Antanas Sileika - Underground

“This is the partisan I told you about,” said the farmer. “I’ve seen him around before. He calls himself Karpis. I hope you two will straighten out whatever you have to say to one another, but I ask just one thing. From here on in, leave me alone. I have a sick, pregnant wife and two children. My problems probably don’t interest you, but your problems don’t really interest me either.” He walked away without so much as a wave.

“You see how it is now,” said Karpis. “The people are tired.”

“Are you armed?” Lukas asked.

“Just a pistol.”

“I’d like to see it.”

Karpis pulled a small PPK from a pocket inside his leather coat. “Maybe you and your friend should set down your arms as well.”

Lukas and Rudis did as he asked, and Karpis knew enough about them to ask where Shimkus was, but they said he was away. Lukas asked Rudis to sit apart from them as they spoke, but Rudis ignored the order and stayed nearby. It was standard operating procedure: no man should know more than he had to. Rudis’s refusal demonstrated his incompetence and his stupidity. Now Karpis would know that Lukas’s men did not follow orders.

“The farmer tells me you come from abroad,” said Karpis. “How can this be possible?”

“We landed on the beach in a rubber raft.”

“Could you show me where you buried it?”

“I don’t think so. We don’t want to go back there. But look at this.” He took out the folder with the American money in it—a thou-sand American dollars in tens.

“This shows me you’re rich, but the money could have come from anywhere. Anything else?”

Lukas showed the miniature camera and a letter he had posted to himself just before leaving Stockholm. The postmark seemed to convince Karpis.

“And what about you?” Lukas asked. “How do I know you’re a partisan?”

“You might recognize me, for one thing. I was the mayor of Panevezys before the war.”

“Not my part of the country.”

“I’m the brother of the late president’s wife.”

Lukas looked him over. The late president had installed many of his wife’s relatives in the government. Poor former mayor. He would have lived the life of striped pants and municipal receptions until the war—a soft life. How did men like that survive now?

“Bring me up to date with the situation in the country,” said Lukas.

“We don’t carry out many missions anymore. We’re hard up for food and we’re out of touch with most of the other partisan groups. We just try to survive now. We haven’t actually fired on anyone in months. We’re down to collecting information and printing up newspapers whenever we can find the ink and the paper.”

“It sounds bad.”

“It is. What did you come here for? If I had a way out, I’d take it and never come back.”

Lukas glanced at Rudis. The man was looking more unhappy than ever, if that was possible. He had even let some of his precious curls slip out from under his cap.

“If you want, we can help you a little,” said Karpis. “My men and I can escort you to the frontier of the next partisan district. It’s true we’ve lost touch with them, but we might be able to use some of the old contacts.”

“How many men can you spare?”

“There are three of you, right?” asked Karpis.

“That’s right.”

“Then I could send along four or five escorts. We’re short of manpower—I’ll come along too.”

“Are you sure you want to go yourself?” Lukas asked.

“Don’t worry. I look old, but I’m tough.”

They agreed to confirm their plans the next day. Then it would take a couple more days to gather up the men, who were scattered in pairs in small bunkers, getting ready to settle in for the winter.

After Karpis left, Shimkus came out of the woods and Lukas told him what Karpis had said. Rudis corrected him twice on details, and Lukas told him to shut up. Rudis sulked.

“There’s something I don’t like about Karpis,” said Lukas.

“What’s that?”

“His long leather coat. It’s the kind of thing you might wear in the city to cover a revolver in your pocket, but out in the country it doesn’t make sense. It would get caught on branches, or all bunched up when you were crawling into a bunker.”

“Maybe he just uses it for special occasions,” said Shimkus, smiling at his own joke.

“What did you think?” Lukas asked Rudis, trying to mollify him.

“I don’t see why he’d lie to us. I think the greater danger comes from the farmer.”

They radioed Stockholm again to say they had made contact with a partisan code-named Karpis. Unsure of his own intuition about Karpis, Lukas asked for instructions. Six hours later the reply came in, terse, the exasperation clear even in the brevity of the message: Follow the plan. Use partisan contact to gain access to Lozorius.

Karpis did not return the next day as planned, but all plans were contingent. They changed the placement of their camp and permitted themselves a small fire, which Rudis tended, breaking sticks into shorter and shorter pieces until they could not be made any smaller. Lukas cleaned his gun, sensing Shimkus’s eyes on him.

Lukas tried to be calm and methodical for the sake of the two men, but it was hard to keep up appearances. One was too nervous and the other was undisciplined. In his other partisan bands he had relied on the men with him, but these men did not fill him with confidence. And he could not forget Karpis’s long coat.

“We could just go across country on our own,” said Lukas.

“Why would we want to do that?” asked Shimkus. Rudis just looked at him, his eyes giving away his alarm. Lukas did not press the matter.

That night Lukas offered to take second watch. When Shimkus woke him at one in the morning, he put the strap of the rifle across his shoulder and walked out beyond the perimeter of firelight. He waited there a half-hour until he was sure Shimkus was asleep, and then he came in closer, lifted his knapsack and carried it a little farther away where no one would hear him rustling through it. He unpacked whatever he considered too heavy, leaving the radio and most of his ammunition. He dabbed the soles of his boots with lamp oil. He checked the map in the campfire light, took a compass bearing and walked to the edge of the forest before cutting across country on his own.

When Karpis appeared the next day, he came with five other men dressed in short woollen jackets with turtlenecks underneath and woollen caps on their heads. They carried a variety of sidearms and two types of light automatic rifles—the kind with the banana clip below the barrel and the kind with the round pan above. None of these weapons was of much use because they found Shimkus covering Rudis, who was sitting on the ground, his jacket pulled behind his back pinning his arms, and his hands tied at the wrists for good measure. His hat was askew and his pretty hair spilled down one side of his head. He had a bump on his forehead and was bleeding from it, the blood running down over his eye.

“Thank God you’ve arrived,” said Shimkus.

“Where’s the other one?” Karpis asked.

“He took off in the night without any warning.”

“Why didn’t you go with him?”

“I would have, but he didn’t give me a chance. This one wanted to follow after him this morning, but we don’t even know what direction he headed in, and he left the radio behind. This one is the radio operator. We can use him.”

Karpis swore. “It would have been better to stick with the other one. He’s the big fish. Then we would have taken both of them.”

Moscow was going to be unhappy about this, and unhappy Moscow put pressure to bear on Vilnius, and they would put pressure on him.