Shadow of a Hero

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Next morning, I’d asked to have breakfast in my room to rest my foot, and the girl who brought my tray up was one of the two I’d talked to the day before, the one with the cousin, remember? I could see she was pretty nervous. She put her finger to her lips and put the tray on the bed and just lifted the corner of the cloth and pointed, so I nodded to show I’d understood, and thanked her as if I’d never seen her before, and let her go. Want to guess what was under the cloth?’

  ‘I don’t know. A key? No, a message from your friends.’

  ‘Right. And . . .’

  ‘Give up.’

  ‘Grandad’s last letter.’

  ‘No! What did he say? Where is it?’

  ‘Come to that in a mo. I’m telling you all this because the letter was for you.’

  ‘Oh! Give it to me! Now! Please!’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got it. Not my fault. You’ll see why. Let me go on. The message was from a chap called Riccu, not the girl’s cousin, but his cousin, a teacher at the University, very bright, full of ideas, a really good guy. I hadn’t known him that well, but I’d met him a few times last year, because he’d been very interested in what Otto was up to, very keen, but now he started off bluntly by saying he’d been working as Grandad’s secretary for the last year. In fact he’d been with him when he died. Riccu was at his desk when he heard a thud from next door and he’d gone in and found Grandad on the floor. He was conscious, and he tried to say something, but then he closed his eyes and he was dead. The first thing Riccu did after he’d called for help was to take all the important papers off Grandad’s desk, including the letter he was writing to you, and hide them, because he knew what was going to happen as soon as the news got out. And it did. A gang of Otto’s people swept in and took over, and seized all the papers they could find and they were actually trying to get Grandad’s body out of the house when some of Riccu’s lot showed up and there was pretty well a pitched battle and only then did the police start taking notice – Riccu says they are never around when Otto’s people want to make trouble. They calmed things down and took the body off to the morgue. There was a bit more – obviously Riccu had been scrawling in a hurry, but the chief thing was that he begged me not to commit myself till I’d had the chance to talk to somebody who wasn’t on Otto’s side.

  ‘I wasn’t as shaken as you’d think. Ever since the accident, I’ve been brooding about what happened last year, and how I got myself into the position I did, and more and more I’ve come to think I was being used. And I’d hardly heard from them, as if they didn’t give a damn once I was laid up with my foot and couldn’t be any use to them. I wouldn’t have gone to Otto now if I could have thought of any other way of getting into Varina. What’s more, I’d already done what Riccu wanted, talked to somebody who wasn’t on Otto’s side – those two girls in the kitchen.’

  ‘My friend Parvla says the same. She was thrilled when Grandad came back, and she started talking about him and Otto Vasa working together, and then she started to go off Vasa, and now she’s frightened. She was praying for Grandad every night. I haven’t heard from her since he died.’

  ‘Right. Well, then I read Grandad’s letter to you. It started off saying he was going to have to wait for someone to carry it out of the country because he thought it likely that anything he mailed from Romania would get opened and read. And then he said some of what you’d expect, you know, thanking you for yours and saying he was a bit tired, and he was missing you, even more than he missed crumpets and marmalade. Then he said things had been going fairly well for him here and it shouldn’t be long now before he could stop being so careful about just seeming to be a moderating influence and letting Otto carry on much as he wanted, because he’d at last got evidence that Otto was working hand in glove with the old Ceauşescu gang in Bucharest, and the main question now was how or when he could use it.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘He didn’t say a lot about that, actually. He went back to chat. He’d paid a visit to his father’s farm, and he was hoping to get out to Lapiri for a funeral, Minna somebody . . .’

  ‘Minna Vari.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She was Momma’s foster-mother. You’ve got to tell her. That’s important. What else?’

  ‘Nothing. That was where he’d got to when he died.’

  Letta burst into tears. They rushed up into her head, filling her face and streaming down her cheeks. She turned to the window, seeing only a foggy rectangle of light, groped for the sill and leaned there, sobbing. Vaguely she was aware of Van hobbling to her side and putting his arm round her, but he didn’t try to say anything, just let her cry the fit out until she was able to master it, shake herself, drag her sleeve across her eyes and say, trying to make a joke of it, ‘You better have a good reason why you haven’t got my letter.’

  ‘I have, Sis,’ he murmured. ‘I think you’ll understand. Tell me when you’re ready.’

  ‘I’m all right. Go on.’

  He went back to the chair but waited while she found some tissues and mopped herself up.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I wrote a note for Riccu saying I was glad to hear from him and I wanted to talk to him and I’d be careful, but I didn’t put it under the cloth, which was just as well, because Jagu showed up before my tray was collected. He said Otto wanted to see me. Otto was all smiles. We got into one of his cars and he took me down to his office in Potok, and gave me the speech he wanted me to make at the rally. He said I’d better learn it by heart, so that I could make it look as if I was making it up as I went along.

  ‘I said OK, but as I’d come all this way to represent the family I’d like to be able to put in something personal about Grandad, and what he’d meant to me and my brother and sister, and he said that was all right provided I kept it short. I said I would, and I’d finish that bit by saying that of course Varina was Grandad’s real family, and that would get me into the speech he’d given me. Then I asked him how Grandad had died, as if I didn’t know, and he told me he’d been ill for a while, and hadn’t been doing very much, and had passed away in his sleep, and it had all been very serene. “A good death for a hero,” he said. He went all gruff, as if there was a lump in his throat. That was what finally made my mind up. About whether to trust him or Riccu, I mean.’

  ‘Didn’t you want to strangle him?’

  ‘Pretty well, but I managed not to let him see. In fact, in a funny sort of way, I’d begun to enjoy myself. He thought he was using me, the way he’d done from the start, but actually now I was using him. So I wrote a harmless little bit about us all going to meet Grandad at the airport when the Communists let him out, and then I settled down to learn that bloody speech. It was pure rant about Varina’s inalienable rights, and how our enemies were still trying to take them from us, but the spirit of Restaur Vax and Lash the Golden, et cetera, et cetera. You know Otto likes people to think he’s some kind of reincarnation of Lash?

  ‘That took the rest of the day. We sat in the office, and then we drove around, and Otto got out and saw people while I sat in the car with the blinds drawn, learning my lines. Then we went back to the summer palace and I ran through the speech with him. I really hammed it up, and he was pleased as Punch. I couldn’t stand another supper with his gang of creeps, so I said my foot was hurting and I’d better go to bed. I lay in next morning too, and hung around getting more and more nervous most of the afternoon until a car arrived to take me to the rally.

  ‘It was in the meadows below St Valia, where the camp had been for the festival. They had a stage up, and a sound system, and they smuggled me in through the ruins with Jagu to keep an eye on me, so that I kept out of sight till the time came for my big moment. Jagu was on top of the world. He said it was the biggest rally they’d had for months. There might be a few trouble-makers around, but I’d know who were our people by their yellow sashes. They had a band, and marching, and then a pathetic woman talking about what the Serbs had done to the village where
she’d been living in Croatia . . .’

  ‘Was that true?’

  ‘I should think so. There’ve been quite a few refugees from the north, I gathered later – I’ll come to that. Anyway the chairman-figure who was introducing the speakers cut her short and said that was the sort of thing Varina had got to expect if we didn’t take our destiny into our own hands, and everyone cheered – at least it sounded like everyone from where I was, but it was probably pretty well orchestrated because at that point Otto strode on and whipped up the cheering like mad and stood there saluting and triumphant for several minutes – I could see him sort of haloed from behind – and then got them quiet and began to speak.

  ‘He started off quietly, saying that the future of Varina was in the balance, but first they must honour the past, and the hero Restaur Vax, who had given his life for his country. He talked a bit about Grandad’s doings in the war – rather good and honest-sounding – and then he said that the oppressors of Varina had attempted to deny the family of Restaur Vax their natural, God-given right to attend the funeral, but that he, Otto Vasa, had refused to accept that and had arranged for one member of the family to be there, whatever the oppressors might decree.

  ‘Then Jagu gave me a push and I climbed up on to the platform and Otto came over and shook my hand and slapped me on the back and led me up to the microphone. There was a lot of cheering which went on quite a while, and I had time to get used to the lights.

  ‘It was a huge crowd, I don’t know – twenty thousand? A lot of them were wearing yellow sashes, especially at the front, but quite a few weren’t, and after a bit I realized that at least half of those weren’t cheering either. I made signs to them to quiet down, and in the end they did. Otto had gone back to his seat but I could see him out of the corner of my eye. As soon as they’d let me, I started in on the bit I’d written for him about meeting Grandad at the airport. I saw Otto relax and begin saying something to the fellow on his right.

  ‘You remember that bit finished with me saying how much Grandad had meant to the family? Well, instead of going on about Varina being his real family I said I’d got Grandad’s last letter with me, to my sister, and I’d read it to them to show what sort of a man he was. I saw Otto sit up with a jerk and frown, but I pretended not to notice. I skipped the bit about not trusting the Romanian post and started in on the marmalade and the crumpets, and he relaxed and went on muttering to the chap next door to him. So I don’t think he was listening when I got to what Grandad said about what was going on in Varina.

  ‘That was when everything changed. It’s difficult to explain. Everybody had gone very quiet. You’d have said it was reasonably quiet before, between the cheering, but there were coughs and murmurs and so on, the sort of background noise you get with any big crowd, but the sound system meant the speakers could be heard without yelling, so it had been quiet enough. Now it was dead quiet. I could hear the river. Every single person in the whole crowd was listening with all their attention to what I was saying.

  ‘In fact Otto took a moment or two to catch on. I saw him jump up and make a signal and I grabbed the mike and carried on. I’d learned this bit by heart because I’d known they’d never let me get away with it so it didn’t matter when somebody snatched the letter out of my hand. There were several of them, trying to wrestle the mike away from me and somebody got an arm-lock round my throat but I got it all out, the whole bit about Otto working with the old Ceauşescu gang, before some bastard stamped on my foot and I yelled and collapsed – God, it hurt!

  ‘In fact I don’t know what happened next but I must have managed to crawl to the front of the platform because people were trying to grab me from below and I was fighting them off, and then I heard them yelling that they were friends – there was a colossal racket going on and my foot was still screaming at me – and I let them help me down, and then I must have fainted.

  ‘When I came to, I was being jostled about but people seemed to be holding me up and trying to support me and there was this hullabaloo going on, so I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. I realized they were trying to push their way out through the crowd, but then someone pointed back over our shoulders and we swung round to look and there was Otto, up on the platform in the spotlights, absolutely purple with rage and yelling, though no-one could hear him – he’d completely lost it – and all the while his hands were tearing something into smaller and smaller shreds and scattering them onto the stage. I don’t think he realized what he was doing, but it must have been Grandad’s letter. That’s why I haven’t got it. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s all right. It was worth it. Go on.’

  ‘Oh, well, it was chaos, fights going on everywhere between the yellow-sashes and the others, and yells and boos and whistles and cat-calls, and the yellow-sashes trying to get organized cheering going, and being drowned out. The people I was with went struggling on till we were right at the edge of the crowd, and they made a space for me and took off my shoe and somebody fetched water from the river and they bathed my foot, which helped a bit – it was swelling up like a balloon – and by the time they’d done that, things had quietened down a bit, and Otto had got control of himself, but he made the mistake of trying to carry on with his rally.

  ‘It was a disaster, from his point of view. They never let him get a word out. The more he tried to rant and bully them into silence, the louder they cat-called. He’d got the microphone and the sound system, but they drowned him out. Then they started chanting Grandad’s name. Vax! Vax! Restaur Vax! Over and over and over. They destroyed him. You know, they destroyed him with Grandad’s name! What’s the joke?’

  ‘What you just said. I hope he was watching. Tell you later. Go on.’

  ‘We saw one extraordinary thing. You know there’d been fighting? There was a gang of yellow-sash thugs over to our left, and now we realized they were fighting among themselves. Some of them had taken their yellow sashes off and were trying to make the others do the same. And then all the lights went out and the sound system went off – it was pretty well dark by now – we decided afterwards that Vasa’s people must have done that as a way of getting him out of the jam he was in. There was still a lot of yelling and shoving and fighting, but the people I was with found a stretcher and carried me back into Potok, to one of their flats, and went out to find a doctor or a nurse who could do something about my foot.

  ‘Next thing, Riccu turned up. He said the police were looking for me. His lot had friends in the police, and there was a rumour going round about someone being arrested at the rally, a foreigner. Riccu thought they meant me. It would have been something Otto had laid on, to stir things up still further, arresting Restaur Vax’s grandson on the eve of the funeral . . .’

  ‘He sort of did that with Grandad, didn’t he? Last year? Pretending he was being beaten up in prison when he was on his way back to England, really.’

  ‘I remember. In fact I asked him about that, and he just grinned and said it was politics. I’m afraid I thought it was OK at the time.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Oh, a jolly old doctor showed up, who’d actually known Grandad before the war. He couldn’t do much, but he gave me some aspirin, and then about a dozen of us sat round talking all night. I couldn’t have gone to sleep anyway. My foot was throbbing like a jungle drum, but even so I was a lot happier than I’d felt for ages. Riccu said he’d known I’d got his message and Grandad’s letter because the kitchen-maid had told him, and he’d guessed I hadn’t let on because she’d not got into trouble. They’d gone along to the rally, he and his friends who’d been helping Grandad, to heckle a bit and try and let people know that not everyone was wild about Otto, but there weren’t a lot of them. Most of the non-yellow-sashes had been more or less neutral, ordinary Varinians, who’d gone along – I don’t know – to try and find out what they thought, I suppose. You see, Otto hadn’t just been keeping me under wraps to prevent me being seen. As well as that, he didn’t want me to find out that
what Grandad had said in his letter was true. He’d been immensely popular a year ago. He could have done anything he liked with Varina then, almost. But then things started getting worse and worse in Croatia, and his own people threw their weight around trying to frighten the opposition off the streets, and rumours began to spread about Otto’s friends in Bucharest, so people went off him. They still desperately want a free Varina, just as you and I do and Grandad did, but not with Otto Vasa in charge. And not his way. Not his sort of Varina. The rally was a last throw, an effort to whip up a great frenzy of enthusiasm, and use that to hijack Grandad’s funeral and give himself a fresh start. But it didn’t work. Grandad fixed him, after all, despite being dead.’

  ‘You and Grandad.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He was sitting on Grandad’s chair with his foot up on the stool which Letta used to use for toasting crumpets. It was obviously still hurting. He must have had a lot of pain from it while he was away. His face was drawn, and lined. He looked ten years older than he had before the accident, and for the first time Letta could see that what Minna Alaya had said about his being the spit image of Grandad might be true.

  ‘Is that all?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, but what about the funeral, and how did you get away, and what’s happening now? Is it going to be all right?’

  ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘Anything could happen. All you can say is, it’s better than it might have been, because people have seen through Otto, at least for the moment. But they’re still pretty discontented, not just about independence. Prices keep shooting up, and there’s a lot of racketeering and corruption, and deep distrust of the Romanian and Bulgarian governments, and fear of the Serbs . . . I think all you can say is we aren’t going out of our way to pick quarrels with anyone, and that’s what Otto was trying to set up. But if somebody chooses to pick a quarrel with us, well, I think we’ll fight. It’ll be pretty well hopeless if we have to do it on our own, but we’ll do it. It’s nothing like over yet, Sis.