Spies of the Balkans (17 page)

The taxi sped away, cornering through side streets as Akos, from time to time, turned the rearview mirror so he could see out the back window. The driver said something in Hungarian, Akos answered him briefly. They crossed a bridge, then drove for a few minutes more, entering a narrow street with dead neon signs over nightclub doors. "It gets busy here at night," Akos explained. Midway down the block they stopped in front of a hotel--an old building two windows wide, brick stained black with a century of soot. "Here we are," Akos said. The Gruens peered out the window--
here?
"Don't worry," Akos said. "You'll survive. Wait till you get to Serbia!"

The smell inside was strong: smoke, drains, garlic, God only knew what else. There was no clerk--a bell on the desk, a limp curtain over a doorway--and Akos led them upstairs, up three flights past silent corridors. The room was narrow, so was the bed, with a blanket over a mattress, and the paint had been peeling off the walls for years. "If you want food," Akos said, "just go downstairs and ring the bell, somebody will get you something, but you don't leave the hotel." He stood to one side of the window, moved the curtain an inch with his index finger, and muttered to himself in Hungarian. It sounded like an oath. To the Gruens he said, "I'll be back. Something I have to take care of."

Gus wanted these people kept safe, and Akos was proud that he'd been chosen for the job. But now he had a problem. A man he'd spotted at the dock had stared at every passenger leaving the
Leverkusen
, then a taxi followed his own through a maze of back streets, and now the hotel was being watched by the same man. Not young, with the sort of head that looks like it's been squeezed flat, a brush mustache and waxy complexion, he wore a grimy pearl-gray overcoat. Who was he? A policeman? Akos didn't think so. The guy definitely didn't act like a detective; he was furtive, and he was alone. He was, more likely, some miserable little sneak who sold fugitives for cash--cash from the Budapest cops, or even from the Germans.

These people he'd hidden in the hotel were on the run, surely using false papers. And how did the sneak know that? Because when people ran from the Nazis they ran through Budapest, and when you see something often enough you learn to recognize it; you can smell it. And if the guy was wrong, so what? He was still some cop's lapdog, next time he'd get it right. Cops lived off informers; that was how they did their work. They'd tried it with Akos, but only once: he shrugged, he didn't know anything, I'm the dumbest guy in town. In the gang Gus ran, no rats allowed, there were
stories
, bad stories, better to be loyal. Akos left the hotel, made a sharp turn away from the man in the doorway of an abandoned store, then, head down, in a hurry, he walked around the block, coming up on the man from behind.

Akos carried a little knife, simple thing, a cheap wood handle and a three-inch blade. But that was all you needed, if you knew what you were doing. Only a three-inch blade but he kept it sharp as a razor, so it had to be protected by a leather sheath. As he neared the man, he took the knife out of its sheath and held it behind his leg. What to do? Slide it in and out? That would be that. Put it in the right place and the victim never made a sound, just fell down, as though the air had been let out of him. But now you had a corpse, now you had a murder, so there would be cops on the street, sniffing around. They would search the hotel.

Akos dropped his hand on the man's left shoulder and, as he turned in that direction, circled around on his blind side. Startled, the man opened his mouth, ready to tell some tale but he never got it out.
What an ugly tie
, Akos thought. Maroon, with a gray knight-on-horseback in the middle. Who would wear such a thing? He took the bottom of the tie between thumb and forefinger as though to study it, then the knife flashed, so fast the guy never saw it, just below the knot. Ah, but maybe Akos wasn't as deft as he thought, because the blade not only sliced off the tie but took a shirt button as well, which flew up in the air, landed with a click on the pavement, and rolled away. Still holding the bottom of the tie, Akos folded it in half and stuck it in the pocket of the man's shirt. The man whinnied with fear.

"Could've been an ear," Akos said. "I think maybe you should go back wherever you came from. And forget what happened. Because if you don't ..." Akos put the knife away.

The man said, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir," turned, and hurried off.

29 December. The train was classified as an express, but it never sped up, just chugged slowly south across the Hungarian plain, past snow-covered fields where crows waited on the bare branches of the trees, through mist and fog, like a countryside in a poem or a dream. The Gruens were nine hours from Belgrade, in the neutral nation of Yugoslavia, as Germany faded away with every beat of the rails.

And so, slowly, they began to believe that they had escaped. The wretched hotel in Budapest had been frightening; neither of them had ever been in such a place. But with the appearance of the little gangster Akos--what a character!--a hand had reached out to protect them. Now all they had to do was watch the scenery and talk about the unknown future, a life different from anything they'd ever contemplated, but at least a life. This optimism, however, proved to be unfounded.

They passed easily through Hungarian customs; then the train stopped in Subotica, the first town in Serbian Yugoslavia, for border control. Ten officers boarded the train and took the Gruens, and many other passengers, into the station. The officers were ferocious--
why? Why? What had they done?
One or two of the officers spoke some German but they didn't explain; that was the ancient prerogative of border guards. They gestured violently, shoved the passengers, swore in Serbian, and took all documents away for examination behind the closed doors of the stationmaster's office. The passengers were forced to stand facing a wall. For more than an hour.

When the officers returned, they took Frau Gruen and two other women into the office and made them undress, down to their slips, while two men in suits and ties ran their hands over every seam and hem in their clothing, then slit the shoulder pads in their dresses and jackets. But, Frau Gruen realized, Emilia Krebs had saved her, had told them both not to
think
, even, of sewing jewels or coins or papers or
anything
in their clothing. And, apparently, the clothing of the other women also hid nothing. As the search proceeded, the women's eyes met: why are they doing this to us? Later, Frau Gruen learned that her husband and several other men had been subjected to the same treatment. And one man, the passengers thought, had been taken away.

They weren't sure. When they were permitted to reboard the train, they gathered in the corridor of the first-class car and, as the engine jerked forward and the station fell away, they argued. Had there not been a fat man with red hair? Perhaps he had simply left the train, perhaps he lived in Subotica. No, one of the passengers didn't think so; she had spoken with this man, and he'd said he was Polish. Well, yes, perhaps he was, but did that mean he didn't live in Subotica? As the train made slow progress through a frozen valley, the dispute went on and on. No one claimed to have actually seen him being led away, but somebody said, "That's the way it's done!" and again they could not agree. Mysterious disappearance? Public arrest? The passengers had stories to tell, had seen arrests, had heard of disappearances. In time, they returned to their compartments, in accord on only one point: the man was gone.

Twenty minutes later, a woman came to see the Gruens. She had been taken into the office alone, an afterthought. While she was there, a senior officer, speaking halting German, had attempted to telephone an office in Berlin. In his hand, she said, was a piece of paper with the name
Hartmann
, and what she thought were passport numbers. "I don't know your name," she said, "but I am telling everybody who was searched." The Gruens were silent; could do no more than stare at her. "Don't worry," she said. "He never got through. Something wrong with the line, maybe a storm in the north. He shouted and carried on, then the operator got tired of him and cut him off." After a moment, Herr Gruen, his heart pounding, admitted they were the Hartmanns, and thanked her. Later he wondered,
Was that safe?
It was surely the decent thing to do but, perhaps, a mistake.

When the train stopped in Novi Sad, the station before Belgrade, a uniformed police lieutenant opened the door of the Gruens' compartment, as though searching for an empty seat. When Herr Gruen looked up, the lieutenant made eye contact with him and gestured, a subtle nod of the head, toward the corridor. He waited there until Herr Gruen joined him; then they walked along the car together. He had a friend in Zagreb, he explained, who'd asked him to see "the Hartmanns" safely through the police control in the Belgrade railway station. He knew they would be changing trains there, for the line that ran south to Nis, not far from the Greek border.

So when they left the train at Belgrade station, the lieutenant accompanied them, spoke briefly to the officers, and the Gruens were waved past. In the station waiting room, he bought a newspaper and sat nearby, keeping an eye on them. When the train for Nis was announced, he followed them along the platform and, once they found seats, paused at the window and gave them a farewell nod.

The train to Nis was slow and dirty and crowded. There was no first-class car. Across the aisle from the Gruens, a woman was traveling with two rabbits in a crate, and at the far end of the car, a group of soldiers got drunk, sang for a time, then went looking for a fight. To the Gruens, none of this mattered at all--they had traveled deep into the Balkans, now far from central Europe, thus the rabbits, the soldiers, the women in black head scarfs, meant safety, meant refuge.

In Skoplje, capital of Yugoslavian Macedonia, they sat in the waiting room all night and, in a slow rain that came with the dawn, boarded the train that followed the Vardar River down to the customs station at Gevgelija, then across the border to Greece, at Poly-kastro. At last on Greek soil, in sight of the blue-and-white flag, Frau Gruen broke down and wept. Herr Gruen comforted her as best he could while Greek soldiers, manning machine guns and an antiaircraft cannon, stared at them. Greece was at war, and the border guards were courteous but thorough. As the Gruens walked toward the waiting train, a man in civilian clothes was suddenly by their side. "My name is Costa Zannis," he said, adding that he was an officer of the Salonika police, would escort them into Salonika, and arrange for their passage to Turkey. Frau Gruen took his hand in both of hers, again close to tears. "I know," he said gently. "A long journey." He took his hand back and smiled, saying, "We'd better get on the train."

A very old train, that ran to Salonika. Each compartment spanned the width of the car and had its own door to the exterior, where a narrow boardwalk allowed the conductor to move between compartments as he collected tickets. Brass oil lamps flanked the doors and the seats were made of wood, with high curved backs. As the train rattled along, Zannis took a pad and pencil from the pocket of his trench coat. "Forgive me," he said. "I can see you are exhausted, but I must ask you questions, and you must try to be as accurate as possible." He turned to a fresh page on the pad. "It is for the others," he said. "The others who will make this journey."

In Berlin, at the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Hauptsturmfuhrer Albert Hauser kept a photograph of his father on his desk. It had been taken in a portrait studio during the Great War, but it looked older than that, like a portrait from the previous century: a rotund, solemn man, sitting at attention on the regal chair provided by the studio. The subject wore a white handlebar mustache, a Prussian-style helmet, and a uniform, for he had been, like Hauser himself, a police officer in the city of Dusseldorf. A good policeman, the elder Hauser, stern and unrelenting and, in much the same way, a good father. Whose son had followed him into the profession.

Hauser, on a frosty day in mid-January, looked nothing like the photograph. He was heavily, powerfully built, with blunt features, hair worn Prussian-army style: near-shaved on the sides, an inch long on top. Hauser smoked cigars, an old habit from his days as a detective in Dusseldorf, an antidote to the smell of death, sweetish and sickening, that nobody ever got used to. But a policeman's lot was murder, suicide, and week-old corpses who'd died alone, so Hauser smoked cigars.

He'd been very good at his job in Dusseldorf, but as his family grew in the mid-1930s he needed more money. "You should come and work for us," a former colleague told him. "Join the SS, then work for the Gestapo, we are always keen to hire talented men." Hauser didn't much care for politics, he liked quiet evenings at home, and membership in the SS seemed to entail quite a bit of marching and singing, attendance at Nazi rallies, and riotous drinking in beer halls. Though none of this appealed to Hauser, he applied to the SS, was welcomed, and discovered that they didn't insist on marching and singing, they simply wanted his skills: his ability to discover crime, to investigate, and to hunt down criminals and arrest them. Working for the Gestapo, of course, the criminals were different from those he'd pursued in Dusseldorf. No longer burglars, or thieves, or murderers, they were instead Jews and Communists who broke the political laws of the new Nazi state. Laws that concerned flight and false documents, nonpayment of special taxes levied on Jews, and, in the case of the Communists, agitation and propaganda intended to undermine the state. To Hauser, it didn't matter; laws were laws--you simply had to learn how they worked--and those who broke them were criminals. Nothing could be simpler. By January of 1941 he'd risen quickly to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer, captain, and by his standards was paid very well indeed.

At nine-thirty that morning he stubbed out his cigar--an expensive cigar, for now he could afford such things--and slipped his arms into the sleeves of his overcoat, an expensive overcoat, so nice and warm. From his office on the third floor, he walked down to the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, where his partner, a thin, rather bitter fellow called Matzig, waited behind the wheel of a Mercedes automobile. He had to work with Matzig, formerly a detective in Ulm, but didn't much care for him, a man who took his membership in the Nazi party quite seriously, reading, in fact studying, certain books and going endlessly to meetings. Oh well, to each his own, and he didn't see all that much of Matzig, working mostly by himself. But today they were going to make an arrest, a couple called Gruen, a lawyer and his wife, Jews, suspected of affiliation with Communists. His department in the Gestapo had a long list of such people, wealthy Berlin intellectuals for the most part, and was, at a steady pace, arresting and jailing them for interrogation, so that they might be persuaded to confess to their crimes, provide names of others, be tried, and imprisoned.