Another Green World (23 page)

“We've got to be careful here,” she said quietly to Timo.

“I am careful everywhere. But especially in the Balkans.”

A stench of live coals, wetted down but still smoldering, arrived at intervals on a puffy eastern breeze that also carried smells of peppery cooking, rotting fish and broken sewer mains. It reminded Martina of the sluggish breeze off the Anacostia River, fetching odors of undrained swampland and the municipal water treatment plant.

Amidships, a ratcheting sound. The ship's gangway was being lowered. The first lieutenant took his post on the quarterdeck, fidgeting as he watched a party of uniformed men stroll unhurriedly along the wharf. Port authorities, she guessed, the sort of men who might need special encouragement to overlook the crates of ammunition and weaponry
stashed belowdecks. Captain Aristotle approached wearily from the stern, accompanied by One Moe, the most impressive of his noncoms. When Martina moved to join them, Timo raised an arm to block her.

“It might be unhelpful,” he said, “for these people to think a woman is in charge. A woman like you, most particularly. I will go. Just to make sure there are no…errors in translation.”

She nodded, though it galled her—
A woman like you?
What did that mean?— but she forced a smile, making a good show of it. From inside, the smile had an Eleanorish feel. Make no mistake: the First Lady was a great woman, Martina's personal heroine, a living saint. Yet you couldn't help noticing the strain, the wistfulness, in that smile of hers. Which made you wonder what really went on in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Ashore, negotiations ensued in plain sight at the end of the gangway and seemed to require, on the Yugoslav side, much raising of arms and shaking of heads and gesturing with automatic rifles. The American side had recourse chiefly to stoic glares and official-looking documents. This went on for half an hour. Finally Aristotle lumped off toward the harbormaster's office, a seedy wooden shed resting on piers at the foot of a jetty, in company with two of the natives. A second pair of Yugoslavs stayed behind and One Moe stuck with them, passing out cigarettes. Timo started up the gangway with a noncommittal expression. Grabsteen, always hungry for news, hurried down from the bridge to intercept him.

Martina gritted her teeth. “What is it this time?”— venting her annoyance at Timo.

“They will allow us to land, in consideration of certain…factors that have been mutually agreed upon. But there are no trucks.”

“What do you mean, no trucks?” said Grabsteen. The pitch of his voice reminded Martina of the gulls that circled the wharf, searching for choice bits of garbage. “There were supposed to be trucks!”

“There are no trucks.” Though Timo's expression didn't change, you got the feeling he was enjoying this.

“There have to be trucks! How else are we supposed to get to—”

“Shh,” Martina hissed. “Not so loud, for God's sake.”

“Ah.” Grabsteen got a shifty look. “You're right. Loose lips and all that.” Dropping to a whisper: “What happened to the trucks?”

Timo shrugged. “You don't sign contracts with a revolution.”

The other two watched him, curious as to what you did do.

“Arrangements must be made on an ad hoc basis. Forget yesterday, and leave tomorrow to fend for itself. Aristotle will sort things out, don't
worry. Only it may take a while. And there may be other factors to consider.”

“What do you mean, a while?” Grabsteen's voice edged up the stave. “How long is a while?”

Martina's mind snagged on something else. Had Grabsteen just said “we”?
How are we supposed to—
as in, not just the competent members of the Brigade, but also the rabbi personally? Did he now fancy himself a gun-toting avenger, dropping over the line with the rest of them? This terrible thought was leavened only somewhat by the near-certainty that the Germans would make quick work of him.

For no reason, she glanced up to find Ingo looking at her from his perch on the foredeck. His expression was out of place, almost cheerful. There was no figuring him. Maybe he, too, was a gun-toting avenger, a fact only now coming to light. Maybe all these guys, Timo included, were like a gang of little boys who love nothing more than hiding in the bushes and shooting off their cap guns. Leaving Martina to tote up the losses, and Sara Weiss to type the letters home.

“You know what the problem is,” she said.

Grabsteen gave her a surprised look, as if he'd forgotten she was there, and Timo's eyes flashed a question mark.

“I've got cabin fever,” she declared. “I need to get off this damn boat. I'm going ashore, right this minute.”

And so she did. Who was going to stop her?

The waterfront at Sibinik, crimped around a U-shaped harbor, fell roughly into two halves. The right held the usual things you find in any port town—warehouses, saloons, cheap pensions, a shuffle of shady characters with time on their hands. The left was more original, with small boats of varying description, none of which looked remotely seaworthy, lined up gunwale to gunwale along a broad wharf. The masters of these boats had laid down blankets on the shore or erected little stalls. Fires snapped and coughed smoke from pits banked with rubble, over which hung skewers of unidentifiable food. An open-air market, evidently. Martina wondered what was for sale.

She headed over that way, ignoring the efforts of one of the harbor cops—a very young man who shouted in some incomprehensible language, then switched to Italian and, in extremis, German—to impede her. Over her shoulder she sensed, and also ignored, Timo hustling to overtake her.

“May I ask what you are doing?” His eyes scanned the street.

“Shopping.” She waited to see what kind of reaction that provoked, then added, “I'm kidding.”

“You must not speak to them,” he told her, seriously. “Nor to anyone. Yes, I know”— raising a hand, forestalling her—” you are a freethinking person who refuses to be told what not to do. But think. The appearance of an…English-speaking foreigner—”

“An American woman, you mean.”

“— would be…
interesting
to these people. And interesting things lead people to talk.”

He was right. She didn't care to admit it. “Where do those boats come from?”

“From the islands.” He gestured toward the open Adriatic. You could see low, gray-green mounds a few kilometers offshore. “People have fled there over the years, whenever there is trouble. And always there is trouble. But the islands are very poor, it is almost impossible to live there. This”— sweeping a hand over the wharf—” is how the people support themselves. They sell whatever they can find, or catch, or grow. Some of them are said to be pirates.”

From the look of them, Martina doubted it. But what did appearances count for? “Have Jews fled there, too?”

Timo looked at her, puzzled by the question. He shook his head. “When I say over the years, I don't mean the Nazi time. I mean the last four centuries. There may be Jews out there, I don't know. They may not know themselves, not by now. They are all just islanders.”

Martina looked at Timo and then, mournfully, at the market for a while longer.

Back in the cabin, she surprised Sara Weiss in the act of snipping off fistfuls of her Bergman-blond hair.

“I decided,” Sara announced without looking around, “I don't want to be called Sara anymore. I want to have a partisan name, like Aristotle.”

Martina wasn't sure what to say. She thought Sara sounded nicer than Marty. “Have you picked one?”

Her cabinmate turned with a puckish smile, her hair as short as a boy's. “I think I want to be called Tamara.”

Nobody left the ship again that day or the day after, except for the crew on regular shore leave and a small delegation led by Aristotle that got no farther than a café on the built-up side of the harbor. By the second
evening there was still no word on trucks, and Aristotle spoke of a new arrangement involving mule-drawn wagons. Harvey Grabsteen chose this moment to say, “I don't understand what the holdup is. The pilots are probably waiting out there in the hills, wondering what's become of us. It wouldn't surprise me if they've flown right back to Palestine.”

Aristotle's response to this intrigued Martina. The three of them were up on the bridge, which was otherwise deserted, and spread before them on the navigator's bench were maps and aeronautical charts showing the terrain from here through Bosnia and Hungary all the way into Czechoslovakia. The last light of day came at double strength from sky and water through windows on three sides. Aristotle's eyes were a complementary gray and for a moment, as he raised them to study Grabsteen, looked equally ancient.

“Has your organization, Rabbi,” he said slowly, turning the thought over in his mind, “also taken upon itself the task of arranging air transport?”

“Naturally,” said Grabsteen. “We have resources worldwide. We're in daily contact with the Haganah.”

“And the Haganah are under daily surveillance by the world's intelligence services. Not the British alone. Is that where your weapons came from?”

Grabsteen shrugged. “I'm not a detail man. We needed certain things, and we got them—that's what counts.”

“Indeed. A full platoon's worth of Mausers and Machinepistole, all in new condition. And the proper bullets to go with them. And not just hand grenades, but
German
hand grenades.”

“So what?” Martina demanded. “What are you driving at?”

“Nothing really. Only that it gives one pause for thought. This confusion with the trucks, that is perfectly ordinary. It is the most natural thing, in a time of war and chaos. Matériel is desperately short, Tito is scrambling to secure his hold on power, and of course still there are Germans about, being uncooperative. So—a few trucks are misdirected, or perhaps there never were any trucks. Such things happen. But now and then something different happens. A much needed item is immediately available. A ship of neutral registry passes through a war zone without attracting undue notice.”

“I don't get it. Are you saying there's something fishy going on?”

“I say nothing of the sort.”

It seemed Aristotle was going to leave it at that. Then he turned to
Grabsteen and said, “But I am curious now, whether these airplanes of yours will be waiting when we arrive. Fueled and ready, with expert pilots, and plenty of parachutes to go around.”

“Sure they will,” said Grabsteen. Not getting it, or perhaps feigning obtuseness.

Martina said, “What is it you're worried about?”

Aristotle sighed. “I have been at this too long to worry about anything. Rather, to worry about any
one
thing. But a special problem in the Underground, which only increases as we come to the endgame, is that one never really knows who anybody is. What strange bedfellows have they acquired? What is their deeper purpose?” He turned back to Grabsteen. “I agreed to join this expedition because I am a Jew and a patriotic Czech. But I am not a puppet. I will resign—believe me—if I conclude that I am being played. It makes no difference, Rabbi, which side is playing me.”

In the end, it was mules. Mules and wagons, like something from another century.

Martina guessed it could be worse. It beat sitting on the
Paloma
twiddling their thumbs. At least she didn't actually have to ride one of the animals. Though that might have lent the ordeal a nice biblical flavor.

As it was, everything fell out neatly. There were six mules, three wagons, thirty humans: the Brigade's twenty-odd dogfaces, the Three Guys Named Moe, Grabsteen, Aristotle and the hoary Bosnian who owned the mules. They loaded supplies and munitions first, starting an hour past sunset. Sentries were posted along the wharf to discourage onlookers. The moon had not yet cleared the hills behind Sibinik. Loading went smoothly, with only a modest amount of stumbling in the dark, smashed knuckles and crates that landed with a crack on the pavement. On the whole, you might have been watching an organized military operation.

Martina figured it wouldn't last.

The hitch arose toward the end, when the time came to decide who was going to ride on which wagon. On paper, the brigade was organized by squads. But during the ocean passage an unofficial realignment had occurred. Now there were people who did not care to be crammed into close proximity with certain other people. And there were spontaneous groupings, such as Eddie, Ingo and Stu, that did not accord with the official roster.

“This ain't gonna wash,” grumbled Eat Moe, the smallest of the noncoms.
He strutted up and down the wharf like a bantam rooster, clucking out orders that the volunteers mostly ignored.

“What's the point?” Martina asked, of nobody in particular. “Why not let people sit where they want? It's just a damn wagon ride.”

“It is not just a damn wagon ride,” said Middle Moe. “It's a question of discipline. Of order.”

“Order is for Aryans,” Stu's voice quipped from somewhere in the dark.

Oddly, that appeared to settle it. People boarded higgledy-piggledy. The military contingent—Aristotle, the Moes and a handful of toadies— commandeered the first wagon. Martina was slow in collecting herself and heaving her kit bag to her shoulder, and in consequence was left with no choice but to hop on the last wagon as it began creaking off into the night. Hands reached down to yank her up, and she landed in a graceless heap amid a thicket of kneecaps and GI boots. She strained her eyes to make out who she was riding with.

It was the wise-guy caucus. The old D-for-Dog Squad, plus or minus. Ingo and his pals, Sara—no, make that Tamara—and a bunch of people Martina had barely gotten to know. She had been, as she now realized, pretty isolated of late, what with
mal de mer
and the general fretting over what lay ahead. Now that whatever it might be, doom or glory, lay practically on top of them—only a few hours' bumping along by wagon, then a quick hop by airplane into the jaws of hell—she felt strangely lighthearted. Or perhaps the pervasive mood of terror, her own and everyone else's, had disguised itself as something different, an irrational gaiety.

“Hiya, guys,” she said.

There were return greetings, and Ingo gave her a hand up from the floor planks, clearing a little spot for her between himself and a pile of ammo crates.