Alan Furst: Spies of the Balkans

“Then we shan’t be visiting Wyoming? With Effendi Slade?” This in English, but for the Turkish title. Her Greek was close to perfect but she knew how her English voice affected him. Prim, upper-class, clipped, and chilly, a voice perfectly suited to her firm horsewoman’s body, weathered face, mouth barely touched with lipstick.

“Perhaps we could go later. Or now, if you prefer.”

“No,” she said. “I prefer depravity.”

Balthazar, tucked away in a cellar beneath lowlife Vardar Square, wasn’t far away so they walked, protected by her umbrella, a hideous thing with pink polka dots on a green field. Very much a couple; his arm reached around her shoulders-they were just about the same height-hers around his waist. “Is the world being good to you, this week?” he said.

“Not too bad. The school has a recital coming up this weekend but I refuse to worry about it.” Arriving in Salonika in 1938, by way of expatriate years spent first in southern France, then in Capri, she had purchased the Mount Olympus School of Ballet and, once every eight weeks, the daughters of the city’s bourgeoisie, all shapes and sizes, twirled around the stage to Tchaikovsky. As rendered by a Victrola that ran, in its old age, not as fast as it once did, so the dance was perhaps a little on the stately side, which frankly suited some of the statelier daughters.

“Am I invited to the recital?” he asked.

She pressed her cheek against his. “Many things I might ask of you, my dear, but …”

“Do you perform?”

“In tights? I think not.”

“Don’t tell me you can’t wear tights.”

“That is for you to look at, not the butcher and his wife.”

Balthazar was delighted to see them and offered a solemn bow. “So pleased,” he said, “it’s been too long,” and led them to a very small, very private room. Filled with ottomans, wool carpets, and low brass tables, the soft, shadowy darkness barely disturbed by a spirit lamp flickering in one corner. Balthazar lit some incense, then prepared two narghilehs, each with a generous lump of ochre-colored hashish. “You will eat later?” he said. “A nice meze?” Small appetizers-eggplant, feta, hummus.

“Perhaps we will.”

He well knew they would but didn’t make a point of it, saying only, “As you wish,” and closing the door carefully-their privacy his personal responsibility.

Music would have been nice and, as it turned out, music there was. If not from Balthazar itself, from the taverna next door, a bouzouki band and a woman singer, muffled by the wall, so just the right volume. They sat on a low loveseat, shoulders and hips touching, and leaned over a worked-brass table. When Zannis inhaled, the water in the narghileh bubbled and took the harsh edge off the hashish so he could hold the smoke in for a long time.

They were silent for a while, but eventually she said, “Quite nice tonight. The smoke tastes good, like … what? Lemon and lime?”

“Did you ever eat it?”

“No.”

“Best not.”

“Oh?”

“Very powerful. It will take you, ah, far away. Far, far away.”

“I’m rather far away as it is.” After a moment she said, “You see that little lamp in the corner? It reminds me of Aladdin, I believe it might have been in a book I had, as a child.” She stared into the distance, then said, “Do you suppose, if I rubbed it …?”

“You’d burn your fingers, the genie keeps it hot.”

“Doesn’t want to come out?”

“Not in this weather.”

She giggled. “Not in this weather.” She tossed the tube of the narghileh on the table, turned sideways, rested her head on his shoulder, and began to unbutton his shirt. That done, she spread it apart and laid her cheek on his chest-hairless and smooth, with broad, flat plates. Putting her lips against his skin, she said, “You smell good.”

“I do? I took a bath, maybe it’s the soap.”

“No, it isn’t soap, it’s something about you, something sweet.”

For a time they drifted, then, returning from wherever he’d been, he said, “Would you like to sit on my lap?”

“I always like that.” She stood, hiked up her dress, settled herself on his thighs, leaned her weight against him, and raised her knees, so that, as if by magic, his hand covered her bottom. On the other side of the wall, the singer’s voice grew plaintive. That made them both laugh, as though she could see through the wall. “Can you understand the lyric?” he said.

She shook her head.

“She’s singing about her flower.”

“In her garden?”

He moved her top knee a little and said, “No, this one.” The tips of his index and middle fingers rested on tight cotton. She was, he thought, so very clever, wearing white cotton panties, just right for a proper Englishwoman, but they were cut to provide a snug fit, and the cotton felt very fine, very soft, to his fingers. After a few moments, a breath escaped her; he could feel it and he could almost, but not quite, hear it. Delicately, he moved his fingers, not ambitious, simply savoring the warm reception, and much more pleased than proud.

On. And on. Until she raised her head and spoke quietly by his ear, in the King’s English: “Let’s have those off, shall we?”

Later, after Zannis had gone out into the public room and Balthazar had brought them-now famished-the meze, she scooped up some hummus with a triangle of pita bread and said, “Strange, but it just now occurs to me that the ottoman is an extraordinary piece of furniture, ingenious.”

“Yes?”

“Oh yes. Because you can, you know, also sit on it.”

After such a night, going back to work the next day was something like a punishment. Sibylla, the office clerk, always starched and taut, was wound especially tight that morning-neither Saltiel nor Zannis would admit it but they were both afraid of her. She stood straight as a stick, with fair hair set every Wednesday in a warrior’s helmet. And warrior was, at the moment, the very word, for she had come to work in a bad mood and was taking it out on the files.

Of these, there were two distinct sets. The first lived in a row of wooden filing cabinets in what was called the other room -there were two, with a bathroom in the hall-and included all the various paper that flowed through a government bloodstream: directions from on high, carbons of correspondence, letters from the citizenry, and various oddments, like newspaper clippings, that got themselves into the files and stayed there. Though sometimes-as witness Sibylla’s attack du jour -not forever.

“Gabi,” she said, holding a paper so that Saltiel could read it, “is this important?”

Saltiel didn’t want to read it. “Probably not.”

“A memorandum, from Station Six. It seems to concern the cemetery.”

“Which one?”

“The old Turkish one. The subject is ‘Copulation at Night.’”

“By the living?”

“If not, keep it,” Zannis said, looking up from his desk. They couldn’t really get Sibylla to laugh, but they never stopped trying.

Instead, a sigh. What bad boys they were. “Dated 10 September, 1938.”

“By now, they’re likely done copulating,” Saltiel said. “Get rid of it.”

The other file was maintained by Zannis, on five-by-eight cards in shoeboxes, and, taken altogether, was a working map of the power centers-and there were many-of Salonika. Thus it included cards for shipowners and bankers, Greek Orthodox prelates, consuls, spies, resident foreigners, journalists, politicians, high-class criminals, and courtesans-anybody who mattered. For an official whose job was to work behind the scenes, it was crucial to keep track of the cast of characters.