As she moved a little unsteadily towards the door Nicholas stepped forward and said, “Do lean on my shoulder.”
She laid her hand only lightly on his forearm, and gave him a faint smile. “Thanks; but I’m not all that bad. No bones broken, anyway.”
Frček was already collecting the papers that he would require for his meeting, but he looked up to snarl with sudden venom, “If the Russians don’t break them, I’ll break them for both of you after your trial. This pretty plot of yours very nearly resulted in my having to make an explanation to the Kremlin, and I’ll not forget that in a hurry.”
Both of them half turned and caught a glimpse of the implacable hatred in the pasty moon-like face, then they were hurried from the room. But it was neither of broken bones nor devilish ingenuities practised by unscrupulous psychologists in Moscow that Nicholas was thinking as they were taken down in the lift; he was wondering what an X-cell was like. Five minutes later he knew.
It was virtually an upright box three feet square and five feet high. He could neither sit, lie nor stand upright in it, and it had eight glaring electric lights covered with unbreakable glass—one in each corner of the ceiling and one in each corner of the floor.
For a few minutes he stood with bent neck, his rumpled red hair pressed against the ceiling; then he managed to get himself into a slightly less uncomfortable position by sliding his feet forward to the door and leaning his back against the wall. In that way he could just keep his head clear, but he soon found the relentless glare of the lights almost unbearable. Even when he shut his eyes it came through their lids as a steady pink glow. Only by keeping his hands over them could he get relief; and with his palms pressed to his face, he tried to think.
That morning he had been in the position of a man convinced against his will, and so ‘of the same opinion still’. Fedora’s talk with Jirka the barman, their confinement to the hotel, the microphone in the bedroom, the things that Fedora had said there, her bold arrangements with the Chef for their escape, and their interview with Frček, had all proclaimed a state of things which it seemed impossible to explain away. Yet the convictions of a life-time had died hard in him.
He had argued to himself that, although forced upon him by circumstances as a temporary ally, Fedora was in fact the enemy of all he stood for. He had discounted her attitude as inspired by bitter, unreasoning hatred of the régime, and decided that nine-tenths of the things she said about it were baseless accusations concocted by a wild imagination and neurotic urge to dramatise every situation in which they found themselves. For the rest, he had reasoned that the police in any country were justified in taking strong measures to check the type of movement in which Fedora obviously played an active part; and that Frček’s attitude could not be taken as evidence that the People’s Government was a mockery controlled by evil men who were exploiting the masses, and ruling by tyranny, injustice and torture.
But his experiences in the past hour had stripped from him every vestige of belief he had had in the splendid fellowship of Communism. Its vaunted ‘Welfare State’, in which all men were free, equal and cared for by a paternal government truly representative of the workers, had proved a ghastly myth. Frček’s threats of the morning had not been a justified bluff to extract information from prisoners suspected of criminal activities; they had turned out to be a terrible reality. Moreover, it had emerged that he was not just a police chief, but a Minister; and to suppose that the government was ignorant of the horrors that went on at his headquarters was unthinkable. Still worse, it was not the People’s Government of Czechoslovakia alone that had fallen into evil hands. Comrade Gorkov had made it clear beyond all doubt that Frček and his colleagues were only puppets controlled by Moscow; and the cold little Russian’s terrible intentions towards the prisoners made even Frček’s physical brutalities pale.
Nicholas groaned aloud as he thought how often he had argued that the Soviet trials of saboteurs were not ingeniously stage-managed affairs, and that the confessions made at them were in fact the outcome of prisoners having, after long free discussions, at last been brought to ‘see the Light’, so that they willingly testified their past errors to the world. Now, he knew the awful truth.
He recalled a book that he had read by Paul Galico called Trial by Terror. He had thought the scenes in the Paris newspaper office a brilliant piece of work, but had been both indignant and amused by those describing the treatment of the central character when, through his own fault, he had found himself in a Soviet prison. The idea of putting a tin pail over a man’s head, and beating on it with a broom-stick until the drumming drove him to the verge of madness, had seemed a wickedly skilful piece of imagination. Now, with fear gripping at his heart, he wondered if that was one of the ‘physical treatments that leave no trace’ that would be inflicted on him in Moscow. Gorkov had spoken of destroying the prisoner’s mind, then building him up as a new, docile personality. That was exactly the theme of Paul Galico’s book. It couldn’t be true. It was too terrible; and yet …
His arms were aching from holding his hands up over his face. For a few moments he removed them, but the glare was so blinding that he could not stand it for long. Taking out his big silk handkerchief, he folded it into a bandage and tied it over his eyes. That helped a little, but the light still penetrated through the fabric; so to give each arm a rest in turn he pressed the bandage over his eyes first with one hand for a while, then with the other.
It was stiflingly hot in the coffin-like cell, and his mind began to wander. The more he thought of his situation, the more fantastic and improbable it seemed. How could it possibly have come about that he—Nicholas Novák, a quiet-living, unadventurous professor of Political Economics at Birmingham University, an ardent supporter of the Peace Council, and a champion of Socialism in its most advanced form—should find himself imprisoned under a People’s Government on a charge of being a British secret agent?
The term switched his mind to another book, and one he had read quite recently. It was about a thoroughly unscrupulous character who, between nights of love-making with a beautiful Countess, went about the continent murdering innocent policemen and others, because it chanced that their duties caused them to stand in the way of British objectives during the last war. He was instructed and abetted by a ferocious and evil old millionaire whose object in life seemed to be to force the domination of British imperialism upon as many countries as possible. The two of them drank champagne out of tankards while they glorified the sort of reactionary sentiments that had been current in Disraeli’s day. They were absurd and unreal, and wickedly calculated to inspire anti-social ideas in the young. There had been a scene in which the central character, who rejoiced in the unlikely name of Gregory Sallust, had been present, although a civilian, at Dunkirk. He had refused to be taken off with the army because his old crony had charged him with some private murder assignment, and he had ranted to himself that he could not go home because it was his job to ‘seek out and destroy the enemy’. That was just the sort of claptrap to inflame youngsters with the narrow nationalism and hide-bound patriotism that begot future wars.
As a picture of a British secret agent, Nicholas thought it might easily bear some resemblance to the truth; and here was he, charged with being that sort of revolting buffoon. Incredulity piled on incredulity; he was at that very moment in just the kind of situation in which that licensed thug had landed himself again and again in his unrelenting war against the Nazis. But he always argued, bluffed, laughed or killed his way out, and Nicholas saw no possible prospect of doing any of these things.
The book had been given to him by Wendy, otherwise he would never have read it. He remembered the name of the man who had written it now; it had been by a blood-lusting blimp named Dennis Wheatley. Wendy had said that he was the family’s favourite author. Of course it was just the sort of dangerous tripe that would appeal to a man like John Stevenson. He and his friend Benjamin Salting-Sala flatly refused to accept the term ‘Commonweal
th of Nations’ as a substitute for ‘The Empire’. They opposed equality of status and self-government for native races, because they believed that British governors, residents and judges administered the territories in which they functioned without any thought of lining their own pockets, whereas the native politicians who would have replaced them were mostly self-seeking crooks. Having stolen the poor Persians’ oil for half a century, they would have continued to take it by force if they had had their way. They still believed in sending battleships to ‘see things done’. They even refused to kow-tow to their friends the Americans, and wanted the Mediterranean to remain forever a lake under the White Ensign. If they could, they would have painted every land on the map bright red. No wonder they liked the drum-banging Wheatley with his aged flag-waving V.C. millionaire, and the trigger-happy, stick-at-nothing Gregory Sallust.
And Wendy, his adorable Wendy, was as bad as the rest. One evening he had asked her what her most cherished beliefs were, and she replied quite simply:
“I believe in God, the Queen and England.”
He had been so taken aback that he had not known what to say. It seemed incredible to him that any intelligent person could hold such outworn tenets in this modern age, much less unashamedly proclaim them. God did not exist, the Monarchy was an anachronism, and England a greater bar even than the United States to World Federation. He had not expected her to say anything about Social Justice, Equality, or the Welfare State, but she had not even included Freedom, Liberty, Democracy. Perhaps, he thought, she had the hopelessly erroneous idea that all those were embodied in her three hoary old images. He could only hope so, and had quickly turned the conversation to tennis.
Now, in acute discomfort, sweating from the heat, and panting heavily to absorb enough oxygen, his bemused mind continued to revolve round Wendy. He wondered what she was doing at that moment. Guessing the time to be about half past six, it seemed pretty certain that she would be drinking a cocktail, either at home or with friends. Knowing all her arrangements, he sought to get nearer the probability by working out what day of the week it was. The result seemed unbelievable. Not until he had checked through what had been happening to him three times could he fully convince himself that it was still only Saturday.
It seemed days ago since he had landed at the airport that morning, and weeks since he had left England. Yet barely thirty hours had elapsed since he had had that miserable quarrel with Wendy after his morning class in Birmingham. The small hands of the world’s clocks had not even travelled twice round their dials since he had arrived at the Russell to keep his appointment with Bilto. Less than twenty-two hours ago he had not had so much as an inkling of this frightful nightmare into which he had been drawn. He had not yet been made the confidant of Bilto’s awful secret; he had never seen Fedora, or known that such people as Vaněk, Kmoch, Frček and Gorkov existed.
That his circumstances, his beliefs, and his future prospects could all have been so unthinkably altered in so short a time seemed yet one more incredulity on top of all the others; but that was just as incontestable as the fact that without trial he had been condemned to occupy a cell which meant torture of a kind that no medieval tyrant had thought of.
With swimming senses his mind groped round Bilto. From what Gorkov had said it was clear that Bilto had not panicked; but, as he had at first supposed might prove the case, had assumed that the Russians had refrained from picking him up for good reasons of their own. He had simply lain doggo. And now they had got in touch with him again. Short of another intervention by fate, he and the atomic secrets that he carried were to be flown into Prague to-morrow, Sunday, night.
Nicholas passed a damp hand over his sweating forehead. From that moment in the Palm Court of the Russell, when he had dismissed his last scruples about attempting to prevent Bilto from leaving England, he had had few doubts about the rightness of his action. During the morning his conviction in that rightness had subconsciously strengthened. Now, he felt that not to have made the attempt would have been positively criminal.
He needed no telling that the world and nearly all its peoples were in a most hideous mess, and that the majority of them were further from enjoying a stable government, under which they could hope to live out their lives in peace and security, than they had been for many decades past. He had cherished the belief that a new era of enlightenment was dawning in those countries where the workers had thrown off the shackles imposed upon them for centuries by the triple tyrannies of birth, money and superstition. Now he knew that was not true.
People like John Stevenson might angrily declare that in twenty years ‘a lot of dirty snivelling little bureaucrats’, incapable of appreciating the grandeur of their inheritance, had robbed the British people of nine-tenths of the liberties that it had taken their forefathers six centuries of courageous endeavour, and sometimes martyrdom, to win. The fact remained that such glimmerings of individual freedom and protection from oppression as still lit the darkened world did not glow in any newly-fashioned neon lights behind the Iron Curtain, but from the little home fires maintained through many generations by the ancient civilisations of the West.
Through a mist of pain, exhaustion and semi-suffocation, Nicholas came dimly to realise that however justified the fight against privilege, capitalism and a narrow nationalism might be, until some better way of life developed from them it must be the first duty of all who knew the truth to protect those hearth fires of the West from being trampled into extinction.
To reach that final conclusion took him a long time. He had not wound up his watch that morning, and when he glanced at it he found that it had stopped at twenty past four; so he could get no idea how long he had been in the cell, but it seemed an eternity. The sweat was running down him in rivulets, his cramped position made his muscles ache intolerably, and from lack of air his head felt as though it was about to burst. Gradually his mind lost all coherence, and ranged without direction over a score of subjects having little or no connection with one another; but every now and again it drifted back to Wendy, Frček, Bilto or Fedora.
At length the heat and exhaustion overcame him. Automatically his limbs relaxed and he slid down on to the floor in a senseless heap. His last conscious thought was that if he could live the past twenty-four hours over again, fond as he was of Bilto he would have gone straight to the nearest police station and had him arrested.
When he came to, rough hands were hauling him from the cell. Two warders half dragged, half carried him along the corridor and into a wash place. There he slid to his knees and leaned against the wall, gasping in the welcome cooler air. Without warning one of the men threw half a bucket of cold water over his head. Gasping, he staggered to his feet, once more fully conscious.
They let him dry his face on a towel, then hurried him along to the basement office. Fedora was just outside it with the wardress. The side of her face which had been slapped was still red, but she was standing erect instead of with her shoulders hunched, and looked in an altogether better state than when he had last seen her.
Raising a smile, he said, “Congratulations on the way you have pulled yourself together. I’d never have believed anyone could look so good after what you’ve been through.”
She made a little grimace. “Oh, it’s just part of the service. The best of attention and the most expensive drugs without a penny to pay. The idea is that the quicker they repair the damage the sooner they can start in on you again without the risk of your passing out and bringing a premature end to their fun. But you don’t look too good.”
“I’ll be all right as soon as I get a bit more air,” he assured her. “But they kept me all night in a cell like a coffin and as hot as an oven.”
Fedora smiled. “I expect it felt that long, but actually we’ve been down here only just over two hours.”
At that moment Kmoch came out of the office and signed to them to enter the waiting lift. In the hall he collected two State policemen. One was a blue-eyed ruddy-faced young man, the
other was older and had a black moustache. The little party went out to the street. A six-seater car was waiting for them. Kmoch made Fedora and Nicholas sit in the back, he and the black-moustached man took the seats opposite them, and the youngster got in next to the driver. As they settled themselves Kmoch produced his automatic from the pocket of his long overcoat, and said to Nicholas:
“Please observe that I can fire at you without any risk of injuring my men in front. If you make any attempt to escape I shall blow your knee-cap off. That will not prevent your appearing for your trial, but it will be a long time before you forget the pain that such a wound causes.”
Fedora had lowered herself carefully into her place, but as the car started off she jerked up her head with a grimace of pain, then sat forward holding on to the strap so that her sore back should not come in contact with the cushions.
Nicholas had already decided that to try to escape would be hopeless, and as he looked about him he saw from a clock in a church tower that it was just after eight. It occurred to him that it was already past his usual supper time. Apart from the bowl of stew at the airport he had had nothing to eat all day, so he now felt distinctly hungry and began to hope that they would be given some sort of meal on the train.
The city looked very peaceful in the soft evening light, and except for the still overloaded trams, there was very little traffic in the streets though which they passed; so the police chauffeur drove swiftly. His klaxon wailed and the car sped through a big square to the south of the Přikopy. Beyond the square they shot down a narrow turning. A hundred yards along it the klaxon wailed again. A heavy lorry had emerged just ahead of them from a side-street.
Suddenly there came a shriek of brakes, shouts and a violent crash. The car stopped dead. Nicholas and Fedora were thrown forward on top of the two men opposite. She screamed as the unexpected movement lacerated the weals on her back, then fell upon Kmoch. Nicholas’ right hand landed on the policeman’s shoulder, and with it he thrust himself away.
Curtain of Fear Page 19