Blood of Victory (31 page)

“A little, maybe.”

The Aprilia climbed for a few minutes, the road swung away from the river, then descended, Marrano pumping the brakes as the sedan whined in first gear. In the sky ahead of them, a white flicker, followed by a zigzag flash against the clouds and a long, low roll of thunder as the rain intensified. “Spring storm,” Marrano said. The wiper squeaked as it cycled back and forth. “Must get that fixed,” he said.

2:00. 2:15. Hard work for Marrano, leaning over the wheel and squinting into the rain, shifting back and forth between second and third gears. The engine didn’t seem to like either one and, as it labored, Serebin watched the needle on the temperature gauge.

“Road’s not meant for cars,” Marrano said.

“Horse and carriage.”

“Yes. Make a note of that, would you. For next time.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

A few minutes later, Marrano said, “What was that?”

The road curved, hanging on the side of a mountain, and he’d seen a light, thought he had, somewhere ahead where, for a moment, a distant section of the road came into view.

“Some kind of light,” Serebin said.

“Another car?”

“Yes, maybe.” But on reflection he didn’t think so. “Was it fire?”

Marrano had to slow down as the road drifted to the left, then narrowed to the width of a single car. “We’re back on the river,” he said. Barely crawling, they approached a sharp corner to the right, then back to the left. On the other side, an army roadblock.

In the flickering light of pitch pine torches driven into crevices in the rock, a squad of soldiers, most of them trying to shelter in a hollow at the foot of the cliff, and a command car with a canvas top, parked against the cliff wall. Marrano managed to get the Aprilia around it with inches to spare, then stopped in front of a barrier—a pole laid across two x-shaped sawhorses made of cut logs.

Marrano unbuckled his briefcase, on the floor by the gearshift, and found what he was after just as an officer, water streaming down his rubber cape, stepped into the headlights and held up a hand.

Marrano rolled down the window. “Yes, sir?”

The officer came around to the driver’s window and peered into the car. He was young and vain and very pleased with himself, stared first at Marrano, then at Serebin, and said, “Passports.”

Marrano took his passport from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to the officer. “He doesn’t have one,” he said casually, nodding at Serebin.

“Why not?”

“He’s coming from the Bucovina. The Russians took it away.”

Serebin got just enough of this—the USSR had occupied the province a few months earlier.

Not an answer the officer expected. “He’ll have to wait, then. You can go ahead.”

“He can’t wait, sir. It’s his wife, she’s giving birth in Belgrade.”

“Too bad.” He looked directly at Serebin and said, “You. Get out of the car.”

“His wife, sir,” Marrano said. “Please, she needs him by her side, she’s not well.”

The officer’s mouth grew sulky. “Get out,” he said, flipping his rain cape aside and resting a hand on the flap of his holster.

Marrano held his fist just below the edge of the window, where only the officer could see it, paused a moment for effect, then uncurled his fingers. Four gold coins gleamed in the torchlight. The officer stared, transfixed. This was a fortune. He reached through the window, took the coins, and put them somewhere beneath his cape. Then he stood up straight. “Now get out,” he said. “Both of you.”

Serebin was watching Marrano’s left foot, where it pressed the clutch pedal against the floorboard. It rose—quickly, but under control—as his other foot stepped on the gas. There was a soft thump—the officer sideswiped by the car, then Marrano drove full speed into the pole. Didn’t work—the sawhorses slid backwards, so Marrano jammed the accelerator to the floor, the engine howled as the tires spun on wet rock, one of the sawhorses tipped on its back and the other disappeared over the edge of the road. The car leaped forward, bouncing over the pole, past a soldier’s white face, his mouth open wide with surprise. Marrano hammered his hand against a knob on the dashboard and the lights went out. Something pinged against the trunk, something else made a spiderweb in the rear window.

Maybe Marrano could see ahead of them, Serebin couldn’t. Only rain and the dark bulk of the cliff flying by on the right. Marrano speed-shifted, lost the road, and Serebin’s side of the car went scraping along the rock. Marrano jerked the wheel, the car fishtailed and slid toward the outer edge of the road, then he took it back the other way, the right front fender caught the cliff, a headlight ring flew up in the air, and the car straightened out.

The road twisted, cornered, switched back on itself, rain streamed across the black windshield. Marrano, hands in a death grip on the wheel, powered through every turn, worked mostly in second gear, slammed his foot on the brake until the rear wheels began to slide, then accelerated out of the skid.

Then, on a long, even climb, the car lit up—a pair of headlights behind them, glaring yellow beams that sparkled on the fractured glass in the back window. Marrano ducked, grabbed Serebin by the shoulder of his jacket and pulled him down. A stone chip hit Serebin’s door and he said, “They’re shooting at us.”

The car swerved violently, Marrano fought the wheel and said, “Tire.” The headlights moved closer, the car wobbled on the flat tire, ground it off, then bounced along on the rim. “It’s over,” Marrano said. They were sideways for a moment, then off again as the back window blew in.

“Now,” Serebin said. “Go ahead.”

Marrano said shit and turned left.

In the air, the silence went on for a long time. Serebin’s mind was empty, or maybe just a name, as though it were the first word of an apology.

Then they hit some saplings, which bowed before they broke, then brush, then earth; then a sudden drop that stood the car on its front end. It stayed there for a moment, canted over in slow motion, and came to rest upside down. Serebin wound up sprawled across the roof, facing the windshield, where two red impact marks pocked the glass. He felt the blood, seeping from his hairline, then smelled gasoline, kicked savagely at the door, which was already open, and slid himself out on the ground. He crawled around the car, found the driver’s side door jammed shut, reached through the broken window, and cranked it up—with the car on its roof—until it was out of the way. Marrano’s foot was caught in the steering wheel, Serebin got him loose, then hauled him out through the open window. This took some time, because only one hand worked, his wrist either broken or sprained.

He could see the lights of the command car, parked up on the road, and he could hear voices. Excited, he thought. Somebody had a flashlight, up there, and tried to find the sedan. “Briefcase,” Marrano said.

“Can you walk?”

Marrano mumbled something he couldn’t hear.

From the opposite shore, thunder, but not close, the storm moving west, the rain a light, steady beat on the river. Serebin leaned into the car and searched for the briefcase, finally found it pinned between the floor and the brake pedal, which had been bent on its side. He took out a small bag of gold coins and slid the revolver in his belt.

Some of the soldiers were now working their way down the hill—the flashlight, masked by a hand, was still clearly visible. Somebody fell, somebody swore, somebody whispered angrily. Serebin drew the revolver and thumbed the safety off. Turned around and took a good long look at the river, perhaps forty feet away. He put the safety back on, got his good hand under Marrano’s arm, and began to drag him toward the water.

Plenty of driftwood logs on the shore, all sizes. Serebin got one of them launched, draped Marrano over it, held on and kicked, carefully keeping his feet well below the surface, until he felt the pull of the current. Back on the hillside, the search party was getting near the car. Serebin hung on to the log by looping his arm around it, kept his good hand on Marrano.

On shore, they’d apparently reached the car, and there was a loud conversation with somebody up on the road.
Search the woods.
Looking down the river, Serebin saw a low shape ahead of them, some kind of promontory jutting out from the shoreline. It took quite some time to get there, his legs numb and lifeless when he finally beached the log on the sand. Marrano was unconscious, Serebin pulled him a few feet up the slope, then fell.
Done.
No more he could do. He tried to force himself to get up, couldn’t, passed out.

29 March.

“Good morning to you, sir.”

Logically, there was something in this Balkan opera of a city that could surprise the doorman at the Srbski Kralj but it sure as hell wasn’t Serebin. With four days’ growth of beard, wearing a sheepskin fisherman’s vest one of his rescuers had given him, a bloody rag around his head, his left wrist bound to a stick with fishing line—just good old Mr. Thing in Room 74.

“Good morning,” Serebin said.

“Lovely day.”

“Yes, thank you, it is.”

“Need any help, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

Limping, he got himself up the stairs to the top floor, then down a long hallway.
Stained carpets, green walls, the aroma of yesterday’s dinner;
all very appealing to Serebin, who was lucky to be alive and knew it. That went for Marrano as well. In the hospital for a day or two but he would live to fight again.

He stopped in front of the door numbered 74. He’d had a key to this door, once upon a time, but it was long gone. Or was it this door? Because, if this was his room, why was somebody laughing inside? Tentatively, he knocked. Then knocked louder and Captain Draza, wearing only undershirt and underpants, threw the door open and gazed at him with surprise and delight. “Say, look at you!”

A fine party, it must have been. Or, perhaps, still was. Captain Jovan, in underpants only but wearing a uniform cap, was sleeping in the room’s easy chair, a bottle between his thighs. The air was thick with black tobacco and White Gardenia, the bed occupied by three young women, one very young, all of them striking, but striking in different ways.
Mysterious, Milkmaid,
and
Ballerina,
he named them. Mysterious and Ballerina sound asleep, Milkmaid sitting propped up on pillows, reading the book of Anya Zak’s poetry she’d given him for the train. “Hello,” she said, rather formally, and, an afterthought, pulled the sheet up over her bare breasts.

“Ah, Natalya,” Draza said. What way is that to greet a guest?

Jovan was suddenly awake. “Welcome home,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

The room had been—sifted. Nothing was broken, but everything had been picked up and put down somewhere else. This apparently made it hard for Captain Draza to find what he was looking for but, eventually, beneath a pile of women’s clothes, tunics, and a holstered pistol on a belt, a newspaper was discovered. “Famous guy,” Draza said, handing him the paper and pointing to a headline at the bottom of the first page:

BRITISH SABOTEURS ATTACK RIVER TARGETS

They had put the Moldova Veche pilot station out of commission for ten days to two weeks. Burned down the office, destroying valuable charts and records. And severely damaged a repair ship, when a booby trap blew up while a sunken barge was being craned to the surface.

Draza took the newspaper and read his favorite part aloud. “‘The Axis has been put on notice that the British Lion will strike anywhere, at any time, to disrupt the supply lines of its enemies.’”

Jovan liked hearing that. “To victory,” he said, and drank to it.

“You don’t mind we’re here, do you?” Draza said. “We were waiting for you to come back, so, we thought, what better place to wait?”

“You’re welcome here,” Serebin said. “But I’m going to wash, and then I need to sleep.”

Jovan stumbled out of his chair, caught himself, then stood upright, swaying. “Right here,” he said. “It’s very comfortable.”

“And we’ll be quiet,” Draza said, quietly.

The following morning he stopped at a barbershop for a shave, bought a new jacket, and, feeling better than he had for some time—the cut on his head was healing nicely—went to see Marrano in the hospital. When Serebin showed him the newspaper he laughed, holding his side. “So, success,” he said, “and you’ll notice what it doesn’t say. About German diplomats.”

Serebin had noticed, had become, over the years, something of an expert on what newspapers didn’t say. “Any chance the Yugoslavs will blow up the river?”

“Not now. They’re mobilizing—they’ve had their coup, and they’ll pay for it soon enough. All the foreign journalists are getting out, legations shutting down, arms dealers—that whole crowd, going back wherever they came from. As for us, you’d better get out right away, I’ll follow in a day or two. Our friends in the air force will know the details.”

“Then I’ll see you in Istanbul,” Serebin said.

“Well, somewhere.”

Serebin was glad to go home, wherever that was. He’d slept in the chair, after drinking much of the night with the captains. And their girlfriends. Just looking at them, blithely immodest as they strutted about, smoked cigars, drank and laughed and teased, had done his heart immense good. And before Draza passed out, he’d found it necessary to tell Serebin how sweet these girls were. “Patriots,” he’d said, pretty much the last word before Serebin and Jovan put him to bed.

That was one word for it, but then, early in the morning on the day after he said good-bye to Marrano, it made a lot more sense. Out on a field—an airfield because there were planes parked on the weedy grass, but pasture was what it was—a line of biplanes. “The Yugoslav air force,” Draza said.

Hawker Harts, and Furies, Bristol Bulldogs—with their wings on struts above and below the pilot cockpit, armed with a single machine gun, they were the aircraft of the early 1930s but they looked like they belonged to an earlier time—descendants of the Spads and De Havillands of the 1914 war—and Serebin doubted they could stay long in the air with German Messerschmitts.

“You have others?” Serebin said.

“No. This is what the British sold us, but they’re faster than you think.”