Vladimir stared at him fixedly. ‘It can’t be. He’s dead. But my God, you look like him.’
Sophie stared at Paul too. ‘Looks like who?’ she asked Vladimir, still speaking Czech.
Furiously Steve shouted, ‘What are you all talking about? Will you speak English, please?’
But Sophie was remembering her own brief sense of familiarity when she saw Paul. Who was it he looked like? One of her photos . . . what had happened to them? She had had them last night when she talked to Cathy.
‘My family photos,’ she said in English, looking at Steve. ‘Have you seen them around this morning? I had them last night. Could you look in the drawing-room over there, please, Steve?’
‘I burnt them,’ Paul said, and she looked at him sharply.
‘Why did you do that? You burnt my photos? I . . .’
Vladimir had been staring at him all this time, his face confused, uncertain.
‘It is you, isn’t it? My God, it is!’ he burst out. You aren’t dead, you were never dead. You’re alive. My God. I don’t believe it. Pavel . . .’
Cathy started. Pavel? He couldn’t mean . . . no, it couldn’t be! Pavel was a popular name; there must be thousands of Czechs with the name Pavel. What was the matter with her, getting into a panic over nothing? Vlad must know a hundred Pavels. She knew several herself; there had been three Pavels in her first year at college, she remembered.
Then she thought: of course, Paul was the English version of the name Pavel. Vladimir must have met Paul before somewhere. Nothing to do with her father!
But what was all that about being alive, not dead?
Vladimir said hoarsely, ‘It is you, isn’t it? I’m not imagining things? My God, I can’t believe it, although after the story your wife told me about Anya I’m almost past being amazed. Even if you tell me you’re a ghost I think I’ll believe it.’ He grinned. ‘Are you a ghost, Pavel?’
Sophie began to shake violently. She felt she was almost breaking apart. It couldn’t be true. Her father had been killed by the Russians; she knew the story by heart, she had heard it all her life – how he had been in a car that didn’t stop at a Russian checkpoint, they had shot the driver and the car had crashed, killing everyone in it, and her father had been a martyr to the cause of freedom, a hero of their country.
What was Vladimir talking about? He had mentioned Anya. Asked if Paul was a ghost. But he couldn’t mean her father. Paul couldn’t be her father. Her father was dead.
But she had been told Anya was dead. Her own mother had told her over and over again how Anya had died of measles before she was born. She had visited Anya’s grave a thousand times, talked to her, taken flowers to her, even taken her own first communion wreath to her – but it hadn’t been her sister in that grave; it was Gowrie’s child. All those years her mother had been lying to her.
Had her father’s death been another of her mother’s lies?
Once upon a time Sophie had believed in something she thought of as ‘facts’, but now she was beginning to realize that ‘facts’ could be just as lying and manipulative as any fiction ever written. Her head spun dizzyingly. Everything was a cheat, you couldn’t believe anyone or anything.
‘What did you say, Vlad? What the hell are you talking about?’ Steve asked, his eyes sharp as diamond cutters, whirring from Vlad and Sophie to Paul’s grey, stony face, biting into them all.
Sophie was almost fainting. Vladimir saw the colour draining from her face, the wild shock in her eyes. He caught hold of her just as her body turned heavy, began giving at the knees, falling. He held her up, muttering roughly, anxiously, ‘Sophie! I’m sorry, girl. I am stupid, a stupid fool. I forgot what it would mean to you . . . Steve, you better take her in that room. She should lie down, she’s going to pass out, I guess.’
‘No! I want to know . . .’ Sophie took a long, audible, shuddering breath, fixing her eyes on Paul. ‘It isn’t true, is it?’ She didn’t believe it, yet she had to ask because she no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t, and she had to know or she would go mad.
Paul looked at her bleakly. ‘I don’t know what to say to you. I’m sorry, Sophie.’
‘You . . . you’re . . . my father?’
He didn’t say anything, but his eyes told her the truth.
Steve caught her as she fainted, lifted her bodily into his arms, her head on his shoulder, his arm under her slack legs. He was barely conscious of her weight, he was too busy looking at her unconscious face, reading the pallor, the lines around mouth and eyes, and so worried about her he felt sick.
His ears buzzed with hypertension. He was beginning to guess but he didn’t want to believe his own intuition. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be.
Poor Sophie, he thought, hasn’t she stood enough over the last week? One shock after another. Now this. And then another thought hit him like a knife in the guts. Oh, my God, Cathy; what will this do to her? His stomach began to churn as he took in all the implications. He had loved Cathy passionately once, she had hurt him when she dumped him for this man, but Steve had forgotten all that now. It was just part of the past, whereas his lifelong affection for the girl he had known most of her life had survived their love-affair and even been deepened by it. How on earth could she cope with a discovery like this?
Vladimir said, ‘Holy Virgin, I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.’
‘So do I, damn you!’ Steve said with bitter force, moving away. Behind him the other men followed in silence, each absorbed in his own thoughts.
Steve took Sophie through the first door he came to, into the elegant drawing-room, the calm formality of the room making an ironic setting for that moment. He laid her down on one of the silken brocade couches. She was already stirring, her lashes fluttering, her breath coming so lightly and shallowly that he could only just hear it. Steve slid a cushion under her head, knelt beside her, stroking her cold cheek with one finger, looking down at her compassionately.
She was beautiful and he had fancied her the minute he saw her, but his feelings for her now were deeper and far more complicated. Getting to know Sophie had been a helter-skelter ride these past few days, a mind-shattering experience. She had guts, this girl – he’d known plenty of men with less nerve than she had, less determination and tenacity, but she had had a tough time already. The strain of the past week must have eaten into her reserves, and now, just when she had managed to meet and get to know the sister she had come so far to find, now, just when Gowrie’s threat to her was neutralized, this had to hit her!
How the hell was she going to be able to cope with this too?
He looked round and saw Paul, stared at him with new eyes – this man was Pavel Narodni? He must be a damn sight older than he had seemed to be.
Paul met his eyes and turned away, walked across the room to a cabinet, got out a bottle of brandy, poured some into a tumbler and came back, holding it out to Steve.
‘Give her some of this.’
‘Good idea,’ Vladimir said. ‘I could do with one of those, myself, but a little more than a finger, please.’
Paul gave him an ironic, angry smile.
‘Help yourself.’
Vladimir came back with a large tumbler of brandy and swallowed a mouthful, sighing.
‘That’s better. Nothing like a good brandy to cure shock.’
Paul began to laugh hoarsely. ‘My God. Vladimir. It would be you, wouldn’t it? You were always a gadfly, buzzing around into every cesspit . . . but I never expected it to be you who would break my cover.’
Vlad nursed his tumbler of brandy, staring. He asked curiously, ‘You mean nobody ever recognized you until now? You’ve been very lucky.’
‘Very,’ agreed Paul. ‘I knew that some day someone would turn up, I was prepared to have to deal with it, but why is it you, of all people? For years I expected it every day, but it never came, and I suppose I forgot, in the end, that I was living on borrowed time.’
Rapid footsteps crossed the hall, then Gowrie wal
ked into the room. ‘What was all that shouting about? For Christ’s sake, what is going on now, Paul?’
Paul looked at him with deadly calm. ‘I’m not Paul Brougham. My name is Pavel Narodni.’
Gowrie, mouth open, like a fish stranded out of water, breathed noisily, staring at Paul.
‘What?’
‘My God, you’ve changed, Pavel,’ Vladimir said.
‘I don’t understand . . . what are you talking about?’ Gowrie sounded almost demented. ‘Are you trying to tell me . . . you can’t be him, he’s dead, he’s been dead nearly thirty years. Pavel Narodni was Cathy’s . . . her real . . . father. What are you trying to pull?’
Paul’s lips curled. ‘The reports of my death were much exaggerated, as your Mark Twain once said.’
Gowrie staggered to a chair against the wall and sat down, looking as if he had been pole-axed. He had aged visibly; his face had fallen in on his bones, his eyes sunk into his head. Nobody now would think he looked strong enough, fit enough, to become president.
‘Cathy,’ he whispered, almost whimpering. ‘Jesus, how do we tell Cathy? You’re her father . . . you married . . . Jesus, that’s sick.’ He sat up again and almost screamed. ‘You fucking bastard, you married her, your own daughter, did you know? All this time, did you know? She’ll go out of her mind, she’ll . . . Jesus . . .’
Paul closed his eyes, breathing audibly, his face ashen. ‘Of course I didn’t know. My God, do you think . . .? When I realized who she really was . . . and that was your fault, you lying bastard . . . when I realized what had happened to us, I felt as if a trapdoor had opened under my feet, it was like falling through space.’
‘It’s a lie, it can’t be true, you can’t be him!’ Gowrie screamed.
‘I wish to God I wasn’t. Ever since I found out, I haven’t been able to think straight. I had to be alone to try to think, and that hurt her, I knew I was hurting her, but I couldn’t do anything about it, the whole world had just disintegrated but I wasn’t ready yet to tell her, I didn’t know how to do it.’
Gowrie sat back again, staring at nothing. There was a long silence, then Vladimir said, thinking aloud, ‘I get it . . . the Russians lied? You weren’t killed, they took you away to be interrogated – you poor bastard, how long did they keep hammering on at you? Were they trying to get the names of all the student leaders out of you?’ He frowned, chewing his lower lip. ‘But surely they haven’t kept you locked up all this time?’
‘I wasn’t in that car when it crashed, Vlad,’ Paul said wearily. ‘I’d got out just before we reached the checkpoint. I was going to collect some petrol bombs we had made that afternoon – we were going to attack some Russian tanks with them that night once it was dark. We didn’t realize the Russians had set up a checkpoint round the corner. God knows why my friends didn’t stop. Too damned scared, I suppose. We had some printed leaflets with us in the car. You know the sort of stuff we used to hand out, we printed them in a cellar off Wenceslas Square, below a bakery. I did most of them myself, on an old hand press.’ His face contorted in a grin of mixed amusement and bitterness.
‘What’s funny?’ Vlad asked.
‘Life. It’s just so funny how things work out. I never thought when I was working down in that cellar, printing away, that one day I’d actually own a large printing works.’ Then he shrugged. ‘The leaflets were innocent enough, a lot of talk of freedom, that was all, but freedom was a dirty word after Dubcek fell.’
‘A very dangerous word, too,’ agreed Vlad. ‘If the Russians had found your leaflets they could have used them in a show trial, called you traitors!’
‘But they didn’t need to, because my friends panicked and were killed. I was just sliding quietly down a side-street when I heard the shouting, then shots, and then the explosion when the car blew up. I ran like hell, of course.’
‘But the official verdict was that you were in the car and were killed, too,’ Vladimir protested.
‘I know, I heard later. I went into hiding. An old friend had a tiny space under his roof, not even an attic, just a gap right under the beams. I couldn’t even stand up, and after three days crouched like that I could hardly walk. My friend heard the news about the car crash and told me my name was on the list of those killed, when he brought me water and bread the next morning, but the Russians came for him later that day. He vanished into prison on some trumped-up charge, and died there of a heart attack, so they claimed. The bastards probably tortured him, but he never betrayed me to them, because nobody came looking for me.’
‘How long did you stay hidden? Didn’t anyone know you were there? Was the house empty?’
‘No, his sister lived there too. She took care of me, brought me food and water every day, which was very brave and kind of her, because the body that had been identified as mine was that of her lover – a foreign student at Prague University, Paul Brougham. The irony of it was that he got into the car when I got out – that was why the authorities thought he was me. Nobody had seen us change places.’
‘So that’s where you got that name?’ Steve said flatly, hostility in his face as he watched the other man.
He had always had him down as an opportunistic acquisitive bastard, building his empire by grabbing this and that, even grabbing Steve’s girl, so he wasn’t surprised to hear that the man had snatched his very identity from its real owner.
Paul turned his head to look with wry understanding at him. He had always known Steve hated him; it was mutual, he had detested Steve too. He had been jealous of his old relationship with Cathy. His stomach clenched. He must not think about her. Must not.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘His girlfriend told me he was dead. She was heartbroken, but she still insisted on helping me. For his sake, for our country, she hated the Russians like poison. She brought me all his documents, including his passport, and told me everything she could remember about him, so that I would be word-perfect if I was stopped and questioned. He had been born in France, and had a French mother, but his father was English, so he had dual nationality and two passports. I got out of the country on the French passport.’
‘And nobody suspected anything?’ Vladimir asked with what sounded like admiration. Vlad was always impressed by daring and courage. Steve was too, and couldn’t deny that Pavel Narodni had exhibited both, but he had other reasons for hating the man.
Paul shrugged. ‘I grew a beard, because he had had one. We looked vaguely alike and his passport photo wasn’t very good, it was fuzzy. Our colouring was very similar, and the shapes of our faces. At the airport they hardly gave me a second look. Thousands of foreign students were flocking out of the country. I was just one of the crowd. The Russians had closed the borders and the airports for some days. By the time they let people leave there was a terrific pressure for seats. They weren’t interested in foreigners – just Czechs who might be trying to escape to the West.’
Steve coldly asked, ‘Why didn’t you let your wife know you had survived?’
Giving him an equally hostile look, Paul snapped back. ‘You don’t understand what life was like for us then. You Americans never do understand what life is like for everyone else. You live in a mental Disneyland. But life isn’t like that outside America.’
‘We’re not so innocent any more,’ Steve said. ‘Vietnam and a whole host of other wars have taught us quite a lot. I wish to God they hadn’t.’
Paul said curtly, ‘Well, I couldn’t risk letting Johanna know I wasn’t dead.’ He saw the contempt in Steve’s eyes and bit out, ‘As much for her sake as for my own. If the Russians had found out they might well have arrested her and tried to blackmail me into coming back.’
Vladimir grunted, making a face. ‘I guess they would, at that. It was the way they always worked, Steve. He’s right.’
‘OK, but couldn’t you have let her know later, when it was safer?’
‘I waited too long. I was too busy to think much about her at first. I could only just make enough money for myself to
live on, I couldn’t have sent her any money for the first few years. By the time I did have a good income it was too late.’
‘Oh, come on!’ Steve snarled. ‘What do you mean, too late?’
Paul gave him a look of deep dislike. ‘I mean it was too late. Literally. I got a private investigator to go to the village to look for her. He told me Anya was dead, and Johanna had remarried, some schoolteacher. I knew the baby she had been carrying when I left had been another little girl and the detective got me a photo of her at her first communion, but I couldn’t let Johanna know I was alive, could I? She had a new husband, she was expecting his baby – how could I wreck that for her?’
Steve didn’t argue that one; by then it had been too late, obviously, but why had the man waited so long?
‘I had you checked out,’ Gowrie suddenly said, as if slowly beginning to understand. ‘I should have realized you were a phoney – I did wonder about you right from the start. You were far too vague about your past, but then I thought it might be because you were English and the Brits are always so tight-lipped. My people couldn’t find out anything about your life up to the point where you showed up in Paris, but they got lots of details about your family history from the village your people came from.’
‘I visited there, myself, just for a day, to look at the place. I had to go to France when I left Prague, because of the passport. I was only permitted to board a plane to Paris.’ Paul smiled at Vladimir. ‘My French was always very good – remember? Nobody suspected me for a second.’
‘How on earth did you survive there, though? Did you have any money with you?’
Paul shook his head. ‘A few francs. I got a job, of course, translating freelance for a Paris publisher – I had to sweat for hours to earn enough to live on.’
‘And nobody realized you weren’t this Paul Brougham? What if his parents had started searching for him, had gone to the police and reported him missing?’
‘That was one of my biggest pieces of luck. He didn’t have a family. His parents were dead and he was an only child. He hadn’t lived in France for years.’
Walking in Darkness Page 34