“Ah!” said Methuen. “At last we are getting to the point. What has, in fact, happened?”
“Peter Anson is dead.”
“Ah!” said Methuen soberly.
“You never met him. He was Military Attaché in Belgrade, and a keen fly-fisherman. He found a way of spending his week-ends in these mountains, and last week he didn’t come back from a trip. Yesterday the OZNA notified the Embassy that they had found his body in the mountains near Novi Pazaar. Shot through the head. By one of these roving Royalist bands.”
“But how stupid of him”, said Methuen angrily, “to go blundering into an area like this with his trout-rod. I suppose he drove down there in his car, followed all the way?”
“No. He was cleverer than that. You see every week a car is allowed to take a bag down to the Consulate in Skoplje. The road passes through this area and there is a place in the valley where the OZNA car drops behind a good way. Peter used to drop himself off the car, spend Sunday in the mountains fishing, and pick up the car as it returned at dawn on Monday. Only this time he didn’t come back.”
There was a long silence. Dombey seated himself behind his desk again and began to draw on the green blotter with a pencil. “You see,” he said softly, “why there isn’t any brief? All this may be quite unworthy of our attention. Peter was of course trying to get in touch with one of these Royalist bands to find out what they were up to. It is quite likely that the Communists are telling the truth. He may have made contacts, only to be shot up by them. You see, the Royalists hate us nearly as much as the Communists do. They consider that we put Tito into power and were responsible for the death of Mihaelovic.”
“I know,” said Methuen wearily.
“Will you go as far as Belgrade. Not into the mountains, please. Just spend a week or two there and see what you can pick up. I shan’t worry if you find nothing. The whole place is under the blanket.”
“How would I go?”
“The War Office is sending out a civilian accountant to inspect their establishment there. His visa has been cleared. You could go as Mr. Judson if you wished, and stay for a week or so.”
“All right,” said Methuen without any marked enthusiasm. “It’s a thankless task. Hated by the reds and blacks, distrusted by the Embassy.…”
“Above all, no dicing with death,” said Dombey, picking his nose. “Don’t take chances.”
“What does the Ambassador think?”
“He is livid with rage. But the Secretary of State is for us this time so he can’t actually stop you.”
“When do I start?”
“When can you?”
“I want a week. I shall ask Boris for a brief on the territory. You won’t mind?”
“People don’t read files any more,” said Dombrey plaintively. “They always go and see Boris.”
“He should be on your staff really.”
“If there were any justice in the world he should have my job,” said Dombey. “But he prefers to make wigs.”
“He’s a good deal more rational than either of us.”
“Yes,” said Dombey sadly. “Yes.”
“I’m getting old,” said Methuen suddenly, standing up. “I can’t think why having once retired I shouldn’t end my days in the south of France or somewhere nice. Why keep on like this?”
“You would die of boredom.”
“I suppose so.”
“And by the way, if you don’t like this job you have only to turn it down and I’ll assign someone else.”
“Who else?” said Methuen not without some pardonable contempt. “Is there anyone who knows that part of Serbia as well as I do?”
“Let us not become boastful,” said Dombey, and he took from his pocket a roll of galley proofs covered in erasures and blotches, and spread them before him gloatingly. “At least if I retired I should have a consuming interest to keep me sane.” (He was the proud author of a monograph entitled “Aberrations of the Chalk-Hill Blue Lysandra Coridon”.)
“Butterflies,” said Methuen contemptuously. “I’ll bring you back some butterflies to knock your eye out. You should see them in those mountains, settling in clouds along the rivers.”
“Remember,” said Dombey sternly. “No mountains. No rivers. You are not to go wandering off or I shall get hell from the Foreign Office.
“The Foreign Office!”
To his surprise Methuen found himself feeling all of a sudden extremely youthful and spry. He recognized the familiar feeling of heightened life which succeeded every fresh call to adventure.
“Damme if I don’t walk over and see Boris now,” he said, and he was already walking briskly across towards Covent Garden before he realized how skilfully Dombey had baited the hook for him; he was probably sitting up there in his office now, smiling, clasping and unclasping his great hands. Methuen felt the idea of Yugoslavia skidding upon the surface of his mind like a trout-fly, tracing its embroidery of ripples. He had risen right out of the water. “I shall certainly take my trout-rod,” he muttered as he marched along. “Whatever Dombey says.”
CHAPTER TWO. Boris the Wig-maker
Boris Pasquin’s little shop was locked when Methuen reached it, but there was a light at the back of the building so he rattled the letter-box loudly and shouted “Boris” through it. The little theatrical wig-maker very seldom left the premises and there was a good chance that he was in the great rambling workshop at the back busily engaged in polishing a stone or playing patience.
In the gloom the crammed shelves of the showroom guarded their mysterious treasures — enough to delight the heart of a magpie or a child, for Boris combined his wig-making business with that of a general dealer in everything from precious stones to playing-cards. He himself was fond of saying that there were two hubs of the Empire, one official and one unofficial. The official hub was of course Piccadilly; the unofficial was Boris Pasquin’s little shop in Covent Garden. This was something more than a flight of fancy for the range of Boris’s interests did extend to practically every country in the Commonwealth.
While he had the kind of talent which goes to make millionaires he preferred to deal in small ranges of rare objects which delighted his imagination more than they profited his pocket. Shelves of china; Japanese fans; Byzantine metalwork from the marts of Salonika and Athens; statuettes smuggled from the “digs” of Egypt; hand-painted playing-cards from Smyrna; pages of illuminated manuscripts from the monasteries of the Levant; lovely corals from the Red Sea; dried herbs from China; chess-men carved in wood and ivory by Burmese prisoners. The visitors to his little shop were legion, though they were never men of title or importance. Lascars from the liners brought him precious stones and carvings picked up in the ports of the East; scholars and collectors in the humbler walks of life traded him ancient coins against gems or manuscripts. But no visitor ever escaped sharing a black coffee with him in the work-room at the back of the shop, and these business conversations enabled him to pick up a mass of miscellaneous information about foreign countries which was of the utmost interest to Dombey’s little band of enthusiasts in SOq.
Boris was a Galician Jew who had emigrated to London in the early twenties and had rapidly established himself in business as a wig-maker; but his range of interests was too large to be confined, and he rapidly expanded his business in a hundred unorthodox directions. He had also in the past performed several difficult and dangerous missions for the organization to which Methuen belonged, though he never accepted a bounty for them. He would explain gravely that the security of British citizenship was a bounty freely bestowed upon him which he felt that he could never repay. To take money for his services to the Crown was more than he could bear. “What I do, I do because I am proud to be accepted in the British family,” he would say, his hand on his heart.