The Amateur Spy (2 page)

All of this makes us sound like aging hippies on the lam, although we are anything but. We both grew up in cities—Mila in Sarajevo, of course, I in Boston—and in our long years of service in the field we grew accustomed to the amenities that regularly fall into the laps of aid workers. That’s the funny thing about our business. We can go for months putting up with mud, mobs, and disease, while enduring enough shellfire and checkpoint thuggery to fuel a lifetime of nightmares. Yet, relatively speaking, we often live like pashas, almost always served by a cook, a cleaner, a driver, and a laundress, complete with armed guards and the best available housing. There is also sex on demand from any number of eager colleagues, the only craving that outweighs wanderlust among our gypsy tribe of do-gooders.

So it was not as if Mila and I wished to start a commune. Our rustic agenda had two basic goals: One, keep from becoming hostages to the overpriced food supplies shipped from the mainland. Two, stay busy enough to be comfortably weary at the end of each day, if only because exhaustion is the best antidote to memory.

And once we had attained those goals? Ask us later. We would climb to the next plateau as soon as it showed itself through the mist. When your emotions have lived hand to mouth as long as ours had, even the little planning we had done seemed above and beyond the call of duty.

Mila unlocked the house while I counted out a few euros for the driver and unloaded our bags. When I joined her she was just across the threshold, sniffing the air like an animal whose den has been invaded.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t you smell it?”

I sniffed. Nothing but dampness and dust. The cool air felt as if it hadn’t stirred in ages.

“Cigarettes,” she whispered. “Someone’s been smoking.”

I leaned toward her and sniffed again.

“It’s your clothes. From the ferry. You’ve been around too many Greeks.”

“No. It’s the house.”

“Probably just Stavros, from the last time he made the rounds.”

Stavros was our nearest neighbor and acted as a sort of caretaker in our absence. He had grown up here, and lived in a much older and smaller house on the opposite side of the road, a quarter mile up the slope. We paid a small fee for his vigilance, although neither of us had the slightest idea of what could go wrong in a place as sleepy as Karos.

“What’s the matter?” I joked. “Getting a craving?”

She frowned. Like most sons and daughters of the former Yugoslavia, Mila had once been a chain-smoker, maintaining the habit at great expense throughout the war only to quit on the very day of the Dayton Peace Agreement, reasoning that if her leaders could give up their vices, then so could she. Like them, she was forever on the verge of relapse.

“Stavros isn’t supposed to come inside,” she said.

“But he has a key, remember? C’mon, you don’t really expect an old goat farmer like him to resist the temptation to do a little snooping around?”

I certainly didn’t. Stavros was the quintessential local, which meant he wanted to know all the doings in his patch of the pasture. His family had been here since Hellenic times, and he maintained the limited viewpoint of the entrenched islander. To hear him speak of people from the neighboring isles you’d have thought they were from another country altogether, so disdainful was he of their seamanship and their farming skills. This outlook made him the perfect watchdog, and he had always seemed friendly enough. Although who knows what he really thought of us, with our hobbyist attitudes toward the sort of chores he had poured his life into.

“Well, at least nothing seems to be missing.”

“He’s not a thief, Mila. Just a gossip. Remember all the dirt he told us when they were building the DeKuyper place? He probably just needed some new material for his friends at the pub. Maybe he’s worried you’re secretly a Turk.”

That produced a theatrical cold stare. Nothing gets a Serb’s back up quicker than calling him a descendant of the Ottomans.

“Relax,” I said. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll speak to him tomorrow. Lay down a few ground rules. But he’s going to be our neighbor for the rest of our lives, so we might as well get used to him poking around.”

“The rest of our lives. I had almost forgotten that part.”

Her eyes got a little dreamy, and she moved closer, her hand brushing my cheek before she slipped her arms around me. The top of her head came up to just beneath my nose, and her hair smelled like the sea. We stood that way a moment, tightening our grip while we got used to the idea of settling in. It was scary and exciting all at once, and I felt her heart beating urgently. I looked over her shoulder through the big window facing the sea, searching for an omen. But there was only enough sunlight to see the faintest glimmer of the waves.

“Why don’t we wait ’til tomorrow to round up supplies,” I said. “I’ll fire up the scooters. We can go back into Emborios for dinner, that fish taverna you like. We’ll bring back a jug of retsina.”

“Sounds perfect.” Her forehead was pressed to my sternum, and I felt the words go straight into my chest. “We’ll watch the nine o’clock ferry come in, like we always do. When the wake comes ashore we’ll know it’s the last thing from the mainland that can bother us.”

“Until tomorrow, anyway.”

She unpacked our bags while I retrieved our scooters from the locked shed out back. I had left the tanks empty, so I poured in fresh oil and gasoline, cleaned the plugs, and primed the carburetors. Each engine choked to life on a wheezing sputter of blue exhaust, and I let them run a while before shutting off the smaller one. We would take the big one into town, riding double. Mila didn’t like riding hers after dark on the island’s narrow and twisting climbs.

Our favorite taverna was on the opposite side of the harbor from most of the noise and tourists. This offered more seclusion, and also a pleasant view back across the water. At night you could see the ferries approaching from miles away, lit up like floating Christmas trees.

The evenings were still warm enough to eat comfortably outdoors, so we took a table at the edge of the patio. Wavelets hissed onto the smooth stones of the beach just a few feet away.

As with almost any such place in Greece, cats were underfoot from the moment our food arrived. They were fatter out here in the islands, perhaps from hanging around the fishing docks, demanding their cut of the action as the boats came in. Their overwhelming numbers in Athens were easy enough to explain, with all those alleys and sewers to breed in. Here their presence was more of a riddle, and I liked to joke that they must have been placed by the government’s secret police. They certainly made perfect operatives—invisible by day and omnipresent by night, eavesdropping on conversations at virtually every café and taverna.

We dined simply but well on a tomato and cucumber salad, a bowl of olives, a plate of the local goat cheese, and a whole snapper, which had been brushed with oil and grilled until the skin was charred. Mila’s stomach was still a little shaky from the ferry, so I ate the lion’s share. We also drained the better part of a small carafe of the taverna’s homemade retsina, and then bought a corked jug to take home. We had developed a taste for its sharp, piney flavor, much as the Greeks did under Roman occupation, when the centurions and imperial bureaucrats took all the good stuff for themselves.

The proprietor, a big jolly fellow named Nikos, delivered the jug personally to the table, having remembered us from earlier visits. When we told him we were now here for good, he slapped me heartily on the back and called for complimentary shots of ouzo, beaming all the while. Mila was strangely silent throughout, and seemed relieved when he finally left the table.

“Still queasy? Or are you chilly?”

She shook her head and smiled wanly.

“Sorry. He scares me a little.”

“Nikos?”

She nodded, knocking back her ouzo in a single gulp.

“It’s the only thing I’ve never liked about this place.”

“He’s a big teddy bear.”

“I know. But he reminds me of Karadzic.”

I turned in my chair just in time to see Nikos disappear through the kitchen door.

“You’re right,” I said, chuckling at the resemblance. “Especially the hair. A Balkan pompadour.”

But a glance at Mila told me this was no laughing matter. For a moment she even seemed to be trembling. Reminders of the war could affect her that way, especially when they triggered one particular memory. And I suppose someone who looked like Radovan Karadzic was as potent a reminder as any. I am referring, of course, to the wartime “president” of the Bosnian Serbs, an accused war criminal still at large. As a Serb, Mila had technically been one of his subjects, but by going to work for the UN as a legal protection clerk she had boldly declared her neutrality. That turned all three warring factions against her, and the Serbian soldiers were especially harsh. Just for laughs one of them fired a shot over her head when she was escorting refugees across a snowy checkpoint.

Throughout the war Mila lived and worked at a UN office in the city’s hulking telecommunications headquarters, the PTT Building, which sat within a hundred yards of the siege lines like a giant concrete bunker. She shared space with three other women. They slept on cots next to their desks, then stacked the cots in a corner every morning. They stored their clothes in a file cabinet and their cosmetics in an abandoned office safe.

We met in that office. It’s also where we had our first desperate assignation, right there on her cot, taking advantage of a rare evening when her roommates were away. I still remember the sharp press of my elbows against the aluminum tubing, the eerie red flashes in the darkened office every time a tracer round screamed past the windows, and the rumble of the floor whenever a shell landed nearby. Make love during a firefight and the earth
does
move. Afterward Mila took great pleasure in introducing me to friends and family as “battle-hardened,” knowing that only the two of us would get the joke.

Since the end of the war she hadn’t once been back to Sarajevo. Whenever she needed to touch base with her family she instead visited her mother’s Greek relatives, her aunt Aleksandra’s brood in the suburbs of Athens. In fact, it was while staying with them that we had planned our first trip to Karos.

But now, seated there at the taverna on the first night of our future, she looked truly shaken, and I wondered if it had something to do with knowing we were now here for good. On previous trips, any annoyance would soon be left behind. Now it was something she had to endure.

“Don’t worry,” I said, refilling her glass. “If I see him rounding up any tourists for detention I’ll make sure he’s arrested.”

Mila shook her head, and soon afterward I quietly paid the bill to a crestfallen Nikos, who seemed mystified by the pall that had fallen over our table. We strapped the jug to the back of the scooter and set out for home. By then the last ferry had departed, and from across the water only one bar along the strip in Emborios was still playing music, a blaring chorus of the Who.

These scooter trips could be a little harrowing even by day, and the air had cooled considerably in the hours since sunset. Mila kept my back warm by snuggling close and tucking her arms around my waist, and I soon grew accustomed to negotiating the tight curves. I fell into a rhythm, leaning gently into each turn and accelerating on the inclines, just tipsy enough to be thrilled by fleeting glimpses of dimly lit farmhouses in the ravines below. An oncoming van passed a bit too close for comfort, but that was customary here.

It was only the smaller hazards that made me jumpy. Approaching the crest of a hill, the pale beam of our headlight illuminated a clump of pine needles on the pavement just ahead. I swerved to avoid it, trying not to squeeze the brake, and then accelerated jerkily as the engine coughed. Mila must have felt my racing heartbeat, but she was accustomed to this quirk of mine, this remnant of our past. Having traveled on far too many mined roads, I could no longer bring myself to cross suspicious piles of leaves, mud, or trash on any bike or scooter. I had once assumed the habit would fade over time, but if anything it now came to me naturally, like a feature built into the steering. Mila had learned not to mention it.

If we hadn’t left a light on we might not have spotted our house. It was something to keep in mind for future late-night excursions, although I wondered if those would become a rarity as our little homestead developed its own comfortable rhythm. Even the worst places did, and I had developed a knack for learning them, a skill almost as useful as picking up the local language.

The last few hundred yards up our stony driveway were some of the trickiest of the ride, and Mila heaved a sigh of relief when we finally bounced to a stop.

“I’m spent,” she said, as breathless as if she had been running.

The silence of the hillside seemed to close in on us.

“It’s been a long day. Got enough energy for one last toast?” I lofted the jug from the back of the scooter. “Christen our new life?”

The pale glow from our front window illuminated a weary smile.

“Of course.”

We had to search the cabinets for the wineglasses, and if I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn Mila was again sniffing the air.

“Here they are,” she said. She wiped off the dust with the hem of her skirt while I threw open the doors to the patio. We went to the trestle table outside, and she raised her glass to mine.

“To perfection,” she said.

“You think that’s what we’ll find here?”

“Not all the time. No one does. But sometimes, sure. It’s what you deserve. You’ve earned some perfection.”

Doubtful. But I was happy to let Mila believe it, so I tipped my glass to hers and savored a resinous sip. Then, as if by prior signal, we strolled off hand in hand to the bedroom, where she placed her glass on the nightstand and lit a candle. I embraced her from behind, pressing against her buttocks as she sighed and arched her back. She turned to me slowly for a lingering kiss, and we undressed each other as tenderly as if it were our first time. Considering the circumstances, it almost seemed like it was. I suppose we were eager to set just the right tone. No need to rush anymore. No mouths to feed or fears to calm but our own. With a new and unlimited freedom lying before us, we could achieve frenzy by degrees, which made it all the more tantalizing.