The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac (5 page)

‘If we can.'

‘Of course we can. Victoria station over the way, or Heathrow airport in half an hour.'

‘Do you still want to visit Prague?'

‘I want to go back to Lille and drop the whole thing. But tell me the truth and I might see that I can't drop it.'

‘It's not fair to you.'

‘It is! If the KGB are going to pull out my toenails in any case I might as well know why.'

‘I'll tell you as much as I was told by Kren: that the armies of the Warsaw Pact are the greatest guarantee of peace.'

‘Same old story! I've heard that one, Miss Fodor. Just for home defence against the wicked west. No threat to us at all!'

‘Mr Rivac, they are the greatest guarantee of peace because in time of war they might go over to the enemy. I think Kren had a list of the commanders who were prepared to defect and the units they were sure of carrying with them.'

‘The Kremlin would stick at nothing to discover that,' Rivac said, and then realised that his cheerful comment was a cold statement of fact. ‘Good God! And we . . .'

‘And we! Suppose the list was in the brochures which Kren made you take to London?'

‘They don't do it that way. Secret despatches belong to the time of Napoleon. They do it by radio. Transceiver under the floorboards. That sort of thing.'

Exactly! Zia, remembering her uncle's guarded explanation, saw it at once. They had to close down their transmitter in a hurry. That left them with no channel of communication except by hand and without a reliable agent. So Karel Kren, able to travel at will and still with no more than a question mark against his name, decided to go in person.

‘You didn't see anything out of the ordinary in the brochures?' she asked.

‘Not a thing. Anyway they would have been printed by the thousand.'

Having gone so far, Zia told him everything she knew, leaving out any mention of her uncle, and all her movements from Basle to Valenciennes.

‘Well, that explains Lukash,' Rivac said. ‘He was the radio operator. “Lukash calling” perhaps he used to say. He didn't know what he was sending because it was in code. All he could confess when they got him was who gave him the messages. That would have been a nameless member of the cell or just a drop at a postbox. But Kren came under grave suspicion as the link between Lukash and what you call the club.'

‘How do you know so much?'

‘Because my father ran the secret radio in Lille. I only heard all about it after the war, as soon as I was old enough to understand.'

‘Kren was left free too long.'

‘Oh, no! Cat and mouse act until he gave himself away. And he did.'

Cat and mouse act, yes. It occurred to Rivac that it would not be difficult for any experienced agent to have followed him all the way from Lille to Bridge Holdings to Buckingham Palace Road. He looked quickly behind him and realised that for all he knew the whole blasted KGB could be on his trail.

‘Those two men you saw getting on the same train as Kren—would you recognise them again?' he asked.

‘Yes. Yes, I was sure. I couldn't have made a mistake! I couldn't have!'

Zia had turned pale and was shaking all over. By now they were close to St James Park. He took her arm and led her to the nearest seat.

‘Courage! There is no danger. If they try anything on we have only to inform the police.'

He threw out his hand towards a policeman proceeding along Birdcage Walk and doing nothing at all with a proper air of stateliness.

‘No! No! I can't bear it any more. Don't you know I killed him?'

‘
Doucement, doucement, ma petite
! It was an accident.'

‘I hadn't any doubt. Tell me I hadn't any doubt!'

‘About whom?'

‘Him on the boat. He was one of the two on Kren's train. He must have followed you from Lille. And there was I talking to you. If he reported that we were together . . .'

‘But you haven't the strength. Imagination!'

‘Look! Touch!'

Her forearms, bare to the elbow, shot out from the slits in the green cloak. They were feminine enough but slightly out of proportion. Under his diffident fingers she deliberately hardened the sleek muscle developed by the reins and the épée.

‘The deck was empty. So I bumped into him to see what would happen. And then my cloak blew over us . . . oh, it was all in an instant like the crack of a whip. I heaved on the belt round his coat.'

‘But that woman?'

‘I never saw her. She was all shapeless under a rug.'

Only ten minutes earlier, Rivac exclaimed to himself, he would have called that policeman. But no, he wouldn't! Never! Well, why not? Poor girl! Poor? She could heave him right over the bench if she wanted to. Pink piece, good God, in the bottom of a lifeboat! But lucky they didn't pick him up alive. What do you mean—lucky? Think of papa and
maman
! Yes, but then there was a war. And what's this, if not? Say something to her, you fool!

‘I am most grateful to you, Miss Fodor,' he stammered very formally as if she had just picked up his hat which had blown away. ‘Between comrades . . .'

‘You understand?'

‘Desperation! Spur of the moment! I mean, not as if you were used to it.'

‘Is anybody?'

‘That thug—we can be sure he was—got what was coming to him! I don't wonder you wouldn't dine with me last night. Couldn't face it. But all alone much worse!'

Zia had got the crying and shaking under control. That was not due to any effort of hers and she knew it. The mere fact of having confessed her guilt to this very odd companion had done the trick. He reminded her of some half-tamed animal, leaping away and circling and then with unexpected intelligence returning.

‘What do we do now? Suppose that Spring man tells the police we are in some shady business together?'

‘Stick to our story.'

‘But the publicity!'

Any publicity would be deadly to the general since the connection between uncle and niece could not be missed. She could only hope that the club had been able to cover its tracks after receipt of her telegram.

‘Spring fired us out, and that's that,' Rivac said. ‘And if you are thinking of Rippmann—well, individuals must often be drowned without getting into the news. He followed me on to the boat and that's the end of him. He can't report on either of us, thanks to you.'

‘But the East German consulate or someone will make enquiries.'

‘And just hear he fell overboard. It isn't as if there was a case for the magistrates or the coroner. You're clear anyway. Harbour Police hardly questioned you. You're just a name on a file with a dozen others. Me, I may not have heard the last of it. Serves me right for jumping in when I needn't have done. What we must do now is to find the right place and they'll get us out of trouble.'

‘What right place?'

‘The place where Kren ought to have gone. Somebody gave him the wrong address. Wrong something. I don't know.'

‘How can we find it in all this?'—she pointed to the imposing remnants of Empire massed along Whitehall—‘and if we could, we haven't the brochures.'

‘I think they were just an excuse to make me call on Bridge Holdings. All straightforward they were. And Kren would never have risked secret ink when they were sure to test for it. But I can get the damned things. I've only to telephone my secretary. And you must fly back to Switzerland.'

‘No, I'll wait. I can get away with it somehow. There is always that charming Frenchman.'

‘Yes, he wouldn't let you go in a hurry, Miss Fodor. Well then you and I might have a weekend in the country.'

Zia had not expected this. Mr Rivac seemed to alternate between treating her as his commanding officer or his younger sister. But beautiful spies could not take offence at the drearier duties of the profession. She had to be tactful.

‘Mightn't it be embarrassing for you, Mr Rivac? We have to remember that you told the captain we were only casual acquaintances. And if they do keep an eye on me . . .'

‘
Nom de Dieu
, I did not mean . . . that is to say, it would be an honour, Miss Fodor. But never entered my head. No, I assure you. Just somewhere to stay quietly till the brochures arrive. Out of reach of all enquiries, you see. It is possible that I have not told you I was brought up in England. The village—I should be welcome there. And for you, not far away, is a choice of small hotels. When we meet it will be as strangers. And to my secretary I shall give the address of a Post Office.'

They decided it was wise to separate at once before British or other police had a chance to suspect any connection between them. Before Rivac left her he called his office in Lille asking his secretary to send to him at Poste Restante, Thame, the two new brochures of the Intertatry engine which were in the drawer of his desk. She was not to give away the address, saying that he was only in England for a few days and she did not know where he was staying. There had been, she told him, no enquiries except from the Intertatry manager who had invited him to Prague. Mr Appinger had seemed surprised to hear that he had been called away to England.

‘You can trust her?' Zia asked.

‘Suzi is a dragon, my dear! But very conscientious. I pay her, therefore she obeys me—quite often.'

‘And asks no questions?'

‘Naturally she asks questions, but sometimes I myself do not know the answers. It is the essence of a good business man to be alive to his intimations. So she is accustomed to not understanding. “But why, M Rivac, are you going to Paris?” she will say. “I have an idea, Suzi,” I reply. That is true, and as often as not I return with a new agency which is not the one I thought I intended. Then she sniffs and asks to what account she is to debit my travelling expenses. On this occasion what shall I say to her? Services to Mr Lukash?'

‘What is your Christian name, Mr Rivac?'

‘Georges. Why do you ask?'

‘Because my charming Frenchman has come to life. And I am Zia.'

They agreed to rendezvous at one o'clock the following day in the churchyard of the little town of Thame, not far from the village of Alderton where Rivac was brought up. By then he would have found accommodation for her and made sure that he had not been followed. He explained to her precisely how to take train and bus and recommended that she should pack the green cloak and cap instead of wearing them.

‘You will recognise me without them?'

‘We have known each other for twenty-four hours. It is quite enough.'

‘Enough?' she asked mischievously.

She had expected Georges Rivac to stammer his way out of that one; but he was used now to the way her mind as well as body took off on impudent wings and settled serenely.

‘Enough to be aware of the attractions of which Mr. Spring was good enough to warn me,' he replied with pretended gravity.

Rivac left London at once before any organisation—sure to be wildly exaggerated because unknown—could pick up his trail. He carried only his overnight bag, never intending to stay more than a day in England, and chose to walk the few miles from Thame to Alderton rejoicing in his second country and the scent and snow of the hawthorn dividing field from field and field from lane over the low-lying land.

It was twenty-one years since he had left the village for France, thereafter only returning at intervals to see his grandmother until her death in 1965. He found that Alderton had changed little except for a couple of housing estates where he remembered the cottages of agricultural workers, picturesque outside and inside foul and damp as the mud of winter. At least the neatness of colour-washed bungalows mostly with cars parked outside, was in keeping with affluent Europe however foreign to the stone and rosy brick of the village street. The manor which long before his time had descended the social scale into nothing more than an elaborate farm house had been tarted up and proudly exhibited its seventeenth-century architecture, lawns mown, shrubberies disciplined, a brood mare and a hunter in the white-railed paddock.

Daisy Taylor who had presided over his youth as his grandmother's cook and companion received him at her cottage gate, at first shyly and then with tears as he gathered her waistless rotundity into his arms.

‘Well, well, Master Georges! Who would 'a thought it? And there's a rabbit pie in the oven what you used to be that fond of and I only 'ope you don't want them red Spanish bangers in it what your dear grandmother used to buy whenever she could get 'er 'ands on 'em. And your room's nearly ready if you'll give a minute to get them sheets ironed, for it's no time ago that Mrs Stone slipped over to say as 'ow you'd telephoned her to give me a message.'

Yes, it would be the same welcome in France but different, and different in Spain but the same, and equally familiar to Czechs and Poles exiled from their Europe, not to mention butterflying Hungarians! He sat down in the kitchen while Daisy ironed the sheets and chattered of lives and marriages and the scandals which weren't really, Master Georges, scandals no longer. Twins it was, and it weren't 'im that wouldn't marry she but 'er that wouldn't marry 'e. And our Mr Longwill as you used to catch hares with not to mention that there deer which would 'ave brought you up before the beaks if the sergeant 'adn't been a particular friend of mine—he's made a lot of money in London and done the place up a treat. Got a bit above 'imself but there's nothing 'e won't do for you if you can put up with the way he carries on.'

‘Married?' Rivac asked.

‘One and a 'alf times. 'Ussies, both on 'em! Not that 'e's no better 'imself. Ah, I wouldn't mind being young agin in these days, what with them pills and all.'

‘Daisy!'

‘There! You 'aven't changed much, Master Georges! Still talkin' to 'em over the gate and then 'opping it, I bet!'