The Thin Wall: A POW/MIA Truth Novel

by R. Cyril West

  Dal pushed Milan over with his boot so that he was lying on his back and they were looking into each other’s eyes. “This thin wall that separates the strong from the weak? If the truth be known, it’s only as strong as the fear that cements it together.”

  He pointed his Makarov calmly at the physician──in the same sympathetic way a rancher might put a horse out of its misery──and then he shot a bullet into his head.

  And he was not afraid.

  For Bedrich had mounted many roofs in the village, including the library, the marionette theatre and the rows upon rows of houses, all connected by a single red roof. Today, however, was the first time he had ever climbed to the top of the church. That was what made it different and why Bedrich believed he had accomplished something significant. Even his hero Josef Novak, big, muscular, strong, Josef, had never climbed so high.

  He leaned against the slanted roof and scooted along tile by tile. In places the stucco, red baked against the warm sun, flaked off and stained the palm of his hands. There was a cadence in how he moved, left hand, right foot, right hand, left foot. Always leaning just so, and careful now of the wind. He identified loose tiles based on their weather stains and avoided them. Only once, when a pelican landed nearby, and he paused to marvel over the beautiful white-winged creature, did he lose his concentration and accidently kick a wedge of stucco, sending it crashing to the cobble below.

  And people were there; a crowd gazing up with their hands over their mouths. Men and women shouting, “come down” and hollering “be careful.” And some, he thought, calling him a “fool.”

  But Bedrich knew what he was doing. He was not a fool. He was a skilled roof climber. With his experience, he safely inched his way toward the steeple and sat with his chin to his knees. He had never felt such a thrill. Here, he was taller than the trees and gazing across the rooftops he saw the sparkling river and the road stretching for miles. Endless, it seemed to him.

  He had many questions and counted them on his stubby fingers: why did Father Sudek allow the Russians to harass the citizens? Why did Father Sudek allow the Russians to shoot Sascha Boyd? Why did Father Sudek allow the Russians to burn their favorite books? Why did Father Sudek allow the Russians to arrest Ayna?

  He dug into his pocket and found the decomposing remains of his mouse. He missed the creature’s appetite for food and how it hobbled along on three legs. The mouse, his tiny, dear companion, had been a good comrade, a loving comrade. He dangled the carcass by the tail and looked into its dried-out eyes. Why, of all things, did Father Sudek allow the Russians to kill his mouse?

  With a tear in his eye, Bedrich pried up a tile and solemnly buried the rodent beneath it.

  HOURS AFTER the recital’s disastrous ending, with long shadows stretching across the square, Ayna was feeling sick with worry about Milan. She stood on the cobblestones with Father Sudek, Josef, Oflan, and Evzen, and listened to the townspeople gossip about what had happened that day.

  “Who was in the Škoda with the doctor?”

  “Had he set the villa on fire?”

  “Will the colonel arrest him?”

  Bedrich’s antics were an additional distraction. How the clumsy halfwit managed to clamber atop the church baffled everyone. For several minutes, they stopped talking about the shooting, the car chase, the judge fleeing town, and gazed bewilderedly toward the red roof.

  How did Bedrich do it?

  There were no ladders leading to the roof. And the stairwell inside the bell tower was rotting and had been in disrepair for many years, making it completely inaccessible.

  Josef’s best guess was that Bedrich, with his portly body and short legs, had somehow climbed the bell’s thick-knotted rope, before making his way onto the bell and out a window──a feat previously accomplished by a handful of delinquent teenagers.

  “I’ve seen him climb many walls,” Ayna said, doing her best to ignore Evzen, who was smiling grimly to himself. “The walls at the old monastery are no challenge for him. These walls, though even higher, must be easy, too.”

  Oflan started to theorize, then stopped, and said, “Oh forget it. What difference does it make how he got up there? The simple fact is, he must come down.”

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Ayna insisted. The urge to call him down was strong. She fought it off. “We shouldn’t scare him.”

  “I agree.” Josef nodded. “Let him be.”

  Father Sudek thought it over. “We don’t need more people hurt today. There has been enough violence on our streets. Look at Ota Janus, dead in the street. And Emil’s broken wrist. Enough is enough.”

  Evzen said, “Bah. Bedrich has lost his mind.”

  Before she could defend the halfwit’s risky behavior, Ayna heard someone whistle and screech, “KGB!”

  She glanced over her shoulder. People were scattering, men, women and children running for their homes, toward alleys, jumping into cars. As they cleared the street, she saw him. Dal. He was standing on the cobble.

  “This isn’t good,” Josef said. “The colonel has that crazed look.”

  “He must be stopped,” she said. “Finally. Right now.” She regretted raising her white flag that morning. Whatever Milan had done, she supported his actions.

  “Mmm,” the priest muttered.

  “. . . that same crazed look,” Josef elaborated. “That look we saw in 1945 when the Nazis killed Ayna’s father.”

  EARLIER, AFTER commandeering a station wagon from a newlywed couple who had unsuspectingly stopped at the bridge to help, Dal took a spade shovel and buried Milan and Johnston in a shallow grave. He was unremorseful for the slayings, and offered no eulogy or even a moment of silence for the dead. He just needed to bury them, hide the evidence and return to Mersk. Working mechanically, he scooped dirt over their bodies, and then covered the ground with leaves and fallen oak tree branches.

  He returned to his car and drove to a store near the farm collective. His eye was black and swollen. And there was blood on his clothes and hands. People dropped their items and fled the store.

  “I want no trouble,” the clerk begged. “Take what you want.”

  Dal grabbed a bottle of vodka, some aspirin, a carton of cigarettes, and left without paying. While he drank, his feelings of denial slowly gave way to bewilderment and anger for the loss of the Devil Dog dossier in the river. He really was fucked, exactly as the POW had warned.

  Dal had swigged a third of the bottle by the time he parked in front of the hardware store and stumbled drunkenly from the driver’s seat with a crowbar.

  THE PANDEMONIUM on the cobble went on. Total mayhem. Like someone had yelled fire in the cinema house. He’s got a crowbar. Blood on his shirt. Run for your lives. In the rampage to get off the street, people shoved each other and cursed at friends, forgetting for a moment they were neighbors.

  Ayna was running, too. It felt cowardly to flee. She was unafraid of him. So why was she running? Someone gave her a violent push and she stumbled into Oflan. Jiri scampered ahead, before falling behind. She quickly lost sight of his red-striped shirt in the stampede, passing through the bakery’s narrow door and stopping behind the pastry counter. After the last person stuffed inside the store, Josef quickly shut the door and rammed home the bolt.

  “We’re out of harm’s way,” Josef said. “The colonel can’t knock down this door. It’s too strong.”

  “Why does he have a crowbar?” someone asked.

  “Get control of yourselves,” Josef insisted.

  “What if he has a pistol,” another said, “or a machine gun?”

  “I will think of something.” Josef raised his hands, hushing their voices. “This isn’t the time to panic.”

  Ayna was skeptical. She knew the colonel was unrelenting, but tried to remain calm and cleared her mind. Just breathe, she told herself. Everything will be okay. She brought herself under control and began to search for Jiri. “Where are you?” she shouted, her eyes darting between the bodies, people taller, people s
horter, all stuffed together inside the bakery like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. He must be in the room somewhere. Ayna felt herself start to tremble, a cold sweat forming on her forehead.

  AFTER MAKING an attempt to look somewhat presentable by tucking in his blood and dirt-stained shirt, Dal lit a cigarette. There was an arrest to be made. Maybe multiple arrests. He staggered along the row of shops and houses with the crowbar in one hand and the vodka in the other.

  As the streets cleared, he tried to imagine how the doctor had pulled this damn thing off. Dal had put procedures in place to prevent intrusions. It tore at him, the breakdown in security. At the end of the day, the Ukrainians were experienced prison guards and Gurko was as dependable as any soldier in the Soviet Army. That a civilian could somehow enter the secured villa and free the prisoner from captivity boggled his mind. There must be a logical explanation. Culprits. Yes. Culprits. Who were they? Ayna Sahhat was the only citizen capable of leading any kind of treachery. She was cunning. She was unafraid. She had tested him time and time again.

  “If I can catch her once upon the hip,” Dal said in slurred words, reciting from Shakespeare. “I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear her.”

  He recalled the play King Lear, Scene seven of Act three, when Cornwall hastily plucks out the eyes of Gloucester as his servants watch in horror. That bloody scene was similar to what was taking place in Mersk. The people running from him, scurrying for the protection of locked doors, they were much like the fearful servants in that play. Instead of a fictional king, they had rejected the will of a high-ranking KGB political officer, having served Dal and his policies with prejudice. Whom among them could he trust? He put the fiery vodka to his lips and drank. He remembered now, yes, he had convincingly played the part of Cornwall in the army theatre, and recalled his sense of empathy for the character, against the feelings of those in the audience who saw him as a monster.

  “Where is the anarchist Ayna Sahhat?” he asked Irena. The woman kept her head down, rushed inside the library and locked the door.

  He moved into the street and stumbled toward the tavern. It seemed only fitting that his vengeance began at the local watering hole, the hornet’s nest of Bohemian treachery, where the late hour plotting of evildoers went unchecked like hungry mice in the night.

  He placed the vodka bottle on a slatted bench and peered through the windowpane. Tad Kriz and his children, the reclusive Pavel, and the viper-like Verushka cowered behind tables. He delivered lines from King Lear, words rolling from his tongue with grandiose flair, phrases he had not recited in years. “What confederacy have you with the traitors?” he asked spectacularly. He became exasperated when they failed to respond to the question and thumped the palm of his hand against the door. The onlookers backed away from the window. He gripped the crowbar and began thrashing everything in sight: a welcome sign, the door handle, a pot of flowers. He heard women screaming and children crying and swung the crowbar more furiously.

  As he shattered the tavern’s window, Pavel appeared at the doorway and said, “ge-ge-get a hold of yourself.”

  Without difficulty, Dal overpowered the lanky chauffeur and shoved him to the ground. People hiding behind tables and chairs urged Pavel to run. He put up his hands and attempted to protect his head, but Dal gripped the crowbar and bashed his skull with a spray of blood.

  “Ayna,” he shouted, grabbing the vodka and proceeding on. “I know you hear me. Surrender.”

  Moving into the square, pooled here and there with black puddles from the afternoon downpour, he returned his attention to the last of the fleeing citizens, a window shutting, a car driving away, a dachshund slinking into a side street. Even the street musician had dropped his accordion and ran for his life. They had vanished from the cobble, scurried away like roaches caught in sudden house light.

  Now Dal had center stage.

  This was his moment.

  Feel their mesmerized souls, he was thinking.

  He scanned the square. Where was she? What was she thinking? What was her next move? With the cigarette dangling from his lip, he began to speculate over which home harbored his pretty anarchist. “Aiding and abetting the enemy is a crime,” he warned, fumbling with the bottle, which slipped from his hand and shattered on the cobblestones. “Do you people understand the penalty? You will be imprisoned for conspiring against my authority. And yet, I suspect there are heroes among you. The librarian? The jeweler? The banker? Who has the courage to bring the girl to me?” Again he scanned the upstairs windows, the closed doors. “Citizens of Mersk. Consider this proposition wisely. Bring her to the square. There will be immunity for the whistleblower. And a handsome reward.”

  But no one stepped forward with the Azeri woman.

  Dal fumed.

  He could take them one by one and put them to the gun, interrogate them. Eventually everyone talked. “Ayna Sahhat,” he said. “Don’t defy me. The punishment will only become more severe the longer you hide.” He fell in and out of character. One minute he was clearheaded, the career political advisor wondering what had gone wrong in Bohemia, the next he was Cornwall, wicked, vengeful, Cornwall.

  Dal wiped his forehead with the back of a hand. The situation was ugly. There were no winners in today’s mess. Both he and the young woman had suffered a great deal──she from a lonesome desire to be loved and he from his sworn duty to uphold the laws of socialism. Yet he did not pity the girl or her wicked curse. She had rebelled. She had disrespected him. In her secret plotting she would fail. He alone would decide when the final curtain fell.

  With a firm hand on the crowbar, he bashed the windshields of parked cars and plodded toward the charred fountain. There were pigeons. And breadcrumbs. And trash. Annoyingly there was also pig excrement in his path, which he blindly stepped in. “These uncultured peasants,” he said to himself, scraping his left boot against the cobblestones. “How can they live like this?” The smell turned his stomach. He would arrest that pig farmer. He would fine him triple the penalty for not cleaning up after his animals.

  Slowly he calmed down, catching his breath.

  He noticed Jiri sitting crossed-legged at the fountain, with his back against the parapet. The boy was reading a magazine, in all likelihood unaware that he was alone in the square.

  Dal approached, his shadow overcoming the magazine’s glossy pages. Jiri looked up with a faint nod of hello and removed his headphones. “What’s wrong?” the boy asked. “You have blood on your shirt. And what happened to your eye? It’s swollen. You look like a Cyclops.”

  Dal towered over him, intoxicated, though broad and strong. As Jiri had pointed out, the shard of windshield glass had completely swelled shut his eye.

  “We had a little accident today. That’s all . . .”

  AYNA WALKED to the bakery’s paned window. “The colonel can’t bully each and every one of us,” she said, attempting to rally the people. “We outnumber him. We are hundreds. He is one.” And yet the sound of his voice──don’t defy me──sent shivers up her spine.

  Someone said, “Hey, he’s going after Jiri.”

  Her eyes darted in desperation. She could not find her son in the bakery, though was certain he was somewhere. Wasn’t he? Oh, my god, she thought. Had she confused him with another boy who was wearing a similar shirt? “What are you saying? Where’s Jiri?” she asked. “Where’s my son?”

  “He’s outside,” a boy said. “With that freaked out colonel.”

  “IT’S BEEN A bad day,” Dal said to Jiri. He set the crowbar at his feet, and then shook a cigarette from a pack. “It’s true. A bad day for the ages. Some day when you take on more responsibility in life you will have disastrous days like this.”

  “Uh, if you say so.”

  “Days like this are best defined not by how they start, rather how they finish.”

  Jiri looked suitably confused. “The people are mad at you.”

  “Oh?”

  “For ruining the recital.”

  “Yes,
yes. The quartet performed like a well-oiled machine.”

  “Yeah, until the ending . . .”

  “Ah well, there were two dangerous criminals on the loose. I had to apprehend them. To protect you. And to protect everyone in this village. That’s my duty as a KGB officer. Mmm. I cannot expect you to understand, but my actions were in your best interest.” He paused, rubbing his forehead. “Really. I had every hope for your mother’s success this afternoon. I was rooting for the quartet. I had even planned to declare today Bedrich Smetana Day.”

  “You look mad. Are you mad at me and my friends for giving back the uniforms? Our parents made us do it.”

  “No. Not mad.”

  “What do you want then?”

  “Do you smoke?”

  THE COLONEL was leaning into Jiri with a cigarette when she arrived. “Leave him alone,” she barked, smacking it from his hand. “Don’t you dare touch my son.”

  Dal tossed up his hands in mock surrender. “I’ve been calling your name . . .”

  She stood in front of Jiri, her body a shield. “You’ve caused enough trouble.”

  “You seem confused by the facts. Your friend. The doctor. He is someone who stirred up some very serious trouble.”

  “Where is he? Where is Milan?”

  “Ah . . .” He grinned. “I’ve piqued your interest, eh?”

  “What have you done with him?”

  Dal made his hand into the shape of a pistol and stuck it to his temple. “The hottest love, so it goes, always has the coldest end.” He pretended to pull the trigger and said, “Socrates. Though I do not think the tragic fate of your lover is actually what the Greek Athenian philosopher had in mind when he wrote these famous words.”

  Milan shot? Was he dead? Her heart sank, though she remained strong for Jiri. Had to. “Go find Josef,” she said, pushing her son toward the bakery. “Stay with him until I come get you.”