White Eagles Over Serbia

CHAPTER TWO. Boris the Wig-maker

Boris Pasquin’s little shop was locked when Methuen reached it, but there was a light at the back of the building so he rattled the letter-box loudly and shouted “Boris” through it. The little theatrical wig-maker very seldom left the premises and there was a good chance that he was in the great rambling workshop at the back busily engaged in polishing a stone or playing patience.

In the gloom the crammed shelves of the showroom guarded their mysterious treasures — enough to delight the heart of a magpie or a child, for Boris combined his wig-making business with that of a general dealer in everything from precious stones to playing-cards. He himself was fond of saying that there were two hubs of the Empire, one official and one unofficial. The official hub was of course Piccadilly; the unofficial was Boris Pasquin’s little shop in Covent Garden. This was something more than a flight of fancy for the range of Boris’s interests did extend to practically every country in the Commonwealth.

While he had the kind of talent which goes to make millionaires he preferred to deal in small ranges of rare objects which delighted his imagination more than they profited his pocket. Shelves of china; Japanese fans; Byzantine metalwork from the marts of Salonika and Athens; statuettes smuggled from the “digs” of Egypt; hand-painted playing-cards from Smyrna; pages of illuminated manuscripts from the monasteries of the Levant; lovely corals from the Red Sea; dried herbs from China; chess-men carved in wood and ivory by Burmese prisoners. The visitors to his little shop were legion, though they were never men of title or importance. Lascars from the liners brought him precious stones and carvings picked up in the ports of the East; scholars and collectors in the humbler walks of life traded him ancient coins against gems or manuscripts. But no visitor ever escaped sharing a black coffee with him in the work-room at the back of the shop, and these business conversations enabled him to pick up a mass of miscellaneous information about foreign countries which was of the utmost interest to Dombey’s little band of enthusiasts in SOq.

Boris was a Galician Jew who had emigrated to London in the early twenties and had rapidly established himself in business as a wig-maker; but his range of interests was too large to be confined, and he rapidly expanded his business in a hundred unorthodox directions. He had also in the past performed several difficult and dangerous missions for the organization to which Methuen belonged, though he never accepted a bounty for them. He would explain gravely that the security of British citizenship was a bounty freely bestowed upon him which he felt that he could never repay. To take money for his services to the Crown was more than he could bear. “What I do, I do because I am proud to be accepted in the British family,” he would say, his hand on his heart.

Many had been the attempts to coax him into SOq, but he valued his independence too much to become a full member of an organization so exacting in its demands upon his time. He remained nevertheless an unofficial ally of the brotherhood his usefulness growing with the years; he had become almost an institution, and there was hardly an operator who would undertake a mission to a little-known country without first asking Boris to offer him a brief. Methuen was no exception to the rule.

“Boris,” he called again, and putting his ear to the flap of the letter-box was relieved to hear the familiar shuffling step of the wig-maker as he crossed the dark floor to the light-switch. The light came on and Boris stood there staring at him through the glass like a small and rather soiled penguin. His black beard was uncombed and he fumbled with the pince-nez which always dangled round his waist on a length of string. He got Methuen into focus at last and smiled. “Methuen!” he said. “Welcome back,” drawing the stiff bolts of the door, and repeating “Welcome back”. He locked the door carefully behind his visitor and led the way to the back of the shop. The great work-room was brightly lit, and full of the smell of coffee which simmered in a pot on the gas-stove.

Methuen looked around him with amused interest. “What have you got here?” he said. Boris rummaged in a cupboard for a cup and saucer. A large silver wig stood upon a wooden pedestal obviously half-finished; next to it, offering a grotesque contrast, were two shrunken human heads in bottles. “Peruvian,” said Boris. “They came in yesterday. One is all that remains of Atahualpa, the Indian who started the revolution years ago, remember?” “My God,” said Methuen, “one of these days someone is going to stroll in to you with my head in a bottle. You won’t turn a hair.”

Boris looked shocked. “I should be upsetted to see my friend in a bottle,” he said severely. Sometimes he found it a little difficult to appreciate the English sense of humour. “I am selling these to the Science Museum,” he added irrelevantly. “But my dear, my darling,” he went on in a burst of enthusiasm, “wait till Dombey sees what I have for him.” From a shelf he reached down two large cases of beautiful moths, neatly pinned to corks and classified. “Such beautiful things!”

They chatted for a while until the coffee-pouring ritual was at an end and they sat facing one another across the workbench. Then, idly fiddling with the little lapidary’s wheel which stood near him, Methuen disclosed his plans. Boris put his hand to the side of his head and moved his face from side to side repeating “Aie! Aie” very thoughtfully. “It is most difficult,” he said. “I have good informations from a currency smuggler. Most difficult. The countryside is ruined. People starve. And you want to run around Serbia like a tourist with a fishing-rod.”

Methuen felt rather slighted by this description of himself. “Not exactly a tourist,” he said. “I want to know how I could live for a short while, say a week, in this territory which I know like the back of my hand.”

“You must look like a Serb.”

“What must I wear?”

“I will tell you.”

As usual Boris’s information was copious and exact. In a series of brilliant and exact strokes he built up a Serbian peasant: baggy woollen trousers tucked into heavy leather riding-boots; greasy fur cap; woollen cape. Methuen for his part wrote out a list of the equipment he intended to carry: a thermos, a pistol and ammunition, a solid fuel stove, matches, a trout-rod. (“He is mad,” said Boris to the ceiling. “A trout-rod of all things!”) But he could not help smiling. “I will find you”, he said, “a three-quarter length duffle jacket and build you in poacher’s pockets. Up here a pistol sling,” he slapped his left collar-bone. “You will clink about like the men-at-arms in Drury Lane.”

But already he was entering into the spirit of the thing. Money, for example, was little use. Communism had so debased currency that Methuen would be better advised to carry a few needles and some pack-thread. He could always buy eatables from the peasants with these. If he could fish without getting caught he might live mostly on trout; but he must beware of the police patrols. Nor could he count upon the peasantry to help him, for they had been reduced to a state of cowed subjection by the policy of collectivization and the police terror. They would immediately disown an unknown man living in their midst. “That is just it,” said Methuen. “There are only a few scattered villages in this area. It is all mountains, Boris, completely cut off. I lived once for a month in a cave there without seeing a soul.”

Boris shook his head doubtfully. “It is a most difficult thing,” he said. Nevertheless he set his mind wholeheartedly at Methuen’s service, examining every aspect of the problem carefully and in detail. Their conversation lasted long into the night and when Methuen at last said good night and turned away down the dark streets in the direction of his club he felt as if he had just returned from a week spent in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Lying in bed in the dark he heard the ripple of the torrents, still mushy with spring snow; saw the twinkle of trout in the dark gulleys and fents of the Studenitsa river. And fragment by fragment recaptured the details of those two lost summers which he spent once with a Serbian friend, climbing the dizzy escarpment near the Janko Stone, or swimming in the black pools of water by the rocky river.