The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep

Chapter 13

The street had gone mad. There were so many guns going off that they no longer sounded like gunfire. It was too much to be real, more like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. To the north a row of houses was already in flames. A police car roared past us, and men dropped to their knees to fire at it. One shot burst a tire. The car swung out of control, plowed off the street into a shop front. The police jumped out, guns ready, and the men in the street shot them down.

The girl was at my side. “They’re crazy,” I said. “They’ll all be killed.”

“Those who die will die in glory.”

“They can’t stand off an army-”

“But America will help us.”

I stared at her.

“You said America would help. You told Todor-”

“I told him I was behind his cause. That is all.”

“But you are with the CIA, are you not?”

“I’m running from the CIA.”

“Then, who will help my people?”

“I don’t know.”

Two blocks down the street a canvas-topped truck careened around the corner and pulled to a stop. Uniformed troops spilled from it. Some of them had machine guns. They crouched at the side of the truck and began firing into the crowd of Macedonians. I saw a woman cut in two by machine-gun fire. She fell, and a baby tumbled from her arms, and another blast of gunfire tore the child’s head off.

Shrieking, a young girl heaved a homemade cannister bomb into the nest of soldiers. The gunfire ceased. Two of the soldiers staggered free of the truck, clutching at their wounds, and a ragged volley of shots from the rooftops cut them down.

Sirens blared to the north. The whole town was alive with the fury of the uprising. The girl was still at my side, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words she said.

Revolution-

I had told Starcevic there would be no revolution. Not in his beloved Croatia, not anywhere. I was, after all, no revolutionary, no agent provocateur. I was simply a treasure hunter headed for a cache of gold. But it was I who had sparked this, and it was, after all, a revolution. Mills bombs, Molotov cocktails, barricades thrown up in the streets, bursts of gunfire, the screams of the wounded-these were not sound effects, not bits of the backdrop of a movie, but the sounds of a popular rising, a revolution.

When one has long been conditioned to respond in a certain fashion to a certain set of stimuli, one does not think things out. One reacts and glories in it.

I reacted.

A police van had piled up at the barricade closing the south end of the block. A trio of uniformed troopers had taken up positions behind the barricade and were firing at us. Two had rifles, one a Sten gun. I grabbed up a brick from the ground and heaved it at them. It fell far short.

Their fire came our way. I ran forward, toward the source of the firing. A youth ran beside me, pistol in hand. More shots rang out. The youth dropped, moaning, wounded in the thigh.

I grabbed up his pistol.

I kept running. The Sten gun swung around and pointed at me. I fired without aiming and was astonished to see the policeman spill forward, a massive hole in his throat. His blood washed out of him and coated the piled-up bedsteads and furniture of the improvised barricade. One of the other police fired at me. The bullet brushed my jacket. I ran toward him and shot him in the chest. The third one shoved a rifle in my face and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. I clubbed him aside and kicked him in the face. He was reaching for another gun when I lowered the pistol and blew off the back of his head.

A cheer went up behind me. The rebels had fired a public building in the center of town. I grabbed up the Sten gun of the first cop I had killed and pushed forward with the crowd. For four blocks almost every house we passed was in flames. In the middle of the city, we pressed in around the police station. A small force of police and soldiers had barricaded themselves inside the stationhouse. They were firing into the crowd from the windows and lobbing grenades down amongst us. I saw the girl who had been at Todor’s house putting a torch to the front door. The flames leaped. A band of men were heaving Molotov cocktails into a second-story window. The blaze spread in several places, and the crowd dropped back out of range to let the fire have its head.

We shot them down as they came out. There must have been two dozen of them, not counting the ones who never got out the door.

In the public square, Todor proclaimed the Independent and Sovereign Republic of Macedonia. “Historic birthright” and “sever the shackles of Serbian oppression” were phrases that kept recurring. It was, all in all, a good proclamation. He paused once, and part of the crowd, thinking he had finished, began to cheer, but he picked up again, and the cheering died down. Then he did finish the speech, and a ground swell of exhilarated applause burst from the mass of people, and for a thin fraction of a moment I actually thought the revolution would succeed.

The Independent and Sovereign Republic of Macedonia, while unrecognized by the other independent and sovereign nations of the earth, did endure in fact for four hours, twenty-three minutes, and an indeterminate number of seconds. Thinking back, I cannot help viewing this lifespan as an enormous moral victory. It was at least five times the duration I would have predicted for the Republic, although it fell far short of Todor’s expectations-he had announced at one point that Free Macedonia would endure, as was claimed for the Third Reich, for a minimum of a thousand years.

Those four hours were as active as any I had ever spent. After the police station fell to us, we still had to conduct mop-up operations throughout the town. It was necessary, for example, to dispatch a delegation to rouse the mayor from his bed, take him out of his house, and hang him from the tree in front of his front porch. It was also necessary to rush the town’s small Serbian quarter and massacre the inhabitants thereof. I was fortunate enough to miss out on both the hanging and the pogrom, however. During this stage of the revolution I was cloistered with Todor and Annalya. Annalya was his sister, with blonde hair and huge eyes and hour-glass body. The three of us-a troika? a triumvirate? a junta? no matter-were to plan the course of the revolution.

“You shall not return to America,” Todor insisted. “You shall stay here forever in Macedonia. I will make you my prime minister.”

“Todor-”

“I will also make you my brother-in-law. You will marry Annalya. You like her?”

“Todor, what do we do when they send in the tanks?”

“What tanks?”

“They used tanks in Budapest in fifty-six. What can your people do against tanks?”

He thought this over. “What did they do in Budapest?”

“They used Molotov cocktails on them.”

He brightened. “Then we will do the same!”

“It didn’t work in Budapest. The revolt was crushed.”

“Oh.”

“The rebels were shot down by the hundreds. The leaders were executed.”

While he tried to think of a reply to this dismal bit of news a man burst in with some information that took the edge off what I had said. Reports were coming in of sympathetic risings throughout Macedonia. Skopje, the provincial capital, was in flames. Kumanovo had gone to the rebels almost without a shot. There were rumors of rebellion in Britolj and Prilep in the south.

Todor rocked me with another bear hug. “You see? It is not one city in arms, like your Budapest. It is a nation taking its place among nations. It is an entire people rising as one man to throw off their chains and capture their freedom. And we shall triumph!”

Annalya and I left him. We ran around town, planning the defense of Tetovo. If it were true that other cities were in arms, we might have a little more time to prepare for the assault from Belgrade. We ranged barricades around the entire town, blocking off every road in and out of it and concentrating the bulk of our defenses across the main road in the north and the smaller roads immediately to either side of it. I was fairly certain the initial assault would come from that direction. If we were properly prepared, we might be able to break even in the first attack.

After that, when the tanks came down and the fighter planes dived overhead, was something I did not want to think about.

“Ferenc?”

“What?”

“Do we have any chance?”

I looked at her. I decided that she wanted me to lie to her, so I told her that there was a good chance we could win if every man fought as hard as he could.

“Ferenc?”

“What?”

“Tell me the truth.”

“There is no chance, Annalya.”

“I thought not. We will all be killed?”

“Perhaps. They may not want a massacre. The Russians got a fairly bad press after Hungary. They may just kill the leaders.”

“Like Todor?”

I didn’t answer her.

“It would be horrid if we lost and they spared him.”

“I do not understand.”

She smiled. “My brother wishes to be a hero. He is a hero already. He has fought like a hero and he will fight like a hero again when the troops arrive. It is only fitting that he die like a hero. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Where will the worst of the fighting be?”

“In the center.”

“You are certain?”

I nodded. “The other streets are too narrow for heavy traffic. Even if they want to spread out for strategic reasons, the heavy weapons and the mass of men will come right down the center.”

“Then I must be certain that Todor is here,” she said. “In the center. May it please God that he dies before he learns that we are to be defeated.”

I had spotters stationed a mile out on the main road to the north. When the revolution was just a hair under two hours old, they rode back full speed to announce that the troops were on their way. I asked what sort of vehicles were coming, but they had not noticed. In their eagerness to bring the news to us as fast as possible, they had neglected to determine just what sort of troops were headed our way or how many of them we could expect.

The first wave, as it turned out, was an afterthought. Evidently a mass of troops had been dispatched to the capital, and some major had decided it might be a good idea to find out what was happening in Tetovo. They sent four truckloads of infantry and two units of mobile artillery at us, and that wasn’t enough to storm the city. We were properly deployed behind our barricades, we were fairly well armed, and we fought like cornered rats. The government troops threw everything they had at our center, and I told our men on the east and west to move in and engulf them.

We brought it off. The two small cannons never got to do us much damage. A batch of our sharpshooters knocked off the two gun crews before more than four or five rounds had been fired, and the few shells that looped over the barricades at us had little effect. Bottles of flaming gas had the trucks in flames before the men had finished pouring out of them. We suffered casualties-over a dozen dead, almost as many wounded. But we completely destroyed the government forces.

Half an hour later they brought in an attacking force five times the strength of the first, and they rolled right over us.