Protocol for a Kidnapping (7 page)

“Mr. Wisdom provides our comic relief,” I said seriously. “He’s young and brash and fun-loving. Mr. Knight, a wiser, older head, will shortly pull out a briar pipe and suck on it to demonstrate his sadly gentle disapproval of Mr. Wisdom’s exuberance. I serve as the levelheaded balance, equally tolerant of youth’s foolish foibles and middle age’s dull despair.”

“I think you’re also the chief bullshitter,” she said.

Knight gestured with his pipe and leered at her. “You holding, baby?”

“Jesus,” she said. “One actor and two nuts. I’m attached to the press attaché and he assigned me to stick with you and guide you around and see that you don’t get lost and order your meals and wipe your noses and buy presents for your wives.”

“The actor there’s the only one who’s married, ma’am,” Wisdom said. “I’m a single man myself and Mr. St. Ives here’s become sort of a rakehell since his divorce.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “I wish I were Catholic so I could pray.” She looked up at me. “I’m also your translator if any of you ever shut up long enough to need one.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s our hotel?”

“I booked you in at the Metropol,” she said.

“
Je Metropol hotel jedan dobar hotel?
” Wisdom asked her quickly.

She turned on him. “I thought none of you spoke the language.”

Wisdom smiled and patted her rounded butt. “Don’t worry, love,” he said, winking. “It’s the only phrase I know.”

“You do speak it, Arrie?” I said.

“My father was a Hungarian who got us out in fifty-six,” she said. “My mother’s a Yugoslav. A Serb. We speak everything. We have to.”

“How long have you been with the State Department?” Knight asked her.

“Four years,” she said. “Hell, it’s almost five now. I was in Prague for two and I’ve been here nearly two. Have you got all of your luggage or have you lost half of it?”

“We didn’t bring much since we’re not staying long.”

“The car’s outside. When do you want to start tomorrow, early?”

“What’s early?”

“Eight—eight thirty.”

“It’s the middle of the goddamned night,” the actor stated and then looked around for someone to contradict him. Nobody did.

“Nine,” she said. “They speak English at the Metropol so you can manage breakfast by yourselves. The only thing I have you scheduled for in the morning is the Ministry of Interior. You’re to meet a Mr. Bartak there at eleven.”

“What’s it about?”

“I thought you knew,” she said, “I don’t. They haven’t told me a goddamned thing because everybody’s got their bowels in an uproar about old grab-ass being kidnapped.”

“Still at it, huh?” I said.

“He never misses a chance and the younger the better.”

“All right,” I said. “We see Mr. Bartak and then what?”

“Then lunch. After that, you go calling on a Nobel poet. Anton Pernik.”

“Does he speak English?”

“I don’t know if he does, but his granddaughter does. If you want me to translate for you, I will.”

I said, “We’ll see,” and then we pushed through the entrance to the airport and waited for the black embassy four-door Ford sedan which seems the standard U.S. conveyance for those who are greeted at foreign airports by the assistant to the press attaché. If you rank slightly higher up the protocol scale, you get a big new Mercury, also black.

It was my first trip to Belgrade so I couldn’t compare it to what it had looked like before the Germans flattened it in 1941, or what it had looked like five or ten years ago when the building boom was on, or even 1500 years ago when the Huns sacked and razed it or when the Crusaders wandered through it in the eleventh century or when it was captured by the Turks in 1521. But on the twelve-mile trip into the city it looked new and fairly clean with lots of glass and concrete apartment buildings. In fact, it looked very much like Bonn and Barcelona and Birmingham (either England or Alabama) and I wished that it didn’t, but most cities look very much alike today.

Arrie Tonzi sat up front with the embassy driver and pointed out a few sights, but she really didn’t have her heart in it. When we pulled up at the Metropol, I asked her to join us in a drink, but she shook her head no and said that she had to get back to the embassy.

“Change your mind about the drink,” Wisdom urged.

She smiled and shook her head. “Some other time,” she said.

“It is
Miss
Tonzi, isn’t it?” he said.

“Miss Tonzi, twenty-six, a maiden lady of uncertain prospects.”

“If only you’d forget your pride and let me help you!” Wisdom said or cried, I guess, with an appropriate gesture.

“He is sort of cute, if a little pudgy,” she said to Knight.

Knight put his hands on her shoulders and stared down at her. “There’s something wrong with his glands, but here in Belgrade there’s a doctor who may be able to help. Still, over the years there have been many doctors, and if this treatment fails, well—”

“Jesus,” she said to me. “Does it go on like this all the time?”

“Only when they’ve got an audience.”

“You can check in and get up to your rooms by yourselves, can’t you?”

“I think we can manage.”

“It’s going to be fun, I can tell.”

“Let’s hope so,” I said.

Arrie Tonzi had a pretty little face with a mouth that kept going in and out of an uncertain smile, eyes that were too large one moment and squinted up into smiling arcs the next, a fair complexion that probably tanned well in summer, and a good enough figure which you could see most of if you peeped, and she didn’t seem to care much if you did. I suppose she was one of the first volunteers in the no-bra movement. She stood now in what seemed to be her favorite stance, her legs planted a little widely apart, her fists on her hips, trying to make her 102 or 103 pounds look tough and aggressive and not missing the desired effect by more than a couple of miles. She wanted to say something and she wasn’t quite sure how she should say it but she was damned sure going to say it anyhow.

“Is what you’re going to do going to be dangerous? I mean getting the ambassador back?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. If it were going to be dangerous, they probably would have sent somebody else.”

“Well—” She stopped and then started over again. “Well, I mean, if it
is
going to be dangerous and you need some help, well, what I mean is you can—oh, hell, I know it sounds corny, but goddamn it, St. Ives, you can call on me.”

“Thanks, Arrie. I appreciate that. I really do.”

She looked at me carefully. “Like shit you do,” she said and turned and walked back to the embassy car.

We made it up to our rooms without any trouble and I was lying down, testing the bed, when the phone rang. There was no one I wanted to talk to, not Knight or Wisdom or Arrie Tonzi or Artur Bjelo or Anton Pernik or Amfred Killingsworth, especially not Amfred Killingsworth, but I picked up the phone on its third double ring and answered it anyway.

“Mr. St. Ives?” It was a man’s voice, accented, a little muffled.

“Yes,” I said.

“Jovan Tavro here.”

“All right,” I said. “You name it, where and when?”

“Good,” he said. “You are quick—no nonsense. I like that.”

“Fine,” I said. “Name it.”

“The Café Nemoguće,” he said. “It’s near the Central Station. Nemoguće means ‘impossible’ in English. That is funny, is it not?” and he laughed harshly to let me know that he at least thought so.

“Very,” I said. “What time?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Any recognition?”

“Order some
plejescavitsa
,” he said. “An American eating
plejescavitsa
should be recognizable enough.”

“I can’t even pronounce it,” I said, but he had already hung up.

I
TOOK A 1939
Plymouth taxi to the Central Station and walked from there. With sign language, a smattering of German, and a few phrases of French, I was directed north along Gavrila Principa past Kamenica Street and then left on a street that dead-ended into a triangular-shaped park that seemed to be about three blocks from the Sava River.

The wind blew in from the river, cold and wet. There was hardly any traffic and the pedestrians looked as if they were in a hurry to get home to a glass of something warm. The Café Nemoguće had been allotted an impossibly narrow slice of the ground floor of a new office building, grudgingly it seemed, and on fair days there was room on the sidewalk to set out the half-dozen tables and their chairs which were now neatly stacked near the entrance. I suppose the café got its name from its narrow width, which was no more than nine feet, but inside it seemed to run back forever.

I chose a table near the door and the newspaper rack. The café was neither crowded nor empty and most of the customers seemed deeply involved in their conversation which they carried on in voices loud enough for me to overhear or perhaps even join if I could have spoken the language.

I’ve never tried to pass for a native in any European country, not even in London where, if you keep your mouth shut, you might have a fifty-fifty chance. But in the rest of Europe, unless you’ve lived there long enough to get a haircut and buy some clothes off the peg, you might as well have “Donated by U.S.A.” stamped right across your forehead. It’s in the walk maybe, or the shape of the butt, or perhaps the facial expression, but almost anyone can spot Americans in Europe, even if they keep their mouths shut and even if they’re alone, although neither happens very often.

So it was no surprise when the waiter welcomed me in English to his country, city, neighborhood, and café and then asked in German how things were going back in the States and how long I’d been in Yugoslavia and then switched to Serbo-Croatian to ask what I wanted to eat (at least he kept pointing at the menu) and then nodded his melancholy agreement when I told him that I’d try the
plejescavitsa.

“
Und ein Schnapps, ja?
” he said, back in German again, and I agreed that ein Schnapps was just what I needed so he brought me a large thimbleful of
slivovica
which is a plum brandy of about 140 proof whose warming qualities were so reassuring that I promptly called for another round.

The
plejescavitsa
turned out to be a dozen balls of well-seasoned ground meat—beef, veal and pork, I think—with some odd bits of lamb and sweet pepper that had been spitted and grilled. It was quite good, as was the salad that came with it, and the combined culinary success seemed to call for another
slivovica.
I was halfway through it when the man with the face like an unhappy carp sat down at my table. I smiled and nodded at him and started to ask if he’d care for a drink, but before I could speak, he said, “We can talk here as well as anyplace. I’m Tavro.”

“You care for anything?” I said.

“Coffee.”

I ordered two coffees from the waiter who nodded familiarly at Tavro as if he were a regular customer. The coffee was a Turkish legacy, sweet and thick and black, and Tavro sipped his noisily.

“You know anyone called Bjelo who looks something like me but who’s about ten years younger?”

“No,” Tavro said. “Why do you ask?”

“I keep running into him. I thought he might be interested in you.”

Tavro wagged his thick head from side to side. “Nobody has much official interest in me now except for the pair that keeps me under surveillance. But since I make it a point to be here every night, they no longer come inside but sleep in their car instead.”

“Have you tried this before?” I said.

“To leave? No. I’ve had no reason to.”

“But you have one now?”

Tavro was somewhere in his late fifties, not tall but big-boned and wide, except for his shoulders which seemed curiously narrow until I realized that his thick neck made them appear that way. The neck was corded with heavy muscles and tendons that gave it a fluted appearance, something like a sturdy Doric column. His head was not much wider than his neck, dished in shape, and it turned carefully and slowly as if it were kept up there with the aid of a brace. It was a peculiarly Slavic face with high cheekbones that planed out from the curved nose which beaked toward the wide, petty mouth. It was a hard, mean, ugly face and I wondered how much of it Tavro was responsible for.

“Is your task to interrogate me, Mr. St. Ives, or to help me get across the border?”

“When I think I need to ask questions, I will, so I’ll ask another one right now. Which border? You’ve got seven of them.”

“Not the Albanian, of course,” he said.

“No.”

“And I despise Hungarians, which eliminates that. The Greeks are still impossible, the Rumanians inhospitable, and I never did trust a Bulgar, so that leaves either Italy or Austria, doesn’t it?”

“Either one?”

“Either one.”

“All right,” I said.

“When?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“How?”

“I don’t know that either.”

Tavro folded his big-knuckled hands on the table. The hair on their backs was black and white and matched the thick, shortcropped covering on his head. His eyebrows, however, were still a fierce, bristly black and the pale blue eyes that glared out at me from beneath them shone not with tears, but with a contempt so intense that it glistened.

“Do you work for your government, Mr. St. Ives?”

“No.”

“You are an entrepreneur, a free agent of sorts?”

“Of sorts.”

“Then there is none that I can complain to?”

“None I can think of, unless you want to try the ambassador, but I understand he’s pretty busy right now.”

“That fool.”

“You tried him, didn’t you?”

“It was a mistake. He offered much in exchange for what I gave him, but returned nothing.”

“He’s like that,” I said.

“Do you know him?”

“I know him.”

“Do you think there is a chance that his kidnappers might kill him?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would be convenient, if they did.”

“Convenient for whom?” I said.

He shrugged. “For mankind, let’s say.”

I nodded. “When I come up with a scheme to get you out, how do I get in touch?”

“Thank you for saying when and not if,” Tavro said and took a small notebook from his dark, boxlike coat, wrote something down, tore out a page, and handed it to me. There was an address and a name; the name was Bill Jones.