.”

“Well, all the news is bad. The German army is now at the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia. Though the Hungarians, according to the newspaper, have issued a protest.”

“To who?”

“I don’t know, maybe just to the world, in general.” She started to go back to work, then stopped. “Oh, before I forget, two men showed up here yesterday, asking for you.”

“Who were they?”

“Greek-speaking foreigners. Polite enough. Were you expecting them?”

“No.”

“What if they return?”

“You know nothing about me, get rid of them.”

It took, for Sibylla to understand, only a beat or two. Then she said, “Germans? Already?”

Zannis nodded. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “And we have work to do.” He began to take his five-by-eight card files out of the shoebox. “We’ll have to burn the dossiers as well,” he said.

“You read the name,” Sibylla said, “and I’ll pull them.”

He looked at the first card-ABRAVIAN, Alexandre, General Manager, Shell Petroleum Refinery-and said, “Abravian.”

In time, they carried the first load down the stairs. Out in the tiny courtyard, enclosed by high walls, the sound of the rain pattering on the stone block had a strange depth to it, perhaps an echo. One of the rusty old barrels Zannis had chosen was half full, so he decided to use the other one. He crumpled up pages from Sibylla’s newspaper and stuffed them in the bottom, knelt, and used a rusted-through slit to start the fire. Burning papers, that ancient tradition of invaded cities, turned out to be something of an art-best to drop them in a few at a time so you didn’t starve the fire of oxygen. A grayish-white smoke rose into the sky, along with blackened flakes of ash that floated back down into the puddles on the floor of the courtyard.

It took more than an hour, Sibylla working with mouth set in a grim line. She was very angry-this had been her work and she had done it with care and precision-and they didn’t converse, beyond the few words necessary to people who are working together, because there was nothing to say.

When they were done, they returned to the office. Zannis stayed for a time, making sure there was nothing there for the Germans to exploit, then put on his coat. As he was doing up the buttons, the telephone rang and Sibylla answered. “It’s for you,” she said.

“Who is it?” He didn’t want to be late getting back to the hotel.

“The commissioner’s secretary. I think you’d better talk to her.”

Zannis took the phone and said, “Yes?”

The voice on the other end was strained, and barely under control-somewhere between duty and sorrow. “I’m afraid I have bad news for you. Commissioner Vangelis has died, by his own hand. At one-thirty this afternoon, he used his service revolver.”

She waited, but Zannis couldn’t speak.

“He left,” she took a deep breath, “several notes, there’s one for you. You’re welcome to come over here and pick it up, or I can read it to you now.”

“You can read it,” Zannis said.

“‘Dear Costa: you have been a godson to me, and a good one. I have known, over the years, every sort of evil, but I do not choose to tolerate the evil that is coming to us now, so I am leaving before it arrives. As for you, you must go away, for this is not the time and not the place to give up your life.’ And he signs it, ‘Vangelis.’ Shall I keep the note for you?”

After a moment, Zannis said, “Yes, I’ll come by and pick it up. Tomorrow. What about the family?”

“They’ve been told.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “He was-”

She cut him off and said, “There will be a service, we don’t know where, but I’ll let you know. And now, I have other calls to make.”

“Yes, of course, I understand,” Zannis said and hung up the phone.

5 April. 8:20 p.m. The captain of the tramp steamer Bakir had six passengers for Alexandria and no empty cabins, so he showed them to the wardroom. At least they could share the battered couches for the two-day trip across the Mediterranean-it was the best he could do and he knew it really didn’t matter. The other five passengers-an army officer, a naval officer, and three civilians-had obtained passage, Zannis suspected, the same way he had: by means of the discreet yellow envelope. One of the civilians was prosperously fat, with a pencil-thin mustache, very much the Levantine, all he needed was a tarboosh. The second, thin and stooped, might have been a university professor-of some arcane discipline-while the third was not unlike Zannis; well-built, watchful, and reserved. They spoke a little, the man knew who Zannis was and had worked, he said, for Spiraki. And where was Spiraki? Nobody knew. He said. And if they were surprised to find that a woman, a woman like Demetria, was joining them, they did not show it. What the British did, they did, they had their reasons, and here we all are.

At twenty minutes to nine, the captain appeared in the wardroom. Zannis stood up-if the ship was about to sail, he had to get off. “You can sit back down,” the captain said. “We’re not going anywhere. Not tonight we’re not, problems in the engine room. We’ll get it fixed by about eight, tomorrow morning, so, if you and your wife, or any of you, want to spend the night ashore, you may do that.”

Zannis and Demetria looked at each other, then Zannis gestured toward the passageway. He picked up Demetria’s two suitcases, one of which was very heavy. “Silver,” she’d told him when he asked. “Something you can always sell.”

Back at the Lux Palace, Suite 601 had not been taken, so Zannis and Demetria rode back up on the elevator. The flowers were gone. “Likely the maids took them home,” Demetria said. “I hope so, anyhow.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No. The opposite.”

“Me too.”

“I was ready to leave,” she said. “Now this.”

Zannis sat on the sofa. “Well, a few more hours together,” he said. He certainly didn’t regret it.

She managed a smile, weak, but a smile. Without saying anything, they agreed that the idea of making love one last time did not appeal to either of them, not at that moment it didn’t. They talked for a while, and eventually undressed and tried to sleep, without much success, lying silent in the darkened room. And they were still awake at dawn, as early light turned the clouds to pearl gray, when the first bombs fell on Salonika.

The first one hit somewhere near the hotel-they could feel the explosion and the sound was deafening-and sent Zannis rolling onto the floor, pulling the blankets on top of him. He struggled to his knees and looking across the bed saw Demetria-the same thing had happened to her-staring back at him. He got to his feet and headed for the window, which had cracked from corner to corner. She was immediately behind him, her arms wrapped around his chest, her body pressed against his back. Down on the waterfront he was able, after searching the line of docked ships, to find the Bakir. She was tilted awry, with a column of heavy black smoke rising from the foredeck. “Can you see the Bakir?” he said.

She looked over his shoulder. “Which one is it?”

“The one on fire. I mean, the second one on fire, in the middle.”

“What should we do?”

Toward the eastern end of the city, the smoke and thunder of an explosion; then, two seconds later, another one, closer, then, two seconds, another, each one marching toward them as bombs tumbled down from the clouds. Her arms tightened around him-all they could do was watch and, silently, count. Three blocks away, the roof of a building flashed and a wall fell into the street. One second, two. But there it stopped. From the far end of the corniche, long strings of orange tracer rounds floated upward, aimed at a dive-bomber headed directly at the battery. The gunners didn’t stop, the pilot didn’t pull up, and the plane caught fire just before it crashed into the guns.

After that, silence. Well to the east, where the oil storage tanks were located, the rolling black smoke of burning oil had climbed high into the air. “The railway station,” Zannis said. “Our only chance.” They dressed quickly and took the stairs down to the first floor, Zannis carrying Demetria’s suitcases.

In the lobby, the hotel staff and a few guests were gathered around a radio. “The Germans have set Belgrade on fire,” the bell captain said, “and they’re attacking Fort Rupel with paratroops, but the fort still holds.”

The Rupel Pass, Zannis thought, fifty miles north of Salonika. He’d found photographs of the fort carried by a German spy in the Albala spice warehouse, back in October. Now, if the Wehrmacht broke through, they’d be in the city in a few days. “Is there a train this morning?” Zannis said. “Headed east?”

The bell captain looked at his watch. “It’s gone. Should have left twenty minutes ago but who knows, this morning. Still, if they can run they will, that’s how it is with us.”

Zannis picked up Demetria’s suitcases. As he did he saw Sami Pal, sitting in a chair in the corner, reading a newspaper, a cup of coffee by his side. Sami Pal? The Hungarian gangster? At the Lux Palace? But Sami seemed to be doing well, wore an expensive sky-blue overcoat, and, absorbed in his reading, apparently did not see Zannis.

Out in the street, a carpet of shattered glass sparkled in the early light. “Off we go,” Zannis said. There were no taxis, no cars of any kind, though he could hear sirens in the distance. Demetria and Zannis moved at a fast trot, taking the corniche, coughing from the acrid smoke that hung in the air. “Are you all right?” Zannis said.

Demetria nodded, breathing hard, a line of soot around her mouth and below her nostrils. “We’ll get there,” she said.

It took fifteen minutes. The station had been hit-a hole in the roof and a black crater in the floor of the platform-but there was a train. Perhaps it had been scheduled to leave but people were still trying to jam themselves into the cars. A conductor stood by the door of one of the coaches. “Where’s it going?” Zannis said.

“It’s the Athens-Alexandroupolis Express, one stop at Kavala, but it may go all the way to Turkey.”

“Why would it go to Turkey?” Demetria said.

“Because it’s a Turkish train. Eventually it goes to Edirne, but, today …”

“Do we need tickets?” Zannis said.

The conductor laughed. “We don’t care this morning, try to get on if you can.”

The train was packed. At the far end, only four people were standing on the steps of the coach and there was room for one more. Demetria forced her way onto the first step, then put a foot on the second. Above her, a large angry man shoved her back. “No room up here,” he said. His face-pitted skin, a well-trimmed beard-was knotted with rage.

“Make a space for the lady, sir,” Zannis said. He started to help Demetria up to the step, but this time the man pushed with both hands on her shoulders. Zannis led her back down onto the platform, then turned, climbed on the first step and hit the man in the throat. The man made a choking noise, a woman screamed, and Zannis hit him again, knuckles extended, between the ribs, in the heart, and he folded in two. The woman next to him had to grab him or he would have fallen. “Now make room,” Zannis said. “Or I will finish this.”

The man moved aside, Demetria stood with one of the suitcases upended between her legs. Zannis was wondering what to do with the other suitcase when Demetria reached down and grabbed him by the lapel. “Please don’t leave me here,” she said. Beside her, the bearded man was staring at her with pure hatred. Zannis climbed up on the first step and held on to the railing, straddling the second suitcase. He would, he thought, get off at Kavala. When the train jerked forward, Zannis stumbled, put one foot on the platform, and, using the handrail, hauled himself back on. The train jerked again, the crowd on the platform was still trying to find a way to board. Somebody yelled, “The roof! Get on the roof!” Slowly, the train picked up speed. One more man climbed on the bottom step, forcing Zannis against the railing. “Beg pardon,” the man said.

“Can’t be helped,” Zannis said.

An hour passed, then another. They crossed from Macedonia into the province of Thrace, the train chugged past flat farm fields, always twelve miles from the coast. The Turks had built this railroad in the days of the Ottoman Empire and set the tracks inland so that military transport trains could not be bombarded by enemy naval vessels. Zannis hung on every time the train rounded a curve, the gravel by the track only inches from his feet, his hand freezing where it gripped the iron railing. They would soon be in Kavala, where he’d intended to leave the train, but he had two problems. The bearded ape above him, swaying next to Demetria, and the Turkish border post-if the train went that far. Demetria had no entry visa and Zannis well remembered what had happened to Emilia Krebs when she’d tried to bribe her way past the customs officials.

In the event, it was the train’s engineer who made the decision. He did not slow down for Kavala, he sped up. Zannis soon saw why. On the station platform, a huge mob of people yelled and waved as the train rumbled past them.

And then, another two hours on, at Alexandroupolis station, the same.

“Where’s he taking us?” the man next to Zannis said.

“Edirne. Turkey.”

“Well, my wife is waiting for me in Alexandroupolis. She will be extremely annoyed.”

Zannis shrugged. “We’re at war,” he said.

Edirne. 3:50 P.M. Slowly, the passengers climbed down off the train and joined a long snake of a line, maintained by Greek and Turkish gendarmes who tapped their palms with wooden batons by way of enforcing discipline. Rumors ran up and down the line-some people had visas, and they were allowed to enter Turkey. Those who didn’t were being sent back to Greece. This was apparently the case, since a crowd of passengers, looking weary and defeated, began to gather on the Greek side of the customs post.

“Will we get in?” Demetria said.

“We’ll try.”

“Do you need money?”

“I have Swiss francs, more than enough.” If they’ll take them.

But they wouldn’t.

When Zannis and Demetria approached the desk, the Turkish officer said, “Passports and visas, please.”

“Here are the passports,” Zannis said. “We have no visas.”

“You will return to Greece. Next!”

Zannis brought his hand from his pocket, holding a wad of Swiss francs. The officer met his eyes and began to tap a pencil on his table. “If you dare-” he said.

“Excuse me.” This was reeled off in several languages: German, Spanish, French, and English, by a man who had somehow appeared at the table. The officer stared at him-what did he want? Who was he? Bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, and a sparse mustache, he wasn’t much: a short, inconsequential little fellow in a tired suit, Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. Now that he had their attention, he consulted a slip of paper in his hand and, speaking to Zannis in French, said, “You are Strathos?”

“No, Zannis. Constantine Zannis.”

The man studied the paper. “Oh, of course, my mistake, you’re Zannis. Strathos is somebody else.” He turned to the officer, drew an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket, slid out a letter typed in Turkish, and showed it to the officer. Who stood, saluted Zannis, and said, “Forgive me, Captain Zannis, but I didn’t realize…. You are not in uniform. The lady is with you?”

“She is.”

“Please,” he said, his hand extended, welcoming them to Turkey.

As the little man led them toward a dusty Renault, Zannis said, “Captain Zannis?”

“That’s right. You’re an officer in the British army. Didn’t you know?”

“I didn’t,” Zannis said.

“Oh well,” said the little man. “Always surprises, in this life.”

Once the suitcases had been put in the trunk and they were under way, the little man got around to introducing himself. “S. Kolb,” he said. “That’s what some people call me, though most don’t call me anything at all. And, unfortunately, there are those who call me terrible names, but I try, when that happens, to be elsewhere.”

Zannis translated for Demetria, sitting in the backseat. Then said to Kolb, “We’re going south, not to Istanbul.”

“We’re going to Smyrna, I mean, Izmir. I can never get used to that.”

He was a woeful driver, gripping the wheel as though he meant to choke it, squinting through the cloudy window, slow as a snail and impervious to the horns honking behind him. After battling his way around a gentle curve, he said, “You’ll work there, in Smyrna-ah, Izmir. Though I think they meant for you to be in Alexandria, to begin with. Meetings, you know, with the big brass.”

“We couldn’t get to Alexandria, a bomb hit the ship at the dock.” Zannis wondered, briefly, how Kolb knew he’d come to Edirne by rail, then recalled Sami Pal, sitting in the lobby of the Lux Palace.

“The Bakir?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm, too bad, I liked the old Bakir. Anyhow, a lot of Greeks are coming out of the country, and a few of them we’ll send back. Resistance operations, spy missions, the usual, into occupied Greece. And we want you to run the Smyrna part of that-it’s an important job. Ever been there?”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, there’s a big British expatriate community, and you’ll find a way to get along with the Turks, no?”

“Of course,” Zannis said.

“You’ll have to sign a few papers, but there’s time for that.”

Zannis turned halfway around in the seat, hung his arm over the back, and told Demetria what Kolb had said. “Smyrna, of all places,” was her only response, though she took his hand for a moment. A small gesture, for a couple who had indulged themselves in every possible intimacy, but it meant something, that late afternoon in Turkey, we’re safe for the moment, safe from a brutal world, and together, something like that.

On 27 April, 1941, Wehrmacht forces occupied Athens and, at 8:35 that morning, German motorcycle troops appeared at the Acropolis and raised the swastika flag. Some weeks later, at the end of May, two Athenian teenagers slipped past German sentries and took it down.

From the Tulsa Star-Tribune, 5 June, 1942:

A new bookstore is coming to town. Two of our newer residents, the sisters Hedy and Frieda Rosenblum, will be opening The Bookmark tomorrow at 46 S. Cheyenne Ave. next to Corky’s Downtown Cafe. The Rosenblum sisters, who’ve been working at the library, were brought to town under the sponsorship of Dr. Harry Gutmann, a local dentist, from New York City. Before that, they managed to escape from Hitler’s Nazis and are writing a book about their experiences. The Bookmark will carry all the latest bestsellers and will have a special section for children’s books.