“That clears up a lot of things that have been puzzling me,” Nicholas said thoughtfully. “But tell me one thing more. It’s clear that you know the ropes here, and you arrived still unsuspected. I’m sure that during the course of the morning you could have got away on your own. Why didn’t you?”
“I really don’t know. I suppose I felt that having got you into this I ought to do my best to get you out.”
“No; that won’t wash. You’ve just said that when you were planning to have me sent here on my own, you didn’t give a damn what happened to me. And getting to know me better can hardly have made you regard me as a long-lost brother. This morning I nailed the Red flag to the mast and showed up as the type of chap you are fighting tooth and nail. When you found out that I was a pro-Communist I wonder you didn’t throw me to the wolves and rejoice at having done so.”
Fedora gave a low laugh. “You’re not a Com; and the only flag you could hoist is a washed-out pink. You’re just a woolly minded Liberal with an infinite capacity for believing any lie he’s told. You wouldn’t hurt a fly yourself; and if people like you ever formed a government you’d be eaten up by the real Marxists in ten minutes. The only thing I hold against you is that as a teacher you are entirely lacking in responsibility. You are handing out mental Mills bombs and Sten guns to young people, some of whom may be evil enough one day to use them.”
“Well, obviously that idea could not endear me to you,” said Nicholas stiffly. “Why have you taken big risks yourself to stick with me and try to get me out?”
“If you must know,” she replied lazily, “I suppose it is because I’m a woman. I got a silly maternal sort of feeling for you when you were sitting doped beside me in the aircraft. Then, later, it was so transparent that your head was filled with fool ideas only because you hadn’t realised the truth. I didn’t feel that I could possibly let you go like a lamb to the slaughter because I had made use of you. Another thing—you are quite different from most of the men I’m used to meeting, and by then I had decided that I rather liked you. I liked you all the more, too, for not making a pass at me when we were up in the hotel bedroom.”
Nicholas felt insulted, awkward and flattered in turn, and muttered, “I’m afraid I can’t take much credit for that. As I told you, I’m in love and engaged to be married.”
“Oh, don’t be stuffy!” she retorted with a little shrug. “Single, engaged, or married, there are few men of your age who wouldn’t have tried their luck. That is the nature of men; and being in danger only makes them the keener to snatch at that sort of thing whenever they get the chance. But don’t run away with the idea that I wanted you to. I’m in love with someone myself.”
For a few moments they were silent, then she asked, “Now I no longer have to pretend that you are Bilto, what would you like me to call you?”
“My friends call me Nicky,” he replied, “so I’d be glad if you would too; and I’ll call you Fedora. But that’s not a Czech name, is it? How did you come to be given it?”
“I was named after my maternal grandmother, who was a Russian Baroness. She escaped from the Bolsheviks during the revolution and took refuge here.”
“Then it is hardly surprising that you are such a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. You must have imbibed it with your mother’s milk.”
“Don’t talk like an inverted snob,” she said sharply. “And don’t get worried that you may have sold your spotless proletarian soul to the Devil by kissing me, either. I’m only one fourth noble; the rest of me is quite common Czech.”
“I wasn’t trying to be priggish,” he protested. “I meant only that it is natural that you should always have been an anti-Communist.”
“But I wasn’t.” Her tone had become friendly again. “At least, when I was a girl I had the same sort of advanced Socialist views that you seem to hold. It was seeing what they led to that made me change them. Even then I didn’t become an active anti-Communist until 1950. My husband refused to allow me to be mixed up with his secret work, so I knew very little about the part he had played in the Legion until the Coms caught him and pulled me in. I was fool enough to think that by making a deal with them I could save him. They imagine that I believe that he is still living reasonably comfortably in prison as a hostage for my good behaviour; but I know for a fact that they did him in a few months after he was caught. By then, I’d already got in touch with the Legion myself, and I’ve been double-crossing the Coms ever since.”
“It must have been pretty ghastly for you,” Nicholas said sympathetically. “But if those old memories aren’t too painful, I’d be awfully interested to hear more about your life and work.”
Lifting her head from his shoulder, she shook it slowly. “No, not now. We have been down here long enough. Someone may think it queer, and tumble to the fact that we have been hiding, if we don’t at least make a pretence of seeing something of the show.”
As she spoke, she pressed the button beneath the table edge, and the hydraulic lift brought them slowly up to floor level.
The stage was now occupied by another set of dancers; but they too were clad in peasant costumes, and were doing a very similar dance to that of their predecessors; which caused Nicholas to remark:
“There doesn’t seem to be much variety about this show.” Fedora smiled. “If you expected anything like the Folies Bergère you are going to be disappointed. The fact that the principal amusement of our rulers is making pretty women dance to their tune in private does not mean that they encourage, or even permit, anything at all suggestive in public. Leg-shows are ideologically connected with the bourgeois-capitalist exploitation of women, so barred as being both anti-social and frivolous. Even the films all have to be based on one theme—the unselfish worker who triumphs over some form of temptation and denies himself pleasure in order to produce more of something for the Soviets.”
“How dreary. And does this place never put on anything but peasant dances?”
“Oh yes; physical drill displays, amateur ballet, and sketches by young would-be playwrights in praise of the Com régime. It is one of the many places that have been turned over to the Sokols for propaganda purposes and winning recruits for their organisation.”
Nicholas well remembered the Sokols. When he visited Prague as a boy it was the great national youth movement. Young people of both sexes and all classes had belonged to it, and their rallies had been a feature of the life of the nation. There were over 300,000 of them, and they prided themselves on their special code of honour and their physical fitness. At times as many as 12,000 Sokols gave marvellously synchronised displays of physical drill and community singing. Glancing at Fedora, he said:
“I should have thought the Sokols would have formed the best basis for the Legion, as they were such a patriotic institution and had their branches in every village as well as in all the towns.”
“Is it likely?” Her low voice held a bitter note. “Do you think the Coms are such fools as not to have realised the value of the movement? One of the very first things they did was to get hold of it and unobtrusively pervert it to their own uses. For years past thousands of helpless youngsters have been indoctrinated through it with the Com ideology, and many of them now are among our worst enemies.”
After they had watched a succession of dance groups for about three-quarters of an hour, Fedora said, “It must be dark by now, so I am going to telephone. Don’t worry if I’m away for quite a time.”
“Why?” he queried. “Is the telephone service very bad?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not that; but I may have to telephone several people before I can fix up a hide-out for us. It is nearly three months since I’ve been in Prague, and a lot can happen in that time. Quite apart from Legionnaires being caught, there are the deportations. The Coms know that the old middle classes will always remain their enemies, so every month they make a swoop on several thousand unsuspecting people and send them either to the uranium mines or to Russia. One never knows from one day to
the next when friends will disappear never to be heard of again.”
“How terrible!” Nicholas breathed, as she stood up and left the box.
She was not, after all, away for very long; and when she returned, the bald-headed, mean-eyed old waiter followed her in. Producing her few notes, she waved a hand towards the empty bottle and asked:
“How much?”
He gave her a long, steady look. “More than you have there, Comrade. I want five thousand Koruny.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she said with a slightly forced laugh. “That Hungarian muck isn’t worth more than three hundred Koruny a bottle, and you’ve had a tip already. The girl who owns the hat I’m wearing took it out to you. I’m quite willing to give you another, but you must be reasonable.”
With a slow unpleasant smile, he retorted, “Five thousand Koruny is reasonable, Comrade. You are the couple the Coms were after. You admitted it by sending that bit on account to keep my mouth shut. I kept it shut, but I want five thousand Koruny before you go; otherwise I’m going to open it.”
“I … I haven’t got it,” she faltered. “Really I haven’t. This is all I’ve got.”
“Then you had better find some more. And don’t think you can start anything, or get away without paying. There are twenty Coms sitting at tables out in front, and round about in the boxes. I’ve only got to give a shout, and pretend that I’ve just recognised you as the wanted couple. They’ll nab you, or put bullets into you, long before you could reach the street.”
“Listen!” she pleaded desperately. “We are in trouble; bad trouble. Please don’t hold us up like this. Take all I have and let us go. My friend hasn’t got any money at all on him; so with the best will in the world we can’t find you any more.”
“Oh, yes, you can,” he replied, a gleam of cunning showing in his little eyes. “You must have friends somewhere in the city. This place won’t be closing till midnight, so we’ve a couple of hours to go yet. One of you can go out and raise a loan. But the other stays here till the one who goes brings the money back.”
Fedora’s hand was resting on the edge of the table and Nicholas saw it tremble slightly, so he guessed that she was speaking the truth when she said:
“We only got into Prague to-day, and we know hardly anyone here. There is no one I could go to who is likely to have that amount of money available to lend me at this time of night.”
The man’s hard little eyes showed no trace of pity, and he gave a shrug. “Well, you can’t say I haven’t given you a fair chance. The Coms always pay a good reward to anyone who turns in people on the run. I’ll claim that instead. We’ll wait here till this act finishes. It won’t be more than a few minutes. Then when the lights go up I’ll beckon over a couple of tough Coms to take you in charge.”
CHAPTER XV
THE FAITH THAT FAILED
Nicholas was almost choking with ill-concealed fury. To have escaped the awful prospect which had faced them only two hours ago, to have survived a street battle uninjured, to have thrown their pursuers off the track, and now to be menaced again with all the horrors that the word ‘Moscow’ had conjured up for him since that afternoon, seemed an unbelievably brutal twist of fate. That this new threat to their liberty, sanity and lives should have arisen solely owing to the avarice of the miserable little old man who had it in his power to betray them made it infinitely worse.
More shattering still was the thought of all that hung on the retention of their freedom. Fedora’s refusal to accept the waiter’s offer to go out and get the money made Nicholas suppose that her telephoning had been unsuccessful; for had she located friends who could hide them for the night, it seemed that she could have gone to them now and that, somehow, they would have managed to raise the ransom demanded. But, if she had failed, there remained Jirka at the airport.
The barman had implied that morning that, given a few hours to work in, he could get them both out through the ‘funnel’. Since their escape from Kmoch, Nicholas had been counting on that. To get back to England within the next twenty-four hours was their one hope of preventing Bilto’s leaving for Prague. Now that Nicholas had seen for himself the evil and ruthless régime of the Soviets, the thought of Bilto’s placing his awful secrets at their disposal made him sick with horror. Their escape and the chance to stop him had seemed a deliberate dispensation of Providence. Compared with the appalling calamity which might ultimately overtake humanity as a result of Bilto’s treachery if he could not be stopped, then their own lives counted for nothing. Yet it was impossible to explain to this wretched blackmailer how much hung upon their freedom from arrest. Either he would have disbelieved it, or thought that if there was any truth in it at all he might get a still bigger reward for turning them over to the police.
These thoughts rushed through Nicholas’ brain in a matter of seconds, to be followed by another. Anyhow Fedora must accept the offer to go out and collect the ransom. If she could not get it that could not be helped. She, at least, would be free. Even if she had no friends to whom she could go at once, she could make her way to the airport before morning, and fix up with Jirka to get her out through the ‘funnel’. Even if he could not get her out until the evening she would be in Frankfurt, or in some other city on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in time to telephone London and have Bilto arrested before he caught the night ’plane for Paris. And that was the one thing above all else that mattered.
Urgently, he said to her in English, “For God’s sake stop arguing! Get out while the going is good. If you can’t get the money that will be just too bad. But you’re not to come back or worry about me. Somehow you’ve got to get through the Curtain to-morrow. You know why!”
In spite of the two hours’ relief from strain she had had since their escape from discovery in the box, now that she was faced with another crisis pain and fatigue seemed to have temporarily dulled her mind. Shaking her head she replied in the same language:
“I can’t! It’s no use! I daren’t leave here.”
There was no time to ask her why. The gaily-clad peasants on the stage had entered on a wild Czardas that obviously heralded the end of their turn. At any moment they would cease their whirling. With the applause the lights would go up, and the horrid bald-headed little vulture blocking the way to the door of the box would be calling to some of the uniformed men in the audience to arrest them.
“All right,” said Nicholas in Czech. “Then I’ll go.”
He did not wait for Fedora to make any comment, but added to the old waiter, “I think I know a man who will lend me five thousand Koruny.” Then he pushed past him.
Nicholas had had only a matter of seconds in which to make up his mind. He had no hope whatever of raising the money, but with luck he might reach the airport and get Jirka to arrange for him to be smuggled out through the ‘funnel’. On the other hand it meant abandoning Fedora, and that, after all they had been through together, he could not bring himself to do.
He had no sooner passed the waiter than he pivoted on his toes and stretched out his hands. As he fell with all his weight on the old man’s back his clutching fingers closed round the skinny throat, choking back the beginning of a cry. His victim gave at the knees, and Nicholas, still grasping his throat in a vice, crushed him down on to the floor.
Instantly Fedora’s look of helpless despair vanished. Leaning across the table she swiftly pressed the button below its edge, and the lift began to descend. It was not a moment too soon. A burst of clapping sounded from the auditorium; as the platform of the box came gently to rest six feet down the lights went up.
“Quick!” whispered Nicholas. “Get something to gag him with.”
Fedora was stooping over the two writhing men. “No,” she whispered back. “Keep your fingers pressed hard on his windpipe. He’ll be dead in under two minutes.”
Suppressing a shudder at her ruthlessness, Nicholas muttered angrily, “Is it likely that I’d kill him?”
“You must!” she breathed. “Our
safety—and much more than that—may depend on it.”
“I’ll not become a murderer!”
“This won’t be murder, but self-defence. Dead men tell no tales.”
“What can he say about us that the police don’t know already?”
“Nothing! But if you let him live I’m sure he will become an additional danger to us.”
“I can’t help that! It’s bad enough my having shot that policeman. I’ll not kill another man in cold blood.”
“Nicky, be sensible! He’s a dirty blackmailing swine. He asked for it.”
“I won’t, I tell you! Give me something to gag him, or I’ll have to take one of my hands away to grope about. Then he may manage to cry out.”
“You squeamish fool,” Fedora whispered; but she grabbed up two rough paper napkins from the table and knelt down beside him.
With a heave Nicholas turned the waiter over on his back. His face had gone purple and his mean little eyes were bulging from their sockets. Seizing his nose between her finger and thumb, Fedora gave it a violent upward jerk, then crammed the paper into his gaping mouth. To complete the job she undid his rag of a black tie, pushed the middle of it between his yellowed teeth and tied the ends tightly behind his head, so that he could not possibly work the wad of paper out.
Curtain of Fear Page 22
