Judgment on Deltchev (5 page)

After a moment or two the glazed doors were flung open and three men entered the court. Inside the door they paused for a moment blinking in the lights that poured down on them. Two of them were uniformed guards, tall, smart young fellows. Between them was an elderly man with a thin, grey face, deep-set eyes, and white hair. He was short and had been stocky, but now his shoulders were rounded and he was inclined to stoop. He stood with his hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets, looking about him uncertainly. One of the guards touched his arm and he walked over to the rostrum and stepped onto it. A chair had been placed for him, but for a moment he stood there looking round at the flags on the walls. He smiled faintly. He still had his hands in his pockets. Then, with a curt nod to each of the judges, he sat down and closed his eyes. This was Yordan Deltchev.

There were twenty-three counts listed in the published indictment against him. They charged (principally in count number eight, though the same charge was paraphrased in two other counts) that he had ‘prepared terrorist plots
against the state and conspired with reactionary organizations, including the criminal Officer Corps Brotherhood, to secure, for financial and other personal advantages, the occupation of the motherland by troops of a foreign power’. There were other charges concerned with terrorist activity, the smuggling of arms, and plots to assassinate members of the People’s Party Government ‘in particular P. I. Vukashin’. Sprinkled throughout were dark references to ‘various confederates’, ‘notorious foreign agents’, ‘hired saboteurs and murderers’, ‘reactionary gangsters’ and so on, while the name of the Officer Corps Brotherhood recurred with the persistence of a typewriter bell. It was soon evident that the indictment was a propaganda document intended for foreign consumption. It said, in effect, or hoped to say, ‘He is the kind of man against whom such charges may seriously be brought,’ and, ‘He is accused of so much that of some he must be guilty.’

The public prosecutor conducted his case in person. His name was Dr Prochaska and he was one of the few members of the legal profession who had joined the People’s Party before it had come to power. He was an authority on questions of land tenure, and most of his practice had been concerned with cases involving them. He had had little experience of court advocacy of any kind and none at all in criminal proceedings. A stout, pugnacious-looking man with quick, jerky movements and a habit of licking his lips every few seconds, he seemed more concerned to defend himself against accusations of weakness than to present his case effectively. He made scarcely any reference to the official indictment and dealt with only two of the charges in it. If he could prove, or seem to prove, those, then Deltchev would stand convicted
on the whole indictment. That, at least, was the impression I had of it. From the commencement of his long opening address he adopted a tone of ranting denunciation that carried little conviction and confused even the more reasoned passages. In spite of the earphones on my head, and the voice of the interpreter quietly translating the speech, I was constantly distracted by the sight and half-heard sounds of its originator.

His case, however, was dangerously simple.

It was generally known that at the time of the German retreat in 1944 Deltchev, who had been secretly in touch with both the Russians and the Western powers, had gone to great lengths to secure Anglo-American, rather than Soviet, occupation of the country. Against the wishes of a majority of the Committee of National Unity, he had at one point gone so far as to propose to the Western Powers that the national army should continue to resist the Russians in the north so as to give the Americans and British time to prepare an airborne invasion from Middle East bases.

It was now suggested by the Prosecution that this proposal had come in fact from the Western Powers themselves and that Deltchev’s support of it had been bought with the promise that he would have control of the reallocation of the German oil concessions. In other words, he had tried to sell his countrymen’s lives for money and power.

The other favoured charge was the one that had so amused my economist friend. It was that Deltchev had planned to assassinate Vukashin, the head of the People’s Party Government, and that he was, in fact, a member of the Officer Corps Brotherhood. If this could seem to be
proved, he could quite legally and with full popular approval be sentenced to death. The case against Deltchev was designed to destroy both him and the Agrarian Socialist Party which had produced him for ever.

I left the court that day in a peculiar frame of mind. I felt as if I had been to the first night of what had seemed to me a very bad play only to find that everyone else had enjoyed it immensely. A Propaganda Ministry bureau had been set up in a room adjoining the court. On the way out Pashik stopped to get the official bulletin on the day’s proceedings. The room was crowded and I waited in the doorway. There were a number of tables, each signposted with the name of one of the official languages. As I stood there, I saw a bald young man whom I thought I knew coming away from the English table. I had noticed him earlier in the day and been unable to place him. Now as he pushed his way out we came face to face. He nodded.

‘You’re Foster, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. We’ve met before.’

‘Sibley, Incorporated Press.’

‘Oh yes.’ I remembered, too, that I had not liked him.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Getting local colour for a new play?’

I explained. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Very nice too. Still, I expect you’ll make a play out of it sometime, won’t you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I should have thought that there were masses of material for you. It’d make quite a nice little paragraph, your being here. Do you mind if I use it?’

‘Yes, I do.’ I smiled as I said it, but not very cordially.

He laughed. ‘All right, I’ll spare you. But it’d be nice to
send something even a
little
more interesting than these handouts.’ He waved the sheets in his hand. ‘I’m at our Paris office really. I’ve been lent for the trial. Why I can’t think. An office boy could file this junk for all of us.’ He turned his head as Pashik came up. ‘Hullo, Georghi, we were just talking about you.’

‘Good evening, Mr Sibley. We must be going, Mr Foster. I have to get to the office.’

‘That’s our Georghi. Always on the job!’ Sibley grinned. ‘Where are you staying, Foster?’

I told him.

‘We must have a drink together,’ he said.

In the car Pashik gave me the bulletin. I glanced through it. Most of it was composed of extracts from Dr Prochaska’s address. They were even more idiotic to read than to listen to. I put the bulletin down. The streets leading back to the centre of the city were narrow and crowded and Pashik was a driver who twitched at the wheel instead of steering with it. He squeezed his way none too skilfully between two carts.

‘Mr Foster,’ he said then, ‘there is a suggestion which I think I must make to you.’ He looked round at me soulfully. ‘You will not, I hope, be offended.’

‘Not at all. Look out.’

He twitched away from a cyclist just in time. The cyclist shouted. Pashik sounded the horn unnecessarily and put on speed.

‘It is a small thing,’ he said – the car swayed unpleasantly across some protruding tram lines – ‘but I would not, if I were in your place, be too friendly here with Mr Sibley.’

‘Oh? What’s the matter with him?’

‘It is nothing personal, you understand.’

‘But what?’

‘He drinks too much and becomes indiscreet.’

‘I don’t see that that has anything to do with me.’

‘His associates will be suspect.’

I thought for a moment. ‘Mr Pashik,’ I said then, ‘as a newspaperman don’t you think that you’re a bit too anxious about the censorship and the Propaganda Ministry and the police and all the rest of it?’

A woman missed death by an inch. He sounded the horn absently and shook his head. ‘I do not think so. It is difficult to explain.’

‘What’s so difficult about it?’

‘You are a stranger here, Mr Foster. You look on our life from the outside. You are interested in the trial of a man whose name you scarcely know because his situation seems to you to contain the elements of a spiritual conflict. Naturally so. You are a writer of fiction and you make the world in your own image. But be careful. Do not walk upon the stage yourself. You may find that the actors are not what they have seemed.’

‘Is Sibley one of the actors?’

‘I was speaking generally, Mr Foster.’

‘Then I’m sorry but I don’t understand what we’re talking about.’

He sighed. ‘I was afraid not. But perhaps it does not matter.’

I let that one go. A few moments later he pulled up outside my hotel. I got out of the car.

‘Shall we meet for dinner, Mr Foster?’

I hesitated. The air outside the car smelt good. I shook my head. ‘I think I’ll get to bed early tonight,’ I said.

The Hotel Boris had been built by a German company in 1914 and was one of those hotels in which footsteps echo and only the sound of a toilet flushing in the distance reminds you that you are not alone there. The foyer was a cavernous place with a tessellated floor and a hydraulic lift in a wrought-iron cage. The reception clerk was a slow-moving, mentally deficient youth with a charming smile. He spoke a little English.

‘There is a message for you, sir,’ he said. He glanced at the scrap of paper that he had taken out of the key rack. ‘Mr Stanoiev called to see you and will call again.’

‘Stanoiev? I don’t know anyone of that name. Are you sure it was for me?’

He looked stupid. ‘I don’t know, sir. He went away.’

‘I see.’

The lift was deserted. I walked up the wide shallow stairs to the sixth floor.

My room was at the end of a long corridor with upholstered benches set against the wall at intervals along it. As I started down the corridor, I noticed that at the far end there was a man sitting on one of the benches. He was reading a newspaper.

It made an odd picture; one never expects corridor furniture to be used except as shelves for trays and chambermaids’ dusters. As I approached he looked up
casually, then went back to his newspaper. I glanced at him as I passed by.

He was a thin, dried-up man with pale, haggard eyes and grey hair cropped so that the bone of his skull was visible. He had a peculiarly blotchy complexion like that of someone just cured of a skin disease. The hands holding up the newspaper were long and yellow. There was a black soft hat beside him on the bench.

I went past him to my room. I put the key in the lock and turned it. Then someone spoke from just behind me.

‘Herr Foster?’

It made me jump. I turned round. The man who had been on the bench was standing there with his hat under his arm.

I nodded.

‘Petlarov,’ he said, and then added in German, ‘I can speak French or German, whichever you prefer.’

‘German will be all right. I’m glad to see you.’ I finished opening the door. ‘Will you come in?’

He bowed slightly. ‘Thank you.’ He walked in and then turned and faced me. ‘I must apologize,’ he said in a clipped, businesslike way, ‘for answering your note in this fashion. A native of this country would not find it strange, but as you are a foreigner I must make an explanation.’

‘Please sit down.’

‘Thank you.’ In the light of the room his clothes were shabby and he looked ill. His precise, formal manner, however, seemed to ignore both facts. He chose a hard chair as if he did not intend to stay long.

‘First,’ he said, ‘I think you should know that I am under surveillance; that is to say, I have to report to the police every day. Second, I am officially listed as an
“untrustworthy person”. That means that if you were to be seen entering my house or talking to me in a public place, you would attract the attention of the police, and yourself become suspect. That is why I have used this unconventional means of seeing you. I discovered your room number by leaving a note for you in the name of Stanoiev and noticing which box it was put into. Then I came discreetly up here and waited for you to return. You need therefore have no fear that my name is in any way connected with yours or my presence here known about.’ He bowed curtly.

‘I am most grateful to you for coming.’

‘Thank you. May I ask how you obtained my address?’

‘From a man named Pashik.’

‘Ah, yes. I thought it must be him.’ He looked thoughtfully into space.

‘Do you know him well, Herr Petlarov?’

‘You mean what is my opinion of him?’

‘Yes.’

He considered for a moment. ‘Let us say that I do not subscribe to the common belief that he is merely a disagreeable person whose political views change with the person he talks to. But now that I am here, what do you want of me?’

I had held out my cigarettes. His hand had gone out to them as he was speaking, but now he hesitated. He looked up from the cigarettes, and his eyes met mine.

‘I have some more,’ I said.

He smiled in a deprecatory way. ‘If you had perhaps a bar of chocolate or a biscuit, Herr Foster, it would, I think, be better for my stomach than tobacco.’

‘Of course.’ I went to my suitcase. ‘I have no chocolate, but here are some biscuits.’

I had a box, bought in Paris for the train journey and then forgotten. I opened it. The biscuits were the kind with pink icing sugar on them.

‘Not very good for a bad stomach,’ I remarked.

He took one with a polite smile. ‘Oh yes. Excellent.’ He nibbled at it with very white false teeth.

‘Pashik gave me your piece on Deltchev to read,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes? It was considered unsuitable for publication.’

‘By Pashik?’

‘Yes, but I was not surprised or upset. I knew that it had been commissioned in the belief that because I had had a difference of opinion with Yordan I would therefore write about him in an unfavourable way. If Pashik had asked me, I would have told him what to expect. Fortunately he did not ask.’

‘Fortunately?’

‘If he had known he would not have commissioned the article, and I needed the money.’