It was worth a try. Bucarest telephones were not good enough for any very clear analysis. Mitrani could not be suspected since he was known to speak very little English. He called up Scheeper at the Athénée Palace Hotel.
‘This is Holgar Johannsen speaking.... No, I am not calling you to worry you more for a contract.... It is something else.... No, I am not in gaol. My noble consul very much protested. But I am forbidden to go forth until they catch that dirty pig Mitrani.... No, it is my duty to speak to you about the girl, Nadya. I did not believe a gentleman would do such a thing.... You know what thing. I will not mention it.... But her behaving was most wrong. When she confessed to me, I was very much in dudgeon. I will not allow blackmail. I addressed her severely, Mr. Scheeper, until she was on her knees to me. So I have your passport and the tickets.... Yes, she regrets very much her sin.... No, the police do not know, Mr. Scheeper. I was by good fortune able to hide your property in a safe place How much? I beg your pardon, but I do not understand.... I am indeed insulted.... Ah, just a reward! Is it so? Then I will ask you to give it to the Mission to Seamen, Mr Scheeper No, I am not in the quod. I am honourably treated by the military but I may not go forth till they find me guiltless.... Four or five days. So they have assured my consul.... I shall then visit your hotel, Mr. Scheeper, and deliver to you the passport and tickets.... Your foreign money? Tchk, tchk! This is a bad mischief indeed. She has not told me all the truth. She will be on her knees to me again.... At three o’clock on Tuesday. Yes, I will make it convenient, so I give you my knightly word.... And I must ask you not to prosecute the erring child.... That is most Christian, Mr. Scheeper. Till Tuesday, Mr. Scheeper.’
Bernardo put down the telephone, wiped his forehead and collapsed on the divan kicking his legs in the air. Nadya was in fits of laughter. She threw her arms round him and kissed him. It was the first time he had ever felt the deformity close against him. She too realised the effect of her impulsive gesture and drew back. He held her close, but shoulder to shoulder, expressing wordlessly that his affection for her was—leaving aside desire—all that one human being could feel for another.
She kissed him again and rolled lazily off the divan. The grey clouds of her eyes were luminous and transparent. A broad smile was back as if she were just recovering from laughter without any interval.
‘What was that about money?’ Bernardo asked.
‘Oh, he must have meant his wallet.’
‘You took it?’
‘Not the one he used to pay his bill at Capşa. This one was much flatter and came out with the envelope. I couldn’t put it back, could I?’
She plunged a hand into her blouse and took out a smart, thin folder of black leather meant to stand upright in a breast pocket. It contained a few notes of high value—Hungarian, Austrian, Swiss and Belgian—all ready for the journey and the restaurant car. Mr. Henri Scheeper was evidently a neat and experienced traveller.
‘Weren’t you ever caught at this?’
‘Yes, David. But by then I had passed on whatever I got. So they were ashamed and gave me something to eat. Russians are kind. Now I will do your hair.’
She opened her bag and took out a bottle which he recognised. It had put the fear of God into him for weeks. Despina in one of those irrational, fairy-tale urges of women for metamorphosis had decided to become a dazzling blonde and could only be dissuaded from the sacrilege by Bernardo’s repeated protests. With the aid of Pozharski’s brush and comb Nadya went to work on him. First she peroxided the whole head and made him wash it off after an hour; then she did a streak, assuring him that when he woke up in the morning he would have a white mèche very like Scheeper’s.
‘And I’ve got an idea. David. Don’t shave and I’ll do the bristles every day.’
‘Will it work without taking my skin off?’
‘Of course it will! It’s what these Romanian women use for their moustaches.’
In case Scheeper or the police should call on her, Nadya had to remain in the house until it was time for them to go. She had decided that for herself, leaving her few clothes behind and buying the cheap, square case to carry toilet necessities and lingerie. More baggage was essential for the journey to avoid suspicion and give the customs men something to stick their white-gloved hands into. Search of the house produced a battered suit-case of crocodile leather but few contents which could produce a casual impression that it was shared by uncle and niece.
For the female side of the family there were an alluring, flouncy peignoir, one stocking, the housekeeper’s overall and two pairs of Pozharski’s silk pyjamas which might be anything. A neutral pile of freshly washed laundry added bulk. All that Bernardo could find for himself was a splendid old Norfolk jacket with a fur collar, dating from shooting parties before the war, plus the equipment of Pozharski’s dressing table and bathroom. He chose to wear the jacket, though it was too small, and pack his own coat. That would make him look like some impoverished country gentleman, German or Austrian, who stuck to his pre-war clothing because he could not afford any more. A hat to go with it would have to be bought on the way to the station.
He put Nadya in the upstairs bedroom with instructions to climb down the drain pipe and run if police were busily occupied with his arrest. Himself he lay on the divan sleeping little. It was excitement rather than anxiety which kept him awake, for there was no halfway house in this escape. If they were stopped at the station or on the Hungarian frontier it was the end; if they were not, they would go all the way through undisturbed. He was more worried by the problem of Nadya in England. She would not fit into his dreaming, now more resigned than optimistic. She could not expect much help from any refugee organisation as soon as Scheeper found out that he had been robbed and fooled. And she was only seventeen, without experience of the normal solidities of life.
Up a tree! How perfect and how young! He would have loved to know at what point on the way from the travel agent to Capşa to her chosen dark street that tree had occurred to her. It did not simply grow when she needed it, though to hear her talk one might think that she was confident that it would. She had this gift of committing an irrevocable act of audacity and, if it failed, of lifting her head from her paws, as it were, and blinking at an angry world with surprised and innocent adoration. If only the girl were not handicapped she could capture any man she set her heart on, and he couldn’t do much about it against divine approval.
They were up early. Bernardo shaved, refusing to allow chicken fluff to grow on his face. The light brown hair and its white mèche were perfect. He disliked himself in the mirror—a sleek, shady customer old enough to know better. Nadya made the bed and smoothed the divan, meticulously cleaning up to remove all the evidence of their presence. What she had done to herself was impossible for an honest man to analyse. She did not look a day more than fourteen and clumsy with puppy fat. Her face was scrubbed and pink. Her hat was more on the back of her head than usual and she had tucked her hair into it untidily so that one ear showed and the other did not. A few pins—she seemed an expert on the use of pins—had transformed the plump and simple grey coat and skirt in which she had arrived into something schoolmistresses allowed you to wear when uncle asked you out to lunch on Sunday.
He telephoned for a taxi. Its arrival set a seal of quiet normality on last-minute fussing. Bernardo shut the front door and tried to walk down the courtyard with the air of a responsible householder under the eyes of a maid shaking her mop out of a window on the other side of the street. He hoped that she had never seen Pozharski. He hoped she would not gossip about a strange gentleman without a hat.
On the way to the station he stopped to buy a tweed cap which he put on severely straight instead of flopping over in the English manner. He did not, he supposed, look particularly Belgian, but would pass as a sound continental traveller without money to waste on the luxury of the Orient Express and enough to sit up snoring in the dignity of the First Class.
He whisked Nadya into the waiting room and th
en looked carefully round the platform for Scheeper or any abnormal number of police. The coast was apparently clear, so they went straight to their compartment where he took off his cap to show the colour of his hair. He wondered which of the passengers drifting up and down the corridor were security police in plain clothes. Some of them must have been. He talked unceasingly to Nadya in French. Their relationship had to be manifest.
Looking back, Mr. Brown was amazed that they got away with it.
‘That touch of peroxide—the first thing any detective would think of! The real disguise was Pozharski’s coat and his crocodile leather, plus my angelic young niece with her wide-open eyes drinking in everything on the funny, foreign station.’
The half hour before the train pulled out was interminable. Even when they were away they dared not face the restaurant car though breakfastless and very hungry; so long as they remained where they were the charm might hold. At Brasov, three hours out, he found the courage to buy some food from the station buffet. Then they sat on and on, glued to their corner seats. The compartment itself carried an aura of respectability. In the other two corners was a middle-aged Hungarian couple of obvious integrity with whom relationship was limited to safe nods and smiles.
In the middle of the night they reached the frontier at too familiar Oradea Mare. Bernardo sank into his corner pretending to be asleep and praying that Lieutenant Muresanu left the examination of passports to his underlings. Meanwhile Nadya gazed out of the window at the first peaceful frontier she had ever crossed. He watched her out of half-closed eyes, noticing how she was at first controlling nervousness and then beaming with the expression of a child patted on the head by her dentist and told there was no work to be done. The joint passport was stamped without question, the joint bag unexamined. The Arlberg Express clanked off into Hungary. It was a pity that the restaurant car was closed till morning. Bernardo was in a mood to celebrate his niece’s birthday.
VI
Nadya
‘Nothing else to report! Mr. Scheeper’s black folder provided for us amply. So I remained in a pleasant sort of limbo between the extinction of David Mitrani and the birth of someone who hadn’t yet been christened. That nameless person only began to wake up when we got to Basle and were about to cross northern France into Belgium. It occurred to me that if Scheeper often travelled to central and eastern Europe his face might be well known to Belgian officials and we had better leave the train before the frontier. So we got off at Nancy—no trouble about that—and spent a pleasant day cleaning up and refreshing ourselves. You couldn’t have asked for a more fascinating companion than Nadya once the pressure was off—that preposterous faith in the future and more than a touch of Russian extravagance! Damn it, she actually encouraged me to spend money!’
At Calais Bernardo strolled into the British Consulate to find out whether a Belgian needed a visa or not. He was received with a cordial interest which seemed to him more friendly than official. The vice-consul asked him twice whether he was sure that he and his niece really wanted to go to England. He said that of course they did. She was joining her mother in London and could not be allowed to travel alone.
The white cliffs of Dover produced no tear from the exile. They seemed to him forbidding—a white wall with a narrow hole in it. Mr. Scheeper and niece were going to get in but he would have preferred to know what welcome they would receive and how they would get out again if it became advisable. However, the damp quay, the porters, the trains, the immigration control were comfortingly safe and familiar. He presented his passport. The officer stamped it, looked at it again, looked at Mr. Scheeper and passed the pair of them through.
On the way to the train a respectable citizen who had the neutrality of a bank cashier or insurance clerk touched his bowler hat and asked:
‘Mr. Scheeper?’
Bernardo agreed that he was. The greeting was so neutral that he wondered—though his heart was doing overtime—whether it could not possibly be a friend deputed to meet Scheeper on arrival.
‘Would you mind stepping this way?’
He stepped, followed by Nadya. At the door of an office marked PRIVATE the unknown friend remarked:
‘Perhaps the young lady would like a cup of tea.’
Whether the young lady liked it or not, a female, equally neutral, materialised to back up the invitation. Nadya, caught between two very professional smiles, was led away and Bernardo waved to a chair in the office.
‘Well, Mr. Scheeper, we didn’t think we should see you again.’
‘You were expecting me?’
‘Since you were kind enough to call at the Consulate....’
‘Do you want me for anything in particular?’
‘Come off it, Mr. Scheeper! The police want you for keeping a brothel and skipping bail. Who’s the lady? Bit young for a new recruit isn’t she?’
Bernardo’s mind became an absolute, terrifying blank. Whatever he said would be wrong. He preferred to be jailed for brothel-keeping rather than extradited to Spain, but what would happen to Nadya?
‘The lady is really my niece,’ he said. ‘There was nobody else to escort her to her mother, so I—er—had to take the risk.’
‘I see from your passport that you left Romania on Friday. Your niece was living there?’
Bernardo explained that he had picked her up at Zurich where she was at school. The immigration officer rang a bell, wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to his clerk.
‘A cup of tea, Mr. Scheeper?’
Bernardo silently blasted the tea and accepted it. In any decent European country he would have been offered—if offered anything at all—a drink which might have inspired imagination.
‘How long do you think I’ll get?’
‘Well, I see you pleaded Not Guilty. No faith in the jury, Mr. Scheeper?’
The clerk returned with another slip of paper.
‘Miss Marie-Louise says she was at school in Belgium.’
‘Well, so she was.’
‘She also states that you both left Brussels this morning.’
There was nothing more to be said, and Bernardo did not say it. Henri Scheeper and niece were despatched to London by a later boat train. Bernardo retired behind a newspaper, trying ineffectively to read it and ignoring the pale green dance of spring all over the Kentish countryside. He commented that although it was May the rain had stopped and it was not freezing. Nadya on the other hand prattled away to the escorting constable. She soon had him in a fatherly and tender mood, telling her all about his daughter of the same age and wishing the pair could meet. It seemed most unlikely. Encouraged by this love-fest Bernardo began to consider whether anything could be gained by getting the constable to take her hand and lead her to the lavatory. But the train stopped nowhere and offered no chance of escape. He felt helplessly imprisoned by the compartment and the miles and miles of uniform London suburbs now streaming past the window. Since the State would be supplying board and lodging for some time he told Nadya in Romanian to remove and keep Scheeper’s black wallet without the constable seeing.
They were delivered to Vine Street for further enquiries. Nadya was taken away for still another nice cup of tea. Bernardo was shown into the Superintendent’s office by a constable who had an unpleasant air of knowing all about him and finding it offensive.
‘Well, well, Scheeper, isn’t this an unexpected visit?’ the Superintendent began and then stopped short and stared. ‘And what have we here, may I ask? I knew he’d never show his face in this country again!’
Bernardo said weakly that it was a longish story and feverishly began to compose it. He explained that he was English and lived in Brussels. He gave a false name and address, though well aware of its futility. Still, there might be a chance of vanishing before the facts were checked.
‘I shall hold you on a charge of illegal entry. Anything you say may....’
‘No, you won’t,’ Bernardo answered boldly. ‘I’m British. I don’t need any passport.’<
br />
‘Then why did you see fit to use someone else’s?’
‘That’s the Belgians’ business, not yours. You can’t hold me on any charge at all.’
‘I can think of half a dozen, my lad. You may or may not be British, but your Scheeper’s niece isn’t.’
Bernardo saw a gleam of light. Wherever it led, it would do for the moment.
‘She’s a White Russian refugee and hasn’t got a passport. That is why I borrowed Scheeper’s. I wanted to get her into this country, you see.’
‘Your young lady?’
‘You could put it that way.’
‘Fourteen years old?’
‘That’s Scheeper’s niece. This lady is over the age of consent, if that is what you mean.’
‘I understand you to say you are not Henri Scheeper?’
‘You know I’m not.’
‘I know nothing of the sort, sir. You answer his description, and it is my duty to keep you in custody until you can be identified or otherwise by the police officers who carried out your arrest.’
A mean and ingenious fellow, the Superintendent! There was no arguing with that one.
‘Well, can Mr. Scheeper talk to his niece then?’
‘No. But you have no need to be worried. She seems to have mislaid that mother of hers in London, so we will see that she is put up at a respectable hotel for the time being. Now come on, Romeo, and take it easy!’ he added with a grin.
Bernardo was duly locked up. The experience was not so bad as he imagined it would be throughout the months he had daily awaited it. Supper was edible for a hungry man and the cell clean, as indeed one would expect if gilded youth was frequently locked up at Vine Street as that amusing young fellow Wodehouse seemed to think. He could not remember exactly what happened if a man was charged with a criminal offence and skipped bail, but certainly he would have to come before the magistrate next day. And what the hell to say there? The only hope was to expand the Romeo and Juliet romance which the Superintendent apparently had half believed.
The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown Page 22