He suspended operations, and looked round at me. His big face was grotesque in the torch-light, red and dirty and running with sweat, the eyes bulging, the mouth wide open and sucking air hard, and making a snoring noise as it did so. I said, “Ease down, for Christ’s sake, Frumm! You don’t want to have a stroke too.”
“What shall we do, then?”
“Leave it, and try to get past as it is. You’ll have to be first in any case. And if you make it, then so by God will the rest of us!”
“But the General, he —”
“He’s dead, Frumm. He’ll never know. Or if he does — if he’s watching from wherever it is he’s gone, Frumm — he’ll be willing us to do just that. Don’t you see, man? He wouldn’t want us to die down here. He wouldn’t want to be the means of holding us up!”
Young Frumm went on looking at me, his eyes narrowing, then he gave a shrug and said quietly, “Very well, I shall try.” He looked away, seemed to brace himself, then moved ahead on to the body of his dead master, which in point of fact was now almost covered in the fallen debris. Panting and groaning, drawing those terrible laboured breaths as we all were, young Frumm went forward inch by inch. As he advanced, putting pressure on the body, the legs moved, poking through the earth shroud, the high leather boots stirring as if with resurrected life. It was rather horrible, and it was also sad. But Heilersetz, if his spirit lived on, was no doubt glad to be out of it. He wouldn’t have wanted to live, with his castle gone. Besides, he had been a patriot. He could never have been really happy in the current state of things, not even if he had managed to witness the end of Drakotny. For him, what had happened had probably been the best way out. None of this, however, would be of much comfort to the loyal Frumm family.
Young Frumm went on manfully, reaching forward to lay hold of one of the iron hoops ahead. He grasped this with both hands, and heaved. I could almost feel his effort myself; I was straining away with him in my mind, and I sweated too. I saw his feet move slowly away from me. I saw Heilersetz moving as well, caught by young Frumm’s paunchy figure, and then young Frumm pressed himself upwards, hard against the roof so that the wooden lining moved away a little. He called out to me, and although I couldn’t interpret the actual words, I took his meaning and reached out between his stomach and Heilersetz, and jerked young Frumm’s duffel coat free of the body’s entanglement — it had become engaged, after the anorak had ridden up, with a big silver belt-buckle. After this Frumm went on heaving; groaning and snoring as he did so. It took him a long, long time because while he was struggling more dusty earth came down, blindingly, to create more problems, but in the end he made it, and then collapsed in the free space just the other side of Heilersetz’s head.
I called out my heartfelt thanks, and I gave him as long as possible to recover, then I told him to move on and keep going. I called out to those behind to follow as closely as they could, then started moving forward myself before I remembered Krajcin. I stopped and called back, “How is the Professor?” and Katenie answered, saying he had come round. I said, “Tell your grandfather to feed him all the wine he needs to keep him going, Katenie. Let me know at once if he passes out again.”
*
I heard Mrs Frumm sobbing behind me. The women had crawled over Heilersetz without fuss, but when we left him well behind they were hit, I think, by a reaction. I could well understand that. A way of life had come to a horrible and sudden end for all of them, and the physical abandonment of the General even in death must have worked on their minds. But they kept going, and so did Pavol Krajcin. Not for the first time in my career as an agent, I marvelled at the capacity of the human spirit and body to endure and pull through. I thought now that we had a very good chance of pulling through this time. The going was becoming gradually easier and although we had two or three minor falls of roof to cope with and dig through, we were making a rather better average speed. The air supply seemed better too, as if the ventilation shafts in this section were more efficient. That alone had a remarkably elevating effect on all of us, and although we still hadn’t excess energy for speaking, I began to think ahead once again and to plan what we could do when we emerged. There was the East German border, which, Heilersetz had hinted, should not be too difficult to cross — though I couldn’t side-step the obvious fact that the Czech guards would be very much on the alert once our bodies had failed to turn up in the shattered castle — or even before that, just to be on the safe side. One way and another I felt the border, all borders in fact, should be avoided for some time to come. That left us fairly well out on a limb. I didn’t know exactly where the tunnel emerged and neither did Sergeant Frumm; the General had evidently kept all details to himself, confiding not even in the Frumms. He must even have seen to the maintenance of the air shafts himself — this would have been quite easy, while he was doing the rounds of his estate. I imagined all they needed was a good probe now and again, and it wouldn’t have been beyond him or his father to construct something long and pliable, in sections perhaps, that could be disguised from his employees, who, consisting solely of the Frumms, were thin enough on the ground in any case. As to the exit, at a guess I would have said we would come out into wooded country. I had seen from Vorsak’s car and the castle windows that there was a good deal of afforestation and it seemed logical to have the exit in the best possible cover.
But — where to go from there?
I didn’t even know who the General’s friends had been. Old Frumm might have some names, but wouldn’t be able to assess any of them for total trustworthiness. The Frumms, of course, would have friends of their own on the farms of the area, or in the villages. That might be a useful angle.
During one of our rests, I asked Sergeant Frumm about the possibilities, calling down the line to him. He said, “I, also, have been thinking about this.”
“And?”
He spoke carefully. “Friends are friends. I think you will agree with this?”
“Sure. Friends like to help.”
“Like, yes. If they are good friends. Always the General was very, very careful whom he regarded as good friends.”
“Of course. That was only wise. And you?”
Frumm shrugged. “It is so hard to be certain, except in a very few cases.”
“Well, then.”
“No, it is not so easy. Good friends … one does not care to compromise good friends, to embroil them and make them the targets of the police.”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s fair enough, of course, Sergeant Frumm. But that isn’t the spirit that wins wars, and I reckon this is a kind of war, when all’s said and done. The General regarded it as such — no doubt about that!” I added, “In France, in the Second World War … well, you know what I mean. The underground. They didn’t win through by refusing to embroil their friends — nor did their good friends refuse to be embroiled, Sergeant.”
Frumm nodded, but I could see his distress. He said, “Yes, all this, it is true. Quite true. I still do not like it.” I looked at him, hard, in the light of my torch. He was a very honest, straightforward old man, the sort you rarely see any more in Britain. Not big, but sturdy, with a firm chin. Cropped white hair, blue eyes that looked a man in the face and never wavered, walrus moustache, as white as the hair. In its way, a sad face. So honest that it hurt to look at it with anything but honest thoughts in one’s own mind, and an agent can never be entirely honest with anyone except his own personal Max. That was one reason I so often loathed the life.
I said, “Sergeant, somewhere to go is vital. General Heilersetz would have said exactly the same thing. We have his work to carry on. His work for Czechoslovakia.”
“But you, you do not mean to kill Drakotny?”
“No,” I said. “Did the General?”
He wouldn’t answer that; I made a mental note that once we were in the clear, I would raise it again, but not just now. I said, “Well, okay, I agree I’m not here to kill Drakotny but to save him. But only till Racilek gets back from Mosc
ow — that’s all. After that, anybody can kill Drakotny for all I care. And I swear that’s God’s own truth, Sergeant Frumm.”
I saw him looking at me, frowning, summing me up, and then I saw his nod. I went on, “You’ll live to fight another day, Sergeant, if you take sensible precautions in the meantime. You know what I mean by that.”
Frumm nodded again and then addressed his daughter-in-law almost as if she had been his own wife: “Mother, what do you think?”
For the first time in my hearing, Mrs Frumm spoke. It was an extraordinarily beautiful voice, and it came oddly from that greyish, beaten face, that patient peasant body. “We must do as the Englishman says, for without him we shall die, Father. Remember the General had confidence in him.” She turned her head then, and looked me full in the face. I was surprised at the depth in her dark eyes. She said, “He will not betray us, or our friends. I am sure of this. If harm comes, as it may, it will not be his doing.”
There was a silence; they were all looking at me now, including Katenie. She no longer had that dimpling, seductive smile on her lips, but there was a much more agonizing and penetrating look — a look of total trust. It worried me badly; I had a job to do and the welfare, the safety, of the Frumms was not part of it. Max wasn’t going to thank me if I happened to balls things up just to keep them in the clear. Racilek was still in Moscow and Drakotny was still under threat, and once other people got to hear about what had happened to General Heilersetz, things might move the faster to put Drakotny in his ceremonial coffin. For the sake of the West, if that doesn’t sound too grandiose, I had to put Drakotny before the Frumms and their friends. And, facing them, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. But I said, “Well, Sergeant? How about some shelter till I can get on the road again?”
Old Frumm looked again at his son’s wife, then said, “Very well, it shall be as she says. I have learnt to trust her judgment, after these many years.” There was a soft look in his face as he said that. I saw the interchange of eyes and it was like a loving hand-clasp between them. They were fond of each other. Frumm went on, “There is a place where we can go. I shall take you there.”
“Thank you,” I said inadequately. And then, because I could take no more Frumm looks, I ordered the crawl to start again and we went painfully onward. We had to keep stopping again, and during the halts we ate and drank as much as we needed to keep going. I felt cautiously optimistic. We were well armed, for one thing, and now I had Heilersetz’s revolver, which I had removed from him while crawling over. Thinking of that reminded me of the General’s briefcase, and I cursed my carelessness; it must have been buried under the dust and earth and I couldn’t go back for it now. Too bad. Soon we began climbing, reaching the final upward slope that Heilersetz had mentioned. Now the air was much better and we took great gulps of it as we moved along. At last we came to another set of steps, just a short one this time, and not a spiral. I went up first, and laid my hands against a rusty metal plate. I heaved, but nothing happened. I heaved again, with all the strength I had left, but still nothing. Then young Frumm climbed up beside me — there was just room — and we both strained away, sweating rivers. The plate moved — or rather, so rusted was it that it gave way and split in half. The world fell in upon us, stones and earth and snow. Dazedly when the fall had stopped I reached up and found my hands were in the cold, cold air and then I realized that a thin light was filtering down and I could see young Frumm without the aid of the torches. We had been in the tunnel all night. Not being able just then to think of anything else to say, I said, “Journey’s end, and all’s well.”
I grasped the concreted lip of the hole with both hands and hauled myself up and through. There was a foot of bare earth fringe above the metal and concrete, just an empty space now that the camouflage had all fallen in on us. I sat for a moment sucking in wonderful fresh air, with my legs dangling, and saw that I had been right about the trees. We were in thick wood cover — lovely!
Young Frumm’s voice came disembodied from the shaft: “It is safe to come up?”
“Yes,” I said. “Fast as you like!”
I pulled myself clear as the others got on the steps. Just to be free of that ghastly tunnel … I reckon it was the best moment of my life. But I changed my mind when we were all up and standing in a convenient bunch and I saw the ring of steel closing in from behind the trees, the ring of steel that was the guns of the Security Police.
10
There were a lot of them, upwards of a couple of dozen, and it was out of the question to use our weapons against them. We wouldn’t have had a hope. I managed to stop Sergeant Frumm just in time; he’d looked like bringing his sub-machine-gun into action. Krajcin, however, panicked. As we obeyed an order to throw down our weapons he gave one wild shriek, and ran, a grotesque sight in that grey dawn, with his filthy, tunnel-torn coat-tails streaming out behind and his scraggy, angular body moving like an actor in one of the old-time silent films. One of the policemen shot him on the run and he went down like a rabbit.
A plain-clothes man moved away from the line of uniforms and walked over to examine Krajcin. He said, “Dead. A pity, that. All questions will now have to be answered by these others.” The man came towards us, smiling, his hands thrust deep into capacious pockets. From somewhere I heard the song of a bird, and a robin bounced across the snow. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, where, please, is Comrade General Heilersetz?” He was speaking in Czech and it was Sergeant Frumm who answered, his face crumpling, before I could stop him.
“The General is in the tunnel. He is dead.”
“Aha. You expect me to believe this?” The man’s eyes flicked over us.
I said, “It’s the truth.” It was too late for a denial and I could only hope no-one would find the briefcase. “But you can always send a man along the tunnel to check, if you care to risk him being caught in a roof fall.”
“Yes, yes.” I saw the indecision; there was an undeniable risk. I guessed the man would compromise by leaving a sentry posted, and he did. If Heilersetz was down there and was alive, he would come out eventually or starve. In the meantime they would mount a wide search, just in case, and they might even start digging out the tunnel. “Now we shall go along to the cars,” the man announced when his plans had been made.
There was no point in asking questions that wouldn’t be answered, and none of us did. We were formed into a silent line and the police fell in beside us, with their guns ready in their hands. We were led through a path in the forest and soon the sun came up and dropped golden light down through the trees; it was a lovely morning, crisp and clear, and the sky, which I glimpsed now and again, was a startling blue. There would be no more snow for a while, no more snow to lay a temporary and kindly bandage across the death-wounds of Heilersetz’s castle.
We were in fact heading back for the castle; the plainclothes man came along and told me that. He knew exactly who I was, not surprisingly after Vorsak had opened his mouth, so he treated me as the leader and potential spokesman. I asked what they had done to the castle and he confirmed the blowing up.
“Why?” I asked.
“Vorsak’s information was very precise and when we found none of our men, but only the cars riddled with bullets, it was not hard to guess what had happened. I decided to blow up the castle when a thorough search revealed no persons.”
“You thought we might be hidden away in secret rooms, or something like that?”
He nodded; he had a thoroughly nasty face, had that man, sly and mean. There was cruel amusement in it now. “Something like that, yes! What the demolition did show us, my good fellow, was the entry to the tunnel. It laid bare a section of your escape route. After that, it was merely a question of finding the first of the ventilation shafts, and then following in a straight extended line.”
“So that was it, was it?”
“Yes. So easy, once the initial discovery had been made. The pinpointing of the exit …” the plain-clothes man shrugged and smiled again, grea
sily. “This was a mere matter of estimating, once no more air shafts were found — estimating and intelligence and the use of mine detectors, of course.”
Mine detectors. Quite! They’d have followed all along the trail with them, getting a reaction from the iron hoops. The moment that explosion had ripped the entry open, our number had been up and we hadn’t known.
“What are you going to do with us?” I asked.
“You will be taken to Prague, where you will be held for questioning. Before that, however, I think you are going to have a surprise.”
“What sort of surprise?” I asked sourly.
He sniggered. “Oh, you’ll see, you’ll see.”
I did too — and was duly surprised, though perhaps not quite as much as the plain-clothes man had seemed to think I would be. At the end of the march we came in sight of what was left of the castle: just two walls standing, guarding a great pile of smoking rubble. Gaunt and dark against the blue sky and the brilliant white background of the lying snow, those walls seemed a fitting memorial to General Heilersetz: war and death and violence were there, but also a kind of dignity and a last-ditch steadfastness. This, however, was not the surprise the plain-clothes man had lined up, and I didn’t see what it was until we were halted beside a number of police cars and vans. Then, under guard in the back of one of the cars, I saw the north-country greengrocer Fred Bassett, and standing nearby was Miss Borjorac, looking grim and accusing. These two brought an incongruous touch of comedy to a grim situation, and I laughed a little, but the grimness came back with a rush when I saw someone else, under guard in another car: Nada Strecka.
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