Masaryk Station (John Russell) (30 page)

‘You will be when it works.’

The Czechoslovak railways seemed in worst shape than the German, and it was early evening before their train entered the outskirts of the capital. As they rumbled into Wilson Station, Russell remembered Karel hustling him into the bathroom. ‘When we get to our hotel room, be careful what you say,’ he advised Effi. ‘It’ll probably be bugged.’

‘Will there be hidden cameras to film our love-making?’

‘God only knows.’

They barely had their feet on the platform before a familiar face turned up. ‘This is Petra Klíma,’ Russell said, introducing her to Effi. ‘Ministry of Culture,’ he added.

‘I loved your film,’ Klíma told Effi, as if she’d only made the one.

There was a car waiting outside, along with a young male chauffeur. He quickly stamped out his cigarette when they saw them approaching, then opened a door with studied insolence, as if regretting the show of deference. Once Effi and Russell were in the back, Klíma joined him in the front.

Their hotel was supposedly close to Císař’s apartment, and the drive to Smichov took about twenty minutes. En route they passed the sites of several lacunae in Russell’s espionage career, but given Klíma’s probable fluency in German he forbore from pointing them out to Effi. It looked as though their time in Prague would be highly supervised, which might be a problem when it came to meeting Janica.

The hotel was on Zborovska, one block west of the Charles River. It didn’t look much from the outside, but their suite was large and well-furnished. Once Klíma had left them to get settled in, they left the tap running noisily in the wash-basin and sat either end of a brimming hot bath, discussing their plan for the next two days. They were still there when Klíma started banging on the outer door, intent on escorting them down to dinner.

While Effi was dressing, Russell told the Czech woman that their travel plans had changed, that while he still planned on travelling on to Vienna, Effi would be going straight back to Berlin. Could Klíma check the Vienna trains on Wednesday, and arrange the appropriate permit?

She didn’t foresee any problem.

There were no other guests in the dining room, which seemed a trifle strange, and Klíma’s explanation—that people ate late in Prague—bore no relation to Russell’s experience. She didn’t sit with them, claiming she’d already eaten, but sat alone at a table near the door, as if on sentry duty. Her German, they’d discovered, was as good as her English.

The food and wine were both excellent, but the thought of microphones close by inhibited conversation. After coffee, when Russell announced that they were going to take a romantic stroll by the river, the Czech woman said she would join them.

‘How are we going to get rid of her?’ Effi asked Russell, once back in their bathroom with the tap full on.

Russell had already come up with an answer. ‘After lunch tomorrow, you’ll say how you’ve never been here before …’

‘I haven’t.’

‘… And ask to see some sights. I’ll say I’m coming, too, and then I’ll drop out at the last moment. I’ll say I’m tired, and am coming back here for a snooze.’

‘You
are
fifty next year.’

‘Thanks for reminding me. I still have some youthful vigour, you know.’

‘Remember the cameras!’

‘They’ll be in the bedroom.’

The appointment with Jaromír Císař was at ten the next morning. He was clearly overjoyed to meet Effi, kissing her several times on both cheeks and cupping her face in his hands to study it more thoroughly. Russell would have slapped him, but she took it all in her stride. Bloody thespians, he thought, echoing a character in a movie whose name he couldn’t remember.

‘What a lucky man!’ was all Císař said to him, but even that was
four words more than Klíma received. She just hovered in the background, smiling an uncertain smile.

One of the apartment’s two bedrooms had been converted into a projection room, with four seats facing a plain white wall. Císař had already seen two of the sampled films, so they watched the rushes from Effi’s performances in the other two. The director sat with a rapt look on his face, expressing his appreciation of a particular look, gesture, or spoken line by patting Effi’s hand with his own.

‘I already have a project in mind for us,’ he told Effi when they emerged. ‘An adaption of a book by one of our best young writers, which our Culture Minister has publicly praised, so there should be no problems from that direction.’ He shot Klíma a glance, and received an angry one back.

‘What’s it about?’ Effi asked.

‘It’s about who we are. Czechoslovaks, that is, but also human beings. The central character, which you would play, is a Sudeten German mother. People assume that all Sudeten Germans were eager to join the Reich in 1938, but they weren’t. This woman’s family opposes the Nazis, and she loses a son as a result. And seven years later, she loses another one, when the Czechs take out their frustrations on all the Germans they can lay their hands on. And through it all, she refuses to grow bitter—she’s convinced that people are people, no matter which group they think they belong to. When she finds out that her daughter is having a love affair with the son of one of the Czech vigilantes—a nod to Romeo and Juliet, of course—she moves heaven and Earth to save the girl from the wrath of her own third son. That’s a very crude summary, but you get the idea. When I’ve finished the adaption’—he nodded towards the desk, where a pile of pages and an overfull ashtray flanked his typewriter—‘I shall send you a copy.’

Their leave-taking was extended by another long examination of
Effi’s face from various angles, but eventually Císař let them go. The Skoda was waiting outside, the driver smoking another cigarette, which he took his time stubbing out. ‘Hollywood suddenly seems less appealing,’ Effi remarked once they were seated.

‘I don’t suppose Mickey Mouse has heard of the Sudetenland,’ Russell added flippantly.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, of course. But they do make good movies in Hollywood. Just not the sort that he makes.’

The car was on the move.

‘Where are we going?’ Russell asked.

‘To lunch,’ Klíma told him.

The restaurant was only a few minutes away, and a table had been reserved in the garden, which overlooked the Charles and offered a panoramic view of Malá Strana and its looming castle. This time Klíma did eat with them, and Russell set out to disarm the young woman with questions about her family. It half-worked, but no matter how many times he offered the bottle of wine, she refused to take a refill. She was, he decided, depressingly single-minded.

He asked if she’d remembered his train ticket. ‘Yes,’ she said, digging in her handbag, ‘I forgot to give it to you.’ The hand emerged with an envelope. ‘Here it is. The Vienna express leaves Wilson Station at 10 A.M.—that’s half an hour after Fraulein Koenen’s train to Berlin.’

Russell pocketed the envelope and thanked her, glad that his train was departing after Effi’s. After his recent experiences in Prague he hadn’t fancied leaving her on the platform.

‘So what shall we do this afternoon?’ Klíma asked, like a mother inviting suggestions from the children. ‘Now that your business is done, some sightseeing perhaps. Prague is a very beautiful city.’

‘I’ve been here many times,’ Russell told her, ‘and I think I’d rather
have a lie-down at the hotel. But I’m sure Effi would like to see some sights.’

‘I’d love to,’ Effi agreed enthusiastically.

Klíma looked flustered for a moment. ‘But how would you find your hotel?’ she asked, adding with more than a hint of suspicion that she hadn’t thought he spoke the language.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Russell replied cheerfully. ‘But you can hail me a cab and tell the driver where to take me.’

She looked relieved at that. ‘Yes, why not?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But first I must, how do you say it in English? Powder my nose.’

It took her a long time, long enough to ensure that someone would be waiting when he got back to the Slovan.

When she returned they all walked out to the pavement, and a cab was duly waved down. Klíma gave the driver his instructions, which included an awful lot more than the name of their hotel, if the cabbie’s face was any guide. Russell gave Effi a parting kiss, wished both women an enjoyable afternoon, and climbed into the front seat.

‘And you have a good rest,’ Effi said sympathetically.

As Russell had hoped, his driver headed for the Legii Bridge. There were traffic lights at the far end, and his 50-50 chance came good—they were red. He slid the $10 note into the other man’s pocket with one hand, opened the nearside door with the other, and deftly stepped on to the road.
‘Cigaretten,’
Russell said, miming a smoke and raising a hand in farewell. The cabbie sat there stupidly for a few seconds, until the rising chorus of horns behind forced him to let in the clutch.

Russell walked in the opposite direction, and ducked through the doorway of the first suitable sanctuary, which turned out to be a junk store piled high with old furniture. He didn’t think the cabbie would come looking for him, but those the man reported
to probably would. Russell skulked inside the store for at least ten minutes, searching through a tray of second-hand earrings, swapping smiles with the bewildered proprietor, and keeping a watch on the street.

Eventually he ventured out. The tram route was two blocks north, so he hurried in that direction, keeping as much as he could to the shadows. Once aboard a northbound car, he consulted his watch. He had almost three hours to kill before his
treff
with Janica, and he didn’t want to spend them out in the open. A bar seemed a good bet, and after changing trams and re-crossing the river he found one in the Old Town backstreets, about a ten-minute walk from Masaryk Station. With only an incomprehensible Czech newspaper to read, he worked his way through two beers and a compensatory cup of strong black coffee, before finally setting out on the final lap. The first thing he did on reaching the station was find the public toilets, and relieve the pressure on his bladder.

Back on the concourse, he sought out an ill-lit corner and began his vigil. It somehow seemed fitting that his future should hang on a meeting here, in a station whose name reeked of failure. Both father and son had sought the humanist middle ground between rampant capitalism and communism, and both had failed. They had not been alone—the entire European left, himself included, had sought in vain for a socialism that worked—but Jan Masaryk’s tragic end, thrown from a window by communist thugs, seemed like the final straw.

Masaryk Station, the end of the line.

It was getting busier by the minute, as people who worked in the centre of town took their trains home to the suburbs. Which was perhaps why Janica had chosen that time of day. If so, it was a smart move.

The clock above the platform barrier was showing two minutes
past, but so far he hadn’t seen the face in the photograph. But it was then that he noticed her, sitting on a bench on the other side of the concourse. As he did so, she threw him an irritated glance and nodded slightly. She’d probably been there for a while.

He ambled over and sat down beside her. ‘Janica, how good to see you,’ he said softly in German. Merzhanov had claimed she spoke it quite well, or at least much better than he did. ‘Have you been visiting your mother?’ Russell asked, completing the password which the Russian had given him.

‘No, she moved to Brno,’ Janica answered, which according to Merzhanov was actually true. She was a slightly plump, full-breasted woman, with dark shoulder-length hair, an attractive mouth, and surprisingly steely eyes. Her ensemble of white blouse, black skirt, and two-inch heels nicely avoided the twin pitfalls of too conspicuous and too anonymous. Another smart move.

And she looked younger than her photograph, which was a definite bonus, now that that they wouldn’t be making her up.

‘Let’s walk,’ Russell suggested, getting to his feet.

She followed suit, taking his arm, and only asked where they were going as they emerged on to the street.

Russell steered them across before answering. ‘To Wilson Station to buy you a ticket,’ he said. ‘In my pocket there are papers with your picture in the name of Ruza Zdeněc,’ he told her, remembering how Effi had considered it a good omen that Grelling had chosen the Czech equivalent of Rosa. ‘Do you have the film with you?’

‘It’s in my bag. And it stays there until we cross the border.’

‘That won’t be possible,’ Russell said. ‘My wife will be taking the film to Berlin, and I shall be taking you to Salzburg, and Merzhanov. It will be safer for us all that way. My wife is less likely to be searched at the German border than you are, and if they stop you at the Austrian border you’ll be better off without the film. A lot better off.
You’d only get five years for trying to leave the country without permission, but if you’re caught with this film the Russians will shoot you.’ Though exaggerating for the Czech woman’s sake, he still felt a shiver of apprehension for Effi.

Janica was silent for a while, mulling over what he had said. Eventually she asked the inevitable question—‘why should I trust you?’

‘I can’t answer that.’ He had thought about confiding Effi’s plan to hide the film among others, but the StB might get that information out of her before Effi reached the border. ‘Except to say this,’ he went on, ‘why would we get you false papers and buy you a railway ticket if we meant to betray you?’

‘I haven’t seen these papers yet.’

The street they were on was empty. ‘Take them now,’ he said, extracting the envelope from his pocket. ‘Put it in your bag,’ he advised her. ‘The papers are there, and the money you’ll need for the ticket to Vienna. You can see for yourself in the station toilet.’

They walked across the park that fronted Wilson Station and in through the main entrance. Russell waited while she went off to examine the contents of the envelope, and on her return he led the way to the station buffet. There was an empty table in one corner.

‘I will trust you,’ she told him, when he came back with two coffees. ‘I have no other choice. Do you want the film now?’