Vagabond (21 page)

They retraced their way, then Karol Pilar took his arm and stopped him. The water flowing below the bridge was deep and should have contained secrets.

‘The Nazis were fleeing. Their executioner brought the guillotine he had used to the banks of the river and had it thrown into the current. He hoped it would never be found. In two years that man, Alois Weiss, had beheaded by guillotine more than one thousand Czechs. It was retrieved. There were bloodstains on the wood frame and the blade. He died, an old man, in Germany.’

The traffic noise had faded. Rats scurried in the gutters, derelicts snored in doorways, and another day started. The street-sweepers were out and rubbish bins were emptied. The first lights lit office windows. They were under the prison walls.

‘We had the tyranny of Fascism and replaced it with the barbarity of Communism. A woman opposed the Soviet regime and its Czech sycophants, Milada Horáková. It was announced she had been executed by hanging. In fact, she was strangled. Each time she was near to death they stopped and loosened the pressure. They took seventeen minutes to kill her. Should we go further?’

Sparse traffic was now on the roads and the first trams. Men and women were starting to spill from the metro entrances. They were back in the long square onto which Danny’s hotel fronted. There was a statue, many times life-size, of a figure astride a horse, in armour. Karol Pilar said it was of Wenceslas I, then pointed down to what seemed to be a cross embedded in the cobbles. It was twisted and broken. The policeman’s face was sober. ‘Most people accept the hardship of a vile dictatorship, from the left or the right, but a very few do not. Jan Palach was studying history and economics. He protested against the Soviet occupation and the Czechs who collaborated. He poured petrol over himself, lit it and died days later in great pain.’

‘Why are you showing me these places?’

‘I can take you near to where I live. There is a street corner where a man was shot dead. His crime? He had the same car – same make and colour – as a man condemned by a rival gang. It was a mistake. The court case against the assassins failed. Why? You should understand that here, Mr Curnow, life is cheap, so people in my country are not careless about their survival. Be careful.’

He thought of the innocence of the young men – British, Canadian and American – who had been on the beaches along the coast of France from Dunkirk, their lack of cunning, and of the many who lay there. He thought of the pastures stretching up towards the forestry and summit of the mountain, the narrow lanes running down to the Dungannon road.

‘Karol, in your family, were they victims or executioners?’

‘My grandfather was at the Pankrác gaol and fortunate to escape the axe room. He died nine years ago, much loved by his family and respected in his community, but he was not a clever man. He had been careless.’

They had coffee in a Costa lounge. Around them young men and woman were readying themselves for the office. The sight-seeing expedition had not been tourism: every action, he always assumed, had purpose. It would have toughened him. The agent would be subject to his discipline or they might fail. It was not that Bentinick was short of men or women who could have done a decent job. Bentinick had been looking for a man of proven ruthlessness, which was what Danny had been and for which he had paid a high price. He went back to the hotel, and the policeman settled on a sofa.

Chapter 7

‘You know why we’re here, Danny?’

‘I expect you’ll tell me, Mr Bentinick.’

‘You’re here, Danny, because I worry that your exile in France, among the dead and the battlefields, may have softened your resolve.’

‘You’re never found me wanting.’

‘A different war here from those beaches, and no Geneva Convention on prisoners. It’s merciless and for high stakes. “The end justifies the means.” Our sort of language at Gough, Danny.’

They were on a wide street on a hill with busy traffic. They had crossed the road – Bentinick walked straight across, looking neither right nor left, ignoring horns – and stopped a few yards short of a church that was flush to the pavement. Baroque style, mid-eighteenth century, the stonework was clean: it was important. Karol Pilar was behind them, silent. Danny had lain on his bed for an hour until the phone had erupted beside his head. He’d had three minutes to get down to the lobby. The policeman must have borrowed a razor: he was clean-shaven but in the same shirt, alert, suffering no ill-effects from the night tour of the city.

‘Here, Danny, and in another place, we find evidence of courage, treachery, collateral, and the ruthlessness required of agent handlers. We hit the old brick wall, the one that has to be passed through. Was it necessary?’

The stonework up from the pavement showed bullet marks. In relief there were man-sized sculptures of a paratrooper and a priest; between them names were embossed on a stone slab.

‘A little group of men, Danny, saved a country. A German was in charge of Prague, Heydrich. He was reviled and feared. The plan was to subsume most of Czechoslovakia into the Reich. As an independent entity, with language and culture, it would have disappeared. The Czechs had a government in exile, in Buckinghamshire. Some of their men who had escaped to England were trained as assassins, then parachuted into Czech territory from an RAF flight, with firearms and explosives. Heydrich drove in an open-topped limousine, no security escort, from his commandeered residence to Prague Castle in late May sunshine. He was attacked, with grenades and pistols, wounded and died a week later. His killers fled, disappearing off the face of the earth. Reprisals followed, but that’ll keep. That’s collateral – the responsibility that handlers carry. The man hunt ended here. Seven of the parachutists were hiding in the church, given refuge by the priest.’

‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘Nothing, Danny. Just listen.’

He wondered if the Czech would interrupt, but he did not. They went past the monument, then ducked into a side entrance to a cellar area. The Czech flashed his card at the curator, who gave a shrug of resignation: they did not have to pay. The walls were lined with photographs and dummies in British-issue Second World War uniforms.

‘An informer, Kurda, brought the German military here, several hundred of them. He gave information to the investigators, but his motive was to halt the savagery of the reprisals. He would have been what you’d have called, in your Vagabond days, a “walk in”. He came off the street when the hunt had gone cold. Three died in the nave, and the remaining four took refuge in the crypt. Follow me, Danny. Informers – we can’t do without them, but they’re seldom admired.’

Danny Curnow followed Bentinick into the crypt. Against the walls there were bronze busts of the seven.

‘The last four were where we stand now. The fire brigade was called in to flush them out – flooded the place. Grenades were thrown in. They tried to tunnel out to the sewers under the street, scratching with their hands. At the end, some took poison capsules and some had saved a last round for themselves. None was alive for torture and execution. They were trained in England, handled in England and controlled by men who knew that savage killings would follow. The chief man was Jan Kubis. His mission started at Leamington Spa and ended here. His handlers knew what would happen, which didn’t deflect their determination.’

They went out. Back in warm sunshine, the traffic swept past them. A girl pushed a pram, and a couple held hands as they walked briskly towards the metro. Each had a laptop bag slung on a shoulder, and no one had time to glance at the church façade. Danny Curnow understood the place, and the men who had been in the crypt – but they had not been part of as great an army as had been on the beaches. Matthew Bentinick lit his pipe, struggling in the breeze. Danny had no wish to be gone, and he lingered.

Karol Pilar hovered and watched. He was a man without illusions.

His office was in the Criminal Police section on Bartolomejska; the southern side of that street was taken up by buildings occupied by detectives of different agencies. Many would slip out at lunchtime for a meal and a drink in the bar opposite. Karol never went before seven. Then he would leave his Russian unit desk, go to the Konvikt and drink a bottle of Pilsner Urquell, then head off into the evening to the mini-mart and buy something for supper. The Sherlock and the Al Capone bar were on the same street but he used the Konvikt, only occasionally. He had little option: he earned the equivalent of one thousand five hundred American dollars a month, and his expenses were hardly a bonus. Then, with a plastic bag in his car, which was an old but well-maintained Skoda, he would go back to the studio flat he shared with his girl-friend and they’d eat what he’d bought. She was studying accountancy at college and did bookkeeping at a café to help with her fees. He could have earned more.

He did not interrupt them. Mr Bentinick had won him over. Danny was cautious and serious, perhaps suffering still from a wound inflicted long ago. Where could they have coffee? He shrugged, pointed down the hill, away from the church and towards the river.

A detective who attached himself to the political élite or a member of the judiciary could make a good living. And openings gaped for those prepared to ally themselves with the city’s gang leaders – Russian, Albanian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, any of them. Those who worked on surveillance teams were also in demand. He was clean. Many in his office thought him unnecessarily squeamish. There was a saying, deep-rooted in the country’s culture: ‘If you don’t steal, your family will stay poor.’ He occupied a middle-ranking position with the Russian desk. It was about resources, or the lack of them. On occasion he could go to Karlovy Vary, less frequently to Mariánské Lázn
e
˘
– prettier, with the same sulphurous springs and classic villas – which was second favourite with the Russians, with their suitcases of money. He could talk there to local police and underpaid informants and did the same in the capital where big men lived close to the Russian embassy and schools on the north side of the river. His seniors had given him the job of escorting Mr Bentinick because it concerned an Irish matter and he spoke good English – and while he was investigating the Irish he would have no opportunity to meddle in satisfactory arrangements. He thought Mr Bentinick a clever man.

They reached a café. It was cool, bright and a wind was blowing off the Vltava, as usual, but Mr Bentinick had decided they’d sit outside. Pilar was given two hundred Czech
koruna
to buy coffee. At the church of St Cyril and St Methodius, Mr Bentinick had spoken of ruthlessness. Karol Pilar did not doubt that he possessed it.

They were on the road and far out of Nürnberg, running late on the schedule. The driver seemed reluctant to burn some rubber, even though they were on the E51, a dual carriageway. There had been fog at the airport and they had spent more than an hour in stacking circles. When they had come down, his knuckles were white from gripping the top of the seat in front.

Malachy Riordan had been met. The fog had made a close wall around the car park and terminal buildings.

They had crept away and at snail’s pace. It was rare that Malachy Riordan was a passenger on a long-distance journey. He was in the front seat, belt on, and the car was an old Mercedes, with more than two hundred thousand kilometres on the clock. In the fog, great lorries with trailers had surged by – intimidating. He didn’t know where he was, recognised none of the place names, knew nothing of the old German Democratic Republic. Eventually the fog lifted and they had got stuck in Dresden’s rush-hour traffic.

The driver talked but Malachy Riordan didn’t. He ached for silence.

He knew the driver’s name: Sean. Knew his age: twenty-seven. His job: he worked as a barman in an Irish-themed pub in Nürnberg. His origins: the family was from the Ballymurphy part of west Belfast and his father was a walking no-hoper after interrogations in the old Castlereagh barracks: an uncle limped from a wound above the knee where he’d been shot by a paratrooper; his mother had a cousin who had not bought into the war of the volunteers, and the martyrs. Malachy could not comprehend why the driver thought he would be interested in all of that. He could, of course, tell him to shut his face, but then the man could have pulled over onto any hard shoulder opened the door on the passenger side and said, ‘Well, fuck you, man. Find your own way.’ He could have been dumped on a roadside not knowing where he was or how to move on. He sat and endured.

Malachy Riordan never asked a question about the job in the Irish bar or whether the man had a family in Nürnberg. He didn’t have to: he was told. The man leaked information. He imagined how it would be when the driver was back on his own territory. It was a mark of how far the Organisation had declined. In the old days, before the betrayal and the sell-out of the so-called ‘peace process’, people had been going regularly to the States, and for negotiations with the regime in Libya for weapons shipments; a delegation had gone to Colombia to teach workshops in mortar building and wiring. It strained his faith, but he knew nothing else – there were few days when he didn’t go to his father’s grave, and few weeks when he didn’t pause in front of the monuments in Cappagh or Galbally on the slopes of the mountain. He couldn’t imagine his faith being broken.