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Alan Furst: Spies of the Balkans

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Alan Furst Spies of the Balkans

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He’d certainly never meant to be a cop. And-once he fell into being a cop-never a detective, and-once promoted to that position-never what he was now. He’d never even known such a job existed. Neither of his parents had been educated beyond the first six years; his grandmother could neither read nor write, his mother doing so only with difficulty. His father had worked his way into half ownership of a florist shop in the good part of Salonika, so the family was never poor; they managed, pretty much like everyone else he knew. Zannis wasn’t much of a student, which didn’t matter because in time he’d work in the shop. And, until 1912, Salonika had remained a part of the Ottoman Empire-Athens and the western part of the nation having fought free of the Turks in 1832-so to be Greek was to know your place and the sort of ambition that drew attention wasn’t such a good idea.

By age twelve, as the Greek army marched in to end the Second Balkan War, Zannis’s private dreams had mostly involved escape; foreign places called to him, so maybe work on a ship or a train. Not unusual. His mother’s brother had emigrated to America, to a mysterious place called Altoona, in the state of Pennsylvania, from whence postal cards arrived showing the main street or the railway station. Until 1912, at times when the money ran out, the Zannis family considered joining him, working in his diner, a silvery building with rounded corners. Yes, maybe they should go there; they’d have to talk about it. Soon.

And, six years later, they did leave, but they didn’t go to Altoona. In 1917, as Anglo-French and Greek forces fought the Bulgarians in Macedonia, a sideshow to the war in France, Salonika burned, in what came to be known as the Great Fire. The Zannis house, up in the heights by the ancient battlements, survived, but the florist shop did not, and there was no money to rebuild. Now what?

It was his father’s brother who saved the day. He had, as a young man, involved himself in fighting the Turks, with a pistol, and the day came when, threatened with life in a Turkish prison, he had to run away. He ran to Paris, mostly walking or riding trains without a ticket until they threw him off, but in time he got there.

And, with luck and determination, with playing cards for money, and with the advent of a jolly French widow of a certain age, he had managed to buy a stall in the flea market in Clignancourt, in the well-visited section known as Serpette. “Forget Alteena,” he wrote in a letter to his brother. “I need you here.” A little money was sent and the Zannis family, parents and grandmother, Costa and his younger brother-an older sister had earlier married an electrician and emigrated to Argentina-got on a fruit ship and worked their way to Le Havre. And there, waving up at them from the wharf, was the benevolent uncle and his jolly wife. On the train, Zannis’s heart rose with every beat of the rails.

Two hours later, he’d found his destiny: Paris. The girls adored him-soon enough he fell in love-and he had a lot of money for a seventeen-year-old boy from Greece. He worked for his uncle as an antiquaire, an antiques dealer, selling massive armoires and all sorts of junk to tourists and the very occasional Parisian. They had a magnificent old rogue with a great white beard who turned out Monets and Rubenses by the yard. “Well, I can’t say, because it isn’t signed, maybe you should have somebody look at it, but if the nice lady comes back in twenty minutes, as she swore she would, we’ll have to sell it, so if I were you …”

The happiest time of his life, those twelve years.

At least, he thought later, it lasted that long. In 1929, as the markets crashed, Zannis’s father went to bed with what seemed like a bad cold then died a day later of influenza, while they were still waiting for the doctor. Bravely, Zannis’s mother insisted they stay where they were-Costa was doing so well. By then he spoke good French-the lingua franca of Salonika-and he’d taken courses in German and learned to speak it well: some day the stall would be his, he’d met a woman, Laurette, a few years older than he and raising two children, and he was enchanted with her. A year earlier they’d started living together in Saint-Ouen, home to the Clignancourt market. But, as winter turned to spring, his mother’s grief did not subside and she wanted to go home. Back to where she could see her family and gossip with friends.

She never said it aloud but Zannis, now head of the household, knew what she felt and so they went home. Laurette could not, or would not, leave with him, would not take her children to a foreign place, so her heart was broken. As was his. But family was family.

Back in Salonika, and urgently needing to make a living, he took a job as a policeman. He didn’t much care for it, but he worked hard and did well. In a city where the quarter known as the Bara held the largest red-light district in eastern Europe, in a city of waterfront dives and sailors of every nation, there was always plenty of work for a policeman. Especially the tolerant sort of policeman who settled matters before they got out of hand and never took money.

By 1934 he was promoted to detective and, three years later, to, technically, the rank of sub-commander, though nobody ever used that title. This advancement did not just happen by itself. An old and honored expression, from the time of the Turkish occupation, said that it was most fortunate to have a barba sto palati, an uncle in the palace, and it turned out, to Zannis’s surprise, that he had that very thing. His particular talent, a kind of rough diplomacy, getting people to do what he wanted without hitting them, had been observed from on high by the head of the Salonika police, a near mystic presence in the city. Vangelis was at least eighty years old, some said older, with the smile of a saint-thus St. Vangelis, at least to those who could appreciate irony and veneration in the same phrase. For fifty years, nothing had gone on in Salonika that the old man didn’t know about, and he’d watched Zannis’s career with interest. So in 1937, when Zannis decided to resign his position, Vangelis offered him a new one. His own office, a detective, a clerk, and a greatly improved salary. “I need someone to handle these matters,” Vangelis told him, and went on to describe what he needed. Zannis understood right away and in time became known to the world at large as a senior police official, but to those with knowledge of the subterranean intricacies of the city’s life, and soon enough to the Salonika street, he was simply “Zannis.”

Was the Belgian consul being blackmailed by a prostitute? Call Zannis.

Had the son of an Athenian politician taken a diamond ring from a jeweler and “forgotten” to pay for it? Call Zannis.

Did a German civilian arrive “unofficially” in Salonika on the freighter of a neutral nation?

When Zannis walked back to the foot of the pier he found his assistant, Gabriel-Gabi-Saltiel, waiting for him, smoking a cigarette, leaning back in the driver’s seat. Saltiel loved his car, a hard-sprung black Skoda 420, built by the Czechs for Balkan roads. “Pull over behind the wall, Gabi,” Zannis said. “Out of sight, where we can just see the pier.”

Saltiel pushed the ignition button, the engine rumbled to life, and he swung the car around and headed for the customshouse. A gray fifty-five, Saltiel, tall and shambling, slump-shouldered and myopic, who viewed the world, with a mixture of patience and cynicism, through thick-framed eyeglasses. A Sephardic Jew, from the large community in Salonika, he’d somehow become a policeman and prospered at the job because he was intelligent, sharp, very smart about people-who they really were-and persistent: a courteous, diffident bulldog. On the day that Vangelis offered Zannis the new job, saying, “And find somebody you can work with,” he had telephoned Gabi Saltiel, explained what he’d be doing, and asked Saltiel to join him. “What’s it called, this department?” Saltiel said. “It doesn’t need a name,” Zannis answered. Ten seconds passed, a long time on the telephone. Finally, Saltiel said, “When do I start?”

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