Canceled Czech

by Lawrence Block

  “…of incest as a humorous component,” I typed. “Ophelia’s madness and its sexual overtones, seen in this light…” And the telephone rang.

  I answered it. A young man said, “Mr. Tanner? My name is Jeff Lind. A friend suggested that I get in touch with you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Could I come up and see you?”

  “What about?”

  “I’m enrolled at Columbia. There’s…uh…something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Huh? Well, I’d rather not go into it over the phone.”

  “No one from Columbia has a tap on my phone. At least I don’t think—”

  “Would it be all right if I come up to your apartment?”

  “Not before noon.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ll be busy until then.”

  “All right,” he said. I asked if he had my address. He said he did, and that he would see me at noon. I finished up Diane Blumberg’s term paper, put it in an envelope, and went downstairs to mail it to her. I picked up my own mail on the way back and carted it upstairs. There was the usual glut of pamphlets and magazines and newspapers, a batch of appeals for donations, and a good bit of foreign correspondence. Sir William Wheatly had dashed off an enthusiastic note accepting an article of mine for the quarterly bulletin of the Flat Earth Society of England. He liked my thesis that the sky was a curved two-dimensional entity. Rolfe MacGoohan of the Jacobite League reported sadly that he had made no headway with Prince Rupert of Bavaria, the Stuart pretender we hoped to restore to the English throne. A French anarchist named Claude Martinot sent me an elaborately engraved announcement of the marriage of his daughter Monique to a M. Henri Pierre Peugeot.

  I had barely organized the morning mail, much less read through it, when my doorbell rang. It was eleven-thirty. I opened the door and admitted a young man with a crew cut, an NYU sweat shirt, chino pants, and dirty tennis sneakers.

  He said that he was Jeff Lind, and I said that he was early.

  He came inside, closed the door. Once inside his manner changed remarkably. He put a cautionary forefinger to his lips, took a folded slip of paper from his pocket, passed it urgently to me, put his finger to his lips again, motioned for me to unfold the slip of paper, and then began to talk rapidly about a paper he had to prepare for his economics seminar.

  I unfolded the paper he had handed me. It was a single sheet of typing paper with this message on it.

  TANNER:

  IGNORE EVERYTHING I SAY AND MAKE NORMAL ARRANGEMENTS WITH ME FOR THE ECONOMICS PAPER. WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT YOUR APARTMENT IS BUGGED AND YOUR PHONE TAPPED. THE CHIEF WANTS TO SEE YOU THIS AFTERNOON. HE WILL BE IN ROOM 1114 OF THE RUTLEDGE HOTEL. ARRIVE THERE AT 2:45. MAKE SURE NO ONE FOLLOWS YOU. DESTROY THIS NOTE.

  The bearer of the note went on to explain the details of his economics assignment. Everything he said sounded as though it had been carefully memorized and laboriously rehearsed. We discussed time, price, and theme. True to my instructions, I ignored everything he said.

  The Chief was a pudgy man in an expensive blue suit which appeared to have been perfectly tailored for someone else. It was tight around his waist and loose at his shoulders. He closed the door, motioned me to a couch, offered me a cigarette which I refused and a drink which I accepted.

  “You’ll excuse this morning’s dramatics,” he said. “Probably unnecessary, but it’s unwise to take chances.”

  “Is my apartment really bugged? And my phone?”

  “We think so.”

  “By whom?”

  “Either the CIA or the FBI. Quite possibly both. The Agency boys know you worked for us. They’re always hungry to find out something about us. The fact that we work better without their scrutiny doesn’t seem to deter them.” He shook his head sadly. “Sometimes,” he said, “those Boy Scouts seem to forget that we’re all on the same side.”

  “And the FBI?”

  “They don’t know of your connection with us. I’m not entirely sure whether or not they know of our existence, as far as that goes. But they have you pegged as a subversive, you know.”

  “They visit me all the time.”

  “Well, you are a member of a startling number of unusual organizations, Tanner. Your allegiances more or less blanket the Attorney General’s subversive list.” He sipped tentatively at his drink. “But that’s beside the point. I told you last time that we might have a piece of work for you now and again. I liked the way you handled yourself, particularly in Macedonia. We’re still collecting dividends from the revolution you started.”

  I had met the Chief once before, in an unidentified office somewhere in Washington. His name was one of the myriad things about him which I did not know. He headed an extraordinary secret government agency, also blessed with an unknown name. I knew that he thought I had been recruited by an agent of his, a man named Dahlmann whom I had seen shot down by the Dublin police. I knew that his men went places and did things, that they were permitted an unusual amount of independence and were encouraged to use their own judgment and discretion. And that, actually, was just about all I did know.

  “Something unusual has come up,” he said. “Something that I think might be particularly suited to a man of your talents and connections. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a man named Janos Kotacek?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “That’s not surprising. Very few people have. Kotacek was a Slovak who—did you say yes, you have heard of him?”

  “If you mean Josef Tiso’s Internal Affairs minister in the Slovak puppet government, yes, I have.”

  “Well, that’s a pleasant surprise, Tanner. It should save us a great deal of time.” He leaned forward in his chair and rested his plump hands upon his knees. “When Czechoslovakia fell to the Russians, Kotacek got out in time. He ran to Germany and stayed there until the fall. Again he got out in time. We’re not sure where he went from Germany. Argentina, possibly, or perhaps Spain. He seems to have been active, though from a distance, in the abortive fascist coup after the assassination of Masaryk. Of course that never got off the ground—the Russians were in there and they stayed. A few years ago he turned up in Brazil. He was in touch, evidently, with much of the Nazi Underground. Israeli agents almost captured him outside of Sao Paulo. He escaped. In 1963 there were rumors that he had committed suicide.”

  “That’s what I had heard.”

  “Did you? Do you happen to remember the details?”

  “Not clearly. I think he was supposed to have shot himself in Brazil.”

  He nodded. “That was one story. Another had him discovering that he was dying of cancer or some such, and taking poison. It appears he did neither. Instead he went to Lisbon. He lived unobtrusively but well. His Swiss bank accounts have evidently not yet run dry. Ten days ago…more whiskey, Tanner?”

  “Please.”

  He filled our glasses. “Let me see,” he said, “where was I?”

  “Ten days ago…”

  “Yes. Ten days ago, agents of the Czechoslovak secret police kidnapped Kotacek from his home in Lisbon and spirited him away. The day before yesterday they landed him in Prague and tucked him into a prison cell. In approximately three weeks he will be brought to public trial, charged with collaboration with the enemy, complicity in the murder of several hundred thousand Slovakian Jews and Gypsies, and a variety of more specific war crimes. He will be found guilty on all counts and will be hanged.”

  “Good for him.”

  “I think not, Tanner. Not good at all, for him or for us.” He leaned forward. “We’ve known of Kotacek’s whereabouts almost from the day he turned up in Lisbon. And we’ve been very careful to leave him alone. From his base in Portugal, Kotacek has been one of the key figures in the global neo-Nazi movement. As you may know, the orientation of Nazism has changed slightly since Hitler’s death. Germans remain at the helm, but the idée fixe has shifted from Aryan supremacy to general white supremacy. Anti-Semitism is
still a chief tenet, but anti-Negro and anti-Oriental policies have come to the fore; integration and the Yellow Peril are evidently more potent scapegoats. The movement aims at developing little Nazi parties throughout the world and making power plays in various countries whenever circumstances seem right.

  “Kotacek, as I said, is at the hub of all this activity. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that he is the most influential non-German in the contemporary Nazi movement. He has contacts all over the world. He engages in constant correspondence with open and clandestine Nazi leaders. He’s one of the few men anywhere who know just what’s going on among the leaders of the Fourth Reich—which is what they’re apt to call themselves, incidentally—not just in one country, but everywhere.” He paused, raised his glass, set it down. “He has been extremely useful to us.”

  “How?”

  “He writes to a man named Ottmar Pedersen, a Dane living in the Bronx. Over the past few years he has passed on a great deal of important information to Pedersen.”

  “And Pedersen is your agent?”

  “No. Pedersen is a loyal Nazi, a member of Madole’s National Renaissance Party. The man who opens Pedersen’s mail is our agent.”

  “I see.”

  He got to his feet. “Kotacek knows a great deal more than he has ever told or will ever tell to Pedersen. At one time we considered killing our Golden Goose—making a raid on Kotacek’s home in Lisbon and grabbing off what records we could. This was always rejected. The information is only valuable when our knowledge of it is not known. Sooner or later we would have found a way to gain full access to Kotacek’s files without his knowing it. But it was not urgent, it could wait.”

  “And now?”

  “His capture changes things considerably. We’d planned on going through his files when he died. He’s an old man and a sick man. He has diabetes and a heart condition and is a cataleptic. He would probably have died within a year or two and that would have given us our opportunity. Now we can’t wait—his death won’t do us any good if he dies on the end of a rope in Prague. More important, we don’t want the Russians to get to his files. I don’t think he’s given them anything yet. I don’t think they know enough to ask for it. But during or after his trial, he may try to barter his information for his life. It would be a bad bargain for him. His files are worth a great deal more than his life.

  “There’s more to it than that. This doesn’t entirely concern you, but I’ve never felt that it hurts an agent to know what the hell is going on and why. The Czechs are likely to make a big show out of his trial. They’ll stir up a lot of anti-German feeling at a time when we don’t want too much attention focused upon the policies of our friends in Bonn. Armament policies and such. There’s more, but that’s the essence of it. We want Kotacek out of Czechoslovakia. We want his files.”

  There was a long space of silence, with both of us trying not to carry the conversation any further. He finished his drink and I finished mine. He nodded toward the bottle, offering another, and I shook my head, declining. He lit a cigarette. I got to my feet, walked to the window, looked out. He took the bottle and filled his own glass. I turned, walked back to the couch, sat down.

  Finally I said, “You want me to go into Czechoslovakia, get him out of jail, and sneak him out of the country.”

  “Yes.”

  “All by myself.”

  “That would probably be best.”

  “Why? Why not the CIA or someone with manpower?”

  “The Boy Scouts,” he said. “No, that’s unjust of me. There are certain operations they handle rather well. But suppose the Agency did handle this one, Tanner. What would you have? You’d have an official agency of the United States government rescuing a little tin Hitler from a country that has every right in the world, legal and moral, to try him and convict him and execute him. If the CIA tried it and blew it—and don’t think they’re not fully capable of doing just that now and then—well, you can imagine the public reaction. Even if they got him out, the story would probably leak. And if it didn’t, if everything went off without a hitch, we’d still be on the outside as far as Kotacek’s files are concerned. He’d no sooner turn them over to us than to the Russians. If we twisted his arm, the information would be close to useless; the men involved would go underground. You see what happens? If we lose, we lose big; if we win, we still lose. No, there’s a better way.”

  He put out his cigarette. “Suppose the man who rescues Kotacek is not a CIA man at all. Suppose he’s a member of, say, the Slovak Popular Party and a group of other nationalistic extremist movements. Suppose his presence would be interpreted as an obvious instance of a neo-fascist sympathizer selected by the network of international Naziism to spring Kotacek from the trap. Now do you see how neatly you fit in?”

  “I’m hardly a Nazi. And the Slovak Popular Party isn’t fascist. It’s more a cultural organization for the preservation of the language than anything else.”

  “True. But a number of its members are Slovak fascists.”

  “That sort of charge can be leveled at any group.”

  “Precisely. That’s exactly why you’ll be able to operate effectively in this affair. You can enlist the aid of a variety of persons who would have no interest in helping the CIA or the United States government. You can approach Kotacek as a fellow conspirator, an advocate of Slovakian autonomy and, by extension, a natural part of the new international Fourth Reich. He will trust you. He will give you access to his files, and he’ll never know it when you bring their information back to us. If you bring it off, Tanner, you win all the way.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  His smile had an element of treachery to it. “If you lose,” he said, “then what has happened? A fellow Nazi has tried to rescue Kotacek and has been caught in the attempt. Perhaps he tries to identify himself as a U.S. agent. If he does, the charge is laughed off. Perhaps he is imprisoned. Perhaps he is able to escape. Most likely, he is killed.” He frowned. “Which would be a pity, but not a tragedy. I would lose a most useful agent, but the country would not get a black eye. Can you see how much better you fit the scheme than all of the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  Chapter 3

  There is a special method to be followed in jumping from a moving train, or, presumably, from any other similarly mobile object. One jumps in the direction in which the train is moving, falls with the body bent forward and the legs already in motion, and lands running.

  I was quite familiar with this method. I had read of it often enough in books and had seen professional stuntmen display it frequently on the motion picture screen. And so I stood poised on the trestle of the Prague-bound train, waiting for my faithful Nazi comrade to slow it to around a dozen miles an hour, and fully confident that I could dismount from my perch with the agility of John Wayne’s double.

  Brakes were applied and hissed in protest. The train slowed. I stepped to the edge of the trestle, crouched, hurled myself off into the night, and wondered, now that it was too late for wondering to do much good, why all those Hollywood stars used doubles. If it was so easy, as easy as falling off a train…

  It wasn’t so easy. The ground was there ahead of schedule, and my flailing feet hit it wrong, and my couchant body was improperly balanced, and there was a wide gulf, it seemed, between theory and practice. I stumbled, I bounced, I sprawled. And lay there, quite motionless, while the train picked up speed and hurried on toward Prague.

  The damage was not as great as it might have been. I had managed to shred one trouser leg and most of the knee it had contained. The other leg was doubled up awkwardly beneath me, not broken, not sprained, but not in entirely perfect order either. I had bruises on the palms of my hands, an aching shoulder that I seemed to have landed on, and a bump on my forehead about the size of a robin’s egg. On the other hand, I did not have my suitcase, which I had left on the train, or my breath, which I had left somewhere between the trestle and the ground.

  I got up tentatively and determ
ined that nothing was broken. I tried walking and found that both legs hurt, but that the one which had been twisted in the fall was worse than the one that had been torn up. I limped around for a while. I was supposed to go to the town of Moll and tell Kurt Pisek that Heinz Neumann had sent me. No. I was supposed to go to the town of Neumann and tell Kurt Heinz that Pisek Moll…No.

  I sat down. Everything went around for a few minutes. Before long they would be stopping the train at Tyn. More policemen would board it, and this time they would wait for the real Evan Tanner to stand up. They would spend perhaps half an hour searching the train before it became apparent to them that I had somehow left it. Then they would blow whistles and draw up plans and begin searching for me.

  So there was not a great deal of time. But I could not start searching for Moll or Neumann or Pisek until I could clear my head enough to know which was which. I had to make use of what time I had.

  I stretched out on my back, placed my arms at my sides, closed my eyes, and remained that way for twenty minutes.

  I had not chosen the ostrich’s method of hiding from danger. The play was one I had borrowed from Yoga, a deep relaxation technique which helped replace sleep for me. I lay very still, contracting and elaborately relaxing each muscle group in turn, then doing what I could to turn off my mind, making it as blank as possible. About twenty minutes had passed when I yawned and stretched and sat up again. I couldn’t be sure of the time—my watch was another casualty of the fall—but that particular regimen generally takes somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three minutes.

  I felt much better. The pains were still there but they didn’t get in my way as much. More important, my head was working again. I had to go to the town of Pisek, where a man named Kurt Neumann lived. I would tell Neumann that Heinz Moll had sent me. Pisek, if I remembered the map of Czechoslovakia correctly, was a few miles east of the Vltava and about twenty miles up the river from Tyn. I was probably about ten or twelve miles from Tyn myself.