The Black Mountain

He closed his eyes and sat and breathed. After a little his eyes opened, and he spoke. "The river is at its highest now. This is the Zeta, you see where it joins the Moracha. Over there is the old Turkish town. In my 159 boyhood only Albanians lived there, and according to Telesio only a few of them have left since Tito broke with Moscow." "Thanks. When you finish telling me about the Albanians, tell me about us. I thought people without papers in Communist countries were given the full treatment. How did you horse him? From the beginning, please, straight through." He reported. It was a nice enough spot, with the trees sporting new green leaves, and fresh green grass that needed mowing, and patches of red and yellow and blue flowers, and with enough noise from the river for him to disregard the people passing by along the path. When he had finished I looked it over a little and asked a few questions, and then remarked, "Okay. All I could do was watch to see if you reached in your pocket for the lullaby. Did Stritar sick Jube on us?" "I don't know." "If he did he needs some new personnel." I looked at my wrist. "It's after six o'clock. What's next -- look for a good haystack while it's daylight?" "You know what we came to Podgorica for." I crossed my legs jauntily to show that I could. "I would like to make a suggestion. 160 Extreme stubbornness is all very well when you're safe at home with the chain-bolt on the door, and if and when we're back there, call it Podgorica if you insist. But here it wouldn't bust a vein for you to call it Titograd." "These vulgar barbarians have no right to degrade a history and deform a culture." "No, and they have no right to give two American citizens the works, but they can and probably will. You can snarl 'Podgorica' at them while they're making you over. Are we waiting here for something?" "No." "Shall I go tie Jube to a tree?" "No. Ignore him." "Then why don't we go?" "Confound it, my feet!" "What they need," I said sympathetically, "is exercise, to stimulate circulation. After a couple of weeks of steady walking and climbing you won't even notice you have feet." "Shut up." "Yes, sir." He closed his eyes. In a minute he opened them again, slowly bent his left knee, and got his left foot flat on the ground, then his right. "Very well," he said grimly, and stood up. 161 Chapter 9 It was a two-story stone house on a narrow cobbled street, back some three hundred yards from the river, with a tiny yard in front behind a wooden fence that had never been painted. If I had been Yugoslavia I would have spent a fair fraction of the fifty-eight million from the World Bank on paint. We had covered considerably more than three hundred yards getting there because of a detour to ask about Grudo Balar at the house where he had lived years before in his youth � a detour, Wolfe explained, which we bothered to make only because he had mentioned Balar to Gospo Stritar. The man who answered the door to Wolfe's knock said he had lived there only three years and had never heard of anyone named Balar, so we crossed him off. When the door was opened to us at the two-story house on the narrow cobbled street I stared in surprise. It was the daugh- 162 ter of the owner of the haystack who had changed her clothes in our honor. Then a double take showed me that this one was several years older and a little plumper, but otherwise she could have been a duplicate. Wolfe said something, and she replied and turned her head to call within, and in a moment a man appeared, replaced her on the threshold, and spoke in SerboCroat. "I'm Danilo Vukcic. Who are you?" I won't say I would have spotted him in a crowd, for he didn't resemble his Uncle Marko much superficially, but he was the same family all right. He was a little taller than Marko had been, and not so burly, and his eyes were set deeper, but his head sat exactly the same and he had the same wide mouth with full lips -- though it wasn't Marko's mouth, because Marko had spent a lot of time laughing, and this nephew didn't look as if he had laughed much. "If you would step outside?" Wolfe suggested.