1967 - Have This One on Me (2 page)

Now, this day, Worthington had decided he must go. Time was running out. He felt the pressure. Even now, he might have left it too late. He felt instinctively that they might arrest him at any moment.

But he wasn’t ready. If there had been more time, he could have followed his original plan, but he knew they were almost ready to take him. He had to run to cover.

He pushed the suitcase under the bed, then he walked into the small living room. He was tall, slightly built; a man in his late forties. His grey-black hair was thinning. He was unmistakably English with his hooked nose and his closely clipped military moustache.

Emilie, his wife, had gone out shopping. She wouldn’t be back for at least two hours. Every shop had its queues, and shopping for food was long, serious business in Prague. He felt no pang about leaving her. When he had first met her, some fifteen years ago, he had thought her the most exciting woman in the world. During the passing years, she had grown fat and had become dull minded. Love had left them and he couldn’t remember when they had intercourse together. The thought of that made him wince. All she could think of was food and where to find it. As far as he knew she had no idea that he worked for the C.I.A. and that he had accumulated a reasonable fortune in Switzerland. Nor, as far as he knew, did she know that there was another woman ... nor did the other woman know that Worthington had fallen in love with her.

He crossed to his desk: a poor piece of furniture, rickety, scratched, with numerous cigarette burns on its unpolished surface. He opened a drawer and took from it a cosh he had made from a piece of sacking. It contained sand and pieces of lead he had picked off the sloping roof while Emilie slept. He balanced the weapon in his hand, his heart beating uncomfortably. He wasn’t a man of violence. He hated violence, but now his life was threatened. He had no alternative but to resort to violence.

He slid the cosh into his hip pocket, then he sat down at his desk. He was surprised that he was so calm: it was a calm of fatality. The lesson today, he remembered, was a reading from Galsworthy’s
The Forsyte Saga.

Although he hated and feared Suk, Worthington had to admit the Czech was showing promising progress. His accent was now acceptable. It was surprising that a man of his brutal reputation should find such obvious pleasure from the very English Forsytes.

Worthington opened the well-worn book and found the place where Suk had left off the previous d a y He was thankful to see his hands were steady. As he placed the book on the desk, he heard footsteps on the bare wooden stairs that led to his fourth floor apartment. Wiping his hands on his handkerchief, he went to the window and looked again into the narrow street.

The watcher had gone.

The front door bell rang. Putting away his handkerchief, he went to the door and opened it.

Suk nodded to him and walked past him into the living room ... a fat bulky man with thin lips, stony, suspicious little eyes.

‘It is a fine morning,’ Worthington said automatically. ‘The sun makes it pleasant to walk. Please be seated. Mr. Suk.’

‘It is a fine morning and it is pleasant to walk.’ Suk said, putting his black, greasy hat under the chair. He stared at Worthington as Worthington moved around his desk and picked up the Galsworthy novel. ‘I hope your wife is well.’

‘She is very well, thank you,’ Worthington said, knowing this was an exercise in English and that Suk had no interest in his wife.

‘I hope your wife is well too.’ He handed the book to Suk.

‘Yes, she is well,’ Suk said. He crossed one fat leg over the other. ‘Thank you,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘Well, let us commence,’ Worthington said, trying to steady his voice. ‘Shall we continue to read? You did very well yesterday. I have marked where you should begin.’

Suk again stared at him, settled his bulk into the chair and holding the book away from him, began to read.

Worthington, his hands behind him, moved slowly around the room. He wondered if Suk could hear how violently his heart was pounding. The muscles in his legs were twitching. He wanted badly to sit down, but this had to be done quickly. It could be his last and only chance of freedom.

‘One moment,’ he said, pausing. His teacher’s instinct for perfection overrode the urgent need for action. ‘Do you understand what he means by that sentence? Will you read it again?’

In his heavy voice, Suk read, ‘Dry up! Don’t I tell you he’s taken the knock?’ He stared at the printed pages, then he scowled, shaking his baldhead. ‘No, I don’t know what it means.’

‘Dry up means stop talking,’ Worthington explained, his fingers touching the cosh in his hip pocket. ‘Taking a knock means he has had a misfortune. Do you understand now?’

‘Yes,’ Suk said.

‘Then please go on.’ Worthington began to move around the room. He was now behind Suk. His sweating fingers drew out the cosh. He stared at the enormous baldhead. What thoughts, he wondered, were going on under that bony structure? Was Suk really planning to arrest him and hand him over to Malik?

Suk was reading a descriptive passage of Soames Forsyte in court. He suddenly stopped as if he had a premonition that something was about to happen. He began to turn his head as Worthington, his breath whistling between his teeth, struck him.

The sand-filled canvas bag smashed down on Suk’s head.

The canvas split, showering sand and bits of lead over the carpet. Suk remained motionless, his great head low on his chest, sand trickling down the top of his baldhead, around his flat ears and on to his scurfy collar. Holding the limp, empty strip of canvas, Worthington watched him in horror. Then the squat body seemed to become boneless. Suk slid off the chair and his fat body thudded to the carpet, an inert mass of flesh and shabby clothes.

Worthington dropped the strip of canvas and ran unsteadily into the bedroom. He snatched out the suitcase from under the bed, grabbed up his black mackintosh that was now a uniform in Prague and ran back into the sitting room. Suk still lay where he had fallen. Worthington wondered in terror if he had killed him, but there wasn’t a moment to lose. He left the apartment and began to walk quickly down the four flights of stairs.

As he was descending to the first floor landing, he heard someone coming up. He paused, hesitating. There was nowhere to hide. He knew if the person coming up was one of his neighbours, he or she would be immediately curious about the suitcase he was carrying. He was still hesitating, in an agony of indecision, when Emilie, his wife, came into sight.

Emilie now forty-four, was a short, enormously fat woman with blonde dyed hair that looked like a discarded bird’s nest, whose blue eyes were buried in layer of fat and whose shabby summer dress struggled desperately in its attempt to confine her bulging figure.

They stared at each other.

Emilie’s eyes went to the suitcase and then she looked at Worthington who was smiling fixedly, wondering if he would have to kill her.

‘So you are leaving?’ she said. She always spoke in Czech to him. ‘Don’t look so frightened. Do you think I care?’

He drew a long slow breath, realising in his desperation to get away, he could have killed her. ‘Yes, I’m leaving,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘Goodbye. Emilie. I hope it works out for you. Don’t go up yet ... do some more shopping.’

She moved her heavy shopping basket from one hand to the other.

‘So you are finally going to join your whore?’ she said. ‘Good riddance! I’ve been waiting for this moment. I am glad to see you go.’

Worthington flinched.

‘I’m sorry, you’ll be all right. Your father ...’

‘Don’t tell me what to do! Go to your whore,’ and turning she began to plod up the stairs to the next landing.

‘Emilie! Don’t go up!’ Worthington’s voice shot up in panic. ‘Do more shopping. I - I had to hit him ... he’s up there.’

She paused and regarded him.

‘You fool!’ Her voice was full of contempt. ‘Do you imagine you will get far?’

Worthington realised he was wasting time. He looked at her, feeling this was the last time he would see her. He looked from her to the red cabbage showing through the network of her shopping bag. She was always partial to red cabbage.

‘Goodbye, Emilie.’

The last he ever saw of her as he glanced back was a picture that fitted her so well, clutching on to the basket of food, her eyes screwed up, her face cold. As he reached the door to the street, he heard her plodding down the stairs after him. She would go back to the market and then return with more food. He didn’t blame her. Life in Prague now centred around food.

He walked quickly d own the narrow street, his eyes searching every doorway. There was no one to see him go. They had been so sure that so long as Suk was with him, reading Galsworthy, he wouldn’t attempt to escape.

At the end of the street, Worthington paused at a tram stop, falling in behind a long queue of people who waited with the passivity of cattle for the tram to arrive.

As he waited, he wondered how long it would be before Suk recovered and began a relentless and deadly hunt for him.

It depended, Worthington thought, on the thickness of Suk’s skull. He grimaced as he thought of the violence of his blow.

The tram clanged to a standstill and there was a surge forward. There was no hope of a seat and Worthington found himself wedged against an elderly man who looked at him and then away. Worthington’s obvious English appearance made the man suspicious, but this Worthington was used to. People in the streets, hotels and restaurants always looked curiously at him. They knew by his shabby clothes that he couldn’t be a tourist. Ever since he had lived in Prague, he had been the subject of suspicion.

When the tram reached the Town Hall square, Worthington got off. He walked briskly past the famous clock, constructed in the 15th century by Hanus of Rouze. Already tourists were assembling to watch the statuettes of the Apostles and of Christ appear when the hour struck. He looked up at the figure of Death the Reaper which would toll the passing of time, and slightly quickened his step, knowing that his own time was threatened.

Working his way through the crowds that thronged the sidewalk, he turned down a narrow street, flanked on either side by restyled Baroque buildings until he came to a courtyard.

Here he paused and looked back over his shoulder. An old woman, limping, her gnarled knuckles white over the handle of her stick, was coming towards him. He and she were alone in the street. He walked into the courtyard, skirting a moss covered fountain that had long ceased to function and then, with another furtive glance over his shoulder, he stepped into a dark doorway and began to mount steep wooden stairs.

On the top floor, a little breathless, he walked down a dimly lit passage and stopped outside a shabby door. Again he paused to listen, then satisfied no one was coming up the stairs, he pressed the bell push. He heard a movement behind the door, the sound of a key turning, then the door swung open.

He always experienced the same surge of excitement when he saw Mala Reid. He had been in love with her from the time they had first met, but he had never given any indication of his feelings. He knew by her attitude, by the way she received him that she regarded him merely as a man who delivered messages as she would regard the postman and now as she looked inquiringly at him, her dark eyebrows lifting, he again realised how impersonally she regarded him.

‘Why, hello ... what are you doing here?’

Worthington entered the big studio, set down his suitcase, took off his hat and shed his raincoat. While he did so, he regarded the girl who had shut the door and was leaning against it. her expression worried.

Mala Reid was twenty-eight years of age. She had been born in Prague of American and Czech parents. Her father, the Czech, had been executed during the revolution. Her mother had died some three years ago of generalised cancer. Mala now made a reasonable living as a singer at the Alhambra nightclub.

Her voice wasn’t anything very much, but with the aid of a microphone, she had managed to satisfy not-too-critical tourists.

She did have a small talent for imparting feeling and sensuality into the songs she sang, and the American tourists liked her.

This was a qualification that the Government encouraged.

Because of her, extra dollars were earned. She had been singing now every night at the club for the past two years.

She was above average height. Her hair was tinted to the colour of sable. She was attractive without being beautiful. She had high cheek bones, large violet coloured eyes, a full-lipped mouth and a long, thin nose that turned up slightly to give her a cheerful, gamine look Her body was her biggest asset: full breasted with a narrow waist, solid hips and long sensual legs. Her body kept the eyes of the tourists occupied while they scarcely listened to her voice.

Two years ago one of Dorey’s agents had persuaded her to work for the C.I.A. Although she was of normal intelligence, the agent felt she didn’t realise into what danger and into what situations, his sales talk was leading her. She was strongly against regimentation, against Communism, and it seemed to her the obvious thing to agree to help. Up to now, she hadn’t done a great deal to help. She had passed messages on to other agents, she had worked with Worthington, not knowing how involved he was and how close to danger he was living. Three times, during the past two years, without understanding what was happening, she had given the C.I.A. vitally important information They had marked these achievements to her favour although she had been merely a postman Back in Paris, Dorey’s opinion of her capabilities were exaggerated. Had she known that she was now regarded as the best woman agent in Czechoslovakia, she would have been utterly dismayed Because she had lived all her life in Prague, was a good dollar earner and knew how to behave herself, she was regarded by the Security Police as a good citizen. She was completely suspicion-free and therefore a perfect tool for Dorey.

Worthington’s sudden appearance startled her. The time was eleven-ten in the morning. She had just got up and was finishing a cup of coffee. She was wearing a faded housecoat, her bare feet in pink mules. She looked from Worthington to the battered suitcase he was carrying.