“I know a few words, like ‘okay’ and ‘dollar’ and ‘cigarette’.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t teach him Serbo-Croat. We’ve been here long enough. I’ll lead, and my son will bring up the rear. Come on.”
If Zov had had his gun he might have balked, and we would have had either to go on without him or find a place to spend the day. He did try to argue, but Wolfe got emphatic, and I had the gun, so he came. We went to the brook for a drink and then hit the trail, with Zov in between us. His gait was more of a shuffle than a walk, but he didn’t seem to be in any great pain. It could have been as much from lack of enthusiasm as from the condition of his legs. When we had passed through the defile and topped a rise, and Wolfe stopped for breath, I asked him, “Where will the charade be? You didn’t tell me.”
“It isn’t necessary. We’ll keep colloquy at a minimum. Statements about linguistic proficiency may be equivocal. I’ll tell you when to draw a gun.”
“You might tell me now about the colloquy you just had.”
He did so, and then turned and proceeded. As I padded along behind I was thinking that we certainly had the bacon — not only the murderer but the weapon, and I knew the rest of the evidence was on file because I had seen the assistant medical examiner getting it from Marko’s corpse. I remembered the first sentences of a book I had read on criminology. In criminal investigations, it said, the investigator must always have in mind the simple basic requirements. Once he gains possession of the person of the criminal and of evidence adequate for conviction, the job is done. It is, like hell, I thought. If I had that book here, and the author, I’d make him eat it.
I was supposed to forget about being stopped and leave it to Wolfe, but as we approached the point where one left the trail if one was ass enough to want to walk the ledge to the cave, I kept close behind Zov and had my eyes peeled. We went on by without sight or sound of anyone. If you wonder why Wolfe didn’t let me know, which he could have done in ten words, I can tell you. I would have had to put on an act for Zov’s benefit until I reached the spot that had been agreed on, and he thought I might overdo it or underdo it, I don’t know which. He thought that, not knowing, I would just act natural. You may also wonder why I didn’t resent it. I did. I had been resenting it for years, but that was my first crack at resenting it in the mountains of Montenegro.
With the sun nearly straight above us, blazing down, I wouldn’t have recognized the trail as the one we had climbed the night before with Danilo. We went down rock faces on our rumps, skirted the edges of cliffs, slithered down stretches of loose shale, and at one place crossed a crevice ten feet wide, on a narrow plank bridge with no rails, which I didn’t remember at all. My watch said ten minutes past one when we stopped at a brook for a drink and a meal of chocolate. Comrade Zov ate as much chocolate as Wolfe and me together.
Half an hour later the trail suddenly spilled us out at the edge of a wide level space, and there was the house Wolfe had been born in. I stopped for a look. Apparently its back wall was the side of a cliff. It had two stories, with a roof that sloped four ways from the center, and eight windows on the side I was looking at, four below and four above. The glass in three windows was broken. The door was wooden.
I was just starting to turn to tell Wolfe I was going to step inside for a glance around when his voice snapped at my back, “Gun, Alex!”