Curtain of Fear (33 page)

“Guard the door against a break out! Get up those stairs! Show a light! Don't shine a torch where they can see you! Shoot at sight! No, no! Comrade Frček said take them alive if possible. See if there's another staircase, some of you! Get on, damn you; rush those stairs!”

As a burst of bullets spattered past Nicholas, he leapt back, sent one last shot blindly down the well of the stairs, then turned and ran. Enough light was coming from below for him to see his way round the first turning, but he had to switch on his torch to find the next. He was hardly round it when he heard feet pounding up the wooden stairs. A third alley led him past an end wall of the building. In it two windows were very faintly outlined by starlight just percolating through glass encrusted with the dirt of half a century. On passing one of them he sent a shot through it. The crack of his pistol and the tinkle of falling glass brought another chorus of cries.

“They are down that end! Who are they firing at? Quick; after them; they're going to jump out of the window!”

Nicholas had found the second staircase and was up it. His pursuers reached the window. Someone shouted. “There's only one pane smashed. They're still in the building.” Then they too found the stairs and charged up them.

His heart hammering wildly, Nicholas raced down a long corridor formed of bales on the second floor. In his haste he missed the turning he should have taken. To his horror, at the end of the alley he found himself in a
cul-de-sac
. Facing about, he ran back. To find the turning he should have taken he had to flash his torch. Its beam had just fallen on the opening when the darkness ahead was stabbed with a spurt of flame. A bullet whistled past his ear. There was no time to aim, but he pressed the trigger of his gun. As he flung himself round the corner, a
cry told him that he had had a lucky shot. His pursuers had been bunched together at the far end of the narrow canyon formed by the bales, so he could hardly have missed; but it did not halt them. As he ran up the third staircase he could hear the relentless pursuit coming after him in full cry.

On the third floor he lost his way completely. In an agony of apprehension, expecting every moment to get a bullet in the back, he stumbled from turning to turning, no longer daring to flash his torch, even for a second. Suddenly, he heard Fedora's voice call softly from somewhere up in the darkness above him:

“This way, Nicky! This way.”

With a gasp of relief he ran towards it; then tripped and fell on the lowest step of the fourth stairway. As he picked himself up there was a shout behind him. He had dropped his torch but still had his gun. Swinging round, he fired twice in the direction from which the shout had come. A scream rang out; a heavy body thudded on the floor, and near it an automatic exploded. Fedora was standing at the top of the stairs. As the flashes from the guns momentarily lit the darkness she saw Nicholas clearly. He bounded up the stairs and her outstretched hand met his left arm. Sliding her fingers down it till they found his fingers, she clasped them firmly and drew him along behind her.

“Thank God you came to find me!” he panted. “In another minute I should have run right into them. I dared not show a light, and I was hopelessly lost.”

“I was afraid that might happen,” she replied quickly. “That is what decided me to come down directly the firing started.”

Fedora had had the forethought to count the paces from turning to turning on the top floor; so, without a moment's delay, they were able to hurry through the darkness to the final enclave. In it, the ladder hung bathed in the gentle pool of light from above. Three rungs at a time, they sped up it. As soon as Nicholas had tumbled after Fedora through the trap door, they drew the ladder up, laid it along the hall, and closed the trap. Still kneeling there, struggling to get their breath back, they stared at one another with consternation on their faces.

“How … how many of them are there?” she asked with a catch in her voice.

He shook his head. “I don't know. Eight, ten, twenty maybe.”

“Then it's not just one of the arbitrary searches that the patrols often carry out in the hope of finding arms or an illicit printing press?”

“No. They are after us. I heard one of them say ‘Comrade Frček wants them alive'.”

Fedora swore. “How the hell can they possibly have traced us here?”

“God knows; I don't!”

“I suppose there is no chance of breaking out? I mean by going down again, and trying to sneak past them in the darkness?”

“I'm afraid not. There are too many of them. They were searching the ground floor systematically. It is certain that they would have left someone to guard the door.”

“Did you get any of them—besides the one I saw you shoot just now?”

“Yes!” He was still flushed with excitement, and his voice held a jubilant note. “My opening shot was a bull's-eye, right on the fellow's heart; and I wounded two others.”

“Well done!” she smiled, and her green eyes showed a glint of amusement, as she went on, “You've soon got over your squeamishness about killing Coms, haven't you? But it's like getting kisses, or olives out of a bottle—the first one's difficult, the rest come easy.”

Her mockery caused him an acute twinge of distress. His mind flashed back to his righteous disgust at such killings by the character he had thought of to date as ‘that imperialist-capitalist-bandit', and the idea that his recent doings had a quite definite similarity to those of Mr. Gregory Sallust momentarily horrified him. Then that hangover from his old beliefs was swept away by his now positive conviction that these police were not the decent representatives of law and order, but licensed gunmen richly rewarded for maintaining a barbarous tyranny.

His reactions to Fedora's grimly humorous comparison occupied
only a few seconds; yet, before he had time to reply, the telephone buzzed and, jumping up from her knees, she ran into the sitting-room to answer it.

He dragged an old oak chest, that stood in the hall, over the trap-door, so that it could not be forced up from below, then followed her. She was holding the instrument to her ear. After listening for a minute or so she said:

“Thank you very much indeed. But I'm sorry to say they are already here.”

As she hung up, Nicholas asked, “Was that Mr. Smutný?”

She shook her head. “No; a woman who works in the office at the Moulin Rouge. I don't know who she is. She rang up to warn us to expect a raid, but she couldn't get away from the club till nearly one, and then had a job to get through. Anyhow, it has solved the riddle of how Frček's boys managed to trace us. That brute of a waiter was found when the staff began to clear up, soon after midnight. You remember he followed me back into the box after I had been out to telephone. He saw me in the booth. When they got him round he gave the police the time I had made my call, and they got the number I had rung from the record kept by the girl on the switchboard. From that it was easy for them to get the address of the warehouse.”

Mentally, Nicholas groaned. Fedora had certainly not foreseen this, or they would not have been there, but when she had urged him to kill the old waiter her instinct to take no chances had been right. By refraining from doing so he had again brought her life, as well as his own, into imminent peril. In addition he had been the means of giving away the secret quarters in which Mr. Smutný had lived comfortably and securely for so long. Nicholas expected her to reproach him, but she generously refrained, and said:

“It's no good crying over spilt milk, and we have no time to lose. As soon as they've satisfied themselves that we are not hiding somewhere on the fourth floor they will try to find a way up to the roof. I expect all the old ones are blocked, but they'll break through somehow; so we had better get away across the neighbouring roofs as quickly as possible.”

Switching out the lights as they went, they made for a door at the end of the hall-way and unbolted it. As they had supposed, it led on to the open part of the roof, which was much larger than that occupied by the penthouse. It was surrounded by a low parapet, inside which there was a walk-way; its centre consisted of a series of pointed ridges that embodied skylights, but all of these had been covered and sealed down with tarred felt.

As they glanced about them they were filled with dismay. The warehouse formed an isolated oblong block. All the roofs of the other buildings adjacent to it were several feet lower and some distance off. It seemed that there was no means of escape and that they were trapped there.

“Pan Smutný must have some emergency get-away!” exclaimed Fedora. “But I've got a rotten head for heights. Try to find it, then come back for me.”

Leaving her by the doorway of the penthouse, Nicholas hurried round the three open sides of the roof, taking cautious peeps over the parapet as he went. The two longer sides faced on to narrow streets, but the roofs of the buildings opposite were well over thirty feet away. The shorter side, at the extremity of the roof, looked on to the canal that they had twice crossed when trying to find the warehouse. There was no wharf; the wall of the building dropped sheer to the water, so that barges could come alongside and be loaded or unloaded by hoists which projected from each floor level.

For a moment Nicholas peered down at the hoists, wondering if it would be possible to drop from one to another; but the distance between them was much too great, and he decided that even a monkey would not have risked it.

From a steel stanchion near him a thick telegraph cable, encased in some tarred material and having a smaller cable running in long loops below it, stretched in a graceful curve across the canal to a slightly lower building some sixty feet distant. The cable was thick enough to provide a good hand grip, and Nicholas thought that a trained trapeze artist could have crossed by it; but he felt sure that his own muscles were not up to such a strain, and as Fedora suffered from vertigo, that put out of the
question even the wild idea of making an attempt. Hurrying back to her, he said glumly:

“I've had no luck out there. The streets on both sides are full of police and cars. Even if we could lower ourselves to the top of one of the fire escapes that come up to the fourth floor, we should be spotted coming down. There's no one covering the far end; but they don't have to. The canal is there, and there's no way down at all.”

“That's bad, Nicky!” Fedora did not attempt to disguise how worried she felt. “If we had been able to lie doggo they might never have found the flat. Once they had searched the warehouse they would probably have decided that we must have been warned and got away before they arrived, or had never come here at all; but now they know we are here for certain they'll take the building to pieces rather than give up.”

Her words were symbolically prophetic. It was at that moment they both smelt smoke. At first unnoticed by them in the dim light, a wisp of it was curling up from a crack in the covering of a skylight only some ten feet from where they were standing.

“Good God!” Nicholas exclaimed. “Surely they don't mean to burn the place down.”

“They may,” Fedora replied grimly. “You say there were a dozen or more of them chasing you. That's more than enough to have searched the fourth floor thoroughly in the ten minutes since we got back here. Having failed to find us they probably think we have gone to earth in some crates previously emptied to form a hiding place; so they have set about smoking us out.”

Nicholas nodded. “I see. Then by now they are down on the third floor with their torches on the stairway and their guns in their hands, waiting for us to be driven into their arms. Of course, they can call up the fire engines to stop the blaze spreading downwards, or to other buildings, but in half an hour's time the whole of the top here may be a raging furnace.”

“You've said it! But I can't believe Pan Smutný would allow himself to be caught in such a trap. There must be an escape route from the dead end of the penthouse, where it's flush with
the fourth side of the building. The gap to the next roof may be narrower there.”

Turning, Fedora ran back through the hall-way, switching on the lights as she went. At its far end were two bedrooms. She dived into one and Nicholas dived into the other. The windows of both had been screwed down and painted over. Knowing that it was now futile to maintain the secret of the flat, they both smashed panes of the windows, regardless of lights being seen up there from below. From both rooms the outlook was the same; a sheer drop to an alley, no sign of a ladder, and a yawning gulf of from thirty to forty feet to the much lower roof of the next building.

In the hall they met, their drawn faces reporting without words their failure to find an escape route. Parting again, they ran into the other rooms, seeing frantically for some indication of a way to get out of the flat, other than by the trap-door or on to the open roof. They could not find even a clue to work upon.

Back in the hall, Nicholas dragged aside the chest and was about to open the trap-door, when Fedora came upon him.

“What are you doing?” she asked sharply.

“I thought that if the fire is only at the far end, we might go down again,” he muttered. “Then we could anyhow get to one of the fire escapes. It would be better to go down that and be shot than to be burnt alive.”

“You can if you like,” came the quick reply. “But they wouldn't shoot you. They would wait until you had emptied your gun, then take you alive. I'd rather throw myself off the roof.”

As she finished speaking he got the trap open. If he had had any doubts about the soundness of her view, that settled it for him. A great puff of black smoke billowed up into the hall. Choking and spluttering, he slammed the trap to again. No one could now have got more than a dozen paces along the floor below without suffocating.

Half blinded by the smoke, they staggered back, covering their smarting eyes. Then, in desperation, they again ran along
the hall to the door that gave on to the open roof. Even in the few minutes since they had left it the evidence of the fire had multiplied tenfold. At intervals along each pointed ridge there was now a glowing patch indicating the position of the skylights. Their wooden frames and tarred felt made them more vulnerable than the slate-covered sections between them. Spirals of smoke were issuing from their tops, bottoms and sides, and in some places little fountains of sparks spurted up into the darkness.