Curtain of Fear

by Dennis Wheatley

  As an explanation made up on the spur of the moment it was not a bad one; but it did not get past Frček. Without hesitation he picked on its weak spot, and sneered:

  “I do not believe one word of this. Where the work of the Party is concerned its members have no sense of humour. To do so would be anti-social; so it is forbidden. Your assertion that Comrade Hořovská consented to collaborate with you in a joke, which had as its object making a fool of the Comrade from whom she received her instructions, is enough to qualify you for an asylum. I am quite used to people lying to me. I do not mind it. But to expect me to believe that sort of lie is to insult me.”

  Nicholas saw then that in trying to extricate Fedora he had strained the plausibility of his explanation too far; but no story could hold water that did not somehow or other account for her identification of him as Bilto; so he felt that even had he been thinking only of his own interests, he could not have cooked up anything more likely of acceptance. All he could do now was to stick to his guns, and he cried angrily:

  “If you don’t believe it I can’t make you. But that’s how it was; and neither you nor anyone else in the world will ever be able to alter the fact that I am Nicholas Novák.”

  “Your mulish persistence with these stupid lies makes no impression on me whatever,” Frček bellowed back. “All you have succeeded in doing is to convince me that since you decided of your own free will to come to Prague something has happened to change your outlook. Therefore, having got you here in order to exploit your brain, it will now be necessary for us to exert severe pressure on you.”

  “If I were Bilto, to do so would be to dishonour the People’s Government that you represent,” Nicholas stormed. “But I am not; so however long you may keep me in prison you will never succeed in extracting from me one single item of useful information.”

  Frček sighed. “Really, you tire me. All this is too absurd. Why not admit that you are Bilto, have lunch with me, and meet the Comrades with whom you will sooner or later find yourself compelled to collaborate? That would save you much unpleasantness and me some trouble.”

  “Damn it, can’t you see that to do that would simply be a waste of time? I’m Nicholas, I tell you, and … and …” A sudden inspiration had come to him, and he ended triumphantly, “… what is more, I can prove it!”

  “How do you propose to do that?” asked Frček sceptically.

  “Quite simply. Apparently you are Lord and Master here. All you have to do is to send for my relatives. Some of them may have died since I last heard of them, but Bilto and I must have several mutual uncles and aunts and cousins still living here in Prague. At the time of my last visit I was only fourteen, but all the same they couldn’t possibly mistake me for Bilto. If you really want the truth, send for them and you will get it.”

  For the first time Frček looked a little shaken, and his voice held just a trace of doubt. “You are again trying to make a fool of me. What you suggest could result only in a farce.”

  “It will prove that no amount of wishful thinking can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse,” retorted Nicholas. “Or myself into my brilliant cousin the atomic-scientist. I challenge you to confront me with all the members of the Novák family that you can get together.”

  Frček shrugged his broad shoulders. “All right. It shall be as you wish. I will have these people hunted out and brought here this afternoon.” Turning to Kmoch, he added, “Take them both downstairs and have them put in the cells until I send for them again.”

  Nicholas was already standing. Kmoch came to his feet like a jack-in-the-box, and Fedora stood up more slowly. Frček had apparently again become absorbed in his papers and did not give them another glance as they left the room.

  Outside on the landing one of the pretty lift-girls turned her automatic smile on them as they stepped past her, swiftly closed the gates, and at a word from Kmoch pressed the lowest button on the indicator. Taking advantage of the whirring noise as the lift shot down, Fedora said softly to Nicholas in English:

  “I’m afraid we’re finished now you’ve thrown your hand in. There was always a chance that you might have bluffed your way through the meeting with the scientists; but once your relatives have identified you Frček will charge us with having conspired to enter the country in order to spy for the British.”

  CHAPTER XI

  THE PEOPLE’S REPRESENTATIVE

  Kmoch was facing the lift gates, so had his back turned; but he caught Fedora’s murmur before Nicholas could reply, and, swinging round, ordered her to be silent.

  Ignoring him, she whispered a single last sentence. “All the same, whatever happens now, I want you to know that I thought it very generous of you to try to get me out as well as yourself.”

  “Be silent, I tell you!” Kmoch said in a sharper tone.

  Nicholas gave him an angry look and asked in Czech, “Why shouldn’t we talk if we want to? We are not criminals. We haven’t even been charged with anything yet; and this is supposed to be a free country.”

  Kmoch waved the protest aside. “You may speak in Czech, but to talk in a foreign language is forbidden.”

  The lift had arrived at the basement, and Kmoch took them across a corridor to a small office. Particulars of them were entered in a ledger, then Fedora was led away by a gross-faced, huge-limbed wardress. Nicholas called after her in English, “Keep your chin up”, and was marched off by an equally brutal-looking warder, who locked him in a cell.

  There was nothing particularly cell-like about it, and except for the grille in the door it might have been a small private ward in a hospital, as it smelt strongly of disinfectant. The narrow iron bed looked reasonably comfortable; it had a chair, a table, a bed-side lamp and a water bottle. Sitting down on the bed, Nicholas went over in his mind the happenings of the past half hour.

  He wondered uneasily if Fedora had been right, and he ought to have stuck to his guns a bit longer. Evidently she reasoned that if he had succeeded in bluffing his way past the scientists they would then have been sent back to the Engelsův Dům and so secured another chance to escape; whereas by his confession, although it had not been believed, he had finally burned their boats.

  After some cogitation, he decided that her hopes had been based on false premises, as she could hardly be expected to appreciate the sort of discussion his meeting with the Czech scientists would entail. He was certain that he could never have got through it; so to accept the challenge would have been only to postpone the evil hour, and having reconvinced himself of that he dismissed the matter.

  Her belief that they would be charged with espionage sounded alarming, but he was not inclined to take that very seriously. All along she had displayed a fanatical hatred of the People’s Government, and a conviction that it employed the most barbarous methods to keep itself in power. His experiences in the past few hours had badly shaken his own belief that this Socialist Soviet satellite country was all that his Marxist friends in England had painted it, but he argued that people like Frček could not be truly representative of the Czech Communist leaders. After all, Frček was a policeman, and all over the world bad police chiefs sometimes abused the licence they were given to carry out their job of maintaining law and order. Therefore, it did not follow in the least that the People’s Government denied individuals a reasonable freedom, and failed to protect them from being imprisoned without trial or otherwise unjustly treated.

  That he might, as Nicholas, be sentenced to a few months’ imprisonment for having entered the country illegally, he now glumly accepted; but he decided that Frček could only have been bluffing when he had threatened him, as Bilto, with imprisonment for an indefinite period. At the time the threat had rattled him; but now he could regard it calmly he felt sure that the Government would never allow that sort of thing.

  Fedora’s fears, he told himself, could be put down to undue pessimism. If it came out that she was a member of this antisocial resistance group known as the Legion, things would certainly go badly f
or her; but there seemed no reason why it should. At the moment, if he stuck to his story about her false identification of him being part of a silly joke that they had agreed to play, she could be accused only of having failed in her duty towards the Party, and that was a very minor offence compared with a charge of spying for the British. As far as he was concerned the idea seemed absurd, as Frček had only to order a check-up in London to be informed that the record of his pro-Communist activities placed him above all suspicion of being a spy in the service of the warmongering Tory Government.

  Somewhat comforted by these reflections, he lay down at full length on the bed and after a conscious effort succeeded in turning his mind to more pleasant things. Wendy was his natural target for such thoughts, and fond day-dreams about her merged imperceptibly into sleep.

  As his eight hours or so of unconsciousness during the night had been mainly drug-induced, and since waking he had passed through a long morning every moment of which had been exceptionally exacting, the sleep into which he fell was a very deep one; so he did not hear the guard enter his cell, and roused out of it only when the man shook him roughly by the shoulder.

  Still only half awake, and not realising where he was, he stumbled out into the corridor; then as they turned into a cross-passage, he caught sight of Fedora and the wardress who looked like a female all-in wrestler. His brain at once began to tick over again, and, assuming that he was now being taken up to be confronted with his relatives, he wondered which of them he would shortly be seeing after a lapse of so many years, in these unhappy circumstances. On reaching the office he saw from a clock in it that it was nearly five, and with a smile at Fedora he said:

  “It seems that I’ve been asleep for over four-and-a-half hours.”

  She returned his smile a little wanly. “I didn’t do as well as that, but I managed to doze for quite a while.”

  At that moment the gates of one of the lifts opposite rattled open and they were ordered into it by their hefty guardians. Two minutes later they stood once more in front of the moonfaced, caterpillar-browed Frček, with fat, spaniel-eyed little Kmoch beside them, and their respective keepers standing rigidly to attention two paces behind their backs.

  This time Frček did not invite them to sit down. Having ordered the male and female gorillas to stand back on either side of the door, he stared hard at Nicholas for a moment, then said:

  “I have had three members of the Novák family unearthed and brought here. When they enter this room I shall ask them if they know who you are, and I will not permit that their answers should be influenced in any way. You will, therefore, remain absolutely silent until they have given their opinions. I take it that is understood, as this test is being carried out at your request, and will otherwise be rendered useless?”

  “That sounds fair enough to me,” Nicholas replied; upon which Frček nodded to Kmoch and said, “Bring them in.”

  Kmoch went out and returned a moment later leading a short procession of five people. It consisted of a stooping white-haired woman, an old man, another woman of about Nicholas’ age and two state policemen. The policemen took up positions standing as stiff as ramrods beside the warder and wardress, the others sidled with obvious reluctance after Kmoch until he halted them a few feet from Frček’s desk.

  With knitted brows Nicholas surveyed the three civilians who had been produced as his relations; he could not recognise any of them.

  Frček addressed the trio. “Look well, please, at the male prisoner. Have any of you ever seen him before? If so, tell me who he is?”

  The old man only shook his head; but the old woman broke into a swift, frightened gabble. “No, no, Comrade Minister! We do not know him. Why should we? If you have the idea that we mix ourselves up in the resistance movements you are quite mistaken. We are quiet people who do just what we are told, and every day we feel more thankful for the simple, happy life that Comrade President Gottwald and the People’s Government have made possible for us.”

  Suddenly the younger woman took charge of the situation. She was plain, thick-set, with reddish hair that was turning grey, and a sullen mouth; but she had a determined chin. Laying a restraining hand on the older woman’s arm, she said:

  “Be quiet, Mother. The Comrade Minister can have no reason to be angry with us if we tell the truth. This man is Nicholas. Surely you and Dad remember him. He is your English nephew, Nicholas.”

  Frček gave a loud grunt. The elderly couple looked at their daughter, nodded uneasily, then stood staring at the floor. It was obvious to Nicholas that whether or not they had recognised him at first sight, they were reluctant to admit it: but by now he had placed them all.

  The old people were his Uncle František and his Aunt Anka; the younger woman was his cousin Ludmila, whom he had last seen as a fat-faced girl of fourteen with a couple of thick plaits. To see them as they were now shocked him profoundly. He knew that his uncle and aunt could only be in their later fifties, yet their lined, unhappy faces and stooping shoulders gave the impression that neither of them could be less than seventy. The clothes of all three were threadbare, and in any city they would have been taken for people of the working-class. Yet in the old days the Nováks had been, if not wealthy, at least moderately well-off. The family had owned a glass-manufacturing business, and its profits had been sufficient to maintain them all in solid middle-class comfort. As one of the junior members of the firm Nicholas’ father had been sent to travel its products in England, but for several generations its senior members had lived in quite large houses with three or four servants and had enjoyed the respect of all who knew them.

  Another thought which distressed Nicholas acutely was that by addressing Frček as ‘Comrade Minister’ they confirmed the impression given earlier by Kmoch, that he was a member of the Government, and so a fully responsible representative of it. But feeling that Ludmila’s spontaneous recognition of him had now released him from his undertaking to remain silent, he thrust these thoughts aside, stepped forward and said:

  “I am sure, Aunt Anka and Uncle František, you remember me, but I am most distressed to see you all in such poor shape.”

  “Oh, we are well enough, nephew, well enough,” his uncle replied quickly. “Your aunt and I are still quite capable of doing our shift at the factory; and we enjoy it.”

  “But Aunt Anka never used to work there in the old days.” Nicholas’ voice held both surprise and disapproval.

  “Ah! But we were still criminally blind to what each one of us owed to others, then,” Uncle František hastened to reassure him. “You remember your cousin Bilto, and how greatly we all disapproved of his Marxist politics. We were wrong, very wrong; and he was right. We know better now, and we are doing our best to show our repentance for the evil, reactionary-bourgeois lives we lived, almost in idleness while taking the lion’s share of the profits that really belonged to our workers.”

  Nicholas knew that as a joint managing director of the factory his uncle had worked far longer hours than any of his employees. What sort of menial job the poor old man had been given to do there now could only be guessed at. With his heart suddenly gone leaden he forbore to enquire, but asked:

  “What about the rest of the family? How are they?”

  The old couple uncomfortably averted their eyes, and it was Ludmila who answered, “There was the occupation, then the war. Our family was greatly reduced by the Nazi bandits. Some fell as honourable victim-martyrs in the purges, others were conscripted for the wicked war against our Russian brothers and we have never heard what happened to them.” A bitter note entered her voice as she added, “Your cousin Máša is still in Prague. She has had the good fortune to please one of the Comrade Food Controllers; but she was always the lucky one, and she is too grand to know us now.”

  At a loss for a suitable reply, Nicholas turned to his aunt and enquired: “Are you still living at the house in Pelléova?”

  Her glanced flickered in Frček’s direction, and her wrinkled old face broke i
nto a cringing smile. “Yes; oh, yes. Everyone has been most kind to us. Of course the house was always far too big for just us three, so several families live there now. But they have let us keep the basement and …”

  Frček’s booming voice cut her short. “That will do! I have heard quite enough to satisfy me.” He turned to Kmoch. “Get rid of these people. No! Wait a minute. They may talk about this meeting with a Novák from England, and I don’t want any rumours to start getting about. We had better detain them for a few days. Let the warder take them down to the cells. I wish the wardress and the two troopers to remain here.”