Prague Spring

by Simon Mawer

“Professional.”

  “It’s hardly my job, you know.”

  “Of course it’s not, Harold. But you know as well as I do that security doesn’t know its arse from its elbow. Mr. Plod the policeman, retired. Whereas our dearly beloved Friends…”

  Harold sniffed, torn between wounded pride and flattery. “I’ll see what I can do. You don’t have a photo, do you?”

  Sam produced the film cartridge and tucked it into the man’s top pocket as he might have tucked a cigar. “In there, right at the end. Perhaps your chaps can have it developed. I didn’t have any time. There’ll be a few snaps of little consequence—Steffie and me doing something silly—but the last one should show her. It’s a group photo, gathered round a table, late evening. Taken with a flash, so I’ve no idea how it’ll come out. Some of them will be making faces, but not her. She’ll be on the far left.”

  Harold removed the item from his top pocket and secreted it elsewhere about his person, as though there was a correct place for such things. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I’d be most grateful.”

  9

  The Whittakers had a rooftop terrace. This elevated their apartment to a level appropriate to Head of Chancery. One reckoned one’s progress through the service by measures like that—the quality of posting, of housing, of furnishing—until finally you reached ambassadorial level and might live in a palace surrounded by furniture and artworks fit for a museum, at which point the time came for your K and subsequent retirement to that dull and unfamiliar bungalow in the Home Counties. But for the moment, as he showed his guests onto the terrace, Eric Whittaker was heedless of that. “Two messages are inherent in this apartment,” he was explaining in his best academic manner. “One is that.“ He made a theatrical gesture to demonstrate what was obvious, the view before them, across the rooftops of Malá Strana to the river and the Charles Bridge. Beyond the river were the imposing buildings and pinnacles of Staré Město, the Old Town. On one building a red star glowed like a single, malevolent eye. “From that view you may appreciate that we are amongst the elite, rising above everyone else in the city, except”—he turned in the opposite direction, backstage, to where a massive bastion rose up from the terrace like a cliff, blocking out half the night sky—”that lot up there.”

  Up there, looming over everyone, was the Hrad, the Castle, where the president of the country resided and Kafka reigned supreme.

  “That,” he said, “is the second message.”

  The visitors laughed dutifully but nervously. They made up the parliamentary delegation come to convince itself that Socialism With A Human Face really was possible even behind the barbed wire and tank traps of the Iron Curtain. They’d spent the morning at the Škoda works in Pilsen and the afternoon in a glass factory, where each member of the party had been presented with a piece of abstract Bohemian glass resembling something you might find in the waste bin of a hospital operating theater. Now it was an informal dinner at the Whittakers’ with carefully selected guests.

  “What dreadful, dull people,” Madeleine whispered. She was tall and dark and vindictive towards things that did not amuse her. The MPs’ wives did not amuse her. Having spent most of the day showing them the sights of Prague (the wives not deemed serious enough to deal with the Škoda factory), she now considered her duty done and had enticed Sam into a secluded corner of the terrace where she could give vent to her spleen. “In France tout le monde understands that you must imitate the arbiters of good taste even if you ‘ate what they admire; but these people seem to think that taste is a matter of opinion. Worse than that, they appear to think that it is a matter of démocratie.”

  She’d had the foresight to put some music on the record player, and the cool voice of a soprano saxophone drifted out of the speakers. Sam knew what was coming next. She would suggest they dance and she would press her hips against him and get him aroused, and he would picture Steffie’s face twisted into a little scowl of “told-you-so.”

  “I think you ought to get your guests dancing,” he suggested.

  “Pah!” It was astonishing how dismissive an innocent exclamation could become when manipulated by a pair of French lips. “Those clod’oppers,” she said. “There is nothing worse-dressed and worse-mannered than a British socialist. And nothing worse at dancing. So I want to dance with you, Sam, and find out how you are doing without the virginal Stéfanie at your side. Is celibacy already beginning to get you down?”

  “She’s only been gone a few days.”

  She laughed. “Do you know what President Kennedy once told me?”

  “When did you meet President Kennedy?”

  “When Eric was in Washington. You don’t believe me?”

  “It all depends on what he said.”

  “He said, ‘I get terrible headaches if I haven’t had a new woman in three days.’“

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “But it ‘appens to be true.”

  “And you replied?”

  “‘Do you have a headache now?’ And he said, ‘Ma’am, I sure do.’ To which I replied, ‘Well, Mister President, if you come with me we’ll see what’s in the medicine chest.’“

  She laughed and took hold of him, moving with the music exactly as he had predicted, sinuously, pushing her hips against him, a rather expert movement that might have been mistaken for a tango. One of the visiting MPs laughed. There was a smattering of applause. Sam heard Eric’s voice saying “French” to one of the guests, as though by way of explanation. Another couple joined them in the dance, with nothing like Madeleine’s snake-like immodesty but with a degree of regimented competence that spoke of hours of practice in Northern ballrooms.

  Her mouth close to his ear, Madeleine whispered, “Steffie has entrusted me with looking after you. To ensure that you don’t suffer from Kennedy ‘eadaches and go looking after lovely Czech ladies.”

  “Steffie asked you to do that? It’d be like putting the fox in charge of a chicken.”

  A little breath of laughter, carrying with it the scent of Chanel No. 5. “Are you a chicken, Sam?”

  Eric’s voice came from across the terrace. “Sam, put my wife down. You don’t know where she’s been.”

  Gusts of laughter. These Foreign Office boys, the laughter seemed to say: nothing like as stuck-up as they seem.

  Madeleine’s voice continued in his ear, “Or are you just a tiny bit queer, like so many of you public school boys?”

  “Grammar school, I’m afraid. Altogether more normal. And duller.”

  She laughed with him and detached herself from his arms to do a little pirouette. “So show me.”

  To Sam’s relief the record changed. Something more upbeat, with a heavy bass riff and an organ wailing protest. Madeleine detached herself from him and began to dance in the middle of the terrace, her arms above her head, hips gyrating in time with the insistent beat. “Gimme some lovin’,” a raucous blues voice demanded. One of the MPs began to jig around opposite Madeleine, leaving Sam to make his escape to the drinks table.

  As he poured himself a whisky a Northern voice spoke over his shoulder. “So what’s your role in all this, young man?”

  He turned to find one of the delegation at his elbow. The man was short and stout and would have fitted well enough into the Party Praesidium during Gottwald’s reign—ill-fitting gray suit that shone like beaten pewter, a shirt collar as tight as a garrote, a glance that hovered between unease and malice. Before the delegation had arrived in the city the diplomatic staff had been briefed to treat members of the group with extreme caution; most of them were well to the left of almost anyone in Dubček’s government and all of them considered the Foreign Office little more than a sinecure for ex–public school boys. This particular example was one such, a trades unionist who was mainly renowned for having brought his own particular branch of industry to its knees through a series of wildcat strikes. “My role in this what, exactly?”

  “In Her Britannic Majesty’s embassy to the C
zechoslovak Socialist Republic. Aside from dancing with the boss’s wife, that is.”

  “I’m political.”

  “Are you, indeed? And where do your politics lie?”

  “Wherever the current government tells me they should.”

  The man laughed humorlessly. “Ever the diplomat, eh?”

  “That’s what people keep telling me.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a Tory.”

  “I wonder if you’d find any takers amongst those who actually know me.”

  “So what’s your view of the politics here?”

  “I think I know too much about it all to have a single view. I have many views, each one calling the previous one into question.”

  “Typical Foreign Office response. Come off the bloody fence for once. Admit that Dubček’s a working-class hero. He’s showing how socialism should be. And you Tories are just as pissed off as the Russians.”

  Sam looked at the man pityingly. “Actually, the Office doesn’t consider hero-worship of foreign leaders to be in our best interests. And whatever you may see now, it’s worth remembering that Dubček and his merry men all came up through the ranks during the Stalinist era, during which they accepted all kinds of horror as though it was the will of God. Now they’re standing on the brink, wondering whether to jump into the unknown or turn back into the familiar arms of Mother Russia. When push comes to shove, they’re likely to turn round and beg Mummy for forgiveness.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “It’s probably happening now, at their meeting in eastern Slovakia. No doubt the fraternal comrades are toasting peace and happiness at this very moment.”

  “Have you met the man?”

  “Dubček? Once, at a reception. The ambassador was in London and Eric Whittaker was ill, so the lot fell on me.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Courteous, amusing, intelligent. As far as one can tell from hello goodbye.”

  The man hummed a bit, his bluff, aggressive humor dampened for a moment. “Speak the language, do you?” he asked unexpectedly.

  “Czech? Well enough. My Russian is better.”

  “At least they’ve posted you to the right place.”

  “Pure chance, I can assure you. I might just as easily have got Ouagadougou.”

  Wry laughter. Did the man even know where Ouagadougou was?

  It wasn’t exactly clear what brought the evening to an end. Probably the arrival of cars to take people back to their hotel. There was much handshaking and a bit of two-cheek kissing, which rather surprised the parliamentarians. And then the terrace and the house below was empty of all but the hosts and Sam was making his belated farewells. Madeleine managed to get him alone for a moment, which was what he had been dreading. She took hold of his shoulders and kissed him full on the mouth. “Sam,” she said, “will you go to bed with me?”

  “Did Steffie suggest you ask me that?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well tell her the answer’s no.”

  She laughed. “Is that because you’re being faithful to her, or because you’ve got someone else lined up?”

  “Mrs. Whittaker, you’re drunk.”

  She was doing that thing, fiddling with his tie as though to make him look respectable. “And you are boring.”

  “Boring is what I should be, under the circumstances. Can you imagine what Eric would say if the First Secretary in Chancery was shafting his wife?”

  “Eric doesn’t mind. When he took me on I warned him that sometimes I’d have a little fling and he wasn’t to mind about it. It was my first husband who minded, and look what happened to him.”

  He took her hand and lowered it to her side. “Was he pushed or did he jump?”

  She thumped him gently in the chest. “I began to push,” she said. “He thought it easier to jump.”

  * * *

  It was a short walk to Sam’s flat through the maze of alleys. As he reached the little square in front of his building a figure detached itself from the shadows and accosted him.

  “Did I give you a fright?” the SIS man asked.

  “Not at all, Harold. Nothing gives me a fright in the Malá Strana. Safest place in the whole city.”

  “Ghosts, I thought. No amount of security can guard against them.”

  “Are you a ghost, Harold?”

  “Spook, maybe. But I’ve always thought of myself as a kind of golem. Occult powers, if you know what I mean. No, I won’t come up. Safer to have a quick chat out here.”

  “I’m sure my flat is clean.”

  The man laughed. “Is that what Mr. Plod the policeman tells you?” He reached inside his jacket as though going for a gun, but all he brought out was a plain envelope. “I thought you’d like the photo. Nice little souvenir. Don’t bother looking at it now. I just wanted to say that she has form. Your young lady, I mean.”

  “Form? What kind of form?”

  “Interesting, really. A few years ago—sixty, sixty-one—she was having an affair with a member of the Party. Respectable chap, married, three children, house in Vinohrady, you know the kind of thing. Destined for the Presidium, by all accounts. So we got to know about his little peccadillo with this particular girl—don’t ask me how—and we had him lined up for a bit of gentle blackmail.”

  “Charming.”

  “We are, Sam, we are.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Total bloody failure. As soon as he was approached by us, he dropped her like a hot potato, confessed everything to the wife and told the StB. Our own chap had a difficult time extricating himself from the deal. He was working under diplomatic cover, thank God, but they declared him persona non grata and we had to get him out in a hurry.”

  Nothing could be more normal, Sam told himself. Young girl falls for older, successful, married man, then gets thrown over when the affair threatens to go public. Yet nothing could be more abnormal than having Harold and his spooks sniffing around your private parts. “But she wasn’t actually working for us, was she? It wasn’t—what do you lot call it?—a honey trap?”

  Harold glanced sideways at Sam. He was hoping, oh, surely he was hoping, that he looked like Orson Welles in that scene in The Third Man. Not as he was in the later scenes—not running through the sewers, and certainly not clawing at the grating of the manhole cover. But the one where Harry Lime appears for the first time, standing in the shadows of the doorway. “I’d say she was a not-so-innocent bystander caught in the crossfire.”

  “Not so innocent?”

  “Apparently your girl was only fifteen when she started with this fellow. Quite a little titbit.”

  Sam felt something snap inside him. Nothing dramatic, just a small palpable rupture. Trust, or something. “Fifteen?”

  “That’s what it seems. Been with him for three or four years when we caught up with it. There’s a theory going around the files that we were trespassing on another operation. That she was set up by the East Germans. Who knows if that’s true or not?”

  “So she might have been an East German agent? At fifteen?”

  “Not saying so, old chap. Just a rumor.”

  There was a pause while Sam digested this possibility. “Sure you won’t come up?” he asked. “A nightcap?”

  “Quite sure, old chap. Must be getting along. Work all hours these days. I do hope I haven’t put the kibosh on the start of a lovely friendship.”

  “Nothing of the kind, Harold. And thank you for the information.”

  In his sitting room Sam opened the envelope Harold had given him and tipped the photographic print out along with two strips of negatives. He examined the print. It was the kind of thing you took on holiday—a group of strangers gathered behind half-empty beer glasses, frozen by the flash and backed by shadows. Faces were white and staring, grimacing with laughter. One of the group had put his hand round the back of his neighbor’s head to give him an antenna of two fingers. In the center was the violinist—Jitka, that was her name—and her h
usband. On the left of the group was Lenka. The others laughed, she smiled.

  What, Sam wondered, was she smiling at?

  III

  10

  It’s raining. Scudding clouds like damp rags hung out in the wind. A boy and a girl, laden beneath rucksacks, climbing out of a Land Rover and taking up position on the roadside. The Land Rover drives off in a plume of spray and laughter.

  “Daddy doesn’t believe we’ll get anywhere,” Eleanor mutters angrily, and it’s only defiance that stops her fulfilling her parent’s belief. Her anorak hood is letting in water around the neck, it’s too damp to roll a ciggie and she’s having second thoughts about this venture.

  Lorries, cars, buses, splash past. They seem indifferent, not even inhabited by human beings, just steel boxes of varying size and design and color careering past as though on a conveyor belt. “What do we do now?” she asks. She feels hopeless and angry, above all angry at James for bringing her here.

  “We walk on a bit.”

  “Walk on? I thought the idea was to bum a lift off someone.”

  James is wearing a smug expression that says this is what he knows and she doesn’t. He’s the expert here. “First rule,” he says. “Only hitch where there’s a place the driver can pull in. No one’s going to stop in the middle of a main road.”

  “What’s the second rule? Give up and take a taxi?”

  They shuffle through the drizzle as far as a lay-by. “You may as well start,” he says, plonking his rucksack on the grass verge. “Shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll stand back a bit. They’ll stop for a girl.”

  “For a girl?”

  “Come on, stick your thumb out.”

  “I don’t want that kind of lift.”

  “It won’t be that kind of lift. It’ll be a lift.”

  “It’s like hustling.”

  “It’s only hustling if the customer thinks you’re a tart. But they’ll just assume you’re hitching. Now stick your bloody thumb out.”

  She does so, like someone trying in vain to plug a leak. Cars splash by.