Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain (6 page)

“You will be going on so soon? But where?”

“Into Slovakia,” she said quite positively, asking no one’s agreement.

“No, really? You go to Bratislava, perhaps?”

“No,” she said, with the same authority; and if no one took her up on it now they were quite certainly committed. And no one did. “No, we want to go to the Tatras. We can make a longer stay in Prague on the way back. Is that the same way you wanted to go? You did say eastwards. Where is your home?”

“My home,” said Mirek, delighted, “is in Liptovsky Mikulás. That is very near the Tatra range. If you are really going so far, and if you would like to have a guide, believe me, I will make it easy for you, I will take care of everything. You have rooms in Prague? No? I can arrange it. The Students’ Union will manage it for us, you’ll see. And I will show you the city. I know it like my hand. How long you would like to stay? One night? Two nights? I shall make a programme for you. And then you will take me with you to Slovakia? I know the best camping-ground on the way, in Javorník, in the most beautiful hills. Oh, I shall work my passage, you will see!”

It sounded like the answer to everything. The others might have demurred at leaving Prague so soon in other circumstances, but with a heaven-sent guide added to the party, gratis, it seemed much the most practical and economic solution to run right through, as Tossa had urged, spend as long as possible in the east, and then make their way back, without a guide, over a road already travelled once. Even if they saw fit to vary it, they would at least know the lie of the land.

“It’s a bargain!” said Tossa, incandescent with eagerness. “One night in Prague, if you can really work it for us…”

“Two!” Christine demurred.

“One! We shall come back, and we shall know the basic lay-out then, we can easily find our way around. And then we go on to the Tatras. Mirek, you must know those parts awfully well, if it’s your home. Do you know a place—not in the High Tatras, actually, in the Low Tatras—called Zbojská Dolina?”

“Dig that!” said Toddy, impressed. “The girl’s been studying the map.”

“You have so good a map?” Mirek was astonished and respectful. “It is only a small valley. I think it is not marked on any map I know. We do not have many such large-scale maps for walking, like yours.”

Tossa fortified herself with a large bite from her cheese cracker, and made the most of the muffling noise. “No, it isn’t on the maps. I knew somebody once who stayed there, and they—she—said it was lovely. I always thought I’d like to go there.”

Geese, parading the dusty open green of the small town of Bor, scuffled with indignant shrieks from before the wheels of the van. The small, dilapidated castle mouldered peacefully among its trees on their right, as they curled through the single deserted street. Everything was coloured a faint, neutral brown. New pastel paint would have shattered a sacred silence. Border Bohemia drowsed, veiled itself, and let them pass by.

“Hey!” reminded Dominic peremptorily. “Which way at this fork? I can’t see any ‘Praha’.”

Children at the crossroads, in diminutive shorts and faded cotton sweaters, bounced, smiled and waved at them energetically. Of the welcome extended to foreigners, on this level, there was no possible doubt. They were the glitter in the children’s world.

“To the left,” said Mirek, sliding hastily back to his duty.

“This friend of mine,” Tossa’s voice persisted, doggedly offhand behind Dominic’s shoulders, “stayed at a little inn somewhere in this Zbojská Dolina. It was called the Riavka hut. Do you know it?”

They cruised down into a river valley, level green meadows on the near side of it, a sharp escarpment beyond, and climbed out again by a winding road, glimpsing silver on either hand as they turned.

“Why, yes, surely I know it,” said Mirek.

“My friend said it was lovely walking country there. We like to walk. Do you think we could get rooms at this Riavka hut? Do you think the Students’ Union would try to arrange it for us?”

They were climbing steadily into the little town of Stríbro.

“It means silver,” explained Mirek, as they wound their way into the square, and turned sharp right out of it, to uncoil in a long spiral down the mount on which the town was built. “Here there were silver mines.” And to Tossa, without turning his head, he said cheerfully: “Yes, they can arrange it. I shall do it for you. For you I shall do everything you wish.”

And not one of them had questioned this sudden detailed knowledge she had displayed of the region to which they were bound; no one had marvelled, and it was too late to marvel now. She had the whole expedition in her hands. They were going where, for her own inscrutable purpose, Tossa wished to go.

Mirek showed them Prague. Seeing they had tamely submitted to staying only one night in that delectable city, it was amazing how much he did manage to show them. The shopping centre, based firmly upon the great, broad thoroughfare of Wenceslas Square and the two streets forking from its massive foot, was concentrated enough to be viewed quite easily and quickly. But how did he manage to get them to Hradcany, that magical castle-quarter walled like a town within the fortress ramparts high above the Vltava river, and also out to the Mozart Museum in its lost, enchanted garden south of the town? It was impossible in the time, but Mirek did it. He showed them the little monastery of Loretto, long monkless, with its honeyed carillon of bells and its blinding treasury. He showed them the eleventh-century hall deep beneath the castle, austere, imaginatively restored and imperishably beautiful, after which all the loftier and later layers were anticlimax. And late in the evening he showed them a very handsome dinner, and two tiny night-clubs, each with an incomprehensible but apparently sophisticated cabaret.

They fell asleep in the beds Mirek had found for them, with a picture of Prague behind their eyelids, shabby, neutral-tinted, mouldering, gracious, imperial, drab, flamboyant, invulnerably beautiful; so old that it was indifferent to criticism; so assured that it turned a deaf ear to praise. The dirty industrial quarters hanging on its skirts were merely the soiled ruffles of an empress, dulled by one day’s wear. The fall of the tumbling terraced gardens beneath the castle, encrusted with stone statuary and grottoes and galleries, was a cascade of lace on the imperial bosom, heady and fresh as the acacia sweetness that hung on the night air.

And the next day they headed eastward for Slovakia.

They drove down out of the Javorník hills at leisure from their night camp, and into the town of Zilina. Beyond the civic buildings in the town square the crests of farther hills hung in the sky, pointed, shaggy, forested, the cones and pyramids of the Little Fatras. Mirek, moved to ecstasies of local patriotism as soon as he stood on Slovak soil, had whiled away the miles by telling them the story of Janosík, the Slovak outlaw-hero, who took to the hills here with his eleven mountain boys, in revolt against the feudal tyranny that kept his countrymen serfs. Born in the Fatra Hills, he died at last on a gallows at Liptovsky Mikulás, and after him all the mountain boys died tragic deaths. No happy ending for them; the usual comparison with Robin Hood, said Mirek a little didactically, foundered on that rock of martyrdom. There were many songs about Janosík, and Mirek knew them all. It took the waft of coffee from the foyer of the hotel to silence him.

“You’d like the second breakfast here? We’re not in a hurry to-day, and the next stretch is wonderful. You will want to stop and take pictures.”

They agreed that they could do with coffee. Toddy turned the van from the road, and let it run gently into the parking-ground along the hotel frontage.

“Look! An MG!” Christine halted them delightedly to admire a car from home. “No GB. Diplomatic plates! Somebody from the embassy must be here.”

“Idiot!” said Toddy amiably. “It doesn’t have to be an English owner. Probably United Arab Republic, or something. Half the world buys British when it comes to cars, especially semi-sports jobs like this.”

“There’s a suitcase on the back seat, anyhow.” Christine had already caught the Czech habit of walking all round unfamiliar cars and examining them closely, without the least embarrassment or offence. “So he’s not staying here, only halting like us. Maybe he smelled the coffee, too. What’ll you bet I can’t pick him out in the kavarna?” She had adopted the Czech word for café, it came more naturally now than the French; and since in English both were borrowed, why not use the native one?

“If you know the code,” said Toddy, “you can tell by the registration letters which embassy it belongs to. Do you know, Mirek?”

“It is someone from the British Embassy,” said Mirek at once.

Tossa’s warm, rose-olive complexion protected her from betrayal by pallor or blushing, and her silences were quite inscrutable. She looked the MG over, and dismissed it from her notice. “Come on,” she said impatiently, “I’m famished for that coffee.” And she led the way in through the cool, dim foyer, shoving the kavarna door open with a heave of her shoulder, and marching across the room to appropriate a table by the window.

“Mostly Czechs,” reported Christine confidently, looking round with interest as she sat down at the marble-topped table, scaled to allow half a dozen people to spread their elbows comfortably.

A white-aproned waiter came bustling to take their order. They left the talking to Mirek. Their only complaint against him was that he made everything too easy; but the time was coming when he would leave them to their own limited resources.

“Got him!” Christine proclaimed with satisfaction. “Don’t look round yet, he’s looking this way. In the corner away to the left, close to the mirror. Wait a moment, I’ll tell you when you can look. But that’s him! He couldn’t be anything but English. Mirek, do
we
go around looking as conspicuous as
that
?”

“Hurry up!” protested Toddy. “I’m getting a stiff neck, trying not to turn round. Can I look yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll tell you when.
Now, quick
! He’s just talking to the waiter.”

She was right, of course. There was only one person there who had to be English. You could almost say he had to be an English diplomat. Quite young, about thirty, dressed for the country, but so correctly that he retained a look of the town. Nondescriptly fair, rather lightly-boned among these solid square Czechs and gaunt, rakish Slovaks, withdrawn, gentle, formal. The cut of his sportscoat gave him away, and the Paisley silk scarf knotted in the throat of his open shirt. Even the way he drank his coffee was unmistakably English.

“Funny!” sighed Toddy. “You never notice anything special about people when they’re at home. Man, does it stick out here!” He plumped his chin into a resigned palm, groaning. “I give up! I bet from over there I look just like that!”

“Oh, not quite,” said Mirek comfortingly. “One could say, perhaps, English on sight, but not
embassy
English. More student English. It is a distinction.”

“Thank you! Thank you very much! I don’t
want
to be identifiable at a hundred yards.”

“Why not?” said Mirek disarmingly. “Are you ashamed of it?”

“He looks lonely,” said Christine. “Shouldn’t we pick him up? It would be quite easy. He’s giving Tossa the eye, anyhow.”

Tossa turned and gave the distant customer a long, considering look. Not a muscle of her smooth oval face quivered. “Not my type,” she said, after a merciless scrutiny, and turned back to her coffee. “Anyhow, he’s probably heading the other way, back to Prague.”

Christine shut her eyes for a moment to reckon up the days since they had left England. “Monday! Yes, I suppose he could be. Back to the grindstone after a week-end in Slovakia. But the way the car’s parked, I’d have thought he was going our way.”

Dominic had been thinking the very same thing, and was thinking it still; and the thought had first entered his mind in the instant when Tossa’s eyes had encountered those of the Englishman in the distant corner, held his gaze just long enough to register detached and unrecognising curiosity, and moved on just in time to avoid any suggestion of rudeness. For the man hadn’t been quite so adroit. He hadn’t the kind of face that gives much away, but for one instant there had been a kindling of his eyes, a sharpening of his attention, the unmistakable, instantaneous light of recognition. It was gone in an instant, too, without trace. He looked at her now with interest and approval across the room but as if he had never seen her in his life before.

Because he had recovered himself, and suppressed what she must not be allowed to see? Or because he had taken a hint from her cool, impersonal glance, and responded in kind as soon as he had grasped what she wanted? If the second, then they were in this curious affair together, and yet separately, for plainly he hadn’t expected Tossa to show up here in the middle of Europe, but equally plainly he had hastened to conform to what she desired when she did inexplicably appear. And if the first? Then Tossa wasn’t acting; he knew her but she did not know him, and there was something in the air important enough—or sinister enough—to make it expedient for him to dissemble his knowledge.

Dominic drank his coffee, and let their chatter ricochet round him; he was beginning not to like this secrecy at all. Tossa’s affairs were her own, but after all, here they were seven hundred miles or more from home, in an alien, and some would even have said an enemy, country. There had been one death, a death which began now to look more and more suspect. Beyond question Tossa was up to something, biting off, perhaps, much more than she could chew. And what could he do? Nothing, not even question her or offer help, unless she showed a disposition to want it, and that was the last thing he expected from Tossa. Nothing in the world he could do, except, perhaps, stay close to her and keep his eyes open.

When they paid for their coffee and left, Tossa walked out without so much as a glance in the stranger’s direction; but Dominic, looking back quickly from the doorway, saw that the waiter was just threading his way between the tables towards the Englishman’s corner.