Curtain of Fear (25 page)

As a picture of a British secret agent, Nicholas thought it might easily bear some resemblance to the truth; and here was he, charged with being that sort of revolting buffoon. Incredulity piled on incredulity; he was at that very moment in just the kind of situation in which that licensed thug had landed himself again and again in his unrelenting war against the Nazis. But he always argued, bluffed, laughed or killed his way out, and Nicholas saw no possible prospect of doing any of these things.

The book had been given to him by Wendy, otherwise he would never have read it. He remembered the name of the man
who had written it now; it had been by a blood-lusting blimp named Dennis Wheatley. Wendy had said that he was the family's favourite author. Of course it was just the sort of dangerous tripe that would appeal to a man like John Stevenson. He and his friend Benjamin Salting-Sala flatly refused to accept the term ‘Commonwealth of Nations' as a substitute for ‘The Empire'. They opposed equality of status and self-government for native races, because they believed that British governors, residents and judges administered the territories in which they functioned without any thought of lining their own pockets, whereas the native politicians who would have replaced them were mostly self-seeking crooks. Having stolen the poor Persians' oil for half a century, they would have continued to take it by force if they had had their way. They still believed in sending battleships to ‘see things done'. They even refused to kow-tow to their friends the Americans, and wanted the Mediterranean to remain forever a lake under the White Ensign. If they could, they would have painted every land on the map bright red. No wonder they liked the drum-banging Wheatley with his aged flag-waving V.C. millionaire, and the trigger-happy, stick-at-nothing Gregory Sallust.

And Wendy, his adorable Wendy, was as bad as the rest. One evening he had asked her what her most cherished beliefs were, and she replied quite simply:

“I believe in God, the Queen and England.”

He had been so taken aback that he had not known what to say. It seemed incredible to him that any intelligent person could hold such outworn tenets in this modern age, much less unashamedly proclaim them. God did not exist, the Monarchy was an anachronism, and England a greater bar even than the United States to World Federation. He had not expected her to say anything about Social Justice, Equality, or the Welfare State, but she had not even included Freedom, Liberty, Democracy. Perhaps, he thought, she had the hopelessly erroneous idea that all those were embodied in her three hoary old images. He could only hope so, and had quickly turned the conversation to tennis.

Now, in acute discomfort, sweating from the heat, and panting
heavily to absorb enough oxygen, his bemused mind continued to revolve round Wendy. He wondered what she was doing at that moment. Guessing the time to be about half past six, it seemed pretty certain that she would be drinking a cocktail, either at home or with friends. Knowing all her arrangements, he sought to get nearer the probability by working out what day of the week it was. The result seemed unbelievable. Not until he had checked through what had been happening to him three times could he fully convince himself that it was still only Saturday.

It seemed days ago since he had landed at the airport that morning, and weeks since he had left England. Yet barely thirty hours had elapsed since he had had that miserable quarrel with Wendy after his morning class in Birmingham. The small hands of the world's clocks had not even travelled twice round their dials since he had arrived at the Russell to keep his appointment with Bilto. Less than twenty-two hours ago he had not had so much as an inkling of this frightful nightmare into which he had been drawn. He had not yet been made the confidant of Bilto's awful secret; he had never seen Fedora, or known that such people as Vaněk, Kmoch, Frček and Gorkov existed.

That his circumstances, his beliefs, and his future prospects could all have been so unthinkably altered in so short a time seemed yet one more incredulity on top of all the others; but that was just as incontestable as the fact that without trial he had been condemned to occupy a cell which meant torture of a kind that no medieval tyrant had thought of.

With swimming senses his mind groped round Bilto. From what Gorkov had said it was clear that Bilto had not panicked; but, as he had at first supposed might prove the case, had assumed that the Russians had refrained from picking him up for good reasons of their own. He had simply lain doggo. And now they had got in touch with him again. Short of another intervention by fate, he and the atomic secrets that he carried were to be flown into Prague to-morrow, Sunday, night.

Nicholas passed a damp hand over his sweating forehead. From that moment in the Palm Court of the Russell, when he
had dismissed his last scruples about attempting to prevent Bilto from leaving England, he had had few doubts about the rightness of his action. During the morning his conviction in that rightness had subconsciously strengthened. Now, he felt that not to have made the attempt would have been positively criminal.

He needed no telling that the world and nearly all its peoples were in a most hideous mess, and that the majority of them were further from enjoying a stable government, under which they could hope to live out their lives in peace and security, than they had been for many decades past. He had cherished the belief that a new era of enlightenment was dawning in those countries where the workers had thrown off the shackles imposed upon them for centuries by the triple tyrannies of birth, money and superstition. Now he knew that was not true.

People like John Stevenson might angrily declare that in twenty years ‘a lot of dirty snivelling little bureaucrats', incapable of appreciating the grandeur of their inheritance, had robbed the British people of nine-tenths of the liberties that it had taken their forefathers six centuries of courageous endeavour, and sometimes martyrdom, to win. The fact remained that such glimmerings of individual freedom and protection from oppression as still lit the darkened world did not glow in any newly-fashioned neon lights behind the Iron Curtain, but from the little home fires maintained through many generations by the ancient civilisations of the West.

Through a mist of pain, exhaustion and semi-suffocation, Nicholas came dimly to realise that however justified the fight against privilege, capitalism and a narrow nationalism might be, until some better way of life developed from them it must be the first duty of all who knew the truth to protect those hearth fires of the West from being trampled into extinction.

To reach that final conclusion took him a long time. He had not wound up his watch that morning, and when he glanced at it he found that it had stopped at twenty past four; so he could get no idea how long he had been in the cell, but it seemed an eternity. The sweat was running down him in rivulets, his
cramped position made his muscles ache intolerably, and from lack of air his head felt as though it was about to burst. Gradually his mind lost all coherence, and ranged without direction over a score of subjects having little or no connection with one another; but every now and again it drifted back to Wendy, Frček, Bilto or Fedora.

At length the heat and exhaustion overcame him. Automatically his limbs relaxed and he slid down on to the floor in a senseless heap. His last conscious thought was that if he could live the past twenty-four hours over again, fond as he was of Bilto he would have gone straight to the nearest police station and had him arrested.

When he came to, rough hands were hauling him from the cell. Two warders half dragged, half carried him along the corridor and into a wash place. There he slid to his knees and leaned against the wall, gasping in the welcome cooler air. Without warning one of the men threw half a bucket of cold water over his head. Gasping, he staggered to his feet, once more fully conscious.

They let him dry his face on a towel, then hurried him along to the basement office. Fedora was just outside it with the wardress. The side of her face which had been slapped was still red, but she was standing erect instead of with her shoulders hunched, and looked in an altogether better state than when he had last seen her.

Raising a smile, he said, “Congratulations on the way you have pulled yourself together. I'd never have believed anyone could look so good after what you've been through.”

She made a little grimace. “Oh, it's just part of the service. The best of attention and the most expensive drugs without a penny to pay. The idea is that the quicker they repair the damage the sooner they can start in on you again without the risk of your passing out and bringing a premature end to their fun. But you don't look too good.”

“I'll be all right as soon as I get a bit more air,” he assured her. “But they kept me all night in a cell like a coffin and as hot as an oven.”

Fedora smiled. “I expect it felt that long, but actually we've been down here only just over two hours.”

At that moment Kmoch came out of the office and signed to them to enter the waiting lift. In the hall he collected two State policemen. One was a blue-eyed ruddy-faced young man, the other was older and had a black moustache. The little party went out to the street. A six-seater car was waiting for them. Kmoch made Fedora and Nicholas sit in the back, he and the black-moustached man took the seats opposite them, and the youngster got in next to the driver. As they settled themselves Kmoch produced his automatic from the pocket of his long overcoat, and said to Nicholas:

“Please observe that I can fire at you without any risk of injuring my men in front. If you make any attempt to escape I shall blow your knee-cap off. That will not prevent your appearing for your trial, but it will be a long time before you forget the pain that such a wound causes.”

Fedora had lowered herself carefully into her place, but as the car started off she jerked up her head with a grimace of pain, then sat forward holding on to the strap so that her sore back should not come in contact with the cushions.

Nicholas had already decided that to try to escape would be hopeless, and as he looked about him he saw from a clock in a church tower that it was just after eight. It occurred to him that it was already past his usual supper time. Apart from the bowl of stew at the airport he had had nothing to eat all day, so he now felt distinctly hungry and began to hope that they would be given some sort of meal on the train.

The city looked very peaceful in the soft evening light, and except for the still overloaded trams, there was very little traffic in the streets though which they passed; so the police chauffeur drove swiftly. His klaxon wailed and the car sped through a big square to the south of the Přikopy. Beyond the square they shot down a narrow turning. A hundred yards along it the klaxon wailed again. A heavy lorry had emerged just ahead of them from a side-street.

Suddenly there came a shriek of brakes, shouts and a violent
crash. The car stopped dead. Nicholas and Fedora were thrown forward on top of the two men opposite. She screamed as the unexpected movement lacerated the weals on her back, then fell upon Kmoch. Nicholas' right hand landed on the policeman's shoulder, and with it he thrust himself away.

Next second a single shot rang out. A man who was standing on the pavement had fired through a window of the car. It starred as the bullet made a neat round hole in its centre. The policeman with the black moustache gulped and clawed at his neck. It was spurting blood. His eyes bulged, then he slid over sideways.

Kmoch was yelling curses as he tried to thrust Fedora from on top of him. He had managed to get out his gun and was pointing it under her arm in the direction of Nicholas's legs. Nicholas made a grab at the pistol. As he seized it the weapon spurted flame and three shots crashed out from it. His wrist was seared but the bullets missed him, and smacked into the leather-covered cushioning behind his back. Forcing the pistol down, so that it pointed at the floor of the car, he strove to tear it from Kmoch's grasp. Suddenly Kmock gave an awful scream and let go. Fedora had got her hands up and plunged her thumbs down into his brown spaniel-like eyes.

While they were still struggling two more single shots rang out; then came a burst of fire from a sten gun. Police whistles were blowing and people shouting. One glance through the glass partition of the car showed Nicholas that nothing was to be feared from the men in front. As the car hit the lorry the driver's head had shot forward and cracked the wind-screen. He lay slumped over the wheel of the car. The young policeman with the ruddy complexion had attempted to get out, but had been shot as his foot touched the road. He had fallen backwards and lay writhing half in and half out of the driver's box. The civilian who had fired from the pavement through the window of the car was now under cover in a shop doorway. He was yelling at the prisoners to jump out and run for it.

Nicholas needed no urging. Wrenching open the door of the car, he stumbled over the policeman who had been shot in the
neck, and landed in the road. Turning, he grasped Fedora by the arm and pulled her after him.

For a moment he paused there, uncertain which way to take. Behind him the groans of the ruddy-faced youngster mingled with Kmoch's screams. To his right the big lorry blocked the view. Its driver was crouching beside its bonnet, a pistol in his hand. At that second he raised it and fired at someone Nicholas could not see. To his right, towards the square, the street had been blocked by another lorry; but there was no one in its driver's cab, and near it a still figure sprawled in the gutter. Three policemen emerged, running from behind it. All of them were holding their pistols at the ready. They shouted in chorus at Nicholas and Fedora:

“Stay where you are! Put up your hands!”

The sten-gun opened again with a staccato clatter. It was being fired from the first-floor window of a corner house overlooking the crossroads at which the crash had occurred. The foremost of the running policemen stopped dead in his tracks, threw up his hands, gave at the knees and crumpled up within a few feet of the dead lorry-driver. As the other two dashed for cover the man in the doorway ran out into the road and shouted: