Mirek’s mind was a blank. Then with an effort he scoured his memory and said, ‘I’m afraid I’m lost. Can you help me, please?’
The shadowy figure answered carefully, ‘Around here it happens all the time.’ And then urgently, ‘Where’s the woman?’
‘By the river. She’s sprained her ankle. I’ll fetch her.’
The relief was evident in the man’s voice. ‘Good. I’ll help you.’
‘I’ll fetch her.’
The man came closer. A light came on from his side, momentarily blinding Mirek. Then the torch was switched off. The voice said, ‘You look all in. Let me help.’
‘No,’ Mirek said stubbornly. ‘I’ll fetch her. I’ll be back in about half an hour.’
‘All right,’ the man gestured. ‘Bring her to the barn. Everything is ready.’
* * *
Mirek carried her across the river holding her above his head, one hand on her back, the other behind her ankles. His exhaustion was forgotten. He had not seen the man’s face but he would remember him all his life. Would never forget the timbre and confidence of his voice.
On the other side he lowered Ania to the ground and then hitched her on to his back. Grunting with the exertion, he marched up the hill through the trees.
The man was waiting at the door of the barn, the dogs were nowhere to be seen. At their approach he opened the door and gestured for them to go ahead. As he closed the door behind them he flicked on a switch. A low light came from a bulb hanging from the high ceiling. Carefully Mirek lowered Ania to the ground. She stood on one leg. The man facing them was young. Mirek guessed in his late twenties. Stocky, round-faced, an untidy mop of black hair. He grinned at them.
‘At last. I’ve waited ten years for this.’
‘For what?’ Mirek asked.
‘To be of use. Ten years he’s been telling me, “One day Anton and I’ll need you”!’
‘Who’s he?’ Ania asked.
The man turned serious. ‘I think you know.’ He held out his hand. ‘Anton at your service.’ They shook the hand in turn. He continued, ‘Come now. You’re exhausted and freezing.’ He walked down the barn. Mirek put an arm round Ania’s waist and helped her hobble after him. Over his shoulder Anton said, ‘I thought you might come tonight. I heard the news. Two policemen murdered by criminals. Descriptions of you. Good descriptions.’
‘Where are your dogs?’ Mirek asked.
Anton gestured one way, then the other. ‘One is half a kilometre down river, the other up. No one will get close without them barking a warning. You can relax, my friends.’
They had reached the back of the barn, which was taken up by a large pig pen. There were three fat pigs in it and a dozen piglets. Anton opened the gate and shooed them out into the barn itself. He pointed to one of the pigs.
‘He’s a bad tempered old so and so. If I wasn’t here he’d charge you.’
The floor of the pen was covered in dirty straw. He scuffed it aside. Under it was a wooden floor. He bent down, put his fingers under a corner and lifted. A whole section came up, revealing a concrete base. Anton smiled at them engagingly.
‘Now watch this.’
He reached for a metal ring cemented into the wall and gave it a firm twist. Then he moved forward and pressed down hard with his foot.
Silently a whole section of the concrete floor swung; half of it down, half up. They could see that its axle was a thick oiled metal bar embedded on each side of the hole. On the far side a wooden ladder led down into the darkness. With a gesture like a conjuror concluding a successful trick, Anton stepped around the hole and started down the ladder. When his head was level with the floor he reached up. They heard a click and a dim light came on. He said, ‘What do you call yourselves?’
Mirek answered, ‘Tadeusz and Tatania.’
‘All right, you’d better help Tatania down. I’ll help from the bottom.’
Ania hobbled round. Mirek held both her wrists. She put her good foot on the top rung. Holding all of her weight Mirek slowly lowered her down. He saw Anton’s hands grip her waist and felt the weight transfer.
Anton was very proud of his hide-out, with good reason.
‘My grandfather built it during the war. Not for the Resistance - there wasn’t much around here - but to hide food from the Germans. They searched a dozen times and they were thorough, those Germans. They never found it.’
It was a spacious room measuring about five metres by six. There were two camp beds already made up with sheets and blankets. Between them was a rough wooden table and two chairs. There were plates, mugs and cutlery on the table. On another wooden table in the corner was a paraffin stove. Shelves had been fixed on the wall alongside and were well stocked with tins and packets of food, milk and coffee. Under the table were two car batteries. A lead from one of them was tacked up the wall to the ceiling and the small bulb. There was a curtain across one end. Anton pointed at it. ‘There’s a chemical toilet behind there, a washbasin and two big jugs of water. Take your trousers off in there, Tadeusz, and change into dry ones.’
Mirek nodded, opened the bag and took out a dry pair of trousers and went behind the curtain.
Anton pointed to a corner of the ceiling: there was a small wire grille. ‘Tatania,’ he said, ‘the ventilation’s good. I put that in myself five years ago and checked it three weeks ago when I heard that the place might be needed.’
Ania hobbled to a chair and sat down. The air was dank and cold. She put her arms round her shoulders.
Anton noticed and hurried to the stove saying, ‘In half an hour it will be warm and snug in here.’ He lit the stove and turned to her. ‘Coffee, Tatania - or hot milk? Fresh from Amethyst - that’s my favourite cow.’
‘Oh, milk please,’ she said, brightening up.
He looked a query at Mirek who was coming out from behind the curtain, zipping up his trousers. Anton gestured at a bottle on the shelf.
‘We’ll wash it down with a shot of Slivovice. Then you can sleep.’ He looked at his watch. ‘In three hours I catch the first train to Brno and make my report. You had better brief me now on what happened.’
‘Report to whom?’
‘My cell leader. He’ll send word down the line to you-know-who and give me interim instructions.’
Mirek could see that he was relishing his cloak-and-dagger role.
‘Who else lives on the farm?’
‘No one. It’s very small. It gives a reasonable living to just one man. My father manages a big collective farm in the south. My mother’s with him. They visit sometimes. My grandfather left the place to me. An old man comes out from Opava to help me during the week. He knows nothing of this place. Even if he did it wouldn’t matter. He hates the authorities.’
He brought three steaming mugs over, then collected the Slivovice and three glasses.
Ania warmed her hands on her mug and sipped at the milk. It was thick and creamy.
She smiled at him. ‘Say thank you to Amethyst.’
He sat down and grinned, then said to Mirek seriously, ‘Right, what happened?’
As Mirek briefed him his eyes shone with excitement like a young boy hearing an adventure yarn. When he listened to the account of the gun battle with the policemen his eyes drifted to the Makarov lying on the bed where Mirek had tossed it. But he was puzzled when Mirek came to the part where he had ditched the motorbike.
He looked at Ania. ‘How did you manage to walk ten kilometres with that ankle?’
‘I didn’t. He carried me.’
Slowly Anton’s gaze shifted back to Mirek. In awe he asked, ‘You carried her . . . over that country . . . and at night?’
Mirek nodded curtly and started to go on with the story but Anton held up a hand, lifted his glass and said, ‘I drink to you, my friend. I consider myself a strong and fit man but I would never have even attempted it.’
‘It was carry her or kill her,’ Mirek said shortly.
At first the younger man did not understand. Then
as comprehension sank in he nodded soberly. The boyish enthusiasm had left his eyes. He realised that this was more than an adventure.
Quickly Mirek finished the rest of the story. Anton asked one question.
‘Tatania, how long do you think it will be before you can walk properly?’
She thought for a moment.
‘About two or three days.’
He stood up. ‘All right, I’ll leave you now. I’ll be back this evening. Have a good rest.’
Something had been puzzling Mirek. He asked Anton, ‘If you’re down here, like now, and someone approaches, how would you know? You wouldn’t hear your dogs down here, not even with the entrance open.’
Anton smiled and said with pride, ‘Tadeusz, I’ve trained my dogs well. When to bark and when not to. And when they bark where to bark.’ He pointed to the grille in the corner of the ceiling. ‘That vent comes out in the roots of a big old oak tree behind the barn. If someone were to approach now to within half a kilometre the dogs would go silently and stand beside that tree and bark for about half a minute. You can hear them down here. Then they would go back near to the intruders and keep barking until I call them off.’ He grinned. ‘Almost certainly the farm will be searched tomorrow. The old man will show them around. The dogs will bark by the tree before they get close. You had better keep quiet then.’ He started climbing the ladder and pointed to another ring bolt set into the wall. ‘If there’s a crisis . . . like I get caught and you have to get out, twist that one hundred and eighty degrees, then push up on either side. It will swing open.’
‘What if there’s a fat pig on it?’ Mirek asked. ‘I wouldn’t want one of them falling down on me.’
Anton’s eyes widened and he grinned down at them.
‘Hell! I hadn’t thought of that. You’d better bang on it first with a mug or something. That will shift them.’
He climbed out and before closing the slab peered down and said, ‘Sleep well. I’ll see you in the evening.’
They both called up, ‘Thanks.’
As the slab closed they heard his answer.
‘You’re welcome.’
They knew that he meant it.
Fifteen minutes later they were snug in their beds with the light out. Exhausted as he was, Mirek found sleep difficult. He wondered about Anton. What motivated him to take such a risk? He seemed to welcome it. Surely it was more than just a sense of adventure? Was it religion? He doubted it. Suddenly Ania’s soft quiet voice came from out of the darkness.
‘Mirek, are you awake?’
‘Yes.’
‘What . . . what will happen to Albin and Sylwia?’
‘Don’t ask, Ania . . . and better don’t think about it.’
A silence, then she said sadly, ‘They were a nice old couple.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘but they must have made a mistake . . . or someone did. We were lucky this time . . . If there’s a next time we might not be.’
Another silence, then her voice again. ‘Mirek, do you remember, back in Florence, telling me that if I couldn’t keep up you would leave me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you leave me back there?’
‘You know why.’
‘No. You killed those policemen without a thought. Why didn’t you kill me? I was just a burden.’
There was a long silence and she prompted him. ‘Mirek?’
She heard him sigh. ‘I don’t know.’
He rolled over and pounded his pillow and tried to settle more comfortably in the narrow bed. It was a question he had asked himself time and again as he stumbled along for all those hours with her on his back. The answer was slowly enfolding him like a warm but frightening embrace. He heard her voice again.
‘Don’t fall in love with me, Mirek . . . I can never love you . . . never. I’m a nun . . . will always be a nun.’
There was no answer. She heard him pound his pillow again, and then just a pitch black silence.
Chapter 16
Colonel Oleg Zamiatin took the dressing-down standing stiffly to attention. It was rare for Chebrikov to reprimand one of his senior officers in front of junior officers. But he was in a rage and he did so now. Zamiatin’s three Majors sat at their desks with eyes downcast.
‘Nearly two hours!’ Chebrikov screamed, his red face inches from the Colonel’s. ‘Two fucking hours before they got that cordon in place. The fucking Czech army couldn’t catch a mouse in a bucket!’ He turned away in disgust and looked at the wall map. ‘You could have had a hundred police in that village from Brno in under an hour. But no, you have to use their army and wait for your bloody friend Sholokhov to arrive from Prague.’
Zamiatin ventured to say, ‘The man is highly trained and very dangerous, sir.’
‘So what?’ Chebrikov exploded. ‘You think I care if a few Czech policemen get killed? I don’t care if he wipes out a battalion of them as long as he gets killed in the process.’ He pointed a finger at him. ‘If you had given correct orders the information about that car would have been gained an hour earlier. They would still have been eating in that restaurant.’
Zamiatin said nothing, but keenly felt the injustice of it all. If he had sent less than adequate units rushing into that village and if Scibor had shot his way out and escaped he’d be getting a similar dressing-down now — maybe worse.
Chebrikov turned back to the map. ‘Well,’ he demanded, ‘what are you doing now?’
Zamiatin breathed a little easier. He walked to the map and, with his finger, indicated a circle. ‘Every disciplined service in the area, including our own army units, is searching here. Meanwhile the Polish border is virtually sealed off from here,’ his finger touched the spot where the Polish, Czech and East German borders met to the north, ‘to here.’ His finger moved down the Polish border to where it met the Russian border.
‘You’re a fool,’ Chebrikov said disgustedly. ‘Or do you think the Bacon Priest is? He’ll never try to send him over that border now.’ He walked over and ran his hand over a section of the map. ‘You can be sure that by now Scibor and the woman will be in a safe place somewhere here. Maybe for two or three days. Not longer, because we suspect he’s got a definite timetable.’
‘Oh?’ Zamiatin said. This was the first he had heard of it.
‘Yes. It’s not positive but Comrade Andropov himself thinks he has a deadline to be in Moscow before the tenth of next month.’
‘Do we know why, sir?’
‘Yes, but that’s confidential.’
Chebrikov was studying the map. ‘No. The Bacon Priest would be more subtle than you think. He will pull his man back from that border and redirect him elsewhere. Somewhere we least expect.’ He pointed at the East German border to the north. ‘It’s my guess that he’ll try and cross him into the GDR and from there across the Polish border.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘You can forget the nearby Polish border, Colonel. Concentrate your forces up there . . . and you can forget about looking for a couple. The woman was just cover and now that she’s blown he’ll pull her off. Now get on with it.’
His face still angry, he strode to the door thinking about his coming confrontation with the First Secretary. Andropov would certainly remind him harshly about fish jumping out of boats.
Ania made lamb stew from a tin with new, boiled potatoes.
They had both slept like the dead, and on waking ten hours later were ravenous. Mirek had rolled out of bed with his limbs stiff as boards from his previous night’s exertions. As Ania stirred the stew she watched him put his body on the rack with a series of short but punishing exercises. He finished with fifty fast press-ups, then, panting, went behind the curtain. When he emerged five minutes later, drying his hands on a towel, she was putting the stew on the table. As he sat down his nose twitched hungrily.
They ate in a relaxed silence. She served him more stew from the pot and he nodded his thanks.
As he mopped up the last of the gravy with a piece of bread he said seriously, �
�Ania, you would make a good, genuine wife.’
She was thinking of an answer when they heard a scraping above them. They looked up to see the heavy concrete slab swing open. Anton’s cheerful face peered down.
He called, ‘Everything OK?’
‘Fine,’ Mirek said. ‘Welcome to the best restaurant in town.’
Anton grinned and then swung a foot down on to the top rung, saying, ‘Give me a hand please, Tadeusz.’
He was wrestling a large, obviously heavy, canvas bag through the opening. Mirek went to the foot of the ladder, climbed the first two rungs and reached up. Slowly Anton transferred the bag to him. Mirek felt the clunk of heavy metal as he lowered it to the floor. He asked, ‘What’s in it?’
‘One thing at a time,’ Anton answered, climbing down.
‘Have you eaten?’ Ania asked.
‘I had a sandwich on the train.’ He walked over to the table and saw that there was still some stew in the pot. ‘But I’ll have some of that if you’re finished.’
Ania fetched a bowl and spoon while Mirek pulled up a chair, asking with some impatience, ‘So what’s happening up there?’
Anton rolled his eyes and talked through mouthfuls of stew. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Every security unit is out in force. Even the Russian army is out of its cantonments. It’s unheard of. My train was searched three times, going and coming, from end to end. They took about a dozen people off it.’
‘Were you bothered?’ Ania asked.
‘No. I have a genuine uncle in Brno, and he’s genuinely ill. I visit him regularly.’
Mirek asked, ‘What happens now?’
Anton finished his stew, pushed the plate away and went to the bag. He came back with a folded map of the area. Ania cleared the table as he unfolded it. The map was large scale. He pointed to a spot just south of Opava. ‘We are here. It seems that the security forces are strangely concentrating their search north-west towards the East German border.’ He looked at Mirek and said dramatically, ‘We have decided to send you over the border south-east . . . here.’ He moved his finger to a spot about one hundred kilometres away. It rested beside a lake. Mirek leaned forward. The lake straddled the border; it was about fifteen kilometres long with perhaps the last five kilometres being in Polish territory. Mirek was looking puzzled.
In The Name of The Father Page 22
