‘My feelings tend – you know that Bruno and I –’ She broke off, then said slowly: ‘What on earth do you mean?’
He smiled at her, broadly although albeit somewhat apprehensively. ‘Dry your tears and come and see.’
The first beginnings of understanding touched her face. ‘Do you mean – ’
‘I mean come and see.’
Bruno pushed back the two covering sheets and sat up in his coffin. He looked at Harper without much enthusiasm and said reproachfully: ‘Weren’t in too much of a hurry, were you? How would you like to lie in a coffin wondering when some enthusiastic apprentice is going to come along and start battening down the lid?’
Maria saved Harper the necessity of a reply. When Bruno had finally disentangled himself, he climbed stiffly down to the floor, reached inside the coffin, held up a limp, dripping linen bag and said: ‘And I’m soaking wet, too.’
Maria said: ‘What is that?’
‘A slight subterfuge, my dear.’ Harper gave a deprecatory smile. ‘An ice bag. It was necessary to give Bruno the cold clammy forehead of the deceased. Ice, unfortunately, melts.’ Harper placed the case on the coffin and opened the lid. ‘And, alas, we now have to cause Bruno some more suffering: we have to transform him into a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’
The transformation took all of twenty minutes. Harper had not necessarily mistaken his profession but clearly he would have been perfectly at home in the make-up department of any film studio. He worked swiftly and skilfully and obviously derived some satisfaction from his creative handiwork. When he was finished, Bruno looked at himself in a full-length mirror and winced. The light brown wig was just that too much long and straggly, the light brown moustache a soupçon too luxuriant: the vivid semicircular scar that ran from his forehead round the corner of his right eye almost to his nose was the result, clearly, of an encounter with a broken bottle: for clothes he wore a blue and white striped shirt, red tie, light brown suit with red vertical stripes, mustard socks and shoes of the same appalling colour. The rings on his fingers would appear to have had their source of origin either in a fairground stall or Christmas crackers.
Bruno said: ‘A thing of beauty, the man says. I could always hire myself out as a scarecrow.’ He bent a discouraging look on Maria, whose hand, discreetly covering her mouth, could not disguise the crinkling in her eyes. He looked back to Harper. ‘This makes me inconspicuous?’
‘The point precisely. It makes you so conspicuous that no one will bother to take a second look at you – except for those who will do a double-take to convince themselves that their eyes weren’t deceiving them in the first place. It’s the anonymous, furtive, grey man slinking down alleyways that attracts suspicion. You are Jon Neuhaus, a machine-tool salesman from East Germany. The passport and papers are in your inside pocket.’
Bruno dug out his passport, a venerable-looking document that attested to the fact that his salesman’s duties had taken him to virtually every Iron Curtain country, some of them many times. He looked at his picture and then again at himself in the mirror. The resemblance was quite remarkable.
He said: ‘This must have taken quite a time to prepare. Where was it made?’
‘In the States.’
‘You’ve had it all that time?’ Harper nodded. ‘You might have shown it to me earlier on. Given me time to get accustomed to the awfulness of it all.’
‘You would probably have refused to come.’ Harper checked his watch. ‘The last train in tonight arrives in fifteen minutes. A car is waiting for you about a hundred yards down the street from here which will take you discreetly to the station, where you will make sure you are seen – you have just come off the train. The suitcase contains all the clothes and toilet gear you will require. The same car will then drive you up to a hotel where you made a reservation two weeks ago.’
‘You fixed all this?’
‘Yes. Rather, one of our agents did. Our man, as you might say, in Crau. Invaluable. He can fix anything in this city – he ought to, he’s a big wheel in the city council. One of his men will be driving your car tonight.’
Bruno looked at him consideringly. ‘You certainly believe in playing a tight game, Dr Harper.’
‘And I survive.’ Harper permitted himself a patient sigh. ‘When you’ve spent most of your adult life in a racket like this you will discover that, at any given time, the fewer people who know anything about anything, the greater the safety factor. Maria will hire a car in the morning. Two blocks west of here is an inn called the Hunter’s Horn. Be there at dusk. Maria will be there shortly afterwards. She’ll look in the doorway then walk away. You will follow her. You have a singular gift for sensing when you will be shadowed so I have no worries on that score. Any change of plan or further instructions will be given you by Maria.’
‘You said your man in Crau could fix anything?’
‘I did say that.’
‘Have him fix a few sticks of dynamite. Any explosive will do as long as it has an approximately ten-second fuse. He can fix that?’
Harper hesitated. ‘I suppose. Why do you want it?’
‘I’ll tell you in a couple of days and that’s not because I’m doing a Dr Harper and being all mysterious. I’m not quite sure myself but I’m developing an idea that it might help me to leave the Lubylan.’
‘Bruno.’ The dark anxiety was back in the girl’s face again, but Bruno didn’t look at her.
‘I think there’s a chance I might get in undetected. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell that I’ll be able to get out undetected. I may have to leave in a very great hurry indeed and once the alarm is raised I’m sure the exits will be automatically sealed. So my best line of exit may well be to blast my way out.’
‘I seem to recall you saying that you had no wish to kill anyone. A dynamite blast could kill quite a few.’
‘I’ll be as careful as I can. It may have to come to the inevitable choice – them or me. One hopes not. Do I get the bangers or not?’
‘You’ll have to give me time to think about that one.’
‘Look, Dr Harper. I know you’re in charge, but here and now you’re not the person who matters. I am. I’m the person who’s got to put his life on the line to get inside Lubylan – and out again. Not you. You’re safe and sound in base camp and will disclaim all knowledge of anything if I get chopped. I’m not asking, not now, I’m demanding. I want that explosive.’ He glanced down in distaste at his clothes. ‘If I don’t get it you can try on this suit for size.’
‘I repeat, I need time.’
‘I can wait.’ Bruno hitched his elbows on the coffin. ‘I can wait all of five seconds. I’ll count them. Then I’m taking this damned suit off and going back to the circus. I wish you luck in your break-in to Lubylan. I also wish you luck when you come to explaining to the police just how you made the trifling error of certifying me as being dead. One. Two. Three.’
‘This is blackmail.’
‘What else? Four.’
‘All right, all right, you can have your damned fireworks.’ Harper pondered, then went on complainingly: ‘I must say this is a side of your nature I’ve never seen before.’
‘I’d never examined that damned Lubylan before. I’ve seen it now. I know my chances. Please have Maria take the explosives in her car tomorrow night. Does Wrinfield know that this was a charade tonight?’
‘Of course.’
‘You took a chance bringing Sergius with you here.’
‘Apart from the fact that he insisted, I’d have taken a damned bigger chance if I hadn’t. That would have been the one thing calculated to rouse his suspicions.’
‘And he’s not? Suspicious, I mean?’
‘The last thing that would occur to Colonel Sergius is that anyone would ever be misguided enough to pick his parish as a place to commit suicide.’
‘Money?’
‘In your other inside pocket.’
‘It’s freezing outside.’
‘There�
�s a nice warm coat in the car.’ Harper smiled. ‘You’re going to love it.’
Bruno nodded to the open coffin. ‘That?’
‘Will be weighted and the lid screwed down during the night. We will bury you on Monday morning.’
‘Can I send me a wreath?’
‘That would not be advisable.’ Harper smiled thinly. ‘You can always, of course, mingle discreetly with your mourners.’
Forty minutes later Bruno was in his hotel room, unpacking, his eyes straying occasionally towards the nice warm coat that Harper had so thoughtfully provided. It was made of thick brushed nylon, in black and white wavy vertical stripes, and looked for all the world like a four-thousand-guinea chinchilla. Indisputably, it was the only one of its kind in Crau and, likely enough, for some hundreds of miles around, and the stir he had caused strolling through the lobby to the reception desk had been more than considerable: when the effect of his coat was added to the fact that he had it carelessly flung open to reveal the sartorial rainbow of his suiting beneath it was understandable that hardly anyone had bothered to give his face a first glance, far less a second one.
Bruno put out the light, eased the curtains, opened the window and leaned out. His room was at the back of the hotel, overlooking a narrow warehouse-lined lane. It wasn’t quite in total darkness but it wasn’t far from it either. Less than four feet away were the steps of a fire-escape, the easy and, in combination with the darkened lane, the perfect way to leave the hotel. Too easy, too perfect.
In line with Harper’s advocated policy of non-concealment, Bruno went down to the hotel dining-room for dinner, carrying under his arm an East Berlin newspaper, dated that day, which he had found in his case. Harper was a man to whom the most insignificant detail could be of importance. Where he had obtained it Bruno had no means of knowing. His entrance did not cause any notable sensation – the citizens of Crau or visiting firemen were too well-mannered for that. But the raised eyebrows, the smiles, the whispers were evidence that his presence had not gone unnoted. Bruno looked casually around. There was nobody in sight who looked remotely like a secret police agent, although there was little comfort in that: the best agents never did. Bruno ordered his meal, then buried himself in his newspaper.
At eight o’clock the following morning Bruno was once more in the dining-room, again reading a paper but this time a local news-sheet. The first thing that caught his attention was a large black-bordered box – the borders were half an inch thick – in the centre of the front page. From this he learnt that he had died during the night. The grief was profound for circus lovers the world over but nowhere, of course, as keenly felt as in Crau. There was much sentimentalizing and philosophical sorrowing over the machinations of a strange fate that had brought Bruno Wildermann home to die. He was to be buried at 11 a.m. on Monday. It was hoped that large numbers of the citizens of Crau would turn out to pay their last respects to their city’s most illustrious son, the greatest aerialist of all time. Bruno took the parcel back up to his room after breakfast, found scissors and cut out the black-bordered article, which he carefully folded and placed in an inside pocket.
Late that afternoon Bruno went shopping. It was a cold and sunny day and he had left his fur coat in his room. This he had done neither because of the weather nor because of any innate bashfulness. It was just too bulky to be carried inconspicuously, however well it might have been wrapped up.
This was the town that Bruno knew better than any in the world and he could have shaken off any shadower without even half thinking about it: it took him less than five minutes to know that he was not being followed. He turned down a side street, then into an even meaner street, little more than a lane, and entered the shop of a haberdasher for whom Savile Row must have lain on the far side of Paradise: even the best clothes it had for sale could not have qualified for the description of second-hand. The proprietor, an elderly stooped man, whose watery eyes swam behind thickly pebbled glasses – although it seemed an extremely remote possibility that the oldster would ever be called upon to identify him Bruno doubted whether he could have identified members of his own family, if any – had a unique but eminently practical way of displaying the wares he had for sale. The articles of clothing were piled in untidy heaps on the floor, jackets in one pile, trousers in another, coats in another, shirts in another, and so on. Ties were conspicuous by their absence.
When Bruno emerged it was with a bulky and exceedingly grimy brown paper parcel roughly tied with some frayed twine. He made his way to the nearest public conveniences and when he emerged his transformation was complete. He was clad in ill-fitting, patched and ancient clothes, wholly disreputable, not the sort of person the average citizen would approach within yards of, far less associate with: the grimy crumpled beret was two sizes too large and fell over his ears: the dark raincoat was irreparably stained, the trousers baggy beyond belief, the creased, once-navy shirt tieless and the heels of the scuffed shoes so worn down at the back that they lent him a peculiar rolling gait. To complete matters he was surrounded by a powerful aura that afflicted people at a distance of several yards: to keep lice, fleas and other forms of wild life at bay the haberdasher was a great believer in drenching every article of apparel with a disinfectant that was as vile-smelling as it was powerful.
Clutching his brown parcel under his arm, Bruno made his leisurely way across town. Dusk was beginning to fall. He took a short cut through a large park, a section of which was given over for use as one of the city’s cemeteries. Passing by an opened iron gate in the high wall that surrounded the cemetery, he was intrigued to see two men busily digging by the light of a pair of storm lanterns. Intrigued, he approached the spot and as he did two men, standing in an as yet shallow grave, straightened up and rubbed clearly aching backs.
‘You work late, comrades,’ Bruno said sympathetically. ‘The dead wait for no man,’ the elder grave-digger said in a sepulchral voice, then peering more closely, added: ‘Some of us have to work for a living. Do you mind standing to the other side of the grave?’
The light wind, Bruno realized, was wafting his presence across the grave. He moved round and said: ‘And whose last resting place is this?’
‘A famous American, though he was born and brought up in this town. I knew his grandfather well. A Wildermann, he is. He was with a circus – the circus – in the Winter Palace. Killed in an accident. It’ll be a big day here on Monday, with Johann and myself in our best suits.’
‘An accident?’ Bruno shook his head. ‘One of those damnable buses, I’ll be bound. Many’s the time – ’
The younger man said: ‘No, you old fool. He fell off a wire in the circus and broke his neck.’ He jammed his shovel into the sandy soil. ‘Do you mind? We have work to do.’
Bruno mumbled his apologies and shambled away. Five minutes later he was in the Hunter’s Horn, where he had to show his money to a nose-wrinkling waiter before being served coffee. After about fifteen minutes Maria appeared in the doorway, looked around, clearly failed to recognize anybody, hesitated and moved off again. Bruno rose leisurely and rolled his way towards the door. Once in the street he lengthened his stride without increasing his pace and within a minute he was only a few feet behind her.
He said: ‘Where’s the car?’
She wheeled round. ‘Where on earth – you weren’t – yes, you were!’
‘You’ll feel better shortly. Where’s the car?’
‘Round the next corner.’
‘Any car follow you?’
‘No.’
The car was a nondescript battered old Volkswagen, one of hundreds similar in the town: it was parked under a street lamp. Bruno got in behind the wheel, Maria in the passenger seat. She sniffed in disgust.
‘What on earth is that dreadful smell?’
‘Me.’
‘I appreciate that. But – ’
‘Just disinfectant. A very powerful one, but still a disinfectant. You’ll get used to it. Quite bracing really.’
; ‘It’s awful! Why on earth – ’
‘Disguise,’ Bruno said patiently. ‘You don’t actually think this is my preferred mode of dress? I think that Dr Harper underestimates Colonel Sergius. I may be Jon Neuhaus, a citizen in good standing from a friendly satellite country, but I’m still an East German. I’m an outsider – and you can bet Sergius has every outsider tabbed from the moment he’s within twenty miles of Crau. He will know – if he wishes – within ten minutes of any stranger checking in to any hotel in Crau. He’ll have a complete description of me. I have the documentation so he won’t give me a second thought. But he’ll give a second thought if a respectable sales representative for a major firm is found in a sleazy dump like the Hunter’s Horn or parked indefinitely in the shadow of the Lubylan. Don’t you think?’
‘Agreed. In that case there is only one thing to do.’ She opened her handbag, extracted a small eau-de-cologne aerosol, sprayed herself liberally, then squirted the contents over Bruno. When she had finished Bruno sniffed.
‘The disinfectant wins,’ he announced and, indeed, instead of the cologne having a neutralizing effect it had a compounding effect. Bruno lowered the windows and hastily moved off, his eye as much on the rear-view mirror as on the road. He twisted and turned through the darkened streets and alleyways until any tail car there might have been must have been irretrievably lost. As they drove, they briefly rehearsed the plans for the Lubylan break-in on the Tuesday night. Then Bruno said: ‘Got the stuff I asked for?’
‘In the boot. Not what you asked for – Dr Harper’s contact couldn’t get that. He says you’re to be very careful with this stuff – it seems you’ve only to look at it and it will explode.’
‘Good God! Don’t tell me he’s got me nitroglycerine?’ ‘No. It’s called amatol.’
‘That’s all right, then. It’s the detonator he’ll be worried about. Fulminate of mercury, isn’t it?’
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