SPIES OF THE BALKANS
By Alan Furst
Random House, $26, 268 pages
There is no current novelist who captures the turbulence, ambivalence, chaos and turmoil of Europe in the years just before World War II as well as Alan Furst. The antecedents of Mr. Furst’s first-rate espionage fiction include Graham Green, Eric Ambler and John Le Carre: ambitious, thoughtful, punctilious practitioners whose spycraft is filled with the sorts of flawed heroes, ethical quandaries, moral ambivalences and risky but honorable versus convenient and profitable dilemmas faced by spies since biblical times. Mr. Furst’s 11th novel, “Spies of the Balkans,” contains all of the above elements, chiseled into an intricate, complex frieze.
The site of the book is Greece. Not the blue water and whitewashed isles, or the Parthenon and antiquities of Athens, but Greece’s north: the rough port city that Greeks know as Thessaloniki - Salonika - from whose docks, looking southwest across the bay, you can see Mount Olympus. It is fall of 1940. Hitler has already taken Czechoslovakia, occupied Austria and attacked Poland. The German blitzkrieg has swept through Belgium, the Netherlands and France, resulting in the evacuation of 300,000-plus British and French troops from Dunkirk. The French have surrendered. And the Greeks? The Greeks are … waiting.
Mussolini has tried to invade Greece, but he has for the moment been pushed back into Albania, giving Greece some time to breathe freely. But not for long. “Germany would rescue the dignity of her Italian partner and invade Greece. Yes, the British would send an expeditionary force, would honor her treaty with an ally. … The Greek army would fight hard, but it would be overwhelmed; they would have no answer to German armour and aircraft.”
Mr. Furst’s hero is not a spy but a cop. A policeman named Constantine Zannis, known as Costa, who is doing his waiting for the Germans in Salonika, where “there was still a tavern named Smyrna Betrayed, located on what once had been known as Basil-the-Slayer-of-Bulgars Street.” Indeed, Salonika is itself a place “where the wars outnumber the streets.”
Zannis, who has just turned 40, favors black suits and wears steel-framed eyeglasses. He looks like “maybe a tough guy, but your friend the tough guy. The policeman.” Indeed, he is known to all Salonika as “a senior police official.” Translation: Zannis’ “particular talent [was] a kind of rough diplomacy, getting people to do what he wanted without hitting them.” And so: “Was the Belgian consul being blackmailed by a prostitute? Call Zannis. Had the son of an Athenian politician taken a diamond ring from a jeweler and ’forgotten’ to pay for it? Call Zannis.”
One day, Zannis gets a “see the woman” call. The woman, Emilia Krebs, is a German Jew married to a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer. She is part of a network smuggling Jews out of Germany. She asks for Zannis’ help - and he agrees. Indeed, he sets up a network of cops and thieves that will smuggle Jews past the Gestapo, past Croatian Chetniks, through Macedonia and Thrace, and across the border to Edirne, Turkey - asylum in a neutral country.
Zannis’ major co-conspirator in this endeavor is Marko Pavlic, a detective from Zagreb whom Zannis met when Pavlic was assigned as a liaison officer to Zannis’ army unit. It is Pavlic to whom Mr. Furst gives the opportunity to explain why these cops will take the risks that will make them marked men when the Germans invade. “What do I do if we’re occupied?” Pavlic asks rhetorically, his moral compass pointed true north, “Nothing? … Nothing doesn’t exist, not for the police. When somebody takes your country, you help them or you fight them. Because they will come after you; they’ll ask, they’ll order, ’find this man, this house, this organization. You’re from Zagreb, or Budapest, or Salonika - you know your way around; give us a hand.’ And if you obey them, or if you obey them during the day and don’t do something else at night, then … you’re ruined. Dishonored. You won’t ever be the same again.”
The opposite side of that moral compass awaits us just a few pages ahead. Mr. Furst’s villain, Hauptsturmfuhrer Albert Hauser, is an ex-Dusseldorf detective who joined the Gestapo because “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. … No longer burglars, or thieves, or murderers, they were instead Jews and Communists who broke the laws of the new Nazi state.” Hauptsturmfuhrer Hauser has Emilia Krebs in his sights. But because she’s married to a senior officer, he must be careful.
Mr. Furst has a wonderful eye for detail. He takes us to Ilka’s, a thieves-den bar in Budapest that is sorta, kinda, the anti-Rick’s. There are spies in Salonika too. We meet Brits who work for the Secret Intelligence Service, as well as Germans, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and others. Each with their own agenda, their own mission. Indeed, the SIS recruits Zannis for a dangerous trip to Paris, where he must rescue a Brit in trouble.
One of Mr. Furst’s strengths is his ability to distill into one or two sentences what most writers would bloviate into paragraphs. At the Smyrna Betrayed tavern, Zannis and his assistant Gabi discuss the impending Nazi invasion over a lunch of grilled octopus. Suddenly, Zannis isn’t hungry anymore: “I’ve had enough tentacles for one day.” Bien fait!
The last third of the book is a ticktock race against time. The German invasion is a sure thing. The problem facing both Zannis and Pavlic is how to act honorably, protect their families, their friends and their co-workers - and still survive. Zannis is also faced with another crisis: an affair of the heart. As the world is collapsing around him, as the bombs explode, he manages to fall passionately, irrevocably, in love. There’s even a surprise appearance by an unlikely deus ex machina, “a short, inconsequential little fellow in a tired suit.” Hooray: It is the spy S. Kolb, whom we met in “Dark Voyage” (“Mr. Nobody from the state of Nowhere”), and again in “The Foreign Correspondent.” There are a huge number of balls simultaneously in the air during the course of this novel. Fortunately, Mr. Furst is a superb juggler.
Washington writer John Weisman’s latest CIA fiction, “Father’s Day,” can be read in “Agents of Treachery” (Vintage Books). He can be reached at aresddog@yahoo.com.
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