Curtain of Fear (29 page)

“How terrible!” Nicholas breathed, as she stood up and left the box.

She was not, after all, away for very long; and when she returned, the bald-headed, mean-eyed old waiter followed her in. Producing her few notes, she waved a hand towards the empty bottle and asked:

“How much?”

He gave her a long, steady look. “More than you have there, Comrade. I want five thousand Koruny.”

“Don't be absurd,” she said with a slightly forced laugh. “That Hungarian muck isn't worth more than three hundred Koruny a bottle, and you've had a tip already. The girl who owns the hat I'm wearing took it out to you. I'm quite willing to give you another, but you must be reasonable.”

With a slow unpleasant smile, he retorted, “Five thousand Koruny is reasonable, Comrade. You are the couple the Coms
were after. You admitted it by sending that bit on account to keep my mouth shut. I kept it shut, but I want five thousand Koruny before you go; otherwise I'm going to open it.”

“I … I haven't got it,” she faltered. “Really I haven't. This is all I've got.”

“Then you had better find some more. And don't think you can start anything, or get away without paying. There are twenty Coms sitting at tables out in front, and round about in the boxes. I've only got to give a shout, and pretend that I've just recognised you as the wanted couple. They'll nab you, or put bullets into you, long before you could reach the street.”

“Listen!” she pleaded desperately. “We are in trouble; bad trouble. Please don't hold us up like this. Take all I have and let us go. My friend hasn't got any money at all on him; so with the best will in the world we can't find you any more.”

“Oh, yes, you can,” he replied, a gleam of cunning showing in his little eyes. “You must have friends somewhere in the city. This place won't be closing till midnight, so we've a couple of hours to go yet. One of you can go out and raise a loan. But the other stays here till the one who goes brings the money back.”

Fedora's hand was resting on the edge of the table and Nicholas saw it tremble slightly, so he guessed that she was speaking the truth when she said:

“We only got into Prague to-day, and we know hardly anyone here. There is no one I could go to who is likely to have that amount of money available to lend me at this time of night.”

The man's hard little eyes showed no trace of pity, and he gave a shrug. “Well, you can't say I haven't given you a fair chance. The Coms always pay a good reward to anyone who turns in people on the run. I'll claim that instead. We'll wait here till this act finishes. It won't be more than a few minutes. Then when the lights go up I'll beckon over a couple of tough Coms to take you in charge.”

Nicholas was almost choking with ill-concealed fury. To have escaped the awful prospect which had faced them only two hours ago, to have survived a street battle uninjured, to have thrown their pursuers off the track, and now to be menaced again with all the horrors that the word ‘Moscow' had conjured up for him since that afternoon, seemed an unbelievably brutal twist of fate. That this new threat to their liberty, sanity and lives should have arisen solely owing to the avarice of the miserable little old man who had it in his power to betray them made it infinitely worse.

More shattering still was the thought of all that hung on the retention of their freedom. Fedora's refusal to accept the waiter's offer to go out and get the money made Nicholas suppose that her telephoning had been unsuccessful; for had she located friends who could hide them for the night, it seemed that she could have gone to them now and that, somehow, they would have managed to raise the ransom demanded. But, if she had failed, there remained Jirka at the airport.

The barman had implied that morning that, given a few hours to work in, he could get them both out through the ‘funnel'. Since their escape from Kmoch, Nicholas had been counting on that. To get back to England within the next twenty-four hours was their one hope of preventing Bilto's leaving for Prague. Now that Nicholas had seen for himself the evil and ruthless régime of the Soviets, the thought of Bilto's placing his awful secrets at their disposal made him sick with horror. Their escape and the chance to stop him had seemed a deliberate dispensation of Providence. Compared with the appalling calamity which might ultimately overtake humanity as a result of Bilto's treachery if he could not be stopped, then their own lives counted for nothing. Yet it was impossible to explain to this wretched blackmailer how much hung upon their freedom from arrest. Either
he would have disbelieved it, or thought that if there was any truth in it at all he might get a still bigger reward for turning them over to the police.

These thoughts rushed through Nicholas' brain in a matter of seconds, to be followed by another. Anyhow Fedora must accept the offer to go out and collect the ransom. If she could not get it that could not be helped. She, at least, would be free. Even if she had no friends to whom she could go at once, she could make her way to the airport before morning, and fix up with Jirka to get her out through the ‘funnel'. Even if he could not get her out until the evening she would be in Frankfurt, or in some other city on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in time to telephone London and have Bilto arrested before he caught the night 'plane for Paris. And that was the one thing above all else that mattered.

Urgently, he said to her in English, “For God's sake stop arguing! Get out while the going is good. If you can't get the money that will be just too bad. But you're not to come back or worry about me. Somehow you've got to get through the Curtain to-morrow. You know why!”

In spite of the two hours' relief from strain she had had since their escape from discovery in the box, now that she was faced with another crisis pain and fatigue seemed to have temporarily dulled her mind. Shaking her head she replied in the same language:

“I can't! It's no use! I daren't leave here.”

There was no time to ask her why. The gaily-clad peasants on the stage had entered on a wild Czardas that obviously heralded the end of their turn. At any moment they would cease their whirling. With the applause the lights would go up, and the horrid bald-headed little vulture blocking the way to the door of the box would be calling to some of the uniformed men in the audience to arrest them.

“All right,” said Nicholas in Czech. “Then I'll go.”

He did not wait for Fedora to make any comment, but added to the old waiter, “I think I know a man who will lend me five thousand Koruny.” Then he pushed past him.

Nicholas had had only a matter of seconds in which to make up his mind. He had no hope whatever of raising the money, but with luck he might reach the airport and get Jirka to arrange for him to be smuggled out through the ‘funnel'. On the other hand it meant abandoning Fedora, and that, after all they had been through together, he could not bring himself to do.

He had no sooner passed the waiter than he pivoted on his toes and stretched out his hands. As he fell with all his weight on the old man's back his clutching fingers closed round the skinny throat, choking back the beginning of a cry. His victim gave at the knees, and Nicholas, still grasping his throat in a vice, crushed him down on to the floor.

Instantly Fedora's look of helpless despair vanished. Leaning across the table she swiftly pressed the button below its edge, and the lift began to descend. It was not a moment too soon. A burst of clapping sounded from the auditorium; as the platform of the box came gently to rest six feet down the lights went up.

“Quick!” whispered Nicholas. “Get something to gag him with.”

Fedora was stooping over the two writhing men. “No,” she whispered back. “Keep your fingers pressed hard on his windpipe. He'll be dead in under two minutes.”

Suppressing a shudder at her ruthlessness, Nicholas muttered angrily, “Is it likely that I'd kill him?”

“You must!” she breathed. “Our safety—and much more than that—may depend on it.”

“I'll not become a murderer!”

“This won't be murder, but self-defence. Dead men tell no tales.”

“What can he say about us that the police don't know already?”

“Nothing! But if you let him live I'm sure he will become an additional danger to us.”

“I can't help that! It's bad enough my having shot that policeman. I'll not kill another man in cold blood.”

“Nicky, be sensible! He's a dirty blackmailing swine. He asked for it.”

“I won't, I tell you! Give me something to gag him, or I'll have to take one of my hands away to grope about. Then he may manage to cry out.”

“You squeamish fool,” Fedora whispered; but she grabbed up two rough paper napkins from the table and knelt down beside him.

With a heave Nicholas turned the waiter over on his back. His face had gone purple and his mean little eyes were bulging from their sockets. Seizing his nose between her finger and thumb, Fedora gave it a violent upward jerk, then crammed the paper into his gaping mouth. To complete the job she undid his rag of a black tie, pushed the middle of it between his yellowed teeth and tied the ends tightly behind his head, so that he could not possibly work the wad of paper out.

He was still too near strangulation to offer further resistance; so between them they got his coat off without trouble, and, tearing strips from its lining, first knotted them together, then used them to tie his wrists and ankles. Within three minutes of being set upon, he was trussed like a turkey and stowed out of sight under the table.

Their hearts were hammering heavily from the violence of their exertions, and Fedora said breathlessly: “We had better remain down here till the lights go out for the next turn.”

He nodded; and as they reseated themselves on the sofa she added, “It's a pity to have spoiled the ship for a ha'porth of tar; but all the same, I take my hat off to you for the way you handled the little toad.”

His laugh was a trifle nervous, and he was still trembling as he replied, “I'm sorry to have had to disappoint you about reducing the population here still further, but I have an old-fashioned respect for human life.”

“As you have been behind the Iron Curtain only about fourteen hours, I suppose that is understandable,” she remarked with a touch of sarcasm. “To get the full flavour of it you need to be here, and on the run, for twenty-four. If you survive that long you'll no longer need any persuading that if you don't kill an enemy when you have the chance the odds are you will be a
dead duck yourself before the big hand has gone round the clock again.”

“Perhaps you're right,” he muttered. “But this fellow wasn't an enemy in the true sense—only a dirty little blackmailer.”

“He is an enemy now,” she argued, “because we had to make him one.”

“Anyhow, we've rendered him harmless; and he is paying pretty heavily for the dirty game he tried to play on us.”

Fedora gave a hard little laugh. “On the contrary, he got off darned lightly. If you hadn't moved when you did I should have smashed his head in with the champagne bottle. He escaped death by about ten seconds.”

Nicholas' jaw dropped as he turned to stare at her. He had been feeling distinctly pleased with himself at the way in which his vigorous action had saved the situation; it was disconcerting to learn that she had been on the point of saving it herself. He could only mutter rather ungraciously:

“The little swine would have let out a yell the instant he saw you grab the bottle, and that would have raised the whole place against us.”

“Probably; even then, with luck, we might have reached the street and got away. But if you had kept your wits about you we shouldn't have had to run any risk at all. I was waiting for you to pull out Kmoch's gun and stick it in his ribs; then he would never have dared to yell when he saw I meant to crown him. I can't tell you how worried I was getting to see you standing there doing nothing.”

“I'm sorry, Fedora,” Nicholas sighed. “The trouble is that I'm not used to this sort of thing. I had completely forgotten that I had the gun in my pocket.”

Her hand found his and pressed it. “It is I who should apologise. In the excitement it slipped my memory that you are an ‘innocent abroad'. Making allowances for that, you did wonderfully.”

His good humour restored, he asked, “Was it because you were expecting me to cope with the situation that you refused to go out and get the money to buy him off, or because you had
failed to get in touch with any friends from whom you could have raised it?”

“Oh, I got in touch with friends all right; and they could have raised it for me. The snag was that I didn't dare to go and ask them. As bald-head said, there is a big reward for turning in people who are on the run, and that applies as well to anyone who helps them. If I had gone out it is a hundred-to-one that he would have had me followed, collected the cash when I brought it back, then shopped us, and my friends who had given us the money, to the police, so as to be able to collect from them on both counts. In this game, the one unforgivable sin is knowingly to risk involving a friend; so I had to count on you, or, at the worst, having to bolt for it with the whole crowd after us.”

“I see how you were placed now,” he nodded. “Anyhow, it's a great relief to know that you have located friends who will help us. What do you think the chances are that they will be able to get us out to the airport and smuggled into it while darkness lasts?”

Fedora did not answer. The band had started a new number. A moment later the lights went out. Without wasting a second she pressed the button beneath the table edge. As the platform slowly ascended she slipped to her knees on its floor and beckoned Nicholas down beside her. When the lift stopped they rolled the trussed body of the old waiter forward so that it lay below the front of the box and could not be seen unless anyone deliberately peered over its edge. Before getting up she thrust her hand into the hip pocket of his trousers and pulled out his wallet. As she had expected, it held his night's takings and was bulging with notes of all denominations. With a low chuckle she held it up for Nicholas to see.