Circus (17 page)

Immediately beyond the bridge the road was swallowed up by what appeared to be virgin pine forest. Less than a quarter of a mile farther on the two men came to a large semicircular glade lying to the right of the road.

‘The helicopter,' Dr Harper said, ‘will land here.'

Dusk was falling when Bruno, clad in his best street clothes, returned to Wrinfield's office. Only the owner and Maria were there.

Bruno said: ‘Okay if I take my fiancée for a coffee, sir?'

Wrinfield smiled, nodded, then got back to looking worried and preoccupied again. Bruno helped the girl on with her heavy Astrakhan coat and they walked out into the thinly falling snow.

Maria said crossly: ‘We could have had coffee in the canteen or in your living-room. It's very cold and damp out here.'

‘Nagging and not even married yet. Two hundred yards is all. You will find that Bruno Wildermann always has his reasons.'

‘Such as?'

‘Remember our friends of the other night, who followed us so faithfully?'

‘Yes.' She looked at him, startled. ‘You mean – '

‘No. They've been given a rest – snow has an adverse effect upon both marcelled hair and bald
heads. The lad behind us is about three inches shorter than you, with a cloth cap, torn coat, baggy trousers and scuffed shoes. Looks like a skid row graduate but he's not.'

They turned into a café that had obviously abandoned hope a generation ago. In a country where the cafés seemed to specialize in smoke and minimal lighting, this one had really touched rock bottom. One's eyes immediately started to smart: a couple of guttering candles would have provided an equal level of illumination. Bruno guided Maria to a corner seat. She looked around her in distaste.

‘Is this what married life is going to be like?'

‘You may look back on this as one of your happiest days.' He turned round. The Chaplinesque figure had slumped wearily into a chair close to the door, produced a ragged paper from somewhere, and sat there dispiritedly with his elbow on the table and a grimy hand to his head. Bruno turned back to Maria.

‘Besides, you must admit there is a certain wild Bohemian charm to the place.' He put his finger to his lips, leaned forward and pulled up the collar of her Astrakhan coat. Nestling deep in the fold of her collar was a small shining metal device no bigger than a hazelnut. He showed it to her and she stared at him wide-eyed: ‘Order up for us, will you?'

He rose, crossed to where their shadow was sitting, seized him unceremoniously by the right wrist, pulled it away from his head and twisted sharply, an action that gave rise to a sudden yelp
of pain from the man but no reaction from the few other customers, who were presumably accustomed to such diversions to the point of boredom. Nestled in the man's hand was a tiny metal earphone attached to a wire. Bruno followed the wire to a small metal box, hardly larger than the average cigarette lighter, which was tucked away in a breast pocket. Bruno put those items in his own pocket and said: ‘Tell your boss that the next person who follows me will be in no condition to report back again. Leave!'

The man left. Bruno went back to his table and showed the trophies. He said: ‘Let's try it.' He lifted the tiny meshed metal oval to his ear. Maria turned her mouth towards the collar of her coat.

She murmured: ‘I love you. Truly. Always.'

Bruno removed the earphone. ‘It works just fine, although it doesn't seem to know what it's saying.' He put the equipment away. ‘A persistent lot, aren't they. But so very, very obvious.'

‘Not to me. I think you should be doing my job. But did you have to let him know we were on to him?'

‘They know anyway. Maybe now they'll stop shadowing me and let me move around in peace. Anyway, how could I talk to you with that character invading my privacy?'

‘What is there to talk about?'

‘My brothers.'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean –
why
were they taken, Bruno?'

‘Well, for one thing, it's given that hypocritical, twisting, sadistic liar – '

‘Sergius?'

‘Are there any other hypocritical, twisted, sadistic liars around? He had the perfect excuse to fingerprint every man in the circus.'

‘How will that help him?'

‘Apart from giving him a feeling of power and making him feel very clever, I don't know. It doesn't matter. They're my hostages to fate. If I step too far out of line things will happen to them.'

‘Have you talked to Dr Harper about this? You can't risk their lives, Bruno. You just can't. Oh, Bruno, if I lose you and they're lost and all the others in your family gone – '

‘Well, really, you are the biggest crybaby I've ever met. Who on earth picked you for the CIA?'

‘So you don't believe this story about the kidnapping?'

‘Love me?' She nodded. ‘Trust me?' She nodded again. ‘Then don't discuss anything I discuss with you with any other person at all.'

She nodded a third time. Then she said: ‘Including Dr Harper?'

‘Including Dr Harper. He has a brilliant mind, but he's orthodox and doesn't have the central European mentality. I'm not brilliant, but I'm unorthodox and I was born right here. He might not care for some improvisations I might care to make.'

‘What kind of improvisations?'

‘There you are. The perfect wife. How come that red stain on your handkerchief? How should I know what improvisations? I don't even know myself yet.'

‘The kidnapping?'

‘Rubbish. He had to have a story to explain their disappearance. You heard him say he knew who a couple of the gang were but could prove nothing? If Sergius knew them he'd have them in Lubylan in nothing flat and he'd have the entire truth out of them in five minutes before they died in screaming agony. Where do you think you are – back home in New England?'

She shivered. ‘But why the threats? Why say they'd cut off your brothers' fingers? Why ask for that money?'

‘Background colour. Besides, liberally rewarded though Sergius may be for his nefarious activities, fifty thousand bucks in the hip pocket gives a man a very comfortable feeling of support.' He looked at his untouched coffee in distaste, put some money on the table and rose. ‘Like some real coffee?'

They returned to the exhibition hall looking for transport to the train, which was almost immediately arranged. As they moved out again into the darkness and the cold they met Roebuck coming in. He was pinched-looking, bluish and shivering. He stopped and said: ‘Hi. Going back to the train?' Bruno nodded. ‘A lift for your tired and suffering friend.'

‘What are you suffering from? Been swimming in the Baltic?'

‘Come winter, all the cab-drivers in this town go into hibernation.' Bruno sat silently in front on the way to the station. When they alighted at the siding opposite the passenger coaches Bruno sensed as much as felt something being slipped into his jacket pocket.

After the coffee, sweet music and sweet nothings in Bruno's living-room, Maria left. Bruno fished out a tiny scrap of paper from his pocket. On it Roebuck had written: ‘4.30. West entrance. No question. My life on it.' Bruno burnt the note and washed the ashes down the hand-basin.

It was during the last performance on the following night – it was officially billed as the opening night, although, in fact, there had already been two performances, a free matinée for school children and a somewhat shortened version of the full show in the afternoon – that the accident happened. Such was the rapturous enthusiasm among the huge audience that the effect was all the more shocking when it came.

The Winter Palace had not one empty seat left, and over ten thousand applications for tickets, made in advance over the previous two weeks, had had to be regretfully refused. The atmosphere at the beginning was gay, festive, electric in anticipation. The women, who gave the lie to the western concept of Iron Curtain women being habitually dressed in belted potato sacks, were dressed as exquisitely as if the Bolshoi were visiting town – which indeed it had done, thought not to so tumultuous a welcome – and the men were
resplendent in either their best suits or in bemedalled uniforms. Sergius, seated next to Wrinfield, looked positively resplendent. Behind the two of them sat Kodes and Angelo, the latter tending slightly to lower the whole tone of the atmosphere. Dr Harper, as ever, sat in the front row, the ever-present black bag unobtrusively under his seat.

The audience, suitably primed by all the wildly enthusiastic reports that had preceded the circus, were prepared for magnificence and that night they got it. As if to make up for the absence of The Blind Eagles – a broadcast announcement before the start of the performance had regretted that two members were indisposed, what Sergius didn't want to get into the papers didn't get into the papers – the performers reached new heights that even astonished Wrinfield. The crowd – there were eighteen thousand there – were entranced, enthralled. Act merged into act with the smooth and flawless precision for which the circus was justly famed and each act seemed better than the one that had preceded it. But Bruno that evening surpassed them all. That night he was not only blindfolded but hooded as well and his repertoire on the high trapeze, helped only by two girls on the platforms, who handled the two free trapezes in timing with the strict metronomic music from the orchestra, had an almost unearthly magic about it, a sheer impossibility that even had the most experienced circus artistes riveted in a stage
halfway between awe and outright disbelief. He climaxed his act with a double somersault between two trapezes – and his outstretched hands missed the approaching trapeze. The heart-stopping shock throughout the audience was a palpable thing – unlike the crowds at many sports ranging from auto-racing to boxing, circus audiences are always willing the performers to safety – and equally palpable was the sigh of incredulous relief when Bruno caught the trapeze with his arched heels. Just to show that there was no fluke about it, he did it all over again – twice.

The crowd went hysterical. Children and teenagers screamed, men shouted, women cried in relief, a cacophony of noise that even Wrinfield had never heard before. It took the ringmaster three full minutes and repeated broadcast appeals to restore a semblance of order to the crowd.

Sergius delicately mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. ‘No matter what you pay our young friend up there, it must always be only a fraction of what he is worth.'

‘I pay him a fortune and I agree with you. Have you ever seen anything like that?'

‘Never. And I know I never will again.'

‘Why?'

Sergius cast about for an answer. He said: ‘We have an old saying in our country: “Only once in a lifetime is a man permitted to leave himself and walk with the gods.” Tonight was such a night.'

‘You may be right, you may be right.' Wrinfield was hardly listening to him, he turned to talk to an equally excited neighbour as the lights dimmed. A millimetric parting appeared between the upper and lower parts of Sergius's mouth – one could not call them lips. Sergius was permitting himself another of his rare smiles.

The lights came on again. As usual, in the second part of his act, Bruno used the low wire – if twenty feet could be called low – strung across the cage, open at the top, where Neubauer was, as he liked to put it, conducting his choir – putting his dozen Nubian lions, an unquestionably savage lot who would permit nobody except Neubauer near them, through their paces.

For his first trip across the back of the cage on his bicycle and with his balancing pole, Bruno – without the normal burden of having to carry his two brothers – obviously found it almost ridiculously easy to perform the acrobatic balancing feats which in fact few other artistes in the circus world could emulate. The crowd seemed to sense this ease, and while appreciating the skill, daring and expertise, waited expectantly for something more. They got it.

On his next sally across the ring he had a different machine, this one with a seat four feet high, pedals clamped below the seat and a vertical driving chain four feet in length. Again he crossed and recrossed the ring, again he performed his
acrobatic feats, although this time with considerably more caution. When he crossed for the third time he had the audience distinctly worried, for this time his seat was no less than eight feet in height, with a vertical drive chain of corresponding length. The concern of the audience turned to a lip-biting apprehension when, reaching the sag in the middle, both bicycle – if the strange contraption could any longer be called that – and man began to sway in a most alarming fashion and Bruno had virtually to abandon any but the most elementary acrobatics in order to maintain his balance. He made it safely there and back, but not before he had wrought considerable changes in the adrenaline, breathing and pulse rates of the majority of the audience.

For his fourth and final excursion both seat and chain were raised to a height of twelve feet. This left him with his head some sixteen feet above the low wire, thirty-six above the ground.

Sergius glanced at Wrinfield, who, eyes intent, was rubbing his hand nervously across his mouth. Sergius said: ‘This Bruno of yours. Is he in league with the chemists who sell sedatives or the doctors who specialize in heart attacks?'

‘This has never been done before, Colonel. No performer has ever attempted this.'

Bruno started to sway and wobble almost immediately after leaving the top platform but his uncanny sense of balance and incredible reactions corrected the swaying and brought it within
tolerable limits. This time there was no attempt to perform anything even remotely resembling acrobatics. His eyes, sinews, muscles, nerves were concentrating on one thing alone – maintaining his balance.

Exactly halfway across Bruno stopped pedalling. Even the least informed among the audience knew that this was an impossible, a suicidal thing to do: when the factor of balance has reached critical dimensions – and here it already appeared to have passed that critical limit – only movement backwards or forwards could help to regain equilibrium.

‘Never again,' Wrinfield said. His voice was low, strained. ‘Look at them! Just look at them!'

Sergius glanced at the audience but not for longer than a fraction of a second. It was not difficult to take Wrinfield's point. Where audience participation is concerned a certain degree of vicarious danger can be tolerable, even pleasurable: but when the degree of danger becomes intolerable – and prolonged, as in this case – the pleasure turns to fear, a corroding anxiety. The clenched hands, the clenched teeth, in many cases the averted gazes, the waves of empathy washing across the exhibition hall – none of this was calculated to bring the crowds flocking back to the circus.

For ten interminable seconds the unbearable tension lasted, the wheels of the bicycle neither advancing nor going backwards as much as an
inch, while its angle of sway perceptibly increased. Then Bruno pushed strongly on the pedals.

The chain snapped.

No two people afterwards gave precisely the same account of what followed. The bicycle immediately tipped over to the right, the side on which Bruno had been pressing. Bruno threw himself forward – there were no handlebars to impede his progress. Hands outstretched to cushion his fall, he landed awkwardly, sideways, on the wire, which appeared to catch him on the inner thigh and the throat, for his head bent backwards at an unnatural angle. Then his body slid off the wire, he seemed to be suspended by his right hand and chin alone, then his head slid off the wire, the grip of his right hand loosened and he fell into the ring below, landed feet first on the sawdust and immediately crumpled like a broken doll.

Neubauer, who at that moment had ten Nubian lions squatting on a semi-circle of tubs, reacted very quickly. Both Bruno and the bicycle had landed in the centre of the ring, well clear of the lions, but lions are nervous and sensitive creatures and react badly to unexpected disturbances and interruptions – and this was a very unexpected disturbance indeed. The three lions in the centre of the half-circle had already risen to all four feet when Neubauer stooped and threw handfuls of sand in their faces. They didn't sit, but they were temporarily blinded and remained where they
were, two of them rubbing their eyes with massive forepaws. The cage door opened and an assistant trainer and clown entered, not running, lifted Bruno, carried him outside the cage and closed the door.

Dr Harper was with him immediately. He stooped and examined him briefly, straightened, made a signal with his hand, but it was unnecessary. Kan Dahn was already there with a stretcher.

Three minutes later the announcement was made from the centre ring that the famous Blind Eagle was only concussed and with any luck would be performing again the next day. The crowd, unpredictable as all crowds, rose to its collective feet and applauded for a whole minute: better a concussed Blind Eagle than a dead one. The show went on.

The atmosphere inside the first aid room was distinctly less cheerful: it was funereal. Present were Harper, Wrinfield, two of his associate directors, Sergius and a splendidly white-maned, white-moustached gentleman of about seventy. He and Harper were at one end of the room where Bruno, still on the stretcher, lay on a trestle table.

Harper said: ‘Dr Hachid, if you would care to carry out your own personal examination – '

Dr Hachid smiled sadly. ‘I hardly think that will be necessary.' He looked at one of the associate
directors, a man by the name of Armstrong. ‘You have seen death before?' Armstrong nodded. ‘Touch his forehead.' Armstrong hesitated, advanced, laid his hand on Bruno's forehead. He almost snatched it away.

‘It's cold.' He shivered. ‘Already it's gone all cold.'

Dr Hachid pulled the white sheet over Bruno's head, stepped back and pulled a curtain which obscured the stretcher. Hachid said: ‘As you say in America, a doctor is a doctor is a doctor, and I would not insult a colleague. But the law of our land – '

‘The law of every land,' Harper said. ‘A foreign doctor cannot sign a death certificate.'

Pen in hand, Hachid bent over a printed form. ‘Fracture of spine. Second and third vertebrae, you said? Severance of spinal cord.' He straightened. ‘If you wish me to make arrangements – '

‘I have already arranged for an ambulance. The hospital morgue – '

Sergius said: ‘That will not be necessary. There is a funeral parlour not a hundred metres from here.'

‘There is? That would save much trouble. But at this time of night – '

‘Dr Harper.'

‘My apologies, Colonel. Mr Wrinfield, can I borrow one of your men, a trusted man who will not talk?'

‘Johnny, the night watchman.'

‘Have him go down to the train. There's a black case under my bunk. Please have him bring it here.'

The back parlour of the undertaker's emporium was harshly lit with neon strip lighting which pointed up the coldly antiseptic hygiene of the surroundings, tiled walls, marble floor, stainless steel sinks. Upended coffins lined one wall. In the centre of the room were three more coffins on steel-legged marble tables. Two of those were empty. Dr Harper was pulling a sheet over the third. Beside him, the plump undertaker, a man with gleaming shoes and gleaming bald pate, virtually hopped from foot to foot, his professional feelings visibly outraged.

He said, ‘But you cannot do this. Straight into the coffin, I mean. There are things to be done – '

‘I will do those things. I have sent for my own equipment.'

‘But he has to be laid out.'

‘He was my friend. I shall do it.'

‘But the shroud – '

‘You will be excused for not knowing that a circus performer is always buried in his circus clothes.'

‘It is all wrong. We have ethics. In our profession – '

‘Colonel Sergius.' Harper's voice was weary. Sergius nodded, took the undertaker by the arm, led him some way apart and spoke quietly. He was back in twenty seconds with an undertaker three
shades paler and with a key, which he handed to Harper.

‘The parlour is all yours, Dr Harper.' He turned to the undertaker. ‘You may leave.' He left.

‘I think we should leave, too,' Wrinfield said. ‘I have some excellent vodka in my office.'

Maria was in the office, forehead resting on crossed arms on the desk, when the men came in. She lifted her head slowly, peering through half-closed eyes as if not seeing too well. A concerned and troubled Dr Harper was standing before her, an equally concerned Wrinfield and an impassive Sergius beside him: Sergius's facial muscles for conveying sympathy had atrophied over the years. Maria's eyes were red and puffy and glazed and her cheeks glistened. Wrinfield looked at the grief-stricken face and touched her arm awkwardly.

‘Do forgive me, Maria. I had forgotten – I didn't know – we shall go at once.'

‘Please, it's all right.' She dabbed at her face with some tissues. ‘Please come in.'