Petrie’s heart lurched.
The driver approached Freya and jabbered something. She shrugged. Petrie wondered about taking her arm and saying something about the wrong bus, when a tall, bespectacled man behind Freya said, in German, ‘What about your boxes?’
‘Sorry?’
‘He won’t let you on without your breakfast boxes. Otherwise you could be anyone.’
‘Of course!’ Freya replied in German, put her hand to her head. The little blue boxes.
‘Better be quick.’
Into the hotel. A fat, surly woman behind a trellis table was handing out boxes, and keys were being handed in at the desk. They joined a little queue. The receptionists, two girls nearing the end of the overnight shift, paid them no attention. The fat woman handed Petrie and Freya little blue boxes without looking up. They boarded the bus, the driver glancing at them with an air of suspicion.
The coach was half-empty, and wonderfully warm. They took a seat near the back, Freya at the window. There was a trickle of ski people, and then the driver finally climbed on board and sat heavily down in his seat, and the doors closed with a hiss. There was no tour operator, and nobody counted heads.
The coach moved smoothly away. They looked at each other, too exhausted even to smile, the sudden warmth draining away the last of their energy. Freya leaned her head on Petrie’s shoulder. Her voice was slurred. ‘Colditz was easy.’
‘Alcatraz was a joke.’
Now she was whispering, and Petrie could hardly hear her. ‘As for Devil’s Island…’
He tapped her nose. ‘Now for the hard bit.’
Colonel Jan Boroviška sighed.
The hand-rolled Don Tomas cigar was carefully placed in the crude ceramic ashtray — a treasure made by a younger daughter at the Gymnasium in the remote past — and he leaned back, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him.
Lieutenant Tono Pittich, standing rigidly to attention at the Colonel’s desk, knew the signs, and longed for a quick release.
‘Tono, how long since you gained your Lieutenant’s badge?’
‘Four years, sir.’
The Colonel nodded thoughtfully but made no comment. ‘And you had an entire platoon at your disposal? To guard two civilians?’
‘That’s true, Colonel, I had a platoon.’
‘And you allowed the two down together in the elevator shaft? Not one at a time, each accompanied by one of your men?’
‘I put four of my men down the shaft ahead of the scientists, and the rest stayed up top. I didn’t see how they could possibly escape.’ The Lieutenant was aware that he was beginning to jabber, but couldn’t stop himself. ‘I didn’t know about the side tunnel.’
The truth was otherwise; the Lieutenant had known about the side tunnel. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the scientists might stop the rapidly falling elevator at its entrance. The young man wondered fearfully whether the Colonel believed him, thought that the story had come out sounding like the lie it was.
‘Did you not have a map of the cave complex?’
Desperately, the Lieutenant wondered if he should compound the lie with another one, and deny that he’d had access to a map. But no, it was too easy to check, and in any case his failure to acquire something as fundamental to an officer as a map could be seen as dereliction of duty. But to admit that he had a map would be tantamount to admitting that he knew about the side tunnel. He was beginning to feel entangled in a web.
‘I had, sir.’
‘I know you had.’ Boroviška took a contemplative puff. ‘We shall go into the matter of your amazing dereliction of duty in due course, Tono. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from where you are standing, it will have to wait. We will shortly be having a visitor.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes. General Kamensky, no less.’ Boroviška spoke softly. ‘What am I to tell the General, Tono? Do you have any suggestions?’
37
Flight by Coach
Between Petrie and Freya, and the Austrians, were several rows of empty seats. This made it gratifyingly difficult to engage the strange, wet young ones in conversation, and in any case nobody seemed inclined to make the attempt. Such desultory chat as there was soon died out, and in the soporific warmth of the coach people dozed or stared morosely out of the window. The countryside was dark and mountainous, the hills barely lit by a crescent moon.
Petrie was too exhausted, too frightened and too wet to sleep, but Freya snuggled into him, shivering, and within minutes she was snoring slightly, her head on his shoulder.
He tried to think it through, but the freezing wetness of his clothes and the awful stress of the past few hours combined to keep him in a sort of stupor. He opened the breakfast box and found himself staring at a small bottle of mineral water, a hardboiled egg and a sandwich filled with some indeterminate gunge. He slid the lot under his seat.
All they could do now, he reckoned, was wait.
The coach took off, and trundled carefully down the narrow, ice-packed road, past the ski hotels, past the Demänovskà Cave. In the lights of the bus Petrie glimpsed a couple of soldiers, tucked away in front of a tourist shop and invisible from the steep footpath leading down from the cave. One of the soldiers, a red-faced farm boy from oxcart country, looked at the passing coach. He stared directly at Petrie, their eyes meeting momentarily; and then the image was gone and Petrie’s hands were clenched into fists and his mind was filled with a simple question: was I recognised?
Nobody stopped the coach. It took a left at a roundabout and picked up speed on a broad road. The snow had gone and there was a pale sliver of dawn to the east. No headlights were pursuing them in the dark. Petrie unclenched his fists. He saw the chemical works, all aluminium pipes and orange smoke stacks catching the dawn light. Freya’s wet hair tickled his nostrils. Suddenly, Petrie was overwhelmed with exhaustion.
Shortly, the bus slowed and turned on to a motorway, and then accelerated to a satisfyingly brisk speed. The countryside here was flat and bleak. In the distance, shortly, Petrie saw a forest of high-rise buildings, shimmering, floating on water and flamingo pink in the light of the rising sun.
He stared stupidly at the distant mirage, mumbled something about a socialist paradise, and flaked out.
‘Tom!’
Freya was poking his thigh.
Memory flooded back. Petrie looked out in sudden panic. They were in the suburbs of some big city. ‘Is this Bratislava?’
‘I think so. The bus is going to Austria.’
‘What? But the border!’
‘We must get off now.’
Now Petrie definitely recognised the city as Bratislava. They made their way to the front of the coach. Freya said something in German. The driver shook his head.
She turned to Petrie in alarm. ‘He’s not letting us off.’
‘We have to. It’s life or death.’
She spoke to the driver again, sharply this time, but the man simply gave a surly shake of the head. Petrie wondered about punching him.
‘I could start to take my clothes off,’ she suggested.
‘He’d just get the police.’ Petrie tapped Freya on the shoulder and they made their way to the back of the coach.
‘What now?’
‘Wait till it stops. Then we’ll get out of the emergency window.’
Down a broad street, every set of traffic lights turning green as the bus approached. Glorious congestion loomed ahead. Petrie recognised the area. The big Tesco store appeared on the left. The bus stopped. A blue tram pulled up a few feet behind the bus. They pulled open the window and clambered out, in front of the astonished tram driver. Freya’s boot caught Petrie on the cheek. The coach driver was shouting angrily.