“Dangerous? It would be dangerous for us to separate.”

  “Why?” He spread his hands. “Why not?”

  I reached under the bed for my attaché case. I wanted to escape this madman. The case was not there.

  “Esteban—”

  “You look for this?” He handed it to me. I opened it and checked its contents. Everything seemed to be there.

  “You see, ‘ he said solemnly, “it would be very dangerous for us to be separated. Every day at four o’clock the Guardia Civil come to check on me to make sure I am still here. I am subversive.”

  “I believe it.”

  “But they do not feel that I am dangerous. Do you understand? They only check to see who it is whom I have been seeing and what correspondence I have received and matters of that sort. I always tell them everything. That is the only way to deal with these fascist swine. One must tell them everything, everything. Only then can they be sure that I’m not dangerous.”

  If they thought the foul little lunatic was not dangerous, then they did not know him as well as I did.

  “So if they come today, I must tell them about you. The names on your three passports, and the papers with the letters and the numbers upon them, and—”

  “When will the Guard visit you?”

  “In a few hours. So you see that it is good you came to me. In all of Madrid, it was to Esteban Robles that you came. Is it not fate?”

  In all of Madrid, it was to Esteban Robles that I came. Of all my little band of conspirators, of all my troupe of subversives and schemers and plotters, I hid sought out the Judas goat of the secret police. And now I had to take the madman with me to France.

  We took a train as far as Zaragoza, a bus east to Lerida, and another bus north to Sort, a small village a few miles from the frontier. The rest of the way was easy—I bribed a farmer who was passing through Sort in his donkey wagon to let Esteban and me hide under the hay in the back of the wagon while he crossed the border at Andorra. The border officials there suspected nothing and the farmer kept riding into France, taking us as far as Foix.

  It was almost impossible to explain to Esteban that we were not going to Paris together. He insisted that brothers such as we could not be separated and he ultimately began to weep and tear at his hair. I did not want to go to Paris. There was a man I had to see in Grenoble, near the Italian border. I tried to put Esteban on a Paris train, but he would have no part of it. I had to come with him, he insisted. Without me he would be lost.

  And so we boarded a train to Paris, Esteban and I. We got on the train at Foix, only I got off it at Toulouse and took another train east to Nimes and a bus northeast to Grenoble.

  M. Gerard Monet must have already received the cryptic note I’d sent him from Ireland. I went to his home. His wife said that he was at his wine shop—it was not quite noon—and told me how to find him. I walked to the shop and introduced myself as Pierre, who had written from Ireland. He put a finger to his lips, walked past me to the door, closed it, locked and bolted it, drew a window shade, and took me behind the counter. He was a dusty man in a dusty shop, his hair long and uncombed, his eyes a brilliant blue. “You have come,” he said. “Tell me only what I must do. That is all.”

  “My name is—”

  He held up one band, corded with dark blue veins. “But no, do not tell me. A man can only repeat what he knows, and I wish to know nothing. My father was of the movement. My great-grandfather fell at Waterloo. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “For all my life I have been of the movement. I have watched, I have listened. Will anything come of it? In my lifetime? Or ever? I do not know. I will be honest with you, I doubt that anything will come of it. But who is to say? They tell me the days of the Empire are over for all time. The glory of France, eh? But I do what there is for me to do. Whatever is requested, Gerard Monet will perform what he is capable of performing. But tell me nothing of yourself or your mission. When I drink, I talk. When I talk, I tell too much. What I do not know I can tell no one, drunk or sober. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you require?”

  “Entry to Italy.”

  “You have papers?”

  “I don’t know whether or not they’re valid. I’d rather slip across the border, if that can be arranged.”

  He picked up the telephone, put through a call, talked rapidly in a low voice, then turned to me. “You can leave in an hour?”

  “Yes.”

  “In an hour my nephew will come to drive you to the border. There are places where one may cross. First we shall lunch together.”

  “You are kind.”

  IN DOWNTOWN Milan I picked up a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune and learned what all the fuss was about. The passports were a dead issue, worthless now, a liability. Someone Had connected me to the tall man who had been shot down in Dublin. The paper didn’t spell it out but explained that the fugitive Evan Michael Tanner had stolen important government documents in Ireland and was thought to be making his escape through continental Europe. They knew I had. left Dublin under the false American passport and knew I had changed money under the British one at Madrid.

  In an alleyway I destroyed the other two passports. I broke the cases open, tore the printed matter into scraps, and tossed the scraps to the winds. I was about to do the same to the remaining passport, the one for Mustafa Ibn Ali, but it seemed to me that there might be a use for it sometime, perhaps in Yugoslavia. One never knew.

  The newspaper article described the black attaché case I was carrying, so I bad to rid myself of that, too. I didn’t know where to throw it away, so I sold it in a secondhand store for a handful of lire. The money was scarcely enough to matter, but I was getting to the point where money mattered, even small amounts. I caught a train for Venice without incident.

  Ljudevit Starcevic had a small farm outside of Udine. He grew vegetables, had a small grape arbor, and kept a herd of goats. When an independent Yugoslavia had been carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the close of the First World War, he bad joined Stefan Radic’s Croat Peasant Party. In 1925 Radic abandoned separatism and joined the central government. Starcevic did not. He and other Croatian extremists fought the central regime. Some were killed. Starcevic, who was very young at the time, was imprisoned, escaped, and eventually wound up in Italy.

  He was astonished when I spoke to him in Croat.

  He lived alone, he told me. His wife was dead, his children had married Italians and moved away. He lived with his goats and saw hardly anyone. And he wanted—desperately—to talk.

  He fed me a dish of meat and rice. We sat together and drank plum brandy and talked of the future of Croatia.

  He wanted to know I if I planned to start a revolution.

  “I will not start a revolution,” I said. “Ah.” His eyes were downcast.

  “Not this time.”

  “But soon?”

  “Perhaps.”

  His leather face creased in a smile. “And now? What do you plan this trip, Vanec?”

  “There are men I must see. Plans to be made.”

  “Ah.”

  “But first I must cross the border.”

  “On Tuesday two men must do the work of three. They cannot cover the space of three. Believe me, I know how to get you to Croatia.”

  Clouds filled the sky all Tuesday afternoon. The night was black as a coal mine, moonless and starless. Around eight o’clock old Starcevic and I set out for the border. I carried a leather satchel he bad given me. In it was a loaf of bread, several wedges of ripe cheese, a flask of plum brandy, and the inevitable mysterious documents that were my last souvenir of Ireland.

  When we approached the border, Starcevic drew me down in a clump of shrubbery. “Now we must be very quiet,” he whispered. “In a few moments the border guard will pass us. You see that tree? If you climb it, you can get over the fence.”

  He fell silent. I waited, my eyes on the tree and the fence beyond it. The tree did not look all that easy to climb. There was a branch that extended over the fence, and I saw that it would be possible to move along the branch and jump clear of the fence. It would also be possible to make a very attractive target on the branch, outlined against the sky.

  After a few moments we saw the sentry pass. He was tall enough to play professional basketball. He wore high laced boots and a severely tailored uniform and carried a rifle.

  We waited five long minutes. Then Starcevic touched my shoulder and pointed at the tree. I ran to it, tossed my leather satchel high over the fence, and shinnied up the tree. I climbed out onto the proper branch and felt it bend under my weight, but it held me, and I moved out until I was clear of the boundary fence. I had the horrible feeling that a gun barrel was trained on me and I waited for a shot to pierce the night. No shot came. I caught hold of the branch with my hands, let my feet swing down, then let go and dropped a few yards to the ground. I found the satchel, snatched it up, and started walking.

  So that was the Iron Curtain, I thought. A stretch of barbed wire one could pass over simply by shinnying up a tree. A hazardous obstacle for James Bond and his cohorts but child’s play for that great Croatian revolutionary, Evan Tanner.

  By dawn Wednesday I had reached the Slovenian city of Ljubljana. There a displaced Serbian teacher took me into his house, fed me breakfast, and took me to a friend who let me ride to Zagreb in the back of his truck. The ride was bumpy but quick. In Zagreb, Sandor Kofalic fed me roasted lamb and locked me in his cellar with a bottle of sweet wine while he rounded up a Croat separatist who provided me with a travel pass that would let me ride the trains as far as Belgrade.

  In Belgrade I had dinner with Janos Papilov. I waited at his house and played cards with his wife and father-in-law while he went to hunt up transportation. He came back with a car, and late at night we set out. He drove me sixty miles to Kragujevac and apologized that he could go no farther. Like the others I had met, he did not ask where I was going or why I was going there.

  Two nights later, I was in Tetovo in Macedonia. And there I felt safer than ever. The whole province of Macedonia is peppered with revolutionaries and conspirators. The ghost of the IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, has never been entirely laid to rest. In the years before the First World War the IMRO had its own underground government in the Macedonian hells, ran its own law courts, and dispensed its own revolutionary justice. Its spies and agents ran amok throughout the Balkans. And, though generations have passed since the cry of “Macedonia for the Macedonians” first echoed through that rocky would-be nation, the IMRO lives on. It may be found in every hamlet of Macedonia. It is listed even now on the US attorney general’s list of subversive organizations.

  Of course I am a member.

  IN TETOVO I stopped at a cafe for a glass of resinous wine, asked directions to the address I had, and headed for Todor Prolov’s house.

  It was a smallish hut at the end of a drab and narrow street off the main thoroughfare, on the southeast edge of downtown Tetovo. Broken panes of glass in the casement windows had been patched with newspaper. Two dogs, thin and yellow-eyed, slept in the doorway and ignored me.

  The girl who opened the door had an opulent body and blonde hair like spun silk. She held a chicken bone in one hand.

  “Does Todor Prolov live here?”

  She nodded.

  “I wrote him a letter,” I said, “My name is Ferenc.”

  Her eyes, large and round to begin with, now turned to saucers. She grabbed my arm, pulled me inside. “Todor,” she shouted, “he is here! The one who wrote you! Ferenc! The American!”

  A horde of people clustered around me. From the center of the mob, Todor Prolov pushed forward to face me. He was a short man with a twisted face and unruly brown hair and a pair of shoulders like the entire defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. He reached out both hands and gripped my upper arms. When he spoke, he shouted.

  “You wrote me a letter?” he bellowed.

  “Yes.”

  “Signed Ferenc?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are Tanner! Evan Tanner!”

  “Yes.”

  “From America?”

  “Yes.”

  A murmur of excitement ran through the group around us. Todor released my arms, stepped back, studied me, then moved closer again.

  Again his hands fastened on my biceps. “And now the big question,” he roared. “Are you with us?”

  “Of course,” I said, puzzled.

  “With IMRO?”

  “Of course.”

  He stepped forward and caught me in a bear hug, lifting me up off my feet and leaving me quite breathless. He set me down, spun around, and shouted at the crowd.

  “America is with us!” he roared. “You have heard him speak, have you not? America will aid us! America supports Macedonia for the Macedonians! America will help us crush the tyranny of the Belgrade dictatorship!”

  Behind me the streets had suddenly filled up with Macedonians. I saw men holding guns and women with bricks and pitchforks. Everyone was shouting.

  A child rushed by me holding a bottle in his hand. There was a rag stuffed into the neck of it. The rag smelled of gasoline.

  I turned to the girl who had opened the door for me. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

  “But of course you know. You are a part of it.”

  “A part of what?”

  “Our revolution,” she said.

  The street had gone mad. There were so many guns going off that they no longer sounded like gunfire. It was too much to be real, more like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. To the north a row of houses was already in flames. A police car roared past us, and men dropped to their knees to fire at it. One shot burst a tire. The car swung out of control, plowed off the street into a shop front. The police jumped out, guns ready, and the men in the street shot them down.

  The girl was at my side. “They’re crazy,” I said. “They’ll all be killed.”

  “Those who die will die in glory. But America will help us.”

  I stared at her.

  “You said America would help. You told Todor—”

  “I told him I was behind his cause. That is all.”

  “But you are with the CIA, are you not?”

  “I’m running from the CIA.”

  Two blocks down the street a canvas-topped truck careened around the comer and pulled to a stop. Uniformed troops spilled from it. Some of them had machine guns. They crouched at the side of the truck and began firing into the crowd of Macedonians. I saw a woman cut in two by machine-gun fire. She fell, and a baby tumbled from her arms, and another blast of gunfire tore the child’s head off.

  Shrieking, a young girl heaved a homemade cannister bomb into the next of soldiers. The gunfire ceased. Two of the soldiers staggered free of the truck, clutching at their wounds, and a ragged volley of shots from the rooftops cut them down.

  A police van had piled up at the barricades closing the south end of the block. A trio of uniformed troopers had taken up positions behind the barricade and were firing at us. Two had rifles, one a Sten gun. I grabbed up a brick from the ground and heaved it at them. It fell far short.

  Their fire came our way. I ran forward, toward the source of the firing. A youth ran beside me, pistol in hand. More shots rang out. The youth dropped, moaning, wounded in the thigh.

  I grabbed up his pistol.

  I kept running. The Sten gun swung around and pointed at me. I fired without aiming and was astonished to see the policeman spill forward, a massive hole in his throat. His blood washed out of him and coated the piled-up bedsteads and furniture of the improvised barricade. One of the other police fired at me. The bullet brushed my jacket. I ran toward him and shot him in the chest. The third one shoved a rifle in my face and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. I clubbed him aside and kicked him in the face. He was reaching for another gun when I lowered the pistol and blew off the back of his head.

  A cheer went up behind me. The rebels had fired a public building in the center of town. I grabbed up the Sten gun of the first cop I had killed and pushed forward with the crowd. For four blocks almost every house we passed was in flames. In the middle of the city, we pressed in around the police station. A small force of police and soldiers had barricaded themselves inside the stationhouse. They were firing into the crowd from the windows and lobbing grenades down amongst us. I saw the girl who had been at Todor’s house putting the torch to the front door. The flames leaped. A band of men were heaving Molotov cocktails into a second story window. The blaze spread in several places, and the crowd dropped back out of range to let the fire have its head.

  We shot them down as they came out. There must have been two dozen of them, not counting the ones who never got out the door.

  In the public square, Todor proclaimed the Independent and Sovereign Republic of Macedonia. For a thin fraction of a moment I actually thought the revolution would succeed.

  The Independent and Sovereign Republic of Macedonia, while unrecognized by the other independent and sovereign nations of the earth, did endure in fact for four hours, twenty-three minutes, and an indeterminate number of seconds.

  I WAS cloistered with Todor and Annalya. Annalya was his sister, with blonde hair and huge eyes and hourglass body. The three of us were to plan the course of the revolution.

  “You shall not return to America,” Todor insisted. “You shall stay here forever in Macedonia. I will make you my prime minister.”

  “Todor—”

  “I will also make you my brother-in-law. You will marry Annalya. You like her?”

  “Todor, what do we do when they send in the tanks?”

  “What tanks?”

  “They used tanks in Budapest in fifty-six. What can your people do against tanks?”

  While he tried to think of a reply to this dismal bit of news, Annalya and I left him. We ran around town, planning the defense of Tetovo. We ranged barricades around the entire town, blocking off every road in and out of it and concentrating the bulk of our defenses across the main road on the north and the smaller roads immediately to either side of it. I was fairly certain the initial assault would come from that direction. If we were properly prepared, we might be able to break even in the first attack.