Snare of the Hunter

by Helen Macinnes

  As for Jiri’s hope that Jaromir Kusak could be persuaded to write a novel sympathetic to the present regime—it wasn’t so wild a hope as it must sound to David. When her mother was released from prison in the spring of 1968 along with several other Communists, she was still a Communist, more intense than ever in her beliefs. Could David explain that? Of course not: no American could understand it. And neither had Irina’s father. He was appalled: he was rejoicing in the liberalising of politics in Prague while her mother was only filled with bitter disapproval; Dubcek had freed her, and she distrusted him; she welcomed the Russian tanks, to keep the country out of the hands of fascists. Irina’s father gave up all hope of ever regaining his wife or of seeing freedom established. It was then that he left the country—an admission of complete despair.

  Irina hadn’t left with him. She wanted to. She had drifted away from her husband: his secrecy, his long absences, his veiled contempt for Dubcek; all these troubled her, set her apart from him. But there were her sons, still too young to risk on any journey with her father. They could have endangered his escape. So she stayed, waiting for the boys to be old enough, hoping, planning. Then her mother fell ill, was dying. Jiri sent her to be with her mother, and took the two boys on a fishing holiday. His cottage was on a remote lake. But it was more than a fishing expedition. He had visitors there, coming secretly. Old Stalinists, true believers. And on the morning he and three men were talking in a closed room, the boys went down to the lake and pushed off in a boat. That was against the rules, of course, but there was no one near to prevent them. They couldn’t handle the oars.

  They drowned in six feet of water.

  David was pulling the car on to the side of the road. “But I have to tell you,” Irina said, “I have to—” He tried to wipe away the tears streaming down her face. He took her into his arms. The weeping subsided. He held her firmly, pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “No,” he said, “you don’t have to tell anything.”

  “I must, I must—”

  “Later,” he said. “We can talk—”

  “No.” She lifted her head, and he let her go from his arms. “I must finish this part at least. There isn’t much more. I left Jiri and all his politics. He had become very powerful. That secret meeting on the day the boys died—it gave him what he wanted.”

  David had edged the car back on the highway, slipping in ahead of a stream of heavy trucks, and increased speed so that they wouldn’t be tempted to pass him.

  “I asked for a divorce. Jiri wouldn’t give it to me.” Irina’s voice was now calm, almost detached. “I got permission to live in my father’s house at Rajhrad, and—very slowly, very carefully—I made contact with two of my old friends. They were working in factories in Brno. And at last they agreed to help me get out of the country.”

  The trucks had given up the attempt to get ahead of him, but David still kept a steady seventy. The highway was narrow but well surfaced, with no sharp turns and good visibility. “I think I know the rest,” he said gently as he noticed her sudden hesitation.

  She shook her head, and was about to speak. Then, abruptly, she fell silent and turned her head away. She seemed absorbed in the fields and the forests spreading over the rolling land.

  David searched in his mind for some way to bring up Krieger’s question. He even wondered if it were needed now: Irina had told him much. And yet this sudden reversion to silence puzzled him. He eased off his speed to fifty, as the traffic coming out of the Graz area thickened. Yes, she had given him many facts, but they all dealt with the past. A preparation for something she might tell him later? Or else you would never understand.

  Small second-class roads were weaving a web around the highway, bringing more cars and many trucks. His speed went down to forty miles an hour: there were only two lanes on this stretch, and some bad drivers were loose on them. So he kept his eyes on the road as he prepared to ask Krieger’s question. He didn’t sidle into it: he wasn’t going to give Irina a lot of diplomatic double talk. He said, quite simply, “Did you know Alois Pokorny?”

  “Alois?” She came to life again. “Of course. Do you?”

  “No. Krieger was interested. He wanted to know if he was a friend of yours.”

  “Yes, he is. But I’m not going to talk about Alois.”

  “Why not?”

  “It could be dangerous for him. The less his name is mentioned, the better.”

  “I don’t think so. Not now. He’s dead, Irina.”

  Her eyes widened, her face went rigid. “Oh, no!... Oh, no!”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “Alois Pokorny died this morning.”

  “But I saw him—he was well—he wanted to bring me to the Sacher.”

  “Where did you see him?”

  “In the flat—his flat—the one he shared with Ludvik. They met me at the frontier and took me there and hid me for eleven nights.” Her words had been racing on, almost a protest of disbelief. Then she said more slowly, “He couldn’t come with me. Two of his friends arrived to collect—to collect some pamphlets he had been writing. They passed me on the stairs as I was going down to the car where Ludvik was waiting.”

  “Did they speak to you?”

  “No.”

  “Had you ever seen them before?”

  “No.”

  “Then who told you they were his friends?”

  “Ludvik.” She stared at him. “Why do you ask these questions?”

  “Krieger said Alois was killed just a few minutes after you left the building where he lived.”

  “Killed?” Disbelief gave way to pain. She closed her eyes. At last she said in a strangled voice, “First there was Josef. And now Alois.”

  “Josef?”

  “Alois’s brother. He brought me to the frontier, and then he was—” She broke off. She opened her eyes, fixed them on the road ahead, saw nothing.

  * * *

  They came through the last of the gentle hills invaded by factories. What the Turks could not do to Graz in two hundred and fifty years of repeated attacks, the machines had achieved in less than twenty. When David had last visited Graz he had thought of it as a country town that happened to be the capital of a province famed for hunting. Now the traffic was thick and clotted. All the cars and trucks on the right bank of the river that ran dark and swift through the town were trying to reach the left bank, where just as many cars and trucks had decided to cross to the right bank. It was complicated too by the fact that the left side rose abruptly from a compression of streets to form a considerable hill on which a fortress had once stood. What the Turks didn’t manage there, Napoleon had accomplished: everything destroyed except for a truncated tower, now embellished with a giant clock that dominated the city far below. At least, thought David as they travelled over a bridge and saw the hotel’s sign, the Grazer will always be punctual. Who would dare be late with that monster of a clock reminding you that everything passed, including precious minutes? He had forty-five of them left before he had to get up that hill and meet Krieger.

  The hotel wasn’t so grand as it had been fifty years ago or more, but it was doing its best to keep up with the newer places. Early August was not the season for Graz, apparently: there was no difficulty in getting two rooms, adjoining. Modern and cramped, everything built in so that there could be eight feet of clear floor space. Together, they had probably formed half of one of the old bedrooms. There was something to be said for ampler days.

  “Will you be all right?” David asked Irina. She was calm, much to his relief. “I’m going to see Krieger.”

  “Would you ask him what happened to Alois?”

  “If you want that, yes. Is it important to you?”

  In the same detached voice she said, “It could be important to all of us.”

  “I won’t be long.” He tested the bed. It was comfortable. “You could rest—try to sleep? We’ll have dinner downstairs as soon as I get back.”

  “Would that be safe?”

  “I haven’t
seen one sign of a grey Fiat,” he said. Then he added quietly, “Why was Ludvik following you, Irina?”

  “I don’t know. This morning I thought I had an answer. But now—I just don’t know. Since Alois—” She cut off that sentence. “I’ll be all right here.”

  David opened the window—it was on the second floor, over-looking a street on the riverbank—to let the sound of rushing water as well as cool air into the room: that would help her fall asleep. All that came in was the shrieks and groans of traffic and the smell of diesel fumes from lumbering trucks. Hastily, he closed the window.

  Irina was actually laughing. “Oh, David—your face!”

  “I’m glad something is funny around here.” For a moment he stood looking at her. Then, impulsively, he put his arms around her, hugged her tightly. “Don’t worry, Irina. We’ll find the answer to all this. Together.”

  He left at once. He had twenty minutes to park the car safely in the garage behind the hotel, call for a taxi, get up to the one-time fortress. Distances were short within the central core of the old town, but the maze of streets on that side of the river was an added trap for the stranger. A cab driver would know the quickest route.

  The hotel clerk called for the taxi, while David took the Chrysler round to the garage—he wasn’t going to entrust Krieger’s car to the hands of any bellboy (the only one visible was nearly eighty, anyway). By the time he was back at the hotel door, the taxi was waiting. He had twelve minutes to get up that damn hill—why Krieger should choose there as the meeting place was beyond David. The cab made it in just under ten minutes, using a curving driveway that branched away from the city street to climb easily up to the level of the clock tower. And now David was beginning to see Krieger’s purpose. The whole place was an enormous public park, with trees and flower beds disguising the levelled ruins. And it was popular. Here, people walked; here, people met to sit and talk. There was constant movement, and plenty of space for it. In fact, it might be difficult to spot Krieger.

  I’ll let him find me, David decided: he probably saw me paying off the taxi; he certainly has been watching me walk over to this low wall. It’s beside the tower. And it’s six o’clock. Now, I’ll just look at the view way down there, as fifty others are doing.

  Krieger’s deep voice said, “Quite a drop, isn’t it?”

  10

  To begin with, Krieger asked the questions and kept them brief. He listened intently to David’s answers and seemed to be trying to fit them into some logical pattern. But he was baffled. “There is something wrong somewhere,” he said at last. “Apart from Ludvik, who knew where to find you, apart from the fact that he didn’t give a damn if you saw him, there is something wrong, something phoney about this whole deal.”

  “Irina isn’t faking anything.”

  “No. But she isn’t telling everything either.” Krieger glanced at David’s taut lips. “Come on,” he said more easily, “let’s walk up through the trees. This view was worth ten minutes, and we’ve given it that.”

  “Irina,” David said as they began to follow a steep path to another spread of park land, “isn’t sure, herself. When she is sure of what she knows, she will tell us.”

  “I hope it won’t be too late,” Krieger said grimly.

  “For Irina?”

  “For Irina and her father. For you too. For anyone who helps in this escape.”

  David said, “That’s a comforting idea. Where, did you get it? From Alois Pokorny’s death?”

  “And from his brother’s.”

  They were entering a long avenue of trees, winding over the hill. There were several couples wandering here, arms around waists, girls’ heads on boys’ shoulders; a few family groups with children racing around; elderly slow-moving men with hands clasped behind their backs as they paced uphill; students arguing, laughing. And we talk of death, David thought. “How did Alois die?”

  “He was thrown from his window.”

  “Thrown?”

  “Yes. The police are certain of that. They found evidence of some struggle. And the poor devil had only one shoe lying near him. The other was found beside his slippers up in that room. Does a man commit suicide with one shoe on? Besides, I saw the body land. It didn’t hit the pavement. It fell well beyond the kerb.”

  David stopped short.

  “No, no, let’s keep moving. I was in a baker’s shop across the street. And the damnable thing is that I sat next to the two men who murdered him. I saw them get a signal from the window of Pokorny’s apartment. I saw them go in. I saw the man who gave the signal leave. I saw Irina come out and enter a grey Fiat and it drove off. I even relaxed about those two men: they had made sure Irina got safely downstairs. I was feeling pretty good. That was the damnable thing. I thought the worst was over: from now on—with some care—we had it made. And then the body landed, thirty feet away from where I stood.”

  “And the man who gave the signal?”

  “The same man who came out just before Irina did. He drove the Fiat, didn’t he?”

  “Ludvik.” And Ludvik had met Irina when she crossed the frontier. “How did Alois’s brother die?” David asked.

  “Josef was shot at the frontier. According to the Austrian translation of a Prague newspaper clipping which I saw this morning when I was visiting a friend of mine—his department is interested in Czech activities: a matter of Austrian security—we’re supposed to think Josef was killed by a border guard as he was attempting to escape from Czechoslovakia. Yes, escape. No mention of Irina. Just that ‘the traitor Josef Pokorny was shot by the frontier patrol while trying to join his accomplices. He had been under observation for some time. It is known that Pokorny was a paid agent of Western imperialists who, from the safety of a neutral country, have been supporting reactionary conspiracies directed against the Republic.’ Of course,” Krieger added as he ended his quotation, “it was the mention of a neutral country which drew the Austrians’ attention to that piece of bull. Clever, isn’t it? On the one hand, Jiri Hrádek reassures his comrades that he’s on the ball: no need for them to lie awake nights worrying about fascist subversives conspiring with a foreign government to overthrow the Republic. On the other hand, he has got rid of two members of the resistance: Josef and Alois Pokorny. In a few days I shouldn’t be surprised to see another small paragraph in Rude Pravo, this time about Alois. Suicide in a state of depression over his brother’s death and the failure of their conspiracy: so perish all traitors.”

  In silence, they walked on, left the avenue of trees for a path which led them towards a large sunken courtyard and some relics of the destroyed fortress in its broken walls. David halted, looking down at the garden that had been planted to disguise the ruins. We’re supposed to think Josef was killed by a border guard... “Who shot Josef?” he asked.

  “There’s only indirect evidence, but it’s strong enough. Two Austrians, going off duty from their border post, were cycling home along the road where the car was waiting for Irina. They were some distance away, but they could see the car with a man and a girl close together, while two men talked across the barbed wire. Then they heard, a shot, and the man on the Czech side fell backward.”

  “Backward?”

  Krieger nodded grimly. “The car drove off. The Austrians reached that section of the fence, and saw it had been cut. The man seemed dead, but one of the Austrians went right up to the wire—it’s my guess, he actually broke the rules and stepped through it to see if the man was still alive, but he wouldn’t put that in his report. He did state unequivocally that he had a clear view of the man, who had been shot in the chest by someone facing him. The wound could only have been made by a revolver fired at very close range—powder burns were visible. Then the Austrian patrol heard a jeep approaching, so they moved back to the road, picked up their bicycles, and went on home. They made a routine report; and that was the end of it, as far as they were concerned. Then Rude Pravo published its version, and the incident on the road became interesting to the Austrians.�
��

  Krieger was taking out his pipe and tobacco pouch, his heavy eyebrows frowning as he carefully packed the bowl. “So your Ludvik is not to be taken lightly. In the Austrian files there is no record of him as a Czech agent; he is only identified—like Alois Pokorny—as a refugee. Which means he is far from stupid. He has been so well covered that he must be important: one of Jiri Hrádek’s hand-picked men.” Krieger lit his pipe, drew on it, got it going to his satisfaction. “But the two who went into Alois Pokorny’s building—they’re on file as agents. I picked out their faces at noon today from a small collection of candid-camera shots. I got duplicates made of them—just a little quid pro quo for information rendered.” Slipping his tobacco pouch back into his pocket, he took out two snapshots and handed them to David. “I thought you ought to keep your eyes open for these two mugs.”

  David studied them. One photograph had been taken in a beer garden, the other at a street corner. Both were clear shoulder-and-head studies, three-quarter face. “How tall?”

  “The dark-haired man is your size—about five feet ten, I’d say. The other is six feet. Strongly built. The dark one has a narrow head and dark eyes. The light-haired man—not blond, just light brown—is round-headed and square-faced, with pale eyes. Two distinct types of Czech—one from the east, the other from the west. Both are obedient, that’s for damn sure: no questions or quibbles in their minds.”

  “Any names to these faces?”

  “Milan—dark hair. Jan—light hair. No, no,” Krieger said as David handed the photographs back, “I had these made for you. I’ll know them again all right. Besides, show them to Irina. She may have something to say about them.”

  “How much shall I tell her?”

  “Whatever you feel she can take. The more, the better. Well, have we seen enough of this garden? Let’s finish our walk up to the top of the hill. I left a car up there. How’s my Chrysler?”

  “Safe in the garage behind the hotel.”

  “And which is that?”

  “The Grand.”