Snare of the Hunter (3 page)

“I’ll see you around eight, perhaps half-past. I’d like to find your cottage before it’s too dark to judge what turn I make at the potato fields. Last time I visited you, I came down the Montauk Highway, made a sharp left at the pond, passed the village green, kept on going along Main Street—old houses and big trees, then some shops, et cetera, and then a windmill. And then what?”

“Bear right and take the next turn on your right. Follow that until you reach the golf course. Then turn left keep on going for half a mile.”

“And then the potato fields. Are they still there?”

“Mostly. Take the second lane on your right towards the ocean.”

“And there you’ll be, among the honeysuckle, thornbushes, and dunes. See you.”

David was left staring at a dead receiver. He replaced it thoughtfully. Mark Bohn’s telephone calls were usually brief. Bohn liked his comforts, and five hours of driving (here and back to New York) wasn’t his idea of bliss. Bohn never did anything without a purpose. So what was bringing him out all the way here? Urgent, he had said. It must be damned urgent.

David put one of his long-playing tapes into the machine, adjusted the volume and tone, went back to his typewriter. He had the work completed by half-past seven, with a varied selection of Vivaldi and Albinoni keeping him cheerful company. The special thing about that kind of music, he thought as he changed into his swimming trunks, was that it didn’t add to your aggravations and annoyances. It didn’t jar your spine, set your teeth on edge. And the miracle was that it didn’t cloy either. Small wonder that people were still listening to those clever old Venetians after two hundred and fifty years.

He went into the porch, waited for the last movement of an Albinoni concerto to end. You couldn’t walk away from that interweave of strings with the trumpet dominating the intricate background. Just the finest trumpeter in the world, he thought as Maurice André let his last notes ripple and soar. Soar as high as these white clouds, tinging now with gold, over the immense sea. Then there was only silence and the steady beat of breaking waves.

He walked over the short stretch of rough grass, followed the path between beach-plum bushes and dog roses, came to the big dunes that blocked his cottage from winter storms. The path went round one side of them—Long Islanders didn’t approve of breaking down dunes by trampling over them—but tonight David went straight over, running now as he jumped on to the deep soft sand. His pace increased as he reached the harder stuff, packed and smoothed by the tide’s reach. He let out a long war whoop as he raced for the edge, running slow-motion until the water was waist-high. Then came the big ones rolling in from the Atlantic. He dived at the base of an upcurling wave, got safely through before it smashed downward. Another dive and he was beyond this line of surf and swimming strongly. It was almost calm tonight, by Atlantic standards, but it was wiser to turn back before he reached the second line of breakers which rose and fell over some unseen reef or sand bar. This was far enough from the shore: he might enjoy taking a risk, but he was not foolhardy. The return was easy, with the ocean helping him tonight: the spasms of the hidden waves floated him in. Some days, he almost had to fight his way back; other days, he wouldn’t put an ankle into this water.

He flopped down on the empty beach, rested in its peace. There wasn’t a fishing boat in sight. Some gulls. Some sandpipers, scuttling along the frothing edge of the waves, their sharp bills busy searching for food before the brilliant sunset ebbed away. At last he picked himself up and began walking to the cottage. He was beginning to feel cold, but pleasantly: it was the first time he had been really cool today. He wondered, still listening to the perpetual waves, how the whalers in the old days managed to get their boats launched through that surf. They did, too. Now that was real toughness for you, he told himself, as he broke into a jogging run.

A Buick was standing in the driveway beside the cottage. Two men were waiting on the darkening porch.

“Eight-fifteen,” Mark Bohn called out. “I told you we’d manage it. And I brought a good driver along with me, just to make sure. Hugh McCulloch.” He nodded to a tall man beside him.

Hugh McCulloch? David studied the stranger briefly. Am I supposed to know him? he wondered. “Let’s move inside,” he suggested. He shook hands and led the way, switching on the lights. “Pour yourselves a drink. I’ll find some clothes. You both look so damn formal.” Hugh McCulloch was carrying a briefcase, looking round uncertainly for a place to drop it. David moved into the bathroom for a quick shower to free the sand from his hair and skin. Dressing took a couple of minutes: chino pants, short-sleeved shirt, feet shoved into loafers. Outside in the living-room he could hear Marie fixing the drinks and doing all the talking. It struck David suddenly that all three of them were embarrassed by this meeting, each in his own way. It was an intrusion on him, certainly. (“Look at this,” Bohn was saying near the desk, “he really has been doing some work!” It obviously surprised him.) On the other hand, it had certainly been one hell of a nuisance for these two men to come chasing down all this distance. Bohn would go anywhere in search of a story. But McCulloch did not look the type to make unnecessary journeys.

“Well,” David Mennery said briskly as he returned to the living-room, “do we eat now or later? There isn’t much to offer you, I’m afraid. Closing up house, you know.”

“Wouldn’t trouble you,” McCulloch said. “We can stop for some food on the way back to New York.” He left the bookcases, where he had been studying the titles. He had a pleasant voice, quiet and gentle like his manner, yet firm. He stood at least six feet, a couple of inches above David and four inches more than Mark Bohn. His hair had been reddish blond: it was now well mixed with white, and thinning. It was conservatively cut, giving him a neat, smooth look. So were his clothes, a lightweight grey suit, a white shirt, a navy tie. Observant brown eyes; pale complexion as if he spent a lot of time indoors. A man in his mid-forties? Not much more. No, thought David, I don’t remember this McCulloch at all, yet there’s a friendly look about him as if he recognised me.

“No trouble,” David lied cheerfully. Too bad about that steak he had hoped to broil tonight. Divided three ways, it would supply a couple of mouthfuls apiece. “There’s cheese and some ham. And,” he added with a grin, as he caught sight of Bohn’s face, Mark the well-travelled epicure, Mark the connoisseur of wines, “we can always fill up the corners by opening a can of beans.”

“I think we should talk first,” Bohn said.

“Fine,” David agreed, and took the Scotch Bohn handed him. Bohn was trying to appear at ease, but he was definitely nervous. Physically, he looked much the same as always: thin-faced, hawk-featured, with amused grey eyes behind round wise-looking glasses. He had dark hair, straight but now long-stranded with limp locks straggling over his collar. By startling contrast, there was a fuzz of sideburns, thick and grey, bulging from his cheeks. If Bohn had grown all that hair in the hope of looking younger, he had achieved the opposite effect. He looked a tired fifty, with all the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders. Actually, he was two years younger than David, making him thirty-seven. David resolved to have a good haircut tomorrow, not short, but not below the collar line either. “Well, what’s all this about?” And what, he was wondering again, could bring three men like us together?

McCulloch had taken a chair, his briefcase lying neatly and not too obviously alongside. He was going to leave the talking to Bohn. A very diplomatic type, thought David, sitting opposite him: he looked as cool and crisp as if he hadn’t travelled almost the length of Long Island on a hot and sticky evening. Bohn, by contrast, was feeling the humidity, although the chill sea air was circulating through the room. He pulled his wide Italian silk tie loose, opened his striped English shirt, then went the whole way and took off the creased jacket of his light gabardine suit. He threw it aside, took another drink, ran his hand through his hair. Yes, thought David, definitely nervous. Of me? That’s unlikely. Of McCulloch, who looked like a good-tempered kind of man? Then Bohn’s hesitations dropped away from him. He became his old business-like self; very capable, quick-talking, thoughts arranged in neat patterns. He went straight to the matter. “Jaromir Kusak’s daughter wants to get out of Czechoslovakia.”

David felt all expression drain from his face. “Irina?”

“Irina. And she needs help.”

David made no reply. The door to one of the rooms in his past life had been wrenched open. He had closed it, locked it, eventually thrown its key away, and here it was, forced ajar and gaping. At least, he thought, he could now bring himself to look inside, see it all as a small museum. Sixteen years was a long time in emotional drainage. He had no feelings left about Irina. Now he could even let himself remember her, remember Prague in the autumn of 1956. A girl he had met on his first day there. By accident. The totally unexpected. And himself when young, almost twenty-four, just out of the army, with enough money saved to let him wander through Europe for a couple of months. It might be a while before he’d ever be able to travel there again; it would give him time to decide whether or not he was going back to college. He had enlisted voluntarily at the end of his sophomore year at Yale, in the middle of the Korean War, when the draft had been stepped up. Partly because an enlisted man had some choice in his branch of the service. Partly—to be brutally truthful—because the group around him talking of draft evasion (and let the other guys do it) had given him a small pain at the base of the spine. What other guys? Anyone except me, me, me? Of course, no one put it as bluntly as that: rationalisations were neat as always, and even dear old morality got dragged in by the hair of its head. The comic thing was, he had enlisted in a state of depressed anger, and then he hadn’t been sent to Korea to get his tail shot off. Instead, he had been assigned to West Germany. And when he was free, he had headed for Vienna because the action was there, music and international politics, his two developing interests. (The German experience hadn’t been all sausage and sauerkraut.)

Eastern Europe in that autumn had been simmering with revolt. The first Polish riots had taken place in July, and failed, with fifty killed and hundreds wounded. By September there were still dangerous tremors in Warsaw. So he left Vienna for Prague, thinking that he might reach Poland by way of Czechoslovakia; or if that failed then he’d try for Hungary, where—the talk in Vienna had it—there could be some trouble too. Just the brash bright young observer, about to produce some inspired reporting, definitely a find for
The New York Times
and a future winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Yes, he thought now, I was very young.

And on his first day in Prague he met Irina. He forgot everything else. It was Irina, Irina... Three weeks of laughter and music and love. He had never felt that way before, never since. A mad and wonderful kind of happiness, a joy that floated you over the solid grey buildings, set your heart dancing in prosaic city streets. Yes, it was love in all its first tenderness and delight, world without end. Except that it was ended for them. Power politics took over. Irina was locked in. He was locked out, sent back to Vienna scarcely knowing how it had all been done so adeptly. But that was what happened to you when you fell in love with a girl whose mother was a Communist party official and whose father was far from Prague, unable to help anyone. He was a prisoner confined to the limits of his house and garden. And that was what could happen even to a major novelist, a Nobel Prize nominee, if he was too admired among his own people, too famous abroad to be jailed without international protests.

“Dave,” Mark Bohn’s voice said with marked patience. “Dave didn’t you hear me? Jaromir Kusak managed to get out of Czechoslovakia four years ago. He’s living in exile. Irina wants to join him. She needs help.”

“Then give it to her,” David answered sharply. He got control of himself, and added in a quiet unemotional tone, “You have connections in Washington who would know how to help. Get your friends in the CIA to take on the job.”

“They won’t touch it.”

“What?”

“Neither will the British. MI6 has backed off too.”

“Aren’t they interested?” David was incredulous.

“Definitely. Most sympathetic. They wish Irina all the luck in the world, but they won’t become involved.”

“Why not?”

McCulloch broke the long silence. He said to Bohn, “I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. Why don’t you start your story from the beginning, and give Mr. Mennery a better idea of the whole problem?”

David cut in, getting well ahead of both of them. “If you’ve come here thinking I can be of any use, forget it.”

“Why?”

“I’m not trained for this kind of job. I’m no escape expert. I’d be no help at all. I couldn’t get into Czechoslovakia in the first place. Not legally. I was thrown out of there pretty damn quick in 1956.”

“That was quietly done, all
sub rosa
. No official record was made. Irina’s mother saw to that. She had the power at that time, and she used it.”

“All for the sake of her husband,” David said bitterly. That was the reason she had given him before she had him deported. If he stayed, if he insisted on seeing her daughter, she would be powerless against her husband’s enemies. They’d say that his daughter was being used to reach him. A Western militarist (wasn’t David barely out of the army?), certainly a capitalist and an anti-Communist, possibly an agent of the CIA (proof wasn’t necessary, only an official statement)—yes, there was enough there to have her husband arrested on conspiracy charges. Neither his reputation nor his name could save him then. A serious charge, always: a deadly charge at this moment, when a revolt had just started in Poland in spite of the magnanimous handling of the July riots. Even now, David could hear the rat-a-tat of her angry words, streaming at him like machine-gun fire. “And for her own sake too, I guess.”