“With your brotherly assistance, we have once again liberated our capital,” the Partisan declared like an actor in a bad propaganda film, so for a few moments the whole scene continued to flicker in black and white, accompanied by the sounds of one of those revolutionary marches.
“The Germans are fleeing from Belgrade again, and the stone watchtower will, from this day forward, serve as a monument to yet another great victory for our side. I’ve heard it’s already been decided that this park will be renamed Pioneer Park. Young Pioneers from all corners of Yugoslavia and the entire free world will come to this place to experience the glory of our people’s revolutionary liberation war.”
The Soviet officer knew that the lieutenant expected him to offer an even more pathetic reply, in which he’d invoke Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the great leader of the even greater world revolution, and summarize the vision of a just, classless society, but the crack of single shots and machine-gun bursts again resounded in a nearby street, while muffled detonations continued to come from the direction of the setting sun, which for some time had been hiding behind the battalion of large gray clouds sprawled across the remaining roofs.
Everything returned to Technicolor, replacing the ceremonial military music with the sound of gunfire, and the air endeavored to conceal its scent of blood and death.
A mere thirty minutes earlier the sun had warmed the battle for the city, but now the only stars that shone were those on the caps of its liberators. Darkness falls at the dawn of freedom, the Soviet officer would have mused, but clambering up his cordovan boots was the sound of a trench spade hitting human bone.
“Konačno,” the Partisan lieutenant said in Serbian from across the dug-out grave, gesturing toward a nearby fence, where his soldiers kept their guns trained on the assembly building, the main post office, and the central square known as Terazije, where, it seemed, the fighting raged on.
The Soviet officer considered how the Serbian word konačno could very easily be taken to mean “of course” instead of “finally,” given its similarity to the Russian word for “of course,” конечно. So he briefly nodded, stamped out his cigarette butt, and said to the young man that, as far as he was concerned, the assignment had been completed.
“You’re free to go.”
“Yes, Comrade Makhin,” said the lieutenant, and took off with his platoon toward the buildings at whose doors freedom had not yet knocked. The colonel approached the hole where a pair of soldiers had carefully placed the ivory bones in an empty ammunition crate.
Only he and that skeleton knew that the outcome could very easily have been (he searched a moment for the phrase that would most precisely describe such a set of circumstances) the exact opposite: that those bones, first and foremost, could have been his own, and perhaps they would have been discovered by the very man whose remains he was under special, top secret orders to find “at all costs, unearth, and send posthaste to Moscow!”
“Comrade Makhin, it seems Fritz broke every bone in this guy before they finished him off,” said the first Red Army soldier.
They may have broken the bones, Makhin ruminated, but they hadn’t broken the man.
For even if one of the comrades dared to think that their fellow soldier had betrayed them at the blows of some unbearable bludgeon, a portion of the notes from his interrogation that they’d obtained the previous winter had said unequivocally that in that grave lay not only the remains of perhaps the greatest hero of the world revolution, but all its darkest secrets too.
And one of these secrets most directly concerned Makhin, who in the spring of ’41 had stayed in Belgrade illegally on assignment. The Germans had just crushed Yugoslavia and much of the rubble in the bombarded capital had yet to be cleared.
It was agreed that he would meet, in this park, the man whose bones the soldiers were now transferring into an empty ammunition crate.
The treetops were in full leaf that day, the sky clear, but the two of them were, like all experienced intelligence officers, as relaxed in the shadows as they were tense and alert.
They exchanged a few of those meaningless opening words that expressed recognition and served to establish communication. Then they set off on a leisurely stroll, during which they exchanged but a few brief glances and almost no long, ambiguous words.
Makhin was tasked with conveying an important directive from Moscow to this man before traveling back to Thessaloniki later that afternoon. From there he’d proceed to Istanbul, where they’d failed previously to destroy the man who was known in Moscow as Walter, and who in the meantime had become the marshal and supreme commander of the Partisan army, the new ruler of the even newer Yugoslavia for whom the liberated people of Belgrade would enthusiastically cheer, “Ti-to, Ti-to!”
The message he’d brought to that park in the spring of ’41 had pertained to the new plan of the Central Committee in Moscow to remove this man from the leadership of the Yugoslav Communists.
The plan had been canceled for the time being.
The order from Moscow was indeed a little unusual, but crystal clear.
“Uncle wants you to leave the swallow in her nest for now.” Makhin rattled off this nonsense as if he were Hamlet and then lit a cigarette like Bogart in Casablanca.
The man on whose grave Makhin now stood didn’t say a word. He knew very well that nothing would’ve been different had he been the one who bore the important orders from the Central Committee and Makhin, the fellow he was meeting in the park, the one to carry them out.
They had both been taught to accept all orders without question. They were both accustomed to the fact that it didn’t matter who delivered the orders and who received them. The only thing that did and ever would matter was who issued them. The two men, just like the tens, hundreds, thousands of secret agents scattered across the globe, served in their roles so that life for the planet’s inhabitants would change forever.
Therefore the man didn’t nod, nor did he blink, but rather turned toward a woman who’d just passed by. She’d left behind the scent of French perfume, and her gait was all about everything but getting from point A to point B.
Yet, as Makhin had heard from many others who knew the man whose bones lay in the place where they’d met that one and only time, the world of romance was pure mathematics for him. The number of women he’d been with was considerable, and one might say the way he’d recruited them was right out of a textbook.
One could clearly see from the interrogation notes that the Germans, thanks to the information obtained from a detective in the local Serbian police, knew about the meeting in the park, but it was even more clear that they in fact had no clue whom they’d nabbed. Gestapo chief Helm had thoroughly interrogated the captive about his false documents and connections to the black market and viewed his confiscated weapon as the basic tool of most common criminals. But he’d insisted most emphatically on knowing the name of his prisoner. He kept asking the suspect the same question, like a kind of refrain: “Are you Mars?”
Police agents had most likely found out about their meeting through some petty informant who worked for both the Germans and the Communists, and who was convinced that the man he’d betrayed deserved even worse because he was a party defector and traitor, and that his downfall would only strengthen the revolutionary movement.