Silesian Station (2008) (17 page)

'In the Castle? I'll find it.'

Kenyon nodded. 'Now, your other business here.' He took a small folder from a desk drawer, extracted a single sheet of paper, and passed it across. There were three names, two with telephone numbers, one with an address. 'These are all supplied by a Czech exile in the States, Gregor Blazek.'

Russell copied the names and numbers into used pages of his reporter's notebook, adding letters to the former and scrambling the order of the latter to a prearranged pattern. The address he memorized. 'What was Blazek's political affiliation when he was here?' he asked.

'Social Democrat. He only left in February, so the information should be up to date. I haven't done any checking, I'm afraid. I'm not supposed to know anything, or do anything.'

'Do you know where Blazek is living now?'

'Chicago, I think,' Kenyon said, checking the file. 'Yes, Chicago. I assume you've been given some guidance as to how to approach these people.'

'Oh yes.' Russell slipped the notebook into his inside pocket and got to his feet. 'Thanks for the help,' he said, extending a hand. 'And for the analysis.'

'Remember,' Kenyon told him, 'this building is still American territory. If you should find yourself in sudden need of a bolthole,' he explained, somewhat unnecessarily.

'Thanks,' Russell said. He could just see himself toiling up the hill with the Gestapo in close pursuit.

He walked back down to the Little Quarter Square and sat at an outdoor restaurant table opposite the St Nicholas church. The plate of pancakes on the adjoining table smelled as good as they looked, so he ordered an early lunch to go with the glass of wine. The pancake-eater, a middle-aged Czech man of prodigious size, gave him a congratulatory beam. Russell took Kenyon's piece of paper out to study the names, seeking some arcane clue as to which might prove the safest one to start with. When a shadow crossed the paper he looked up to find two German officers taking the adjoining table. He put it away.

The pancakes were delicious, and the Germans were still waiting for the waiter when he finished. From little acorns...

He took a tram back to the New Town, alighting on Na Poikopi at the bottom of Wenceslas Square. He walked on to the post office intending to use one of the public telephones there but had second thoughts when he noticed German uniforms in a room behind the counters. Masaryk Station, he decided. Secret agents always used stations.

The booths in the corner of the concourse seemed ideal. He took the last in the line because it offered the widest angle of vision, and rummaged through his pockets for the right coins. After dropping and recovering the piece of paper, he spent several seconds deciding which of the two numbers to call, in the end plumping for the second - the name that went with it was easier to pronounce.

A woman answered.

'Oto Nemec?' he asked.

A garbled burst of incomprehensible Czech.

'Oto Nemec,' he said again. 'Is he there?' he asked, first in English and then in German.

There was a loud click as the woman hung up.

Russell did the same, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. The Americans hadn't mentioned the possibility of language difficulties, and he'd foolishly assumed that they knew the contacts spoke English or German. He had committed the cardinal sin - expecting intelligence from Intelligence.

He dialled the second number. It rang a long time, and he was about to hang up when a hesitant male voice mumbled an answer.

'Pavel Bejbl?' Russell asked.

'Bejbl,' the man answered, correcting his pronunciation. 'I am Bejbl.'

'Do you speak English?' Russell asked. 'Sprechen zie deutsch?'

'I speak German.'

'I'm an American. Gregor in Chicago gave me your name.'

'Gregor Blazek?'

'Yes.'

There was a pause. 'Have you a message for me?'

'Yes, but I need to deliver it in person. Could we meet?'

Another pause, longer this time. Russell could hear a whirring noise in the background - a fan, probably. 'Today?' Bejbl asked. He didn't sound enthusiastic.

'Around six? You pick the place,' Russell said, in an instantly regretted attempt at reassurance.

'Do you know Strelecky Island?' Bejbl asked, suddenly sounding more decisive.

'No.'

'If you're looking from the Charles Bridge, it's just upstream. The Legii Bridge goes over it - there are steps on the southern side. There are benches at the northern end of the island. I'll be there at six-thirty.'

Russell could picture the spot. 'How...' he began, but the line had gone dead. He hung up the earpiece and re-examined the piece of paper. The third potential contact - Stanislav Pruzinec - lived in Vysoeany. Wherever that might be. Russell went back out onto the concourse and read through the platform departure boards, finding what he wanted above the entrance to Platform 2. Vysoeany was the fifth stop out on the line to Hradec Kralove.

A train was waiting, but so was the Acting Prime Minister. Tomorrow, he told himself. If he had the time. And sufficient inclination.

It was almost half-past twelve. He took a tram back to Wenceslas Square and walked up to the Europa. He felt depressed by the future that Kenyon had unrolled for him, the sheer unrelenting predictability of it all. Wars between classes might just replace one set of pigs with another, but they had some underlying point to them. Wars between nations, as far as Russell could see, had absolutely none.

The receptionist was reading Kafka's
Metamorphosis
.

'Enjoying it?' Russell asked in English as he took his key.

The man shook his head in wonderment. 'What a writer!'

'He used to work near here, didn't he?'

'You do not know?' The man scurried out from behind his desk, gesturing for Russell to follow. He crossed the road, still wildly waving an arm, and when Russell joined him in the wide central reservation pointed down towards the next intersection. 'That building on corner. He work there. See window on corner, third floor. Our greatest writer! Europe greatest writer! And he wrote about America too!'

Russell imagined Kafka hunched behind the glass, racoon eyes staring out. The man had been writing about Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia before they even existed. Small wonder he got depressed. 'A great writer,' he agreed with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. 'Thank you for showing me.'

Up in his room, he took out the piece of paper and set about memorising the various names and numbers. Once he had done so he tore the sheet up and flushed the pieces down the lavatory in the adjoining bathroom. Studying his appearance in the mirror, he decided a tie would probably go down well with the Acting Prime Minister and whichever noxious flunky the Nazis had waiting for him.

One tram took him back across the river, another carried him up and round the Castle hill. The Cabinet Room took some finding, as if the Czechs had deliberately hidden it from the Germans, and Karel Mares was waiting for him, checking through a box of papers on a corner sofa. He looked bone-weary, but there was a twinkle in his eyes. Many of his answers to Russell's questions showed a well-honed appreciation of how quickly conquered peoples learn to read between the lines.

'I must point out that the banning of national songs in cafes and bars only applies to provocative songs,' he said halfway through the interview.

'But aren't all national songs a provocation to an occupier?' Russell protested.

Mares just shrugged and smiled.

Russell asked him why he had warned his people against acts of resistance.

'Our people are used to open discussions and passionate debate,' Mares said, 'but we are living in a different world now. We must get used to this new world before we...well, before we decide what our political contribution will be.' The glint in his eyes suggested Guy Fawkes as a possible model.

Cheered by the encounter, Russell sat enjoying the view for a quarter of an hour before walking across to the Reichsprotektor's office in the Czernin Palace. After thirty minutes in the usual anteroom, stuck in front of the usual unforgiving portrait, he was taken to meet Gerhard Bimmer.

'I am permitted to speak for Reichsprotektor Neurath,' Bimmer began, as if there were others who wished to do so, but lacked the necessary authorisation. 'But I can only spare you ten minutes,' he added, somewhat untruthfully as it turned out.

Russell's use of the word 'occupation' opened the floodgates. Germany, Bimmer claimed, would rise to the challenge. The Czechs had behaved abominably to the Sudeten Germans, but the Germans would forgive them. More than that - the Germans would return good for evil, would win them over to the advantages of belonging to the Reich.

'Which advantages would those be?' Russell asked innocently.

Bimmer grunted with surprise. 'Power, of course. A seat at the table where the great issues are discussed. The Fuhrer offers everyone the chance to help build a stronger, purer world. A hard task of course, but so rewarding.'

'You seem to be offering the Czechs a share in the burden of empire,' Russell suggested, and soon wished he hadn't. Bimmer started off in another direction, through a seemingly endless catalogue of British sins, which ended, somewhat incongruously, in a listing of every German vessel scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1918.

Russell thanked him profusely and took his leave. He had a couple of great quotes, but who would believe a high-ranking government official could be that dumb? He would have to invent something more credible. It might be bad journalism, but made-up interviews with Nazi officials were so much more enlightening - and so much easier on the journalist - than the real thing.

There were almost three hours to kill before his meeting - his treff, as the Soviets would call it - with Pavel Bejbl. He walked slowly down through the Little Quarter and ambled out across the Charles Bridge, enjoying the sun-shine and the views. The beer garden on the far bank looked like a suitable place for getting his article in order. Two German officers were abandoning a table above the water's edge as he arrived, and the waiter wasted no time in removing their glasses. They were probably kept on a separate counter for spitting in.

He wrote steadily for an hour, conscious that he still lacked the crucial ingredient - material from ordinary Czechs. The beer garden steadily filled as the nearby workplaces emptied, and he eventually found himself sharing the table with two young women. Their English was as bad as his Czech, precluding any meaningful conversation. He listened as they chattered happily away in their incomprehensible tongue, and supposed that for them, and thousands like them, the occupation was nothing more than an occasional inconvenience. If you spent your days in an office and your evenings and weekends with your lover or family, what did it matter who ruled from the Castle?

It was another clear, warm evening. Strelecky Island was around four hundred metres away across the slow-moving Vltava, and he could see the benches under the trees on its northern end. Why had Bejbl chosen that place for their meeting? It looked a good place for a private talk, assuming the Gestapo weren't sitting in the trees. It also looked like a good place for a trap. From where he was sitting, there seemed only one way in and out. And a lip-reader with a telescope on the opposite bank...

Get a grip, Russell told himself. Lip-readers! He wouldn't even be saying anything incriminating, or at least not obviously so. The Americans had coached him thoroughly on the innocent message he brought from Gregor - how well he was doing in Chicago, the good wages and new car, but home-sick of course, so any news of his old friends and comrades would be most welcome. Did so-and-so know how they were doing?

If so-and-so had no idea, then that was that. If he knew - and sounded sympathetic - then it was on to the next, slightly less innocent step. And so on.

It was a few minutes after six. He paid for his drinks and made his way down the riverbank to the Legii Bridge. The German guards at the eastern end were sweltering in their uniforms, gazes seemingly hooked on the inviting waters below. Russell crossed in front of a bell-ringing tram and walked out towards the island. As he'd feared, the steps that Bejbl had mentioned were the only way onto the island. He stopped for a moment, reminding himself he had nothing to fear. Why would anyone trap him? He had done nothing illegal, not yet anyway. In the last resort he could always reveal that he was working for the SD. Hauptsturmfuhrer Hirth wouldn't let him down.

He trotted down the steps and turned left under the wide bridge. The island tapered to a blunt point some 150 metres ahead of him; the path that followed the water was shaded by oaks and, at the tip, a copse of white willows. Only the furthest bench was empty, the others occupied by two courting couples and a woman with a child. Russell sat down and stared back across the river at the beer garden he had just left.

Bejbl arrived ten minutes later. He was a thin, shortish man of about forty, his still-boyish face framed by floppy fair hair. He was wearing office clothes: a dark suit that had seen plenty of wear, a pale blue shirt and dark blue tie, badly-scuffed shoes worn at the heel. He sat down at the other end of the bench, pulled a half-smoked cigarette out from behind an ear, and lit it with a silver lighter. 'I am Bejbl,' he said softly in German.

'Thank you for coming.'

'What is your name?'

'John Fullagar,' Russell said, pulling his mother's maiden name out of the ether. How had he forgotten to prepare a false name for himself?

'You have a message from Blazek?' Bejbl asked. He was sitting forward on the bench, elbows on knees.

'Yes.' Russell went through his spiel, ending with the request for news from home.

'We are doing fine,' Bejbl said, flicking the cigarette stub away. 'Considering the situation,' he added.

'That is bad?'

'Of course it is bad.'

'Gregor would like to help. He and his friends in America.'

Bejbl smiled, leaned back, and loosened his tie. 'How?' he asked.

'With whatever you need.'

'Ah.'

'Are you interested?' Russell asked.