Pray for a Brave Heart (14 page)

At the hotel desk, the clerk handed over the key to her room with the information that a visitor had been waiting to see her for the last three hours.
“Three
hours?” Paula asked.

“Three hours and ten minutes, madam. He’s sitting in one of the alcoves over there. Behind the geraniums.” The clerk politely nodded in the correct direction.

Francesca pulled gently at Paula’s arm and drew her away,
across the quietened lobby with its pillars and palms now lonely sentinels, towards the series of deep alcoves, almost small rooms in size, where armchairs and tables and desks were grouped for rest or letter-writing or conversation. Now, at this hour, they were practically abandoned: the elderly ladies had left their knitting and listening posts, husbands weren’t waiting impatiently for wives who had decided to wear a heavier coat or another hat, wives weren’t waiting for bill-querying husbands, children had stopped losing chessmen or silting up inkwells with blotting-paper, the postcard scribblers had taken their inspirational phrases to bed with them. There was only a group of four young people entranced in themselves; a white-haired gentleman fast asleep over the London
Times,
a peaceful background to an unhappy couple intense with a private crisis of their own, and, in the last alcove of all, there was a solitary man, bearded, dressed in rough tweeds, who sat with arms folded, his back against the wall, his eyes fixed gloomily on the bank of flowers which shut him away from the rest of the world.

“Ah,” Francesca said, pausing for a moment. “When Gregor waits, he waits.” She went quickly towards him.

At once he rose, a tall figure with powerful shoulders, dark hair greying at the temples, a heavy beard making him older than he actually was. Or perhaps it was the lines around his solemn grey eyes, the heavy furrows between his cheeks and mouth, the permanent wrinkles on his broad forehead, which added twenty years to his age. His was a strong face, with blunt features and a wide mouth. Its grim look vanished as he saw Francesca. Even the wrinkles and furrows changed from heavy despair to overjoyed relief. He hugged Francesca with delight, and then held out a large hand to grasp Paula’s.

“I know you well, already,” he told her. He had the widest grin that Paula had ever seen, and his accent delighted her, too.

“You had to wait so long,” she said apologetically. After all, she was to blame.

“Nothing.” He gave an expansive wave of his free arm. “What else I do?” He let Paula’s hand go at last. “I come here, Francesca is not here, I wait.” His voice was deep, rich with many undertones, a voice normally strong and powerful which he was keeping low. Now, he glanced round the lobby, and then pointed to the wall of the alcove with its screen of geraniums. “We talk here?”

“Why not in my room?” Paula suggested.

He looked a little shocked. “At this hour? Is it—
convenable?”

Francesca smiled, then. She looked at his tweed jacket with its missing button, at the leather sandals on his feet, at the high-necked grey sweater which he wore because he hated collars and ties. “Perhaps not,” she agreed gently. “This is all right, anyway,” and she looked around their private alcove and then chose a group of chairs beside a table near the wall. From the other alcoves, only an occasional laugh and the murmur of voices could be heard, but not the words. “So you finished your symphony,” she said. “The problem of the chorus in that last movement was solved. I knew it would be.”

Gregor shook his head. “They do not matter. Not anything matters.” Then he opened his eyes wide. “You think I—you think I celebrate?”

“Well,” said Francesca, but now she looked at him worriedly, “it isn’t the first time you’ve suddenly gone driving to Bern at night when you’d finished some work.”

“No, no, no!” he said, almost angrily. He glanced over his
shoulder at the lobby. “We must speak low. Very low. And we must smile. You,” he told Paula, “must smile. All the time. We are enjoying. Yes? You speak French?”

“Not very well.”

“German?”

“About the same.”

“Then I fight with your English.” He sighed. “I want you to hear. Your husband—he has a newspaper—he helps us, perhaps? To make public. Yes?”

Francesca sat very still. She had unfastened the knot in her scarf, and pushed the silk square back from her head. “What is wrong?” she asked.

He avoided her eyes. He did not answer.

Was his news so bad? Francesca wondered. “I’m ready, Gregor,” she said.

“Schmid did not come today.” He was talking to Paula.
“Please
smile,” he said.

“Perhaps he decided to stay in Bern for his free afternoon,” said Francesca.

Gregor shook his head.

“But he ought to have let you know,” Francesca added. She looked down at her slender hands to hide the worry in her face.

Gregor kept talking to Paula in his deep soft voice. “He comes, each Thursday, by motor coach at four o’clock. Four o’clock he arrives. Walks up through the village to my house. Little house. In meadows. Behind woods. Two miles perhaps. Half an hour to walk, no more.”

Paula, remembering to smile, smiled.

“Good,” he said, noting the smile. “When he comes, we have tea, some food. We play chess. We talk music. Until late,
very late. We have more food. We talk. Perhaps we sleep. Early, at seven in morning, he goes. Back to Bern.”

“He ought to have let you know,” Francesca repeated. When Gregor’s English became difficult, it was always a sign that he had serious trouble on his mind.

“But he came, he came to Falken today.” And now Gregor looked at Francesca again. He said unhappily, “He came. Through village. But not to my house.”

“Oh, no!” Francesca’s face was carved out of white marble.

“Please,” Gregor said, “please smile. I am telling you. I wait. I get chessmen all ready. I make tea. He does not come.”

“But where—”

“Five o’clock, I go. Perhaps, in village, he talks to Frau Welti. Perhaps he stops to see view. Perhaps there is accident with motor coach. But no, he is not anywhere.”

“Did anyone see him arrive?”

“Heinz Gauch. Frau Welti. She waved to him.”

“From the inn?”

“Yes. She saw him take road to my house.”

“Did you search?”

“But of course. First, alone. It is stupid to worry people. I go to your house. Your aunt says you are in Bern with Paula today. Then I go to some of—” He glanced round, then cupped his face in his hands as he leaned his elbows on the small table, and his voice dropped even lower. “Some others,” he ended tactfully.

Some of the Committee? Paula wondered. Her obedient smile was frozen and foolish, as if she were being photographed inexpertly.

“They search, too,” said Gregor. “Nothing. I go back to
your Aunt Louisa. I am told the American telephoned, you are staying with her tonight. I tell the others to meet at my house. And I drive here.”

“What if your friends have found him by this time?” Paula suggested.

“Then there is a message for you here. You get no message when you come in?”

Paula shook her head. Her lips were dry with nervousness. She watched Francesca.

“We’ll leave now,” Francesca told Gregor. Her blue eyes had darkened. Almost to herself, she said, “They’ve kidnapped him.”

“Francesca,” Paula said,
“please
don’t let yourself think of such—”

“Why shouldn’t I? I’ve seen such things happen before. You haven’t.”

“But—” Paula looked at Gregor. “This isn’t a Communist-dominated little town in a remote part of postwar Italy. This is the capital of Switzerland—with legations and embassies and newspapers and journalists all ready to spread any alarm. And aren’t we going too quickly? A man doesn’t keep an engagement. What then? Perhaps he changed his mind, or something. Perhaps he wanted a long walk by himself. Perhaps he—oh, there are ten or twenty things that could have happened.” Francesca, Paula thought unhappily, lived too much with her bitter memories.

Gregor was looking at her as if she were some strange phenomenon. “Now
you
are being a little stupid,” he said.

Paula stared at him. But he wasn’t trying to be rude. He was stating a fact. “If you are worried,” she asked, “why don’t you call the police?”

“Police!” Gregor began to laugh. Then he checked himself. In a voice so low, now, and yet so intense that it was frightening, he said, “What do they understand of political criminals? Pickers of pockets, yes. Murderers of wives, yes. But politicals saying, ‘I am noble, look at me how noble!’ And then they sell their brothers into slaves. Oh, they are evil, evil of an evil you do now know. They pick up telephone, like this, easy. They say, ‘Two hundred men for Kargopol Camp. At once.’ And two hundred men are shipped. Like cattle.” He took a deep breath, almost a sob, into his powerful lungs. “I heard them. These men who pick up telephone. The men who are shipped like cattle. I heard them both.” Heavy beads of perspiration stood out on his brow. His whole body is crying with pain, Paula thought.

“Come,” Francesca said, rising abruptly.

Gregor followed her, and Paula went too. “Let me see you safely out,” she said, and returned the cold look given Gregor and Francesca by two smartly dressed women who were entering the lobby.

In the street, Gregor said, “My car is near. This way.” Then to Paula, “Your husband comes soon?”

“Tomorrow, I hope.” You never could tell, though. Andy might be delayed.

Gregor was speaking in a burst of German to Francesca as he unlocked the door of a shabby little Renault. (My car, he had called it so proudly—was it the first he had ever owned?)

Francesca said, “Gregor thinks Andy can help. He wants the whole story of Schmid made public”

Yes, thought Paula, Gregor is right. Let the story of Peter Andrássy be made known. How many millions throughout
the civilised world recognise his name, how many hundreds of thousands listen to his symphonies? They must be told how much he has given up in order to be free—all the special privileges, material rewards, lavish honours which are used to blind a famous man, or to bribe him. Instead, Andrássy has chosen danger—escape, hardship, terror. He has worked as an unknown waiter named Schmid. He is even content to let his name and reputation stay hidden, once he begins his new life in America. He is no longer merely the great man— unapproachable, working apart from ordinary people: he has proved he is a human being with moral courage, a man who has chosen between slavery, however disguised, and freedom, however strange and difficult. Yes, that’s how Andy will write about Peter Andrássy: a story of moral courage, without which great men become little.

“And you?” Paula asked Francesca.

“I still don’t know. There are others to be thought of.” Francesca shook her head. “I don’t know what to do,” she said miserably.

“We think,” Gregor said. “As I drive, we think.” He pulled Francesca gently into the car.

“We’ll be home before you are in bed,” Francesca told Paula. And her hand was as cold as the lips that had brushed Paula’s cheek.

“Please call me,” Paula said. “Let me know—”

But the car slipped away, gathering speed even before it left the Square, and Paula turned back to the hotel. She felt dispirited, troubled, and—in the sanity of the cool night—a little annoyed. Gregor had almost convinced her that he was right, and that she was wrong. He had experienced so much
cruelty in his life, so much that was evil, that he had become too quick to judge. And Francesca—she had seen so much that was tragic, that she too accepted the fantastic as possible. What proof, what shred of evidence could either of them produce that something had happened to Andrássy? The tragedy of tragedy was that it could make people too fearful, too credulous, even a little crazed. And there, she thought, I begin to talk, even if I can’t think, like Gregor. Is he crazy? Or am I—as he said—just a little stupid? One thing, I admire his courage with English: if I could speak Russian, I know my accent would be funnier than his.

She stopped at the desk to tell the clerk that Miss Vivenzio was not staying, after all.

“Oh, dear,” the clerk sighed—he was a gentle soul—“then she won’t get the flowers.”

“Flowers? When did they come?”

“I understood they were being sent tomorrow morning first thing. A nice surprise for breakfast? The florist telephoned to say he had flowers for Fräulein Vivenzio, and he wanted to verify her room number.”

“Are you sure they are for Fräulein Vivenzio?” Paula asked, certain in her own mind that the flowers were for her. Andy often sent flowers when she was alone.

The clerk frowned. “I may have been mistaken,” he said, “but I thought they were for—”

“Never mind,” Paula said. She was too tired to talk much more. “There will be a card with the flowers. Then we’ll know.”

She walked slowly towards the elevator. If Andy was sending flowers, then he was apologising for being delayed in Bonn. That was entirely possible, she thought glumly. She ought to
have stayed in Bonn with him, and prevented him from taking on some last-minute job. Then they would both have been on the plane tomorrow. Instead—why, she hadn’t even found an apartment.

She felt not only very tired, but very lonely. Heavens, what a night it had been… Next time she was by herself, without Andy, she’d settle for a good book to take to bed.

The corridor leading to her room was peaceful. There was a dim light, but no sound, from the door of the housekeeper’s quarters. Everyone was asleep. The thick carpet silenced her steps. She passed only a few pairs of shoes waiting outside their owners’ bedrooms to be collected and cleaned. The hotel was still half-empty. In another month it would be bustling with visitors. But now, its quiet emptiness made her feel still more lonely.

The outer door to her bedroom was unfastened as usual, but the inner door opened too easily. Had the maid forgotten to lock it properly? Both beds had been neatly turned down, ash trays had been emptied, glasses cleared. Yes, all was in order. She walked over to the dressing-table, unclipping her earrings. “Ridiculous,” she said, thinking back to the flowers again, “he got it all mixed up. Why, Francesca—” She laughed. No one knew that Francesca had planned to spend the evening with her, except Aunt Louisa and Gregor. She stared at the looking-glass. She was no longer amused. She was troubled. Something was wrong, somewhere.