In the distance there was some sort of demonstration underway-in Trieste there usually was. Yugoslavs wanting the Italians out, Italians wanting the Yugoslavs out, everyone keen to see the backs of the Brits and the Yanks.
Russell thanked Dempsey for the lift, and took the first turning into the Old City’s maze of narrow streets and alleys. His hostel was on a small plaza nestling beneath the steep slope of St Giusto’s hill, a Serb family business which he had judged much cleaner than its Italian neighbour. The supply of hot water was, at best, sporadic, and his clothes always came back from washing looking remarkably untouched by soap; but he liked the proprietor Marko and his ever-cheerful wife, Mira, not to mention their seven or eight children, several of whom were almost always guaranteed to be blocking the staircase with some game or other.
There was no one at the desk, no letters for him in the pigeonhole, and only one daughter on the stairs, twirling hair between her fingers and deep in a book. Russell worked his way around her and let himself into his home away from home, a room some five metres square, with an iron bedstead and faded rug, an armchair that probably remembered the Habsburgs, and, by day, a wonderful view of receding roofs and the distant Adriatic. The bathroom he shared with his mostly Serbian fellow guests was just across the hall.
Russell lay down on the over-soft bed, disappointed but hardly surprised by the lack of a letter from Effi-even when ‘resting’, she had never been a great correspondent. To compensate, he re-read the one from Paul which had arrived a few days earlier. As usual, his son’s written language was strangely, almost touchingly, formal. He was marrying Marisa on Friday the 10th of September, and the two of them hoped that Effi and his father would do them the honour of attending the ceremony at St Mary’s in Kentish Town. Solly Bernstein, Russell’s long-time British agent and Paul’s current employer, would be giving the bride away, Marisa’s parents having died in a Romanian pogrom. Solly also sent his love, and wanted to know where the new story was.
‘I’m working on it,’ Russell muttered to himself. London, like September, seemed a long way away.
He looked at his watch and heaved himself back up-he had a meeting with a source that evening, and was hungry enough to eat dinner first. There was still no one on the desk downstairs, and the drunken English private hovering in the doorway was looking for a less salubrious establishment. Russell gave him directions to the Piazza Cavana, and watched the man weave unsteadily off down the cobbled street. Removing his trousers without falling over was likely to prove a problem. The restaurants on the Villa Nuova were already doing good business, with some hardy souls sitting out under the stars with their coats buttoned up. Russell found an inside table, ordered pollo e funghi, and sat there eating buttered ciabatta with his glass of Chianti, remembering his and Effi’s favourite trattoria on Ku’damm, back when the Nazis were just a bad dream.
An hour or so later, he was back in the Old City, climbing a narrow winding street toward the silhouetted castle. A stone staircase brought him to the door of a run-down delicatessen, whose back room doubled as a restaurant. There were only four tables, and only one customer-a man of around forty, with greased-back black hair and dark limpid eyes in a remarkably shiny face. He wore a cheap suit over a collarless shirt, and looked more than ready to play himself in a Hollywood movie.
‘Meester Russell,’ the man said, rising slightly to offer his hand after wiping it on a napkin. A plate with two thoroughly stripped chicken bones sat on the dirty tablecloth, along with a half-consumed bottle of red wine.
‘Mister Artucci.’
‘Call me Fredo.’
‘Okay. I’m John.’
‘Okay, John. A glass,’ he called over his shoulder, and a young woman in a grey dress almost ran to the table with one. ‘You can close now,’ Artucci told her, pouring wine for Russell. ‘My friend Armando tell me you interest in Croats. Father Kozniku, who run Draganovic’s office here in Trieste. Yes?’
Russell heard the woman let herself out, and close the door behind her. ‘I understand your girlfriend works in the office,’ he began. ‘I’d like to meet her.’
Artucci shook his head sadly. ‘Not possible. And I know everything from her. But money talks first, yes?’
‘Always,’ Russell wryly agreed, and spent the next few minutes patiently lowering the Italian’s grossly inflated expectations to something he could actually afford.
‘So what you know now?’ Artucci asked, lighting a cigarette that smelled even worse than Kuznakov’s brand.
Russell gave him a rundown. The whole business had come to his attention while on a fortnight’s secondment to the CIC office in Salzburg the previous year. The Americans, having decided not to prosecute a Croatian priest named Cecelja for war crimes, had started employing him as a travel operator for people they wanted out of Europe. As he investigated the latter over the next few months, it became clear to Russell that Cecelja, far from working alone, was just one cog of a much larger organisation, which was run from inside the Vatican by another Croatian priest named Krunoslav Draganovic. Using a whole network of priests, including Father Kozniku here in Trieste, Draganovic was selling and arranging passage out of Central and Eastern Europe for all sorts of refugees and fugitives.
The Americans called the whole business a ‘Rat Line’, but Russell doubted they knew just how varied the ‘rats’ had become. In addition to those thoroughly debriefed Soviet defectors whom the American CIC was set on saving from MGB punishment, Russell had so far identified fugitive Nazis, high-ranking Croat veterans of the fascist Ustashe, and a wide selection of all those Eastern European boys’ clubs which had clung to Hitler’s grisly bandwagon. The Americans were paying Draganovic $1,500 per person for their evacuees; but the others, for all he knew, were charity cases.
Artucci listened patiently, then blew out smoke. ‘So, what are your questions?’
‘Well, first off-are Draganovic and his people just in it for the money? Or are they politically motivated, using the money they get from the Americans to subsidise a service for their right-wing friends?’
‘Mmm,’ Artucci articulated, as if savouring the question’s complexity. ‘A little of both, I think. They like money; they don’t like communists. All same, in the end.’
‘That’s not very helpful,’ Russell told him, putting down a marker.
‘Well, what I say? I no see inside Draganovic mind. But Croat people he help-they kill for fifteen dollar. They only see fifteen hundred in dreams.’
‘Okay. So, as far as you know, have the Americans only bought exits for Soviet defectors and refugees? Or have they shelled out for Nazis and Ustashe as well?’ This was the key question in many ways. If the Americans, for whatever twisted political reasons, were helping certain war criminals escape Europe and justice, then he had a real story. Not one his American bosses in Berlin would want published, but with any luck at all they would never know the source. For more than a year now, Russell had been using a fictitious by-line for the stories which might upset one or both of his Intelligence employers, and the elusive Jakob Bruning was becoming one of European journalism’s more respected voices. As far as Russell knew, only Solly and Effi were aware that he and Bruning were one and the same.
Artucci was pondering his question. ‘Is difficult,’ he said at last. ‘How I say? All these people-the Americans, the British, Draganovic and his people-they all have agenda, yes? This Rat Line just one piece. I don’t know if Americans pay Draganovic for Nazis or Ustashe to escape, but they all talk to others-Americans here in Trieste; and British, they talk to Ustashe, give them guns. And everyone know they help Pavelic escape, everyone. Why they do that, if not to please his Krizari, the men they want to fight Tito and the Russians?’