The Lights of Skaro

by David Dodge

  While we were writing cablegrams to submit to censorship, I found an opportunity to get her away from the others and offer to trade.

  “For what?”

  She looked terrible; hollow-eyed and drawn. She had been through enough to take the starch out of anyone, but she was still a reporter.

  “For whatever you learned from Radovič that Yoreska was trying to hammer out of you.”

  “What will you trade with?”

  “Something I heard from Madame Gorza that I didn’t believe. Something else I learned from Jim Oliver about Djakovo’s break that made me wonder. Something that might tie both breaks in with Radovič’s, if you’ve got what I think you have.”

  She went on writing, not looking at me. All at once she sighed, closed her eyes, put her hand to her forehead, and crumpled.

  I wasn’t quite quick enough to catch her. She went down in a heap. Graham was nearest and came running. Between us we got her stretched out on a bench with her feet up and her head down.

  She came out of the faint in a minute and apologized for being a nuisance. She said she hadn’t eaten for a long time. She was shaky and white while she finished writing her dispatch. We wouldn’t be told until the next day whether or not the dispatches would clear, so we all filed together and then took her home.

  It was possible, even from a moving car, to sense the turmoil that boiled in the capital. The loudspeakers were back at their usual monotonous grind, but men and women in the street kept looking up at them, furtively expectant. Public gatherings of more than three people were prohibited, so they stood or walked in groups of two and three, buzzing to each other in low voices. When a roko or a soldier passed, they stopped buzzing and stared straight ahead with blank faces.

  The split in Authority was even more apparent. Solitary soldiers walked with an unusual stiffness near pairs of rokos,and the rokos had a tendency to stand back to back when groups of soldiers were near them. Uniformed city police fingered their billies and pistol holsters uneasily. The whole city was taut, waiting for something to break. We in the car felt the same tense expectancy ourselves. No one knew what was coming next, but everybody sensed that it was on its way.

  Heinz made another effort to pump Cora after we delivered her to her rooms. Room, I should say. One to a person was the maximum allowed, and it took a high priority to get that. Hers was overcrowded, with five people arguing in it. Heinz wheedled, pleaded, tried to bribe her, reminded her that it had been the pool arrangement that gave her the opportunity with Radovič. She said, “No,” and ‘No,” and ‘No,” and “I don’t care what you say. I’m not going to give you anything.”

  Heinz got excited and Teutonic before he finished, slamming tables with his fist and shouting. We were all pretty keyed up, and I wanted to make my own deal with Cora. I told Heinz to shut up. He fired back at me, Graham andLéon came in on his side, and international solidarity blew up with a bang. Germany, France, and Great Britain said harsh things to America, the way they do every once in a while when their feelings are hurt. America told them to go to hell, in its own pigheaded fashion. They stormed out.

  The tension that was in the air didn’t leave with them. Cora’s room was in the Pera district, facing Hohe Park, not far from the main army barracks. There were always stray soldiers in the park at dusk, sometimes with their girls, sometimes with wives and children. That evening, as the darkness began to gather and the park lamps came on, hundreds of men gathered under the loudspeakers fixed to the lamp standards. There were no women or children in the crowd, and few civilians. No rokos at all. The park would have been poison to rokos.

  It wasn’t an organized mob. They wandered, or sat on the grass, or stopped under the speakers to listen when a musical selection ended, wandering again as soon as some canned commentary on the glorious future of the People’s Paradise came on. Drifting aimlessly in and out of the pools of light cast by the park lamps, they made me think of an experiment I had seen once which involved harmless motes of dust suspended in the air of a sealed container. An electric spark had set the motes off in an explosion that blew the container to bits.

  It was I who suggested to Cora that she had better eat something. She chain-smoked nervously while she heated soup on a primus stove and made coffee. I didn’t talk, or try to crowd her. I expected that she would deal when she was ready to deal. We ate a silent scratch meal of soup, black bread and coffee, sitting at the window where we could watch the soldiers in the park and hear the loudspeakers.

  It seemed as if the spark to set off the mob had come when the speakers cut out abruptly in the middle of a bar of music. A shrill, unfamiliar, excited voice bellowed, “Comrades and citizens of the—”

  That was all. The speakers went dead. It was another ten seconds before music began to play again. During those ten seconds, not a man in the park moved a muscle. We could see the lamp-lit blotches of their faces turned up towards the speakers. Motes of dust, waiting.

  I said, “That’s all your doing, Cora. You must have written a terrific story. I’d like to read it someday.”

  Like that, it uncorked the dam. She had been fighting not only against Heinz and Léon and Graham and Yoreska andBulič and me, but also against her own need to talk. She was steamed up like a boiler. She had to blow off to someone or explode, and I was there when the safety-valve began to tremble. In a rush of words she told me everything that had happened from the moment she boarded Radovič’s plane, hardly stopping for breath once she had begun. There was an almost frantic urgency about the way she talked. She was driven by the electric tension in the air. She had not finished before scattered pistol shots began to pop somewhere on the other side of the city.

  The shots started while she was telling me that part of the story she later told Piotr. For me, she went a step further with Radovič’s epitaph. He had said, at the end, “My life is too shabby a gift for me to accept from the bloody hands of the man who gave it to me.” He didn’t elaborate for publication, and he had shot himself before anybody except Cora could ask further questions. That was the cracker line on the story she had written, the top-off that brought Yoreska to the airfield to snatch her away from Bulič’s men. Yoreska hadn’t yet begun to suspect Bulič, but he distrusted Bulič’s reliability. Security had made too many fumbles. Yoreska took charge of Cora personally and began to hammer her, first in the Rolls-Royce and then in his office.

  “He kept asking me whom Radovič had meant,” she said. “Whose bloody hands was he talking about? What else had he said about the help he had had? I kept answering that I didn’t know, that I had put everything I knew into the story, that any reporter would put everything he knew into a story like that. He wasn’t satisfied. He threatened me for breaking censorship, and screamed that he would put me in prison, and promised that anything I told him would go no further. I said I had nothing more to tell him. Then Bulič stormed in, and you saw what happened. I don’t know what I would have done if you and the others hadn’t been there, Jess. I was terribly scared.”

  “We were waiting for you at the airport when Yoreska grabbed you. Didn’t he suggest that he wanted you to nameBulič?”

  “He didn’t suggest anything. He just wanted to find out who it was, if I knew.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Do I have any reason to lie?”

  “Of course not. I mean I don’t understand why Yoreska didn’t try to put Bulič’s name in your mouth. He was obviously prepared to sink Bulič at the first opportunity, as he did with the flimsiest excuse. He wrote Bulič off for a simple slip of the tongue. It seems to me—”

  “But it wasn’t a simple slip of the tongue, Jess. Don’t you understand? It was Bulič. I knew it, and Bulič knew I knew it. He thought that I must already have accused him.”

  I forgot what I answered to that. I have a feeling that it was ‘Preposterous!’ or ‘Ridiculous!’ or something equally flat. I have to say again that until that moment I had never accepted the idea that Bulič was actua
lly behind the double-cross. I knew that there was a plot of some kind, and very probably the same man involved in all three escapes. I knew that he looked like Bulič, deliberately used Bulič’s strong-arm tactics, and went around shoving his face at people and saying, “Look at me.” It was so obvious that it was too obvious. To my mind – and I still contend that any sensible man would have reasoned the same way, even though I had it all backward – the escapes were the motivation of the plot, and the identification of the plotter with Bulič only an incidental red herring, with a further possibility that the incidental red herring might have been a deliberate sub-plot intended to bring about Bulič’s downfall, as it had. I could even have believed that Yoreska himself had rigged the whole thing to accomplish that end, although it was an over-elaborate way to cut an enemy’s throat. But that the imitation Bulič could be in fact the real Bulič was incredible. I am certain my mouth hung open when Cora took off her shoe and produced from beneath the inner sole the note which Radovič had carried aboard the plane in his spectacle case, containing the instructions for his escape. In Bulič’s bold, characteristic handwriting.

  There was no mistaking it. For comparison, we each carried Bulič’s scrawled pass to be on the streets after curfew. And though a signature can be successfully forged, with care and patience, it is impossible to forge a handwritten message covering two sides of a piece of paper, particularly if the message must be thought out and written between four o’clock of one afternoon and eight the next morning, and then delivered, together with a smuggled pistol.

  The note wasn’t signed. In that handwriting it required no signature. It began: ‘Radovič: Do this or die’; and continued with carefully detailed instructions; time intervals, landmarks, compass courses, a sketch of the plane’s interior. Alternative procedures were outlined for situations in which both the pilot and co-pilot lived, and where the pilot had been shot. There was no consideration of the possibility that both men might have to die. The brilliant mind, as always, had measured human character against realities. Bulič knew that no man would throw away his life in useless defiance when he had seen another man shot for a failure to obey orders. This fact, and Radovič’s ability to pull a trigger even though, he could not fly a plane, had all entered into the calculation.

  I got up to walk round the room after I read the note. I felt unusually nervous. Isolated shots were popping all over the city now. The soldiers in the park had bunched more tightly under the speakers. They didn’t move round as much as they had been moving, only waited. They weren’t armed, but they could arm themselves in a hurry. And there were a lot more of them in barracks, armed and ready, than there were in the streets and parks. The loudspeakers still played music.

  I said, “I understand less than ever why you came back, Cora. You’d be finished in a minute if Bulič had won out instead of Yoreska. Even if he wasn’t certain that Radovičwould have shown you the note, he couldn’t take a chance on the possibility. You’re crazy.”

  “But the story, Jess! It’s the biggest thing I ever touched! What’s behind it? Why did he do it? What kind of a man risks his life to help people escape from his own prison, and deliberately exposes his identity while doing it? And why did he provoke Yoreska into denouncing him?”

  I opened my mouth to debate the last point, but she went on.

  “He did! He did! Didn’t you see how he taunted Yoreska with the microphone? He bullied him into it! And when he left the room he was triumphant! Why? How had he beaten Yoreska?”

  It would be dramatic to say that the answer came pat on the question. It didn’t come for several hours. Until then, tension held the city like a tight spring, neither increasing nor decreasing. The soldiers waited in the park, shots popped now and then, the loudspeakers played music while Cora and I put our bits and pieces of information together to try to understand Bulič.

  Once I had accepted the fact that he arranged the escapes, for reasons we did not know, it was evident that nobody else except Yoreska himself could have arranged them, and possibly not even Yoreska. The Gorza escape had required Authority; to deliver the laissez-passer, to withdraw the guards, to arrange that the car would not be turned back short of the border post where Bulič waited with his machine-pistol. Why he had not used Authority at that point instead of the gun, was part of the puzzle. Djakovo’s escape had been less complicated, but only someone as important as Bulič could drop off the runaway switch engine and safely appear in the quarantined frontier zone without explanation or challenge. The heavy peasant clothes he wore on both occasions had been to conceal his uniform, as the skull-cap concealed the scars on his head. We couldn’t guess why he had covered his head but not his face, nor why he had chosen to write Radovič’s note in his easily identifiable handwriting instead of on a typewriter, nor why he had done what he had done. But we learned simultaneously of our own danger and the reason for Bulič’s look of triumph at Yoreska’s denunciation when, just before midnight, the loudspeakers announced that President Radovič had an important message for the nation.

  Radovič was then three days in his grave. My flesh crawled at the sound of that magnified, compelling voice on the air. It went on crawling at the significance of what the voice was saying. Radovič, dead, spoke of the events that had just happened.

  “Comrades, citizens and soldiers! I, your President, speak to you in a moment of national emergency. Our enemies, ruthless in their unceasing attack on the People’s Free Federal Republic, have shown their hand again. Penetrating into the very heart of the Party of the people with gold and treachery, they succeeded in placing in a position of high authority a man who has betrayed us. I name the traitor: Milo Yoreska, one-time—”

  Cora gasped. The hair was rising on the back of my neck. The soldiers in the park stood motionless, their faces upturned.

  “… general in the Red Army and formerly my Minister of Internal Affairs. Discovered in his treachery by the alert action of the people’s Security Police, frantically attempting to conceal his crimes in a final rat-like spasm of cowardly hate, he had publicly denounced Chief of Security Comrade Colonel Bulič, my loyal aide and now, by my order, General Bulič and Minister of Internal Affairs. The traitor and all those who have aided him will pay for their treachery with their lives. The harm they have done cannot be undone, but it will be remedied. Our country is once again in safe and capable hands. I call on you, citizens and comrades, to rally shoulder to shoulder behind me and my ministers, in brotherhood, unity, and strength. Long live the Party of the people! Long live the People’s Free Federal Republic!”

  There was a humming and a click, followed by the opening bars of the sign-off music. It was almost midnight, curfew hour. The spark to explode the motes of dust hadn’t come. The crowd of soldiers in the park began to break up and drift away.

  When the loudspeakers quit for the night, moments later, we could hear the horns of roko cars sounding across the city, as well as the continuing shots. They were all pistol shots, significantly. No rifle fire. Soldiers carried rifles, rokos and city police carried pistols. Security was cleaning up.

  I closed the window, for no particular reason.

  Cora said, in a whisper, “Radovič has been dead three days.”

  “I wouldn’t repeat it too loudly or too often.”

  She looked at me with a blank, unseeing stare. She was still trying to reconcile her mental picture of Radovič’s dead body with the sound of his living voice. I hadn’t looked at him dead, so the reconciliation wasn’t as hard for me to make. My thought processes were a step ahead of hers.

  “You and I are two of a small group of people who know it was a recording, Cora. Bulič had Radovič make it days or weeks or months ago, and kept it ready for the day when he and Yoreska would come to a showdown. The people who know or have reason to suspect that Radovič is dead are being liquidated by those shots you hear. None of them could prove, as we can, that Bulič was the traitor Yoreska charged him with being. We’re in bad trouble.”


  She said dully, ‘I’m in bad trouble. There’s no reason why you should be involved.”

  “We’re both involved, if it’s any comfort. Bulič never distinguished between one spy and another. And he wouldn’t believe you could keep this to yourself, even if you had.”

  We both looked at the note, lying on the table. Cora picked it up, put it in her shoe and slipped the shoe on her foot. A single pistol shot, nearer to us than any that had sounded before, went off. The rokos were working in our direction.

  I remember how the shots came gradually closer, and that we had another pot of coffee, and how the primus stove hissed when Cora heated water, and that there was a smear of lipstick on the rim of her cup, all the irrelevancies. It’s hard to bring yourself to the realization of imminent danger when you don’t see it staring you physically in the face. A pointed gun, a speeding car, a crumbling avalanche, all make you jump instinctively for your life. Bulič was more dangerous to us than any of them. Yet because he was only an idea in our minds instead of a man in the room with us, we could sit there and drink coffee while we tried to think our way out of trouble, like intelligent people. With rokopistol shots sounding the death of Bulič’s enemies all over the city, we could even bicker about what we should do.

  Cora said, “We’d better try to reach the legation.”

  “We wouldn’t make it, on foot. And I’m not so sure that it would do any good even if we did.”

  “He wouldn’t dare violate diplomatic immunity.”

  “What makes you think he wouldn’t? Caution? Fear? He doesn’t know what the words mean.”