I said, “All right, General. I’m here to keep Drakotny in the clear. And I think you must know why.”
“Yes. For the selfish purposes of the West. I know the lines along which they think.”
I reminded him of the results to his own country, and to Racilek, if Drakotny died; but he shrugged this off. He seemed to think his underground movement could cope, and keep the peace. I said, “Maybe, but that still doesn’t help Racilek, does it?”
“Racilek, in certain circumstances, will be safe.”
“Oh?” I sat up straight. “What circumstances are these, General?”
His answer told me something I certainly didn’t know. He said, “A week from today, a little unexpectedly, Racilek returns to Prague from Moscow.”
“So —”
“So if the killing of Drakotny is delayed …”
“If! General, do you know when it is scheduled for?”
“I have told you already, I know nothing. It is you I ask for help, do you not understand?”
“I’m sorry,” I said in a flat tone, “but I don’t know anything either — nothing beyond the fact that we believe a threat does exist. We don’t know who is behind it, we don’t know the timing, we don’t know the method and we don’t know the location.” I added bitterly, wondering just what kind of a fool I was being in confiding in General Rudolf Heilersetz, “I was supposed to find all that out, don’t you see?”
He looked down at me in silence for a few moments, then said, “Yes, my friend, I see. And I believe you. So now it is up to us — the two of us together. You will see how vital it is that we find out the timing, how vital that Racilek is back from Moscow before Drakotny dies.”
“I agree that’s vital,” I said, “but there’s one thing we still don’t see eye to eye on, General, and that is, I’m still here to see that Drakotny doesn’t die at all.”
He smiled, then nodded. “The best man must win,” he said. “In the meantime, there is much we can try to achieve together, Commander.”
*
It was all so bloody involved, I thought dejectedly, so flaming crazy. How did we begin? Nada Strecka knew of the existence of the threat, so did Heilersetz; so, I believed, did Professor Pavol Krajcin. But none of them knew anything more. Not even Nada, who might have been supposed to have the most personal interest of any of the parties involved. Frankly, I didn’t see what on earth we could try to achieve together, as Heilersetz expected. For a start we lunched together, in a magnificent dining-room panelled in old oak, with a long and highly polished oak table set with silver and bowls of hothouse flowers, and a white-jacketed elderly man like an ex-soldier to wait upon us with the assistance of a young girl. I think the girl was the milkmaid I’d seen earlier from the car; close to, she was distinctly pretty, and I could see the promise of her breasts as she leant close to me when serving. She had a scrubbed, soapy smell, fresh and clean. Vorsak lunched with us too, but, figuratively speaking, well below the salt. After all, whatever his official position, he was little more than a peasant when on the General’s home territory. I was amazed that Communism would wear this sort of thing; but understood a little when I thought of the Scottish clan system in the old, remote, Highland days. That was basic Communism, with all the clan on a dead level except the chief — and he, of course, lived like the lord he was. And right now, clearly, I was in the presence of The MacHeilersetz. As a vast and welcome meal of — yes — roast ox was served, I amused myself by dreaming up a coat of arms. A ducal crown quartered with the hammer and sickle and with a burning village, superimposed with a tank and a dove, the lot bathed in blood and guts laced with noblesse oblige … the supporters two bullet-riddled university students, the crest Drakotny’s head. The motto … well, something patriotic and elevating. And a lot of deviousness scattered around somewhere, disguised as simple honesty. I didn’t know quite where to fit that in and I stopped bothering my head about it when Heilersetz lifted the glass that the old manservant had filled along with Vorsak’s and mine. Once again, he gave us a toast:
“Racilek, gentlemen! May he be preserved, long to rule!”
We drank to that, Heilersetz and I, joined by that confessed Racilek supporter, fat little Vorsak. But I was watching Vorsak as he put his glass to his lips. He was investing the toast with much fervour and emotion and it came to me that possibly he was putting rather too much effort into it. It had, to me, the feel of a performance, though even so he couldn’t prevent a slight flicker in his eyes when he saw that I was watching him. I thought: Ha, ha, ha. Racilek my foot! It was almost like a Prince Charles Edward’s man waving his glass over a finger-bowl when he drank to the English usurper-monarch. I wondered old Heilersetz didn’t see it; but then, I’d been highly suspicious of Vaclav Vorsak right the way along the line, myself. Heilersetz obviously hadn’t. Sometime or other, I would ask General Heilersetz what he thought of fat men who carried knock-out drops in hypodermics concealed in attaché-cases … I had an idea that episode would come as news to him.
During that lunch, Heilersetz didn’t talk a great deal; he seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts. But I did get the information out of him that he’d had personal and private word through of Racilek’s forthcoming early return. It seemed he was quite a pal of Racilek’s and he heard things, by various means, that other people did not. I asked, “Do you know how many people know when Racilek’s due back, other than us?”
“I would doubt if anyone else knows,” he said. “He will not announce his departure from Moscow until nearer the time.”
“Then this attempt, whatever it is, isn’t likely to have its timing brought forward so that Racilek can still be caught with his pants down?”
Vorsak gave one of his girly giggles, and got a frosty glare from the General. Heilersetz said, “What you say is correct, yes.”
“But only if you’re dead certain no-one else knows.”
He frowned, and nodded.
“Can you be dead certain, General?”
After some hesitation, he said, “No. One can never be that, Commander.”
“That’s what I thought. So from now on out, anything could happen, couldn’t it? Just where is Drakotny at this moment, do you know that?”
Heilersetz said, “In the Castle. In Prague.” He added, “He will, of course, be very well guarded in the Castle.”
So he might be, I thought. The point was, whose side were the guards on? It needed only a handful of them to do the dastardly deed. Or even just one, nicely placed. I wondered if Heilersetz, despite his protestations of non-knowledge, did in fact know who the traitor inside the gates was. Probably not, I decided, or he wouldn’t have been bothering with me — it all seemed to add up to a kind of honesty, if that is the word. And if this was indeed so, then I could understand the General’s anxieties and his conflicting loyalties and desires. Drakotny had to die, but for heaven’s sake don’t let it happen before Racilek has safely hopped the twig out of the Kremlin. That, I could see now, was poor Heilersetz’s awful dilemma. That, and the fact that he would feel impelled to inhibit the attempt — if he could — if it was scheduled within the next week. And he might never see another attempt, once one had been ballsed up. It was enough to lift anyone’s blood pressure through the roof.
I thought about Drakotny’s doctors, then. “Tell me, General,” I said. “Do you know a Dr Palovitch?”
“He was Drakotny’s doctor. He’s dead. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, just a thought.” I chewed on some roast ox. “How about Professors Fierlinger and Lina?”
“Two more of his doctors. I do not know them. Nor, personally, did I know Palovitch.”
“Uh-huh. Who replaced Palovitch?”
“Ah …” Heilersetz screwed up his eyes. “I forget the fellow’s name … wait a minute, I think it was — dear me, yes — Krajcin. Yes, it is a Dr Krajcin. A youngish man. What’s the matter, Commander?”
I had almost choked on a mouthful of ox. Rich gravy streamed down my chin. I mopped at it w
ith a linen napkin, and apologized. I asked, “What do you know of this Krajcin, General?”
He shrugged. “Nothing, except what I have said.”
“Youngish, you said. How young?”
“Oh … I would say, in his early thirties, not more.”
“I see.” I drank some wine and felt better able to breathe. “Do you happen to know an older Krajcin, a Professor of Moral Philosophy in Charles University?”
Heilersetz shook his head disinterestedly. “No, I do not know such a man.”
I said, “Well, it may be no more than a coincidence of names, but I think you ought to meet him.”
*
It didn’t take long for me to convince Heilersetz that Krajcin would be well worth talking to. I myself had fully intended having another chat with him, because I was convinced he hadn’t told me all he knew. Krajcin was clearly a frightened man and I didn’t think he would be easy to get hold of, but Vorsak, who, to my consternation and alarm, was dispatched impetuously to go and get him even before lunch was over, was confident of success. If he took his thug with him, I reckoned his confidence wouldn’t be too misplaced. Krajcin would collapse in terror at first sight. That thug simply shrieked Security Police, however falsely. But I was dead scared about Vorsak and when he had left the dining-room I begged Heilersetz to bring him back and let me go in for Krajcin myself. No go. The General trusted Vorsak. I said, “I wouldn’t trust him an inch.”
“I have given my orders,” Heilersetz said. “They will be adhered to.”
I tried thereafter to keep it in mind that back in Cornwall Vorsak had said he was a Racilek man; he could have been speaking the truth — desperately I hoped he was. After coffee and liqueurs, by which time Vorsak was presumably well on his way to Prague, Heilersetz took me back to his study and we started a game of chess. Actually, he won in about half a dozen moves, because my mind was elsewhere, and we started another. He won that quickly too, and after that he seemed to lose interest in a lousy opponent and we just sat by the fire and gazed out of the window at the wintry scene. If Vorsak didn’t hurry back he would never get the car up the track; snow was falling still. As I gazed, I wondered just what Pavol Krajcin’s part in all this might be. He must be a fairly eminent sort of person, at least in university circles, and if he had been a member of Heilersetz’s underground movement I would certainly have expected Heilersetz to know. But I believed he genuinely did not. So maybe Krajcin was merely on the fringe of events after all, a wishful liberalizer who couldn’t quite summon the courage to commit himself personally. Czechoslovakia would be full of people like that. But I still felt quite certain he would have plenty to tell us, if he could be made to talk; and there was something about Heilersetz’s face that told me he had methods of extracting information when he had good reason to believe it was being withheld.
I hated the idea of putting poor Krajcin under that sort of grill, but it might have to come to that.
Five o’clock came and there was no sign of Vorsak. Earlier however the snow had stopped, and the sun had appeared briefly and thinly before retiring again for the night. It was a pretty scene while it lasted, with the sun on the snow and the trees climbing the slope on the far side of the valley, the side beyond which lay the East German border according to my reckoning. At one stage of the wait I went outside with Heilersetz, who wanted to test the snow for depth. He prodded with a shooting-stick, and grunted a bit, and frowned up at the sky which, though darkening with the evening, looked to me clear of snow now. We went back inside and the General heaved on a bell-rope. The milkmaid appeared, gave me a dimpling smile, and stopped demurely in front of Heilersetz. In his own language he told her to pass the word for the snow-plough. Ten minutes later I heard this machine grumbling and clanking down the track for the main road. It wasn’t a moment too soon; just as the thing got busy on the snow, a wind came up. Very suddenly. We heard it whistling and whining around the chimneys and the irregular roofs of the schloss, demoniac and somehow spine-chilling. Heilersetz was anxious and beginning to fret: there would be drifts now, he said, the track was very susceptible to drifting. We couldn’t hear the sounds from the snow-plough any more, though we had both gone to the main door to take a look at the weather. The day had darkened fast. Snow, brought up by the wind, zipped into our faces like a blizzard; Heilersetz’s cheeks became blue.
It was 1800 hours now. Still no Vorsak.
“There has been time,” Heilersetz said.
“I wouldn’t worry,” I told him, though I was feeling more and more uneasy about Vorsak. “Krajcin may have been lecturing or anything. We don’t know.”
“True, true.” We lingered in the great porch; Heilersetz seemed disinclined to go inside, but as for me, I was frozen. I don’t know if he had some kind of premonition; he stood there frowning anxiously and gazing into the snow being whirled up by that shrieking wind. It was undoubtedly drifting hard now, piling up along the track where the ruts lay lower than the surrounding fields, bringing the level right up to that of the fields themselves. The plough might never have passed that way at all, and by the look of it, it would need to keep on travelling up and down, up and down, until Vorsak came back.
I was just about to tell Heilersetz that I’d had enough and was going back to the fire when we both caught the sounds from the darkness, ahead along the track. First the sound of a car’s engine, revving like fury and carrying above the wind. Then shouts, and angry voices. Heilersetz turned, looking annoyed at all this noise, went into the hall and pulled the bell-rope again. When the girl appeared, he sent her for the old manservant, and then, without waiting himself, ran out into the night. I followed; by this time I had a premonition too, though not a very well-defined one: just that trouble was in the air.
It was, too.
Dimly, ahead, I saw the snow-plough. It had stuck fast. As it was silent I assumed that its engine had conked out. Behind it was Vorsak’s car, blocked. Vorsak and the thug were shouting and yelling, and the snow-plough’s driver was yelling back at them and waving his arms — I could see all this in Vorsak’s headlights. That wasn’t all I could see. I could see Pavol Krajcin, wrapped in a fur-collared coat and fur hat; and I saw him break and run, run like a hare to get on our side of the snow-plough. Then I saw the other men piling out from a car behind Vorsak’s, the men in the sinister uniforms of the Security Police, men running in our direction with guns in their hands, though I didn’t believe they had seen us yet. I saw one of them speak to Vorsak as he passed, saw him clap the fat man on the shoulder in a friendly way.
I had reached Heilersetz by this time. I glanced at his face, I could just about see his expression in the light reflected off the lying snow. He too had seen that friendly touch on Vorsak’s shoulder. I was scarcely aware of his movement by my side — not until he had fired. I hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying a gun, as a matter of fact. His first shot took Vorsak somewhere vital — the throat, it was — and the fat man went down with a hideously strangled scream. Another shot thumped into one of the policemen.
I grabbed Heilersetz as the return fire started, and shoved him down in the snow. “Stay there for God’s sake!” I snapped. “If we run, we haven’t a hope.”
I didn’t believe we had much of a hope lying in the snow either, but it was still a better chance. Then something unexpected happened. I heard no footsteps on that thick snow, but I heard laboured breathing coming closer, and when I looked round I saw the old manservant approaching from the flank, coming out of the darkness beyond the stream of light from Vorsak’s car, like an avenging angel. I saw the brief glitter of reflected light on steel in his hands and then a sub-machine-gun opened up. It sprayed the cars and men, travelling an arc, and it kept up its fire until they were all dead as stone. They must have been, I knew.
Then it stopped. Heilersetz and I got to our feet, and, by saying nothing, added to the total, terrifying silence that lay beneath the wind.
8
The snow started again, falling sof
tly, gently on the spreadeagled bodies. The big flakes drifted through the air, slanting across the headlight beams still blazing from Vorsak’s car. Beside me, Heilersetz was cursing beneath his breath, cursing Vorsak but doing it in a hiss as though he, like I, had been struck by the curious solemnity of that bitter evening, and the sudden dead, and the drifting, falling snowflakes.
Then we heard a man sobbing and we moved forward, Heilersetz and I and the old servant. We found Krajcin’s fur hat, then we found Krajcin, cowering in the lee of the snow-plough. I reached towards him and took his arm, and drew him to his feet. He was crying like a baby, with his face all crumpled, and he could hardly stand upright.
Heilersetz, looking over my shoulder, was full of contempt. “Is this the man Krajcin?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You wanted me to meet — that?”
“I still do,” I said. “General Heilersetz, you’re a soldier. Gunfire and death doesn’t hit the university life all that often.”
Heilersetz swung away with a sharp movement of distaste for universities, making towards where Vaclav Vorsak’s body lay. He stirred at it with the prong of his shooting-stick, his face set like a vice. He spat. Then he came back to where I was still trying to keep Krajcin on his feet.
“What happened?” the General barked at Krajcin.
Krajcin wept.
Heilersetz lifted his arms and in a strangled voice said, “Get him inside, and quickly. Frumm!”
“Sir!” This was the manservant who had used the submachine-gun and was clutching it still.
“Give the Commander a hand, Frumm.”
Frumm did as he’d been told, and I too found myself obeying the General’s orders. Frumm and I half carried the weeping Krajcin towards the castle entrance, while Heilersetz remained behind to examine the bodies of the Security Police, and the two cars. I left Krajcin in the porch with Frumm, who certainly wouldn’t let him get away, and ran back through the snow to Heilersetz. I sensed that up to a point the old man was enjoying himself: he had smelt powder again, and seen action and death. It was a better thing than waiting around and doing nothing. Nevertheless, he was in a bad temper. Vorsak had let him down, Vorsak had fooled him.
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