Canceled Czech

by Lawrence Block

  But Ferenc Mihalyi was a conspirator, and conspirators constitute a marvelous breed of man. They do not need to have pictures drawn for them. They are able to read between lines even when nothing is written there. “Your uncle will come for you,” the guard said at last. “He says that you are not to worry, that everything will be all right. He will arrive within the hour.”

  He arrived, as it happened, about forty minutes after the phone call. It was a rough forty minutes because there was simply nothing to do but wait, no way for me to do anything positive. All I could do was sit there and wait for something disastrous to occur. My mind supplied any number of possible disasters. Kotacek could suddenly sit up, open his eyes, and ask what was happening. Ferenc Mihalyi could turn out to be a fink, in which case the Hungarian Secret Police would have interesting questions to ask me. Someone could remember some unusual regulation which barred the entrance of corpses into Hungary, or the exit of same from Czechoslovakia. Any number of things could go wrong, and I think I anticipated just about every last one of them.

  But at last a car drew up, and a tall man with a broad forehead and a neat gray moustache strode to the shed. I got to my feet. “Sascha,” he said, and we embraced.

  “Poor Lajos,” he said. “His heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. We shall make arrangements for the funeral. Is everything set? You have your bags?”

  “Destroyed in the car.”

  “It is nothing to worry about. Are there any more formalities or can we go now?”

  There was nothing else to sign. The guards helped us load Kotacek into the back seat, and Mihalyi and I got into the front seat and drove off. I didn’t know quite what to say to him, so I waited for him to get things started. He apparently had the same idea. We drove several miles in silence.

  Finally I said, “My name is Evan Tanner, Mr. Mihalyi. I am of course a member of the Organization.”

  “Ah. Must we continue to transport that man’s body, or can we dispose of him in a field?”

  “We’d better keep him. He’s not dead.”

  “Ah. I am not Ferenc.”

  I gaped.

  “No, it is no trick. Ferenc was going to come himself, but he thought there might be trouble, that they could not possibly imagine him to be your uncle. He is, you see, only twenty-eight years old himself. A few years younger than you, I would guess. My name is Lajos, like that of your dead uncle. Except that you assure me that he is not dead. May I assume also that he is not your uncle, and that his name is not Lajos?”

  “You may.”

  “Ah. You have business in Budapest? Or is this merely a way-station for you?”

  “We are going to Yugoslavia.”

  “I assume you have no papers?”

  “None. They were…destroyed in the crash.”

  “A most fortuitous crash. Yes. It should be simplicity to move you and your dead companion into Yugoslavia. We Hungarians are rather good at negotiating border crossings, you know. We had considerable practice ten years ago.”

  “I imagine you did.”

  “A great deal of practice. Some of us, however, did not leave then. Ferenc feels that those who left were cowards. Or felt that way in the past. He was only a boy then, but enough of a man to destroy two tanks. And to join in our vow not to leave the country. Were you here then?”

  “No.”

  “Your name is not Hungarian. You are American?”

  “Yes.”

  “For an American to escape into Hungary is rather the reverse of the usual course of events. It is more commonly the other way around. You do not happen to live in New Jersey, do you? I have a family there.”

  “I’m from New York. It’s close to New Jersey, of course.”

  “They send us packages. Food and clothing.” He smiled. “If I give you their names, could you speak with them when you return to America? There are things one does not put in a letter. You could tell them that we have no great need of food and clothing. You could tell them to send guns.”

  Ferenc Mihalyi had an apartment in the old section of Budapest. He and his wife and two children lived in three rooms on the fourth floor of a drab red brick building nestled among several other buildings, also of red brick, also drab. Tanya Mihalyi was slender and birdlike, with light brown hair and constantly amused eyes. No one my age had ever called her Mama before, she told me. If she liked it, Ferenc assured her, he would call her nothing but Mama in the future.

  We ate chicken paprikash on beds of light egg noodles. Kotacek was laid out neatly on the Mihalyis’ double bed. They found it difficult to believe he was really alive, but I belabored the point until they accepted it. I didn’t want him emerging magically from his trance and scaring my hosts into heart attacks of their own. Greta had only fainted, but the girl had an exceptional constitution.

  After dinner we sat drinking Tokay. It was around midnight. Ferenc wanted to know if I felt up to traveling some more. “Lajos will provide his car, and I will take you to the Yugoslav border if you wish. Or if you are tired we can wait until morning. Perhaps it would be best to wait until your friend is awake.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not tired, and he can travel as is, if you prefer.”

  “Perhaps it would be best to go now.”

  “Fine.”

  “Because,” he explained, “it might not be safe for you to stay here for very long. And it is still much safer to travel by night than by day. I will drive you directly south along the banks of the Duna. It should not take us more than two hours. Lajos has a very fast car. It does not look so fast, but his son is a mechanic and has worked wonders with the engine. We shall leave”—he hefted his glass—“when we reach the end of the bottle.”

  We killed the bottle. Ferenc left the apartment, walked the few blocks to Lajos’ house, and returned with the car that had brought us from the border. Together we carried Kotacek down three flights of stairs and loaded him into the back seat. The car was Russian-made and resembled the General Motors cars of around 1952. Lajos, I was told, had a good position in the Ministry of Transportation and Communication. His political sympathies and his activities in 1956 were not a matter of record.

  The night was cool, the moon nearly full in the cloudless sky. Ferenc was an uneven driver, making up in sheer determination what he lacked in natural ability. He aimed the car instead of steering it, and he was more a tactician than a strategist; he would hurl us into hairpin curves with no prior planning, then figure out a way to keep us on the road. I was a while getting used to this, but eventually decided that there was nothing too precarious in what he was doing. It only seemed that way.

  “The border will be nothing,” he said. “There is a place in eastern Serbia near the Rumanian border. The guards there are all friends. There is a break in the fence; you can walk directly through. Will he be awake by then?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “An odd sickness. It is hard to believe that he is not really dead. Suppose, in one of these fits of his, that he really died. How would you know?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Perhaps he is dead at this moment, and we neither of us know it. Perhaps you will carry him all the way back to—where is it that you are taking him?”

  “Greece.”

  “Perhaps you will take him all the way to Greece only to find that he has been dead all along. A joke on you, eh?”

  It was a horrible joke. I changed the subject and we talked about some mutual friends, members of some of the Hungarian refugee organizations I belonged to in New York. This one had married an American girl, that one had finally won the right to practice medicine, another was homesick and talked constantly of returning to Budapest. We talked, and I tried not to consider the possibility that I had managed to kill Kotacek somewhere along the line, and that I wouldn’t know for sure until his flesh started to putrefy. I could have done it in the car crash, of course. Perhaps the shock stopped his heart forever. Could a man have a coronary in the midst of a c
ataleptic fit? I had no idea.

  But eventually, after about an hour in the car, Kotacek solved the problem for me. He woke up.

  He was hungry and ill-tempered and had to relieve himself. Ferenc stopped the car and we let him out, and he staggered over to the side of the road and did what he had to do. Then he came back to the car and got into the back seat again. Everything ached, he told me. He was hungry, his head ached, his back was bothering him, and where on earth were we? I told him we were in Hungary, heading south.

  Hungary! He was delighted. He had met Admiral Horthy and overflowed with admiration for the Hungarian fascist leader. The Hungarians had been staunch allies during the war, he told me. Good men and true. Of course there were strong partisan movements, vicious bands of Resistance fighters, but that was no doubt due to the long domination of Jews over the Hungarian peasants. Still, he remembered a time…

  I gave him a shot of insulin, then fed him some sandwiches we had brought along in a brown paper bag. There was wine as well but I did not give him any. I wasn’t sure what effect it might have on his diabetes, or whether it would be good for his heart. He ate greedily, then insisted we stop again so that he could urinate once more. We did, and he did.

  And, while he relieved himself, hunched over at the side of the road, Ferenc turned to me with an accusation in his eyes. “This comrade,” he said. “Who is he, Evan?”

  “A Czech fugitive. An anti-Communist.”

  “There are all manner of anti-Communists.”

  “Yes, there are.”

  “I understand Slovak. I do not speak it very well, but I can understand it. I know what the man was saying.”

  “I see.”

  “There were men of that sort in 1956. They would face the Russian tanks so that we might have the sort of Hungary we had under Horthy. Exchange one set of masters for another, Communists for fascists. I think I know the name of your friend. I had heard that he was dead, in Prague.”

  “Perhaps this is a different man.”

  “Perhaps. I do not think so.”

  Kotacek returned to the car. For the first time he took notice of our driver. Who was this man? I told him he was a friend who had helped us enter Hungary and who would now help us get into Yugoslavia. A Hungarian here, Kotacek proclaimed, and began to enlarge on the role of Hungary in the foundation of the worldwide Fourth Reich. Hungarians were good healthy Aryans, he announced, and he began to trace the history of the Hungarian nation, a Magyar band who had come westward just as other tribes had come to settle in Germany, in Slovakia, in all of the pure Nordic nations. I half listened to him while I watched the expression on my friend Ferenc’s face.

  “I do not like your friend,” Ferenc said.

  “You cannot dislike him as much as I do.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have been with him longer. I make excuses for him—his age, the state of his health. But I have grown to hate him.”

  “And yet you save his life.”

  “There are reasons I cannot tell you.”

  “You do not share his beliefs?”

  “God, no!”

  “But you have your reasons.”

  I picked my words with care. “He can supply valuable information. He knows secrets that others would like to know. I have managed to convince him that I am the sort of man he is. That I share his beliefs. It shames me to be with him, it sickens me to have him for company, but I do what I must.”

  Ferenc spent several minutes digesting this. Throughout it all, Kotacek was talking in the back seat. We both ignored him. Finally Ferenc said, “I am armed, you know. I have a pistol.”

  “I did not know that.”

  “I took it for protection en route, and to give to you at the border. You yourself should not be unarmed. Then I had thought of using it to kill the Slovak, once I realized who he was. My parents were partisans during the war, you see. He takes me for a Hungarian fascist, this Slovak of yours, but you see he is quite wrong. I thought I might have to kill you as well, but if you are like him, I think I could do so without any bad feelings. Now I do not know whether to believe you.”

  “You know of me?”

  “I do now. Not when you called, but while Lajos went for you I did some investigating. You seem to be one of us.” He paused. “I am not going to kill you or your friend, of course.”

  “Do not call him my friend.”

  “Forgive me. I of course am not going to kill anyone; I do not preface acts of violence with small speeches. Instead I am going to forget the name of my back-seat passenger. I never knew his identity. He never once awoke, and I had no idea who he was. You understand?” I nodded. “And in return,” Ferenc Mihalyi continued, “you must do me one favor.”

  “What is that?”

  “You must never tell anyone that it was I who helped this bit of filth to escape. I will tell no one that he is alive, and you will tell no one that I am partially responsible for his existence.”

  “Agreed.”

  “A hellish bargain. He should not be allowed to live.”

  “He is old, and sick. He won’t live too long.”

  “He has already lived too long.”

  The rest of the trip was dreary. Conversation stopped entirely. Ferenc and I could no longer talk to one another. We had each of us shed portions of self-respect, and we wanted only to separate and forget the entire night. We had genuinely liked each other at the beginning. Then Kotacek had awakened and spoiled everything, and now we could not wait to be away from each other.

  We reached the border. The trip took less than two hours, because from the moment of Kotacek’s awakening Ferenc had stepped up the pace, careening around curves at seventy miles an hour, driving as fast as he dared and somewhat faster than I dared in reckless haste to divest himself of his passengers. I did not blame him.

  We waited in the car, Kotacek and I, while Ferenc found the proper guard and made the proper arrangements. Then he came back for us and led us to the break in the fence. The guard had carefully deserted his post, as had his Yugoslav opposite number. They would return, Ferenc told us, in ten minutes. By that time we were to be across the border and well on our way.

  Kotacek walked through first. Ferenc produced a small black automatic from his jacket pocket. For a moment I thought he might shoot Kotacek in the back. At the time I would not have stopped him. Then he sighed and presented me with the gun.

  “You may need this.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Perhaps one day you will come back to Hungary, without such baggage as this.”

  “I hope to.”

  “You will be welcome with us.”

  “You are kind, and generous.”

  “The gun,” he said. “Should the situation change, should you have occasion to kill the Slovak, I would be pleased if you saw fit to use the gun.”

  He turned without a handshake and walked back to his friend’s car. I hesitated only for a moment, then crossed through the break in the Hungarian fence, walked twenty yards to my right, found the break in the Yugoslav fence and crossed into Yugoslavia. I looked at the gun, at Kotacek, and over my shoulder. Ferenc was driving back toward Budapest. I put the gun in my pocket.

  With Kotacek I had played the earnest Nazi, with Ferenc the liberal anti-fascist revolutionary. I examined my own feelings, the hatred I felt for my sloppy, sickly loud-mouthed cargo, and then I thought of my speech in Pisek, my address to the Bund. How the words had leaped from my throat with a will of their own. How role-playing had carried me along.

  I thought of the Red Queen’s advice to Alice. Speak French when you can’t think of the English for a thing, walk with your toes turned out, and remember who you are.

  Remember who you are. It was not all that easy, and getting harder all the time.

  Chapter 14

  There was a time when they described the Balkans as the patchwork quilt of Europe. Since then the Iron Curtain had descended and the Soviet army had dyed the old quilt a uniform shade of red. Ye
t Yugoslavia remained the old Balkan patchwork quilt in microcosm.

  In a way, the nation was like a carefully assembled jigsaw puzzle. From a distance one saw only the picture which had been created, one of progress and peace and harmony, independence from Russia, industrial progress, increasing westernization, a burgeoning tourist trade, and so on. But closer up the cracks appeared. Closer up one saw that the whole was composed of an infinity of little oddly shaped pieces held precariously together. Croatians, Serbs, Slovenes, Dalmatians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Hercegovinians, Macedonians, all carefully if tenuously interlocked in a pattern called Yugoslavia.

  A delightful country.

  We crossed the border near Subotica, in the Serbian province of Voyvodina. We passed southward through the country step by careful step, making more stops than a milk train, moving from one band of fanatics to another. In Subotica we were received by two old women, spinsters, sisters, who claimed to be vaguely but directly related to the last king of Yugoslavia. They were monarchists and prayed for the restoration of a Serbian king to the Yugoslav throne. They fed us, we bathed, and they summoned a great-nephew of theirs with a horsecart. He had no idea of our politics and didn’t seem to have much understanding of his aunts’ political ideas either, but he took us twelve miles down the road before dropping us off and turning back to Subotica. We went from the monarchist ladies to a trio of Bosnian anarchists, from them to some Croat nationalists, and so it went, all the way through the country.

  It took us a full week to go something like four hundred miles, although we probably covered twice that distance, zigging and zagging, going up some mountains and down others and around still others. It would have gone faster without Kotacek, but then without him there would have been no reason to take the trip in the first place. I didn’t mind spending the time, anyway. As I’ve said, I like Yugoslavia. I liked eating bits of roasted lamb around a campfire in the hills of Montenegro. I liked talking with bitter-eyed young men in dimly lighted apartments, on hillsides, in farm cottages. I liked everything but Kotacek, and I was getting to the point where I could put up with him. Not because he was becoming tolerable. Never that. On the contrary, he had become increasingly loathsome to the point where I hated him with a steady, unremitting hatred. His words could not bother me now, not once I got to the stage of complete hatred. His delaying tactics, his need for insulin, his constant grumbling, his just as constant urinating, his propensity for embarrassing me, all of this ceased to have any particular effect upon me. With or without them, I hated the man.