CHAPTER 6

There are things that are done in the light of the moon, but making our first contact with the coast of Jugoslavia when we were not certain that the port to which we sailed was in friendly hands would not normally be one of them. This caused us some anxiety from the outset.

On that first evening in Bari, Mladineo left us to dine aboard the Bog s Nama with his wife and I decided not to visit the vessel until the next day. Tim had already been aboard and he could tell me about it. He and Radic and I dined together at the hotel, faring very well after giving the hard-working "maestro" in charge of the dining room a large friendly tip, then we adjourned to our room to confer until late in the night.

There was a balcony beyond the big French windows on the east side of our room. It looked out across the gleaming Adriatic. The port lay further up to the north of us about a mile. The scene was flooded with moonlight.

"How do you propose to sneak across that ocean when the nights are like this?" Tim asked. "We're right at the beginning of the moon period. Mack and Steve"—two of our fellow officers in Cairo who were on the point of going in by 'chute when we left for Algiers—"may be dropped over there this very night. This is weather for them, not for us."

He was right. The moon would not help us. The parachutists can go out only on moonlight nights, as dropping in the dark is considered too perilous; but we needed darkness for what we had to do.

"Might as well be a woman as be in this business," Tim complained; "our lives and activities could hardly be more intimately geared to the cycles of the moon—by the way, did you notice those hot numbers in the lobby as we came up?"

"You won't have much time for them," I ragged him. "When your days are over in this town you'll be ready to sleep."

He laughed: "Okay, but how do you expect to conduct a reconnaissance along the Dalmatian coast on nights like this? ... or are we going to wait ten days before we go across?"

"I don't know. Perhaps. We haven't even found a ship to take us over, so why worry? Perhaps we'll go in the moonlight. What does the Bog s Nama look like?"

"Not much good for a job like that," Tim answered, in his deadly-earnest manner. "She's an old passenger steamer, dirty and run down and slow. Engines are bad and there's six inches of barnacles on her bottom. She has too much freeboard and you could see her coming for miles. She's practically defenceless too—and she couldn't run for it if she got into trouble."

Radic said: "Why don't we just load her up and sneak back to Vis? We can find out anything you want to know about the coast when we get there."

"Are you certain that Vis is still in Partisan hands?" I asked. "Did you find out anything about that today, Tim? Are there any new arrivals from the other side in port?"

"Nothing new," he answered, "but Commander Mladineo seems to have no anxiety about it: he thinks we should simply load up and go over, as Radic suggests."

We talked for a long time. I learned that when Radic and Tim arrived at the Bari airport they succeeded in thumbing a ride to town with all their equipment in an army truck which had dumped them out at Brigadier Trollope's 86th Sub-Area Headquarters. There they had found the town mayor busy setting up shop. He had just arrived and was not yet in a position to assist them very much, but he gave them the requisition for our room and told them to stop any car they fancied—as long as it was not an official vehicle—and get the name and the address of the owner, together with the license number: he would give them a requisition for the car. But they had made no progress toward actually obtaining any transportation. Private vehicles were scarce and army vehicles were out of the question, being practically non-existent in that area.

From Headquarters they had gone to the port to visit the Bog s Nama and meet Petrinovic—and Olga, Mladineo's wife.

"What a smile she had for the commander when she saw us on the pier!" Tim said. "He kissed her a little stiffly, I thought, but I suppose he was conscious of all the Partisan eyes watching: even so, I could have done it better."

The third member of the "mission," the engineer Petrinovic, was at the hospital. I learned he had had a bad fall on the greasy steel deck in the blackout and had fractured his skull.

"Was there any food aboard?" I asked.

"Damn little," Tim replied. "We were there at midday and lunched with them. It was meager. But Olga said it was all right. They have wine they brought over with them. Apparently there is lots of wine produced at Vis, and it's uncommonly good, much better than that red ink we drank at dinner."

"What's Olga like?" I asked.

Tim answered in his most solemn style: "She's beautiful! Brown hair and big brown eyes, heart-shaped face and turned-up nose . . . good figure, on the sturdy side . . . wears slacks and a flannel shirt and probably never owned a lipstick in her life ... no make-up at all, of course, and doesn't need it . . . wait 'til you see her! She's a soldier, too. I had one of the Marlin sub-machine guns with me and I noticed she couldn't take her eyes off of it, so I gave it to her to examine. You should have seen her handle it! She took the clip out, shot the bolt, squinted along the sights, tried the balance from the shoulder and the hip and flashed me a great smile of approval. One minute later she had stripped it and was examining the dismantled pieces. I never saw a gun fall apart in more expert hands . . . and it was the first time she had ever seen a Marlin. She handles a machine gun the way ordinary girls handle a powder puff . . . but with half her clothes off she's a pin-up

"What's a pin-up girl?" Radic asked. Tim explained, not without a touch of embarrassment.

Radic rocked with laughter. "She's a very serious girl," he said. "Sometimes it seems to me she is too serious; she has the soul of a revolutionary and has read all the revolutionary books, but her understanding is still a little childish, a little doctrinaire and over-simplified. Mladineo, as you may have noticed, is also a bit unworldly in his directness."

He paused briefly, glancing first at Tim, then at me, and added: "They are typical Partisan leaders, both of them. I guess that's what it takes, a simplicity of purpose that is almost nai've. You've got to add or subtract something from an ordinary man or woman to make a person capable of living a Partisan leader's life."

We talked a little longer, then I unrolled my sleeping bag in the moonlight on the clean stone floor of the balcony and we turned in for the night; but for a long time I lay snug and warm in the covers, looking east across the narrow sea-thinking of—trying to imagine—the other shore.