I watched my little French friend doze off in his seat and tried unsuccessfully to remember what sleep felt like. I could not recall the sensation. But I did not envy the sleeping man beside me. With an extra eight hours a day of wakefulness, he might have improved himself in any of a number of ways. He might have learned German, or Italian, or Czechoslovakian. Or, for that matter, tact and civility.
I looked out the window, or tried to; all I could see was my own reflection in the glass. I couldn’t read my guide book. The lights had been turned off just after we crossed into Czechoslovakia. I closed my eyes and thought about the old man in the jail in Prague, and tried to figure out how I would get to him, how I would remove him from his prison, how I would slip him out of the country, and how I could possibly manage all of this without getting myself killed.
After perhaps fifteen minutes of generally fruitless thought, the train stopped and the lights went on and a pair of tall young men in dark green uniforms entered the car.
My Frenchman was awake and chattering but I couldn’t be bothered with him. The stop, I knew, was an unscheduled one. We were not due to stop until Ceske Budejovice and were still miles from that city. I looked around. The train buzzed with fear. At the front of the car, the railway policeman was talking with the two uniformed men. I could only catch occasional words, and none of them were especially encouraging. “American… spy… Prague…” And, as if there were any doubt, “Evan Tanner.”
Evan Tanner was my name. It was also, unfortunately, the name on my passport.
“Where are we? Why have we stopped here? What is the matter with everyone?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The railway policeman had turned and was looking at me. I noticed that he had a revolver on his hip. So, for that matter, did the two men in green.
“What is this? Are we in Prague?”
“No.”
“Then why have we stopped?”
The railway policeman walked directly toward us. If the window had been open I would have gone through it. But there was no place to go, nothing to do. I thought of the days I had spent pretending to be a tourist. Wasted, all of them. I might as well have flown directly to Prague. For that matter, I might as well have shot myself in New York and saved myself a trip.
“Your passports. Both of you.”
I turned. His thick face was utterly expressionless. The Frenchman demanded that I explain what was going on.
“He wants your passport,” I said.
“The idiot saw it ten minutes ago.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. I reached into my jacket pocket and wished that it contained a gun instead of a passport. I handed my passport to the policeman and wondered if there was any way on earth I could bluff my way clear.
It seemed unlikely.
“And yours,” the policeman said to my companion. For once I didn’t have to translate. The meaning was obvious, even to the Frenchman. He produced his passport and the policeman took it from him. The two men in green uniform moved up and flanked the railway policeman.
He studied the passports, selected mine, shook it vehemently in the faces of the men on either side of him. “This is the man,” he announced sternly. “Evan Michael Tanner, American. This is the agent.”
And, incredibly, his hand fastened on the Frenchman’s shoulder. “Take him away,” he told the men in green. “This is the man you want. Take him off at once. We’re nearly an hour late as it is.”
The Frenchman didn’t understand. They asked him to stand and he had no idea what they wanted. “You have to go with them,” I said.
“But why?”
Because Providence has supplied me with the stupidest policeman on earth, I thought. But in rapid French I said, “They believe you are an opium smuggler. They intend to torture you until you turn in your accomplices.”
That did it. His jaw fell and he began to shriek that it was all a mistake, that he was innocent. If the twins in the green uniforms had had any doubts before, their reservations were now forever erased. No man who made such a show of innocence could be anything but guilty. They dragged him from his seat and walked him the length of the car. The railway policeman followed behind with the Frenchman’s suitcase and magazines in tow.
I could still hear him screaming as the train pulled away.
“Monsieur Fabre? I am sorry to have troubled you, sir. Your passport-”
I nodded dumbly, took the little Frenchman’s passport from the policeman, tucked it away in my pocket. My heart was still pounding and my hands were slippery with sweat. I did not trust myself to look at the man, much less speak to him.
“An unfortunate interruption. The man sitting with you was a spy, an American agent. A very dangerous man!”
The policeman sighed and eased himself into the seat beside me. I wished he would go away. He offered me a cigarette. I shook my head. He lit one himself, inhaled deeply, blew out a cloud of bluish smoke.
For several moments he was silent. I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes, pretended to be asleep. When he spoke again, he switched from Czech to German, an oddly accented German with reedy vowels and softened consonants.
“I am no Czech,” he said. “I am from the Sudetenland. You understand?”
I nodded.
“By now they know their mistake. They will call ahead to the next stop. Tyn. It is not scheduled, but they will stop the train there. You must get off before then. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Go to Pisek. There is a man there named Kurt Neumann. He will hide you and help you get to Prague. Tell him Heinz Moll. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“You will help the old man? Help him out of this damned country. I’ll go now. Wait to the count of twenty, then follow me.”
He left. I counted to twenty, got up from my seat, walked after him to the rear of the car. I found him waiting on the trestle between the two cars.
He said, “Kurt Neumann in Pisek. You remember that?”
“I’ll remember.”
“I cannot stop the train. They would remember. I can go to the front, talk with the engineer. I can pretend to see something on the track and he will slow down to twenty kilometers an hour. When the train slows you will jump. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“Good.” He hesitated. Then he straightened up sharply, and his right arm swung upward and his heels clicked sharply together.
“Heil Hitler!”
The words were sharp and clear over the roar of the train. I brought up my own hand in the familiar salute, met his eyes with mine, echoed his words.
“Heil Hitler!”
Chapter 2
When the telephone rang to begin it all, I was sitting at my desk typing up the last few pages of an eight-page report which Diane Blumberg would submit as her term paper in Shakespearean Tragedy. The paper was one I’d originally written several years ago for an NYU student. Since then it had made appearances at Barnard, Adelphi, and Fordham, and now Miss Blumberg would add Hofstra to the list. It was one of my favorites, built upon the thesis that Hamlet was intended by its author as a comedy, a sort of farcical satire upon the earlier Elizabethan tragedy-of-blood cliché. The neurotically indecisive Hamlet, the accidental murder of the buffoon Polonius, the manner in which revenge is constantly thwarted by Hamlet’s own incompetence – these and other elements combined to make a legitimate if unconvincing case for my argument. Highly original! An unlikely but engaging viewpoint. A-, the instructor at NYU had written. I’d dearly love to see the play performed as a comedy, said a professor at Adelphi, who’d given the author of record an A. Barnard and Fordham gave the paper a B, the former musing that the student didn’t seriously mean all of this, do you? and the latter offering jesuitical disputation but giving grudging praise to the originality and logical organization of the argument.