The Broken Penny Page 9

  Garden pulled the girl, not gently. Would they never get out? Katerina Arbitzer put her hand to her breast with a look of extreme surprise, and dropped to the floor. A red stain spread quickly over her dress. She smiled up at them and said ‘Not hurt.’ The red stain grew larger. Her eyes closed. Garden dropped to his knees beside her, felt for her pulse, lifted her eyelid, searched vainly for her heartbeat.

  Cetkovitch came over, his face contorted with rage. ‘Why haven’t you gone? We can only hold out here because they want us alive.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Cetkovitch looked at her briefly. ‘She is a few hours in advance of most of the rest of us. Now get out.’

  Garden took the girl’s hand. She did not resist him. They went out through the door and down a flight of steps. Just before he closed the door Garden heard a soft plop and a hiss, and caught for a second the smell of tear gas. They ran through the well-lighted cellars, which were full of pieces of furniture, pottery and pictures, all carefully labelled. The wood pile had been hastily pushed aside to show a dark hole ahead. They groped up stairs here. Once the girl stumbled and Garden felt her body warm against him. Invisible above them a voice said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Theodore? Garden.’

  ‘About time.’ A beam of light came down the steep stairs. ‘Jacob is in the car. Where’s Madame Arbitzer?’

  Garden told him. Granz said nothing. The garage at the side of the house was a broken-down affair, but the car inside was long, sleek and gleaming. Arbitzer was huddled in a back seat, looking white and ill. Garden put a finger to his lips and Granz nodded. They opened the garage doors and Granz started the engine. ‘In the front,’ Garden said to the girl and she got in. Garden opened the back door and sat beside Arbitzer, who did not even look up. They slid smoothly out into the empty road and away from Cetkovitch’s house.

  Garden glanced quickly at Arbitzer who remained in his corner, looking straight ahead. Then he leaned forward and talked to the back of Granz’s neck. ‘How much did Peplov know about the organisation?’

  ‘Everything in the north. He controlled it.’

  ‘The classical touch,’ Garden said. ‘The agent-provocateur who is half in sympathy with the movement he betrays. Down here?’

  ‘Not so much, but enough. He could have found out.’ Like a man in agony Granz cried out again, ‘We trusted him.’

  Half a dozen of the People’s Police were guarding a house while one knocked thunderously on the door. This time Granz said nothing about stopping, but simply swore fiercely to himself. As they came nearer the town centre there were more black-coated police in the streets. Little squares of light showed in houses where the police stood at the door or hustled protesting pyjamaed figures out to waiting cars.

  ‘Keep away from the square,’ Garden said. ‘We don’t want to be questioned.’

  Even as he spoke a black-coated figure waved the car to a stop. He came to the window and revealed himself as a very young man with a fair moustache that was carefully curled upward. He spoke in a dialect strange to that part of the country. ‘You are out late.’

  With surprising fluency Granz said, ‘These are English comrades, come to attend the Cultural Congress for the outlawing of Imperialist Warfare. I have been instructed to take them to the airport.’

  ‘The airport is closed,’ the young man said.

  Granz leered at him. ‘You are smoking out some of the counter-revolutionary assassins, eh? There are too many of them in this town.’

  ‘Our mission here is of the first importance,’ the young man said proudly. ‘That I can tell you.’

  Garden said in English, ‘Jacob and I have papers, but not the girl.’

  ‘What did the English comrade say?’ the officer asked.

  ‘He said that even in a short stay he has seen too many of such gentry, who like sewer rats have poisoned the pure rivers of our town. Other towns too, they tell me.’ Granz put the car into gear.

  The young officer stopped twirling his moustache. ‘I have no knowledge of that. Your papers, comrade.’

  ‘Papers, yes.’ Granz fumbled in his coat. ‘Here they are.’ He leaned out of the window and swung viciously with the butt-end of the revolver in his hand. The blow caught the man absolutely unprepared. He staggered and fell, but his hat broke the blow’s force. Garden heard two shots as they drove away, and a ping on the glass at the back.

  ‘Bullet-proof glass,’ Granz said happily. ‘They should have shot at the tyres. He won’t follow us without instructions, but he’ll report back. They’ll be after us.’

  Arbitzer moved like a man rousing himself from sleep. ‘Katerina, where is Katerina?’ The car was moving fast now, and they had reached open country. Arbitzer put a hand on Garden’s arm. ‘Where is Katerina?’

  ‘We left her behind.’ In the darkness he could not see Arbitzer’s face clearly.

  ‘Left her behind? Nonsense, we must go back.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him?’ the girl asked harshly.

  ‘Katerina was struck by a stray bullet,’ Garden said. ‘She came back to comfort Ilona, who was upset about the death of her dog. Katerina is dead, Jacob. She died at once.’

  Arbitzer showed no sign of having heard these words. He sat bolt upright, a spectral but commanding figure. ‘Go back, Theodore. Go back at once.’ The road vanished underneath them, an endless ribbon stretched ahead. ‘Theodore!’

  ‘It’s no good, Jacob. She died at once.’ Garden put a hand on one thin shoulder. It was impatiently shaken off. ‘We must go back and fetch her, she will think that I have left her behind. She must know that I would never do that. Katerina!’ Absurdly Arbitzer tried to stand up, bumped his head and fell down sideways on the seat.

  ‘Listen to me, Jacob. It’s no good going back, we can’t go back, Katerina is dead.’

  ‘Lies, all lies. Where are you taking me in this car? You have kidnapped me.’ Arbitzer began to shout at the top of his voice, ‘Help, help.’ There was a rattling sound. He was trying to get the car door open.

  ‘The light, Theodore, quick.’ Arbitzer turned as the light came on in the back of the car, revealing wild eyes enlarged in a white anguished face. Garden brought up his right fist the short distance to the old man’s chin. Arbitzer grunted, his eyes closed and he slumped down to the seat. Garden covered him with the rug.

  Granz switched off the light. ‘Our President,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Why do you sneer at him?’ the girl said. ‘He has risked his life to come back. His wife has been killed. Can you do nothing but sneer at him?’ She spoke so quickly that Garden could hardly follow her.

  ‘You had better be quiet,’ Granz said. ‘What do you think we should do, Charles? Twenty miles to Baritsa. Shall we go there now?’

  ‘I think so. Remember that we have one small advantage. If everything had gone as Peplov planned it, we should simply have walked out of Cetkovitch’s house into the arms of the police. We should not have known the identity of the informer. As it is we know it is Peplov, and we know their plans. The revolution was arranged to begin tomorrow morning, they suppress it the night before. Was Peplov killed?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘It’s an outside chance that we can do anything in Baritsa, but worth trying. After all, Lodno was the focal point of suppression. They may not have arranged things so well elsewhere.’ Through Garden’s veins there crept a warming stream of assurance and excitement. ‘If we are stopped again, Theodore, I am one of the party’s foreign friends on a tour of inspection. We know all about what is going on, and Peplov has sent us to see how things are progressing in Baritsa. Ilona is my girl friend, Jacob is a friend who has got tight. We shall have to muffle his face so that they don’t recognise him. We may get away with it, eh, Theodore?’

  ‘We shall be lucky if we are alive tomorrow morning,’ Granz said gloomily. The car drank up the road with hardly more than a purr to tell them that they were moving. This wide highway running two hundred miles from the southern
provinces almost to the centre of the country was, Garden remembered, one of the government’s principal achievements. It had been made by that odd kind of voluntary principle on which those that do not volunteer are deprived of rations and get a black mark in their occupation. None the less, it was a fine road. Houses, fields, toy villages rushed past them like a screen backcloth.

  The girl turned round. Dimly Garden saw her yellow hair and her pale face. ‘Now you’re feeling happy, isn’t that so? This is what you came for.’ Garden thought, How well she knows the secret injury, how cleverly she touches the inner core of doubt. He did not reply. ‘I do not enjoy it so much. Why should I pretend to be your piece of local skirt?’

  Granz muttered angrily. Garden said, ‘All right. If you want to destroy your uncle and the rest of us, it is simple enough. If we are stopped, tell the People’s Police who we are. Granz and I will be shot. They will shoot you, too, but they may pin a badge on you saying that you are a heroine. Your uncle will be preserved for a public trial. If that’s the kind of thing to make you happy, we can’t stop you doing it.’

  ‘Oh, you’re so smug.’ Her voice was high. ‘What do you care about my dog?’

  Granz spoke with heavy brutality. ‘Speaking for myself, I do not give a damn for your dog. Or for you, either.’

  ‘I don’t mind about you. You don’t pretend. I am talking about him, I am talking to him. What does he care about Nicko, what does he care about Katerina? All he wants is the chase, the excitement, the violence. He does not care if any of us live or die. Why do you pretend?’ she screamed. ‘Why don’t you answer?’

  Garden leaned forward and smacked her face hard twice, once on each side, with an open palm. As he felt the warm contact of flesh against flesh he knew that the action was in a way a triumph for her, a betrayal of himself, and that this was something she would understand, perhaps without ever being able to put the thought into words. For the moment, however, the action was effective. She sank down in her seat with a cry which expressed astonishment and indignation as much as pain. The toy villages were replaced by ghostly lime-washed houses, mildly modernistic in appearance. They were in the suburbs of Baritsa.

  Garden remembered Baritsa from two short visits to it, once on a raid during the war and once when the war was over. It was a small town whose inhabitants were dependent for their living on a large tobacco factory which made half of the country’s bitter-tasting cigarettes. There was an enormous and once-luxurious hotel which on Garden’s visit had lacked running water or any kind of room service. This was a democracy, people were saying. It was not fitting for one man to wait on another. The result was exhilarating but uncomfortable. No doubt that had all been changed. What could not have been changed so easily was the semi-Moslem atmosphere, the houses with their projecting upper storeys full of windows, the onion-domed churches. They had come to Baritsa the second time, he remembered, to rename Wilson Square. It was to be called in future Arbitzer Square. Cetkovitch – yes, of course, Cetkovitch – had made an easy and graceful little speech. It had all been polite, but it had been enthusiastic too. What was the square called now?

  ‘What is it called, Theodore, the big square here? You remember we named it for Jacob.’ In his corner Arbitzer stirred.

  ‘What do you think? Who is Number One?’

  ‘Number One? Oh yes. It is not one of your own people.’

  Granz chuckled. ‘They would have to change it too often. You remember we have had two new Presidents and three new Foreign Secretaries in the last five years. Now we shall see. Round the corner one of our men lives.’ Their headlights played on a narrow cobbled street that had about it an unnatural stillness. ‘The third house down. I don’t see anything – oh, yes.’ From the darkness of the doorway two figures emerged wearing familiar long coats and stiff caps.

  ‘Stop the car,’ Garden said. ‘What was the man’s name here?’

  ‘Trajko. But–’

  ‘Stop.’ Granz stopped the car. Garden got out and walked up to the two men. ‘I am from headquarters at Lodno, on a tour of inspection. Is everything under control here?’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ said the taller of the two men. Garden recognised again the northern dialect. ‘We dragged the rats out of their holes one by one. Respectable citizens stayed indoors.’ He winked and spat.

  ‘You have taken the man, Trajko?’

  ‘Took him in bed. There was some trouble though – resisting arrest.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Garden made his voice sharp.

  ‘He had a gun under his pillow and one of our chaps got hurt. So–’ The man grinned, put his finger to his head and clicked.

  ‘Didn’t you receive orders that all suspects were to be taken in for interrogation?’ The man continued to grin foolishly. ‘Comrade Peplov of the Central Committee will take a serious view of this. Have there been other cases of men shot while resisting arrest?’

  The other man spoke for the first time, in a treacly, wheedling voice. ‘Now have a heart, comrade. Mistakes will happen.’

  ‘Come to attention when you speak to me.’ The man, startled, sprang to attention, and as he did so his cap fell off, revealing cropped fair hair and a youthful face. Why, he’s no more than a boy, Garden thought with a sudden, sharp, unidentifiable feeling. ‘In a workers’ state, mistakes do not happen. Who is your officer and where shall I find him?’

  The wheedling voice had become frightened. ‘Lieutenant Knapp, the Central Hotel in the square. That is our headquarters.’

  Naturally the Central Hotel would be the headquarters of the security police – that, of course, was the inevitable. Garden snapped, ‘Return to duty. I shall investigate this and whoever is responsible will be punished.’ He went back to the car. ‘Trajko is dead. Drive in the direction of the square when you leave here, but turn away from it. Get out of the town as quickly as you can. It is hopeless here.’

  They drove down the cobbled street, they turned sharp left and left again. Beyond its small centre of square solid government buildings, Baritsa was a town of steep cobbled streets with houses that bent toward each other, cliff-like alleys at the opening of which in daylight children sat begging. Down these twisting streets Granz guided the great American-style car. No glimmer of light showed in any window. The only figures to be seen in the streets were People’s Police who stood on street corners in bunches of three or four. They paid no attention to the car. Obviously anybody out in a large car on this particular night was thought automatically to be a member of the ruling oligarchy.

  About these utterly silent streets there seemed to Garden something terrible, something that told of an awful conformity of the human spirit. Was it awful, however, or merely contemptible? Draw the curtains close, turn out the lights, pretend that the knocking at the house next door does not exist, put cotton-wool in your ears against the screams, be thankful above all that it is not your turn, perhaps it will never be your turn. Contemptible? Garden asked himself. And answered, no, it is merely human. Looking at the broad back of Granz he thought, few are what we call heroes, and those few are so most often because they have denied social responsibilities. ‘Are you married, Theodore?’ he asked.

  Granz hesitated.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Granz stopped the car. They were out of the town now, and in the countryside. Garden turned the handle of the window and drank in the soft, rich air. It was no longer raining. He looked at his watch. The time was five minutes past eleven. Four hours and five minutes ago he had been in England.

  Granz shook out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to the girl and to Garden. ‘Is the old man awake?’ He snapped a switch and the back of the car was illuminated. Arbitzer was sitting up staring straight in front of him, with his eyes wide open. He seemed not to see the packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Lodno no good, Baritsa no good,’ Granz said. He sounded hopeless, like a child looking for guidance. ‘What are we going to do now?’

  ‘Go back.
’ They were all surprised to hear Arbitzer’s voice. ‘We must go back to fetch Katerina. That man Peplov is keeping her prisoner. He should never have been trusted. I should have handled things myself…’ His voice died into murmurs.

  ‘Jacob.’ The girl’s voice was softer than Garden had heard it. ‘Katerina is dead. There is no use in going back.’

  ‘But in that case–’ Arbitzer passed a hand across a forehead as white as wax. He seemed to have forgotten what he was going to say. Suddenly he began to talk very fast, as though some dam between himself and normal speech had been suddenly broken. ‘You are accusing me, Ilona, that’s so, isn’t it, you are all accusing me, you think I should not have brought her. Vanity, vanity, it was vanity that made me come over here, an old man fit for nothing. And Katerina would never have come, never wanted to come but for me.’

  ‘Dear God,’ Granz muttered.

  Garden said, ‘Jacob, remember when we were in the car. She said you were right to come back.’

  ‘She said that, yes. But she is dead.’

  Granz threw his cigarette away. ‘She is dead, yes, and I am very sorry, Jacob. But we are alive, and I want to know what we are going to do. We have till daylight if we are lucky. Then, if we are seen in this car – finish.’

  In his dull voice Arbitzer said, ‘What does it matter? There is no chance of escaping, and if there were what is there to escape for? I am ready to give myself up now.’ He looked vaguely round as if in search of a captor.

  ‘Ah, you don’t know what you’re saying.’

  Garden said, ‘Listen to me, Theodore. Your leading figures in the towns are all known, and unless they’re lucky they will have been arrested. Is there any organisation in the mountains?’ The mountains – as he remembered the months he had spent there, the efficiency of their communications, the speed with which news had been filtered through to them, he longed for Granz to say yes.

  ‘None.’ Granz’s voice was bitter. ‘Two years ago, yes. Peplov persuaded us to abandon it, to concentrate on the towns. He said you cannot make a revolution by little raids, ambushes, we must work among the people. We came down, not all at once you understand, a few at a time. Everything seemed all right, we found many friends, there was no trouble. Oh, he fooled us cleverly, that one.’