Judgment on Deltchev Page 14

  ‘Yes, Mr Foster?’ He was on his guard again.

  ‘I find it strange that although you are quite ready to serve someone you say is of the Government secret police, you put obstacles in the way of Sibley, who is trying to serve the Propaganda Ministry.’

  He stared at me for a moment and I thought he was about to reply. Then he changed his mind, cleared his throat, and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Mr Foster,’ he said heavily, ‘I think we should get on with our eating.’

  I could get nothing more out of him. After the luncheon break the conspiracy evidence was resumed. Now that he had something like real evidence to deal with, Prochaska spread himself. Every detail of Kroum’s evidence was sworn to by three or four different persons, every document certified and proved. Had you not heard the earlier days of the trial, you might from Prochaska’s attitude have supposed the judges to be pettifogging martinets hostile to his case. When you remembered the rubbish that had already been admitted as evidence by that pathetic trio, the present solemnity was funny. But not for long. Presently it became boring. Only one thing kept me there: the possibility of Deltchev’s speaking in his own defence. But he seemed as bored as I was. As witness after witness was brought in to swear to the authenticity of the message with his address on it, I expected a protest from him. It would have been easy enough.

  ‘These conscientious policemen swear to the presence of my address on this piece of paper. Nobody disputes that it is there. Why waste the time they might be devoting to more useful duties? Produce a really serious witness: the man who wrote it or who saw it written or, even better, the man who can tell us why and in what circumstances it was written down there. Those questions are important, gentlemen, for I, too, have been plotted against by assassins. They threw a bomb and badly wounded my chauffeur. That was outside my house, and to find my house you need the address, and to remember it you have to write it down. I have no wish to deprive Minister Vukashin of his martyr’s laurels, but if I am to be convicted of plotting against his life, at least make sure that the evidence you use is not part of an old plot against my life. For a new plot new evidence should be manufactured. Economy in such matters is discourteous.’

  But Deltchev said nothing at all and the afternoon drowsed on. Curiously, it was only the diplomatic and press sections who seemed bored. For most of the spectators it was an exciting afternoon. As each witness appeared, there would be a buzz of interest, then dead silence while he gave his evidence, then breathless whispering as he stepped down. It was the factual nature of the evidence that did it. There must have been many in that courtroom who had been unwilling to believe in Deltchev’s guilt and privately uneasy about the trial. Now they were enjoying the illusion that the legal forms were being properly observed and that they were free of the responsibility of condoning an injustice. I was glad when the afternoon was over.

  Pashik had nothing to say as he drove me back to my hotel. He knew that I was going to see Petlarov and he was saving himself for a farewell admonishment on the subject of discretion; so I thought, at least; and I was tired of him; I was tired of his smell, of his admonishments, of his evasions and mystery-making, of his long-suffering brown eyes, of his dirty seersucker suit, and of his bad driving.

  He stopped jerkily outside the hotel and turned to me. ‘Mr Foster-’ he began.

  I interrupted irritably. ‘Look, do you have to go on calling me “Mr Foster” all the time? Can’t you make it “Foster” or “you”? It would be easier for you and I shouldn’t feel so stiff-necked.’

  He began again picking at the vulcanite covering of the steering wheel. He already had most of it off and the metal beneath looked bare and squalid.

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Foster,’ he said, ‘I wished only to be polite.’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s not important.’

  But he was upset. ‘I am afraid you are not a good-tempered man, Mr Foster,’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m not. I apologize. You wanted to tell me to be discreet again, didn’t you?’

  He picked for a moment or two in silence. He was working on a big piece and it peeled away like a strip of sunburnt skin.

  ‘I don’t know what more I can say to you, Mr Foster,’ he said. ‘I have tried to warn you, not because I like you or even because I have a responsibility to the New York Office, but in the spirit of any man who sees another by accident going into a danger he does not realize. I can do no more. There are things more important than the safety of a stranger. You will not take the advice; then you must take your chance. I will not discuss the case with you further. The services I am paid for are yours, however. Tomorrow I will be getting your press ticket for the Anniversary Celebration. When the end date of the trial is known, your return passage by air will be available. If there is any other service you wish performed, you must tell me. Meanwhile, when we meet we can talk of other things.’ He turned and looked at me. ‘Good night, Mr Foster.’

  ‘Good night.’

  I got out and went into the hotel. I was both impressed and depressed. As I walked up the stairs I decided that I would take his advice. I told myself that it was only my personal dislike of the man that had prevented my taking it before. That was really stupid. My task was to write articles about the trial, not to play policeman. I had stumbled on a political murder in a country where political murder was a commonplace. The fact that for me it was a novelty did not give me a licence to enquire into it. I should remember that I was a foreigner, there on sufferance, that I had a very lucrative profession to return to, and that in my temporary role of newspaper reporter I had done very well to get an exclusive interview with Madame Deltchev. That was enough. I would now mind my own business. And it might be a good idea to apologize to Pashik. He had been very patient with me and I had behaved with the bumptiousness of an amateur. And, by the way, since when had Mr Foster been entitled to object to being called Mr Foster by someone who wished to be courteous? Mr Foster was making a very tiresome fool of himself. He’d better stop.

  Petlarov was sitting stiff and straight on his usual seat in the corridor. Without speaking he followed me into my room and sat down. I went to the wardrobe and got out the whisky. He took the toothglass with his usual polite bow and then glanced up at me.

  ‘You look tired, Herr Foster.’

  ‘I’ve had a tiring twenty-four hours.’

  He nodded politely. He did not even look a question.

  ‘What about today’s evidence? What do you think?’ I asked. ‘It’s more or less what you feared, isn’t it?’

  He considered for a moment, then he shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think it is. You see, I expected something possible. I thought that Yordan might have committed some indiscretion capable of being shown badly. But not this. It is really very funny. I know Yordan and I know that he is incapable of this kind of association. And with men of the type of Eftib and Pazar it is grotesque.’

  ‘He associated with Vukashin and Brankovitch.’

  ‘He did not like them, but he recognized their importance. Both are considerable men, leaders. But conspiracy with this delinquent riffraff? It is impossible! Yordan is too much of a snob.’

  ‘What sort of indiscretion did you expect?’

  He shrugged. ‘Many things are possible. For example, it would not have greatly surprised me to learn that some of the exiles were planning a coup d’etat and had nominated Yordan their leader. If they appealed to him he would be flattered. He might temporize, but he would treat with them. In transactions of that kind many foolish things are written. Now with this, all is different. We have circumstantial evidence of the kind that is used to convict ordinary criminals — the piece of paper with the note on it, the scribbled address, the conspirators who escape and those who do not, the mysterious Pazar, who is missing but really dead — it is all of a different pattern.’ He shrugged again. ‘But that is only what I feel.’

  ‘What did you mean by saying that Pazar is really dead?’

  ‘If he were alive they would
certainly have found him before the trial. They could not risk his being found unexpectedly. He might be an inconvenient witness and it would look bad if he, too, were killed resisting arrest.’

  So then of course I told him. Whatever else was not my business, the problem of the evidence against Deltchev certainly was, and I had come to rely upon Petlarov’s opinions. I told him about the letter I had carried, of the dead man in Patriarch Dimo 9, of Pashik’s arrival, of the visit to Aleko, and of the Aleko note. He listened in silence and was silent for a time when I had finished. I noticed that he had gone very pale. Then he put down his drink and stood up.

  ‘Herr Foster,’ he said slowly, ‘I too have something to tell you. Every two days I have to report to the police to get my papers stamped. It is part of the control to which, as an untrustworthy person, I am subject. Today when I reported, I was warned. I was told that I had recently made an undesirable association and that if I did not wish to be removed with my wife to a labour camp, the association must cease. That was all. Your name was not mentioned.’ He hesitated. ‘When I came here this evening, Herr Foster, I had almost made up my mind to ignore the warning. I thought that if it had been a serious matter I should not have been warned but arrested. I see now that I was wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But he did not reply. He was fumbling agitatedly in his pocket. He got out the ration card I had given him and held it out to me.

  ‘I am sorry, Herr Foster,’ he said, ‘I cannot keep our bargain.’

  ‘That’s all right. I understand.’ I didn’t, but he was so obviously upset that I wanted to soothe him. ‘Keep the ration card anyway. I don’t want it.’

  He shook his head. His face looked pinched and there was sweat on his forehead. I had a curious sense of shock. I had come to think of Petlarov as some kind of genie who inhabited the corridor outside my hotel room, ready to explain, to enlighten, to serve when I needed him. Because his own account of himself had been quite calm and impersonal, because he had not exuded the self-pity I should have been so quick to condemn, I had not found it necessary to think of him as a human being. Now suddenly he was very much a human being; he was frightened. The realization gave me a curious feeling of discomfort.

  ‘Herr Foster,’ he said, ‘please take the card. I cannot use it any more, and if I am arrested I do not wish to have it found in my pocket.’

  I took it. He picked up his hat and went to the door.

  ‘Just a moment,’ I said.

  He stopped. The effort he made to control his agitation was almost painful to watch. He just wanted to be gone.

  ‘Can’t you give me any idea what this is all about?’ I asked.

  For a moment I thought he was going without answering. Then he swallowed and licked his lips. He looked at his hat as he spoke. ‘I will tell you one thing, Herr Foster. K. Fischer, Karl Fischer, you mentioned him.’ He hesitated before he went on with a rush. ‘He was a left-wing politician, very popular in the working-class quarters of Vienna. A good man and a fearless speaker. He was in principle for the Soviets, but still in ’46 he protested against the Soviet kidnappings of Austrians from the American sector. An honest man. He did what he thought right. He was murdered.’ He hesitated and swallowed again.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘In September it was,’ he said. ‘He went out one evening to see his married daughter in Favoriten. Next day the railway police found his body behind a shed in the marshalling yard outside the Ostbahnhof.’ He paused and looked up at me. ‘You said that the man you saw at Patriarch Dimo had been killed by a bullet wound in the back of the head, by the ear.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded. ‘That was how Karl Fischer died,’ he said. ‘That was the hand of Aleko.’

  Then he went.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  That was on Friday, the 14th of June. The assassination took place on the Saturday.

  I have since been described in the People’s Party press as ‘a well-known agent of the English secret service’, ‘the leader of a foreign murder gang’, ‘Anglo-American spy and pervert’, and in other less reproducible ways. In one article the fact that I am a writer was acknowledged by a reference to ‘the notorious pornographer and English murder-propaganda lackey Foster’.

  That part of it has been less amusing than I would have thought. Some of the stuff was reproduced in London papers, and among my friends the ‘notices of Foster’s Balkan tour’ were quoted hilariously for a day or two. But when the news of the Deltchev verdict came and the mass executions of Agrarian Socialists began, the attacks on me became related to events that were anything but funny. I began to be asked questions which the Foreign Office had suggested I should not answer.

  With the newspapers it was not difficult; I did as I had been asked and referred them to the Foreign Office. With friends and acquaintances it was less simple. It is, I find, extraordinarily embarrassing to be described in print as a member of the British secret service. The trouble is that you cannot afterwards convince people that you are not. They reason that if you are a member you will still presumably have to say that you are not. You are suspect. If you say nothing, of course, you admit all. Your denials become peevish. It is very tiresome. Probably the only really effective denial would be a solemn, knowing acknowledgment that there might be some truth in the rumour. But I can never bring myself to it. Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, I have to explain what really happened.

  To begin with, I think I should make it clear that I am not one of those persons who enjoy danger. I take pains to avoid it. Moreover, my timidity is speculative and elaborate. For instance, in Paris at the time of the Stavisky riots I was living in a hotel room overlooking a street in which the police fought a revolver battle with rioters. My first impulse was to lean out of the window and watch. The firing was several hundred yards away and I knew perfectly well that at that distance a revolver is about as dangerous as a water pistol. What I remembered, however, was that the author of Way of Revelation had had a similar impulse of curiosity in Mexico City and died of it, absurdly, with a stray bullet through his head. Instead of leaning out of the window, therefore, I had knelt on the floor by it and tried to use my shaving mirror as a periscope; but by the time I had arranged all this, the battle was over and I saw nothing but an indignant woman with an upset shopping bag.

  The war did nothing to make my attitude to danger bolder or more philosophic. I do not have heroic impulses. The news that a bomb had killed my wife in our London flat had many other effects on me, but it did not send me out in a murderous rage to exact retribution of the enemy, nor did it make me volunteer for some suicidal duty. For a long time my life felt less worth living than before, but I did not for that reason become careless of it. Accounts of great bravery sometimes move me deeply, but they arouse in me no desire to emulate them. The spirit of romantic derring-do runs somewhat thinly in my veins.

  The truth about my part in the Deltchev affair is untidy. I did not even blunder into the danger; I strayed into it as if it were an interesting-looking tangle of streets in an old town. Certainly I had been warned that they were dangerous; but only to those who warned, I thought, not to me. When I found out that I was mistaken and tried to get out, I found also that I was lost. That was how it felt. The last moment at which I could have turned back was when Petlarov went out of my room that evening. If at that point I had shrugged my shoulders, had another drink, gone out to dinner, and spent the evening at a cinema, I should have been fairly safe. And I very nearly did do that. I had the drink — it was the last of the whisky — and I looked at a cinema I could see from my window. It was called LUX and was playing a dubbed version of a German film called La Paloma that I did not want to see. I considered opening a bottle of plum brandy I had bought, decided against it, and then caught sight of the typewriter I had brought with me but not yet used. I thought of the solemnity of my departure with it from London ten days or so before and felt absurd. Images came into my mind of those groups of t
oys you see mounted on highly coloured boards in the shops at Christmas time: the Boys’ Conductor Set (complete with ticket punch), the Boys’ Detective Set (complete with disguises), the Boys’ Tank Commander Set (complete with binoculars). I spent a self-abasing minute or two thinking of a new one: the Boys’ Foreign Correspondent Set, complete with typewriter, whisky bottle, invisible ink, and a copy of John Gunther’s Inside Europe. Then I did a foolish thing: I decided to pull myself together and be sensible.

  What, I asked myself over dinner, were the facts? Quite simple. I was supposed to be reporting the trial of a man named Deltchev who was accused of planning an assassination. Probably he was innocent. Yet some of the evidence against him had a ring of truth about it. Moreover, his daughter had been in touch with someone concerned in the assassination plan. I had found that person dead, killed in the same way as an Austrian politician and most likely by the same man, Aleko. Aleko had pretended to be of the secret police but was probably an agent of another kind. Who had employed him? Deltchev? Or the People’s Party to implicate Deltchev? But why should either employ Aleko when they had dangerous psychotics like Eftib and Pazar ready to hand? It didn’t make sense. And where did Deltchev come in? That was the important thing. I was preparing to defend him before a very large public. It might be just as well (might it not?) to make sure that I had the facts right. Might be! A fine fool I should look if the noble Deltchev I had postulated turned out to be in reality as murderous as his persecutors but rather cleverer at concealing the fact. ‘Mr Foster, what steps did you take to check the validity of your impressions?’ ‘Well, none really. I thought it better not to be inquisitive. Too risky.’ Oh dear, oh dear! By the time the wine arrived I no longer had any doubts. Nothing I already knew about the case seemed either logical or in any other way satisfactory. Far too much was hidden. Well, it must be revealed; and if the intimidated Petlarov did not want to help me, I would find it out for myself. The first thing for me to do anyway was to see Madame Deltchev at once — that evening — and hear what she had to say about the day’s evidence. Then I would give myself the pleasure of an interview with little Miss Katerina, tell her the news about her friend Valmo, and ask her the questions that Aleko did not want me to ask. After that I would decide what to do next.