Dead Man's Tale (14 page)

They were correct on both accounts.

It was at Loringhoven's telephoned suggestion that the ministry of police in Prague alerted all units for the Budweiser truck. They were to find the truck. They were not to make themselves known. The truck was to be kept under continuous surveillance. Detain no one. But no one was to get away.

The truck was pinpointed on the brief stretch of highway between the Sázava River, a tributary of the Vltava, and the southern outskirts of Prague. A bridge maintenance man, unable to sleep because of the heat in his tin-roofed shed, had remembered seeing such a truck pass. The driver of another truck had almost collided with the van outside Prague when it made a sudden U-turn not thirty metres ahead of him. It was trapped along thirty kilometres of highway.

The stretch of highway followed low hills hiding the Vltava gorge, studded with the villas and gardens of the new bureaucracy; past the grey, drab factories; the rolling fields with their skeletal poles and wires waiting for the autumn hops; the higher Bohemian hills with narrow unpaved roads and footpaths twisting upward through the pines.

Thirty kilometres of highway. With the only satisfactory hiding place the high, pine forests between the Sázava River and the suburban factories.

At dawn the army of police, in small groups, moved quietly into the hills.

They had come as far as the southern outskirts of Prague in darkness. They could not see the lights of the city yet, for these were hidden by the low, steep hills of the Vltava gorge, but they had passed a road sign marking the Prague city limits. They had bowled along for perhaps a mile, overtaking and passing a slow truck, when Steve suddenly said, “Where do we start looking for the bum? Prague's a big city.”

Lou Goody shrugged. “You got any ideas?”

“No,” Steve admitted. Then he said, “Wait a minute. Turn around.”

“What the hell for? I come this far, Steve, I want a crack at them ten thousand bucks.”

“Turn around, I said. We can hole up in those woods back there. Then, when it gets light, Andy can drive into the city and see if he can locate Hacha.”

Andy stirred. “Alone?” Goody asked doubtfully.

“Sure, alone. At least he speaks German. All Andy has to do is set it up for us. If he can find out where Hacha is, we drive in at night and get it over with.”

“How's he gonna drive in?” Goody asked. “In what?”

“That's easy. We find a back road in the woods to hide in. Then we detach the cab. You and me stay with the vans. When it gets light Andy goes in the cab.”

“Yeah,” Goody said, still not convinced.

“Okay, turn back, Lou.”

Andy said nothing.

Goody swung the big truck in a U-turn. The truck that they had just passed rumbled down on them.

“Look out!” Andy cried involuntarily.

“Relax, kid. This is the old master at the wheel.”

The tail of the second trailer missed the truck by inches. Andy saw the driver shake his fist at them. Lou Goody laughed and stepped on the gas. The factories began to slip by, then the hops fields. Soon they were climbing back into the high hills.

“There's a road, Lou,” Steve said.

Lou Goody turned into it. The road was hardpack, just wide enough. Pine boughs cracked and scraped against the sides of the two vans. They went on for half a mile until the dirt road forked. They chose the left, climbed steeply, the truck labouring in low gear.

The road ended in a clearing, in the centre of which stood a stone chimney and the charred remains of a cottage.

“What's wrong with right here?”

“It damn well better be right here. There's no place else to go, except back.”

Goody was jittery. The woods seemed to bother him. He kept scanning them as if he expected tigers to come bounding into the clearing. Before he would let Steve and Andy out of the cab he insisted on seesawing the truck around to face the way they had come.

“I could use some sleep,” Steve said, stretching.

“I could use some grub,” Goody said.

“We'll find berries or something in the morning, Lou. With the Czech money we got, Andy can bring us back some groceries after he spots Hacha.”

“If he spots him.”

If I go, Andy said. But not aloud. Andy Longacre, finger man. The sole Phi Beta Kappa finger man extant. It sounded all wrong. Andy shook his head.

“What you shaking your head about?” Goody growled.

“Was I?”

The gunman came very close. “Look, kid, if you're cooking up another one of your cute ideas, stop cooking. Hear? You're gonna do just like Steve said, or I'll blow your gut clear back to Long Island!”

“Lay off, Lou.” Steve sounded very quiet. “Andy'll be all right. Let's get some shuteye.”

Andy's last thought as he fell asleep on the hard floor of the van was that he would have to go. For Steve's sake.

20

“The beauty of it is,” Minister Otto Zander of the Czechoslovak People's Republic State Police said to Dieter Loringhoven, “Milo Hacha actually has reason to hate old Mydlár. Mydlár, you see, testified against Hacha's father at the trial, and Rudolf Hacha, of course, was executed.”

“That is why you brought Milo Hacha back?”

“Precisely. It would be mere bourgeois formalism to claim Rudolf Hacha would have been executed in any event,” Zander said. “While now, from the viewpoint of socialist realism, it may be said that Mydlár was responsible for Rudolf Hacha's death. You see?”

Loringhoven merely frowned. He was an
agent provocateur,
not a politician.

“Consider, please,” Zander went on in his dry, professional voice. “Mydlár remains a focal point for unrest. Like Rudolf Hacha before him, he is very popular with the masses. He has been stripped of any real power as Minister of the Interior, and though we could try him for treason as Rudolf Hacha was tried, there is a better way. Milo Hacha will assassinate him.” Minister Zander smiled. “This has been arranged.”

“With Hacha?”

“It has been arranged,” the Minister repeated, frowning slightly. Loringhoven did not press the question. “And the Americans?”

“We'll come to them, Comrade. Now. Hacha has slipped across the border from Austria illegally. As far as we are concerned, the government is not involved. Our hands are clean. We know nothing of Hacha's presence until Mydlár's assassination. Then, of course, we are shocked. The masses howl for the assassin's blood. We are indignant. We give the martyr a state funeral with full honours. And what is accomplished? Mydlár, the rallying point for the Social Democrats, is eliminated, and Milo Hacha, who means nothing, is tried and executed for the murder.”

“And the Americans?” Dieter Loringhoven asked again.

“That is where you come in, Herr Loringhoven. The government wishes to keep its hands absolutely clean in this affair. You will be responsible for returning the Americans to Austria. For this we will give you whatever police cooperation you need.”

“Have they been found?”

Zander nodded. “Fourteen kilometres north of the Sázava River. They have been under surveillance since shortly before dawn.”

“This limp,” Loringhoven said, smiling. “You'd be surprised how it has served me, Herr Minister. An
agent provocateur,
bitter, blaming the government for his injury—”

“I don't understand, Comrade.”

“Well, a limp is a defect. I put it to work
for
me. The Americans—”

“Yes?”

“The Americans are a defect. So we put them to work for us. For example, if it can be shown that Milo Hacha was in the pay of foreign, capitalist-imperialist agents?”

“How could you do this?”

“They want to find Milo Hacha but they don't know where he is. If we led them? If we put rings in their noses and led them? Suppose—”

Dieter Loringhoven outlined a plan. Minister Otto Zander was all ears.

“Where's Goody?” Andy asked, climbing down from the cab.

“We found a stream a couple of hundred yards down the road. He's getting water. What you doing back here so soon, kid?”

“Did you want to starve to death?” Andy turned around and reached up to the high seat of the cab. Grinning, he tossed Steve two loaves of bread and a big, round, waxy cheese.

“Where'd you get these?”

“A town called Benesov, back across the river. And that isn't all.” Andy reached into the van again and produced six bottles of beer. “Now say you're sorry I came back!”

“It ain't that, kid. I'm hungry enough to eat a horse, but this don't get us any closer to Milo Hacha.”

“First we eat,” Andy said. “Go ahead, cut it up.” He set the beer on the ground. “Come on, Steve! I'm drooling.”

“Listen, Andy. There's something I want to tell you before Lou gets back. If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing's going to happen to you.”

“There's a lawyer in Flushing named Philip Dempsey. I gave him a deposition once. Years ago. Life insurance, you might call it. It was so I could get out of the rackets and stay in one piece.”

“Why didn't you use it before we left the States?”

“I couldn't. Once they killed Barney I couldn't scare Estelle Street. There was nothing in the deposition could touch her. She had me where she wanted me. But if anything happens to me, you get hold of that deposition and see the county D.A. gets it. I'll feel better knowing. Okay?”

“Okay. But—”

“I know. Nothing's gonna happen to me.”

Then they heard Lou Goody tramping up the hill.

Lou's eyes got mean when he saw Andy. He set a heavy gas can full of water on the ground. “I thought you were heading for Prague,” he snarled. Then he saw the bread, cheese and beer. He forgot everything else.

A half hour later, Andy climbed back into the detached cab. “How's the gas, Andy?”

“I'll fill up on the way to Prague.”

“Good luck!” Then Steve said, “Hold it!” and ran up to the truck, thrusting a Luger in at Andy.

“I don't want—”

“Take it, kid. I'll feel better.”

Andy drove down the road with the gun on the seat beside him.

He wished he knew what he was going to do if and when he found Milo Hacha.

The unmarked car drove out from behind some bushes where the dirt road ran into the main highway to Prague. It kept several hundred metres behind Andy. The other police car was half a kilometre ahead of the cab.

Andy saw the trailing car in the side-view mirror, but he thought nothing of it. He never noticed the lead car at all.

“It is breath-taking, isn't it?” Libusé asked.

Milo Hacha whirled, for she had come up behind him silently. From where he stood in the garden of the Mydlár house he had a magnificent view of the spires of St. Vitus Cathedral, thrusting above the Malá Strana hill, and the massive ramparts of Hradcany Castle.

He nodded. The dark grave girl was an odd one, all right. Since her abrupt outburst the night before she had been the perfect hostess.

“Where is your father?” Hacha asked.

“Arranging everything for tonight, naturally. What are you going to tell them at the Manes Café?”

“Your father is writing my speech.”

“Will you deliver it?”

Hacha laughed. “I haven't seen it yet.”

He had been told not to make contact with the government. They would get in touch with him. He felt cut off, vulnerable. There was nothing he could do but wait. And tonight, if he said the wrong thing—

Maybe even going to the Manes Café with Vaclav Mydlár would be the wrong thing. If it were a test, as he was half-convinced, how would they expect him to act? Co-operate with the Mydlárs? Publicly disavow them? Remain noncommittal until he was given some official lead to follow?

He heard the back door open and shut. He turned. It was Vaclav Mydlár. The old man's eyes were glittering.

“It is arranged,” he said. “All arranged, my boy!”

Milo Hacha nodded with what he hoped looked like enthusiasm.

21

“I want to show you something,” Minister Zander said. He had not seen Loringhoven since early morning, and both of them had been busy. Zander held up a glossy photograph on stiff paper. “You recognize this? It was taken when he arrived, the one time we had official contact with him.”

Dieter Loringhoven studied the photograph. It was a full-face close-up of Milo Hacha staring off into space solemnly.

“Of course. That's Hacha.”

Minister Zander raised his voice. “You may come in now.”

The office door opened and a man Dieter Loringhoven had never seen before entered. He was in his late thirties, well-built, and had dark hair and broad Slavic cheekbones. “Herr Minister?” he said stiffly.

“Well?” Minister Zander asked Dieter Loringhoven.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He does not resemble Milo Hacha?”

Loringhoven scrutinized the stranger's face. “No. Not at all.”

“Good. Very fine.” Zander turned to the man. “You may proceed.”

Obediently, the Slav turned his back. Dieter Loringhoven saw his hands go to his face. When he faced them again, Dieter Loringhoven gasped. The man now looked incredibly like Milo Hacha.

“Such a subtle thing, facial resemblance,” Minister Zander murmured. “An expert touch here, an expert touch there, and you have a double.”

“I wouldn't have believed it possible!”

“The basic structure of the face was already similar,” Minister Zander said modestly. “But, of course, it is the touches that matter. Also, in this case, it is important that the disguise can be assumed and disposed of in seconds.”

He lit a cigar. “In Hacha's case,” the Minister continued, “the subtle touches are principally two. First, the eyebrows. Hacha's are darker, thicker. Show him, please.”

The stranger rubbed his eyebrows with the fingers of his right hand in a quick movement. He had used a readily removable darkening agent on them. Now his eyebrows were thinner, paler. But he still resembled Milo Hacha.