Escape to Perdition--a gripping thriller!

by James Silvester

  “Your final word?” Peter’s gaze remained firm, directly ahead of him.

  “Yes. I let my country down, Peter. Had I been more active after the Revolution then maybe I could have spared Czechoslovakia from being torn apart at the seams. Instead I stood by, content to build my fortune and snipe from the side lines. No more.”

  Silence returned to settle between them, dampening the prospect of immediate resolution, until Peter finally tilted his head towards Herbert, his eyes still glistening but without the dampness of a few moments ago.

  “I never told you this,” Peter began, “but I wrote an essay about you at school. You were my hero.”

  The comment touched Herbert, though he stayed silent to aid his friend’s flow.

  “They told us you were a ‘true man of principle’. How you’d stood up alongside Dubček and the others, how you refused to sign the Moscow Protocols. They told us everything about the Spring, about Jan Palach and the protestors. We had black and white photographs of the Russian tanks rolling up Wenceslas Square lining the walls of the classroom. You were in a few of them, staring down the tanks, challenging the soldiers.”

  Herbert, always uncomfortable with flattery, shifted a little in his seat. “History often exaggerates,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” countered Peter, “I’ve got to know you and I believe everything they said about you. If anything I think you undersell what you did.”

  Herbert was still determined to end any notions of hero worship. “I was a headstrong, arrogant fool,” Herbert retorted, “And I’m a little surprised to find that disputes behind the Iron Curtain are grounds to become the hero of a British child. There were many people in many countries standing up to the Soviets, many for nobler reasons than my own. It did none of us any good.”

  Peter looked up briefly into Herbert’s fatherly eyes then back to his feet. Herbert smiled in return as though he were a headmaster dealing with a nervous schoolboy.

  Peter seemed distant, his voice taking on an almost whimsical quality as he continued with his memories.

  “There was one picture of Louis Armstrong when he came over for the Jazz Festival, I think it was in ’64? You were right next to him on the stage. I always liked to think that you’d been in the crowd, not as a politician or the face of the establishment, but just as a fan; just enjoying the performance. You were shaking his hand, thanking him for coming, for being there and playing for the people. That was why you were my hero.”

  The memory played in front of Herbert’s eyes; such a beautiful time. Who would have thought it? The great Louis Armstrong, performing in Prague under the noses of the Soviets. Jazz was the voice of freedom, and there was Louis, sounding a blast of freedom in the heart of the Eastern Block; poking his trumpet under the curtain and blowing a reveille for the people. Herbert remembered it well. After the band had stopped playing and the people were cheering, Herbert had given in to his emotions and leapt onto the stage, grasping Louis warmly by the hand in unrestrained joy. Hardly the behaviour of a rising star of the Party, but Herbert hadn’t cared.

  He let his eyes close and began to realise that he was only half listening to the man next to him. The euphoria of the memories Peter was stirring complemented the familiar erratic thumping in his chest, accompanied by the light-headedness which told him he was overdue for his insulin. His sensations had begun to disconnect him from the reality of his surroundings, and Herbert found he was enjoying it.

  He could hear silence once more and realised his friend had stopped talking. Herbert reached out and placed his strong, steadying hand on Peter’s leg. Peter responded with a deep sigh.

  “You’re immovable aren’t you?” the younger man asked.

  Herbert nodded, reaching into his pocket for the thin metallic case that housed his insulin. He lifted a syringe and placed the needle discreetly onto the pale flesh, just visible below his cuff link.

  “As immovable as the tanks proved in 1968,” Herbert responded with a smile, pressing down on the syringe and releasing the fluid within.

  At once, Herbert knew something was wrong. Where he had expected nothing but the usual sting of the needle, he felt the smallest of tickles tracing his inner arm, as though someone had pushed a tiny marble into his vein. He clenched involuntarily as the marble reached his chest, bringing with it a discomfort Herbert had never experienced before, all consuming. Almost before Herbert had depressed the syringe, he had felt Peter’s arm around his shoulder, saving him from the collapse that was overcoming him. He felt Peter’s right arm wrap around his chest, holding him in a loving embrace as the discomfort in his chest bloomed into pain.

  “I’m sorry Herb,” Peter was whispering, “but you’re not going to see the Promised Land after all.” And Herbert understood that this was the reason for Peter’s silence, for his tears. He could feel the weight of his body sinking downwards, still cradled in the arms of its murderer, who likewise sank to his knees with him, continuing his tearful apologies as they descended.

  Herbert was gasping as his chest grew tighter, but that didn’t matter. With enormous effort, he lifted his eyes to meet his killer’s, and he heard the younger man spew forth a mix of apologetic explanation.

  “I’m so sorry Herb, it was the kindest way I could think of; air embolism, it should be quick.”

  The flurry of words pausing, Herbert felt Peter embracing him tighter, pressing his lips close to the old man’s ear.

  “Shout for the guards, Herb. Shout them in.”

  Herbert understood what Peter was asking of him. If Herbert, with his last breath, were to shout for his personal bodyguard, waiting patiently outside the doors, if he were to scream the fact of his murder as his life left him, then Peter was doomed. He would be caught, red handed and inescapably. He might even find himself at the end of a retaliatory bullet from one of the more zealous members of the detachment. Without Herbert’s condemnation, his death would be written off as the natural result of an old man with a weak heart heaping too many stresses upon himself. Peter was asking Herbert to kill him, to have his revenge even as he lay dying himself.

  Peter was almost begging now, clutching his victim closer and closer, whispering his pleas, his apologies, his protestations that he had no choice, that if only Herbert had withdrawn from the election then it wouldn’t have come to this. Herbert understood. Having lived under the KGB’s constant gaze, he knew how such people operated and he understood that Peter probably really did have no other choice, or at least none that he would be allowed to live with. And Herbert knew that this man, his killer, was still his friend, and that his friend needed help, Herbert’s help, not his aid in suicide.

  Herbert could feel only pain now; his vision was blurring and he could not catch his breath, Peter’s confessions fading in his ears. Somehow, he found the strength to lift his hand to Peter’s mouth, silencing his words.

  “John, thirteen, fifteen,” Herbert wheezed, “John, thirteen, fifteen”.

  He saw Peter’s face twist into confusion, then allowed himself a smile and closed his eyes, clamping his hand onto that of his friend for the final moments. The pain was gone and Herbert felt warm and relaxed, looking forward to the impending admonishing administered by his wife for his un-brushed hair and loosened collar, before taking his hand and leading him to the Almighty. The thought cheered him and he embraced the encroaching darkness with a smile. In the distance, he could hear Peter shouting for the guards, “He’s down,” he was saying, “he’s down!”

  Herbert could only hope, as the sound finally died, that Peter would one day understand that he had helped him in the best – and only – way he could.

  CHAPTER 3

  IT WAS LATE THE NEXT EVENING when a drunk and exhausted Peter finally boarded the tram to Žižkov, the ex-pat district where he resided and which teemed with Britons, Ukrainians and a hundred other nationalities gathering under Prague’s graces. The stress of the last forty-eight hours pecked at his mind as he gripped the metal bar above his h
ead for support, looking to the rest of the carriage like one of the typical drunk Brits come to celebrate a friend’s impending wedding by vomiting over a foreign city. Despite the cold wind outside the tram, Peter was sticky and warm, his shirt glued to him by two day old sweat. When the young woman sat closest to him grimaced and moved to stand further down the carriage he became aware of his pungent odour. Well he couldn’t help that, he thought, as he dropped into her vacated seat to the obvious displeasure of the tired commuters alongside him. The last day had been a nightmare.

  The actor in him had come to the fore as Herbert’s bodyguards had responded to Peter’s urgent cries for help, his façade completely believed. Chaos had erupted around him. He had been swept along to the hospital in the ambulance where the great and the good of the Party waited in dramatic anxiousness for the object of their fakery to arrive. They rushed around Herbert’s gurney as they had rushed to his lectern hours before, desperate to be the one with the sincerest tears and the most profound sorrow. The same cameras that had blinded him at his speech hours before glowed again, this time at his corpse. The only absentee had been one of the few whose grief was genuine; Karol Černý, who had given a brief statement to the press and retired to mourn in private.

  Peter had allowed himself to drop back, having no wish to be part of this bogus outpouring. As Herbert’s body was pushed through the hospital’s inner doors and the plotters and schemers were stopped from going any further, Peter had found a battered chair and collapsed into it, sinking his head into his hands. Just as he had begun the surrender to the sound of his own weeping, he had heard someone next to him sniffing discreetly and turned to see the seated figure of Miroslava Svobodova quickly straighten herself and breathe deeply.

  Unsure of what to do or say, he felt clumsily in his pocket for a tissue and handed it to her. She had accepted in an obviously forced show of politeness but made no effort to use it.

  Peter had returned to looking at the floor, wishing to God that he wasn’t there, and that she wasn’t there, full of the resentment that he’d known would be pouring through her mind. A few times, Peter had thought she was about to ask a question but no words came. The anxiousness in Peter’s chest had grown with the damning buzz of silence in his ears, to the point where he thought he would scream just to break the tension. In cold desperation to break the wall of ice between them, Peter had scrambled for something, anything to say.

  “It was quick,” he’d muttered, “he didn’t suffer.”

  “You were with him?”

  “Yes.”

  He’d made the mistake of glancing at her, only for his conscience to be pricked by the sadness in her eyes, her longing to know what had happened. He’d offered her a half smile.

  “He asked me to go to the Church with him; he wanted to have a few minutes to remember his wife.”

  “With you?”

  “I guess he thought you were busy, you and Černý, with election stuff and that.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to snap, this is just… difficult.”

  “No worries.”

  She had spoken again, more quietly, without anger or resentment in her voice. “What happened?” was her simple question.

  Peter had shifted uncomfortably, though the story was, by now, well-practised. He had been sitting with Herbert in the church, when the old man began to struggle for breath. He had clutched his chest and had passed away, despite Peter’s best efforts and cries for help. It was a workable story, a believable one made all the more so thanks to Herbert’s long standing gallows humour about his chest problems, and the very public knowledge of his heart attack a decade earlier. Party colleagues had since unwittingly played their part in embedding the lie by informing the press of how Herbert had privately confided in them of the worsening extent of his ailment. He hadn’t, of course, but all good lies begat others, and Peter’s was a good lie. But the thought of telling it again, to Miroslava Svobodova, had made him sick at heart. Nonetheless, repeat it he had, only to feel Svobodova’s eyes on him as he stared at the floor; expectant, demanding of something more, some small detail or noble last words. Her dissatisfaction with his explanation had been obvious but he had had nothing else to give her and suspected she would be unlikely to take warmly to an admission of murder, or that his months of working alongside Herbert had been for less honourable motives than the Institute for European Harmony had implied when arranging his secondment.

  Frustrated with her unwillingness to be fobbed off, Peter had opted for a new tactic of crass insensitivity, cutting off follow up questions before they could be asked.

  “You’ll be Prime Minister now, won’t you?” he had asked. “Of Slovakia, I mean. It’ll be a hell of a job for anyone to step into Herbert’s shoes. I don’t envy you, that’s for sure.”

  The shock on her face had demonstrated a perhaps understandable ignorance of her impending elevation until his tasteless comment. Pleased at having prevented a further question, he had pressed on for the kill.

  “And I suppose the polls will take a hit after this and it’ll be up to you and Černý to drive the campaign now.”

  As his crowning move, Peter had exhaled an exaggerated breath, shaking his head to emphasise the enormity of the responsibilities which had suddenly become hers. He had felt the grip of the stare on him begin to loosen and within moments the sound of Svobodova’s footsteps rather than her questions had filled his ears.

  His thoughts back in the present, he wasn’t exactly proud of how he had acted towards Svobodova, but the moments after a murder were not a good time to press Peter for subtle niceties. She was a strong woman, he mulled, and she would get over it.

  He levered himself out of his seat and off the tram, staggering across the road to the graffiti covered door of his apartment building. Stopping halfway up the winding stone stairwell, the alcohol sapping his stamina, he sighed as he looked up at the rest of the steps requiring negotiation. With a huge effort, he heaved himself away from leaning on the cold, hard wall only to curse in alarm as something shot past his right leg, speeding in the opposite direction down the steps. He didn’t have time to voice his surprise further before the object was followed by a tall, thin man in his early sixties, hurrying in pursuit, sweat beginning to break out on his bald head. Peter grinned.

  “Evening John,” he shouted after the man, “kids let the dog out again did they?”

  “Little sods!” John shouted back up toward Peter. “It’s the second time tonight!”

  Peter’s laughter lifted his spirits and gave him the energy to push on up the rest of the steps to his top floor home. It was always the same, he thought, when his Czech neighbour Andrea asked John, a fellow Englishman, to babysit the kids. John loved them dearly but they got up to some tricks and Peter chuckled at what other mischief would occur on John’s watch.

  Falling against his front door, he paused outside it long enough to make sure John was coming back up the steps muttering with the dog safely in his arms, then turned the key and stumbled through. Staggering a little, he shuffled into the cluttered living room and sat down, cross legged at the foot of the dusty bookcase, filled with an uncoordinated blend of vinyl and literature. His eyes struggling to focus on the titles his fingers were running over, he eventually stopped at a small, battered, leather bound book and pulled it from the shelf.

  He muttered profanities to himself as he turned to the index and forced his eyes to concentrate on searching for the right page, his fingers irritably flicking at the stupidly thin paper, reminiscent of the only slightly thicker primary school grade toilet paper of years ago.

  Eventually he found his place, his finger wrinkling the page as he dragged it across to better focus on the impossibly small lettering. As his blurring eyes struggled to take in the print, he swore he could hear Herbert’s voice echoing his own. The words were simple, eating into Peter, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend”, John Chapter 13, Verse 15. Herbert’s final words,
a last message to his killer. The words sank into Peter, a final component to the emotional cocktail bubbling within him. Reaching up, he pulled a half empty bottle from the adjacent table, twisting the cap off with his teeth and spitting it against the pages of the book he still held in his other hand. He managed a brief swig before the tears began to leak and his throat clenched to prevent weeping, his body finally succumbing to the rigours of the past couple of days. The first night’s sleep after a murder was a hellish experience which Peter had strained against submitting to, and as he felt his resistance waning he cursed in resentment and screwed at the page he had staggered home to read, tearing it from the book as he did so. And as the sleep he dreaded claimed him, his final lucid thought was the vain hope that this time, the faces of the dead would leave him in peace.

  CHAPTER 4

  PETER STUMBLED THROUGH THE NEXT FEW WEEKS as best he could. His cover necessitated his continued presence among the Party’s hierarchy, although he was now very much, and very noticeably, pushed to the periphery. The intended rejection suited him fine. Had it been up to him, he would have retired to the sanctuary of his favourite blues bar the moment the job had been done and drunk until he’d vomited his conscience clean. As it was it was not his decision and he was left in the mind numbing limbo he now found himself in; unable to run, unable to confess, resented by all around him for the close bond he had enjoyed with the man they professed to adore and who had, unknown to them, died at his hand. And while he would rather have been someplace far away, Peter appreciated the distraction from introspection that his presence in this company afforded him. Since Herbert’s death, Peter had not had a single night of peaceful sleep. He had expected the first night after the murder to be full of the usual nightmares, in truth he was as used to them as much as he feared their occurrence. But this time it wasn’t just the first night; the next was no different, nor the following, and the effects were beginning to show. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Herbert’s face; eerily silent and deathly white, yet the stare oddly devoid of malice. Peter knew that such dreams were not good for his mental state, and he yearned, fruitlessly, for them to stop. He had begun to physically dread the onset of exhaustion and the irrational fear it would bring. In his waking moments meanwhile, a whirlwind had blown up around him, engulfing all others and leaving him the sole, curious observer. And there was much to observe.