I went straight to the fire and thawed my hands. Nada, smiling, said, “I guessed you’d like a drink. Help yourself.”
“Thanks. You?”
“Please.”
I went over and poured. I handed a glass to Nada. The old servant hadn’t come in and we were alone. I raised my glass. I said, “Good health — and good luck. And that includes Drakotny.”
She liked that. She smiled, gratefully. “That was nice of you, Commander. Thank you.”
I shrugged. “Think nothing of it! Let’s not forget what I’ve come for.”
“You have come to save Drakotny?”
“Curious as it might seem,” I said, “I have and all! But God knows how I’m going to do it,” I added.
“A way will come. I have always found there is a providence that helps people who have good motives,” she said, with complete sincerity.
“Well — maybe, maybe not.” I drank some whisky. “Only if there is one, this time its name is Pavol Krajcin. Did you do as I asked, Nada?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Good girl!” I said in relief. “And?”
“He will come.”
“Come?” I was startled. “Come where, and when?” She smiled a little. “Here, tonight.”
I said, “Oh, my God. You must be crazy! Nada, you can’t mean that!”
“But I do. You said it was important that you talked to him. Vital, was what you said — remember?”
“Yes, but —” I lifted clenched fists and shook them in sheer angry frustration. “It’s a bloody insane risk, can’t you see —”
“No. No, it is not! Please just listen to me. I spoke to this Professor Krajcin on the telephone and told him who I was and where I lived. I explained that I was a personal friend of Comrade Drakotny and I said another friend, one from England, wished to speak to him, privately. You see, I told no lies … but it was what I did not say that aroused his interest! Perhaps a woman can do this better than a man. Anyway, although he sounded scared, he agreed to come, and he will be here in one hour. What are you afraid of?”
I said, “Oh, never mind, it’s done now.” I was still angry, still scared, but I did need to meet Krajcin.
Nada said with a touch of coolness, “I agree there is some risk. I know nothing myself of Pavol Krajcin. I don’t know whose side he’s on — Drakotny’s, or Racilek’s, or neither. I don’t know if he will come, or whether the Security Police will come.”
“Oh, he’s safe enough in himself,” I told her. “If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have compromised you.”
“Exactly,” she said, smiling again. “I banked on that, as a matter of fact — because I trusted you! Can’t you trust me?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. After a moment I said, “Oh, hell,” and grinned sheepishly. I said, “Well, you won’t bank in vain. At least … not if Krajcin has hoisted in the fact that 6D2’s involved. Has he, d’you think?”
I looked at her hard, and she returned the look. “Not through me,” she said. “You must remember you’re in Czechoslovakia. Bugs and telephone taps are the norm.” I nodded. “Quite. You did the right thing there. Don’t worry about Krajcin’s loyalties. Even if he doesn’t hook on to 6D2, I’m pretty sure he’ll come along to see things for himself rather than zoom off to the cops.”
“I hope so,” she said.
“If it’s you that’s worried now, you could always get out before he comes,” I said nastily.
She said, “Oh, I’m not worried for myself! It’s you.”
I gave her an enquiring look, wondering why she was personally so confident. Then I walked over to a window, and drew the heavy curtain aside just a fraction. It looked a longish drop. I asked, “Where does that go to?”
“An alley, which leads two ways, to two streets.”
“Right,” I said. It would do, at a pinch, if the worst did happen. I went back to the fire, where Nada was still standing. “We’ll soon know if it’s the police, when your old lady opens the front door. Now — you’ve some things to tell me. First and foremost — why you say you’re not worried for yourself. How safe are you here in this house? And secondly, what happened when you came into Czechoslovakia, at the airport check?”
“The two things link.” She walked over to a big, fat sofa, and sat. “Come and sit down,” she said. “That way we shall talk better.”
I joined her. I liked the feel of her body close to mine. “Damn it to hell,” I said irritably, “I wish you weren’t Drakotny’s girl!”
*
There was a new look in her face, in her eyes — a fresh look and a more determined one too, though in all conscience she’d seemed determined enough back in Britain. But there was a difference, just the same. She was still on the drugs, of course; that, I had to accept; but I had an idea that the mere fact of being back in her own country again after so long, and being close geographically to Josef Drakotny, had brought an enormous change for the better. A lot of the haggardness had already gone — it was a miracle, but dead true. She almost glowed. And, in answer to the wish I had expressed, she was generous enough to say, “For now you can be my Drakotny. Just while we talk,” and she reached out an arm and held me closer to her body, and I put my arm around her as well. It was all make-believe and she was quite clearly Drakotny’s girl all the way along the line, but it was very nice and the homey feel of her and the room and the coal fire, and even the old girl below stairs, all made me realize what I was missing by being an agent of 6D2. Such a life was fine in its way. It was extravagantly paid and I had no need to threaten a strike to touch fifteen thousand a year, plus bonuses. My bachelor flat in London was fun, so was the Jag, so were the occasional holidays in the sun with one girl friend or another. I was never a celibate and had never found women hard to come by and I flatter myself it wasn’t just the cash that did that. Yes, it was good; very, very good, with danger as a spice to make it all the more worthwhile. But there was no permanency in my private life, no-one to come home to, many girls to weep for a day or two if I got myself rubbed out on a job but no-one actually to mourn, to feel any real gap in their lives that couldn’t soon be filled by someone else. I rather liked the idea of a fireside. Unless it was just Nada Strecka herself, and a tinge of green-eyed jealousy because she was indeed Drakotny’s girl …
Still. It seemed that Drakotny had a streak of decency somewhere, or maybe he was just sentimental for the past, though I didn’t rate that as very likely in any Russian puppet dictator; anyway, when Nada had hit the immigration control and the Security boys at Ruzyné she had made no bones about who she was and she had asked that Drakotny be informed that she had come back. She was very insistent about this, she told me, and although she had, somewhat naturally, been arrested, Josef Drakotny had been contacted and within the hour she had been released with apologies. She had been told to go to Hradcany Square and there, as she waited under the leafless winter acacia trees, an old familiar figure dressed in black had come to her, sent by order of Drakotny — the old woman who had let me in, Nada’s mother’s old childhood nanny. The house in which we were now sitting was hers. She had taken Nada in gladly and would give her a home for just as long as she wished. All this, Drakotny had arranged; but he would not see Nada Strecka and there had been no personal contact of any sort.
“So you haven’t been able to pass your message?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I still can’t risk giving it to anyone else. I still don’t know who to trust.”
I said, “Professor Krajcin may have some ideas on that.”
“I must give Josef the message myself,” Nada said. “I can make him believe … or I think I can. I wouldn’t trust anybody else.”
I ran my fingers along her arm; the skin was smooth, warm. “You know,” I said, “it does seem to me that Drakotny might in any case be expecting something like this, even without being warned. I’d have thought it was always a bit of a tightrope, being a Prime Minister, even a temporary acting one, in a C
ommunist state subservient to Russia. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “How many Prime Ministers have been murdered, in fact, since the Russians moved West after the war?”
I couldn’t think of any off-hand who had been actually murdered, at any rate without trial, and I had to admit it. But I said, “Just the same, the thought must occur. Especially here in Czechoslovakia, where the position isn’t all that static. Drakotny must know that at least half the people would like to see him dead.” I added, “I’m sorry, Nada, but it’s no use trying to avoid the facts. They don’t all love Drakotny like you do.”
She sighed, forlornly and sadly. After a moment she said, “Yes, very well, the thought must occur. But the thought must occur to sailors that the ship may sink, to miners that they may be trapped underground, to airline pilots that one day they may crash. It’s an occupational hazard, and men learn to live with it and very soon to forget it and never think about it. In a sense their guard is always lowered — it’s natural. But give them a definite warning … that the ship is approaching a rock, that the roof of a mine-shaft, or tunnel, is creaking, that a wing is breaking up — you see, don’t you?”
I grinned down at her. “Yes, of course I see. And I’m not weakening. I’m still here to save your Drakotny. I may even find a way of passing the warning myself — if you’d trust me. But one thing bothers me, Nada. Badly.”
“Yes?”
I said, “Drakotny fixed you up and he won’t see you, but that doesn’t mean he’s lost interest. Even if he doesn’t put a tail on you, the Security people will, off their own bat. They can’t afford not to, can they?”
“No, that’s perfectly true, though I haven’t been able to spot anybody watching me.”
“Which doesn’t prove a thing, as well you know if you’re half an agent, Nada.” I wagged a finger in her face. “So why did you compromise me by asking me to come here?”
“Why did you allow yourself to be compromised? You obviously knew the risk involved.”
I nodded. “Okay, so I did.”
“Well, then?”
“I reckon,” I answered, grinning, “we must both think alike after all. I knew the risk but decided it was acceptable, because …”
“Because we each have a need of the other, jobwise?”
“That’s it,” I agreed. “Jobwise. You must know the Coms pretty well, of course, Nada. Tell me this: would you say I was right in assuming they won’t pounce on you just because they see callers, even if they happen to recognize me — or Krajcin, when he comes?”
“Yes, I’d say that was quite right. They would go on watching, and wait their time for a big killing; just as you would in the West. In my case, I think, particularly, there would be no sudden arrest —”
“Not until they’d contacted Drakotny again?”
She nodded. “Right!”
“Okay,” I said. “I think we are in accord, Nada. We’re on a knife-edge and we both know it, but for the moment the knife hasn’t been sharpened. And in my case at least, I had another consideration in mind and I still have: the pressure of time, which somehow doesn’t seem to be on our side judging from all the urgency you generated back in Britain — and I felt that almost any risk was justified. Do you check with that?”
“Yes,” she said quietly, “I check with that.”
It was funny, how we both felt just the same way without anything definite to go upon. But as we sat there and waited for Krajcin to come we began to talk of other things and Nada told me something of her past, and of her family. Her father, Otakar Strecka, had been a man of the people, a worker in a Prague factory and a good Party member right along the line from the underground days. On the liberation from the Nazis by the Red Army and the U.S. forces in 1945, he had left his factory for full-time Party work and by 1949 had progressed as far as a minor Government post in the Gottwald administration, or dictatorship would be a better word, and he had held this until his death in 1957. Nada’s mother, who had been more or less swept off her feet by Otakar Strecka when she was a young girl in the resistance, was from a very different background. Her father, Franz Drummel, came of an old Austrian family whose lands had been carved up in 1918 when the boundaries had been cruelly altered to accommodate the new Czechoslovak state under Masaryk, and Prague, then an Austrian city, had become the capital of the new-born republic. It was from the remnants of this family and an aristocratic past that the old nanny, Wilhelmina Frossen, a German by birth, had been handed down; she and Nada were all that remained. I didn’t even need to ask if Fräulein Frossen could be trusted. It was so obvious, from one sight of her, that all her loyalties were so firmly entrenched in the past, that it was a wonder to me she had been allowed to live at all once the Communists had taken over control.
Oddly, I couldn’t get Nada to say very much about her years as a student here in Prague, where she had attended the Charles University — Krajcin’s university, though Krajcin evidently hadn’t held his post at that time. Or about her affair with Drakotny, whose acquaintance she had made at some minor reception or other to which she had been invited as the daughter of a former Government and Party official. All I gathered was that Drakotny had been very pressing — he had not in fact been in the topflight leadership then, but was pretty well up in the Party and the Government — and assignations had been made. The affair had been a very hot one and she had fallen completely under Drakotny’s spell and, damn it to hell, she was still there. She seemed to bear no ill-will for the way he had discarded her. It had been necessary for him to do so, and that had been that. She was sad, but compliant. What she was suffering from was real love. Undoubtedly!
I tried to probe her about the drugs, and the hippies, but I didn’t get very far. She told me she’d started on cannabis and then she’d gone on to the amphetamines; and she had tried LSD before getting hooked on heroin. It turned out that my first impressions had been correct — I remembered Max had told me this as well — and she hadn’t been long on heroin, just a matter of weeks. To me, that figured all right. I fancied, or anyway I hoped, that not too much damage had been done so far. I also hoped that Fräulein Frossen would do her utmost to exert what must be a good influence. As to the hippies, they had followed the drugs: nothing unusual about that. It was a phase she had come through, anyway; she was clean and tidy in her appearance.
At thirty-six minutes after midnight there was a banging at the front door. Nada got up with a swift movement; I followed her across to the door, and we both listened. I was all set for a dash to the window and a long drop into that back alley, even if I had to leave Nada, for I could be more use to her and Drakotny — which was all she cared about — free than in captivity. But there were no expostulations from the old nanny, no shouts, no crash of jack-boots or jingle of military arms and equipment; two sets of footsteps came quietly enough up the stairs and we breathed again, as it were … and moved away from the door, not to appear too untrustful.
Fräulein Frossen opened the door and stood back wordlessly. She looked scared and I couldn’t wonder at it; she had been caught up in something pretty big, by personal order of the acting Premier. A man came in, tall and thin, a walking corpse with yellowish skin and a very long face, clean-shaven and deeply lined. He was shaking all over, and he nearly fell through the floor when he saw me, even though Nada had told him a friend wanted to talk to him. “Who are you?” he asked in his own language. “And you, Madame? What do you want with me, may I ask?”
I said, “You’re Pavol Krajcin, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Charles University?”
He nodded, his head jerking violently down and up. “This is so, yes. And you?”
“I believe you know a man called … Max, in London?”
“Max?” He started, and his eyes seemed to bulge from his head. “Oh — yes, yes. I have met him.” The way he said it, he gave the impression that he had already decided it was no good trying to fool the authorities since they knew this much and he might j
ust as well make a few admissions. He was pouring sweat; I wondered he had dared to come along at all. He stared at me and Nada, one after the other and back again.
I smiled and said quietly, “Its quite all right, Professor Krajcin. I’m from 6D2. You’re in no danger.” I indicated Nada. “This lady has already told you on the phone, she is a personal friend of Mr Drakotny’s. We have asked you to come here because we believe you can help us, if you are willing. You have nothing to fear, isn’t that right, Nada?”
Nada said, “Of course. Please sit down, Professor Krajcin.” He sat, rather suddenly, on a hard chair near the door, as if poised for instant flight the moment Nada took her clothes off and I clicked the compromising camera lens — or vice versa, even. You weren’t safe from anything behind the Curtain. Nada said, “I’m sure you’d like a drink,” and Krajcin overcame his anxieties enough to say, “Thank you, yes.” He looked in the most dire need of a stimulant and I thought it advisable not to warn him of the fact that his visit would almost certainly have been seen and would be duly noted down in the Security Police files. Thus did one more sacrifice climb the altar. He grabbed the glass when Nada brought it, and took a big gulp. She’d given him vodka, not whisky. A tiny trail of it ran down from one corner of his mouth, and this he mopped up with a finger before asking once again, “What do you want with me?”
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