Background to Danger (20 page)

“Nice chaps, aren’t they? Picturesque, gay, cleverer, more logical than silly us. Good business men they are, too. You can’t move your little finger without paying graft. The factory owners treat the work-people nearly as good as pigs. Why not? There’re always other poor devils round the corner so desperate for a meal that they’d blackleg for anyone. If a man’s sacked, he’s blacklisted by every factory owner in the district. Talk to a foreign office worker. He spends half his life scared out of his wits wondering if the man on the stool next to him is trying to pinch his job. The bosses like that. It keeps people from asking for more money, and that means they can turn out more filthy mass-production trash even cheaper than before. They take no pride in the stuff they produce. They don’t know what craftsmanship means. They don’t care. They’re out to make money. I don’t blame them for that. We all are. But they don’t want to give value for money. They don’t think that way. Business for them isn’t honest trading. It’s just another sort of politics and nearly as crooked. ‘How much is this cloth?’ they ask me. I’ll tell them. They’ll laugh; and
when I tell them to look at the quality they get wild and hold up a piece of fifth-rate muck that I wouldn’t use to polish my boots, and tell me it’s cheaper. They don’t talk the same language as us. I don’t mean that they don’t speak English, but that their minds are different. They’re like animals, and because I hate the sight and sound of them, and because you’re a Britisher, I’m telling you to get out now while the going’s good. Now for God’s sake get out and leave me.”

His thin face was flushed, he was breathing quickly, there were tears glistening behind his spectacles. He looked away.

The journalist watched him for a moment, then turned on his heel and started down the slope towards the trees. When he reached them he stopped and looked back up the hill to the promontory; but Mr. Hodgkin had gone.

Sick at heart, Kenton walked on among the trees. The air was heavy with the scent of pines, and the sun filtering through obliquely from the west made patterns of light on the soft brown surface of the hillside. It was, he thought, better than the view from Mr. Hodgkin’s promontory.

B
Y NIGHTFALL
Kenton was within a few yards of the frontier.

It had taken longer than he had expected. With vague memories of reading that persons unused to forests lost their sense of direction and walked in circles, he had made repeated detours to re-establish contact with the road. In this way the four miles had become more like six. The sun had gone down and the light was going when at last he saw, from the edge of the road about a quarter of a mile away, the small white guardhouse and the striped barrier of the frontier post against a dusky and smouldering sky.

He retreated into the forest until he had put about a kilometre between himself and the road, and then began to work his way forward.

He was now in darkness and there was only the upward
slope of the ground to guide him. He continued in this way for about twenty minutes, then the ground became level, the pines thinned, and putting out his hand to feel for obstacles ahead, he touched the smooth, cold surface of a sawn-off tree stump. He halted. By the faint early evening light, no longer shut out by the trees, he could distinguish the outline of a clump of bushes. He moved forward and came up against another tree stump. He was in the frontier clearing.

He remained still for a moment and listened. There was not a sound but the faint sighing of the stiffening breeze. Then, far away on his left a pin-point of light flashed. He watched, and a minute later the light appeared again. This time, however, it did not go out but bobbed jerkily from side to side. For a moment or two he was puzzled, then, as the light grew slightly larger and brighter, he realised that someone was coming, and that whoever it was, was flashing a hand-lamp among the bushes. He stepped back hastily into the shadow of the trees and crouched down.

The light came nearer and Kenton could hear the crunch of a man’s feet on what was evidently a path. The footsteps grew louder and the light winked through the bushes. The man drew level. He was humming softly. The light swept across the ground once and he was past.

Kenton stood up quickly and peered after him. The man was in uniform, and had a rifle slung over his left shoulder. Of more immediate interest to Kenton was what he could see by the light of the lamp. It depressed him profoundly.

He was about thirty yards from the actual frontier line. From where he stood on the edge of the forest to the path there was roughly twenty yards of half-cleared ground, dotted with tree stumps and squat, scrubby bushes. The path itself was about six feet wide and covered with large grey stone chips and a sprinkling of weeds. Beyond the path the ground sloped up sharply to the most formidable-looking fence Kenton had ever seen.

It was about eight feet high and composed of barbed wire stretched tightly between heavy steel stanchions, grounded into concrete bases at intervals of ten feet. The wires were so close together that it would have been difficult to push so much as a hand between them without the barbs drawing blood; but the designer of the fence had evidently meant to leave nothing to chance, for the horizontal strands had been festooned with so many additional coils of wire that the structure looked more like a bramble thicket than a fence.

Kenton sat on a tree stump to think things over.

One thing was clear. There could be no crawling through the fence. If he had had a pair of heavy wire-cutters, and thick armoured gloves, he might have tackled it with that end in view; but he had neither cutters nor gloves. Besides, he did not want to leave any trace of his passage across the frontier if he could avoid doing so. He had no wish to have the Czech authorities on the lookout for him at the frontier towns. He considered putting his overcoat on top of the fence and endeavouring to climb over, then concluded that this was impossible. He would need several thicknesses of blanket to muffle the wire sufficiently; and, even if he could get across that way, it would be difficult to retrieve his coat once it was entangled in the wire. He toyed wildly with the idea of getting a long branch from somewhere and using it as a pole with which to vault over; but this he soon abandoned. He had never attempted to vault eight feet, even with a proper pole. He would probably break a leg and be impaled on the top of the fence. He shivered miserably. The wind was blowing harder, and it was bitterly cold. He remembered Mr. Hodgkin’s prophecy of snow. Should he return to Linz? He promptly rejected the suggestion. Even if he could find some means of getting back there, there was the risk of capture. Mr. Hodgkin’s catalogue of his blunders had shaken his confidence in his ability to avoid arrest. There
was nothing for it but to get across the frontier—somehow. It ought not to be so difficult. According to their biographers, men like Lenin and Trotsky, Masaryk and Beneŝ, Mussolini and Bela Kun, to say nothing of their friends, had spent half their political lives “slipping across” frontiers with prices on their heads and no passports in their pockets. But perhaps the rising generations of frontier officials had read those biographies too.

He glanced in the direction in which the guard had gone, saw that the coast was clear and crossed the path to the fence.

It might, he thought, be possible to climb up one of the stanchions, using the horizontal wires as steps. A few seconds’ careful exploration with his fingers showed, however, that the bulk of loose wire made this impossible. There was only one thing to be done. If he could not go through the fence or over it, he must go
under
it. He knelt down and investigated. To his joy, he found that the ground at the foot of the fence consisted for the most part of large stones which had been piled up to form a small embankment. He began to pull them away, and after about five minutes’ work, was able to push his hand under the bottom wire. Suddenly he stood up and scurried back to the shelter of the trees. The guard with the light was returning.

Kenton crouched behind a tree until the man had passed. Then he went back to the fence and worked away furiously at the stones and earth. Speed was essential, for as the gap under the wire grew larger the risk of its being seen by any more guards who might patrol the fence increased. There was an additional danger, too, in the shape of the guards on the Czech side. So far there had been no sign of life from the other side of the fence; but he could not rely upon that state of affairs continuing.

Twenty minutes later the gap was wide and deep enough for him to get his head and shoulders through and he was
experimenting with this development when he had to dash once more for cover as the light of the returning guard approached.

This time Kenton was thoroughly frightened. The breach in the embankment was now about a yard wide and surrounded by loose stones and earth. The guard must see it. Cursing the man’s conscientious prowling, Kenton nursed his grazed and ice-cold fingers anxiously among the trees.

The guard came on steadily. Suddenly, within a yard or two of the breach, he stopped. Kenton heard him emit a grunt. His heart in his mouth, the journalist waited for the shot that would give the alarm. He crouched down, his heart thumping painfully. Then, in the silence, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching from the right. A second or two later someone coughed and said:
“Guten Abend.”

“ ’n Abend,”
answered the man on the path.

“Heute abend wird’s schneihen.”

“Jawohl.”

“Ich bin mal wieder schwer erkältet.”

“Das tut mir leid—gute Besserung. Bei mir sind’s die Füsse.”

“Gerade diese Woche muss ich Nachtdienst haben.”

“Ich hab’s besser. Schultz hat morgen abend dieser Dienst.”

“Ich mach mir nichts aus Schultz. Er tut so vornehm.”

“Er ist nicht besonders beliebt. Er kommt von Carinthia und ist immer unzufrieden.”

Kenton listened to this gossip for a few moments, then cautiously raised himself until he could see the speakers. The Austrian guard was standing on the path, his lamp shining through the fence on to the feet of a man in the uniform of a Czech infantryman; and, to Kenton’s horror, they were six feet from the gap. Fortunately the Czech guard had extinguished the small torch he carried, but as they talked the Austrian displayed a growing tendency to gesture with the hand holding the flashlamp.

“We have been told,” the Austrian was saying, “to keep a special look out for the Englishman, Kenten, who murdered that German in Linz.”

“He has been seen?”

“A woman reported that there were two Englishmen on a tourist bus making a tour in this direction. When they got out at the inn, one of them did not return. She has been questioned by the police, and says that she thinks that the one who returned is the murderer. She says he scowled a lot at her and smoked a pipe; but it appears his papers are in order. Of the other, nothing is said but that we must keep a look out for him. The Neukirchen police are fools.”

He waved the hand holding the lamp disdainfully and the beam danced across the ground near the gap. Kenton waited breathlessly for discovery; but the guard went on talking, and at last the Czech announced that he had to report at the guard-house and moved off. The Austrian continued on his way to the right.

The moment they were out of earshot, Kenton went back to his work. Below the stones he struck solid earth and progress was slower; but after another quarter of an hour, and a little feverish experiment, he found that by wriggling forward on his back, and holding the bottom wire away from his face and clothes, he could squeeze through. Having carefully piled the stones by the edge of the hole so that he could refill the breach from the other side, he prepared to go. Two minutes later, dishevelled and very dirty, he crawled into Czechoslovakia.

He had just crammed the last of the loose stones back into place when he heard footsteps approaching from the direction of the road. In his excitement he had slackened his watch on the paths and the man was quite close. The intermittent flashing of the light told him that it was the Czech guard—the Austrian kept his lamp switched on the whole time. There was not a moment to lose. He turned and dashed
blindly for cover; but he had gone no more than a dozen paces when his foot caught in a tree stump. Desperately he tried to recover his balance, then he stumbled again and went down flat on his face. The next instant his outstretched fingers touched a thick strand of rusty wire. In a flash, he remembered Mr. Hodgkin’s warning about alarm bells. There was no time now to get up and go on. He lay still, praying feverishly that the good luck which had saved him from blundering against the alarm wire would hold out for the next two minutes.

As the footsteps approached they seemed to accelerate slightly, then slow down. A few yards from where the journalist lay, paralysed with fright, they almost stopped. The guard had evidently heard something of the noise of Kenton’s fall. The torch flickered among the tree stumps. Then the man started to cough. It was a heavy bronchial cough and painful, for Kenton heard the man gasp out an oath as the paroxysm subsided. The torch went out and the heavy boots grated once more on the stones. The man went by and his footsteps died away.

Kenton took a deep breath and stood up. Then, holding the rusty wire carefully between his thumb and forefinger, he stepped over it and went on slowly.

Once in the forest again, however, he pushed on as quickly as he could. It would not do, he decided, to return to the road too near the frontier post. Travellers on foot would probably be rare on that part of the road, and it was just possible that he might be stopped and asked to show his passport. Accordingly he set a course which he judged would bring him to the road about a mile from the frontier. But in the darkness and among the trees, he soon lost his bearings, and after an hour’s walking, came out on the road less than a hundred yards from the frontier post. Deciding that it must be getting late, he made up his mind to follow the road from the fringe of the forest, and use the trees as cover only
if he met with any traffic. But the road was deserted. A clock somewhere was striking eight o’clock when, ten minutes later, having dusted himself down and straightened his tie, he walked into the village of Manfurth.