*
The four Frumms were all piled into one of the vans together, but I travelled back to Prague in the same car as Nada Strecka, sitting by her side with an armed policeman on her left. I didn’t know quite what the set-up was, because although the girl was under guard all right, she was allowed to talk to me, and I to her, and after a while I got the weird idea she was actually pumping me. Of course, I wasn’t giving anything away; but my mind was in a riot, wondering what was going on, what had happened during my brief absence. All I could think was that she might possibly have palled up with Drakotny again and was being used as some sort of decoy to get me to spill the beans about the West’s involvement as evidenced by my own, now known, presence in Czechoslovakia. Yet that would be a shade obvious. They really weren’t being very clever if that was their angle. However, I said very little during that fast drive. Nada was being very sweet, and very patient, and after a while I realized she was bunged to the blissful heights with heroin as the result of what must have been a fairly recent fix. I was surprised that the authorities were willing to continue the drug supply, as they must be doing unless she’d been arrested within the last hour, which wasn’t likely; but a moment’s thought told me they would have a purpose in this. My suspicions grew, strongly, that the purpose must be me. And I was visited by a very nasty awareness of extreme danger in a changed situation. Frankly, I didn’t know yet how to react to Nada; only one thing was certain, and that was, there was no point in any pretence of not knowing her, since Vorsak would have made all that perfectly plain. Under my breath I cursed Vaclav Vorsak and his meddlesome ways, while aloud I told Nada, in answer to a question, that I’d hardly spoken to Pavol Krajcin … and then turned the conversation, if it could be called that, on to Fred Bassett, who was in the car behind with the Borjorac woman. I made a forlorn attempt to disown him. I asked, “Who’s the other man they’ve got hold of?”
She sighed and said, “It’s no use, really it isn’t. They know it all, how you came in, who with … the lot.”
“Uh-huh,” I said nonchalantly. Of course, she was right, but I’d had to make the gesture. “Well, I can assure anyone who’s interested, Bassett’s just a greengrocer on holiday from Stoke-on-Trent — or somewhere. How about Miss Borjorac? Was she a planted agent all the time?”
Nada shrugged. “I don’t know, I don’t know anything about her, honestly.”
I’ll bet you don’t, I thought furiously. Drakotny’s girl was back in the fold and was doing the dirty on me, if not very astutely. Put not your trust in princes’ bedmates. We entered the streets of Prague. It was still early, and the people were going to work. All those speeding cars again, racing dangerously past the dun-coloured houses, many of which were still shuttered and had a closed, dusty look of death. Death! I shuddered; why had the image come to me just now? I looked out of the car’s windows at the crowds of pedestrians; they were drab and cheerless, going to drab and cheerless employment I supposed.
We entered Wenceslas Square, which had been titivated in the short time since I had seen it last. It was all done up for Christmas, with fairy lights and Christmas trees and a big red St Niklaus with a bulging plastic sack. I was surprised; I would have thought such manifestations of jollity would have been too reminiscent of Western decadent culture, to say nothing of Jesus Christ. It might have been okay by Racilek, but surely not Drakotny. But then maybe it was the pagan festival they were celebrating, and not the religious event.
All at once I found I had forgotten the exact date, and I asked Nada what day it was. She said, “December 24th.”
Christmas Eve. I’d known better ones. Today, probably, old Frumm and his family would have been helping Heilersetz to decorate his castle.
The cars stopped in Wenceslas Square, alongside some steps leading into an imposing, old-fashioned building, square-built and dun-coloured like the rest of Prague and with many windows, like a hotel. We were ordered out and we walked across the snow-covered pavement, watched by a curious crowd, up the steps, and into a wide doorway. We entered a large, square lobby with a desk like a reception desk. We were marched towards this, Nada and I and Bassett and the Frumms, who had come in behind us, and our names were taken and entered in a large book. It was still rather like a hotel and there were no overt signs of this being an official establishment. It was just a different feel in the air that told me I wasn’t checking into four-star comfort. That, and the police escort who marched us all off to the lifts across the lobby. And, I suppose — it being Christmas Eve — a notable lack of festivity as compared with Wenceslas Square outside. In fact, the whole place was menacingly reminiscent of Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, which also has that misleading ‘hotel’ façade. The lifts heightened the impression. The one I was in, just me and one of the policemen, was divided into two sections, one for me, one for the escort. My section was entirely shut in and when we stopped I had no idea which floor we were on. I was taken out and marched along a corridor, thickly carpeted so that there was complete silence. No footfalls anywhere; so silent was it that I was quite startled to find, when we reached a door and halted, that Nada Strecka was coming along behind me with another escort. There was no sign of Bassett or the Frumms; they must have been taken to some other section.
The door we had stopped at, and where now Nada stopped as well, was padded with leather. Sound-absorbent leather. Silence was obviously the keynote here — again, like the Lubyanka. My escort pressed a bellpush set into the wall, and after a short interval the door swung open. Soundlessly, of course. I was ordered through; so was Nada. We went in and the door shut automatically behind us. I didn’t hear it, I saw it as I glanced out of the corner of my eye. The two policemen were on the other side of it, and we were now alone with a man who sat behind a desk. He was a small man with gold-rimmed spectacles and he was dressed with extreme neatness and precision in a dark suit, white shirt and gold-coloured tie. He had no hair anywhere, which gave him a pinkly scrubbed look. So clean was he that I felt at an immediate disadvantage with my filthy torn clothes and scrubby unshaven cheeks and jaw. This man told us to approach the desk, which we did. We stood there in front of him. He raised the flesh where his eyebrows would have been if he’d had any, and he sniffed.
I don’t believe I had ever been sniffed at before.
After that sniff, the man got busy with some paper work and took no more notice of us for ten minutes. I suppose it was better than physical torture, but it was quite astonishingly uncomfortable. The softening-up process had clearly started. At the end of the ten minutes I was shaking with suppressed anger and embarrassment; I could have throttled that hairless little bastard, but I knew that if I’d so much as lifted a finger the door would have flown open and the strong-arm boys would have poured in. Anyway, when he was ready, the man slid a cap onto his fountain-pen, shoved his file of papers into a drawer, and looked up at us.
“Now, Commander Shaw,” he said. “And Miss Nada Strecka. I shall start by saying it will not help you to deny those identities. We know all about you, in both your cases.” He fixed a beady eye on me. “I trust you have learnt that it does not pay to spy, Commander?”
“I didn’t come to spy,” I said.
“No?” Once again, he worked the missing eyebrow trick. “In that case, what did you come for?” There was the ghost of a smile as he went on, “Not, I think, for a holiday — in spite of the arranged tour?”
It was no use denying my connection with that wretched tour now; but I was damned if I could dream up any answers that were safe. I still had no idea where I stood with Nada Strecka. I didn’t know how much she had said, or hadn’t said. I didn’t know if her apparent arrest was genuine, though I had that strong feeling it was not and that she was about to shop me good and proper if indeed she hadn’t done so already. But I couldn’t make such a wide assumption just yet, so I couldn’t say anything about Drakotny. Vorsak would have told them, naturally, but I couldn’t confirm it. Somehow, I had to talk my way through this maze, but I sa
w it already as a dead hopeless task.
I took a deep breath and said, “Actually, it was just a holiday —”
“In the name of Peter Frazer, bank clerk?”
“Yes, I —”
“Why the subterfuge, Commander Shaw?”
I said, “Because I didn’t think my own name would help me to get a nice, friendly welcome.”
There was a sudden flicker in the eyes that told me he hadn’t expected this defence. Point to me. It made sense, too. He said crossly, making quite a good recovery, “So you admit you have been, shall we say, a nuisance to Socialist countries in the past — that you have penetrated our frontiers previously?”
I laughed in his face. “I’m sure you have access to the files,” I said with plenty of sarcasm. “I haven’t told you anything you didn’t know already.”
He shrugged. “Please go on.”
“I don’t know that there’s anything else to say.”
“No? You will not be helped by a show of innocence, Commander. I wish now to talk about Vaclav Vorsak, and General Heilersetz, and the family Frumm. Also our deputy Prime Minister.” I saw the sudden, very brief, flick of his eyes towards Nada, and I glanced at her myself. Her face was expressionless. I still had no leads as to where I was in that quarter. That alone was unnerving. The interrogator, who hadn’t yet told us his name, leant across his desk. “Please do not continue to be obstinate. I am willing to agree that your basic motive could be to our advantage, even if the intentions of your employers are suspect. What I mean is this: we, also, do not wish to see our deputy Prime Minister assassinated.”
“God forbid,” I said politely. “Long live Drakotny! But why drag him in?”
The man was patient, I’ll say that for him. “I repeat, it is not good to be obstinate. We know. I would like you to tell me frankly, why the British are so anxious that Drakotny should live. You will do so, please?”
“Why, sure. Mind you, I don’t know if they are anxious, but I expect they are. They have nice, kindly thoughts. They’re good to their mothers, and their dogs. They’re that sort — you know? I don’t think I can add anything to that, really. You know what we British are like, we don’t parade our emotions. But deep down, we’d all be terribly upset if anything happened to Drakotny.”
I suppose I overdid it; the man looked furious, and when he spoke his tone was pure acid. “You must take us for complete fools, Shaw. I —”
“Oh no,” I said, still polite. “Certainly not!” But he didn’t believe it for one moment; he wasted several minutes after that in giving me a lecture on general Communist principles and practice, and he kept on using the word efficiency once he got around to the counterespionage service. When he had finished, he seemed to have lost interest in our reasons for wishing Drakotny a long life — if he wasn’t a complete fool, as he had insisted, he must have known it all anyway — and he turned his attention to Nada. I listened with much interest, hoping to pick up a lead that would tell me what part the girl was playing currently. But nothing helpful emerged. The man berated her for her deviations while in Britain and the United States and the name of Drakotny wasn’t once invoked between them. Nada was probed with a view to the extraction of information about me and my activities, but she didn’t give anything away other than to admit she had met me in Britain and had encountered me again, quite by chance she insisted, in Prague, and had invited me to her home. She said she had no idea as to what my reasons for coming into Czechoslovakia might be although she, too, had heard of an unspecified threat to Drakotny’s life as she had already told other interrogators; and, she added, she hoped due note had been taken of that.
“Of course, of course,” the man said. “Comrade Drakotny, however, is not worried by this. We know how to protect him against Western maniacs and murderers, and this he knows well enough. He places implicit trust in US.”
I said, “Not too implicit, I hope.”
I was given a blank stare. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes implicit trust leads to a dangerous blindness — don’t you find?”
The man shrugged. “It is our concern, not yours.”
“Then stop looking West,” I suggested. “You may not like to admit publicly that you have plenty of indigenous citizens who’d like nothing better than to see Drakotny die — but you know as well as I do that that’s the honest truth.” And then I added, with considerable hesitation in going against my earlier decision not to make any admissions at all beyond what these people knew already, and not knowing what hornet’s-nest I might be stirring up, “Take a good long look much nearer home. Check up on Drakotny’s medical advisers. All three of them.”
That did it; our interrogator pounced on that, and as he did so I was aware of a sudden rigidity in Nada, as though my words had shaken her also. The man said sharply, “So now you admit!”
“Oh, no, I don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t admit a thing. Only you know quite well where your police found me. That tunnel leading from Heilersetz’s castle —”
“So now we come to Comrade General Heilersetz!”
“That’s right. As I dare say you know already, he’s dead. But he’s not important.” For the sake of the Frumms, I told a lie that I hoped would pass. “Heilersetz was one of your lot, but I don’t suppose I need to tell you that, do I? He, too, had heard about this threat, I gathered, though he didn’t know what form it was to take. But, like you, he got his wires crossed and thought I had some connection — so he had me kidnapped. I turned the tables on him, and got his gun, and made him lead me down the tunnel when your lot turned up with Krajcin.” I thought it sounded pretty good, really; it could have happened that way, after all. But there was something I’d overlooked.
“And you shot and killed the police officers?” the man asked nastily.
I thought fast. “No,” I said. “Not me. Vorsak, it must have been.”
“Why Vorsak?”
“I really don’t know. I dare say he had his reasons.”
The man sneered. “I assure you, it was not Vorsak!”
“It’s easy to say that,” I told him. “Vorsak’s dead. But of course you know best who you can trust in a Communist state. And who you can’t,” I added innocently. I believe I’d made him think just a little, and probably no-one had ever been one hundred per cent certain of Vorsak’s loyalties, but I didn’t give him too long to go on thinking just then. I pressed my advantage home. “Let’s get back to Drakotny’s doctors, shall we? Professors Fierlinger and Lina, and Dr Krajcin. In the last-named lies the vital clue.”
“Krajcin,” he repeated softly; and once again I saw the curious flicker of his eyes towards Nada.
I said, “Yes, Krajcin. Krajcin, Professor Krajcin, talked. He talked about his brother. It was a pity your men shot him,” I added regretfully. “He might have said a lot more, mightn’t he?”
“Never mind what he might have said,” the man answered. “Just tell me what he did say, Commander.”
“What I’ve told you. That Drakotny’s doctors are going to polish him off.”
“By what means?”
“He didn’t say, but does it matter? Death is death. They’ll have access to all sorts of means.”
“When is it to happen?”
“He didn’t say that either. I don’t suppose he knew. The process could have started already. There are many slow-working poisons, for instance, that leave no traces behind afterwards.”
“Yes.” The man stared at me speculatively. I had no way of assessing just how much of it all he believed. Then a telephone on his desk buzzed softly and he reached out and answered it. He nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, very well. Yes.” He replaced the handset and looked at us both. He said, “I shall be otherwise occupied for a while. You will be taken away, and we shall resume our talk later.” He pressed a bellpush set in the top of his desk and told us to turn around, which we did. The door had opened as silently as before and the two policemen were waiting outside. My guess was that t
his room was bugged, our conversation had been overheard at a higher level, and our interrogator had now been passed his orders to consult the boss before proceeding. That would be pretty well in accordance with normal routine.
We left the room and were marched away along the corridor by our guards.
*
I say again what I have said before: there were times when I loathed my job. An agent’s life is fifty per cent or more a bastard’s life. You have to be a bastard, and, worse, a betrayer. I felt desperately sorry to be destroying poor Krajcin’s reputation after he was dead — even in Czechoslovakia under Communism, a reputation must still have counted for something. And even more did I detest what I had done to the unknown Lina and Fierlinger and Jan Krajcin. But I’d had to keep faith with Max, I had to do the job entrusted to me, the job I had accepted and was paid to do. I had to have my loyalties, if, before God, that is any excuse at all for bringing torture and final execution to three human beings. I was virtually certain that I had diagnosed correctly what the threat to Drakotny was. It all added up, to my mind. Sum correct — yes, I was sure of that! And my job was undoubtedly to see that Drakotny did not die while Racilek was in Moscow, and I couldn’t be sure that the plan would not go into operation before Racilek’s return. My conscience should have been as clear as crystal; somewhere along the line of my mission here in Prague, someone would have had to be bowled out when I was successful. That was true. But my conscience wasn’t clear at all, because I knew I could be mistaken in my diagnosis and I had a nasty feeling, also, that I had spoken partly out of some deep self-preservative instinct to crawl out from under. If I hadn’t advanced a viable proposition, and made use of a dead man’s name to do it, I would, and this I knew, have been given the full treatment. That could still happen, but it wasn’t so likely now. Next time we were hauled before that bald-headed, scrubbed interrogator, I would do what any innocent British citizen would do, and demand to see someone from the Embassy. Someone would come, too, even though he would naturally deny all knowledge of me. That was part of the routine. But after that the Embassy would be watching, and the Czech puppets just might find it hard to press a charge if Drakotny lived. They might even feel grateful.
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