Mediterranean Cruise

The Palizzi is a little freighter on the Black Sea-Mediterranean run. A fortnight ago, two weeks out from the port of Burgas in Communist Bulgaria, the Palizzi tied up at Marseille, began discharging cargo. French customs men let the cargo lie on the dock for three days. Then uniformed officers of the Surete Nationale (French security police) stamped up the Palizzi gangway, questioned the captain. Had he found any stowaways aboard this trip? No, said the captain. Come along, said the Surete, we're going to open up some of your cargo.

On the dock a Surete officer pointed to a large crate, ordered dockers to break it open. Inside the crate was an old grey Ford automobile. Inside the Ford, smiling and blinking away tears caused by the sunlight, sat an emaciated man with a long beard.

Dockers and customs men watched while a civilian who had come with the Surete officers helped the bearded man to climb out of the Ford. They noted that the stowaway spoke Bulgarian to the civilian, Italian to the ship's captain, French to the police. They heard him say: "M.

was to have come, too, but at the

last moment he could not." Then police whisked him away in an automobile. The crowd looked over the crated Ford. It was full of opened food cans and empty water bottles.

The Palizzi's sailors told what they knew. The crate had been nailed up in Sofia 40 days earlier. It had been taken by train to Burgas, where it had lain on the dock for many days. Said one sailor "The man inside was lucky, for usually such crates are opened by the Burgas customs." The crate had been stowed away in the hold of the Palizzi. There it had remained as the little ship steamed through the Bosporus to Istanbul, Smyrna and Genoa where arrangements had been made to fumigate the hold. Said a sailor later: "It's a lucky thing the ship was late--too late for the fumigation. Otherwise the stowaway would have been dead."

Marseille police reporters soon had a story fleshed out. The man's name was Dontcho Christov, once a top civil servant in King Boris' government of Bulgaria. Christov had stayed on in Sofia after the Communists took over. But when things had got too hot for him he had climbed into his old Ford and taken off. A message to Paris announcing his coming had been delayed. When it finally arrived, officers of the Services de Documentation et de Contre-Espionnage had wired the local Surete to take care of him.

Europe in 1951 was a place where people regarded it as normal that the police gave a respectful welcome to a man who had traveled 40 days in a crate.

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