“She speaks the truth.”
“That is good. I cannot go much further; I must return soon. We are a good distance from the border, but still in Macedonia.”
“Is it far to the train?”
“There is a train in Naousa. Twenty, twenty-five miles.”
“If you will ride that far with me, you may have the donkey and cart. They are of no use to me now, and if you do not mind the trip you may take them back with you.”
“I cannot pay for them, my friend.”
“I meant you to have them as a present.”
“You are kind. But you can sell them profitably in Naousa. The animal is old but still in good health, and the cart is sound. You might realize as much as-”
“I do not need money. I have more than I need. And I would want the donkey to go to a man who would treat her kindly, and not abuse her. She has been a good companion.”
“Better than the one in the back, eh? More lively?”
We laughed. He pulled out a goatskin pouch, wadded up tobacco, crammed it into the bowl of a cracked old pipe. He lit it and smoked and called in Macedonian to the donkey. Domestic animals in that part of the world must answer and respond to a wide variety of languages. What he now told the donkey was, “Keep walking, nice little donkey, and I will take good care of you.” Whether the animal heard or not, she most assuredly kept walking.
“She is evidently a Macedonian donkey,” Esram said. “See how nicely she obeys?” He laughed again. “I will be glad to have her. You are kind. And I will treat her well.”
At the railroad station in Naousa I bought two tickets for Athens. When the train came Esram helped me carry Kotacek inside and sit him upright in a compartment. “Too much wine,” we explained to a passing conductor. “He is old now. He cannot handle it the way he used to.”
“My wife’s father was the same way. He will not vomit?”
“No.”
“That is good.”
Along with the donkey and cart, I gave Esram my pistol, the pistol I had received from Ferenc. He had expressed the hope that I kill Kotacek with it, but that was not to be. “A gun for Macedonia,” I told Esram. “I know you will put it to good use.”
“I will treat the donkey with kindness and the gun with respect.”
“And here.” I gave him a variety of currency – Czech bills, Yugoslav bills, even some Austrian notes. “I don’t know how much this is. Someone can change it for you into dinars. Give it to Annalya, for the child when it is born. Tell her I think of her often. Tell her… you will think of things to tell her. Tell her I will come back someday.”
“She knows.”
The train was slow, bouncy, boring. Kotacek and I were alone in our compartment for most of the way. Fortunately we were still alone when he came out of his fog.
“Where are we?”
“ Greece.”
“The Greeks are pigs. When we are in power-”
I put him out again. It was almost frightening how perfectly it worked.
Athens was the end of a long road. The Iron Curtain was rusted mesh, and we had wormed our way through it. There would be no more stolen cars, no more donkey carts, no more trains. In Athens we could obtain passports, and from Athens we would fly directly to Lisbon, and that would be that. I was about ready to do something the easy way for a change. I was tired, thoroughly exhausted.
Kotacek came to in the railway waiting room. I had managed to wrestle him off the train, again passing him off as a drunk, but I didn’t want to cart him all over the city that way. I put him on a bench and sat down beside him. I read a newspaper and waited for him to come to. The Greeks never bother a man who is reading a newspaper. No one bothered me, and I sat there for an hour and a half and read every word in that newspaper before Kotacek finally woke up.
I took him in turn to a restaurant, a lavatory, and the home of an Armenian moneylender named Sarkan Besmoyan. Sarkan and I had corresponded extensively for many years. Although we had never met before, I felt I knew him well enough to ask him to recommend a good passport artist, and he evidently felt he knew me well enough to oblige me. He gave me an address in the Turkish quarter.
I left Kotacek with him. “Please do not permit him to leave your house,” I said. “His family is worried about him. He is an old man and gets confused easily. I am to bring him back to his friends and family, and if he wanders about harm may come to him.”
“He is safe here,” Sarkan assured me.
I had a great deal of trouble finding the passport artist. First I couldn’t find the street, and then it developed that Sarkan had given me the wrong house number, 86 instead of 68. I finally found my man, a thin withered Turk with bad teeth and cloudy eyes. I told him that Sarkan Besmoyan had sent me, and that I required two American passports.
“Impossible,” he said. “I can let you have one.”
“I need two. How long a wait would there be?”
“An infinite wait. Perhaps forever.” He rummaged through a drawer and produced a blank passport. “Do you see this? Do you know what it is?” I did, and said no. “This is a reject. Do you see? The imperfection in the cover? When blank passports are produced, a certain number are rejected. They are destroyed. Except that in certain instances they are not destroyed, and instead they find their way to Athens. Or to Beirut – there is a gentleman in Beirut who obtains quite a number of them. But a good many come to Athens, to me. I pay very well for them, you see.”
“I see.”
“The production of a counterfeit passport is no simple matter. You see all of these lines in the paper? The intricate pattern? One cannot very easily draw in all of this. One is far ahead of the game when one has a blank passport at one’s disposal. Then one types in the necessary information, punctures a false passport number into the cover and first three leaves, attaches a photograph, impresses photo to paper with a duplicate of the Great Seal of the United States – but you do not want to listen to all of these details; that is not what you came for, eh?”
“It’s very interesting.”
“It is also profitable. I must charge five hundred American dollars for such a passport. If I had two of them, one thousand dollars. But I do not have two of them. To be honest, I must say that you are lucky I have one. Will British do? I have never been able to obtain blank British passports, but I have several stolen specimens. It is not a simple matter to remove the inks and photographs and substitute the proper data and a more suitable picture. And there is the added disadvantage that all of these passports have no doubt been reported stolen. The numbers are thus on file. The chance that someone will notice this is negligible, I grant you, but it exists.”
He went on in this vein for some time. I learned a great deal about the business of a passport forger but not very much about how Kotacek and I were going to get back to Lisbon. I finally wound up buying two passports, an American one for myself and a Brazilian one for Kotacek. I managed to get the pair for seven hundred fifty American dollars. It was the first good chance I’d had to spend the expense money I’d been given, and I didn’t really mind parting with it.
I gave the passport forger my name, age, height, and all the rest. I told him what entrance and exit visas to mark in the appropriate places. I still had my vaccination certificate, and from it I read off my passport number – F-886852.
I went back to Sarkan’s house, collected Kotacek, took him to a passport photographer and had our pictures taken. I dropped him back at Sarkan’s and took the photos to my forger. He put them in place and forged the proper seal on mine. In essence, I had managed to replace my own passport with an identical duplicate of it. The one the Czechs had taken from me – the one they had taken from my little French friend, to be precise – was now reborn from the ashes. True, it had cost me $500, but it seemed easier than going through channels.