Curtain of Fear (24 page)

“Ah! That I can tell you,” cried Frček. “Although I greatly regret to report such a misfortune. He was betrayed by his cousin here, and arrested in his presence by the British police.”

“You incompetent fool!” The Russian's eyes glinted angrily. “You can have nothing but this man's word for that and it is not the truth. With their usual speed in high-priority cases, my Embassy in London has found out the facts and cabled a full reply to my enquiry. It was deciphered ten minutes ago. Professor Bilto Novák is still at the Hotel Russell, and there is no reason to suppose that he is being kept under observation. One
of our agents contacted him, and fresh arrangements are now being made for him to fly here
via
Paris to-morrow night. He had no idea at all why your people had failed to collect him, and was waiting to receive some explanation. Had no one got in touch with him over the weekend, he intended to return to Harwell first thing on Monday morning; but if he had had to do that it might have been a considerable time before he could have left again without arousing suspicion. Had such a serious delay resulted from your failure to find out if the real Professor Novák had left London, you would be making a trip to the Urals from which you would never come back. Unless you wish me to send in an adverse report on you to Moscow, in future you will give less time to self-indulgence and more to thinking about your work.”

Nicholas was savouring the first unalloyed pleasure he had experienced for many hours. It was clear that although Frček might be Minister of Police in the Czechoslovak People's Government, Comrade Gorkov was his master; and it was a most enjoyable sight to see the bulky pasty-faced brute cringe under the lash of the little Russian's tongue. But Nicholas was soon given something far less pleasant to think about. In a servile effort to escape further censure, Frček said:

“Comrade Gorkov, you are much cleverer than myself; so please do not be too hard on me. I assure you I have been far from idle, and between us we shall have the best of both worlds. While you have ensured the arrival after all of the real atomic scientist, I shall be able to offer a fine propaganda trial of the false one. He has already begun his confession, and from the witness-box he will testify to the world how he was sent here by the warmongering English as a spy.”

While forced to witness Fedora being stripped and whipped, Nicholas' emotions had been harrowed as never before. His final intervention had sprung from a desperate urge to prevent her being tortured further, and he had had no time to give proper consideration to its possible consequences. Now, the repugnant and humiliating price he might be forced to pay was brought home to him with brutal suddenness; and next moment an even
blacker chapter of the nightmare serial, in which he had become a helpless actor, was opened to him.

The Russian gave Frček a bleak smile of approval. “Such trials are always of considerable value, so at the Kremlin they will be glad to learn that you have secured the basis for one. But here you have no experts in training the accused in what they are to say. Have the woman looked to, so that she is fit to travel, then send them both on the evening train to Moscow.”

“I will give orders to that effect at once, Comrade Gorkov.”

Frček's reply came promptly enough, but he looked a little crestfallen. After a slight hesitation, he added, “However, I hope you will not take it amiss if I remark that as this is a Czech affair it might be more suitable to hold the trial in Prague.”

“Propaganda trials need careful preparation,” answered the Russian testily. “Your crude methods of beatings and threats are good enough to extract first confessions, but they are never any guarantee that a prisoner will not retract afterwards; and to produce a physical wreck in open court invalidates the whole object of such operations.”

“Of course, Comrade; of course!” Frček immediately became submissive and fawning. “I am well aware that the M.V.D. are more skilled in these matters than my people. The results achieved by their psychologists with the aid of the new drugs, and physical treatments that leave no trace, were wonderfully successful in the trial of Slánský and his thirteen fellow traitors last year. It is only that as a young Soviet Republic, we are in much greater need of further demonstrations of that kind than they are in the U.S.S.R.; so I was hoping …”

With an impatient gesture, Gorkov interrupted, “Had you allowed me to continue, I was about to say that to ensure the success of such trials it is necessary first to destroy the prisoner's mind, then build him up as a new, docile personality. That can be done only in Moscow, and it may take two or three months; but the sooner you send them off the sooner they will be mentally conditioned, and in a fit state to be returned here for trial.”

“Ah!” Frček beamed. “Forgive me if I jumped to a wrong conclusion; but it was in my eagerness to take advantage of any event which may help to enlighten the people of Prague.”

Gorkov said sourly, “That I understand. From the beginning the whole country has shown a most stubborn resistance. Our task is like beating upon a rubber sponge. It is not enough to crush it; no means should be neglected which will help to lessen the qualities of recoil that are inherent in its nature.”

After a glance at his watch, he added, “We are due at that meeting at the Hradčany at six o'clock, and it is nearly ten minutes to now. You had better get rid of these people quickly, or you will be late for it.” Turning on his heel, he walked out of the room.

Frček wasted no time in obeying the orders he had been given. At his shout the three underlings returned. As they resumed their places by the prisoners, he said to Kmoch:

“Have them both taken to the basement. Get the doctor to put some stuff on her weals, then let her lie down until it is time to take them to the train. It's clear now that, as I supposed, he was telling us a tissue of lies about what happened between him and his cousin at the hotel; so teach him a little lesson by putting him in an X-cell. That will give him a taste of Moscow in advance. Telephone the station for a coach with a barred compartment to be added to the train, then make their dossiers up to date. You will accompany them yourself, taking any escort you think fit. As soon as you have delivered them send me a telegram; then report back here.”

Fedora had been crouching, still half stupefied by pain, in her chair. The mark on her left cheek and jaw, where she had
been slapped, stood out more vividly than ever, but her whole face now looked hot and feverish. At the urging of the wardress she stood up, and, turning her back, began to dress. As anything tight would have aggravated her whip-sores, she made no attempt to put on her belt or brassiere; but with the wardress' help she wriggled into her slip and frock, then tucked the other things and her long-strapped satchel bag under her arm.

As she moved a little unsteadily towards the door Nicholas stepped forward and said, “Do lean on my shoulder.”

She laid her hand only lightly on his forearm, and gave him a faint smile. “Thanks; but I'm not all that bad. No bones broken, anyway.”

Frček was already collecting the papers that he would require for his meeting, but he looked up to snarl with sudden venom, “If the Russians don't break them, I'll break them for both of you after your trial. This pretty plot of yours very nearly resulted in my having to make an explanation to the Kremlin, and I'll not forget that in a hurry.”

Both of them half turned and caught a glimpse of the implacable hatred in the pasty moon-like face, then they were hurried from the room. But it was neither of broken bones nor devilish ingenuities practised by unscrupulous psychologists in Moscow that Nicholas was thinking as they were taken down in the lift; he was wondering what an X-cell was like. Five minutes later he knew.

It was virtually an upright box three feet square and five feet high. He could neither sit, lie nor stand upright in it, and it had eight glaring electric lights covered with unbreakable glass—one in each corner of the ceiling and one in each corner of the floor.

For a few minutes he stood with bent neck, his rumpled red hair pressed against the ceiling; then he managed to get himself into a slightly less uncomfortable position by sliding his feet forward to the door and leaning his back against the wall. In that way he could just keep his head clear, but he soon found the relentless glare of the lights almost unbearable. Even when he shut his eyes it came through their lids as a steady pink glow.
Only by keeping his hands over them could he get relief; and with his palms pressed to his face, he tried to think.

That morning he had been in the position of a man convinced against his will, and so ‘of the same opinion still'. Fedora's talk with Jirka the barman, their confinement to the hotel, the microphone in the bedroom, the things that Fedora had said there, her bold arrangements with the Chef for their escape, and their interview with Frček, had all proclaimed a state of things which it seemed impossible to explain away. Yet the convictions of a life-time had died hard in him.

He had argued to himself that, although forced upon him by circumstances as a temporary ally, Fedora was in fact the enemy of all he stood for. He had discounted her attitude as inspired by bitter, unreasoning hatred of the régime, and decided that nine-tenths of the things she said about it were baseless accusations concocted by a wild imagination and neurotic urge to dramatise every situation in which they found themselves. For the rest, he had reasoned that the police in any country were justified in taking strong measures to check the type of movement in which Fedora obviously played an active part; and that Frček's attitude could not be taken as evidence that the People's Government was a mockery controlled by evil men who were exploiting the masses, and ruling by tyranny, injustice and torture.

But his experiences in the past hour had stripped from him every vestige of belief he had had in the splendid fellowship of Communism. Its vaunted ‘Welfare State', in which all men were free, equal and cared for by a paternal government truly representative of the workers, had proved a ghastly myth. Frček's threats of the morning had not been a justified bluff to extract information from prisoners suspected of criminal activities; they had turned out to be a terrible reality. Moreover, it had emerged that he was not just a police chief, but a Minister; and to suppose that the government was ignorant of the horrors that went on at his headquarters was unthinkable. Still worse, it was not the People's Government of Czechoslovakia alone that had fallen into evil hands. Comrade Gorkov had made it clear beyond all doubt that Frček and his colleagues were only puppets controlled
by Moscow; and the cold little Russian's terrible intentions towards the prisoners made even Frček's physical brutalities pale.

Nicholas groaned aloud as he thought how often he had argued that the Soviet trials of saboteurs were not ingeniously stage-managed affairs, and that the confessions made at them were in fact the outcome of prisoners having, after long free discussions, at last been brought to ‘see the Light', so that they willingly testified their past errors to the world. Now, he knew the awful truth.

He recalled a book that he had read by Paul Galico called
Trial by Terror
. He had thought the scenes in the Paris newspaper office a brilliant piece of work, but had been both indignant and amused by those describing the treatment of the central character when, through his own fault, he had found himself in a Soviet prison. The idea of putting a tin pail over a man's head, and beating on it with a broom-stick until the drumming drove him to the verge of madness, had seemed a wickedly skilful piece of imagination. Now, with fear gripping at his heart, he wondered if that was one of the ‘physical treatments that leave no trace' that would be inflicted on him in Moscow. Gorkov had spoken of destroying the prisoner's mind, then building him up as a new, docile personality. That was exactly the theme of Paul Galico's book. It couldn't be true. It was too terrible; and yet …

His arms were aching from holding his hands up over his face. For a few moments he removed them, but the glare was so blinding that he could not stand it for long. Taking out his big silk handkerchief, he folded it into a bandage and tied it over his eyes. That helped a little, but the light still penetrated through the fabric; so to give each arm a rest in turn he pressed the bandage over his eyes first with one hand for a while, then with the other.

It was stiflingly hot in the coffin-like cell, and his mind began to wander. The more he thought of his situation, the more fantastic and improbable it seemed. How could it possibly have come about that he—Nicholas Novák, a quiet-living, unadventurous
professor of Political Economics at Birmingham University, an ardent supporter of the Peace Council, and a champion of Socialism in its most advanced form—should find himself imprisoned under a People's Government on a charge of being a British secret agent?

The term switched his mind to another book, and one he had read quite recently. It was about a thoroughly unscrupulous character who, between nights of love-making with a beautiful Countess, went about the continent murdering innocent policemen and others, because it chanced that their duties caused them to stand in the way of British objectives during the last war. He was instructed and abetted by a ferocious and evil old millionaire whose object in life seemed to be to force the domination of British imperialism upon as many countries as possible. The two of them drank champagne out of tankards while they glorified the sort of reactionary sentiments that had been current in Disraeli's day. They were absurd and unreal, and wickedly calculated to inspire anti-social ideas in the young. There had been a scene in which the central character, who rejoiced in the unlikely name of Gregory Sallust, had been present, although a civilian, at Dunkirk. He had refused to be taken off with the army because his old crony had charged him with some private murder assignment, and he had ranted to himself that he could not go home because it was his job to ‘seek out and destroy the enemy'. That was just the sort of claptrap to inflame youngsters with the narrow nationalism and hide-bound patriotism that begot future wars.