Counting Up, Counting Down Read online

  “Eels!” Ferrero shouted in his bad but loud Croatian. “Eels from Italian waters! Eels!” A crowd soon formed around him. Eels went one way, dinars another. While Ferrero cried the wares and took money, Bevacqua kept trotting back and forth between market and boat, always bringing more eels.

  A beefy man pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He bought three hundred dinars’ worth of eels, shoving a fat wad of bills into Ferraro’s hand. “For my restaurant,” he explained. “You wouldn’t happen to have any squid, would you?”

  Ferrero shook his head. “We sell those at home. Not many like them here.”

  “Too bad. I serve calamari when I can.” The beefy man slung his sack of eels over his shoulder, elbowed himself away from Ferrero as rudely as he’d approached. Ferrero rubbed his chin and stuck the three hundred dinars in a pocket different from the one he used for the rest of the money he was making.

  The eels went fast. Anything new for sale went fast in Rijeka; Croatia had never been a fortunate country. By the time all the fish were gone from the hold of the little boat, Ferrero and Bevacqua had made three times as much as they would have by selling them in Ancona.

  “We’ll have to make many more trips here,” Bevacqua said enthusiastically, back in the fishing boat’s cramped cabin. “We’ll get rich.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Ferrero said. He took out the wad of bills the fellow from the restaurant had given him. Stern and unsmiling, the face of Ante Pavelic, the first Croatian Poglavnik, glared at him from every twenty-dinar note he peeled off. Pavelic hadn’t invented fascism, but he’d done even more unpleasant things with it than the Germans, and his successors weren’t any nicer than he had been.

  In the middle of the notes was a scrap of paper. On it was scrawled a note, in English: The Church of Our Lady of Lourdes. Tomorrow 1700. George Smith passed it to Peter Drinkwater, who read it, nodded, and tore it into very small pieces.

  Still speaking Italian, Drinkwater said, “We ought to give thanks to Our Lady for blessing us with such a fine catch. Maybe she will reward us with another one.”

  “She has a fine church here, I’ve heard,” Smith answered in the same tongue. The odds the customs men had planted ears aboard the boat were small, but neither of them believed in taking chances. The Germans made the best and most compact ears in the world, and shared them freely with their allies.

  “May Our Lady let us catch the fish we seek,” Drinkwater said piously. He crossed himself. Smith automatically followed suit, as any real fisherman would have. If he ever wanted to see Sicily—or England—again, he had to be a real fisherman, not just act like one.

  Of course, Smith thought, if he’d really wanted to work toward living to a ripe old age, he would have been a carpenter like his father instead of going into Military Intelligence. But even a carpenter’s career would have been no guarantee of collecting a pension, not with Fascist Germany, the Soviet Union, the USA, and Britain all ready to throw sunbombs about like cricket balls. He sighed. No one was safe in today’s world—his own danger was merely a little more obvious than most.

  Not counting Serbian slave laborers (and one oughtn’t to have counted them, as they seldom lasted long), Rijeka held about 150,000 people. The older part of the city was a mixture of medieval and Austro-Hungarian architecture; the city hall, a masterpiece of gingerbread, would not have looked out of place in old Vienna. The newer buildings, as was true from the Atlantic to the fascist half of the Ukraine, were in the style critics in free countries sneered at as Albert Speer Gothic: huge colonnades and great vertical masses, all intended to show the individual what an ant he was when set against the immense power of the State.

  And in case the individual was too dense to note such symbolism, less subtle clues were available: an Ustashi roadblock, where the secret police hauled drivers out of their Volkswagens and Fiats to check their papers; three or four German Luftwaffe troops, probably from the antiaircraft missile base in the hills above town, strolling along as if they owned the pavement. By the way the Croats scrambled out of their path, the locals were not inclined to argue possession of it.

  Smith watched the Luftwaffe men out of the corner of his eye till they rounded a corner and disappeared. “Doesn’t seem fair, somehow,” he murmured in Italian to Drinkwater. Out in the open like this, he could be reasonably sure no one was listening to him.

  “What’s that?” Drinkwater murmured back in the same language. Neither of them would risk the distinctive sound patterns of English, not here.

  “If this poor, bloody world held any justice at all, the last war would have knocked out either the Nazis or the bloody Reds,” Smith answered. “Dealing with one set of devils would be bad enough; dealing with both sets, the way we have the last thirty-odd years, and it’s a miracle we haven’t all gone up in flames.”

  “We still have the chance,” Drinkwater reminded him. “Remember Tokyo and Vladivostok.” A freighter from Russian-occupied Hokkaido had blown up in American-occupied Tokyo harbor in the early 1950s, and killed a couple of hundred thousand people. Three days later, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, the Russian port also suddenly ceased to be.

  “Funny how it was Manstein who mediated,” Smith admitted. “Of course, Stalin’s dying when he did helped a bit, too, eh?”

  “Just a bit,” Drinkwater said with a small chuckle. “Manstein would sooner have thrown bombs at the Russians himself, I expect, if he could have arranged for them not to throw any back.”

  Both Englishmen shut up as they entered the square in front of the Cathedral of Our Lady. Like the Spanish fascists, the Croatians were ostentatiously pious, invoking God’s dominion over their citizens as well as that of the equally holy State. Any of the men and women heading for the Gothic cathedral ahead might have belonged to the Ustashi; it approached mathematical certainty that some of them did.

  The exterior of the church reminded Smith of a layer cake, with courses of red brick alternating with snowy marble. A frieze of angels and a statue of the Virgin surmounted the door to the upper church. As Smith climbed the ornate stairway toward that door, he took off his cap. Beside him, Drinkwater followed suit. Above the door, golden letters spelled out za dom spremni—Ready for the Fatherland—the slogan of fascist Croatia.

  Though Our Lady of Lourdes was of course a Catholic church, the angels on the ceiling overhead were long and thin, as if they sprang from the imagination of a Serbian Orthodox icon-painter. Smith tried to wipe that thought from his mind as he walked down the long hall toward the altar: even thinking of Serbs was dangerous here. The Croats dominated Serbia these days as ruthlessly as the Germans held Poland.

  The pews of dark, polished wood, the brilliant stained glass, and the statue of the Virgin behind the altar were familiarly Catholic, and helped Smith forget what he needed to forget and remember what he needed to remember: that he was nothing but a fisherman, thanking the Lord for his fine catch. He took out a cheap plastic rosary and began telling the beads.

  The large church was far from crowded. A few pews away from Smith and Drinkwater, a couple of Croatian soldiers in khaki prayed. An old man knelt in front of them; off to one side, a Luftwaffe lieutenant, more interested in architecture than spirituality, photographed a column’s acanthus capital. And an old woman with a broom and dustpan moved with arthritic slowness down each empty length of pew, sweeping up dust and scraps of paper.

  The sweeper came up on Smith and Drinkwater. Obviously a creature of routine, she would have gone right through them had they not moved aside to let her by. “Thank you, thank you,” she wheezed, not caring whether she broke the flow of their devotions. A few minutes later, she bothered the pair of soldiers.

  Smith looked down to the floor. At first he thought the sweeper simply incompetent, to go right past a fair-sized piece of paper. Then he realized that piece hadn’t been there before the old woman went by. Working his beads harder, he slid down into a genuflection. When he went back up into the pew, the paper was in his pocket.

/>   He and Drinkwater prayed for another hour or so, then went back to their fishing boat. On the way, Drinkwater said, “Nothing’s simple, is it?”

  “Did you expect it to be? This is Croatia, after all,” Smith answered. “The fellow who bought our eels likely hasn’t the slightest idea where the real meeting will be. It’s the God’s truth he’s better off not knowing, that’s for certain.”

  “Too right there,” Drinkwater agreed. “And besides, if we were under suspicion, the Ustashi likely would have come down on us in church. This way we run another set of risks for—” He broke off. Some names one did not say, not in Rijeka, not even if no one was close by to hear, not even in the middle of a sentence spoken in Italian.

  Back at the boat, the two Englishmen went on volubly—and still in Italian—about how lovely the church of Our Lady of Lourdes had been: no telling who might be listening. As they talked, Smith pulled the paper from the church out of his pocket. The message was short and to the point: Trsat Castle, the mausoleum, night after tomorrow, 2200.

  The mausoleum? Bloody melodrama, Smith thought. He passed the note to Drinkwater. His companion’s eyebrows rose as he read it. Then he nodded and ripped the paper to bits.

  Both men went out on deck. Trsat Castle, or what was left of it after long years of neglect, loomed over Rijeka from the hills outside of town. By its looks, it was likelier to shelter vampires than the Serbian agent they were supposed to meet there. It was also unpleasantly close to the Luftwaffe base whose missiles protected the local factory district.

  But the Serb had made his way across Croatia—no easy trick, that, not in a country where Show me your papers was as common a greeting as How are you today?—to contact British military intelligence. “Wouldn’t do to let the side down,” Smith said softly.

  “No, I suppose not.” Drinkwater agreed, understanding him without difficulty. Then, of themselves, his eyes went back to Trsat Castle. His face was not one to show much of what he was feeling, but he seemed less than delighted at the turn the mission had taken. A moment later, his words confirmed that: “But this once, don’t you wish we could?”

  Smith contrived to look carefree as he and Drinkwater hauled a wicker basket through the streets of Rijeka. The necks of several bottles of wine protruded from the basket. When he came up to a checkpoint, Smith took out a bottle and thrust it in a policeman’s face. “Here, you enjoy,” he said in his Italian-flavored Croatian.

  “I am working,” the policeman answered, genuine regret in his voice. The men at the previous checkpoint hadn’t let that stop them. But this fellow, like them, gave the fishermen’s papers only a cursory glance and inspected their basket not at all. That was as well, for a Sten gun lurked in the straw under the bottles of wine.

  Two more checkpoints and Smith and Drinkwater were up into the hills. The road became a dirt path. The Englishmen went off into a narrow meadow by the side of that path, took out a bottle, and passed it back and forth. Another bottle replaced it, and then a third. No distant watcher, assuming any such were about, could have noticed very little wine actually got drunk. After a while, the Englishmen lay down on the grass as if asleep.

  Maybe Peter Drinkwater really did doze. Smith never asked him afterwards. He stayed awake the whole time himself. Through his eyelashes, he watched the meadow fade from green to gray to black. Day birds stopped singing. In a tree not far away, an owl hooted quietly, as if surprised to find itself awake. Smith would not have been surprised to hear the howl of a wolf—or, considering where he was, a werewolf.

  Still moving as if asleep, Smith shifted to where he could see the glowing dial of his wristwatch. 2030, he saw. It was full dark. He sat up, dug in the basket, took out the tin tommy gun and clicked in a magazine. “Time to get moving,” he said, relishing the feel of English on his tongue.

  “Right you are.” Drinkwater also sat, then rose and stretched. “Well, let’s be off.” Up ahead—and the operative word was up—Trsat Castle loomed, a deeper blackness against the dark, moonless sky. It was less than two kilometers ahead, but two kilometers in rough country in the dark was nothing to sneeze at. Sweating and bruised and covered with brambles, Smith and Drinkwater got to the ruins just at the appointed hour.

  Smith looked up and up at the gray stone towers. “In England, or any civilized country, come to that, a place like this would draw tourists by the bloody busload, you know?”

  “But here it doesn’t serve the State, so they don’t bother keeping it up,” Drinkwater said, following his thought. He ran a sleeve over his forehead. “Well, no law to say we can’t take advantage of their stupidity.”

  The way into the castle courtyard was open. Whatever gates had once let visitors in and out were gone, victims of some long-ago cannon. Inside . . . inside, George Smith stopped in his tracks and started laughing. Imagining the sort of mausoleum that would belong to a ruined Balkan castle, he had visualized something somber and Byzantine, with tiled domes and icons and the ghosts of monks.

  What he found was very different: a neoclassical Doric temple, with marble columns and entablature gleaming whitely in the starlight. He climbed a few low, broad steps, stood and waited. Drinkwater came up beside him. In the judicious tones of an amateur archaeologist, he said, “I am of the opinion that this is not part of the original architectural plan.”

  “Doesn’t seem so, does it?” Smith agreed. “It—”

  In the inky shadows behind the colonnade, something stirred. Smith raised the muzzle of the Sten gun. A thin laugh came from the darkness. A voice followed: “I have had a bead on you since you came inside. But you must be my Englishmen, both because you are here at the time I set and because you chatter over the building. To the Ustashi, this would never occur.”

  Smith jumped at the scratch of a match. The brief flare of light that followed showed him a heavyset man of about fifty, with a deeply lined face, bushy eyebrows, and a pirate’s mustache. “I am Bogdan,” the man said in Croatian, though no doubt he thought of his tongue as Serbian. He took a deep drag on his cigarette; its red glow dimly showed his features once more. “I am the man you have come to see.”

  “If you are Bogdan, you will want to buy our eels,” Drinkwater said in Italian.

  “Eels make me sick to my stomach,” Bogdan answered in the same language. He laughed that thin laugh again, the laugh of a man who found few things really funny. “Now that the passwords are out of the way, to business. I can use this tongue, or German, or Russian, or even my own. My English, I fear, is poor, for which I apologize. I have had little time for formal education.”

  That Smith believed. Like Poland, like the German Ukraine, Serbia remained a military occupation zone, with its people given hardly more consideration than cattle: perhaps less than cattle, for cattle were not hunted for the sport of it. Along with his Italian, Smith spoke fluent German and passable Russian, but he said, “This will do well enough. Tell us how it is with you, Bogdan.”

  The partisan leader drew on his cigarette again, making his face briefly reappear. Then he shifted the smoke to the side of his mouth and spat between two columns. “That is how it goes for me, Englishman. That is how it goes for all Serbia. How are we to keep up the fight for freedom if we have no weapons?”

  “You are having trouble getting supplies from the Soviets?” Drinkwater asked, his voice bland. Like most of the Balkans antifascists, Bogdan and his crew looked to Moscow for help before London or Washington. That he was here now—that the partisans had requested this meeting—was a measure of his distress.

  He made a noise, deep in his throat. “Moscow has betrayed us again. It is their habit; it has been their habit since ’43.”

  “Stalin betrayed us then, too,” Smith answered. “If the Russians hadn’t made their separate peace with Germany that summer, the invasion of Italy wouldn’t have been driven back into the sea, and Rommel wouldn’t have had the men to crush the Anglo-American lodgement in France.” Smith shook his head—so much treachery since then, on all si
des. He went on, “Tell us how it is in Serbia these days.”

  “You have what I need?” Bogdan demanded.

  “Back at the boat,” Drinkwater said. “Grenades, cordite, blasting caps . . .”

  Bogdan’s deep voice took on a purring note it had not held before. “Then we shall give the Germans and the Croat pigs who are their lackeys something new to think on when next they seek to play their games with us in our valleys. Let one of their columns come onto a bridge—and then let the bridge come down! I do not believe in hell, but I shall watch them burn here on earth, and make myself content with that. Have you also rockets to shoot their autogiros out of the air?”

  Smith spread his hands regretfully. “No. Now that we are in contact with you, though, we may be able to manage a shipment—”

  “It would be to your advantage if you did,” Bogdan said earnestly. “The Croats and Germans use Serbia as a live-fire training ground for their men, you know. They are better soldiers for having trained in actual combat. And that our people are slaughtered—who cares what happens to backwoods Balkans peasants, eh? Who speaks for us?”

  “The democracies speak for you,” Smith said.

  “Yes—to themselves.” Bogdan’s scorn was plain to hear. “Oh, they mention it to Berlin and Zagreb, but what are words? Wind! And all the while they go on trading with the men who seek to murder my nation. Listen, Englishmen, and I shall tell you how it is . . .”

  The partisan leader did not really care whether Smith and Drinkwater listened. He talked, letting out the poison that had for so long festered inside him. His picture of Serbia reminded Smith of a fox’s-eye view of a hunt. The Englishmen marveled that the guerrilla movement still lived, close to two generations after the Wehrmacht rolled down on what had been Yugoslavia. Only the rugged terrain of the interior and the indomitable ferocity of the people there kept resistance aflame.