The Schirmer Inheritance (15 page)

The fuel dump had been near a railway siding about three miles out of Vodena, on the side road to Apsalos. The trucks had been caught about two miles along this stretch of road.

It was an ideal place for an ambush. The road was climbing steadily and at that point made a hairpin turn below a hillside with plenty of cover for the attackers among its trees and thickets. Below and beyond the road there was no cover at all. The mines had been placed well past the turn so that, when the first truck hit, it would block the road for those following at a point where they could neither turn their vehicles nor find cover from which to reply to the fire from above. For the
andartes
concealed on the hillside the business must have been easy. The remarkable thing was that as many as two of the eleven Germans in the trucks had managed to get back down the road alive. They must have been exceptionally nimble or the fire from the hillside very wild.

Those who had died had been buried lower down the hill in a patch of level ground just off the road. According to the pedlar, the ground had been damp with rain at the time. The neat row of graves was still discernible in the undergrowth. Lieutenant Leubner and his men had piled stones in a small cairn on each. George had seen wayside German graves in France and Italy and guessed that originally each grave had also borne its occupant’s steel helmet, and perhaps a wooden stake with his number, name, and rank. It depended on how much time there had been to spare for such refinements. He looked for the stakes, but if they had ever existed, there was now no sign of them. Under a near-by bush he found a rusty German helmet; that was all.

“Seven graves,” remarked Miss Kolin as they walked up the hill again; “that is what one would expect from the
Lieutenant’s letter to Frau Schirmer. Ten men and the Sergeant went. Two men return. The bodies of the Sergeant and the driver of the first truck are missing. Seven are buried.”

“Yes, but Phengaros said that there was only one prisoner—the driver. So where was the Sergeant? Look! The driver was wounded when the truck hit the mine, but not killed. Most likely the Sergeant was in the cab beside him. Probably he was wounded too. Lieutenant Leubner said he wasn’t a man to surrender without a fight. Supposing he managed somehow to get clear of the road and was hunted down and killed some distance from it.”

“But how, Mr. Carey? How could he get clear?”

They had reached the place of thte ambush again. George walked along the edge of the road away from the hillside and looked down.

The bare rocky ground fell away precipitously to the valley below. It was absurd to suppose that even an unwounded man would attempt to scramble down it under fire from the hillside and the road above. The two men who had escaped had been able to do so because they were in the last truck and unwounded. The Sergeant had been a full two hundred yards farther away from cover. He had had no chance at all of getting clear.

George climbed a short way up the hillside to look at the scene from the attackers’ point of view. From there, the plight of the men in the trucks seemed even more hopeless. He could imagine the scene: the trucks grinding up the hill, the ear-splitting detonation of the mine, the rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire, the thudding explosions of grenades lobbed on to the road, the hoarse shouts, the screams of the dying.

He clambered down to the car again.

“All right, Miss Kolin,” he said; “what do
you
think happened?”

“I think that he was taken prisoner with the driver and that
both were wounded. I think that the Sergeant died of his wounds or was killed trying to escape on the way to the
andartes’
rendezvous with Phengaros. Naturally Phengaros would think that only one prisoner had been taken.”

“What about the Sergeant’s papers? They would have been taken to Phengaros.”

“They would also take the papers of those they had killed here.”

George considered. “Yes, you may be right. At least it’s a reasonable explanation. There’s still only one way we can find out for certain though, and that’s by getting hold of someone who was there.”

Miss Kolin nodded towards the pedlar. “I have been talking to this man. He says that the
andartes
who did this were from Florina. That agrees with the Colonel’s information.”

“Did he know any of them by name?”

“No. They just said they were from Florina.”

“Another dead end. All right, we’ll go there tomorrow. We’d better start back now. How much money do you think I should give this old man?”

It was early evening when they arrived back in Salonika. Something unusual seemed to have happened while they had been away. There were extra police on duty in the streets and shopkeepers stood in the roadway conferring volubly with their neighbours. The cafés were crowded.

At the hotel they heard the news.

Just before three o’clock that afternoon a closed army truck had driven up to the entrance of the Eurasian Credit Bank in the rue Egnatie. It had waited there for a moment or so. Then, suddenly, the covers at the back had been flung open and six men had jumped out. They had been armed with machine-pistols and grenades. Three of them had immediately stationed themselves in the entrance portico. The other three had gone
inside. Within little more than two minutes they had been out again with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of foreign currency in American dollars, escudos, and Swiss francs. Ten seconds later, and almost before the passers-by had noticed that anything was wrong, they had been back in the truck and away.

The affair had been perfectly organized. The raiders had known exactly which safe the money was kept in and exactly how to get to it. No one had been shot. A clerk, who had courageously tried to set off an alarm bell, had received no more than a blow in the face from a gun butt for his audacity. The alarm bell had not sounded for the simple reason, discovered later, that the wires to it had been disconnected. The raiders had saluted with the clenched fist. Quite clearly they had had a Communist confederate inside the bank. Quite clearly the robbery was yet another in a series organized to replenish the Communist Party funds. Quite naturally suspicion as to the identity of the confederate had fallen upon the courageous clerk. Would he have dared to do what he did unless he had known in advance that he was running no risk? Of course not! The police were questioning him.

That was the receptionist’s excited account of the affair.

The hotel barman confirmed the facts but had a more sophisticated theory about the motives of the criminals.

How was it, he asked, that every big robbery that now took place was the work of Communists stealing for the Party funds? Did nobody else steal any more? Oh yes, no doubt there
had
been political robberies, but not as many as people supposed. And why should the brigands give the clenched fist salute as they left? To show that they were Communists? Absurd! They were merely seeking to give that impression in order to deceive the police by directing attention away from themselves. They could count on the police preferring to blame
Communists. Everything bad was blamed on the Communists. He himself was not a Communist of course, but …

He went on at length.

George listened absently. At that moment he was more interested in the discovery that his appetite had suddenly begun to return and that he could contemplate without revulsion the prospect of dinner.

Florina lies at the entrance to a deep valley nine miles south of the Yugoslav frontier. About forty miles away across the mountains to the west is Albania. Florina is the administrative centre of the province which bears its name and is an important railhead. It has a garrison and a ruined Turkish citadel. It has more than one hotel. It is neither as picturesque as Vodena nor as ancient. It came into existence as an insignificant staging point on a Roman road from Durazzo to Constantinople, and far too late to share in the short-lived glories of the Macedonian Empire. In a land which has contained so many of the springs of Western civilization, it is a parvenu.

But if Florina has no history of much interest to the compilers of guidebooks, it has, in the Edwardian sense of the word, a Past.

In the summer of 1896, sixteen men attended a meeting in Salonika. There they founded a political organization which in later years was to become the most formidable secret terrorist society the Balkans, or for that matter Europe, has known. It was called the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization; IMRO, for short. Its creed was “Macedonia for the Macedonians,” its flag a red skull and crossbones on a black ground, its motto “Freedom or Death.” Its arguments were the knife, the rifle, and the bomb. Its armed forces, who lived in the hills and mountains of Macedonia enforcing IMRO laws and imposing IMRO taxes on the villagers and townspeople,
were called
comitadjis
. Their oath of allegiance was sworn upon a Bible and a revolver, and the penalty for disloyalty was death. Among those who took this oath and served IMRO there were rich men as well as peasants, poets as well as soldiers, philosophers as well as professional murderers. In the cause of Macedonian autonomy it killed Turks and Bulgars, Serbs and Vlachs, Greeks and Albanians. It also killed Macedonians in the same cause. By the time of the First Balkan War, IMRO was a serious political force, capable of bringing considerable influence to bear upon events. The Macedonian
comitadji
with his cartridge belts and his rifle was becoming a legendary figure, a heroic defender of women and children against the savagery of the Turks, a knight of the mountains who preferred death to dishonour and treated his captives with courtesy and forbearance. The facts, harped upon by cynical observers, that the savageries of the Turks were generally committed by way of reprisal for atrocities committed by the
comitadjis
, and that the chivalrous behaviour was only in evidence when there was a chance of its impressing foreign sympathizers, seemed to have little effect on the legend. It persisted remarkably and has to some extent continued to do so. In the main square of Gorna Djoumaia, the capital of Bulgarian Macedonia, there is even a monument to “The Unknown
Comitadji
.” True, it was put up in 1933 by the IMRO gangsters who ran the city; but the Bulgarian central government of the time did not object to it, and it is almost certainly still there. If IMRO is no longer served by poets and idealists, it remains a political force and has from time to time sold itself with nice impartiality to both Fascists and Communists. IMRO is and always has been a very Balkan institution.

Florina was one of the “founder” strongholds of IMRO. Soon after the momentous Salonika meeting in 1896, an ex-Sergeant of the Bulgarian army named Marko began recruiting an IMRO band in Florina, which rapidly became the most
powerful in the area. And the most distinguished. The Bulgarian poet Yavorov and the young writer Christo Silianov were among those who chose to join it, and (though Silianov, the writer, disgraced himself by showing an effeminate aversion to cutting his prisoners’ throats) both saw much active service with the Florina men. Marko himself was killed by Turkish soldiers, but the band remained an effective unit and played a prominent part in the rebellion of 1903. The irredentist techniques of sabotage, ambush, kidnapping, intimidation, armed robbery, and murder are part of Florina’s cultural heritage; and although it now takes invasion and a war to induce the law-abiding inhabitants of the province to turn to these old skills, there are always, even in times of peace, a few daring spirits ready to take to the mountains and remind their unfortunate neighbours that the traditions of their forefathers are still very much alive.

George and Miss Kolin arrived by train from Salonika.

The Parthenon Hotel was a three-story building near the centre of the town. There was a café beneath it, and a restaurant which could be entered directly from the street. It was about the size of a third-class commercial hotel in a town like Lyon. The rooms were small and the plumbing primitive. The bedstead in George’s room was of iron, but there was a wooden frame round the springs. At Miss Kolin’s suggestion, George spent his first half-hour there with an insufflator and a canister of D.D.T., spraying the crevices in the woodwork. Then he went down to the café. Presently Miss Kolin joined him.

The proprietor of the Parthenon was a small, grey-faced man with grey hair cut
en brosse
and a crumpled grey suit. When he saw Miss Kolin appear, he left a table by the bar counter, at which he had been standing talking to an army officer, and came over to them. He bowed and said something in French.

“Ask him if he’ll join us for a drink,” George said.

When the invitation had been interpreted, the little man bowed again, sat down with a word of apology, and snapped his fingers at the barman.

They all had
oyzo
. Politenesses were exchanged. The proprietor apologized for not speaking English and then began discreetly to pump them about their business in the town.

“We have few tourists here,” he remarked; “I have often said that it is a pity.”

“The scenery is certainly very fine.”

“If you have time while you are here you should take a drive. I shall be happy to arrange a car for you.”

“Very kind of him. Say that we heard in Salonika that there was excellent hunting to be had near the lakes to the west.”

“The gentleman is intending to go hunting?”

“Not this time, unfortunately. We are on business. But we were told that there was plenty of game up there.”

The little man smiled. “There is game of all sorts in the neighbourhood. There are also eagles in the hills,” he added slyly.

“Eagles who do a little hunting themselves, perhaps?”

“The gentleman learned that in Salonika, too, no doubt.”

“I have always understood that this is a most romantic part of the country.”

“Yes, the eagle is a bird of romance to some,” the proprietor said archly. Obviously, he was the kind of person who could not let the smallest joke go, once he had got his teeth into it.