Dead Man's Tale (15 page)

“Secondly,” Minister Zander continued, “Hacha's jaw development is prognathic. Demonstrate, please.”

The man opened his mouth and inserted both index fingers. In a moment he had removed four slender cylinders of cotton, of the sort dentists use. And now the resemblance between the stranger and Milo Hacha had ceased to exist.

“Magic!” Loringhoven exclaimed. “Sheer magic.”

“It has to be magic, Comrade. One moment he is not Milo Hacha. The next, he is. Then suddenly he must be himself again. Incidentally, when Hacha leaves the Mydlár house tonight to go to the Manes Café, our agents will at once report what he is wearing. You see?”

Dieter Loringhoven nodded in appreciation. Milo Hacha's double bowed and left. Zander leaned forward across his desk. “And you? You, too, have been busy? My men have kept you informed?”

“Yes. One of the Americans is now in Prague—the young one. He parked the truck on the Vaclavské Namesti. He walked. Aimlessly. So far as I know, he is still walking. Twice he has stopped in cafés. He drinks beer. He listens.”

“The others?”

“Still in the Sázava hills. Why, I don't know. The one who is here, naturally, doesn't know where to look for Hacha. But he has ears. He has eyes.”

“How do you plan to help him?”

“There will be talk in the cafés. Planted, for his benefit. And I visited the office of the Prague
Pravda
.”

“Pravda?”
Minister Zander was clearly surprised. Dieter Loringhoven was pleased to have the shoe on the other foot. “Does he understand the language—?”

Loringhoven shrugged. “He goes into the cafés along the Vaclavské and listens. Why should one of them enter Prague and the other two remain behind?”

“Because this one speaks Czech and they do not!” Minister Zander said, delighted.

“Czech? That's not likely. But German, perhaps. So, for the afternoon's German-language edition of Prague
Pravda,
there is to be one special copy printed.”

“Yes?” said Minister Zander.

“That copy will get into the hands of the American.”

A smile of appreciation spread over the Minister's face.

It was insufferably hot in midafternoon along the Vaclavské Namesti.

Drab crowds drifted along, but the broad avenue was almost empty of motor traffic. A tram rattled by, an occasional horse-drawn wagon, an automobile.

At first Andy experienced the disconcerting certainty that everyone was staring at him suspiciously. But he soon noticed that the crowds were too apathetic to care about anything but their sweltering misery.

He had dropped in at three café's after parking the truck in the almost empty municipal lot at one end of the Vaclavské Namesti. There had been much beer-drinking and talk, in both Czech and German, but none of it mentioned the name Milo Hacha.

Still, he could think of no other way to pick up Hacha's trail. He would give himself until nightfall—and then what? Would Steve or Lou Goody take no for an answer?

Worse still, what if he
did
learn Hacha's whereabouts? Report failure anyway? Finger the repatriated Czech for them? The way it shaped up, Andy thought glumly—either condemn an innocent man to sudden death or send his own brother to the chair.

He stopped thinking about it abruptly. He was hot and thirsty and tired. He decided to try one more café along the Namesti before returning to the hills of Old Prague across the river.

Andy passed another small café, stopped and retraced his steps. It might as well be this one as any other. On the wide sidewalk stood a double row of tables shielded from the sun by trees. He sat down at one of the two unoccupied tables outside. The other, adjacent to it, was soon occupied by two men in double-breasted suits.

A waiter came over, and Andy ordered beer. The waiter took another order, also given in German, for white wine at the next table. Andy sat back and drank his beer thirstily when it came, ordered another, and a third. Helmut's wallet had contained about twenty dollars' worth of Czech currency. He had had to have the truck's gas tank filled on the way to Prague. He had used more for the bread, cheese and beer. He would have to go easy with what was left. He decided, regretfully, not to order a fourth beer.

“You are excited?” one of the men at the next table asked the other, giving him a cynical grin.

“
Ja, ja,
a little.”

“You expect miracles from this man?”

Andy listened to the exchange automatically. He was far more interested in a hysterical argument in the street, where two bicyclists had just collided.

The second man sipped his wine. “After all,” he said, “he is his father's son.”

“Even the father wasn't a worker of miracles.” The cynic laughed. “He has yet to rise from the dead.”

“Well, I don't suppose we can expect much from the son, but the fact is, the government has called him to an important post and allows him to meet tonight with the old Social Democrats—”

Andy's heart jumped. He found himself gripping his beer stein in a death clutch.

“Ach,
we'll see. How is Maria?”

“The heat. She hates the summer. You are going tonight?”

“And why should I go?”

“Because the man has a magic name, I tell you. Anything can happen.”

“I am no Social Democrat, my friend.”

“Even so. They'll be in the Malá Strana in force tonight.”

“Maybe that is what the government wants to happen.”

“Do you really think so, Emil?”

“What did Rudolf Hacha ever do for the people? He couldn't even keep himself from the hangman.”

“Times have changed. Well, I must be going.”

The two men finished their wine, dropped some coins on the table and rose. They shook hands and separated on the sidewalk, swallowed by the crowds.

Andy paid for his beer quickly. He had one of them in view; it might pay to follow him. He had not taken three steps when a hand came down heavily on his shoulder. He whirled. It was the waiter.

“Mein Herr,”
the waiter said, “you have not paid enough.” He shoved the restaurant check in front of Andy's face.

Andy dropped three more coins into his hand, not sure of their denomination. The waiter grunted, and Andy hurried on.

After half a block he knew it was useless. His man had disappeared.

At the corner Andy paused to look down the street to his left. It was a narrow, cobbled lane sloping to the river. Beyond it he could see the stone arches of the Charles Bridge and, higher up, above the Malá Strana, the solid massiveness of Hradcany Castle.

He turned the corner.

That was where the newsdealer, an old woman in boots, was standing. As he was about to pass her, she thrust a newspaper at him. “
Pravda?”
she said. “
Pravda?”

Andy glanced at it. What luck! The paper was in German. He bought it.

22

Andy arrived early, with the four-sheet, tabloid-sized newspaper folded in his pocket and the Luger galling weight against his bare skin. He sat down in the smaller of the Manes Café's two rooms; it sported a bar, a few tables, leather-covered sofas along three walls and above them, life-sized portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Klement Gottwald.

The second room, with the magnificent view, was closed to the public for tonight. That was where, according to the newspaper in Andy's pocket, the Social Democrats would greet the son of their hero.

By nine-thirty the smaller room was crowded, although individual groups rarely contained more than two or three men. There were several couples. But except for Andy, there was only one other patron sitting alone over a beer. This was a big, well-built and good-looking man in his late thirties, with broad Slavic cheekbones. He was wearing a grey suit, a shirt open at the collar and no tie.

Then the first large group of Social Democrats came in and were ushered into the larger room. The waiter began scurrying back and forth, holding high steins of foaming beer and bottles of red and white wine. Before long, two more groups arrived and went into the large room after the others.

Milo Hacha was with the fourth and final group. Andy knew it was Hacha from the way the others deferred to him. His immediate entourage consisted of an old man with twinkling eyes and a grave, pretty girl, rather thin, who hardly spoke and did not smile at all. Behind them were a dozen men, most of them past middle age.

They passed by Andy's table.

So that's Milo Hacha, Andy thought.

The man he and Steve had crossed the Atlantic to find for Estelle Street. The man they had tracked halfway through Europe.

The man who's responsible, Andy thought with a grimace, for the lousy and inescapable trap I find myself in.

Hacha was tall yet compactly built. He walked with the grace of a man who has kept himself in shape at a time when men of his age were beginning to slump here and there. His face was Slavic and hard, with the slightly lumpy look of an old pro prizefighter. He was wearing a grey suit and an open-throated shirt, like the similarly Slavic-looking man drinking alone nearby.

Somehow, seeing the man in the flesh at last was an anticlimax. He was attractive enough, radiating a male magnetism that women like Trudy Ohlendorf would find irresistible. But in his mind Andy had built up a portrait of a superman, and the reality struck him as far from that.

In the few moments he had to observe Hacha at close range, Andy tried to see in him the hero, the daring undercover fighter for human liberty, the giant of causes legends sprang up about. But he couldn't. In fact, there was something about Hacha that kept niggling Andy in a sort of plea for recognition. Possibly it had something to do with the man's nervousness. There was a wet gloss to his forehead; he kept smiling almost mechanically at those greeting him. The superman of the Milo Hacha legend did not sweat for emotional reasons or have to force his smiles.

Suddenly Andy saw what was really bothering him. He doubted his conclusion even as it occurred to him. There was something phony about Hacha.

But I'm not here to make a character-analysis of the guy, Andy thought.

The question immediately popped into his mind, just why
am
I here? I'm supposed to locate Hacha. I've located him. All I have to do is get up, go back to the hills, give Steve and Goody the lowdown, and my part is finished. Even if I have to guide them back here, my part is finished. Then why don't I get up and go?

Because I can't, he answered himself, I just can't. I'm immobilized here like an insect stuck on flypaper.

He called desperately for another beer.

An ambulatory Hungarian violinist was playing a marching song. Andy did not recognize. The Social Democrats in the other room broke into enthusiastic applause.

Through the doorway Andy could see about half the big room—a wall of windows, panes slanted open to let in the night air; a section of the wide horseshoe table gay with many flickering candles; the shifting planes and curves in the animated faces seated around it.

As Andy shifted in his chair he felt with surprise the dig of the Luger against his body. He had forgotten the gun. Was this a reminder that here he was, and there Hacha was, and all he had to do was walk into the other room and shoot the guy through the head? That would solve everybody's problem. But even as the thought passed through his mind, Andy knew it was absurd. He could never do it. All he could do was sit here in the Manes Café, pinned to his chair.

He became aware of a disturbance behind him. He turned and saw a couple attempting to leave. They had gotten as far as the doorway, where a man blocked their path. The woman spoke to her escort, tugging at his arm. He raised his voice. The man in their way asked a question. Apparently it was a rhetorical question, for he shook his own head without waiting for an answer.

The man and woman came back into the room and sat down. “… go if we want to,” the man said loudly. “We haven't done anything.”

“Fool!” the woman snapped at him. “Don't you recognize the police when you see them?”

They spoke in German. Andy glanced at the man who had stopped them. He was leaning against the doorframe, his eyes never still. A policeman? Apparently they—whoever “they” were—weren't going to let anyone leave the Manes Café until this was over.

And suppose, Andy thought, suppose they decided to check everybody's papers.

Or search the patrons?

Andy inhaled noiselessly and ordered another beer.

The issue was out of his hands. He was stuck here. Exactly like the fly.

“… although the government will tell you,” Vaclav Mydlár spoke over his wineglass, “there is no relationship between a father and son except by biological accident”—here there was laughter—“we have at least this fact to go by: of his own free will, the biological accident has returned to us.”

More laughter, some applause, but no spontaneous demonstration. That made Milo Hacha, sitting uncomfortably at old Mydlár's right, feel better. He didn't want a spontaneous demonstration. He didn't want to be carried anywhere, on any tide. Except towards the approval of the government.

“… fitting that the Manes Café is the scene of this meeting. I need not remind you of the history of this famous tavern, nor of the misery some of its—ah, alumni—have brought to Europe. But we remember misery and we tend to forget triumph. Thus it was not misery in 1848 when …”

Hacha looked around the big horseshoe table. In the candlelight he could not see faces sharply. But there was no sound in the room now except the sound of Vaclav Mydlár's clear voice. The audience was attentive; some seemed rapt. Hacha, a stranger alike to politics and historical meanings, felt completely out of his depth. All he knew was that safety lay with the strong, and these were the weak.

“… two traditional ways to revolution in Eastern Europe. The first, but the way we here reject categorically, was the way of Hitler and—yes, face it, we are here because of this tonight—the way of the Bolsheviks. This is also the way of violence. Of violent revolution. Of the club and the gun and terror in the night. But there is another way, my friends, there is the way of the moderates. Of us Social Democrats. For if the will to power of the many is ever to take precedence over the will to power of the few, then violent revolution must be shunned. This, my friends, is just as true under totalitarian …”