“Fine, then set it up for twelve thirty and I’ll give them what I can.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
“There’s another thing,” I told him and after he asked what, I said, “When the kidnappers sent their original ransom demand, how’d they do it?”
“It was a phone call to the embassy.”
“Not to Killingsworth’s wife?”
“No, she’s been pretty much kept out of it.”
“Good.”
“Is that what you’re expecting, a phone call?” Lehmann asked.
“I don’t care what it is as long as I hear from them.”
“When do you think that’ll be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you set any deadline?”
“Yes.”
“When is it?”
I smiled at him. “It’s when I start worrying because I haven’t heard from them.”
After calling Knight and asking him and Wisdom to monitor the press conference, I let Arrie Tonzi watch me eat a skimpy breakfast in the hotel dining room while she had some more coffee. The Yugoslavs, I found, aren’t at all keen about breakfast.
“You’re different this morning,” she said.
“How?”
“You seem to know what you’re doing.”
“You mean I didn’t yesterday?”
She reached over and took one of my cigarettes and lit it before I thought to do anything about it. “All you had yesterday were a lot of smart-ass cracks that weren’t as funny as they could have been.”
“It was a long flight,” I said.
“See?”
“See what?”
“You’re starting that funny-funny stuff again. You were different when you were handling Lehmann. You’re good at it, aren’t you?”
“At what?”
“At handling nice guys like Lehmann so they don’t know that they’re being handled.”
“It’s all part of the job.”
“Can I sit in when you talk to Bartak?”
“Do you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I want to see how you handle someone who’s not so nice. From what I hear, Bartak’s a real prick.”
We drew the same driver and as far as I could tell the same Ford as the day before. Arrie Tonzi sat in back with me and pointed out the sights as we drove down the wide Bulevar Revolucije which I shrewdly translated into Boulevard of the Revolution without too much difficulty.
“That’s the main post office,” Arrie said and I gave it a dutiful glance. “And on your right for the next block or so is what they used to call the Parliament, but which is now known as the Federal Assembly.”
“A little architectural influence from the Hapsburgs, I’d say.”
She nodded. “If they didn’t have to put up with the Austrians, it was the Hungarians or the Venetians, and as if that weren’t bad enough, then came the Germans and way before that, the Turks and the Romans, and the Huns. There’s always been somebody tramping through Yugoslavia and telling them how to live. I don’t blame Tito for telling the Russians to bug off.”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” I said.
“I like to think it was.” She poked me in the arm. “Look to your left, across the park, and you can see the Royal Palace. The park used to be the Royal Gardens but they just call it the park now.”
I looked and decided that it was more Viennese whipped cream. I remembered that King Peter had lived there just before the war and I wondered where he lived now and if he really had any hope of living in the Palace again.
We turned left on Brankova Prizrenska and approached a bridge that crossed the Sava River. “Over there is Novi Beograd, or New Belgrade,” Arrie said. “Before the war, it was nothing but swamp, but now it’s got skyscrapers and museums and blocks of flats and lots of culture.”
“I don’t mind swamps,” I said.
“That tall thing is the Communist Presidium and Conference headquarters. Twenty-six stories high. The Presidium runs things but it’s supervised by the annual Conference.”
“It’s a nice building,” I said. “This is on the way to the airport, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I could have pointed it all out to you yesterday, but you didn’t seem too interested.”
“That’s probably because they’re all beginning to look alike,” I said.
“What?”
“Cities and towns. The European towns that were destroyed by the war didn’t just lose some buildings, they lost the flavor that made Zagreb different from Aachen, if you like to alphabetize things. When they design buildings now, they avoid the baroque and the rococo because it’s expensive and it’s not really needed and that’s fine. But they also avoid giving buildings any distinctive character of their own and so an office building in Moscow looks pretty much like an office building in Manhattan.”
“And you don’t like that?”
“Not much.”
“What do you want?”
“Hell, I don’t know. A little Tabasco in the plans, I guess. Even some whimsy. What’s wrong with a dash of fey in the design for the Ministry for Cultural Affairs as long as it lets in the light and keeps out the weather?”
“What do you think of that one?” she asked. “Got enough fey in it for you?”
It was a sweeping, graceful building which rose just the other side of the bridge.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The Museum of Modern Art,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I like it.”
“You won’t like the Ministry of Interior,” she said. “No Tabasco.”
She was right. It was a plain, ugly building, seven stories high and perhaps six years old, that was built conveniently close to the Presidium skyscraper. Inside there was the usual fuss about whom we wanted to see and where we wanted to go and while one of the uniformed guards was on the telephone, I examined a mural done in harsh yellows and reds and blues and unhappy browns that tried to portray the accomplishments of one of Tito’s five-year plans. I assumed that the plan had been more successful than the mural, but then I’ve seldom liked murals.
I never did get a satisfactory translation for Slobodan Bartak’s title (he was either deputy assistant minister or deputy to the assistant minister), but from the size of his office I could tell that he was a comer and from the ambition on his youthful face, I expected him to go a far way.
He was still in his early thirties, but when Arrie Tonzi displayed an unconsciously generous portion of both crotch and thigh as she sat down, it drew only a quick glance from Bartak and if there was any reaction other than a flicker of prudish disapproval, I failed to detect it.
Bartak hadn’t risen when we were ushered in, and we hadn’t shaken hands, and he hadn’t done much of anything other than to nod that he was aware of our existence, if not thrilled by it, and that if we liked, we could sit down. There were two files on his desk, a thin green one and a fat blue one. He flipped through the fat blue one for a while and when he got tired of that he opened the thin green one and pressed its spine down so that it would lie flat on his desk. On the page that he turned to there was a picture, about three by five inches, and even upside down, I didn’t think it did me justice.
He looked up from the photo at me and then back at the photo again. “This is your first visit to our country, Mr. St. Ives.” It was no question so I made no answer. “I hope you enjoy your stay, what little there will be of it.”
“I hope so, too,” I said because he seemed to be waiting for something — maybe to decide whether he liked the tone of my voice.
He shifted his glance to Arrie Tonzi and then back again to me. “Will Miss Tonzi serve as your translator throughout the negotiations?” he said.