Split Code (30 page)

Benedict slept, and I slept with my arms folded round him. I woke once, and we were still driving along the waterside opposite a walled town of antique, pale yellow buildings, skeined all over the opposite hillside. It occurred to me that it could be Kotor.

The next time I woke, we were driving on the same side as the town, and looking down on it.

My eyes stayed open that time, because of the road, which on my side dropped sheer down the mountain. As I looked, the ambulance turned to the right, nearly throwing me out of my seat. It was near enough like being on shipboard again to remind me of the ache in my back and my arms and my shoulders and to make even Benedict’s weight seem oppressive. I laid him still sleeping back in his cot, and planted a foot on either side of it. and held on, as I saw Zorzi and Trifun were doing.

We climbed the mountain in twenty-five zigzags, with the ambulance engine whining with effort, and the gulf below becoming smaller and more distant at every bend. On the edge of one curve I saw a wind sock. It was true then. I hadn’t believed it.

After a bit I stopped looking even at that, because my head got too heavy to hold up. I think the others were sleeping that time before I was. Even when the lurching eventually stopped and the wheels turned on to a long, level surface and ran for some time without deviating, I found it an effort to open my eyes, and to turn and peer out of the window.

I didn’t believe what I saw. but if my brain had been working I would have known it was quite real, even if it was one possibility that Johnson had ruled out of court right from the beginning.

The ambulance stood on a wide gravel drive lined with bushes. Ahead was a sweep of blue water, culminating in what appeared to be a drawbridge. And at the other end of the drawbridge, catching the pink light of dawn on its stairs, its archways, its battlements and pepperpot towers, was the Mad Ludwig castle from Missy’s Golden American Wonderland. The fortress of Kalk with its moat, which was a whimming place.

In which the owner, Hugo Panadek was wont to whim, according to Grover.

Six and a half hours thereupon dropped out of my life.

Whether I went to sleep or passed out I shall never know - probably both. I have a vague recollection of being shaken and shouted at.

Be that as it may, the last recollection I have of that journey is staring out of the ambulance window at Hugo Panadek’s castle. And my next was of waking in bed in my underwear in a darkened room presumably in the same castle, with my luminous watch saying half past midday on the same day.

I ached. Everywhere my bones touched the bed and everywhere they didn’t I ached, but especially on my jaw and inside my ravaged mouth. I searched for and put on my bedlight.

In a confused way, I thought to find Zorzi’s red-eyed unshaven face on one side of the bed and Trifun’s on the other. Then I remembered. Zorzi was taking my tooth for a ride. It would please him to know how many men besides Donovan he would be gulling.

Trifun wasn’t here either. No one was here. Not even Benedict.

I looked about.

I was in a large, low-ceilinged room full of shimmer-shag carpet and de Sede, Albrizzi and Sacco furniture, of the kind any millionaire bachelor would want for his love nest.

Nothing about it reminded me of the
Dolly.
The bed was a two hundred gallon Love Sleep set in a low velvet dais, with a console of switches strongly reminiscent of Wurlitzer’s Back to School Clearance of Pianos and Organs. I pressed a couple, and panels began to slide about on either side, revealing a library of TV and music cassettes, a stack of back copies of
Forum,
a jar of Enriched Night Concentrate and a three litre bottle of Joy.

The contrast was meant, I expect, to be hysterical. I didn’t appreciate it. I was sore, and angry and anxious.

I was also hungry. Another switch got me a radio, a supply of Tuinal, bennies, acid, joints and assorted rubber goods, a couple of very explicit picture books and a telephone which proved to be disconnected. The next one produced a set of crystal and crockery and a miniature fridge, with a dozen expensive bottles of wine and a tin of Malossol caviar in it. There was a spoon, but no tin-opener, and no corkscrew. Black mark, Hugo Panadek.

I thought I deserved, as well as needed, a restorative. I got up to see if my legs would work and to find a bathroom, and to look for a corkscrew.

Of the two doors, one was locked and the other led into a bathroom with a satin and maribou wrap hanging on the back of a chair, beside a shelf of Piz Buin male cosmetics. I stripped and had a sort of mesmerizing warm shower, abdicating from my problems, I found, all too easily. Then I put on a bath towel and opened a few cupboards.

There was a fifty-foot hose and repair kit for the waterbed but no corkscrew visible. I returned to the bedroom and opened more doors. Hugo’s mistresses were all the wrong size, but I found some white French knickers with lace frills I rather fancied, and a check skirt with a long shirt-tail cardigan. I rubbed my hair dry and combed it, and sat looking at my reflection in the mirror.

I looked terrible. My eyes had enlarged like a bush baby’s, and my face had all sunk to bone fencing. I was hungry, and alone, and locked in a suite in a mountain top castle with no help that I knew of anywhere at all within reach.

But no one had molested me, it appeared, so far. I had, if I cared to break the bottles and open the tin with my teeth, some food and drink for a while. I was, after all, still one link in the chain between my father and the Malted Milk Folio, even if the rest of the chain had fallen apart. I could cope.

But Benedict wasn’t here, and Benedict would be much hungrier than I was. Benedict by now would have missed two whole feeds and no matter who had him now, the journey, the strangers, the handling would have his nervous system tangled like knitting. People don’t realize how small a stomach a young child possesses, or what happens if hours go by without nourishment. And after a while the screaming gets on anyone’s nerves.

Controlling my own nervous system wasn’t much of a snip at the time either. Fizzy drinks are not the best cure for a wild night at sea, but there was a single bottle of champagne, and no alternative. I climbed back on to the bed, and pressed the fridge button, and got out the champagne and opened it. Then with a glass in my hand, I shoved a cassette in the TV slot and sat drinking and thinking and watching. The TV obediently unfolded at the foot of the bed and announced itself as a replay of the Defeat of the Minnesota Vikings by the Miami Dolphins.

I didn’t even wait to see if they were playing on land or on water. I switched it off and pressed the only button I hadn’t so far attempted.

For a moment nothing happened, although I was ready for anything: especially a plate of bacon and eggs on a tray with a glass of orange juice and a jar of English cut marmalade. I emptied my glass and lifted the bottle to pour out another. Then I noticed that the whole of the opposite wall was in process of changing.

I don’t know what I expected. A cave; a row of men with machine-guns; a heap of mice and bat bones from the Tertiary Age. Someone told me there were twelve different sorts of bats in the Balkans.

It was quite the reverse. Behind the apparent wall was another one, and fitted into that were ten television screens set in rows, with a counter of knobs just below them. They were all blank.

For quite a long time I sat looking at them. Then I got out of bed, and carrying bottle and glass, walked to the counter. There I pulled a chair up and sat down.

At one end was a set of sunk typewriter keys, with a couple of switches beside them. Next to that was a thing like a microphone. And on the right were nine pairs of switches, half labelled
pic
and half labelled
sound.
In English.

I really had nothing to lose. I pressed the first couple and waited.

If there was meant to be sound, it didn’t function. But I got my picture all right. Into one of the screens there shot a large black and white representation of what appeared to be a set for
The Prisoner of
Z
enda.
I could see a flagged floor, and a stone staircase sweeping up to the roof, and a wall covered with the decapitated heads of sundry post-Tertiary fauna. There were no actors and no dialogue. I pressed the next pair of buttons.

Another room full of books, tables, easy chairs and a monumental dressed marble fireplace. Library, in the same play. I pressed buttons 3A and B and got an empty banqueting hall; 4A and B got a bedroom with dust sheets all over it.

Dust sheets? In a television play?

But of course, it wasn’t a telly drama. What I was seeing through video cameras was Hugo Panadek’s castle, with three of its public rooms and, as it turned out, five of its bedrooms as it lay empty about me. Empty of sound and even of caretakers, unless somewhere there was a kitchen wing closed off from the cameras.

Or was it empty? Of the ten screens, only eight were showing pictures. One remained blank, no matter how often I pressed its buttons. The other stood on its own, on a level with my eyes as I sat at the counter, and had no corresponding switches at all.

Then I remembered the pair on the left of the console. One said
Speak
and the other said
Transmit.
I turned them both on.

There was a click. The screen in front of me lit. Then running in from the right came a line of green computer type print. It went on running, filling the screen, and I sat there, my champagne forgotten, and read it. It said:

You are beneath the Castle of Kalk. The Croatian Liberation Army has certain demands to make on your father. You will not leave this castle until these demands are met. You are now going to record for us a message for your father. Do you understand? Address the microphone.

I picked up the microphone, and it shook in my hand. I said: ‘I don’t know what you mean. My father has no money. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff will pay for the baby. Where is the baby? He could die without food.’

It was like a space puppet film. My hoarse voice died away, and the machine rattled out its tidy, bright green reply.
Your father is head of a British Intelligence department. We need money, but we need weapons more. Your father can supply us with weapons. You will ask him for them.

I sat staring at the screen. Then I picked up the microphone. ‘My father can’t send you weapons! How could he possibly do that?’

That is his concern,
said the screen. He will send them if he wants to see you alive. You will read the message if you want to stay alive.

‘I shan’t,’ I said baldly. ‘I’d rather be dead than see my father ruined.’

It sounded all right. I waited, feeling queasy, to see how they were going to persuade me.

I didn’t have to wait long. The screen remained blank. But from the loudspeaker behind came, loudly and urgently and appallingly, the squalling screams of a hurt baby.

It was Benedict. Not the Benedict of Johnson’s innocuous tape but Benedict now, reacting as I had never heard him react to treatment he had never faced before. I found I was screaming myself: ‘What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it!’ and shaking the microphone in my frenzy as if I would throttle it. The screams went on, and then broke up into short, gasping cries. The ill treatment had stopped, but the shocked crying continued. I said, ‘It’s stupid to hurt him. Very little will kill him. You must give him something to eat if you want any money. You said you needed money as well.’

There was a click. Against the blare of Benedict crying, the green words ran into place.
We want weapons. The child has had no food. The child will have no food unless you send this message. We shall continue to hurt the child until you do. You have one minute to make up your mind.

The crying went on and on. His voice was hoarse, he had been crying so much. Long before the minute was up, I said into the microphone, ‘Give me the message. I’ll send it.’

They ran it on the screen, and repeated it every time I made a stumble. The slightest change in inflection meant a back-track. It was a fairly standard demand, addressing my father by name, and saying that I was being well treated at present, but that I should be killed if my father told the police or anyone else in authority. They specified all the arms and ammunition they wanted. Some of it seemed very advanced: they knew, it seemed, what they were talking about.

On the other hand, they didn’t appear to grasp the difficulty of what they were asking. The stuff was to be landed at a certain airstrip at a certain time three days from now, and my father was to cable his acceptance in a certain form.

The message didn’t refer to Hugo by name, but simply said that I was being held by the Croation Liberation Army and that by aiding them my father would be serving the causes of justice and freedom, without any prejudice to his own country. There was no reason, the message said, why his action need ever be known by his government. I should be back, free and well at his side and his work could continue without interruption. A free Yugoslavia wished nothing but good to her neighbour Britain.

It took an hour to do, and they cut off the crying while it was going on. At the end I sat drained of feeling, my eyes resting on the eight lit screens above while the green letters ticked and fussed over below. One of the rooms was now occupied. A man in butler’s dress was bending over the fireplace in the library, which now had a fire in it. And the light of the fire lit something I hadn’t seen before: a long table covered with white linen and laden with glassware and bottles. A movement on another screen caught my eye. A woman in overalls was in one of the bedrooms, lifting off the sheets. As I watched, she began to make up the bed. I said into the microphone, ‘Can I have Benedict now?’ My voice was very flat.

The green letters ran off and none came in their place. I sat waiting to be given my reward. One of the other bedrooms now had a fire in it. I wondered if the servants knew what was going on, or if Hugo’s love nest was quite separate.
Under
the Castle of Kalk, the screen had said.