Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  That first night, flowers had been put in their daughter’s tooth mug from the bathroom, then changed at the end of the first week of her absence and every week, on Thursday, for the last seven years. The pain never lessened, not for Rosie or her husband.

  There was a chair by the window and part of the seat was filled with teddy bears, but there was room enough for one of them to sit during the evening vigil. Then a candle was lit, summer or winter. The cat would likely be asleep on the bed and the dog, older and arthritic, would be across her feet or her husband’s. Visiting was worse.

  The only light would be the candle and it would play on a photograph on the dressing-table that showed the girl, blonde and happy, with the children around her.

  Timofey Simonov lay in his bed and his mind wandered. He thought of the hood who would be in the darkness inside the lock-up garage. The cement from the bags would now have solidified around his legs and ankles. His toes would be numb and the weight of the cement would drag at his knee joints.

  He thought of his father, a junior officer in the Interior Ministry force that had had responsibility for the security of the camps for convicts. His father went to work each morning in a threadbare uniform at the camp that was Perm 35, and his memories were of the stories his father told him.

  The man in the garage who had shown disrespect would survive the night but not the following day. Timofey Simonov, who regarded himself as a successful businessman, had long been fascinated by the ways, habits and punishments of criminals.

  His father could have moved on from Perm 35, gone back into the main ranks of the Interior Ministry force and sat at a more comfortable desk. He could have been away from the awful damp, perpetual cold and misery of winter, when light was barely visible above the trees around the camp, and the summers of heat, flies and mosquitoes. But his father would not move, and his mother had not demanded that he transfer or quit, and all the time that Perm 35, the logging camp, was open, he had stayed. His mother had been a bureaucrat in the administration of the camp’s hospital. He remembered, from the stories told him, the obsession of his father.

  The criminals would have understood why it was appropriate for a man to go into the river, feet in set cement, as a punishment for disrespect. They would have recognised the retribution of death by shooting, at long range by a marksman, against a man who had broken the rules of conduct. But he did not see himself as a criminal, merely as a businessman whose value was recognised in the corridors of power. The town of Karlovy Vary was the right place for a businessman to be, and he did not seek out the company of criminals.

  He thought of his father’s obsession: the security of the camp. The man had become deranged in the isolation of Perm 35, 1,600 kilometres to the east of the capital. He had feared a breakout and was unwilling to relinquish control. Timofey Simonov had watched his father’s growing madness. His whole childhood had been spent in the garrison part of the camp with criminals, whose faces showed no hope, and horizons of endless forests. The breakout had not taken place at a camp where his father had served, but his father had been called there when reinforcements were required.

  Timofey Simonov would have been angered had it been suggested to him that he, too, was a criminal.

  The camp was at Kengir in Kazakhstan. It was in the spring of 1954 that a guard had killed a prisoner, whose friends had called it murder. An uprising had followed and unchecked anarchy. The guards were slaughtered or had fled. For forty days the prisoners had ruled their own ghetto camp, formed a provisional government, attempted to barter for freedom with the Interior Ministry force commander, who led the military surrounding the perimeter. It was suppressed. Intermittent negotiations were entered into and bought time for the transfer to the nearest railhead of tanks and artillery pieces. When they were in place, talks were suspended. The military had attacked the camp. His father said that only a few dozen of the convicts died as the camp was retaken: the convicts had claimed between five and seven hundred were put to death. Timofey Simonov liked the stories of the mutiny and its suppression. He was grateful to his father for telling them. The lesson he took from Kengir more than half a century later: the prisoners had not shown sufficient respect for the administration of their camp. That was intolerable – and the convicts, grudgingly, knew it. For lack of respect a sniper could shoot to kill, or feet could be put into an oil drum as cement hardened.

  Timofey Simonov had great wealth. He owned a villa overlooking Karlovy Vary with fine views, and the road was the most sought after in the town of Russian émigrés. He had accounts in discreet banks scattered across the globe. He had the protection of a man who had once been a brigadier. Soon an old friend from the days when he’d struggled would be close to him. None of that lulled him to sleep. He lay in his bed, listening to distant traffic and the quiet of his home.

  The key, his father said, to retaking the camp was recruiting informers. They had been among the convicts, but slipped out notes detailing the names of the leadership, where the weapons were and the weak points. Informers, traitors, were a danger to convicts, the state, and to any businessman who traded at the edge.

  It would be a long night. Many were.

  ‘It’s a city of the dead. It has a history of brutal killing. Can I say that to a visitor?’

  ‘Feel free.’

  ‘Here, where we stand, by this plaque, twenty-seven revolutionary leaders were put to death, noblemen, four hundred years ago. Twenty-four died at the hand of the same executioner. Perhaps he was too tired to deal with the last three.’

  ‘Tiring work, killing people,’ Danny Curnow said softly.

  The night was cold. It was past two, the stag parties were gone and the sightseers from across Europe had dispersed. The policeman stood close to him, then took his arm, and they moved across the wide space of the Old Town Square, stopping by a huge memorial, a man of God, in greening bronze. An hour and a half before, Danny had come down from his room, sleep having evaded him, and found Karol Pilar dozing on a sofa in the hotel lobby. Why was he there? ‘It’s my job to be here.’ Wasn’t there a girl, someone important, he should be with? ‘She understands – I thought you or Mr Bentinick might need me. It is a privilege for me to work with you.’ Danny had thought him sincere. They had gone out into the night and tramped the emptying streets, a chill wind gripping him. It had been his intention merely to go round the block, then head back to his room. He was shown the sights, had his own guide. When he was on the battlefield tours some of the guides held bright parasols aloft. The policeman stayed close to him. When a beggar had loomed from the shadows, Karol Pilar had pushed him aside.

  ‘The statue is of Jan Hus. Two centuries before those nobles were slaughtered he was burned alive for spreading heresy. In this square more than fifty of his prime supporters were put to death.’

  Danny Curnow imagined, where he stood, brave men dying, not giving those who killed them the satisfaction of showing fear.

  They walked on. There was a wide old pedestrian bridge, the river flowing briskly through the arches below.

  ‘Charles Bridge. A saint of the Czech people died here, John of Nepomuk, the Queen’s confessor. In 1393 Wenceslas the Fourth had him thrown off the bridge and drowned because he would not tell the King what she had said to him in the confessional box. You good to walk further?’

  ‘Fine.’

  They looked up at the huge illuminated wall of the castle.

  ‘It was the custom in Prague, six hundred years ago, for the mob to attack the seat of power. Officials of the Crown or tax gatherers were thrown from the upper windows – those windows. Come on.’

  They retraced their way, then Karol Pilar took his arm and stopped him. The water flowing below the bridge was deep and should have contained secrets.

  ‘The Nazis were fleeing. Their executioner brought the guillotine he had used to the banks of the river and had it thrown into the current. He hoped it would never be found. In two years that man, Alois Weiss, had beheaded by guillotine more
than one thousand Czechs. It was retrieved. There were bloodstains on the wood frame and the blade. He died, an old man, in Germany.’

  The traffic noise had faded. Rats scurried in the gutters, derelicts snored in doorways, and another day started. The street-sweepers were out and rubbish bins were emptied. The first lights lit office windows. They were under the prison walls.

  ‘We had the tyranny of Fascism and replaced it with the barbarity of Communism. A woman opposed the Soviet regime and its Czech sycophants, Milada Horáková. It was announced she had been executed by hanging. In fact, she was strangled. Each time she was near to death they stopped and loosened the pressure. They took seventeen minutes to kill her. Should we go further?’

  Sparse traffic was now on the roads and the first trams. Men and women were starting to spill from the metro entrances. They were back in the long square onto which Danny’s hotel fronted. There was a statue, many times life-size, of a figure astride a horse, in armour. Karol Pilar said it was of Wenceslas I, then pointed down to what seemed to be a cross embedded in the cobbles. It was twisted and broken. The policeman’s face was sober. ‘Most people accept the hardship of a vile dictatorship, from the left or the right, but a very few do not. Jan Palach was studying history and economics. He protested against the Soviet occupation and the Czechs who collaborated. He poured petrol over himself, lit it and died days later in great pain.’

  ‘Why are you showing me these places?’

  ‘I can take you near to where I live. There is a street corner where a man was shot dead. His crime? He had the same car – same make and colour – as a man condemned by a rival gang. It was a mistake. The court case against the assassins failed. Why? You should understand that here, Mr Curnow, life is cheap, so people in my country are not careless about their survival. Be careful.’

  He thought of the innocence of the young men – British, Canadian and American – who had been on the beaches along the coast of France from Dunkirk, their lack of cunning, and of the many who lay there. He thought of the pastures stretching up towards the forestry and summit of the mountain, the narrow lanes running down to the Dungannon road.

  ‘Karol, in your family, were they victims or executioners?’

  ‘My grandfather was at the Pankrác gaol and fortunate to escape the axe room. He died nine years ago, much loved by his family and respected in his community, but he was not a clever man. He had been careless.’

  They had coffee in a Costa lounge. Around them young men and woman were readying themselves for the office. The sight-seeing expedition had not been tourism: every action, he always assumed, had purpose. It would have toughened him. The agent would be subject to his discipline or they might fail. It was not that Bentinick was short of men or women who could have done a decent job. Bentinick had been looking for a man of proven ruthlessness, which was what Danny had been and for which he had paid a high price. He went back to the hotel, and the policeman settled on a sofa.

  Chapter 7

  ‘You know why we’re here, Danny?’

  ‘I expect you’ll tell me, Mr Bentinick.’

  ‘You’re here, Danny, because I worry that your exile in France, among the dead and the battlefields, may have softened your resolve.’

  ‘You’re never found me wanting.’

  ‘A different war here from those beaches, and no Geneva Convention on prisoners. It’s merciless and for high stakes. “The end justifies the means.” Our sort of language at Gough, Danny.’

  They were on a wide street on a hill with busy traffic. They had crossed the road – Bentinick walked straight across, looking neither right nor left, ignoring horns – and stopped a few yards short of a church that was flush to the pavement. Baroque style, mid-eighteenth century, the stonework was clean: it was important. Karol Pilar was behind them, silent. Danny had lain on his bed for an hour until the phone had erupted beside his head. He’d had three minutes to get down to the lobby. The policeman must have borrowed a razor: he was clean-shaven but in the same shirt, alert, suffering no ill-effects from the night tour of the city.

  ‘Here, Danny, and in another place, we find evidence of courage, treachery, collateral, and the ruthlessness required of agent handlers. We hit the old brick wall, the one that has to be passed through. Was it necessary?’

  The stonework up from the pavement showed bullet marks. In relief there were man-sized sculptures of a paratrooper and a priest; between them names were embossed on a stone slab.

  ‘A little group of men, Danny, saved a country. A German was in charge of Prague, Heydrich. He was reviled and feared. The plan was to subsume most of Czechoslovakia into the Reich. As an independent entity, with language and culture, it would have disappeared. The Czechs had a government in exile, in Buckinghamshire. Some of their men who had escaped to England were trained as assassins, then parachuted into Czech territory from an RAF flight, with firearms and explosives. Heydrich drove in an open-topped limousine, no security escort, from his commandeered residence to Prague Castle in late May sunshine. He was attacked, with grenades and pistols, wounded and died a week later. His killers fled, disappearing off the face of the earth. Reprisals followed, but that’ll keep. That’s collateral – the responsibility that handlers carry. The man hunt ended here. Seven of the parachutists were hiding in the church, given refuge by the priest.’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’

  ‘Nothing, Danny. Just listen.’

  He wondered if the Czech would interrupt, but he did not. They went past the monument, then ducked into a side entrance to a cellar area. The Czech flashed his card at the curator, who gave a shrug of resignation: they did not have to pay. The walls were lined with photographs and dummies in British-issue Second World War uniforms.

  ‘An informer, Kurda, brought the German military here, several hundred of them. He gave information to the investigators, but his motive was to halt the savagery of the reprisals. He would have been what you’d have called, in your Vagabond days, a “walk in”. He came off the street when the hunt had gone cold. Three died in the nave, and the remaining four took refuge in the crypt. Follow me, Danny. Informers – we can’t do without them, but they’re seldom admired.’

  Danny Curnow followed Bentinick into the crypt. Against the walls there were bronze busts of the seven.

  ‘The last four were where we stand now. The fire brigade was called in to flush them out – flooded the place. Grenades were thrown in. They tried to tunnel out to the sewers under the street, scratching with their hands. At the end, some took poison capsules and some had saved a last round for themselves. None was alive for torture and execution. They were trained in England, handled in England and controlled by men who knew that savage killings would follow. The chief man was Jan Kubis. His mission started at Leamington Spa and ended here. His handlers knew what would happen, which didn’t deflect their determination.’

  They went out. Back in warm sunshine, the traffic swept past them. A girl pushed a pram, and a couple held hands as they walked briskly towards the metro. Each had a laptop bag slung on a shoulder, and no one had time to glance at the church façade. Danny Curnow understood the place, and the men who had been in the crypt – but they had not been part of as great an army as had been on the beaches. Matthew Bentinick lit his pipe, struggling in the breeze. Danny had no wish to be gone, and he lingered.

  Karol Pilar hovered and watched. He was a man without illusions.

  His office was in the Criminal Police section on Bartolomejska; the southern side of that street was taken up by buildings occupied by detectives of different agencies. Many would slip out at lunchtime for a meal and a drink in the bar opposite. Karol never went before seven. Then he would leave his Russian unit desk, go to the Konvikt and drink a bottle of Pilsner Urquell, then head off into the evening to the mini-mart and buy something for supper. The Sherlock and the Al Capone bar were on the same street but he used the Konvikt, only occasionally. He had little option: he earned the equivalent of one thousand fi
ve hundred American dollars a month, and his expenses were hardly a bonus. Then, with a plastic bag in his car, which was an old but well-maintained Skoda, he would go back to the studio flat he shared with his girl-friend and they’d eat what he’d bought. She was studying accountancy at college and did bookkeeping at a café to help with her fees. He could have earned more.

  He did not interrupt them. Mr Bentinick had won him over. Danny was cautious and serious, perhaps suffering still from a wound inflicted long ago. Where could they have coffee? He shrugged, pointed down the hill, away from the church and towards the river.

  A detective who attached himself to the political élite or a member of the judiciary could make a good living. And openings gaped for those prepared to ally themselves with the city’s gang leaders – Russian, Albanian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, any of them. Those who worked on surveillance teams were also in demand. He was clean. Many in his office thought him unnecessarily squeamish. There was a saying, deep-rooted in the country’s culture: ‘If you don’t steal, your family will stay poor.’ He occupied a middle-ranking position with the Russian desk. It was about resources, or the lack of them. On occasion he could go to Karlovy Vary, less frequently to Mariánské Lázne˘ – prettier, with the same sulphurous springs and classic villas – which was second favourite with the Russians, with their suitcases of money. He could talk there to local police and underpaid informants and did the same in the capital where big men lived close to the Russian embassy and schools on the north side of the river. His seniors had given him the job of escorting Mr Bentinick because it concerned an Irish matter and he spoke good English – and while he was investigating the Irish he would have no opportunity to meddle in satisfactory arrangements. He thought Mr Bentinick a clever man.