The Lights of Skaro (19 page)

“Yoreska won’t give her the visa, will he?”

“He has. That’s what worries me. He
wants
her back. You’ve got to do something to stop her.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Can’t you send her a cable?”

“We’re under censorship, Danitza. Even if a cable got through, there’s nothing I can tell her that she doesn’t know. She must realize as well as you do how dangerous it is.”

‘Then why is she doing it?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did.”

“You
must
do something.”

“I’ll do what I can. Thanks for telling me.”

“You won’t breathe a word – about the kidnapping, I mean? It’s a very important secret until – until—” she shook her silly, kind head. “I won’t tell you anymore. I shouldn’t have told you as much as I did.”

“I promised, Danitza! You needn’t worry about anything I’ll say. But Yoreska will know you’ve been here. What are you going to tell him?”

“That I told you she was coming so you could meet the plane. There’s nothing wrong in meeting a plane, is there?” She widened her eyes innocently. Sometimes she was so feather-brained that she was clever.

I did meet the plane, with Heinz, Léon, and Graham to back me up. We didn’t know what good it would do, but we wanted to be on hand. Since we were all equally bound by censorship and circumstances, I thought it was safe to tell them what Danitza had told me. They were as puzzled by Cora’s return, and as worried for her, as I was.

Somehow, somewhere, Léon got hold of a car. It was a rattletrap, but it carried us as far as the airfield, which was luckily within our twenty-five-kilometer limit. Several carloads of
rokos
were there ahead of us. They had the landing-apron cordoned off tight, and had closed the waiting-rooms. The nearest we could get to the field was a wire fence running along one side of it. The elaborate preparations showed that those of Radovič’s fellow-escapees who had elected to come home after their contamination by Outside influences were in for quarantine and brain-washing, a standard procedure. On the other hand, Yoreska’s personal appearance at the airfield was highly irregular.

We were standing by the fence, waiting to hear the sound of the plane coming above a low overcast, when we heard instead the blast of Danitza’s horn. The Rolls-Royce drove out on the field at high speed, ripped through the
roko
cordon fast enough to make
rokos
jump for their lives, and skidded to a stop on the asphalt of the landing-apron directly opposite the place where the plane would unload. Danitza climbed out of the driver’s seat to open the door for her boss.

The
rokos
weren’t expecting him. It was easy to see from the startled way they broke the cordon and re-formed it around the car that they had no orders preparing them to expect the Minister of Internal Affairs.

Heinz said thoughtfully, “I wonder what
he's
doing here.”

“I don’t like it,” Graham said.
'’Rokos
are normal. Yoreska in person on the welcoming committee means something sticky.”

“He needn’t be here on Cora’s account,” Léon said. “She isn’t the only passenger on the plane.”

“You wouldn’t want to bet that he
isn’t
here on her account, would you?”

I said, “Save the bets. Here comes the plane.”

The two
rokos
who had been Radovič’s bodyguard were the first passengers out after the steps were wheeled into place. One of them still limped from the wound in his thigh.

They made a mistake in coming back. They had done their job to the best of their ability, but faithfulness of service wasn’t anything that counted with Security. They were grabbed quickly and led off to a car, their guards hurrying the limping man along in a way that showed he wasn’t booked for a soft bed and medical attention. Other
rokos,
in pairs, took charge of the other passengers as they came down the steps. Two men moved forward when Cora appeared, but checked and fell back at Yoreska’s command. Danitza ran to take Cora’s arm and speak quickly in her ear, pulling her towards the Rolls-Royce.

One of the
rokos
tried to say something to Yoreska. He was curtly brushed off. Cora, holding back against Danitza’s urging, looked around for friends. She didn’t see us waving from behind the fence before Danitza got her to the car. Yoreska had already climbed into it. Danitza pushed Cora bodily in beside him, slammed the door and ran round to jump behind the wheel. The Rolls-Royce took off so fast that its tires screamed on the asphalt. The two
rokos
who had been assigned to pick up Cora stared after it for some time before one of them thought to run to a telephone.

We ran for Léon’s rattletrap. There was no council of war, no suggestions made that we sit down and think calmly. Something spectacular was breaking. We went after it.

Léon couldn’t keep up with the Rolls-Royce, but we followed it by its horn until we lost it. A
roko
car, then a second, both with their own loud horns, passed us at the outskirts of the city. We followed them and the path they opened for us to the Ministry.

The Rolls-Royce was parked in front of it, alone and empty.
Roko
cars always parked at the back, in the smelly cement courtyard from which I had first entered the Ministry building. The courtyard was convenient to the fingerprinting, interrogation, and minor punishment divisions of Bulič’s Security Department. One of the reasons the courtyard smelled bad was because petty offenders who crept out that way after a session with the
rokos
often bled, and sometimes vomited, on the cement. Not many people entered the Ministry voluntarily through that courtyard. We did, for that exact reason. There were fewer guards to bar our way.

We were stopped, of course. Several times. Nobody could wander at will through the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But we all had high-priority identification papers, and Heinz, who had a German drillmaster’s arrogance of manner, talked us as far as Yoreska’s anteroom with a bald lie that we had been called to a press conference by Yoreska, personally, at the airport. It was irregular, but it wasn’t impossible. We made slow progress from corridor to corridor and floor to floor until we reached Yoreska’s suite.

The door was guarded not by
rokos
but by soldiers, another irregularity. A hard-jawed sergeant was in charge. His orders were that Comrade Minister Yoreska was in conference and did not choose to be interrupted. Nobody had mentioned a press meeting to him.

“Let us talk to Danitza, then,” Heinz said.

“Comrade Danitza is with the Minister.”

“Take her a note. You’ll lose your stripes if you hold us up too long, soldier. Yoreska himself spoke to us at the airfield a few minutes ago and told us to come. If he didn’t say anything to you about it, he didn’t say anything, but we’ve got to get in there. You’ll be in trouble if we don’t.”

We were gambling with dynamite, certainly. But we could hear Yoreska yelling even through closed doors, and when Yoreska yelled things were popping. We had to take a long shot to get in. The sergeant hesitated, scowled, and reluctantly said he would deliver a note if he could manage it.

I wrote the note. In case he thought of reading it first I worded it in a way that called attention to one of Yoreska’s own regulations. All accredited representatives of the foreign press were promised equal access to official sources of information, without favoritism or priority. The rule would be violated by a conversation of any kind between the Minister and a representative of one news agency which representatives of competing news agencies were not allowed to hear. If the rule had been suspended in favor of Allied Press, the correspondents for A.N.A., Reuters, Ullstein and Agence France-Presse proposed to wire their home offices immediate instructions.

Three minutes after the sergeant went away, leaving us to face a soldier with a tommy-gun who stepped in front of the door, he came back with Danitza.

She looked frightened. She had chewed off most of her pink lipstick and forgotten to put on a new layer. She said nervously, “Please, there is no press conference. The Minister only wants to ask her a few questions.”

“Questions and answers between a reporter and the Minister of Internal Affairs are a press conference,” I said. “If she can talk to him, we can talk to him. Any time that isn’t so I’m going to ask to be recalled from my assignment as quickly as I can get to a cable office. Try that on the Minister.”

“It will do for me, too,” Graham said.

“And me,” Heinz said.

“And me,” Léon said.

The red-faced sergeant knew, by then, that he had been bluffed. He looked at Danitza for anything, a hint, a sign, that would let him take charge. He would have given a lot to be able to bounce us down the stairs, step by step, and throw us out in the street. But poor Danitza couldn’t make a decision. And while she stood there, chewing her lip, the need for decision was taken out of her hands.

We heard boot heels clicking in the corridor. Bulič, with half a dozen of his largest goons behind him, came round a corner of the hall, walking fast. He wore his black uniform with the colonel’s insignia at the shoulders. The sergeant and his squad snapped to attention, presenting arms. Bulič ignored the salute, as he ignored Danitza, us and everything else except the man with the tommy-gun who stood in front of the door. He made a brushing gesture at the soldier. The soldier stepped smartly aside. Bulič opened the door and went in. We followed at his heels. Danitza came last, leaving the sergeant and his men to look at the
rokos,
who waited in the corridor.

Yoreska faced us as we came in. More properly, he faced Bulič. He was standing over a chair in which Cora sat, pale-faced. Yoreska’s own face was yellowish-grey, the color of dingy linen. When he bared his steel teeth at Bulič, it was not a smile but a grimace that stretched his neck tendons. He paid no more attention to the rest of us than Bulič had.

“I didn’t send for you, Comrade Colonel.” He sounded hoarse, as if there were a stricture in his throat.

“I know that, Comrade Minister. I came because I was informed that you had superseded my orders at the airfield. I want to ask to what extent and for what reason I have been relieved of authority.”

Both men were furiously, coldly angry. The conflict between them was so intense that it pushed the rest of us aside. It was like watching a duel. We, the witnesses, were there, but only as shadowy figures on the sidelines.

Yoreska said, with the same thickness of speech, “I superseded your orders because in my judgment you are incompetent to protect the security of the Republic. I have not yet decided to what extent you will be allowed to exercise authority, if at all. It depends on what further facts I can obtain from Miss Lambert concerning Radovič’s flight.”

“Facts?’ Bulič's tight lips curled. “You believe the lies she tells you? You listen to the mouthings of a paid enemy of the Republic whose only purpose is to tear down what the Party has built?”

“I believe the truth when it is shown to be the truth.”

Bulič sneered openly.

“Whose truth? Hers? Don’t you know why she was sent here? To lie, distort and misrepresent! To obstruct! To spread suspicion! To make you listen to her lies about doddering old Radovič. You say they are facts! I say give her tome for one hour and she will tell you real facts – that she lies, and why she lies, and how much she is paid to lie, and who pays her!”

Cora shrank perceptibly in the chair between them. Danitza, beside me, was breathing in a strange way. My own breathing wasn’t very steady. I was thinking of what Oliver had said about the ground being torn up when those two locked horns. It looked as if we were watching the showdown.

Yoreska said, “I will overlook your insolence, Comrade Colonel. I cannot overlook the fact that Janos Radovičwas not a man to give his life for the privilege of telling lies.”

“Radovič! Radovič!’ Bulič roared it. “His name was signed to a thousand lies! How do you know what was said between them? Don’t you see that she wrote the whole story from her filthy liar’s mind? Give her to me for only thirty minutes—”

“I know what you could do to her in thirty minutes. I know what was done to Radovič, and that when he was free to tell what had been done he spoke the truth. She could not make up out of her mind a story I am able to verify in every detail.”

“Every detail? You accept the unsupported accusation of a paid liar as verification that I was involved in the escape?”

Cora raised her hand in a quick, helpless gesture of denial. It was too late.

I know now that Bulič planned everything to build to that disclosure. At the moment I thought – we all thought – that he had hanged himself with a slip of the tongue. The significance of what he had said was apparent even to those of us who had not yet heard Radovič’s story.

Yoreska’s grey face turned even greyer. The hoarseness had cut his voice almost to a thick whisper when he answered Bulič’s question.

“She did not accuse you, comrade. She swears she does not know, that Radovič himself did not know, who aided him. I do not believe her, but it is no longer necessary for me to ask. I know. Who bought you, traitor?”

Bulič stared at him for seconds. Nobody moved. The two duelists faced each other across Cora’s bent head. The loudspeaker in the square outside the Ministry clattered with a propaganda lecture. There was no other sound.

Bulič slowly lifted his hand to touch his wide chest.

“I? Bulič? You call me traitor?”

“You. Traitor. Who bought you? What was your price to send Radovič across the border?”

It was another part of Bulič’s careful planning that the microphone had been set up on Yoreska’s desk for some announcement or speech he was to make that afternoon. The microphone was a small thing like a candlestick. It looked even smaller in Bulič’s big fist when he strode to the desk, picked up the instrument and snapped the switch that cut it in on the broadcast system. The propaganda lecture stopped in mid-sentence.

The silence that followed was as shattering as a blare of trumpets. All over the Republic, in every city, town and village, men and women would be looking up at the speakers, wondering what was to come.