Eric Ambler - Judgment on Deltchev

‘I’m coming to that. Well, the war breaks out and in 1940 Georghi skips to Cairo. For a time he’s on a newspaper there, then he decides that it’s time to do a little war work and gets taken on as an interpreter by the British. Later on, when the United States Middle East contingent arrives, he is transferred to them. In 1945 he turns up in an American Civil Affairs unit in Germany.’

‘Still as an interpreter?’

‘Still as an interpreter. Only by now he has a bastard sort of uniform and is working in a DP camp near Munich. He worked under an American Major named Macready. I had business there, and that’s where I first saw Georghi and got to know about him.’

‘What was your business?’

‘Intelligence — the British lot.’ He caught a glance I gave him. ‘Oh dear me, no! Not any more. I was just the wartime variety, uniform and everything. I was liaising with an American who was on the same job as me — checking up on the bad boys who’d gone to earth in the DP camps and then digging them out — and it was this man who told me about Georghi. Another drink?’

‘I think I will.’

‘That’s good. There’s another bottle in there if we run short or if Georghi comes home. All right, then. We go back to the time Georghi went over to the Americans in Cairo. Almost the first thing that happened was that he was sent up to a small hill town in the Lebanon with a Lieutenant, a Tech Sergeant, and an enlisted man. The job was to operate a radio station monitoring an intelligence network operating in the Balkans. I believe there was some short-wave oddity that determined their position, but that’s not important. The thing was that our Georghi was stuck out in the wilderness for nearly a year with three Americans who didn’t like it either and talked about home. I don’t know anything about the Sergeant and the enlisted man, but the Lieutenant was a radio engineer named Kromak and he came from Passaic, Jersey. Do you know the Lebanon?’

I shook my head.

‘In the evenings the sky is like wine and the shadows falling across the terraces have purple edges to them. Overhead, vines — grape and other things with big flowers and a wonderful smell. Everything is very still and warm and soft. It’s the kind of atmosphere in which myths are born and the pictures in your mind’s eye seem more real than the chair you’re sitting on. I wax lyrical, you see. However, the point is that Lieutenant Kromak talked about Passaic, New Jersey, and read aloud his wife’s letters while Georghi listened. He heard about Molly’s graduation and Michael’s camp counsellor, about Sue’s new baby and the seeding of the front lawn. He heard about the new refrigerator and the shortage of gasoline, about his friend Pete Staal, the dentist, and the Rotary Anns. He heard about the mouse in the cedar closet and the new screens that had been bought for the porch. And when the weekly letter was exhausted, the reminiscences would begin. “Pete Staal, Pete Staal,” Kromak would say dreamily, “a good dentist and a lovable son-of-a-bitch, but what a crazy guy! I remember the night Kitty and me, the Deckers, and the Staals went to Rossi’s — that’s an Italian restaurant at the far end of Franklin Street — and had ravioli. Ever had ravioli? At Rossi’s they make the best ravioli in the world. Well, we didn’t want to take two cars, so we rode down in mine. A Dodge I had then. Well, right after we’d eaten, Helen said she wanted to go over to the Nutley Field Club. That made Pete mad and he said that if she was going to Nutley he was going to fly down to Wilmington to see his mother. Of course, he knew what Helen really wanted — to see Marie and Dane Schaeffer — I told you about them, remember? Well …” And on he went while Georghi listened and drank it in. Do you know Passaic, New Jersey?’

‘No.’

‘Chemical plants and some light industry and the homes of the people who have to work there. But to Georghi Pashik, looking through the eyes of Lieutenant Kromak, who wanted so much to be back with the wife and kids, it must have represented a paradise of domestic security and gracious living. You know how it is? Lots of quite intelligent Europeans have fantastic notions about the way most Americans live. Sitting on that terrace in a Lebanon hill town, poor, unhappy, exiled Georghi must have been a pushover for the American way of life. Just to put it in terms of food — reason might tell him that the ravioli he’d get in Rossi’s on Franklin Street, Passaic, would not be as good as he’d eaten already in Rome and Florence, but Rossi’s ravioli had become the desirable ones. They had the approval of those legendary figures the Staals, the Deckers, and the Schaeffers, and that was what mattered. He began to understand why the Americans didn’t like the Lebanese they came in contact with. Lebanese standards of sanitation and behaviour are not those of Passaic, New Jersey. Georghi heard local ways that he had accepted or failed even to notice condemned quite angrily. He was troubled and began to question himself. You see what was happening, of course? Along with his dream of Passaic, New Jersey, he was beginning to acquire an American conscience.’

He paused for a moment to swallow another drink and fill my glass.

‘How much are you embroidering this story?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘Not much. But the man who told me was an American and he could reproduce that Kromak stuff so you’d think you were really listening to him. I just give you the bits I remember and fill in the rest. The effect’s the same, though. Anyway, after nearly a year of the American Way and Purpose according to Lieutenant Kromak, Georghi was shifted back to Cairo. Americans again, only this time the high priest was a dairy chemist from Minnesota and the dream was in a slightly higher income bracket. Georghi read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Gettysburg Address. After that there was a filling-station proprietor from Oakland, California. He was followed by an insurance man from Hagerstown, Maryland. Then came 1944 and the surrender negotiations between Deltchev and the Anglo-American representatives. There was a British military mission operating with the partisans in Macedonia at that time. They controlled quite a large area and had a landing strip, so it wasn’t too difficult to arrange the meetings. The Anglo-Americans flew in from Foggia. Deltchev travelled overland somehow. They met in a village schoolroom. Georghi was one of the interpreters. It was after the second meeting that Georghi’s little cap went over the windmill.’

‘Wait a minute. Had he known Deltchev before?’

‘Known of him, that’s all. Well now, we get to the second meeting. They had their meeting all right, but storms delayed their return and they had to wait for twenty-four hours in the village. The atmosphere of the negotiations had been quite friendly and the wait produced a lot of general conversation about conditions inside the country, the problems, what was to be done about them, and so on. The man who told me this was on that trip. Anyway, one of the subjects discussed was the Officer Corps Brotherhood. Deltchev was very frank about the problem and the difficulties of dealing with it. Some of his revelations, in fact, were deeply shocking to the Anglo-American brass and they didn’t hesitate to tell him so. Deltchev must have wished he hadn’t mentioned the thing. But that night Georghi went to see him privately. It must have been a curious meeting. After extracting from Deltchev a lot of secrecy and immunity pledges, Georghi revealed that he was a member of the Officer Corps Brotherhood, had been one since he had returned to the land of his fathers from Italy in ’37. I told you he’d had peculiar ideas then about the way things ought to be. He’d expressed them by joining the Brotherhood. But now, he told Deltchev, all that was changed. He’d seen the light of Western democracy — all the way from Passaic, New Jersey, to Hagerstown, Maryland, he might have added — and wanted to make reparation. The long and short of it was that the Provisional Government’s big clean-up of the Brotherhood was made possible because Georghi turned stool pigeon.’