Dead Man's Tale (16 page)

The speech, now, was forgotten. So were the dimly-seen faces around the table. For Milo Hacha had the message he had been waiting for.

The note which the headwaiter had just brought him read: “A representative of the Ministry of the Interior wishes to see you in the other room.
At once
.” The note was unsigned.

Hurriedly reading the note a second time, Hacha felt his elation dissolve in an acid fear. The message he had been waiting for? Perhaps it was … reverse. The reverse! It was a test, as he had suspected from the beginning, and he had failed. He had done exactly the wrong thing. He should have refused to attend this stupid meeting.…

Hacha rose abruptly. All the damned nearsighted Socialist eyes were staring at him in bewilderment. Old Mydlár had stopped in the middle of a sentence; his eyes were the most bewildered of all. Libusé Mydlár was half out of her chair.

“You must excuse me,” Hacha said curtly. “I have had an important message.”

Libusé began to whisper something, placed her hand on his arm. But Hacha pulled away, went to the doorway and through it.

Andy saw the Slavic-featured man dressed like Milo Hacha crook his finger at the headwaiter. The headwaiter came over and stooped deferentially over the man's table. The man scribbled something on a slip of paper. He folded it once and handed it to the headwaiter with a decisive-sounding word in Czech.

The headwaiter immediately walked into the large room.

Andy watched the Slav at the table. He was glancing directly at the police agent guarding the door. The police agent nodded slightly, as if a signal or an order had been communicated to him.

Andy looked over into the big room. The headwaiter was handing over the folded paper to Milo Hacha with a bow.

What the hell was going on here?

“… the Gomulka government at the outset,” Vaclav Mydlár said, amazed at the unexpected power in his voice, “had the right idea. But what happened soon afterward in Hungary frightened the Poles. Tragically, what could have been the embryo of a true Social Democratic movement in Poland, a movement by evolution, not revolution, away from the Bolsheviks—this movement under a now-frightened Gomulka aborted, and Gomulka became an unwilling tool of the Bolsheviks, afraid for his life.”

Vaclav Mydlár paused to sip from his wineglass. Amazingly, Milo Hacha had become unimportant to him. His voice had not even faltered after he recovered from the surprise of Hacha's sudden departure. It was as if all the years of Mydlár's old, tired life had been pointing to this instant in space and time.

“… but slowly. For although the heavy foot of the Red horde lies on the neck of Europe, even the empire of an Alexander, Hitler, Lenin does not endure. It, too, crumbles under the erosion of time. This, my friends, is our legacy. This is our hope, our future. Let history say—”

Then Professor Mydlár stopped. Milo Hacha was striding back into the room. Purposefully. Not the indecisive Hacha who had spent several nervous days at the Mydlár home. This was a new Hacha.

A Hacha with a gun in his hand.

People all around the table, wondering at Mydlár's sudden pause, turned in their chairs to see what had stopped him. Mouths fell open. They sat frozen in their twisted attitudes.

Oddly, Vaclav Mydlár was now looking not at the approaching gun, but at his daughter Libusé. Libusé, too, sat frozen. But in her dark, intelligent face a bitter knowledge was imbedded in the horror.

So this is the end of me, old Mydlár thought in perfect calmness.

Then he heard two bursts of sound.

Then he heard nothing and felt nothing. He was aware only of the ceiling far, far above him.

Libusé's face came glazed and tender between him and the ceiling. Libusé … That was good.

“Go,” he heard his own distant voice. “You have always wished to go, my beloved. You have stayed only for my sake. But now I no longer matter and you must go, Libusé. Where you can speak out. Where they will listen. Libusé, where are you? Libusé …”

When Milo Hacha heard the two shots he sprang to his feet. “Sit down,” Minister Zander said. “It will probably take some time for you to grasp the thought that you are under arrest.” He sounded amused. “Meanwhile, sit down.”

Hacha mechanically obeyed. Then he saw a man darting out of the banquet room. Hacha thought, where have I seen him before?

Suddenly he knew. Why, in the mirror. He's me!… A double.
A double
.

The double turned his back, putting his hands to his face. When he turned around he was no longer Milo Hacha, but another man.

“The gun,” Minister Zander said sharply, holding out his manicured hand. “Good. Now get out, quickly.”

The man fled.

Hacha sat stupidly.

Minister Zander looked around the room. All but a dozen or so people at the tables were police agents. Dieter Loringhoven was going over to the young American's table, where the boy sat gripping an empty glass. He was very pale.

Zander shrugged. These few must be detained, arrested probably. Or, safest of all, quietly disposed of. It would not be difficult. The American boy was a complication, true, perhaps requiring a more elaborate solution.…

The Minister turned in some annoyance at a sudden scramble behind him.

Milo Hacha was struggling with three agents. Then, astoundingly, the three agents were flying through the air. And Hacha, with incredible speed, was running into the banquet room. “No!” he was shouting. “No! I am Milo Hacha!
I
am Milo Hacha!”

It was exactly like the dream Hacha had dreamed, over and over, since the war, of trying in vain to persuade the faceless people of his identity, his good intentions, his purity and compassion, while they tore him to pieces.

Some struck him. Some clawed at his clothes. His arms were being seized. His legs.

“Murderer!”

“Traitor!”

“It's a mistake! I tell you it was not I who—!”

The girl, Libusé, was screaming in his ear. Blows, blows rained on his face, his body, his soul. He tried to strike back, to kick, to penetrate the wall between them.…

Suddenly he was free, jumping over a heap of them where they had tumbled one another in their unorganized rage to get at him. But where to run? They were all between him and the doorway. He retreated slowly, talking, pleading, explaining, and almost fell over something soft and still. It was Vaclav Mydlár's body, still on the floor.

“No, see, I was outside. You all saw how they sent for me. They arrested me. I was helpless. It was someone else who came in here with the gun. You must not think … a trick … the police …”

But they heard nothing, as in the dream. They were stalking him now in a body, slowly, without expression. He kept backing up, talking, talking, until he could back up no more. Hacha wiped the blood from his eyes, crouching a little, waiting, talking, pleading.

A wineglass shattered against his cheek. Then they were upon him.

They picked Milo Hacha up—he was still talking, still telling them the simple truth of his innocence—and they flung him through the great window of the banquet room. He fell and fell in the warm bloody darkness watching Hradcany Castle spin and fly away until he fell no more.

In the vanguard of the people shouting and struggling through the overwhelmed police agents in the smaller room was Libusé Mydlár. She was thinking with great clarity as her slender body was being pushed and pummelled and propelled towards the narrow passageway to the staircase. I have to escape, now, tonight, or I never shall. He is dead and it was his dying wish. If not tonight, then never, for surely Hacha was in the pay of the government, and if I am not gone by morning they will come looking for me.

The words of her father's speech rang in Libusé's memory like cathedral bells proclaiming victory. That was his legacy to mankind, and she must deliver it.

Minister Zander sat in the wreckage of the Manes Café thinking hard.

One tear-gas bomb, he was thinking, just one and I'd have had them all. But there were no tear-gas bombs. Who could have anticipated a flock of sheep turning on their dogs?

Worst blunder of all, Zander mused, was allowing Milo Hacha, fool that he was, to offer himself as a sacrifice on the altar of self-justification. He should have been spirited away the moment he left the banquet room in response to the note. As it was, he was dead, and of what use was a dead man at a State trial?

I don't even have the American, the Minister thought sourly. Of course he took advantage of the confusion to escape with the sheep.

Zander glanced over at the table that the young American had occupied. Dieter Loringhoven was standing there, supporting himself with one hand on the table top, the other dabbing at his mouth with a bloodstained handkerchief. Another fool. Whom could one depend on!

Some police agents appeared, gripping the arms of half a dozen captured sheep. A fine haul! the Minister thought. Of course the girl, Mydlár's daughter, was not among them. Nor the American …

Four cylinders of cotton, Zander thought. And some eye shadow and a few other tricks. That was it, naturally. The man can be found, I know where to find
him,
at least. Several months in a dungeon, a little scientific starvation, the unfailing conversion of the brain to believe its assigned identity and its guilt—that was child's play.

But suddenly Minister Zander realized that he needed more than a resurrected Milo Hacha to repair the damage. His own skin was in peril now.

If I can give them an additional scapegoat …

“Lieutenant,” Minister Zander said.

A rather battered police agent ran over and stood stiffly at attention.

“You will arrest that man,” Minister Zander pointed to Dieter Loringhoven.

PART VI

ANDY

23

When he had fought his way to the street, Andy broke through the crowd surrounding Milo Hacha's body, intent on nothing but getting away—fast. His knuckles, where they had smashed in some of Dieter Loringhoven's teeth, were bleeding profusely, but the hell with that now.

Then he stopped. A woman ahead of him was trying to shoulder her way through the throngs on the sidewalk; she was biting her lip, holding her side. It was the dark, pretty girl he had seen upstairs with Milo Hacha and the old man who had been shot.

Andy lunged and grabbed her arm. She turned fiercely, ready to scratch his face. “Wait, wait,” he said in German. “I know who you are and I'm trying to get away, too. Are you hurt badly?”

“No.… My ribs. Bruised …” Her eyes were wild.

“Have you a car?”

“Yes. But—”

“Where is it? On this street?” Meanwhile he was hurrying her down the hill, towards the river.

“No, no, this way,” the girl panted, rounding the corner. “The third car—you must help me—get away—” She stopped dead in her tracks, her eyes widening. Then she edged into the shadow of the building.

The third car was a long black sedan, a Russian-built Zis. And there, leaning against the front left door, stood a man in uniform.

A police uniform.

“Take it easy,” Andy said in a low voice. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and searched as if for a match. “Do you have a match, dearest?” he asked loudly. “No, of course, you don't smoke. Why can't I remember?” He laughed and said, “Perhaps this policeman …”

He walked leisurely towards the policeman, who was watching them suspiciously. The man's hand went to his holster.

“Do you happen to have a match, officer?” Andy asked in German. He was still poking around in his clothing.

The man said something sharp in Czech. Libusé screamed, “
He knows!”
and Andy was astonished at the speed with which the Luger jumped into his hand and went up and came down with a sickening thud on the policeman's head. The man's eyes turned over and he slid peacefully to the sidewalk, falling over on his face.

I did it, Andy thought, appalled. I really did it. He had felt a kind of leaping satisfaction at the impact of his fist against Loringhoven's mouth in the café, but this … a gun … The poor guy might even be dead.…

He felt the girl shaking his arm wildly. “Come, come, we cannot stand here!” she was saying, over and over.

“Oh … Yes.” He snatched open the car door and she scrambled in. “Wait. The key! Do you have the key?”

“What?” She sounded dazed.

“The ignition key!”

“… driver. Police driver. My father was an official of the government, you see.…”

Andy knelt and frantically began to search the policeman.

“You must hurry. Please,” the girl said in a dead voice.

He found a ring of keys and ran around the car and jumped in behind the wheel. It was like an old-time movie. He kept jabbing keys into the ignition lock and none of them would fit. People were screaming and running past the corner, chased by police agents, and Andy expected the fallen policeman to be spotted at any moment. When one of the keys slid into the lock he found himself saying silently, thank you, thank you, thank you.

The sedan jerked away from the kerb. Andy headed it down the hill towards the Charles Bridge.

“South of Trebon in the Bohemian forest,” Libusé said in the same dead way. “Who are you?”

“My name is Andy.”

“The border there. They can't guard every metre of the pine forest at night.”

“I beg pardon?”

“The gasoline.”

Andy was bewildered. She did jump around so. Must be shock. “What did you say?”

“Is there enough gasoline?”

But they were rolling across the cobbles of the Charles Bridge now, and Andy quietly put the Luger in his lap. There was a police booth at the other end of the bridge. To his amazement, the policeman stepped aside, saluting, to let them pass.

Andy almost laughed as he released his breath. He had forgotten. This was an official car. Cosy!