Shaw gave a bitter laugh. “What country will, in the long run, Herr Prakesh?”
“Precisely!” The little banker nodded vigorously. “Therefore we should now discuss the next point, which in fact is the first priority: how you are going to get behind the Curtain, Mr Alison.”
“Ready when you are.”
Prakesh spoke again to his driver and the Mercedes turned to head back into the city. Shaw looked out once again at the distant prospect of fields and woods and hills. The land he was going to was grimmer, harder, full of menace. He would feel almost nostalgic about this last peaceful scene, this sight of the Austrian plain in sunlight.
As they went along Prakesh told Shaw that he was to leave Vienna that night by train for Indsbach on the Austro-Czech border. Outside Indsbach he was to meet an English-speaking Hungarian named Istvan Gorsak. Gorsak would know nothing of the purpose of Shaw’s journey but he would see him across the frontier into Czechoslovakia and thence into the Soviet Union by means known at present only to Gorsak himself. Gorsak, Prakesh said, never gave anything away in advance and he was very much a rough diamond; but Shaw could have every confidence in him and was not to worry. Prakesh handed Shaw a bulky package containing, he said, 7,500 Russian roubles in mixed notes; Gorsak would provide any local currency he might need as far as the Russian frontier and Shaw would of course be able to get more roubles from the WIOCA office in Moscow if necessary. The full instructions for making contact with Gorsak were lengthy and had to be repeated back until Shaw was word perfect; and he had to memorize a map of the Indsbach area. So it was not until the car was once again crossing the Danube into Vienna that the little man sat back and relaxed.
When the banker dropped him outside the Metropole Shaw went straight up to his room to chuck his things together. But first of all he examined everything carefully, noted that his grip was still locked and intact, as were his drawers. The shaver-transceiver was safe in its case. Nothing had been touched.
Five
It was a comparatively short journey to Indsbach — little more than seventy miles by rail.
Shaw arrived there at eleven o’clock that night. For the time being his appearance was somewhat altered. Before going aboard the train in Vienna he had spent some time in a washroom at the station together with his grip. When he came out again he was no longer the well-dressed WIOCA man who had driven only that morning in a Mercedes with a respected banker. He was a workman now, in soiled corduroys and a zipped leather windcheater and heavy, clumping boots. And it was in this temporary disguise that he left the train at Indsbach and, following his memorized instructions, set out on foot, still carrying his grip.
It was cold, with a hint of rain, and there was a chilly wind blowing dust and scraps of paper along the road as he came out of the station and turned to his left.
He picked up his bearings quickly. Ahead of him now was the railway bridge. He climbed the steps slowly, not hurrying at this stage, making for the other side of the track. An old woman passed him, a peasant, her seamed face half concealed behind a filthy brown shawl, stained with the grease of ages. She smelt of poverty, she carried its inescapable aura with her; she scarcely glanced at Shaw as he brushed by her. Down the steps into a dingy street of sad little dwellings he went, saw the smoking fingers of the scattered factory chimneys, heard in the near distance the nerve-racking scream of a circular saw biting into timber. Somebody was working a night-shift. The factories looked small, and Indsbach itself was a small place; the station was on its outskirts.
Few people were about at this hour, but the occasional vague shadow flitted by across the street, outlined in the few fitful lamps, hands in pockets and heads sunk into thin, ill-clad shoulders. This place was a far cry from Vienna in spirit and it gave Shaw the shivers; possibly it was too close to the grim reality of the frontier for gay hearts and carefree spirits — these could not survive the frightening emanations of slavery and conquest from behind the Curtain. No doubt all frontiersmen throughout time had lived in uncertainty, but in this part of Europe they existed right under the shadow, the shadow of what might come at them swiftly and without warning from a mere few hundred yards away. Across the little town Shaw could see the loom of the floodlights at the frontier-post, could almost fancy he heard the stamp and ring of metal as heavy nailed boots and gun-butts smashed into concrete.
He made his way along, still unhurriedly, stopped after a while to light a cigarette and look cautiously behind. All clear.
He walked on again.
The rows of mean little houses gave way now to dispersed cabin-like dwellings, isolated and ramshackle buildings. A little farther on the metalled road came to a sudden and inglorious end, as though, on this side of town, the road-makers had wearied of their task and had just given up. Shaw trudged on along a country road, rutted and rough, and he was soon into open country with Indsbach, cut off short like an amputated limb, two miles behind him.
It was midnight now and he increased his pace.
Another half-mile and he reached a crossroads. Taking the left-hand turning, he walked on for another fifteen minutes, his eyes straining through the blank darkness. Some distance off, he began to make out the scattered lights of a village — the village for which, in the unlikely event of his being questioned, he was supposed to be bound.
Then, two hundred yards or so farther on, he saw the loom of trees, tall and dark against the night sky — the start of a thick belt of forest. He went on carefully, feeling a strange fluttering in his stomach, a wateriness. There was something about the silent Austrian night, alone there beneath a starless, overcast sky, that reminded him, incongruously enough perhaps, of old-time fairy stories, of Grimm and his monsters and his distressed princesses, and the ogres and giants of folklore, the witches who changed men into dwarfs or animals… he laughed at his fancies and went on, but there was still the feeling of being submerged beneath a thousand years of bloody, turbulent history. Soon he had reached the first of the trees, had come beneath their whispering high branches which locked together across the road above his head, forming a black and continuous cavern.
Except for the faint stirring of the wind in those trees, and his own footsteps, there was utter silence.
Shaw licked his dry lips, and began whistling. It sounded incongruous, eerie, even fearful in that place.
“Land der Berge, Land am Strome…” The notes, somewhat flat, of the Austrian national anthem went out into the still air and Shaw walked on, slowly. He had gone almost a hundred yards between the two halves of the forest when he heard the response. The cry of an owl — once, twice. Shaw now whistled the Blue Danube Waltz. He kept this up for perhaps fifteen seconds and then he stopped, and at once the owl’s cry came back at him. Three times, then a pause, and then twice more.
Then silence again, utter and profound.
Shaw had stopped on the roadway now. The owl’s cry had come, as he expected, from his left. He judged that he was abreast of it now, and that it was not far off in the forest. He moved into the lee of the trees and watched, looking up and down the road. He allowed five minutes but nothing moved, and then abruptly he swung round. Stepping between the trees, he plunged into the forest, felt twigs and brushwood snap beneath his boots. Small night-animals scurried away from his approach, something furry and yet slithery scuttled across his feet and there was a whimper as he jerked his heavy boot. Ahead of him the owl called again and he moved on, feeling his way blindly in the pitch darkness, branches whipping across his face stingingly. Prakesh had warned him not to use his torch. His legs caught in the undergrowth and in roots and fronds so that he tripped constantly as he did his best to home on to the owl’s intermittent cry. He could move only slowly. He cursed the case he was carrying as the branches time after time seized it and he had to stop and free it, wasting the hurrying minutes.