by Dick Francis
Read again the pages about Hans Kramer.
Eight schools. Doctors, hospitals, and clinics. Ill-health, like mine. And, like me, success on ponies, and on horses. Like me, a spot of foreign travel to equestrian events: I to the awesome Pardubice in Czechoslovakia and the Maryland Hunt Cup over fixed timber fences in America, and he to top-rank horse trials around Europe: Italy, France, Holland and England.
Died at Burghley in September of a heart attack, aged thirty-six. Body shipped home, and cremated.
End of story.
I took off my glasses and tiredly rubbed my eyes. If there was anything useful to be gleaned from all the unasked detail it was totally invisible to my current mental sight.
I tried to clear my mind by shaking it, which was about as useful as stirring old port with a teaspoon. Bits of sediment clogged my thoughts and little green spots slid around behind my eyes.
I read the rest of the telex twice and by the end had taken in hardly a word.
Start again.
YURI IVANOVICH CHULITSKY, ARCHITECT. PHONE NUMBER SUPPLIED EARLIER BUT NOW REPEATED… ONE OF THE RUSSIAN OBSERVERS IN ENGLAND DURING AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER LAST. FORMERLY WENT TO OLYMPICS AT MONTREAL. ADVISER ON BUILDINGS NECESSARY FOR EQUESTRIAN GAMES AT MOSCOW.
Yes, I knew all that.
IGOR NAUMOVICH TELYATIN, COORDINATOR OF BROADCASTING. NO TELEPHONE NUMBER AVAILABLE. RUSSIAN OBSERVER, IN ENGLAND DURING AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER. HIS BRIEF; TO LEARN THE BEST GENERAL POSITIONING FOR TV COVERAGE; TO SEE WHAT OTHER FACILITIES WERE ESSENTIAL AND WHICH MERELY DESIRABLE; TO SEE HOW BEST TO GIVE THE WORLD A GOOD VIEW OF SOVIET SHOWMANSHIP AND EFFICIENCY.
SERGEI ANDREEVICH GORSHKOV. NO TELEPHONE NUMBER AVAILABLE. RUSSIAN OBSERVER, STATED TO BE STUDYING CROWD CONTROL AT BIG EQUESTRIAN EVENTS, WHERE THE MOBILITY OF SPECTATORS WAS A PROBLEM. RELIABLY REPORTED TO BE A FULL COLONEL OF K.G.B., AN EXTREME HARD-LINER, WITH A DEEP CONTEMPT FOR WESTERN STANDARDS. SINCE HIS VISIT, INFORMATION HAS COME TO HAND THAT HE HAS IN THE PAST ATTEMPTED TO COMPROMISE MEMBERS OF THE EMBASSY STAFF, AND THEIR VISITORS, FAMILY, AND FRIENDS. STRONGLY ADVISE AGAINST CONTACT.
I put the sheets down. Hughes-Beckett, if it was indeed he who had sent the telex, which was unsigned and had no indication of origin, was up to his old tricks of seeming to help while encouraging failure. Flooding me with useless-looking information while warning me away from the one who really might pose a threat to Johnny Farringford.
Hughes-Beckett, I thought a shade irritably, had not the slightest idea of what was actually going on.
To be fair to him, how could he know if I didn’t tell him?
The mechanics of telling him were not that easy. Anything sent from the Embassy via the telex ran the gauntlet of Malcolm Herrick’s inside informer: and since Malcolm had learned of Oliver telling me to send a message directly from Kutuzovsky Prospect, he had probably made his arrangements there as well. The one place I did not want my adventures turning up was on the front page of The Watch.
There was the telephone, to which someone at either end might listen. There was the mail, which was slow, and might be intercepted.
There was Ian, who, if I read it right, probably had his own secure hot-line to the ears back home, but might not have the authority to lend it to any odd private citizen who applied.
In the back of my mind, also, there hovered an undefined question mark about the soundness of Ian as an ally.
Stephen’s friend duly came to collect Stephen’s pass, at shortly after eleven: and Stephen and Gudrun returned, full of bonhomie and onions.
‘Onions!’ Gudrun said. ‘Back in the shops today after four months without them. No eggs, of course. It’s always something.’
‘Want some tea?’ Stephen suggested, and went to make it.
There floated about both of them the glow of an evening well spent, and perversely their warmth depressed my already low spirits to sinking point; like Scrooge at Christmas.
‘What you need,’ Stephen said, coming back and making an accurate diagnosis with a glance, ‘is half a pint of vodka and some good news.’
‘Supply them,’ I said.
‘Have a biscuit.’
He unearthed a packet from the recesses of the bookcase and cleared a space on the table for the mugs. Then, seeming to be struck by a thought, he began rigging up a contraption of drawing-pins and string, and upon the string he threaded his bedside alarm clock, so that it hung there loudly ticking on the wall. It was only towards the end of this seemingly senseless procedure that I remembered that that exact spot was the lair of the bug.
‘Better interference than nothing, if they’re listening,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And they get a right earful when the alarm goes off.’
The tea probably did more good than the unavailable vodka. A certain amount of comfort began to creep along the nerves.
‘All visitors have to be gone by ten-thirty,’ Stephen nonchalantly said.
‘Will they check?’
‘I’ve never known it.’
Halfway down the mug a modicum of order returned to my thoughts. Very welcome: like a friend much missed.
‘Gudrun,’ I said lazily, ‘would you cast your peepers over something for me?’
‘Sorry?’
I put down the mug and picked up the telex, and she noticed the up-to-date state of the hand I hadn’t used.
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘That must really hurt.’
Stephen looked from my fingers to my face. ‘Are they broken?’ he said.
‘Can’t tell.’
I could scarcely move them, which proved nothing one way or the other. They had swelled like sausages, and gone dark, and it was a fair certainty the nails would go black, if they didn’t actually come off. It was no worse, really, than if one had been galloped on by a horse, and injuries of that order had been all in the day’s work. I smiled lop-sidedly at their horrified faces and handed Gudrun the telex.
‘Would you read all the stuff about Hans Kramer, and see if it means anything to you which it doesn’t to me? He was German, and you are a German, and you might see a significance I’ve missed.’
‘All right.’ She looked doubtful, but compliantly read right to the end.
‘What strikes you?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing very much.’
‘He went to eight different schools,’ I said. ‘Would that be usual?’
‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Not unless his family moved a lot.’
‘His father was and is a big industrialist in Dusseldorf.’
She read through the schools again, and finally said, ‘I think one of these places specialises in children who are… different. Perhaps they have troubles like epilepsy, or perhaps they are…’ She made tumbling motions with her hands, at a loss for the word.
‘Mixed-up?’
‘That’s right. But they also take people who have a special talent and need special schooling. Like athletes. Perhaps Hans Kramer went there because he was exceptionally good at riding.’
‘Or because seven other schools slung him out?’
‘Perhaps, yes.’
‘What about the doctors and hospitals?’
She read through the list again with her mouth negatively pursed, and finally shook her head.
‘Would they be, for instance,’ I said, ‘anything to do with orthopaedics?’
‘Bones and things?’
‘Yes.’
Her eyes went back to the list, but the no’s had it.
‘Anything to do with heart troubles? Are any of those people or places specialists in chest surgery?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
I thought. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘anything to do with psychiatry?’
‘I’m awfully sorry, but I don’t know much about…’ Her eyes widened suddenly and she looked rather wildly down at the list. ‘Oh my goodness…’
‘What is it?’
‘The Heidelberg University clinic.’
‘What about it?’
‘Don’t you
know?’ She saw from my face that I didn’t. ‘Hans Kramer attended it, it says here, for about three months in nineteen seventy.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why is that important?’
‘Nineteen seventy… There was a doctor called Wolfgang Huber working there. He was supposed to be great at straightening out… mixed-up… children from rich families. Not little children… teenagers and young adults, our age. People who were violently rebellious against their parents.’
‘He seems to have managed it all right with Hans Kramer, then,’ I said. ‘Because isn’t that clinic the last on the list?’
‘Yes,’ Gudrun said. ‘But you don’t understand.’
‘Tell me.’
She could hardly frame the sentences, so intense were her thoughts.
‘Dr Huber taught them that to cure themselves they had to destroy the system which was making them feel the way they did. He told them they would have to destroy the world of their parents… He called it terrorism therapy.’
‘My God.’
‘And… and…’ Gudrun practically gasped for breath. ‘I don’t know what effect it had on Hans Kramer… but… Dr Huber was deliberately teaching his patients… to follow in the footsteps of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.’
Time, as they say, stood still.
‘You’ve seen a ghost,’ Stephen said.
‘I’ve seen a pattern… and a plan.’
The teachings of Dr Wolfgang Huber, I supposed, had been a sort of extreme extension of the theories behind the communist revolution. Destroy the corrupt capitalist system and you will emerge into a clean healthy society run by the workers. A seductive, idealistic dream which seemed always to appeal most to intellectuals of the middle class, who had both the brains and the means to pursue it.
Even in the hands of visionaries the doctrine had led to widespread killing. People like Dr Huber, however, had preached their gospel not to reasoning adults, but to already disturbed youth, and the result in widening ripples had been the Baader-Meinhof followers, the Palestinian Black September, The Irish Republican Army, the Argentinian ERP and The Japanese Red Army, with endless virulent offshoots among small groups like Croatians, South Moluccans, and Basques.
The place most free from terrorism was the land which still encouraged and nurtured it, the land where the seedling had raised its attractive head.
At the Munich Olympics, the world had awakened in a state of shock to the existence of the growing crop.
Eight years later, at the Moscow Olympics, someone was planning to carry the fruit home.
14
Stephen lent me his bed and went to share Gudrun’s, which seemed to please them both well, and was certainly all right by me. Foreign students were positively encouraged to lie together, he said sardonically, so that they didn’t go out and pursue the natives.
I shivered a good deal, and at the same time felt feverish, which boded ill.
I didn’t sleep much, though that didn’t matter. My hand throbbed like a pile-driver but my head was clear, and I much preferred it that way round. I spent most of the time thinking and wondering and guessing, and coming back to the problem of the next day. I had somehow got to take some positive steps towards staying permanently alive.
In the morning Stephen fetched some tea, lent me his razor, and bounced cheerfully off to a student breakfast.
He returned with some things like empty hamburger buns from the basement supermarket, and found me studying the long string of letters on the envelope which had held the telex.
‘Deciphering the chemical junk?’ he said.
‘Trying.’
‘How’s it coming?’
‘I don’t know enough,’ I said. ‘Look… when all this was written in Russian and German, was it translated? I mean… are you sure that this is what was meant?’
‘It wasn’t translated,’ Stephen said. ‘It was those letters in that order, but written in formal German script… the sort you see in books. The Russian script version was more or less phonetically the same, but there are more letters in the Russian alphabet, so we adjusted the Russian letters to be the equivalent of the German… was that all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You see here where it reads “antagonist”?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Was that word translated into Russian or German? Or were the letters a n t a et cetera written in German script?’
‘It wasn’t translated, as such, because antagonist is much the same word in all three languages.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Is that of any help?’
‘Yes, in a way,’ I said.
‘You amaze me.’
We buttered and shared the hamburger buns and drank some more tea, and I coughed on and off with an ominous hollowness.
After that I cadged a sheet of paper and wrote the long row of letters into sensible words, adding a few reasonable-looking decimal points. The revised effort read:
etorphine hydrochloride 2.45 mg
acepromazine maleate 1.0 mg
chlorocresol 0.1 –
dimethyl sulphoxide 90
antagonist naloxone.
Stephen looked over my shoulder. ‘That, of course,’ he said, ‘makes a world of difference.’
‘Um,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Would you do me a favour?’
‘Fire away.’
‘Lend me an empty tape for your recorder, and another one with music on it. Or rather, two empty tapes, if you have them.’
‘Is that all?’ He sounded disappointed.
‘That’s for starters.’
He rustled around and produced three tapes in plastic boxes.
‘They’ve all got music on,’ he said. ‘But you can record on top, if you like.’
‘Great.’ I hesitated, because what I wanted him to do besides sounded melodramatic; but facts had to be faced. I folded the list of chemicals in half and gave it to him. ‘Would you mind keeping that?’ I made my voice as matter-of-fact as possible. ‘Keep it until after I’ve got home. I’ll send you a postcard to say it’s OK to tear it up.’
He looked puzzled. ‘I don’t see…’
‘If I don’t get home, or you don’t get a postcard from me, will you send it to Hughes-Beckett at the Foreign Office. I’ve put the address on the back. Tell him that Hans Kramer had it, and ask him to show it to a vet.’
‘A vet?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Yes, but…’ He realised exactly what I’d said. ‘If you don’t get home…’
‘Yeah… well… fourth time unlucky, and all that.’
‘For heaven’s sake.’
‘Do you have lectures on Saturdays?’ I said.
His eyebrows vanished upwards under his hair. ‘Is that a general invitation to put my head in the trap alongside yours?’
‘Probably just to make phone calls and tell taxis where to go.’
He gave an exaggerated shrug and a large gesture of surrender, and put on an expression of ‘ve have vays of not believing a vord you say’. ‘What first?’
‘Ring Mr Kropotkin,’ I said. ‘And if he’s in, ask if I can come to see him this morning.’
Kropotkin, it seemed, was not only in but anxious. ‘He says he’s been trying to get you at the hotel. He says to arrive at ten o’clock, and we can find him inside the first stable block on the left, on the racecourse.’
‘Fine…’ I blew a cooling breath on to my hot, swollen fingers. ‘I think I’ll also try Ian Young.’
Ian Young was back on British soil and seemed to take a while to realise who he was talking to. He was feeling fragile, and no one, he said eventually, with a mixture of misery and admiration, could drink like the Russians; and please would f not talk so loudly.
Sorry, I said, pianissimo. Could he please tell me how best to make a telephone call to England. Try from the main Post Office just round the corner from my hotel, he said. Ask for the International operator. He was discouraging, however, about my prospects.
‘Sometimes you can get through in ten minutes, but it’s usually more like two hours, and with the new flap going on this morning you’ll be lucky if you get through at all.’
‘Newer than the dust-up in Africa?’ I said.
‘Oh sure. Some high-up guy has defected. In Birmingham, of all places. Shock, horror, drama, and all that. Is it important?’
‘I want to ring my vet… about my horses,’ I said. ‘Could I get through from the Embassy?’
‘I doubt if you’d do any better. There’s no one like the Russians for blank obstruction. Brick wall specialists, the Russians.’ He yawned. ‘Did you get your telex last night?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Make the most of it, I should.’ He yawned again. ‘Do you feel like swilling the hair of the dog with me? Round about noon?’
‘Don’t see why not.’
‘Good… Go past Oliver’s office, and past the tennis court… and my flat’s in the row at the back of the grounds, second door from the left.’ He put down the receiver with all the gentleness of the badly hungover.
The snow had temporarily stopped, though the sky was a threatening oily yellow-grey and the air cold enough to freeze the nose’s mucus lining in its tracks. I started coughing and gasping for breath before we’d gone a hundred steps, and Stephen thought it extraordinary.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said, his own lungs chugging easily away like an electric bellows.
‘Taxi…’
We caught one without much difficulty, and immediately, within its comparative warmth and with the help of the pocket bronchidilator inhaler I kept in my pocket like loose change, my chest stopped its infuriating heaving.
‘Are you always like this when it’s cold?’ Stephen said.
‘It depends. The river didn’t help.’
He looked mildly anxious. ‘You caught a chill? Come to think… it’s not surprising.’
We stopped twice on the way. The first time, to buy two bottles of vodka; one to give to Kropotkin and one to keep. The second time to buy me yet another hat to top off my assorted clothing, which now consisted, from the skin outwards, of a singlet, shirt, two sweaters, jacket, and Stephen’s spare coat, which was a size too small and left my forearms sticking out like an orphan.