Heilersetz, of course, saw the point as soon as I opened my mouth. He slapped his thigh, looking angry with himself, though it had been my fault in the first place for telling him to leave the dead in place. “But yes, yes! Sergeant — and you, young Frumm — and you, Professor! Quickly! We shall fetch in the bodies.”
*
Poor Krajcin was in a worse way than ever when the horrid job was done. There had been a good deal of blood around and although the cold had largely congealed it, the movement and then the comparative warmth inside the castle started it flowing again. Once inside the hall, Mrs Frumm and Katenie mopped up behind us. The cloths they used were all shoved down in the tunnel with the dead bodies, and when these had all been stowed we cleaned our own persons as best we could, though we still looked like a bunch of butchers. The entry to the escape tunnel was pretty ingenious and I could well understand how it had never been discovered. Short of taking the castle to pieces, I doubted if it ever could have been found. The actual entry itself, which was remote controlled, was down in the cellar, behind racks of old wine. When the mechanism was activated two whole sections of wall, one behind the other, slid away in opposing directions to give a gap of two feet. The contraption, which had been less sophisticated originally, operated electrically, an improvement introduced by Heilersetz’s father just before the War. The activating switch was in the somewhat primitive closet — primitive by modern standards in the West, anyway — adjoining Heilersetz’s study. This was a small, dark, stuffy apartment smelling of poor drainage and with only a dim electric light bulb overhead, and the cistern had a pull-the-lever-up-from-the-mahogany-seat kind of flushing action. When you gave a double pull, in rapid sequence, the pan emptied and didn’t refill. When it was nicely dry, you reached into the pan and felt with your finger around the bend. If you knew where to poke and prod, you found a tiny catch. You twiddled this and a sealing plate of non-corrosive material slid along and then you found a press-button. Using the morse symbol, you signalled the letter Q, long-long-short-long, and I can only assume the older Heilersetz had had a curious sense of humour and a knowledge of the International Code of Signals, for quarantine was certainly what came to mind after groping about in that primeval pan; but after all that was done — hey presto! You escaped.
*
With the bodies stowed I went back with Heilersetz for a final check around the study. He opened and shut drawers in his desk, and he checked through the safe again. Then he picked up a sizeable leather case stuffed to bursting point with papers, and we went along to his closet. He reached into the pan again and twiddled, giving the closure signal, then he operated the push-me-pull-you lever and the pan flooded up, all nice and normal. “Quick,” he said then. “We have three minutes exactly.”
“Time switch?” I asked as I followed him out at the rush.
“Yes. This, I myself fitted. With my own hands. My father, also, did the job himself, with the first electric fitting. No-one knows, you see — no workmen, not even the Frumms.”
Well inside the three minutes we entered the approach to the tunnel. All lights were off now, and we carried torches. I felt Heilersetz breathing down the back of my neck. The cellar walls slid across smoothly when the time switch operated up in the pan, ending their journey with a muffled thud. It was all very efficient. There was a kind of gasp from Pavol Krajcin as those walls closed us off with the dead. In the torch beams, everyone, except Heilersetz himself, was looking a shade fearful of the unknown. Katenie Frumm was shivering; it was very cold, but there was fear in her shivering as well. For one thing, she had had to bid a very sudden goodbye to home, which, at a guess, she would be unlikely to see ever again. Her mother was crying now, silently and almost without expression, with tears streaming like a river down her grey cheeks.
Seeing this, Heilersetz said sharply, “Dry your tears, woman! We have far to go, but we shall come through, never fear. Crying will not help.” He took my arm then, and led me forward a little way, telling the others to follow carefully. Some dozen or so feet in, his torch picked up stone steps spiralling downwards. One after the other behind the General, we descended. God, it was eerie! There was no sound except for our feet on the stone, a background of silence that could almost be felt as a physical force. There was something evil in the air, I thought fancifully, as though generations of the dead were watching us and planning our destruction, or as though the colandered corpses we had left in the entry chamber had taken fresh life and were hurrying behind us, dripping their running blood from the bullet holes. We went down a longish way — fifteen feet, Heilersetz said. “It rises towards the end of its course,” he told me. “Quite gradually. The going will be uncomfortable, for the roof is low.”
He was only too right; when we came to the foot of the spiral stairway and saw the round hole that was the tunnel, I realized we would have to crawl on our hands and knees, if not do a worm-slither on our stomachs. The diameter of the hole was no more than two-and-a-half feet; it was a drain rather than a decent tunnel. It was lined with rotting wood inside, reinforced with rusty iron hoops. It was like a barrel turned inside out.
And we had to travel this for three miles.
Three miles!
Very, very gingerly we went in. Heilersetz led, then came young Frumm and his wife, with Katenie in rear of them, then Krajcin, then me, and finally Sergeant Frumm. After a while it was hell for us all, but more especially for Krajcin, who wasn’t used to roughing things. He sighed and groaned and grumbled, and carried on and on about the way his life had been so suddenly broken apart, how he could never go back to the university after getting mixed up in this kind of business. Unkindly I said, “No, I suppose not. It makes a difference, when you’ve been on the run from the Security Police, doesn’t it?”
“Through no fault of my own,” he protested.
“But surely that’s a matter of opinion?” The tunnel wasn’t the best place in the world for a deep conversation — we needed most of our energies just to keep dragging our bodies along — but the time had come to start finding out some truths. I felt that by this time, too, Krajcin ought to be in a fairly depressed and disorganized state of mind, all ready to tell me a thing or two in case it should help his situation. In his view, I suspected, he could scarcely be worse off, potentially, than he was right now.
I played on that, hard, fast and sinister, right behind him. I wanted to find out about young brother Jan, and I wanted to know if the medical angle was the right one. I wanted to know where my Krajcin fitted, but did I find anything out?
Pavol Krajcin was tougher than he appeared.
He didn’t give me a thing, not a thing. Brother Jan, he said, managed his own affairs. They had never been particularly close and Jan didn’t confide in him.
I said, “It was you who talked to me about the possibility, Krajcin.”
“What possibility?” He coughed and spluttered; it was dusty.
“That Drakotny might be killed by his doctors.”
“Me?” He grew indignant. “I never said anything of the sort!”
I sucked my teeth; it was true, he hadn’t exactly said it, I’d just read it into his words in Fräulein Frossen’s sitting-room. But I still felt sure that it was in his mind. If it had been, I fancied the fact that his brother was one of Drakotny’s doctors was relevant. But I couldn’t shift Krajcin. Apart from the fact that he could have been telling the simple truth, I saw only one really likely explanation: Krajcin, as well as Heilersetz, could know that Racilek was coming back from Moscow in a week’s time, from which it could be considered to follow that Krajcin knew also that the attempt on Drakotny’s life was not to take place before that time; thus it was not necessary for him to speak out in order to preserve his hero Racilek.
Which, once again, seemed to point to the medical theory.
Not that I could currently do a damn thing about it, of course. And — again I reminded myself — not that I was called upon to do so. Drakotny could have been assassinated any old ti
me at all, and we in the West couldn’t possibly watch over him from now to the grave. So long as Racilek was in the clear, so was I. I told myself that, again and again, as we struggled along that dreadful tunnel which, in places, had suffered minor collapses. These, where the woodwork had rotted right away, we had to negotiate as best we could. There were air shafts along the way, but some of these had silted up, or rusted up, and we suffered tortures. We also suffered worms — great, big succulent ones like small snakes. Even I didn’t like crawling over them much, and as for poor Katenie Frumm and her mother, they cringed every time we met one. By the time we had crawled for ninety minutes by my watch, and probably hadn’t covered more than half a mile at the most, none of us could speak any more. We simply hadn’t the strength or the will. I ceased to care whether Krajcin parted with any information or not. And, under my breath, in my mind, I cursed old Heilersetz and his father for a brace of damned lunatic sadists.
*
Two terrible hours after this, I had decided that nothing worse could possibly happen to us, but I was proved wrong. Just when we were in a narrowed section of the tunnel. There was a distant, dull boom-boom-boom and then a nasty pause; and then the tunnel lifted, and fell again, and rocked from side to side, foul air blasted past us, and a whole lot of muck cascaded down on us from the roof so that we were half buried in suffocating dust and earth and stones and displaced worms.
Krajcin gave a cry of utter despair and in return I gave him a hard, viciously intended punch in the buttocks, which shut him up. The women were crying, and from behind me grandfather Frumm was calling out indistinct words of comfort which they didn’t listen to. Fortunately — or perhaps unfortunately, for they showed us the damage to the walls — the torches were all okay. I heard Heilersetz’s voice, calling me, and I fancied he was asking what had happened. I spoke through the swirling dust, a good deal of which was in my mouth. “I’ve no idea,” I said. “It sounded like one big bang, or three big bangs, and that’s all I know. Could have been gunfire, but …” My voice trailed away, because suddenly I’d realized what it was. My voice sounding awed even in my own ears, I said, “Strewth, d’you know what? They’ve blown up the castle!”
That was a silly thing to say, as I realized a moment later. Ahead, General Heilersetz gave a roar of fury; I saw his fist, shaking the torch like a rat in his grasp. He was quite beside himself, and no wonder; he had been devoted to that neo-German castle of his, a devotion I could well understand. But I wasn’t at all sure that poor Heilersetz hadn’t sat up and begged for it to be taken away from him again — though even I had hardly expected total destruction. It was fairly obvious that those three close booms must add up to total destruction. They had been too massive for anything on a lesser scale, and their echoes were ringing still, like the Admirals in the poem.
Heilersetz knew that too; I don’t think he had ticked over in the first few moments of shock, when I had heard him asking — or thought I had — what had happened. But now … straining my eyes ahead through the dust storm I saw the torch drop from the old man’s hand. It twisted as it fell and it landed shining its beam on his face, which I caught a brief sight of before the Frumm family loomed into my line of sight. Heilersetz looked terrible, and something drastic had happened to the contours of his face, and the mouth had lost its shape and its firmness and the strong chin had sagged into obscurity.
There was a cry from young Frumm: “The General, he is sick, I think he is unconscious. Father, come quickly!”
I called along the line, “Sorry, but Father can’t make it past the rest of us. You and your wife’ll have to cope as best you can.”
It turned out that Heilersetz was stone cold dead. He had had a stroke, I believe, when he had hoisted in what had happened to his beloved castle. More seriously for us in our current position, his body was blocking the broken tunnel.
9
Plainly, it was all up to me now. With the General dead, panic had largely supervened. He had been the Frumm family’s rock, ever since grandfather Frumm had joined some Austrian lancer outfit as a boy soldier at the same time as Heilersetz. Old Frumm had served Heilersetz as batman for many years after reaching man’s estate and continued in his private service after discharge from the army. It had been virtually a lifelong association; indeed, in the case of young Frumm and Katenie it had been literally lifelong.
I had guessed most of this, but it was poured into my ear by old Frumm in confirmation as I lay in the dust and debris and tried to think. What I did think was not a happy thought. Blocked by the General ahead, we could very well be blocked by falls in the tunnel roof behind. I felt we could safely assume that the police had not found the entry to the tunnel, or the tunnel itself, for if they had they would scarcely have blown the castle up in order to flush us out from some secret room, which is what I assumed they had had in mind. On the other hand, the secret could have been laid bare in the explosion — not the lavatory pan, the entry chamber — though in point of fact, of course, it was much more likely that it now lay buried beneath the tons of debris. Rather like us.
Sergeant Frumm supported this view, as well as he was currently able to support anything beyond his grief. He looked a thoroughly crushed old man and kept on bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t obeyed what he took to be his master’s last summons, transmitted by his son. I said, “I know how you feel, and I’m sorry, but it was a physical impossibility to get you past, Sergeant. And if we can’t get past the General now, we’re not going to last very long.”
We were not; the meagre air supply was giving out, but fast. It was sheer murder. We had been caught a long way from the ventilation shafts by the feel of it. I dare say a little air was coming in over the General’s body, for it hadn’t, of course, blocked the whole circumference of the tunnel. But it wasn’t going to be enough to get by on and I told everyone to stop talking unless they had something vital to communicate. I was unable to stop a low moaning sound coming continuously from old Frumm’s daughter-in-law, but Katenie was bearing up well enough and I urged on her the necessity of quietening her mother. She did her best, and that left Krajcin, who, to make matters worse, had gone off into a faint. There was nothing I could do about that, so he had to be left. Trying to keep my mind fixing hard on the bright side, I counted our blessings. That didn’t take long, there being only three: food and drink, torches, and a lack of knowledge of our whereabouts on the part of the police. I wasn’t too sure that the last was such a blessing anyway. All the torture chambers of the Kremlin itself could hardly be worse than our current situation. Capture would be welcome enough, but I didn’t see it happening. The police would be busy picking over the rubble for fragmented bodies and we would be so many write-offs by now. If ever we did get out we would have a useful anonymity, at least until the castle ruins had been picked clean and found innocent of corpses. I felt the picking-over could be thorough or could be done cursorily, depending on just how much the Security people had picked up about me. Was I still just Peter Frazer, bank clerk on a winter holiday, or was I the dangerous Western agent Shaw? Had Fred Bassett blown his top to Miss Borjorac about seeing me entering a car, and thus got the Party all steamed up to dig into my antecedents? Then, through the mists, my brain reminded me of Vorsak. Of course they knew all about me. The search would be thorough.
I summoned such energy and concentration as I had and I raised my voice. “I’m going to try to come past,” I croaked in Czech. “Keep as flat as you can and if I’m heavy you’ll just have to put up with it.”
I reached out towards Krajcin’s unconscious body and heaved myself up on to his legs. Sweat was pouring off me as I came over his scraggy rump, sweat that was turning the earth and age-old dust to a sticky, clinging mud. The air was quite fetid now. Every indrawn breath was a drag. I don’t know how I did it, but I negotiated Krajcin, during which performance he remained flat out. I was aware of Sergeant Frumm coming forward to take my vacated place, and then I was sliding along on top of Katenie, whose buxom body
took up rather more room laterally and vertically than that of Krajcin; after this I tackled her mother, upon whom I collapsed for a while, sucking in the rancid air like a steam-engine taking on boiler water. I heard Katenie’s voice calling out to me through a pounding in my ears and I croaked,
“What is it, Katenie?”
“Drink,” she said. “Here.” Then I felt fingers plucking at my clothing, and her hand feeling for my hand and pushing something into it. She had poured a little of the wine into a cup. I drank and felt a little easier. At least it had settled the dust in my throat. It gave me a fraction more strength, too.
“You’re salvation,” I said to Katenie over my shoulder. “Thank you. Do you think you could do something for Professor Krajcin, Katenie?”
“I’ll try,” she said. I left her to it and looked ahead along the tunnel in the torch-light. Young Frumm, who wasn’t all that young in fact, it being merely a comparative term, was big and fat. There wouldn’t be a hope of crawling over him and he was going to make a tight fit with Heilersetz too. But he had to be the one to try to clear the blockage.
“Young Frumm,” I said, lying on his now silent and unprotesting wife, “how much clearance is there over the General?”
“Little,” he answered. “Very, very little. Here, the tunnel has become much shallower. It is bad luck, that.”
I thought, you stolid, unimaginative bastard! Bad luck! Even his voice was stolid — sombre and lugubrious and calm. Well, that was better than panic, yet in that moment young Frumm’s very calmness acted as an irritant. Furiously I snapped, “Well, never mind the bad luck. Get digging! You’ll have to scrabble away at the roof and bring enough down to let us all get over the General’s body, and you’d better work bloody fast if you ever want to see daylight again!”
“Yes, this I shall do.” Young Frumm gave a sigh, as though he found the whole concept distasteful, then he reached out and separated Heilersetz’s grip from his sporting gun. He ejected the cartridges from both barrels and then, while I held a torch to give him light, he began hacking away at the broken overhead woodwork with the gun’s butt. Streams of earth cascaded down through the breaches, descending upon Heilersetz. I slaved away myself, trying to pack the displaced material down hard beside the body, and passing some back along the line via Mrs Frumm, but after a time I realized it was a hopeless proposition. All we were doing was transferring the top to the bottom with hardly any gain in terms of manoeuvring space. Everyone was too exhausted by the lack of fresh air to put much effort into it. The stink was indescribable; a sewer would have been a lady’s boudoir by comparison. I said, “All right, young Frumm, you can stop now, we’re not doing any good.”
This Drakotny_A Gripping Spy Thriller Page 15