Eric Ambler - The Schirmer Inheritance

He went on at length.

George listened absently. At that moment he was more interested in the discovery that his appetite had suddenly begun to return and that he could contemplate without revulsion the prospect of dinner.

Florina lies at the entrance to a deep valley nine miles south of the Yugoslav frontier. About forty miles away across the mountains to the west is Albania. Florina is the administrative centre of the province which bears its name and is an important railhead. It has a garrison and a ruined Turkish citadel. It has more than one hotel. It is neither as picturesque as Vodena nor as ancient. It came into existence as an insignificant staging point on a Roman road from Durazzo to Constantinople, and far too late to share in the short-lived glories of the Macedonian Empire. In a land which has contained so many of the springs of Western civilization, it is a parvenu.

But if Florina has no history of much interest to the compilers of guidebooks, it has, in the Edwardian sense of the word, a Past.

In the summer of 1896, sixteen men attended a meeting in Salonika. There they founded a political organization which in later years was to become the most formidable secret terrorist society the Balkans, or for that matter Europe, has known. It was called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization; IMRO, for short. Its creed was “Macedonia for the Macedonians,” its flag a red skull and crossbones on a black ground, its motto “Freedom or Death.” Its arguments were the knife, the rifle, and the bomb. Its armed forces, who lived in the hills and mountains of Macedonia enforcing IMRO laws and imposing IMRO taxes on the villagers and townspeople, were called comitadjis . Their oath of allegiance was sworn upon a Bible and a revolver, and the penalty for disloyalty was death. Among those who took this oath and served IMRO there were rich men as well as peasants, poets as well as soldiers, philosophers as well as professional murderers. In the cause of Macedonian autonomy it killed Turks and Bulgars, Serbs and Vlachs, Greeks and Albanians. It also killed Macedonians in the same cause. By the time of the First Balkan War, IMRO was a serious political force, capable of bringing considerable influence to bear upon events. The Macedonian comitadji with his cartridge belts and his rifle was becoming a legendary figure, a heroic defender of women and children against the savagery of the Turks, a knight of the mountains who preferred death to dishonour and treated his captives with courtesy and forbearance. The facts, harped upon by cynical observers, that the savageries of the Turks were generally committed by way of reprisal for atrocities committed by the comitadjis , and that the chivalrous behaviour was only in evidence when there was a chance of its impressing foreign sympathizers, seemed to have little effect on the legend. It persisted remarkably and has to some extent continued to do so. In the main square of Gorna Djoumaia, the capital of Bulgarian Macedonia, there is even a monument to “The Unknown Comitadji .” True, it was put up in 1933 by the IMRO gangsters who ran the city; but the Bulgarian central government of the time did not object to it, and it is almost certainly still there. If IMRO is no longer served by poets and idealists, it remains a political force and has from time to time sold itself with nice impartiality to both Fascists and Communists. IMRO is and always has been a very Balkan institution.

Florina was one of the “founder” strongholds of IMRO. Soon after the momentous Salonika meeting in 1896, an ex-Sergeant of the Bulgarian army named Marko began recruiting an IMRO band in Florina, which rapidly became the most powerful in the area. And the most distinguished. The Bulgarian poet Yavorov and the young writer Christo Silianov were among those who chose to join it, and (though Silianov, the writer, disgraced himself by showing an effeminate aversion to cutting his prisoners’ throats) both saw much active service with the Florina men. Marko himself was killed by Turkish soldiers, but the band remained an effective unit and played a prominent part in the rebellion of 1903. The irredentist techniques of sabotage, ambush, kidnapping, intimidation, armed robbery, and murder are part of Florina’s cultural heritage; and although it now takes invasion and a war to induce the law-abiding inhabitants of the province to turn to these old skills, there are always, even in times of peace, a few daring spirits ready to take to the mountains and remind their unfortunate neighbours that the traditions of their forefathers are still very much alive.

George and Miss Kolin arrived by train from Salonika.

The Parthenon Hotel was a three-story building near the centre of the town. There was a café beneath it, and a restaurant which could be entered directly from the street. It was about the size of a third-class commercial hotel in a town like Lyon. The rooms were small and the plumbing primitive. The bedstead in George’s room was of iron, but there was a wooden frame round the springs. At Miss Kolin’s suggestion, George spent his first half-hour there with an insufflator and a canister of D.D.T., spraying the crevices in the woodwork. Then he went down to the café. Presently Miss Kolin joined him.

The proprietor of the Parthenon was a small, grey-faced man with grey hair cut en brosse and a crumpled grey suit. When he saw Miss Kolin appear, he left a table by the bar counter, at which he had been standing talking to an army officer, and came over to them. He bowed and said something in French.

“Ask him if he’ll join us for a drink,” George said.

When the invitation had been interpreted, the little man bowed again, sat down with a word of apology, and snapped his fingers at the barman.

They all had oyzo . Politenesses were exchanged. The proprietor apologized for not speaking English and then began discreetly to pump them about their business in the town.

“We have few tourists here,” he remarked; “I have often said that it is a pity.”

“The scenery is certainly very fine.”

“If you have time while you are here you should take a drive. I shall be happy to arrange a car for you.”

“Very kind of him. Say that we heard in Salonika that there was excellent hunting to be had near the lakes to the west.”

“The gentleman is intending to go hunting?”

“Not this time, unfortunately. We are on business. But we were told that there was plenty of game up there.”

The little man smiled. “There is game of all sorts in the neighbourhood. There are also eagles in the hills,” he added slyly.

“Eagles who do a little hunting themselves, perhaps?”

“The gentleman learned that in Salonika, too, no doubt.”

“I have always understood that this is a most romantic part of the country.”

“Yes, the eagle is a bird of romance to some,” the proprietor said archly. Obviously, he was the kind of person who could not let the smallest joke go, once he had got his teeth into it.

“It’s a bird of prey, too.”

“Ah, yes indeed! When armies disintegrate, there are always a few who prefer to stay together and fight a private war against society. But here in Florina the gentleman need have no fear. The eagles are safe in the hills.”

“That’s a pity. We were hoping you might be able to help us to find one.”

“To find an eagle? The gentleman deals in fine feathers?”

But George was getting bored. “All right,” he said, “we’ll cut the double-talk. Tell him I’m a lawyer and that we want, if possible, to talk to someone who was in the ELAS band led by Phengaros in 1944. Explain that it’s nothing political, that we just want to check up on the grave of a German Sergeant who was killed near Vodena. Say I’m acting for the man’s relatives in America.”