“Mr. St. Ives?” It was a man’s voice, accented, a little muffled.
“Yes,” I said.
“Jovan Tavro here.”
“All right,” I said. “You name it, where and when?”
“Good,” he said. “You are quick — no nonsense. I like that.”
“Fine,” I said. “Name it.”
“The Café Nemoguće,” he said. “It’s near the Central Station. Nemoguće means ‘impossible’ in English. That is funny, is it not?” and he laughed harshly to let me know that he at least thought so.
“Very,” I said. “What time?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Any recognition?”
“Order some plejescavitsa,” he said. “An American eating plejescavitsa should be recognizable enough.”
“I can’t even pronounce it,” I said, but he had already hung up.
9
I took a 1939 Plymouth taxi to the Central Station and walked from there. With sign language, a smattering of German, and a few phrases of French, I was directed north along Gavrila Principa past Kamenica Street and then left on a street that dead-ended into a triangular-shaped park that seemed to be about three blocks from the Sava River.
The wind blew in from the river, cold and wet. There was hardly any traffic and the pedestrians looked as if they were in a hurry to get home to a glass of something warm. The Café Nemoguće had been allotted an impossibly narrow slice of the ground floor of a new office building, grudgingly it seemed, and on fair days there was room on the sidewalk to set out the half-dozen tables and their chairs which were now neatly stacked near the entrance. I suppose the café got its name from its narrow width, which was no more than nine feet, but inside it seemed to run back forever.
I chose a table near the door and the newspaper rack. The café was neither crowded nor empty and most of the customers seemed deeply involved in their conversation which they carried on in voices loud enough for me to overhear or perhaps even join if I could have spoken the language.
I’ve never tried to pass for a native in any European country, not even in London where, if you keep your mouth shut, you might have a fifty-fifty chance. But in the rest of Europe, unless you’ve lived there long enough to get a haircut and buy some clothes off the peg, you might as well have “Donated by U.S.A.” stamped right across your forehead. It’s in the walk maybe, or the shape of the butt, or perhaps the facial expression, but almost anyone can spot Americans in Europe, even if they keep their mouths shut and even if they’re alone, although neither happens very often.
So it was no surprise when the waiter welcomed me in English to his country, city, neighborhood, and café and then asked in German how things were going back in the States and how long I’d been in Yugoslavia and then switched to Serbo-Croatian to ask what I wanted to eat (at least he kept pointing at the menu) and then nodded his melancholy agreement when I told him that I’d try the plejescavitsa.
“Und ein Schnapps, ja?” he said, back in German again, and I agreed that ein Schnapps was just what I needed so he brought me a large thimbleful of slivovica which is a plum brandy of about 140 proof whose warming qualities were so reassuring that I promptly called for another round.
The plejescavitsa turned out to be a dozen balls of well-seasoned ground meat — beef, veal and pork, I think — with some odd bits of lamb and sweet pepper that had been spitted and grilled. It was quite good, as was the salad that came with it, and the combined culinary success seemed to call for another slivovica. I was halfway through it when the man with the face like an unhappy carp sat down at my table. I smiled and nodded at him and started to ask if he’d care for a drink, but before I could speak, he said, “We can talk here as well as anyplace. I’m Tavro.”
“You care for anything?” I said.
“Coffee.”
I ordered two coffees from the waiter who nodded familiarly at Tavro as if he were a regular customer. The coffee was a Turkish legacy, sweet and thick and black, and Tavro sipped his noisily.
“You know anyone called Bjelo who looks something like me but who’s about ten years younger?”
“No,” Tavro said. “Why do you ask?”
“I keep running into him. I thought he might be interested in you.”
Tavro wagged his thick head from side to side. “Nobody has much official interest in me now except for the pair that keeps me under surveillance. But since I make it a point to be here every night, they no longer come inside but sleep in their car instead.”
“Have you tried this before?” I said.
“To leave? No. I’ve had no reason to.”
“But you have one now?”
Tavro was somewhere in his late fifties, not tall but big-boned and wide, except for his shoulders which seemed curiously narrow until I realized that his thick neck made them appear that way. The neck was corded with heavy muscles and tendons that gave it a fluted appearance, something like a sturdy Doric column. His head was not much wider than his neck, dished in shape, and it turned carefully and slowly as if it were kept up there with the aid of a brace. It was a peculiarly Slavic face with high cheekbones that planed out from the curved nose which beaked toward the wide, petty mouth. It was a hard, mean, ugly face and I wondered how much of it Tavro was responsible for.
“Is your task to interrogate me, Mr. St. Ives, or to help me get across the border?”
“When I think I need to ask questions, I will, so I’ll ask another one right now. Which border? You’ve got seven of them.”
“Not the Albanian, of course,” he said.
“No.”
“And I despise Hungarians, which eliminates that. The Greeks are still impossible, the Rumanians inhospitable, and I never did trust a Bulgar, so that leaves either Italy or Austria, doesn’t it?”
“Either one?”
“Either one.”
“All right,” I said.
“When?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“How?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Tavro folded his big-knuckled hands on the table. The hair on their backs was black and white and matched the thick, shortcropped covering on his head. His eyebrows, however, were still a fierce, bristly black and the pale blue eyes that glared out at me from beneath them shone not with tears, but with a contempt so intense that it glistened.
“Do you work for your government, Mr. St. Ives?”
“No.”
“You are an entrepreneur, a free agent of sorts?”
“Of sorts.”
“Then there is none that I can complain to?”
“None I can think of, unless you want to try the ambassador, but I understand he’s pretty busy right now.”
“That fool.”
“You tried him, didn’t you?”
“It was a mistake. He offered much in exchange for what I gave him, but returned nothing.”
“He’s like that,” I said.
“Do you know him?”
“I know him.”
“Do you think there is a chance that his kidnappers might kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“It would be convenient, if they did.”
“Convenient for whom?” I said.
He shrugged. “For mankind, let’s say.”
I nodded. “When I come up with a scheme to get you out, how do I get in touch?”
“Thank you for saying when and not if,” Tavro said and took a small notebook from his dark, boxlike coat, wrote something down, tore out a page, and handed it to me. There was an address and a name; the name was Bill Jones.