Dead Man's Tale (13 page)

After a while Steve put his head between his hands.

It was then that Andy heard the shot.

They both jumped like one man to the side door. Steve wrestled with it, cursing. Then the door slid back and Andy saw Lou Goody's face in the moonlight. It was afraid and defiant at the same time.

“Lou,” Steve said sharply. “What happened?” He stuck his head out and looked up and down the road. Andy looked, too. Nothing. “I said what happened, Lou!”

Lou licked his lips. Steve jumped down, shook Goody roughly. The night was dry and hot. A slight wind stirred Andy's hair. Crickets were chirping in a field across the way, a field full of twisted, skinny poles. A hops field, Andy thought. He got stiffly down in the road.

“I had me this brainstorm,” Lou Goody mumbled. “Why should we get off at this Chesky-whatever-the-hell-it-is? I got it across to this slob of a driver, in sign lingo mostly. And I keep on saying, ‘Prague, Prague.' He starts in jabbering away a mile a minute, sore as hell. All right, so maybe it was a lousy idea, Steve. But he's got no business grabbing a tyre iron and making like he's gonna swing on me.”

“You shot him,” Steve said in an unbelieving voice.

“I didn't mean to, Steve,” Goody whined. “I just thought I'd scare him into behaving himself. Instead, he tries to muscle the gun away from me and it goes off.”

“How bad is he?” Steve barked.

Lou Goody made a slight backward movement, uneasily. “He's dead.”

Steve stared at him. Then, without a word, he went over to the cab of the truck and looked in. Andy followed.

Helmut lay over the wheel. His open eyes were looking right at Andy.

Andy found himself crouching against the side of the cab, retching.

Lou Goody and Steve had already pulled the body out and over to the other side of the road and were going through the clothing, removing papers and identifying marks and his wallet. Then Goody fished some cotton waste from under the front seat and cleaned up the cab. He went back to the other side of the road and helped Steve lug the dead man into the hops field. They were gone about five minutes. Steve boosted Andy into the cab and climbed in after him.

Goody was already behind the wheel.

“Nothing to it, Steve,” he said soothingly, looking over the dashboard. “You know there ain't nothing on wheels I can't drive.”

“Get rolling,” Steve said.

“Come on, Steve,” Goody said. “You think I wanted to kill the slob?”

“Shut up!”

“Steve—”

“Drive.”

Outside Ceske Budejovice the truck's headlights picked up the first highway marker to Prague.

18

Professor Vaclav Mydlár, Minister of the Interior of the People's Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia, smiled. He was a squirrelly little man with bushy white hair, bright eyes and fat cheeks. “Out of the woodwork of Prague,” he said, “will come all the old Social Democrats. I'll admit it, at first I thought the government had summoned you as an
agent provocateur
. But now—” Another smile. “You must forgive me for running on like this, Milo.”

“It's quite all right,” Milo Hacha said. “I'm interested in everything you can tell me. I need to learn. I want to learn.”

“Well, I will tell you,” Professor Mydlár said. “I managed to survive, as your revered father did not. Nominally, I am a Communist.” He looked quizzical. “That was something Rudolf Hacha could never bring himself to become. But there are many of us old Social Democrats—Hodza, Nosek, Bormann. I could compile quite a list, my boy. In the woodwork now, but ready to come out. Because you are here, Milo. Because the Party admitted, in bringing back a Hacha, that we were necessary.”

Professor Mydlár scowled. “At first I thought, it's a trick. Provocation, the usual thing. But they haven't boarded you up in an obscure ministry somewhere, out of things. They need us, don't you see, if they are to maintain power. That's why they let you come here to live, a free man, in my house. My boy, given time, it will be a revolution!”

“I'd rather you didn't talk like that, Professor,” Milo Hacha said. “I'm not the least interested in starting a revolution. The government offered me a post as your assistant. That's the only reason I came.”

Professor Mydlár tried to hide his disappointment. There was so much that Hacha did not know, so much he did not seem to want to know.

Mydlár was an old man, almost seventy. The only alternative to weak parliamentary democracy was strong parliamentary democracy. Strong parliamentary democracy protected the state while leaving the individual intact. It had taken Vaclav Mydlár a lifetime of disillusionments to learn it.

Could he impart this great truth to a naïve Milo Hacha in a few evenings talk? No, it was better not to try.

The professor smiled. “Here in Prague we have a symbol, my boy.”

“A symbol?” Milo Hacha seemed faintly wary.

“Yes, the Manes Café here in the Malá Strana. It was there that the old political idealists used to meet. It is there, if anywhere, that a new Czechoslovakia will be born. It is there, in the Manes Café, that you will meet the old friends of your father. It is arranged. Tomorrow night …”

The old man rambled on. He's hopelessly lost somewhere in a cuckoo land. Milo Hacha's thoughts drifted to Mydlár's Libusé. Named after the heroine of a patriotic bourgeois opera. Very romantic, Hacha thought. But that was her father's doing. The flesh-and-blood Libusé Mydlár, with her neglected raven's hair, her grimly pretty face that scorned make-up, was underfed, had a shapely and grimly efficient body.… Grim. Yes, grim was the word for her.

Libusé came in now, wearing a severe grey dress, to clear the dinner dishes while her father wandered comfortably through his dreamland. She won't look at me, Milo Hacha thought. Suddenly he thought, she hates me.

“… Masaryk,” the old man said.

Was it a test? Milo Hacha wondered. Had the Party sent him here to live with this old fool and his daughter as a test?

It was unexpected, this girl Libusé's hatred. Whatever else Hacha lacked, he knew it was not attractiveness to women. He liked to think of himself as a Villon, a Casanova with principles—the hero, perhaps, of a rogue novel. Principles … He almost laughed aloud as old Mydlár prattled on.

He thought back to his time in the Netherlands, where circumstances had made him a hero. With the war almost over and the Nazis obviously beaten, he had helped some Allied flyers escape. Why? Who knew the reasons for such things? Perhaps he had dreamed of someday going to England. Or to America. Certainly it had not been a matter of principles.

They had woven a legend around him, untrue though flattering. He might have stayed on, but the woman, the mayor's wife, had become troublesome. So he had left the Netherlands. It was too bad about the child. Such a pretty little thing.

Switzerland? Trudy, he thought. He remembered Trudy's body, her abandon, with regret. In Switzerland he had lived as a gentleman-gambler. The classic rogue. But Trudy had engulfed him in her astonishing passion. Drowning, he had had to move on.

And Austria? That was a comedown, indeed. Passenger representative for a bus line. Hardly more than a tourist guide! And the tourists themselves—how he had grown to hate them, with their gaucherie, their cameras, their inane questions!

His interlude in the wilderness. Waiting for what was to come.

And now? Back to Czechoslovakia and glory! If this doddering Professor Mydlár thought Milo Hacha was going to stick his neck out, get involved in intrigues and revolution …

Was it a test?

“… an old man,” Vaclav Mydlár said, smiling. “Forgive me, but I am going to bed. Why don't you children get acquainted?”

Children!

The Professor shook hands formally and left. Hacha was alone with Libusé. He wondered with amusement what her tack would be.

“Do you have a cigarette, Herr Hacha?” she asked abruptly. She spoke in German as though she refused to regard him except as a visiting alien.

He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her. “I wanted to talk to you,” she said in her flat, mannish voice. Her gaunt face was expressionless. She stood very straight, like a soldier.

“Yes, of course.” He spoke in Czech, holding a chair out for her.

She continued in German, quite as if he had not spoken at all.

“What I have to say, Herr Hacha, can be said standing up. It is this. My father is an old man. He has been hurt greatly in his life. He was forced to watch the Nazis torture my brother Woodrow to death.”

Woodrow, Milo Hacha thought. The son named for the man who had made the Czechoslovakian state a reality, the daughter named for the national heroine. By such childishness they had tried to roll back the Communist tide!

“Your father was Father's best friend,” Libusé went on. “But he testified against your father at his trial because he believed it to be in the best interests of a strong and unified Czechoslovakia. For your father it did not matter. He was going to die in either case. The mistake—and it was a mistake—broke my father's spirit. Now he lives on one hope.”

“Yes?” Milo Hacha asked politely.

“You. Don't disappoint him, Herr Hacha.” She ground her cigarette out in a saucer. “If you do, I shall surely kill you.”

She stalked from the room.

19

Dieter Loringhoven's telephone rang just after two in the morning.

“
Ja?”

“Pilsen Brandenburg,
bitte
.”

“This is he.”

“The job is done, Herr Brandenburg.”

“Splendid.”

“But there are complications.” First the assassin told Dieter Loringhoven about the woman with Mueller. Then about the Budweiser trailer truck that had been carrying Mueller's motorcycle.

“Where was this?” Loringhoven asked.

“Near Gmünd, on the road to the Czech border.”

“Did they cross?”

“I don't know, Herr Brandenburg. I didn't follow them.”

Dieter Loringhoven hung up and thought about it. Assuming the truck had crossed into Czechoslovakia, and it seemed likely, did that necessarily indicate a connection with the Hacha affair? It might.

Loringhoven dressed carefully. He drove to the Praterstrasse and rapped peremptorily on Theresa's door. She opened it, knuckling the sleep out of her puffed eyes. There was a transparent wrapper over her nightgown.

“You are the woman who lives with Gerhard Mueller?”

She was awake instantly. “What do you want?”

“I am from the police.”

She stood aside, mouth open. Loringhoven went in.

“Wait,” Theresa said. She ran into the other room. He waited patiently in the ugly bourgeois living room. She returned wearing a dress and carrying two cups of coffee. She offered him one of the cups, mutely. He ignored it.

“I must tell you,” Loringhoven snapped, “that your man is in trouble.”

She was watching him warily over the rim of her cup.

“Who accompanied Mueller to the border?”

“The border?” she said. “I know nothing of any border.”

Loringhoven stared at her. Theresa's glance fell. “I really don't know what you're talking about, Sir,” she said into her cup.

Loringhoven shrugged. “Very well,” he said. He limped to the door.

“That's … all?”

“Hardly, Fräulein. We take long looks at persons who refuse to assist us. Good night!” He put his hand on the doorknob.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait, please!”

Loringhoven turned around. “But if you don't know what I'm talking about, you can't help me.”

“Where is Gerhard?”

“Detained.”

“At the border?”

“What have you to tell me, Fräulein?” Loringhoven came back into the room and picked up the other cup.

The silence lengthened. Dieter Loringhoven did nothing to disturb it. He looked at his wristwatch and then at the woman. He said nothing.

“Gerhard went with some Americans to the Czechoslovakian border.”

Loringhoven finished his coffee. “So? Why?”

“I don't know,” she mumbled.

He chuckled. “My dear Theresa, don't you think we know all about Milo Hacha? And that Mueller took Hacha across last week? Were the Americans to meet Hacha? Speak!”

“I … I think so. At least they went to find him.”

“Now you are being sensible.”

“
Bitte,”
Theresa said mechanically. “About Gerhard … will he be …?”

“We will get in touch with you. Good night.”

When she was sure he had gone, Theresa snatched the telephone and frantically called the Astoria Hotel. Perhaps Herr Loringhoven—why had she never insisted that Gerhard take her to meet him!—could help them. But Herr Loringhoven's suite did not answer.

She tried to get back to sleep. It was impossible.

It was almost five o'clock in the morning, over her fourth cup of yesterday's coffee, when Theresa's shrewd brain began to function again. Now that she thought of it, the police agent had not shown any identification. After all, this was Austria, not Czechoslovakia.… That was when the sickening recollection flashed into her mind. Gerhard had mentioned it more than once. Dieter Loringhoven limped.

Theresa fumbled for the telephone. Gerhard … Before she could reach it, the phone rang. It was the Vienna city police.

“I was about to call you.…”

“One moment, please. We regret to inform you that Herr Mueller's body has been found on the road near Gmünd.”

“Body?” Theresa whispered.

“I am sorry. He was murdered. Why were you going to call us?”

When the police swarmed into the Astoria Hotel, it was too late. Loringhoven had already checked out.

They went through the motions of inquiring at the border stations, although they were convinced Dieter Loringhoven had already crossed into Czechoslovakia. They could, of course, expect no help from the Czech police.