The man around whom Alan Furst’s new spy novel revolves is Constantine Zannis, a highly placed police official in Salonika, Greece. In late 1940, as Spies of the Balkans begins, Zannis’ specialty is discretion. He heads a new department charged with handling delicate situations. Is a politician being blackmailed by a prostitute? Call Zannis. Has a woman of some importance killed her husband and then insisted she’s glad he’s dead? “Naughty girl,” Zannis says, giving the Furst hero’s characteristic knowing shrug.
Furst has written so often about such men, the intrigue that surrounds them, and their subtle, intuitive maneuvering that he risks repeating himself. But Zannis is a younger, more vigorous version of the prototype than some. And he is Greek, which adds a whole new perspective to Furst’s view of Europe before and during World War II, given the strategic importance of Greece’s ability to resist German domination. If shades of its personal drama are by now familiar to Furst’s readers, this book’s larger and more important geography seems new.
In 1939, Greece’s prime minister, General Ioannis Metaxas, said “that the old Europe would end when the swastika flew over the Acropolis.” The Nazi flag did not rise over the Acropolis until April 1941. Spies of the Balkans is about the time in between, when people like Zannis were forced to get their bearings in an increasingly hostile world and to become rescuers to those fleeing more perilous places. Furst’s gift for exquisite calibration transports the reader back to a realm where characters like Zannis could determine the limits of their authority only by testing it to the extreme.
Zannis does not enter Spies of the Balkans as a freedom fighter. Like any of Furst’s insouciant spies in the making, he starts off with an almost casual view of the dangers mounting around him. And at first those dangers don’t make much of a dent, although Zannis is inconvenienced when his paramour of the moment, Roxanne, an Englishwoman who runs a ballet school, is suddenly summoned home. Although Zannis is extremely astute as a matter of professional necessity, he hasn’t noticed that she might also be a British spy.
By the time “an infinitely deflective Englishman” arrives, perhaps in Roxanne’s place, who calls himself Escovil and purports to be a travel writer at a time when carefree travel is a thing of the past, Zannis has become more watchful. He is made even more so by a quasi-seductive encounter with Emilia Krebs, a Jewish woman from a wealthy German family. Spies of the Balkans can be positioned in terms of time, fear and uncertainty by the facts that Emilia is openly married to a Nazi colonel, and that both of them feel that they are safer together than apart.
But Emilia is also still in a position to help other Jews escape from Germany through Greece, via a route that is increasingly vital because others have been closed. “For Europe,” says one of the many figures in this book’s large international tableau of characters, “it’s like slipping out the back door.” As a police official, Zannis has a suddenly crucial power: He can name certain individuals as wanted criminals and ask that they be extradited to Greece. But this process requires many delicate steps, and Spies of the Balkans pieces them together with Furst’s usual acuity for trans-European scheming. In the process, he incorporates enough historical background to establish how unstable Greece in general, and Salonika in particular, have been, and how age-old Balkan enmities still cast long shadows. The book is dotted with klephts, evzones, Ustashi and other fierce, exotic fighters from this region.
Furst is better at establishing Salonika’s subjugation to the Ottoman Empire than he is at making what, for him, are atypically blunt sexual innuendoes. Ordinarily, he is a writer of very few words and inversely strong impact when it comes to eroticism; here, there are times when he must strain a bit to establish Zannis’ sexual bona fides. “Strange, but it just now occurs to me that the ottoman is an extraordinary piece of furniture, ingenious,” Roxanne remarks at one louche moment. Why? “Because you can, you know, also sit on it.”
However acrobatic this dalliance may be, it’s also over very early in Spies of the Balkans. That leaves Furst time to incorporate an almost de rigueur flirtation between Zannis and the wealthy, imprisoned wife of an important man — a man so important that, if Greece falls, he will have both a ship and yacht at his disposal for purposes of making a getaway.
Her name is Demetria, and she’s not much of a match for the more effortlessly devastating women for whom Furst’s incurable romantics always fall. Or perhaps Spies of the Balkans simply has different priorities. In any case, urgent concerns about the fate of Europe easily eclipse the book’s efforts to contrive star-crossed amour.
Oddly and wonderfully, Zannis’ most tender relationship is not with a woman. He must help everyone in his extended family when the wartime crisis finally erupts. That means saying goodbye to his brave grandmother, who vows that the family will not go hungry if it can hang on to its sewing machine.
But of all the qualities that make Zannis one of Furst’s most appealing protagonists, his rapport with a four-legged family member is one of the best. By now, the ultimate grand-scale nobility of his characters may come automatically to Furst. There’s something more fresh and idiosyncratic in the way this one cannot bear to lose his dog.
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