Kotacek walked through first. Ferenc produced a small black automatic from his jacket pocket. For a moment I thought he might shoot Kotacek in the back. At the time I would not have stopped him. Then he sighed and presented me with the gun.
“You may need this.”
“I hope not.”
“Perhaps one day you will come back to Hungary, without such baggage as this.”
“I hope to.”
“You will be welcome with us.”
“You are kind, and generous.”
“The gun,” he said. “Should the situation change, should you have occasion to kill the Slovak, I would be pleased if you saw fit to use the gun.”
He turned without a handshake and walked back to his friend’s car. I hesitated only for a moment, then crossed through the break in the Hungarian fence, walked twenty yards to my right, found the break in the Yugoslav fence and crossed into Yugoslavia. I looked at the gun, at Kotacek, and over my shoulder. Ferenc was driving back toward Budapest. I put the gun in my pocket.
With Kotacek I had played the earnest Nazi, with Ferenc the liberal anti-fascist revolutionary. I examined my own feelings, the hatred I felt for my sloppy, sickly loud-mouthed cargo, and then I thought of my speech in Pisek, my address to the Bund. How the words had leaped from my throat with a will of their own. How role-playing had carried me along.
I thought of the Red Queen’s advice to Alice. Speak French when you can’t think of the English for a thing, walk with your toes turned out, and remember who you are.
Remember who you are. It was not all that easy, and getting harder all the time.
Chapter 14
There was a time when they described the Balkans as the patchwork quilt of Europe. Since then the Iron Curtain had descended and the Soviet army had dyed the old quilt a uniform shade of red. Yet Yugoslavia remained the old Balkan patchwork quilt in microcosm.
In a way, the nation was like a carefully assembled jigsaw puzzle. From a distance one saw only the picture which had been created, one of progress and peace and harmony, independence from Russia, industrial progress, increasing westernization, a burgeoning tourist trade, and so on. But closer up the cracks appeared. Closer up one saw that the whole was composed of an infinity of little oddly shaped pieces held precariously together. Croatians, Serbs, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Hercegovinians, Macedonians, all carefully if tenuously interlocked in a pattern called Yugoslavia.
A delightful country.
We crossed the border near Subotica, in the Serbian province of Voyvodina. We passed southward through the country step by careful step, making more stops than a milk train, moving from one band of fanatics to another. In Subotica we were received by two old women, spinsters, sisters, who claimed to be vaguely but directly related to the last king of Yugoslavia. They were monarchists and prayed for the restoration of a Serbian king to the Yugoslav throne. They fed us, we bathed, and they summoned a great-nephew of theirs with a horsecart. He had no idea of our politics and didn’t seem to have much understanding of his aunts’ political ideas either, but he took us twelve miles down the road before dropping us off and turning back to Subotica. We went from the monarchist ladies to a trio of Bosnian anarchists, from them to some Croat nationalists, and so it went, all the way through the country.
It took us a full week to go something like four hundred miles, although we probably covered twice that distance, zigging and zagging, going up some mountains and down others and around still others. It would have gone faster without Kotacek, but then without him there would have been no reason to take the trip in the first place. I didn’t mind spending the time, anyway. As I’ve said, I like Yugoslavia. I liked eating bits of roasted lamb around a campfire in the hills of Montenegro. I liked talking with bitter-eyed young men in dimly lighted apartments, on hillsides, in farm cottages. I liked everything but Kotacek, and I was getting to the point where I could put up with him. Not because he was becoming tolerable. Never that. On the contrary, he had become increasingly loathsome to the point where I hated him with a steady, unremitting hatred. His words could not bother me now, not once I got to the stage of complete hatred. His delaying tactics, his need for insulin, his constant grumbling, his just as constant urinating, his propensity for embarrassing me, all of this ceased to have any particular effect upon me. With or without them, I hated the man.
“What a trip we are taking, Major Tanner! And to think that our friends sent you so far just to save my neck. An old neck, too. Old and feeble after years of service. But why do they send just one man? Hmmm? It is a question I have been asking myself. Why just one man? They could have sent an army of liberation…”
Or he would decide that I was an army in one, and when that happened I would get a promotion. “The best thing that ever happened to you, Colonel Tanner, was when you came to my aid. Did you realize it at the time? Perhaps not, but it was your good fortune. Your very good fortune that you came to the rescue of Janos Kotacek. You have a future ahead of you now, Colonel. You will be my aide. My aide! You know what that means? You will live in my villa in Portugal. You will be constantly at my side twenty-four hours of every day. I have lived too long alone, Colonel Tanner. You see? It is not safe living alone. The Jews are everywhere, they never forget, and one must have a bodyguard. You will be with me night and day, my boy, and you will learn a great many things. Ah, the things I know! Matters which will be useful to you, Colonel Tanner, as you become of more and more importance in our movement…”
I do not believe he said this purely out of enthusiasm for me. It was in the nature of a bribe, I think. He hoped that I would become so keen on the idea of serving as his flunky that I would work my head off to keep him safe and happy. I was already breaking my neck in the interests of his safety, and nothing could have persuaded me to try to make him happy, so he was wasting his words. He seemed to have an endless supply of words to waste.
Another of his favorite themes was his monumental importance to the Fourth Reich. His records could not possibly be duplicated. And it was not just his records, he assured me. There were also the funds he personally controlled. Certainly the Party leaders would not like to see that money go up in smoke.
What money? “Nothing I keep about the house, you may be sure, Captain Tanner.” My rank had dropped again; perhaps the question had been impertinent. “Money tucked safely away in a numbered account in Zurich. Money that no Jews or Communists can ever take away from us. Money earmarked for Party activities throughout the world.”
How much money? I asked him that question more than a few times. It was not that he was evasive exactly, but that he gave me a different answer each time. The figures he gave me varied from a low of a hundred thousand Swiss francs to ten times that amount, a range in dollars of $20,000 to $200,000. I was sure it was closer to the top figure than to the bottom one. Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money for an individual but a fairly small amount for an international political movement. I was fairly certain the funds he was talking about ran well into six figures, if in fact they existed at all.
The money gave me something to think about. I had to worm his records out of him once we reached Lisbon, but the records did not concern me personally. They were the bacon for me to bring back home to my nameless master. The money was something else again. I did not want to leave it for the Nazis, nor did I feel it ought to remain forever in the custody of a Swiss bank. The United States government, as represented by my anonymous chief, had no particular legal or moral right to it. It was at that point that I got a shade more interested in the job I was doing. Now, for the first time, it looked as though there might be something in it for me.