Tavro looked at it closely. “It is a new model,” he said. “I am not familiar with it.”
“When did you find it?” I said.
“This afternoon, right after I got through talking to you.”
“It might not have been too wise to have removed it,” Tavro said.
Jones looked at him and nodded. “There’re a couple of other things that might not be too wise that I’ve wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “Now that St. Ives is here, I know we’d better talk about them.”
“What about someplace that we can hole up?” I said.
Jones gave me a cold look. “You in a hurry?”
“I’m in a hurry,” I said.
“If you’ll listen a minute, you might not be in a hurry to go anywhere.” He turned back to Tavro who, like me, was still standing. “What I want to talk about is—”
The woman’s scream interrupted him. It came from the rear of the house. Jones was on his feet and moving fast toward a closed door when we heard the flat, sharp sound of a single shot. Jones jerked the door open and the tortoiseshell cat scampered into the room, its tail swollen double by fear and excitement. Two men followed the cat into the room. Both carried automatics. They were young and one had brown hair and brown eyes and a new-looking scar on his left cheek. The other one was blond with blue eyes. The one with the scar on his cheek shot Jones twice through the chest. Then he turned the gun on me and I watched his finger with a kind of paralyzed fascination as he tried to make up his mind whether to pull the trigger. Instead, he looked at the blond with the blue eyes who had his automatic pointed at Tavro. The blond man shook his head. They motioned us toward the corner near the tile stove. The brown-haired one knelt by Jones and went through the three pockets of the dead man’s dressing gown. When he didn’t find what he was looking for he shook his head at the blond man who snapped something at Tavro who held out his right hand, palm up. In it lay the bugging device. The blond man took it and put it away in a pocket.
They both backed toward the door that led to the rear of the house. The blond one went through first. The one with the brown hair hesitated, as if still trying to decide whether to shoot. After a moment, he decided not to and backed from the room, slamming the door after him. Neither Tavro nor I said anything until we heard another door close, far back in the house.
“They’ve gone,” Tavro said.
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you know why?”
“No.”
“I wonder if Jones did.”
“The woman who screamed,” Tavro said.
“His wife?”
“Probably.”
“We’d better see,” I said.
We went through the door that led from the sitting room and down a hall. The first room on the left was the kitchen. It had a door that led to a small yard that faced on an alley. The first room on the right was a bedroom. I went in followed by Tavro. Mrs. Jones, her gray hair spread over a pillow, lay in a large double bed, the covers down to her waist. She was naked except for the hole under her left breast. The two tabby cats sat at the foot of the bed and stared at her with yellow eyes.
“Children?” I said.
Tavro shook his head. “They are away at school. The oldest boy is in America.”
“What did Jones want to talk to you about?” I said.
Tavro turned his mouth down at the corners, making his face more fishlike than ever. “I do not know,” he said.
“No idea?”
“I can only speculate,” he said.
“Well?”
“It may have been about my attempt to leave the country.”
“Why didn’t he talk to you about it earlier?”
“You mean today?” Tavro said.
“Yes.”
He turned from the dead woman. “I do not know.”
“Why would they want the listening device?”
“I would assume that they are not only the killers, but also the listeners. The police would find the device overly interesting.”
“I wonder if those two knew?” I said.
“Knew what?”
“What Jones wanted to talk to you about.”
Tavro looked more gloomy than ever as he paused at the sitting room door that led to the street. “I haven’t been thinking about that,” he said. “I have been thinking of something else.”
“What?”
“Those two who killed our friend Jones and his wife.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been wondering why they didn’t kill us.”
21
There are two roads to Sarajevo and after I was through telling them that Jones was dead, we took the shorter one which goes through Ub, Valjevo, Titovo Uzice, and Visegrad.
There wasn’t much conversation as we left Belgrade. Arrie, sitting next to me, was silent for the most part, answering anything I said with monosyllables or just grunts when possible. Wisdom swore at the road and the Yugoslav bureau of public highways, if there was one. In the rear Gordana slept with her head on Knight’s shoulder. Jovan Tavro stared out of the window, as if trying to memorize sights that he would never see again. It began to snow.
Traffic was light except for the trailer trucks, usually pulling tandems, that traveled in fast caravans as they headed for the town where only a little more than a century ago camels from Constantinople and beyond came down with bad colds because of the altitude. Sarajevo had been a major terminal on the caravan routes from the east. Now its chief fame rested on the assassination on St. Vitus Day in 1914 of an Austrian archduke and his morganatic wife by a teenager who got a lot of the blame for touching off World War I. If you took a long view of history, you could also blame Gavrilo Princip for World War II and any other conflict that’s popped up since then — even, by stretching a point, for the one in Vietnam. It’s something to think about and that’s what I did as we drove through the snow that fell in wide, wet flakes, cutting visibility to less than thirty yards.
“The chauffeur that the archduke had took the wrong turn,” I said. “Let’s hope that you don’t.”
“What chauffeur?” Wisdom said.
“The one who was driving Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie,” I said. “In 1914.”
“In Sarajevo,” Wisdom said. “Bad security there. Worse than Dallas.”
“Anyway, there had already been one attempt on his life in Sarajevo that day so they changed the route. But nobody told the car ahead of the one that the archduke was in so when it turned up a side street the man driving the archduke got confused and came to a dead stop until somebody straightened things out for him. He stopped right in front of Gavrilo Princip who had a revolver in his pocket. Princip shot Franz Ferdinand in the heart and when Sophie threw herself across her husband, she caught the second bullet. The Austrians took a dim view of all this and blamed the Serbs and so started World War I.”
“What happened to Princip?”
“There was a law that nobody under twenty-one could be hanged in the Austrian empire. They tried him, convicted him, and threw him in jail. He died there.”
“What happened to the chauffeur?” Wisdom said.
“I don’t know.”
By the time we passed Valjevo, the snow plows were out, trying to keep the road open. I switched places with Wisdom, cleaned off the rear window, and we started out again as the snow continued to fall, packed on the road now. Driving got tricky. I was dubious of going much over fifty kilometers an hour so we crept along, the Mercedes’ lights revealing a lot of snow and an occasional road sign which said that the next town of any size was Titovo Uzice.
“What’s Titovo Uzice like?” I said, twisting my head to look at Tavro.
“It’s a place of much liveliness,” he said, adding, “and little else. We had our first headquarters there in 1941, but the Germans drove us out. For every soldier they lost they killed as many as three hundred Serbian hostages.”