He nodded and then, almost as an afterthought, held out his right hand. It was a big, hard hand, but he didn’t use it to show how tough he was. He wouldn’t need to. When I was inside he kept the door ajar and said something in soft Serbo-Croatian. The three cats scampered in and trotted down a hall toward the rear of the house.
“Belong to the kids,” Jones said gruffly. We went into a sitting room and he waved me to an overstuffed chair that was covered with a worn plum-colored fabric. It matched the sofa that Jones lowered himself into. There were some crude oils on the walls of mountain scenes, along with the stuffed heads of a large buck and a wild-eyed wolf. There was also a framed photograph of some smiling men in various uniforms in what looked to be a forest setting who toasted the camera with their canteen cups. They had rifles and submachine guns slung over their shoulders. A white tile stove gave off heat in one corner. The floor was covered with dark Oriental rugs.
Jones sat on the couch, leaning forward, his forearms resting on his knees. He had a careful, watchful face, heavy-chinned and full-lipped, with a blunt, strong nose and a deep, frowning V between his thick eyebrows. Harsh lines, almost furrows, formed trenches around his mouth. I judged him to be somewhere between fifty and fifty-five.
“You want to get in touch with Tavro,” he said, making it a statement. “When?”
“Tonight.”
He nodded. “Okay. I’ll get word to him. You want to meet at that same place?”
“The Impossible?”
He nodded.
“That’s fine,” I said.
“What time?”
“Late. Around ten.”
He nodded again as the gray-haired woman came in carrying a beaten brass tray with three cups and three glasses on it. The tortoiseshell cat followed her into the room and jumped up on Jones’s lap. He stroked its head with one large hand and it turned on its purring machine. “This is the wife,” Jones said as the woman offered me the coffee and slivovica. “She doesn’t speak much English.” He said something in Serbo-Croatian and the woman smiled at me. Despite the gray hair and drab dress, she was glowingly attractive and it was obvious that she once had been pretty, perhaps even beautiful. I said thank you and she smiled again and then served Jones.
“You’ve been here a long time, I understand,” I said.
“Since forty-eight,” he said. “It was as soon as I could get back in. We got married then.”
“Have you been back to the States since?”
“No, but I got a kid over there now, my oldest boy. He’s going to Brown on a scholarship.” He paused to drain his slivovica in a quick gulp. “Tavro told you about me being with the Partisans, didn’t he?”
“He mentioned it.”
“They parachuted me in. September of forty-four.”
“OSS?”
His eyes narrowed slightly, some, but not much. “Yeah, OSS. I was a radio man, but the radio got busted in the drop so they handed me a machine gun instead. That’s what I did until it was over. I met Roza here Christmas Day, 1944.” His wife brightened and smiled at the sound of her name. She sat in a straight-backed chair, her feet barely touching the floor, and sipped her coffee and plum brandy, politely following the conversation with her eyes, if not with her ears.
“Where’d you know Tavro?” I said.
“U šume — in the woods,” Jones said. “He was Rankovic’s dog robber. We got to know each other pretty well and we’ve kept in touch over the years. We’ve gone hunting some together. He was with me when I got that wolf up there.”
“He told you I’m getting him out,” I said.
Jones gave me a long, level stare before he replied. “He told me that you were going to try.”
“He says he’s afraid of being killed.”
Once again Jones was silent before he made his comment, as if he had only so many phrases to spend and he didn’t want to part with any of them carelessly. “He’s a Serb,” he said finally.
“What’s that mean?”
Jones turned his heavy head toward his wife and spoke to her in Serbo-Croatian. She smiled, nodded, gathered up our glasses and cups on the tray, and headed toward the rear of the house. The cat jumped off Jones’s lap and followed her, its tail a moving exclamation mark. “She’s a Serb, too,” Jones said. “If I asked her how were things in town today, she might say fine, and let it go at that, or she might take the rest of the afternoon to tell me, part of the time laughing about what happened and part of the time crying, even if she did no more than buy some thread. But if she’s in the mood, she can make buying a spool of thread a hell of an adventure that’s full of all sorts of meaning. If she’s in the mood and most of the time, being a Serb, she is. Tavro’s like that.”
“You mean he’s not in any danger?”
“I mean he’s a Serb and if he thinks he’s in danger of being killed, he likes to talk about it. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t. I think he is, but then I’m just a construction worker.”
“Why?”
“You mean why do I think he’s in danger?”
“That’s right.”
“You follow the politics here closely?”
“Some.”
“You remember in sixty-six when they were talking about a public trial for Rankovic?”
“Yes.”
“But nothing came of it?”
“Yes.”
“You know why?”
“Not really.”
“Well, one, it would be like putting the American Secretary of State on trial. What’s his name — uh—”
“Rogers.”
“Rogers, yeah. I keep thinking Rusk, but it’s Rogers now. But it would be like putting Rusk or Rogers on trial for treason. That’s one. Now suppose Rusk or Rogers was not only Secretary of State, but also head of the FBI and the CIA combined. What if he was that?”
“I thought Rankovic was vice-president.”
“He was, but what the hell does an American vice-president do?”
“You’re right.”
“So what if it was like I said?”
“It would scare Congress silly,” I said.
“Especially if it was brought out that the Secretary of State had bugged not only the White House, but also the offices and homes of the entire cabinet and had it fixed up so that he could listen in on all their phone calls from his own bedroom.”
“Is that what the setup was?”
“The big shots live out in a fancy Belgrade suburb called Dedinje. Rankovic lived at twenty-five Uzicka Street. The telephone system was rigged so that he was tapped into any house that had a lower number than his. Tito’s address is fifteen Uzicka. Hell, there was even a tap on the phone in Tito’s bedroom. It was all in the papers. So they kicked Rankovic out of the party, fired him as vice-president and head of the UDBA, but refused to give him a public trial. Guess why?”
“He might embarrass somebody.”
“Enough to fill a graveyard. Everything they accused Rankovic of doing, they’d done, too, and that means kickbacks, importing cars tax free and then selling them, letting the government pay for their fancy villas, operating private gambling joints, even using convict labor. You name it. Rankovic had the goods on them and when he wasn’t monitoring those phones, guess who was?”
“Tavro,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“And he know all the dirt.”
“Most of it anyway.”
“So somebody’s scared that he’ll talk.”
“They should be.”
“But it all happened in 1966,” I said.
Jones took his time to remove a cigarette from a leather case. He looked at it, rolled it in his fingers, and then lit it with a match. “Tito was born in 1892,” he said. “How much longer you give him?”
“I see what you mean.”
“It’s a nice job,” Jones said, “and a lot of people want it. Now if you thought you might be in line for it, and there was somebody around who might know something that would embarrass you, you might just make a wish that this person would disappear.”