Protocol for a Kidnapping (19 page)

“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.”

“Anyplace we could stay?” I said. “We aren’t going to make it much farther in this snow.”

“I may know of such a place,” Tavro said and I left it at that.

It was nearly three
A.M.
when we crept into Titovo Uzice and followed the highway markers to the town square that boasts a two-story-high statue of its namesake. That night it looked something like the abominable snowman. On Tavro’s recommendation, we stopped at the Palace Hotel which was just across from the park. Taking Arrie along in case I needed an interpreter, I woke up the night clerk. He was in his thirties and willing to discuss our problem at length, but that still left him with just 120 beds and they were all full. Completely.

“Ask if he has any suggestions,” I said.

“I already did. He said no.”

As we turned to leave, the night clerk called us back. He looked apologetic and with much spreading of the hands and a number of elaborate, don’t blame me shrugs he went into a long description. When he was through, Arrie turned to me and said, “He says that he has heard of a place that sometimes takes in travelers. He won’t swear to its quality nor recommend its accommodations because he himself has never set foot in it, but he has heard that it exists.”

“What is it,” I said, “the local whorehouse?”

She asked him that and he looked shocked at first, then reddened, and finally shook his head vigorously. Arrie asked him another question and he answered her with a brief, prim sentence.

She turned to me. “I’ve got a general idea of how to get there,” she said.

“How far?”

“About a mile.”

It was less than a mile and it was off the highway on a side street where the snow was now about ten inches deep. When I stopped the Mercedes I had the feeling that we weren’t going any farther that night even if we tried. It was a three-story building of gray stone that looked to be about fifty years old. It sat back from the street thirty feet or so surrounded by some tall trees that bowed beneath their frostings of snow. At one time the building might have been an elementary school or the headquarters for some regional government office. Even at night it had that grim look of utilitarian officialdom about it, but the modest green neon sign, written in Roman script, proclaimed it to be the Ritz Hotel.

“It’s the town whorehouse,” Wisdom said.

“The clerk at the Palace said no. We asked him.”

“I do not remember it,” Tavro said, “but I have not been here in several years.”

“You want to go with us this time, Park?” I said and Wisdom said he would go anyplace if there were the chance of a bed. There was no bell so we banged on the door and after three or four minutes it was opened by a middle-aged man in a red wool bathrobe. He invited us in and hurried behind the registry desk where he took up his official position.

“
Deutsche?
” he said.

“
Nein
,” I said. “
Americanische
.”

“Very good,” he said. “I can the English speak.”

“There are six of us,” I said, eyeing the keys in the rack behind the desk. Only four of the twenty-four of them seemed to be missing. “We would like rooms for the night and part of tomorrow.”

“Six rooms?” he said. “That is many.”

“Five will do nicely,” I said. “My wife and I will share one, of course.” I put my arm around Arrie and gave her a hug. She gave me a strange look.

“But six rooms available I have,” he said. “It is the slow season.”

“Five,” I said firmly.

“If I said four, could I bunk in with Gordana?” Wisdom said.

“Five rooms,” I said.

He started taking keys down from the rack. “If you will wait until I my clothes put on, I will with your luggage help,” he said, getting all the verbs nicely tucked away at the ends of his phrase and sentence. Maybe he thought in Serbian, translated it into German, and then into English.

“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “My chauffeur here will see to it.”

Wisdom touched two fingers of his right hand to his forehead and snapped, “Right away, sir, and shall I take the car for servicing?”

“That won’t be necessary. Just see to the others.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“May I sign for myself and my guests?” I said.

“Of course,” he said and slid the forms across to me.

“Our passports are in our luggage,” I said, “but we’ll send them down or show them to you in the morning.”

He nodded and said that the morning would be just fine so I signed in Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Davis of Jackson, Mississippi, Mr. J. W. Booth, Washington, D.C., Mr. Wiley Post of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Miss Belle Starr of Winchester, Virginia, and for Tavro, I signed Lou Adamic, Hollywood, California. I also insisted on paying in advance.

When Wisdom came back with the rest of our carload, but without any luggage, he got a strange look from the proprietor. I told him that my chauffeur informed me that the trunk was frozen and that we would have to wait until morning to open it, but in the meantime we were anxious to be shown to our rooms. I also told each of them the names I’d used to sign us in.

Arrie and I were the last to be shown to our room and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t eaten since lunch and that I was starving. I asked the proprietor if there were any kind of food available and he said that there was some
alaška čorba
left over from dinner and that he would even join me in a bowl. He invited us to meet him in the dining room.

“What’s
alaška čorba?
”

“Fish soup,” Arrie said. “Yesterday was Friday.”

Our room was just a room with a bed, a couple of chairs, a table, and sink with no stopper. Arrie fished in her purse and brought out a large cork. “Here,” she said, “I’m never without it. I’ve also got one toothbrush which I’ll share with you, if you don’t mind my dirty mouth.”

“I haven’t so far,” I said.

She took off her coat and put it on a hook. There was no closet “Who was Bill Jones?” she said.

“One of yours supposedly.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said he was a sleeper, but if he told me that, he had a loose mouth, although he didn’t seem the kind who would. You never heard of him?”

“Never.”

“He came back in forty-eight after the war and lived here ever since.”

“That took some doing in forty-eight if what I’ve heard is right,” she said.

“That’s what he said. He knew Tavro and Tavro apparently squared it with his boss.”

“Alexander Rankovic?”

“The same. Jones fought with the Partisans.”

“Huh.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means huh,” she said. “If I remember my crash course in Yugoslav history, there weren’t many Americans fighting with Tito. The U.S. liked Mihailović and his Cetniks better.”

“So did the British,” I said.

“At first,” she said. “Then they switched to Tito and parachuted Randolph Churchill in to show that they meant business.”

“Jones said he was a radio operator with OSS.”

“He could have been, but there weren’t many of them,”

“You don’t think he was.”

She shrugged. “What does it matter now?” she said. “He’s still dead.”

We joined our host in a small dining room. There was bread and wine and the
alaška čorba
which turned out to be something like a Slavicized bouillabaisse with lots of paprika which I found quite tasty.

“You are my first American guests,” our host said. “An honor you are doing us.”

“Not at four o’clock in the morning,” I said.

“It is the slow season. Next spring and summer will be many Americans coming.”

“Did they last summer?”

He shook his head. “Last summer we were not open. It was still the time that I must the permissions get.

“What permissions?” I said.

He spooned some more of the stew into his wide mouth, wiped it with the sleeve of his bathrobe, and tore off a double fistful of bread. He dunked the bread into the stew and crammed about a third of it into his mouth. As he chewed he studied us with a pair of pale gray eyes, the kind that you somehow expect to be blue and are faintly pleased and surprised when they aren’t. He seemed to be calculating how much of his story we were interested in and whether his English was up to the effort.

“Since The Reform,” he said, “I must the permission get to open my hotel. It is private enterprise, yes?” I nodded. “So it is also a political question. First, the Communal Committee must its order of appearance decide—when to place it on the—” He stopped and said a Serbo-Croatian word to Arrie and she replied, “agenda.”

“Yes, agenda,” he said. “Then the local organization of the Party must be consulted and then the veterans and the Socialist Union and the Socialist Youth and the Socialist Alliance of Working People. All must have their say, for serious questions must be answered.”

“What kind of questions?” Arrie said.

“Such as whether I can employ five workers or three. That is very important. Secondly, and I must to my own language go back for this.” He rattled off something that Arrie translated as, “Whether the Ritz Hotel, under the conditions of a socialist economy, will lead to a capitalist relationship or be completely integrated into the socialist system.”

“What did they decide?” I said.

“If I only four workers employed, there would no danger to our system be. So, I have four workers.” His eyes twinkled. “But also I have my wife, myself, my three sons, and their wives. They are family and do not count.”

I told him that his competition up the street at the Palace Hotel was not at all eager to admit that the Ritz existed. He snorted. “Of course not,” he said. ‘They are afraid that I will away from them the tourist trade take. That is one. Two, they are all Serbs there and I am a Bosnian.” He paused. “That makes a great difference. But soon I will have an answer to my petition. Already through the Communal Committee it has gone.”

“What petition?”

“By spring I will two large advertising boards have at the ends of the city. They will draw much trade from the roads. It will in three languages be.”

“Where’d you get the name?” I said, finishing the last of my soup.

“You do not like it?” he said.

“I think it’s fine. Ritz Hotel. Nothing wrong with that.”

“There was much debate,” he said. “I wanted to call it the Hotel Uzice. I lost.”

“Who wanted Ritz, your wife?”

“No,” he said, “the chairman of the Socialist Alliance of Working People.”

I
DIDN’T AWAKE UNTIL
nearly ten when the management of the Ritz Hotel sent a smiling daughter-in-law up to our room with coffee. Arrie was still in bed, her mop of blond hair barely visible above the covers. She peeked out at me with one eye.

“Who the Christ was that?” she said.

“Room service with coffee.”

“What time did we get to sleep?”

“I don’t know; around five.”

“Screwing’s the best tranquilizer there is.”

“They’ve been trying to package it in one way or another for years.”

She propped herself up in bed and I handed her a cup of coffee. “Takes two though,” she said.

“Or three.”

“You like that?” she said.

“What?”

“Threesies and foursies and whole rooms full, I guess.”

“Three is better than one, but two is better than three.”

“You’re conventional.”

“Backward,” I said.

“Hey, we tried that too last night, didn’t we? I like that.”

She was sitting up in bed now, her knees up to her chin. “I’m going to have to try the other some time.”

“What?”

“A threesome. You want to play?”

“Sure.”

“You’d want another girl, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m selfish.”

“Who?” she said.

“Who what?”

“Who’d you want?”

“I’ll let you send the invitation.”

“How about Gordana?”

“That’s a possibility.”

“Huh.”

“Huh what?”

“I was just thinking,” she said. “About Gordana. She wouldn’t be bad at all, would she?”

“Not bad,” I agreed.

“I never thought about it before. I mean not just like that, not imagining one particular person. What do you think she’d say?”

“Yes or no,” I said.

“How do you ask someone? I mean do you just say, ‘How’d you like to join us in bed tonight because we think you’re pretty sexy-looking?’”

“That’s one way.”

“What’s she going to do now that her grandfather is dead?”