Snare of the Hunter (14 page)

* * *

Jo had reached the terrace. Mark Bohn was still sipping beer. “Thought we might have lunch together,” he began.

“Later. First—come with me.” She led him along the inside of the terrace, suddenly halted when she could see Ludvik. “Get up there quickly. Speak to that man: the fair-haired man in the blue shirt, leaning on the parapet. See him?”

“But—” Mark was uncertain, almost tense.

“Speak with him! Say anything, anything at all to distract his attention from the courtyard. You talk to strangers often enough, don’t you?” She gave him a nudge that started him towards the steps. He kept on going, and soon he was sauntering beside the parapet until he reached Ludvik Meznik. She saw Mark address the man quite casually. And there was a response. The man seemed startled, but he was answering. Definitely talking. Then Mark was pointing out one of the large Hovercraft, the new type of ferryboat, crisscrossing the Danube. With its muffled roar of power it was like a tidal wave rushing towards the cliffs. Everyone on the terrace rose to their feet to get a closer view as the Hovercraft swept below them to its landing place. Ludvik seemed as interested as anyone, for at least one full minute. Then he looked back at the cars in the courtyard, and went on listening to Mark.

Had Dave managed it? Jo wondered. One minute wasn’t much. But luck, even measured by the minute, was something to treasure.

Of course, she reflected as she went slowly back to Mark Bohn’s table, if there hadn’t been the giant Hovercraft to catch Ludvik’s attention, Mark would have found something else such as questions about that far abbey, another fortress-like place standing on its distant hill to the south of the Danube. Or about the vineyards over there on the slopes. Or— She had never known Mark to be at a loss for words. His recent line of writing—“interview in depth” was the fashionable phrase—proved he was as quick-tongued as any in the New Journalism field. It was strange, though, how he had hesitated there for a few moments, almost as if he were suddenly nervous. Mark nervous? Only of driving at night, or on twisting country roads. He had once made a joke about that. “Just haven’t got your reflexes,” he had said. “I pass a direction sign before I notice it.”

She glanced at her watch as she picked up a menu. What bliss it would be to relax in a few days’ time, never look at a watch, never calculate a minute, never keep travelling, just stay put. Preferably beside a swimming pool with a cold drink in her hand and a handsome man stretched near her. Then, thinking of tanned torsos, she remembered the Frenchman. And his Ferrari. And the Grossglockner’s hairpin bends. How am I to get to Lienz? she asked herself again.

* * *

David strolled through the small lobby, stood by the side of the hotel door. He couldn’t see Gerhard: too many cars overtopped a small boy’s head. But he could see Bohn walking beside the small stretch of parapet to reach Ludvik, still stationed at his post. Now? No, not yet. The two men were talking, but Ludvik’s attention was not completely absorbed. Then Bohn pointed at the Danube.
Now
, David decided. Irina was just behind him. Would she remember to wait a few seconds, give him time?

He didn’t look back at her, but headed for the parked cars. Behind the first row, he felt less exposed. A pity he couldn’t be collapsed into Gerhard’s size, he thought. He heard a distant muted roar from the Danube, but didn’t halt. He reached the Chrysler, ducked down as he yanked the door open, and slid behind the wheel. One glance at the rear seat and he saw Irina’s suitcase, and took a deep breath of relief. He couldn’t see his own things, though. Where would Jo put them? He groped under the seat, found nothing. He tilted the seat beside him forward. She hadn’t forgotten. Bag and raincoat lay on the floor, tucked as far as possible out of sight. He lifted the raincoat, struggled into it. He would swelter, but it disguised the colour of his jacket; and the car’s visor, pulled down and swerved around as if to block sunlight through his side window, would hide his hair and most of his face from Ludvik’s searching eyes. He only had to put the key in the ignition, check the position of all the gadgets on the strange dashboard, have his map at hand, and wait. A matter of seconds now.

Irina opened the door and slipped into the seat beside him. He turned on the ignition, went into reverse, and carefully backed out. Then he put the transmission into drive and they were heading for the gate.

“Ludvik saw me,” Irina was saying. “Ludvik saw me as I came into the courtyard, and then he turned away.” She laughed softly. “I paid no attention to him, and he turned away.”

Again Irina laughed. It was a good sound. “He glanced at the car as we left, but he was not interested. He went back to talking with a man. Is that one of his friends?” And at this moment, she thought, I don’t care. We can lose them all, every one of them.

“No. That’s Mark Bohn.”

Irina said nothing more. She was watching the crowded street, the troubled frown back on her brow and deepening. “This won’t last long,” David reassured her. “Soon we’ll reach the bridge and cross to the right bank of the Danube. The traffic will ease there, and we’ll pick up speed.”

She was still silent by the time they had crossed the bridge. David checked behind him several times. Then he could say, “No Fiat. We got away, Irina.” Pulling up to the side of the road, he took off his coat and jacket before he drove on. “Now we can really travel. We’ll stop for something to eat in half an hour.”

“I’m not hungry, David.”

So we’re back to that again. “We’ll pick up sandwiches, and you can eat them whenever you feel like it Irina—please—better eat something. Will you?”

Irina heard his worried voice. She smiled faintly, nodded, and kept her eyes fixed on field after field of vines.

I’ll persuade her to eat first; then we can talk, David decided. “How?” he had asked Krieger. How? he still kept wondering. He wasn’t Krieger, calm and objective about Irina; Krieger had sent the wrong man for this job. One hell of a journey this was going to be. David lapsed into unhappy silence. Nothing was ever what you had expected, he thought. Nothing.

They were in the hill country now, less than an hour’s drive south from the Danube. David risked stopping at a roadside café, one of a patch of eating places that had spread near a ski-lift. The rest of the village sprawled around the highway, which ran along the lower slopes of hills rising into low mountains. In winter the little hotels and week-end cottages would be filled with Viennese and their skis. Now there were only a few stray cars, and a scattering of people enjoying the air while they digested lunch and wondered what to do.

Inside, the café was small, built of new wood varnished to a yellow gloss, one wall spiked with tiny antlers, another displaying a jukebox. Some red-faced men in local costume—green jackets, black trousers, and heavy boots—sat along the bar, their low rumbling voices alternating with bursts of argument. A waitress in a miniskirt was mopping the tables with a grey washcloth. Neither she nor the men paid any attention to the two latecomers. David chose a table that had been cleaned more or less, settled Irina there, and went over to the waitress. “Kitchen is closed,” she told him without looking up.

Perhaps it was just as well, he thought as he noticed her soiled apron. If he hadn’t been pressed for time, he would have walked out after the first glance around him. And the rest of the kitchens in this summer-sad village could also be closed. So he said, his voice friendly, “We are late, I know. Could you get us some bread? Some cheese? Some tea for the lady and beer for me? We haven’t eaten since breakfast, and we must leave soon. I am sorry to give you such trouble, but I would appreciate it. Very much.”

The girl—her make-up was almost expert, her hair high—styled in last year’s fashion—stopped work and stared. Then unexpectedly, she smiled. She smacked down the washcloth on the vinyl tabletop, speaking in a dialect so thick that he could hardly understand a word, and hurried away, her thick-heeled sandals clacking on the wooden floor. She was back in ten minutes, with a fresh apron tied round her waist, and the beginnings of a simple meal. It wasn’t good, but it was edible, and carefully set out. And Irina, noticing David’s dejection, made an effort. She ate enough to please him. “You were right,” she said. “I needed some food.”

“How do we get her to turn that noise off?” The jukebox had been switched on the moment they had picked up the thick chunks of stale black bread.

“We don’t. She took such care in selecting the tune. What is it?”

“Le jazz hot. European Chicago style. Boogie-woogie with a stomp stomp.”

Irina almost laughed. She controlled it, but brightness was back in her eyes. That’s better, David thought. “Have some more delectable cheese?”

“It wasn’t too bad. And the ham was good. And the bread is—nourishing.”

Neither said anything about the uneaten slices of marbled sausage, left to curl on the platter with a wilting radish, or about the yellow potato salad. The beer had been bottled, and foamed like a bubble bath; the tea was made with warm water out of a faucet. But at least there was no temptation to linger. David doubled the tip, and they hurried out. “Come back soon,” the waitress called after them. She stood, Brigitte Bardot, at her empty doorway, with a blare of sound pouring over the quiet valley. The bills looked down, imperturbable and silent.

“We can laugh now,” said David as he closed the car windows and put on some speed. The funniest thing was me, though. There I was, ordering tea, with a neat little pistol in my jacket pocket, and suddenly remembering it. He pressed the button to lower the windows, once the Alpine village and tom-tom beat were left behind. The air from the pine trees was scented with resin; and the only background sound was the music of fast-flowing water over rocks and gravel in a mountain stream. “You noticed?” he asked as he saw the smile in her eyes. “Was it so obvious?”

“No, no. I was thinking of something else. Of a café table in Prague. My friends were telling you all about New Orleans and Chicago style in jazz. And you were in agony, trying to explain and not having one word understood. They had it all wrong, hadn’t they?”

“Well—they knew their Bach better than I did then. It evened out. Did they all stay with their music? I never met so many future composers, conductors, concert violinists, around one small table.”

“No.” She hesitated, frowning. “One teaches. One has gone political. Some have—other jobs.” Her voice drooped.

“And you?” he asked quickly. “Did you give any concerts?”

She shook her head. “And you—?”

“I write for a music magazine.”

“And why are you in Austria—just at this time?”

“Salzburg.”

“Oh—I always wanted to go to the festival. What is it like?” That was a safe topic, and he expanded on it for a full five minutes. She had listened, intent, interested. But now, as he waited for her to say something, she seemed withdrawn, more remote than ever.

“Haven’t you a wife, David?” she asked.

The question, cool, detached, caught him by surprise. He answered abruptly, “Once. It lasted four years. No children.”

“I was married—and now divorced. Two children.” There was a long pause. “They died. In a boating accident on a lake. Three years ago. They would now be nine and eight years old.”

“Look, Irina—”

“No, I must tell you—or else you would never understand.”

Understand what? he wondered.

“Where do I begin?” she asked herself aloud, and shook her head.

“Perhaps when I left Prague, and waited for you in Vienna.”

“And I never came.” She watched his eyes. “I couldn’t. David—please believe me! My mother had me taken to the country—to my father’s house near Rajhrad. That is south of Brno: far from Prague and my friends. My father wasn’t even allowed to walk into the village. And that’s the way I lived, closely guarded, until the last of the troubles in Hungary were put down, and my mother felt it was safe to let me return to Prague and meet friends again. Only she chose them this time.”

“Safe for her position in the party?” David asked bitterly. Irina nodded. “But that did not last. Five years later—” She broke off. “I never got your letters, David—”

“I never got yours either.”

“You knew I was writing to you?”

“I hoped you were.”

She sat very still, completely silent.

“And after five years—what happened, Irina?”

“They arrested my mother. Then, a year after that, they tried her secretly. Sentenced her to prison for ten years.”

“For what?”

“She never knew.”

“None of those who were arrested knew.”

“But she was one of the top executives in—”

“So were they all. She was luckier than some. They had to confess publicly in a show trial. And when they were being transported to prison, eleven of them were taken out of the cars on a lonely road, and shot.”

It was he who was silenced now. He listened, asking no more questions. So, Irina went on, she was alone in Prague.

She was not given permission to go to her father. A concert she had been preparing for was cancelled. She and two other music students were assigned to work in a factory. Most of her friends, and all her mother’s old friends, avoided her. Except Jiri Hrádek. He had been a history lecturer at the university when she had first met him at her mother’s flat; and then he had gone into government service. He never talked about it, even after he had married her, taken her out of the factory, managed to have her mother sent to an easier prison with less hard labour. Now she could see that perhaps Jiri’s chief interest was in her father: doing everything to make her father like him, even trust him. But at the time, she only thought of Jiri as a man of great courage, and she had been grateful.

As for Jiri’s hope that Jaromir Kusak could be persuaded to write a novel sympathetic to the present regime—it wasn’t so wild a hope as it must sound to David. When her mother was released from prison in the spring of 1968 along with several other Communists, she was still a Communist, more intense than ever in her beliefs. Could David explain that? Of course not: no American could understand it. And neither had Irina’s father. He was appalled: he was rejoicing in the liberalising of politics in Prague while her mother was only filled with bitter disapproval; Dubcek had freed her, and she distrusted him; she welcomed the Russian tanks, to keep the country out of the hands of fascists. Irina’s father gave up all hope of ever regaining his wife or of seeing freedom established. It was then that he left the country—an admission of complete despair.