Blood of Victory (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

“Us.”

“Will it last?”

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

“Too bad. What happened?”

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

“Back and forth.”

“Yes.”

“Was it the army?”

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

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

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

“Could they drive it.”

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

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

“How far is it?” Serebin asked.

“To the border? About sixty kilometers.”

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

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

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

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

“What is it?”

“A hole.”

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

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

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

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

“Turbines in the canal?” Marrano whispered.

Serebin nodded.

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

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

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

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