Curtain of Fear (23 page)

She was tall and slender, with good shoulders and boyish hips. Nicholas gazed at the triangle of her back, thinking how beautifully proportioned it was. The muscles in it rippled slightly
when the man and woman who held her jerked her arms slightly, and having been stretched taut they became still.

Frček had stooped down behind his desk and opened one of the bottom drawers in it. As he straightened up Nicholas saw that from it he had taken a whip. It had a thick handle ending in a round knob, so if reversed it could have been used as a formidable cosh; its lash was of thin plaited leather and about two feet along.

“You can't do that,” Nicholas shouted. “You can't do that.”

A sadistic smile spread slowly over Frček's round pasty face. “I can, and I am going to,” he said softly. “Even if you decide to talk, as you have kept me waiting I mean to keep you waiting until I have made a pretty pattern on your mistress's skin. To watch me will give you only a mild idea of the much more painful treatment that I may order her to be given later, should you not talk fast and to the point when I am ready to listen to you.”

Raising the whip, he gave it a preliminary crack. Fedora, her nerves strung to the highest pitch, jerked spasmodically as though she had already been struck. Nicholas swore.

Like most social revolutionaries he was an agnostic, so it did not occur to him to pray for divine intervention. Nevertheless he shut his eyes. By doing so he hoped to blot out the harrowing scene, but the attempt was futile. In his mind he could still see the big room, with its long stretch of window, through which the afternoon sunlight was coming at an angle. He knew the position of each person in it, and saw them as though they were wax-work dummies posed in a grim tableau. Above all, the central figure remained clear. Fedora's body spread-eagled against the dark panel was vividly etched upon his closed eyelids.

Although he had not heard the whip come down he heard her give a sudden gasp. Automatically his eyes flickered open. Frček had not struck her. He was standing there grinning. All he had done was to administer an unexpected shock by using the end of the whip to tickle the base of her spine.

But next moment he stepped back, raised the whip and brought it down smartly just below the spot he had tickled. She gave a sharp cry and jerked herself erect. One of her stockings slithered
down into a ruff round her ankle. Frček raised his whip again and gave her a quick cut on the calf of the exposed leg. She had set her teeth and did not cry out this time but automatically drew up the hurt leg. At her movement the stocking on the other floated down, and with a swift flick Frček gave its calf similar treatment. Then, crossing to her other side, he gave her another vicious cut. She twitched violently and let out a low moan.

“You brute!” Nicholas shouted, and began to struggle with the man who held him; but his arms were gripped behind his back as though in a vice.

Frček only smiled at him and said, “I've hardly started yet.” Turning again to Fedora, he began to strike at her back and shoulders. Once, twice, thrice, the lash descended. Still with clenched teeth she choked back all sound other than a low, quivering moan. But at the fourth stroke, she burst into tears and sobbed out:

“Oh, God! Oh, God! Help me, I beg. Help me! Help me!”

Nicholas had closed his eyes and opened them again. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. The sound of Fedora's sobbing drove him into a frenzy of fury, but he knew that he was powerless to help her. Each time he made the least move, the police thug gave an upward jerk to one of his arms that caused him acute pain and threatened to wrench it from its socket. He could only mutter useless curses.

Standing back, Frček admired his handiwork. He had not lashed Fedora hard enough to draw blood, but red weals now stood out where the whip had cracked down on smooth flesh. With an amused glance at Nicholas he said:

“Now, I think, we must give her a pretty girdle round that slender waist.” Once more he drew back the whip, this time sideways on, and the vicious stroke curled round her body so that the end of the lash cut into her stomach.

At that, she let out a scream and began to struggle, but the man and woman who held her by the wrists had little difficulty in keeping her in position. Frček lifted the whip again, but Nicholas could bear no more.

“Stop!” he yelled. “Stop! I'll tell you everything you want to know.”

Frček lowered the whip, laid it on his desk, and said, “All right, I'm glad you have come to your senses.” Turning to his underlings, he added: “That will be enough for now. Let her sit down.”

They led Fedora to a chair, and she collapsed into it, still sobbing. But after a moment she leaned forward, picked up her dress from the floor, pulled it in a bundle across her middle and hunched her smarting body over it. As her sobs eased Frček sat down behind his desk, and said to Nicholas:

“Now, let's have the truth! If you attempt to tell me any further cock-and-bull stories, I'll have her straddled over the back of that chair so that I can use my whip on her in a way that will be really painful.”

Nicholas knew that it was no longer the least use to beat about the bush, or even to give the true account of how the whole thing had started by his deciding to impersonate Bilto on a sudden impulse. He would not be believed. Unless this brutal scene was to continue, and mount to a revolting barbarity the thought of which made him feel sick, he must now lie, and lie to the limit. He had got to tell Frček the sort of thing he expected to hear, and pin his hopes on some fresh turn of events enabling him later to escape the consequences.

Drawing a deep breath, he said, “The facts are these. You are right about my being a British secret agent, although I became one only a few weeks ago. It was after my cousin Bilto told me of his intention to come here. I went and reported that to the police. They took me to see a man at the War Office. I had several interviews with him, and eventually he persuaded me to impersonate my cousin. As you guessed, the idea was that I should let myself be brought to Czechoslovakia in his place and disappear as soon as possible after landing. My task was to find out all I could about the resistance movement here, and how it could best be assisted.”

Frček nodded. “So far, so good. At what point did your woman accomplice enter the scene?”

“Only a few days ago. Naturally, from the moment I had given Bilto away they put him under constant observation. That's how they got on to her. They pulled her in, told her they knew everything, and that they would get her a ten-year prison sentence unless she would agree to play. It was just the one job of getting me put on the plane for Prague, or ten years; and, of course, she had no idea then that your people would send her with me. She decided that to keep her freedom was worth the risk of Vaněk's finding her out, and who can blame her?”

“I do. She wilfully betrayed the interests of the Party. There is no worse crime than that.”

Nicholas heaved a mental sigh. He had done his best for Fedora all along. He was putting himself in it up to the neck to save her from acute physical suffering now; but he had seen no possible way in which, if he was to be believed, he could do more than attempt to palliate her offence. With a little gesture of helplessness, he went on:

“A meeting was arranged between us, and we fixed everything up. She let me know the date planned for Bilto's departure, and on that day I came up to London again. Bilto and I both used the Russell Hotel on our occasional visits to Town, so he didn't think it particularly strange when he ran into me there. The police knew that he had left Harwell, of course, and were at the Hotel waiting to arrest him. We agreed to dine together and afterwards went up to his room. A few minutes later the plain-clothes men came in and took him into custody. I simply collected his passport, went downstairs, and waited there until Comrade Hořovská picked me up in the car. There you are. Now you know everything.”

For a full minute Frček's round, pasty face remained expressionless; then he said, “I think we are now getting a little nearer to the truth. But there are several points that you have so far failed to explain. Unless a man is a professional agent, and earns his living by betraying people, it is usual to feel shame in the presence of the person about to be betrayed. Why, if the police were in any case going to arrest Professor Bilto so that you could obtain his passport, did you go out of your way to dine with
him? There was no necessity for you to see him at all, or even for him to know that it was you who had betrayed him. In Comrade Vaněk's report, too, he stated that a Power of Attorney made out by Professor Bilto in your favour was found upon you. If you put yourself in his way at the hotel, giving him the impression that you were there only by chance, how does it come about that he had had the document prepared and was still carrying it on him when he did not expect to see you again before his departure? Another point: If you had planned to impersonate him for the purpose of coming to Czechoslovakia, why, when everything was going well, did you risk missing the plane in order to visit a house in North London? Why, too, above all, did you later resort to violence in an attempt to escape from Comrade Vaněk, and make it necessary for him to send you here as ‘a parcel'?”

Nicholas' brain was reeling. The whole awful business had become such a frightful tangle that his mind no longer registered the innumerable lies he had told about it, or to whom he had told them.

“I … I tried to get away from Vaněk because … well, because I got cold feet about coming at the last moment,” he stammered.

“Then why did this Hořovská woman get you sent here against your will, by her positive identification of you as Professor Bilto?”

That was one which Nicholas himself could not answer truthfully, for he still had not the faintest idea. As he floundered for a reply, Frček went on. “She had done all that could be expected of her, so could not have been blamed by your Secret Service friends if fear led you to back out. She must have known, too, that the British would publish the fact of Professor Bilto's arrest in their papers, so that Comrade Vaněk would soon learn of it. If she had held her tongue no-one could have proved afterwards that it had not been her intention to double-cross you and give you away to Comrade Vaněk at the first opportunity, but by insisting to him that you were Professor Bilto she damned herself quite unnecessarily. Another thing occurs
to me. If you had planned to impersonate the Professor in advance, why did you not either take his luggage or set out with some of your own?”

Leaning forward, the bulky, black-haired Minister tapped the glass top of his desk with a pudgy forefinger. “Broadly speaking the admissions you have made are satisfactory, but I am picking holes in your story because there is one part of it that does not ring true. It is of what took place on the night of your departure. Why had the Professor got the Power of Attorney on him? Why did the Hořovská continue to insist that you were him when she need not have done so? Why had you no luggage? Why did you go out of your way to dine with your cousin? Why did you make a visit to your friends in North London? I require answers to all …”

Suddenly breaking off, he got quickly to his feet. For Nicholas, the prospect of a respite of even a few moments came as a most blessed relief. Hearing swift footsteps behind him, he looked round to find out the cause of this most welcome interruption.

Unannounced by any knock, a small man with a close-clipped moustache and dark hair, neatly parted on one side, had entered the room. His features were slightly Mongolian, and when he spoke his pronunciation of Czech proclaimed him to be a Russian. From his undistinguished appearance anyone would have put him down as a very minor official; but after a single glance at Nicholas, he snapped at Frček:

“Get rid of your uniformed people.”

At once Frček made a sign to the two police thugs and the wardress, telling them to wait outside. Kmoch remained, and once more producing the pistol murmured to Nicholas, “If you start anything, I shall not hesitate to put a bullet through your foot.”

As soon as the door had closed behind the underlings, the mild-looking little Russian said to Frček in a cold, contemptuous voice:

“So you and your friends in London have bungled this most important matter.”

“Yes. London has slipped up badly, I'm afraid,” Frček
admitted hastily. “Here, though, we are now getting to the bottom of the affair. But how did you know already that our Novak has turned out to be a fake?”

The reply was acid. “Realising that failure to get a full report to Moscow at the earliest possible moment might land us both in a Labour Camp, I took the quickest means of finding out.”

Frček gave the Russian a reproachful look. “I assure you, Comrade Gorkov, that I have lost no time; and I am surprised to learn there were any quicker means than those I have adopted.”

“You could have done as I did, and put an ‘immediate' enquiry through to London. As it was, when you informed me soon after midday of your reason for cancelling the Novák lunch, you were so over-confident that this was the atom-scientist that you did not treat the matter with any urgency at all. You were quite content to wait about all this afternoon until your police could rake up some members of the Novák family to say whether or not he was the right man.”

In a low, rather nervous voice, Frček made a respectful protest. “Permit me to point out, Comrade Gorkov, that unless you have known the facts for some time, your method of finding them out has proved no quicker than mine.”

“And what have you found out?” sneered the Russian. “Simply that the man is a fake and the woman a traitor. Who cares about them? Or what they are, or what they've done? In this affair—and it is one in which the Kremlin has stressed that our vital interests are at stake—the only thing that matters is, what has happened to the real Professor Novák?”