2. Accented Edges

Part Two
Accented Edges

9. The Party

In their hotel, Egerton Krac had awoken to heavy anxiety, poised on the edge of dreadful panic, and had not sought to recall the terrible ordeal of his dream in any more detail; but he had not been able to put out of mind what Otto Harbinger had told him in that borderland he inhabited, or the sudden dread that if not lying in some shallow grave, Kate might have fallen into the hands of unseen monsters in a 'homeland' on the verge of greed, following sudden freedom and the path to cruel partition. He had been glad when Shams had called the hotel, after he had seen the brief appeal made in the advertisement in the morning newspaper. He had said little over the phone, but they had arranged to meet up this afternoon at the castle, where, Shams had told him, they would be celebrating the president's birthday with a party. Tomáš had already arranged to meet his old girlfriend, Marcela, who was back in Prague, after a period of studying abroad; so Egerton had once again telephoned Olga. "Of course I can make it," she had said, "if it's a party for Václav Havel! I'm absurdly fond of our former political prisoner and playwright! I'll wear my golden party piece!"

"We have time, before I meet up again with Marcela, for a climb!" Tomáš had said to painter in the hotel. "You have a few hours to kill. Come on, the exercise will do us good!"

They cut straight up the hillside, abandoning the easier tread of the twisting path that thread its way up Petrin Hill, and Tomáš sprang up ahead of Egerton, turning about to face him and jogging backwards up the steep grass slope that banked above. He had suggested Petrin for the views and some easy exercise, but now he seemed to want to run! Down below Tomáš, the roofs of Prague were caught in the sun, warm reds to the left, the glint of copper out across the river, and behind the painter, the golden dome of the Museum. The sound of the train on its funicular track rumbled through the quiet air, cutting the peace to schedule.

“Come on,” he shouted down to Egerton, “I’ll race you!”

By the time Egerton caught up with his friend, they were closer to the huge stone wall that had run parallel to their route, and finally turned here to skirt the summit. Tomáš leant against the stone with both his hands, arms locked and head hanging down, as he gasped for air. Egerton dropped on to the grass, his back to Tomáš and facing the city below. He was breathing deeply, his chin on his chest, Prague at the tip of his lungs. He watched an orange tanker’s purposeful crawl as it lined a dusty road with water, and tasted his warm, dry lips with his tongue.

“This is the Hunger Wall,” Tomáš said. “Ending hunger was its function. Charles IV ordered its construction - to solve unemployment.”

Egerton rolled on to his side and looked at the wall stretching away beneath them; it lay in full sun, dividing east from west, and on this side cast no shadow. "It's so damn hot for spring!" he said. "I could do with something more constuctive to solving my thirst!"

“There’s a small ruin ahead, if I remember rightly,” Tomáš said. “I’ve read in the press that an old tramp lives there, now - since the revolution; but we won't be asking him for any hospitality: we can get a drink on the top of Petrin!”

They followed the wall into an undergrowth of gnarled trees and bushes, where the foundations of a small building just about clung to the hillside. Its low, broken walls offered no protection, but the surrounding wood formed a twisted windbreak. There was no sign of a tramp, but in the ash of a burned-out fire were scattered some scorched tin cans, and by the stones of a collapsed internal wall a roof of plastic sheeting had been fixed into place with some loose rubble. Almost grimacing at them from a small outcrop of rock, the narrow mouth of what looked like the opening to a low tunnel had been sealed up with what had become thin, flaking, rusted red and worn iron bars, set into the stone of a rudimentary arch that suggested to the painter the smallest window of a prison.

“That's supposedly Hell’s back door,” Tomáš said, following the direction of his gaze. “When I studied in Prague, the place where Milan had his exhibition hadn't been privatised, or renamed Hell! The Strahov monastery crypt is on the other side of this hill. We were down there once for that 'underground' party I’ve told you about... That's how I met Marcela. The crypt is carved out of solid rock! For a long time, the cave was used as a wine-cellar for the 'Commies' up in the Castle; I think it was only in the Seventies, they stopped using it altogether.”

The painter jerked about one of the corroded bars, and it seemed ready to come away from its stone casing, but he was not tempted to pull any harder. He loved the rock only as a climber; and not the spaces within it - the broken, hidden chambers in the dark: they had always been off-limits. The painter was no caver! He brushed brown flakes and dried, bloody rust from his hands.

“I think I'd rather go in by the front door,” he said.



They had been representatives of the Strahov students' union two years' before, which was how they had met, when they had helped organise a clandestine party, quite an accomplishment in the final years of the totalitarian state. The caretaker had shown around them the chill, dimly lit crypt, accepting a considerable bribe, and telling them that he was going into the country for the weekend and would "know nothing" about whatever would go on in his absence. "I will be away," he had told them, "so I won't have the key, will I?"

As the caretaker was speaking, Marcela had been sitting by the pool, studying a strut of rusted, twisted railing, and Tomáš had lightly touched the wet of the wall, aware of the weight of all that earth above them.

“That goes up - and leads out,” the caretaker had said to Marcela. “Through the pool, beyond the old broken railing, there are tunnels! To build this part of the crypt, they widened an existing passage, you see? It continued on, through there.”

Marcela’s had turned her head, her face in shadow, as she followed his direction and sought the tunnel in her mind.

“Here, you had better take the key,” the old man had said to the club secretary, “and remember, the lot of you, I’ve never even heard of the Strahov residences students' union, when all's said and done!"

Marcela's eyes had seemed to escape from Tomáš through those flaking railings and across the black water into the dark, where it channelled upwards through an impossible, impassable wall of rock; and on his haunches beside her, he had stared hard into the blind cavern, unable to see anything. Tomáš had instead looked at the surface of the pool, like a tensed black tarpaulin, as he had sought her hand; but then her hand had escaped his, to touch the water, breaking the tension across the surface... She had always been escaping.



As they stood beneath the pair of Titans at its gates, Egerton Krac loosened his shirt, hot and sweating from his climb to Prague castle, and his earlier exercise with Tomáš Lovas on Petrin Hill. His Slovak friend had gone on to meet Marcela. In spite of her bulk, Olga seemed to have been unaffected by the uphill struggle to Prague Castle in the hot spring sunshine. There was no shelter up here from the light, and one of the grotesque bare-chested guardians above them seemed to be wielding his huge club against the overpowering force of the sun, unable to break free from its tenacious heat. Beneath his vast, struggling torso, the bronze shining as though with sweat, hung a small, delicate child, hoist high off the ground by her father; as he stood back with care, and slowly lifted a camera, his daughter held a tenacious smile, and clung on tight; she seemed gripped in sultry immobility by the rippling calf of the palace guardian, while her father took her picture.

Around Castle Square, edged with lesser palaces, everyone seemed to be drifting towards a tanker of free beer, stationed in front of the Archbishop’s Palace, where, beneath the white and gold of the papal flags, they congregated. The painter, light-headed, and counting the cost of lack of much decent sleep, watched the celebrants as they drifted, apparently aimless, through the golden light, gravitating to their beer. On a balcony above the door of the palace glittered St. Peter’s keys, their power to bind and unbind denied for fifty years, and beneath them a red archbishop's hat, sides tapering into the highest point of the archbishopric crest; it had to be thirsty work, this lengthy act of absolution from repression. They approached the green-labelled stern of the huge tanker the brewery had gifted a people in celebration of their playwright-president’s birthday, and moved around to the pumps. The service before the font of pilsner was like another kind of communion, the free beer delivered solemnly into patient hands, to be received by grateful tongues; and the taps were orifices to the divine. Egerton held out his glass, and Olga touched it with her own. “Here's to President Havel!" she said. "Stronger than the Deutchmark! More liquid than the Franc!”

"Amen to that!" he said. "I think I see Shams."

Looking back towards the castle gates, Egerton had noticed an olive skinned stranger, dressed immaculately in white, who seemed to be waiting for somebody, glancing up at the bronze statues, and almost scowling.

“Shams?” the painter said, when they reached him. "I'm Egerton."

“That’s right,” Shams said, now frowning. "I'm very sorry about what has happened; and I'm glad that you're here!"

“I am so glad you made contact!” Egerton said. "This is Miss Slídlová.”

“Let’s go inside the cathedral yard,” Shams suggested, “it will be cooler there, and we can talk.”

They proceeded through the gates, across two baking courtyards and into the shadow of the St Vitus Cathedral, which towered above them, considerably narrowing the passage, and almost filling the courtyard. Shams seemed to the painter a little anxious in that enclosed space, as he jerked a hand towards the immense roof. He looked like a little bird, the painter thought, challenged by the heights. Shams was looking up past the flying buttresses towards the winged gargoyles, blind-eyed and mouths gaping dry.

“Their job must sicken them,” he remarked, “when all they have to do up there is vomit down the rain!”

"An earlier form of colonic irrigation," Olga said.

Egerton had observed the gargoyles earlier, and seen in the masons' strange angled work some reflection of his own inner dread, their vast concern the close framed precinct looming up behind and sheering off below their averting vision; and he glanced up, again, towards those staring eyes, striving from grotesque limitation, praying for release from the monumental work of drainage, which would infinitely channel rainwater through their rears, to be evacuated via those grimacing mouths, while the powerful weight of St. Vitus and the heavens was being passed on around them, spreading, even, and carrying swift and sure through the arching, bracing buttressing to earth.

“I find what has happened quite shocking!” Shams was saying. He walked over to a low stone wall and sat down. “In fact, Hell is very near.” He pointed back the way they had come. “Hell was where I met Kate,” he said, "before she disappeared. I’d heard of your cousin, Ivan Krac, before I met him down there; my friend Milan had told me a lot about him! He’s turned from the darkroom to business; and my own feeling is that last he still likes the dark, and the last thing he’d want is close attention from his cousin -.”

“Close attention?” Egerton said. “Whatever do you mean, Shams?”

“He’s a Krac and you're a Krac,” Shams said. “Milan told me that Ivan had successfully placed a restitution claim for some Krac family property in Slovakia, though from what I gather, your father was the elder of two brothers, and it shouldn't have passed to Ivan Krac at all! I have a contact of my own, who works in the public records office, and he has been doing some checking! My guess is that P.S. was founded on the expectation of some value in this inheritance, and he plans to hold on to it at any cost! Anyway, I don’t trust the man; and he was the last person to see Kate Ashe, from what I have read in the newspapers... After I read about her disappearance, I thought...”

“You thought what?” Egerton said. "You can speak freely, Shams; I am not exactly close to Ivan, given those years of enforced separation; and you're right, my father was the first born of two brothers! My cousin has mentioned a property called Sandovisko in Slovakia."

"I must ask that you say nothing of my suspicions!" Shams said. "I told you on the phone, this is off the record! Krac is a powerful man with powerful friends. There’s no slander law here, as yet, but some men will do anything to protect a reputation! All I have to say is pure speculation: I have difficulty in believing it myself! And naturally, I have not wished to speak to the police. You will know, Miss Slídlová, that for years the police here have supplemented their income through corruption. It wasn’t enough to be the police for a totalitarian state. They also had links to criminals: they helped to direct crime against the staff and property of western embassies; and they still do - against tourists; against anybody they don’t like! I have no faith in the Prague police! And then there’s their racism; they're renowned for it! I don’t want to be held on some trumped up charge or harassed as I know others have been!”

"I have said, you can speak freely, Shams," Egerton reassured him. "This will go no further."

“Why would a man with so much to lose," he said, "think about her abduction and secretion, and even worse? What had the photographer to gain from taking Kate? At first, the very idea seemed absurd! I wondered whether there might be anything in his past history to suggest duplicity. I have been asking around, as I say; and I have even heard rumours that after he came out of prison in the Seventies, Ivan Krac was an agent of the Communist regime and passed information to the Czech secret service through the Photography Union! Some people suspect he uses his former connections to promote his interests."

"If that had been so, I wouldn't trust my cousin!" Egerton said. "But even were that true, it wouldn't necessarily mean he was capable of kidnap!"

"To his credit, he has not been openly accused," Shams said, "whereas, so many others are being exposed; and Ivan Krac does have some fine democratic credentials! These rumours may be false, Mr. Krac; but your cousin has robbed you!"

“An agent would have to have democratic credentials,” Olga said. "I know from my own father, there are many former agents nobody would suspect! They still get up to all sorts! But, surely, not Ivan Krac!"

“I can't believe that my cousin Ivan was a spy!" Egerton said. "Or that he would harm Kate in any way! I'm not interested in any property over here, either! My cousin's work speaks for itself! It is Kate we are after! I only have one lead: yesterday, a banker told me about a sex racket run by a group called the ClimAxis. Have you ever heard of them?"

Shams shook his head. "Definitely not my scene!" he said. "I hope to God, Egerton, you are not thinking along those lines!"

"What would my cousin have to gain from this?" Egerton said. "How would Kate's disappearance prevent my finding out about Sandovisko?"

"That, I cannot answer!" Shams said. "It doesn't add up, unless he wanted to tie you up in the search for her, at least for some time... Krac works best with negatives! Who knows?"

"I simply can't believe this!" Egerton said. "Ivan just wouldn't do that to me! He loved my father, Miroslav! I will have to leave you now, Shams, because your friend Milan Procházka is due to phone the hotel around four to confirm a place to meet tonight; maybe he will be able to tell me something more. If you find out anything else at all, please get in touch!"


10. The Capture of Strangers

They had left Smichov in the early hours, and she had been caught in a wild hunt, leaving Prague behind in the night. Kate Ashe had been pushed to the floor in the back of the car by the gypsy who sat beside her; she had been covered with a dirty rug, which the man sitting above her had occasionally straightened and rearranged to hide her head and body. The city streets had been empty; lights had passed them by, and then they had been out in the countryside. When she had complained, after a few hours wedged down between the front and back seats on the floor, the driver had become angry. “Shut up your fuckin’ features!” he had said, menacingly. “Hold down your throat, or I cut it out!” The hours had seemed to stretch on and on, as without resting, he drove. Against Kate’s aching bones, the steel frame of the car seemed to have been shaped only to maximise the impact of the every bump along that dark ride, far, far away from Prague. What had Milan Procházka been doing at that apartment in Smichov? Why had done nothing to help her? He must be part of this nightmare; but where was he? She trembled now with dread at the thought of Narsis - and cursed that thirst for 'midtones'. Why had she ever stepped inside that dark place, a camera secreted in her bag?

Before Natsa arrived, nothing had relieved the emptiness of her second prison, the enforced inwardness and stifling bareness of Kate’s new home. She was used to working for lengthy periods alone in her workshop in Manchester, but with nothing do with her hands, or even look at here, the solitude in the dark room was unbearable. When Kate had arrived, she had seen nothing at all outside, but she thought she was in some kind of tower from its spiral stair and the curve in the walls; she had also noticed the dried yellow mud on the red stone floor and immediately thought of limestone. Sometimes, she heard voices carried up to her, and together with the high grill to the outside air, their filtered foreignness became familiar, distant, only friend.

The red-stoned chamber was only ever barely lit in the fine grained light from that small, impenetrable grill set deep in the wall by the ceiling. By it she watched the days come and go, counting the lonely nights as they passed, but when trapped, the mind is never sure, and here she existed only as the grill did. How many days was it? What lay behind it? Where was she? Who? After three days of this solitude, another woman had arrived in the dark room by night. One minute Kate had been alone; the next, the door had been opened, revealing a dark and heavily pregnant gypsy in the glow of a kidnapper’s lamp; the man had pushed her roughly, and there she had been, there they had both been in the black space without partition they would have to share.

Kate had been shocked by her sudden arrival, and then dread had replaced shock, as suddenly she was no longer alone in her narrow chamber, but trapped in the dark with a stranger. For a long time, the woman had not moved, but she had filled the black space, her swollen body standing soundless and invisible; and Kate, too, had been in dread and too afraid to speak. She had imagined the woman’s eyes straining to their limits, like here own, guessing that they both felt the same; and then the girl had begun to cry. Her pain had been a high pitched rasp deep at the back of her throat, so quiet, but filling the room; and Kate had swum across that narrow channel towards it. The woman had been too afraid to sit down; she was like a child placed for the first time in a pool. Kate had to reach out and touch her, to find her and stand up; but she had pulled away, the rasp becoming a full-mouthed moan. Suddenly, Kate’s own dread had been gone. Only this woman’s pain existed.

“It’s going to be alright,” she had begun to sing, gently, taking her in her arms. They had rocked like that, standing together in the centre of the dark room, the larger woman quietening, through their blindness, as Kate’s touch and her meaningless, pulsating tones reassured them both.

She had not been able to tell Kate her name: “Natsa” was the nearest thing to a word she had spoken.

The next morning Kate had awoken with the warmth of this woman and her unborn child beside her. In the weak daylight from the grill, she could see that the gypsy could only be in her teens. She had tried to communicate in the light, pointing at herself and telling her own name; but when she had pointed to the woman's lips, willing her to speak, she had looked at the ground and said nothing. Then after half an hour or so, she had made that sound again, "Natsa," rubbing at her stomach; Kate couldn’t be sure whether she meant herself, her baby, her hunger or her pain; but ‘Natsa’ she became.

Though younger than her, Natsa was fuller, and her known body became the heart of this narrow space: the dread of Kate's first nights had passed into terror: terror that another prison had been passed back through that solid door to lie beside her. Natsa suffered, too, and in the night she wouldn’t sleep, but would move around the pitch, pacing its black thickness with her own dark motion, carrying her baby like a nervous warder.

Kate would find herself being drawn back into a warmth of shared black wakefulness, drifting in and out of her dreams... This gravid, nightly pacing entered and charted Kate’s thinking, and she found herself holding her own stomach as she slept, both sharing Natsa’s burden, and wishing it away! With the fear came the incommunicable sympathy for the foetus, and Natsa’s own confinement was so complete in this dark room, they became close, like twin sisters, though unable to share their dread or their hope.

‘The day frowns more and more. Thou’rt like to have A lullaby too rough. I never saw The heavens so dim by day.’ How could it be so clear, tonight? How could the lines come back to her, so bright and sure, when at the time they had dried in the dark of her throat? The babe Perdita, the lost one, was to be cast away! She had laughed at the time. How they had all laughed! The place of partition, the ‘island of Bohemia’, had been a few fawn sheets and a papiermaché palm-tree. ‘Our ship hath touched upon the deserts of Bohemia...’ Kate had carried on a rag-doll representing Perdita, and Georgina had played the Mariner. Kate was supposed to abandon the babe with a note and sad regret: “Blossom, speed thee well!” Then the thunder was supposed to roar. A deep-throated adolescent, Cailtin Marsh, had made a crazy recording of her own creation for the sound of the storm. Then Kate had been supposed to ‘exit, pursued by a bear’ - Joanne draped in a sheepskin rug. But Kate had dried up, the lines lost in the storm from the cassette machine; and there had been no escape from the revelling eyes of the sixth-form. Georgina, the Mariner, had surreptitiously mouthed Antigonus's next words at her, so that her lips hardly moved; and that grizzly sheep, Joanne, had been waiting to rush on. To play for time, old Walshy had repeated the sound of the storm, and all Kate had been able to think of was Caitlin, so near to laughter, herself, in that gargled scraping 'thunder'. “I’m lost, too,” she had admitted to the school; and then she had rushed off the stage, without waiting for the sheep to pursue her. Now, here, in their prison, the lines had more easily returned, floating out of the darkness and even entering her dreams. ‘Places remote enough are in Bohemia. There weep, and leave it crying; and for the babe Is counted lost forever, Perdita I prithee call it.’

Perdita...

She seemed to be losing him. “Egerton!” she screamed, wildly, again and again; and in the aftermath of her violent outburst Natsa’s frightened sobbing diluted the pain, silencing her hysteria in the comfort of shared tears. She had never been so lost in, and with another; and sometimes Kate would whisper for her lover in the dark, only finding Natsa, their 'conversations' sometimes soothing, sometimes accusative, sometimes angry exchanges of alien worlds in the dark. The nights were weird parallel streams of sleeping and waking, and sometimes, finding themselves together in the dark, they embraced, the craziness gone, differences overcome, the distance to go before the dawn that much briefer. Night was near madness, and in the day they clung on to the visible space between them, finding in returning shapes only the most faint traces of reality.

On their third night together, the dark gave way. Kate sat up, forgetting her dream. Natsa sat against the wall of the dark room, her knees updrawn, her face turned towards the grill. Her shape was cloudy, but engulfed in a mild, welcoming glow, filtered from the moon. But the grill was quickly penetrated and left behind. Natsa cried in the total dark, and Kate lay back, knowing her pain though its narrow partition. I wish I were the moon up there, Kate thought, looking back through dark and timeless sterility at this moment of life in Europe, so that I could sleep without Natsa’s tears. I would miss gentle hands and soft hope and familiar shapes. I’d miss hot femininity. But I could bear the loss of wounded life! I could bear the cold sleep without dreams. And I could bear never waking.

Eventually the whispers of sleep were swallowed back in the reopening chamber of the blood-red thalamus as the light grew. It was the eighth of April and the eighth day of her captivity. Kate had counted the days - carefully counted the days; but even so, in the dark room she couldn’t be sure. She had to be sure! Today must be her birthday: the eighth of April, oak... As she awoke from her broken dreams, not sure if it was the morning or the afternoon, Kate could only guess, telling herself that she was right - that she had to be right! It was the eight of April. Surely she couldn’t have lost count already!

Last year, on her birthday, during a holiday in Ireland, Egerton had driven Kate to the limits of the Dorinn Rock and parked up beneath a lighthouse. The Dorinn Light stood at the end of a long, single-track lane between high stone walls, out on a peninsular of land towering into the Atlantic: the Dorinn, a column of peat and rock surmounting the ocean. In the restaurant earlier that evening flanked by a curtain of rain, they had peered into a gathering storm that had stolen away the entire coastline, leaving them with only each other. "Shall we drive somewhere?" he had asked her.

Kate could remember so clearly the close white stone of the walled track on the Dorinn Rock and the night around them, lost in a driving rain, his turning off the lights, and their making love - making love, the turning objects of a light, in their writhing obfuscation, as they built passion beneath a revolution of caution, the encircling, sweeping arm of the Dorinn light, swinging up and about them, seeming to cradle their love. A quiet marker in a quiet land, far from habitation, and always manned, the Dorinn was to her a distant signal, an outpost of man’s care, at least a bastion of light in her memory, against this partition of dark and the suffocating air.

Oh, Egerton! she thought.

Her birthday here had not been marked at all; and as once again the light had faded, Natsa had turned - in, or from the gathering night. They lay side-by-side, though she was upside-down, and her eyes were urgently saying something, shaping a question, as Kate felt them taking grip of her own. Behind that fixed and answered stare, maybe she was having contractions! Natsa’s eyes closed, then bloomed, and blinked, quivering in fear for the baby inside.

Kate got up and began knocking on the door. They would have to find a midwife. One of the gypsies responded quickly. He indicated that Kate be silent, spoke harshly to Natsa... Then, faraway, through the grill, a man’s voice rang out in English.

“Ask them if they know one nearby!”

Kate Ashe screamed and the gypsy grabbed her, slapping his filthy hand over her mouth, and kicking the door shut. She bit viciously into his flesh, pulled away and ran across the narrow space of the dark room towards the grill and the world outside. The dull pain came from the back of her skull, exploding, then blotting across her brain, like ink through cartridge paper, darkening Kate’s senses, as she was thrown across the room. Natsa watched with horror her unconscious body slipping down the wall, blood springing from a rift in the white of her forehead.


11. The Photography Pool

Beyond the Strahov gate, the exterior walls of Hell were grass banks and the broad oak door was cased in dressed stone built into the hillside. There was a paper sign on the door, but the words there were an unintelligible scrawl to the painter. The door itself was locked, and Egerton decided to wait for the young photographer. A mounded grass lawn skirted the path, back towards the gate to the courtyard; and he didn't have to wait long before Milan appeared there.

“Hello!” the young photographer called, still some way down the path.

“Hello,” Egerton called. “The place is closed, Milan.”

“Kroupa, Hell’s owner, he’s a bit of a loner,” Milan said, “and I wouldn’t say that we’re what you might call 'friends'. But I can use the place, for an hour or so... You were right, Hell is closed!”

Milan had the key; he opened the door; and as he turned on the lights they revealed parts of the rock, here and there, along the dim passageway, spotted and displayed in brighter arcs, like some fundamental exhibits for visiting geologists. The painter shivered, as Milan relocked the door behind them; and Egerton wished that Tomáš was with him; the young photographer, his cousin's apprentice, had chosen an eerie place for their first meeting. Milan led the way down some steep steps into the first cavern of the crypt. At the foot of the stairs, the rock in places disappeared behind new ceramic tiling, but up above their heads, it kept its place; they moved on, through another narrow passageway into a smaller, bare and unreconstructed cave. There was a bar built into the corner and there were a few tables and chairs; Milan went behind the bar looking for glasses.

Beside the bar was a low red brick wall, newly built, and beyond that stretched the pool Tomáš had mentioned, now illuminated to its farthest limits. The flaking railing had gone, Egerton noticed, and these lights must be new. The rock folded back in patches of light and deepest shadow, and there was no sign of any passageway beyond. The climber shivered again in the crypt, as he wondered whether it might lie beneath the water.

"It's cold down here!" he said.

“This will warm you up!” Milan said from the bar as he mixed some vodka.

He came over and placed three glasses on the table.

"Three?" Egerton said, glancing around the lesser cave.

"I want you to meet a friend,” the photographer said. "I remember Kate made a point when she was last down here that I hadn't invited a single gypsy; my friend Shams said I had erected an ironic partition! It was funny, because they were here to see an exhibition of shots they had let me take of them, but I had only captured them on film..."

For a moment, Egerton’s heart faltered. Was Kate here? How could she be here? Was the third guest to be Shams? What was Milan up to? Then, a swarthy gypsy suddenly appeared, and stood uncertainly in the mouth of the passageway.

“This is Zarek," Milan said.

Egerton could not speak. The air in Hell suddenly felt like ice and his heart raced. The gypsy must have been already waiting down here in the dark, or could there be some smaller cave with its own lights?

Milan smiled. "Don't worry," he said, "Zarek is here only to make sure things don't get out of hand. I am here to make a confession."

Egerton sat down; here seemed to be the truth at last, but he didn't like it; the small muscle below his infrasternal notch was tightly clenched; the young photographer was the last person he had suspected!

"I know where Kate is," Milan said, "or rather, my friends do. Things have gotten a bit out of hand... but I swear on my life, Mr. Krac, I am only the messenger; I'm not involved - or I wasn't, until I found out who snatched her! But that was nothing to do with me! It was a shock to me, as much as anybody! I only found out about this, yesterday! If it were up to me, Egerton, I would free Kate; but it isn't up to me; and now they want to ask something in return for her release! You must recognise this.”

“Where is Kate?” the painter said angrily, staring at the ring he had last seen on her finger. "Where is she, you bastard?"

“I can’t tell you,” Milan said, “because I really don't know! I’ve been told to pass on a message with this ring, that's all. You are not to contact the police. They say -.”

"You knew my cousin was going to fire you!" Egerton said. "Maybe you needed some alternative income! You're part of this, Milan, you bastard! You're no messenger! You have been working with your gypsy friends -."

"No, I swear it!" Milan said. "I wouldn't have harmed her!"

Egerton thought of that locked door at the top of the rocklined passageway through the other cavern, as he pocketed the ring and looked more closely at the gypsy who had seemed so uncomfortable on arrival; he was a powerful man, but somehow disengaged, almost hanging back from Milan. Would he remain like that or spring into action? The distant door was solid oak and the key was in the young photographer's pocket. The chair and the spread of his legs gave Egerton some spring of his own, and he seemed to borrow the weight of the rock through his fist, as he lunged forward from his seat and smashed it into the photographer's right eye. He wasn’t sure if it was his own knuckle that had cracked or the bones in Milan’s face, but as the Czech flew backwards and fell to ground, both seemed to be out of action; the painter rubbed at his fist, forced to reveal his own pain, and wincing in spite of himself, though watching the gypsy.

Zarek, completely surprised, looked lost and for the moment still inexplicably detached, and immobile, for all his great weight. But Milan wasn’t out! Egerton lashed out again, with a foot this time, kicking the photographer in the back, his boot to the kidney, so that Milan cried out and arched away from him across the tiles. Zarek still didn't move, as the gasping photographer tried to crawl up on to his hands and knees. The gypsy seemed undecided; Milan had clearly picked the wrong man! Egerton stepped lightly over his crabbed body and kicked him viciously in the face, turning his back on the only witness.

All he had been feeling had found focus in brute force; his violence had been effortless, and Milan sank back to the floor, spitting blood across the tiles; but suddenly, Zarek's huge hand lay lightly round his neck, the fingers for now feeling almost gentle, and Egerton turned, and kicked out again, so that Zarek, as though still reluctant, tightened his grip. A third person was giving him instructions in Czech or Romany.

Where the hell has he come from? the painter thought. And could there be more than three of them? There will be no chance, now, of getting out!

Egerton could not turn his head to see who was giving the orders: Zarek's hand was like a vice; and then he saw the second man's hand, gripped around a small aerosol canister; he screwed shut his eyes, but the nozzle was inches away and its chemical spray was covering his face. He managed to rip free of Zarek, and he began to retch, his whole face burning. He was for a moment totally blind. Then, his eyes tightly closed against the pain, a great redness crept in, scorching, and forming countless bright lights between his eyelids and retinas; his eyes felt peeled and raw, as they streamed; the spray bitterly lined his mouth and throat and tasted deep within his lungs; and still retching he fell to his knees.

Nobody touched Egerton as he lay on the floor and clawed at his own face, trying to rub away a fire that raged through the tears. His mind was racing. Had his cousin been trying to protect Milan from any accusation of involvement in Kate's disappearance? Was this why he had fired him? Had Ivan allowed it to happen? Milan had said something about an 'ironic' partition; could his own cousin be involved in her secretion? His eyes burned from the spray, and he tried to use his shirt sleeve to stem its spread, scraping at as much of the surface of his corneas as he could reach, immune to further pain; and as the painter scratched at the surfaces of his eyes, he wondered at his cousin, the photographer's duplicity. Had Shams been right? Was Ivan a treacherous spy? Had he robbed him of more than a piece of property? But his attempt to clear his vision was useless. Then, he recalled Tomáš, and Marcela, and thought of the cold pond of subterranean water: some liquid relief, a hiding place, if not escape.

The two men were talking close behind him, and Egerton shut his eyes more tightly, then tried to open them and failed; he would have to do it blind; where he was going he wouldn't need them. He could remember the dark cavern, its vague outlines, he crawled, and then, somehow, and still unnoticed, he was at the low wall of the underground pool.

Dragging himself over the wall, he ducked his entire head, rubbing water into his eyes and sucking it deeply through his mouth and into his burning insides. If they could see him, they would think that he was seeking relief, though he was also thinking of escape. But the filthy water wasn’t helping, and all he could do for the moment was repeat the action, again and again, hoping that eventually the now highly active chemical would be weakened.

When he looked back, managing to open his eyes for the first time, the cave was empty. The other men must have dragged Milan away! Having committed the length of pool and rock to memory, he splashed into the water, which came up to his knees. He was thankful, when it got hardly any deeper, and feeling along one wall, some way into the watery cave, he found the narrow slit of what might just be a passageway. The pitch dark engulfed him. The crack led up and to the side, at a sharp angle; and then the ceiling tapered down to what seemed its end. Blindly, he groped about the rock and finally he found a possible route, low and at the side. He had to bend into it. And he had been right: it went even lower, and the first part at least would mean submerging his whole body in water. He shrugged off his light jacket and sank it in the pool.

Not sure whether he would come up again, Egerton struggled down for what seemed like hours, before his eyes and nose came clear of the water. He could hardly move, and it took a many more minutes for him to leave the pool behind; this was a very tight space, but at least it was leading him upwards; and it would involve some belly work, with almost no room to crawl! He could only lie on his fingers, his hands beneath his face, and edge forward into the tightest of tunnels, hoping that he wouldn’t become stuck fast in the rock. The painter's movements were agonisingly slow, but the pain in his eyes was slightly less unbearable. He coughed a few times - nobody would hear him; and as he cleared his throat, it tasted deeply of foulness, the cavern water a filthy layer over the chemical spray; his face seemed alive with burning scars he could no longer reach; but his hands inched forward, and he shuffled after them as best he could. He was climbing, slowly! The space was so tight! If they followed him now, he thought, they would be able to catch at his foot and drag him back; but would anyone follow him through that?

The rock passage now entombed him, and there was no sound, except that of his own strangled breathing and the gentle scraping of flesh and clothing against the stone. The tight tunnel began to decline for a few metres. After several minutes, the pulse was beating harder in his forehead, the narrow chute carrying him lower, not higher - carrying him more easily forward, but draining the blood to his head. His ears rang with the pulse of it, drowning out the possible sound of pursuit; and then he felt more acutely the cold grip of dread, tightening like the gypsy’s hand around his heart, as he slipped lower and towards panic in that small tight space. The narrowed passage prevented him from working forward with his elbows: he could only push ahead, snaillike, using his own face to create some friction on stone, still oblivious to any new pain on top of the burn. Then, thankfully, the passageway began to twist up and to the side, widening a little so that he could push sideways on his elbows, and increase his speed; but his face came up against blank rock, his head rising against a sheer, impossible wall! He couldn’t turn over, let alone turn around, but now there was some sort of a ledge and suddenly, his chin was up; he hung on the ledge by the bone, working up his right shoulder, and finally getting one hand over. He brought up his whole weight and lay well into a higher passage.

This one stretched a long way, climbing upwards, though it was difficult to tell: sometimes, it seemed, it was climbing steeply upwards and in one direction. Egerton moved ahead slowly; the pain from his skin had eased, except for one bruised cheek, where he imagined he had been badly grazed; and the foul taste in the back of his throat still sickened him; his eyes burned hotly in the pitch dark, as he pushed on through the rock, his body a single invasive pulse though the stone blackness. But the pain was under control. He could even open his eyes a little, though there was absolutely nothing at all to see. He had no idea how long he had been crawling! Against the livid red and the pitch darkness, time had stopped, when he had entered that crack; minutes had been replaced by a scale established with his fingertips, every inch feeling to him different, each tiny stretch of the tight passageway unique; and this inching struggle forward, tunneling onward, had become its own end.

He had to rest; he was exhausted. As he lay still, he stopped breathing in the dark, driving all the muscular tension and trembling out through his body into the rock. He lay stretched into the stone, losing sight, breath, movement - and reducing his pulse, undermining his heart, sending its weakening, warning beat down through solid ground, but he could still hear absolutely nothing, and this deeper silence swept round him, flowing around his face and past his distant feet, enveloping him in a long hollow cocoon of dread, in which the slow beat of his heart was the only remaining thing in existence. He gasped, with what he was surprised to find was sheer relief. Surely by now, if they could, they would have been following him; he was clear of them at least! But ahead stretched emptiness and this labyrinth could be blocked. And the panic suddenly came out of the dark emptiness ahead, the dread up in front, striking back at him, as he feared that they might have gone to the other end, straight to that prison-window in the trees, which he and Tomáš had looked into that morning. They would know. Of course, they would know. Tomáš had known.

But had he really known? Maybe nobody knew! Maybe Tomáš was wrong about Hell, and everything else! Maybe that prison-window wasn't the place this tunnel emerged!

Egerton gulped down stale air far inside the rock, diluting the chemical aftertaste, as he fought back dread, and struggled against waves of nausea: he was trapped down here, dangers lying behind, and up ahead; he had to keep them out there, and make this tight inward space of his home fearless; and he couldn't be sick, not down here, he would have to crawl through it! Come on, Egerton, get a grip! he thought. His heart beat slowly as he waited for the nausea to pass; he crawled forward, felt his back become free of the overhead wall, and went up on his elbows. Then, Egerton froze. No sound, now, but behind him through the tunnel there could have been a brief clatter like iron smashing into rock.


12. That Last Thin Veil

There were two balls that night in the palace on Slovansky Island out in the river close to the Café Slavia, and Olga Slídlová had been given tickets to both events: the Economists’ Graduation Ball and the Annual Ball for Bankers. The first was fancy-dress, its theme: ‘Communist Youth and its Break with the Past’. Olga and Tomáš had dressed without red for the second, to which she had received a couple of spare invitations from her friend, Jana, at the bank.

In an inversion characteristic of revolutions, she thought, the graduating economists were upstairs and the bankers reduced to the palace basement. The younger economists had bedecked both upstairs and downstairs with red.

The walls had been decorated with prints of socialist realism, and Tomáš found himself looking at a group of fishermen, wading into a partly frozen lake in a ragged line, dragging their long nets behind them... Some wind tore at their waterproofs, which flew out behind them like shining green flags as they broke through the thawing ice. That afternoon, he had met Marcela at the restaurant of the Fishermen's Club on Kampa Island, and their first reunion since she had left him to study archeology in Oslo had gone rather well; but looking at the print of those burly fishermen on Slovansky Island, he could only think of Slídl in that green trenchcoat, and the ongoing search in Slapy for a second body, possibly the corpse of Kate Ashe! The blue-white span of frozen lake and snow, cracked with blue-black breaks of coursing water, threw the orbs of pink-white faces into what was meant to be noble relief.

“Here, put this on!” Olga said, handing him a red neckerchief.

The economists wore shorts and leaderhosen, black stockings and old school satchels, and displayed now redundant tokens of the Communist state, red neckerchiefs, hats, rosettes and badges. Upstairs, in a disco, three white Czechs played reggae beneath the red, green and black flag of the A.N.C., but Tomáš and Olga had joined a procession straight through the disco and into the room beyond.

"It’s to be a striptease,” Olga said; but Tomáš had somehow guessed. The crammed room had a quite distinctive, and wholly new atmosphere in which only something like a striptease could materialise.

“I’ve never seen one,” he said.

The lights dimmed and there were excited whispers as a young girl minced into the room and then stood, nervously rooted; Olga pulled Tomáš down to sit on the floor. The girl was sixteen, seventeen at the most, and obviously this was her first time; draped in sheer diaphanous veils, she was visibly shaking as the music commenced. Her feet were bare, and she began to dance, at first very well, though very slowly, on the cold tiles. The music was hauntingly building, as the dancer in her initiation gracefully teased beauty from her exhibition, beginning to remove the first of her veils; all nervousness was lost in the movement, and the crowd held spellbound, but it was fleeting, impossible to hold and suddenly she let if fall - along with the second veil - resuming the troubled motions of the inexperienced teenager. Her ending was hurried, and the girl rushed off, naked, as the music died, leaving behind an immense hush.

“What did you think?” he whispered. “Was it worth making a revolution for this?”

“I think you’re missing the point!” Olga said. “Renata is the daughter of a well-known Party chief, a top socialist banker! She studied Economics. Tonight, she was telling Prague she is on side.”

“Jesus Maria!” Tomáš said. “If that’s being on side, I'd like to see her off -.”

In the doorway, pressed back against the frame, Otto Harbinger was nodding at Olga, eyes hidden behind those dark brown glasses. “It’s Harbinger, the central banker,” she said quietly, and Tomáš looked around.

“He’s overdone ‘the break with the past’,” he said, as the banker approached through the dispersing audience; his right arm was in a plaster cast, supported by a bright red triangular bandage.

"Miss Slídlová, what a pleasure!" he said. "Any news of Miss Ashe?"

"No, nothing at all!" Olga said. "Egerton Krac is in a terrible state! There is simply no trace of her! This is my friend Tomáš Lovas, who introduced us; he was for a while Egerton's Slovakian mountain guide."

“I fell, playing golf,” the banker said. "I won't shake hands!"

“You fell, playing golf?” Tomáš said, laughing.

“It’s permitted,” he said, misunderstanding. “A new course has opened; and naturally, I’m a member.”

“No, I mean, playing golf,” Tomáš said, “you managed to break an arm while playing the game of the capitalists!”

“It was a bunker,” Harbinger said, “but in their enthusiasm to catch up with the west, they have dug the thing too deep... though I doubt that I will receive an compensation! Very embarrassing for me; I was losing to a client!”

“Aren’t you on the wrong floor?” Olga said.

“I’m up here as a guest,” he said. “This sling was my daughter’s idea. She’s been studying Economics. She's here, somewhere...”

The banker was moving his plaster cast in its red bandage; and Tomáš had opened his mouth, but couldn’t find the words.

“Not -,” he began.

“No, no - that wasn’t her!” Harbinger said. “My own daughter knows better than that! I’ve never seen anything like it! Renata's father is still highly respected; and I don’t know why such a thing was permitted!”

“The freedom to embarrass ourselves in public?” Olga said. “Isn’t that a part of our velvet revolution?”

“We should have called it the Velcro revolution!" the banker said. "That way, we might have kept everything fastened-up. It weaves ‘velvet’ with ‘crochet’: that soft cloth of revolution, with a hook to make it stick."

Tomáš laughed. "That wouldn't have stopped her!" he said.

“We’re at both parties,” Olga said. “Shall we go downstairs?”

There was a traditional jazz-band playing in the ground-floor ballroom and as they listened, Harbinger made what sounded like a confession. "One of the most absurd acts of the former regime," he said, "was the arrest of the entire Jazz section of the Musicians’ Union for disseminating counter-revolutionary rhythm. I’ve always loved it! I was hooked from my youth!” His eyes remained hidden, but Tomáš felt sure that he had made an invisible Velcro crack. “That was my one disagreement with the Party!" Harbinger said. "I was at the ‘Lucerna’ for the western concerts they allowed in the Sixties - but a risky record-collection has been the limit of my own subversion!”

As the orchestra abandoned traditional jazz in favour of something more modern, Harbinger tapped his plaster cast. “Our present situation reminds me of contemporary jazz,” he said, “it's a jazz reform... pure Mingus! From the carefully conducted symphony we all knew by heart, where every change in tone could be accurately predicted, every note was known, expected, and ticked off on the score as it passed, to a modernist freeform interpretation; everyone playing at once, and letting rip; now in a country where to change one note was such a major undertaking, everything suddenly changes!” He looked towards the stage, raising his good arm towards the musicians. "We’re faced with an unorchestrated disturbance,” he said, “spontaneous improvisation, but a quite mesmerising disorder; and instead of conducting in the classical harmony of the command economy, these days I’m listening to others, as they explore - as we all try to interpret the rhythm of reform.”

"I wish they could conduct a more careful search for Kate!" Tomáš said, pointedly.

“We haven't heard anything about the search at Slapy," Olga said. "I don't think we told you at the bank that there's already one murder inquiry? An older woman was found dead, and they were dragging the lake!"

Harbinger looked uneasy at the mention of Slapy, the lake near Prague, and this stopped her in her tracks.

“The dam-end of the lake,” Tomáš said. "They showed us a map. I couldn't believe it, when the chief investigator named Egerton Krac as a suspect!"

The banker appeared troubled. “I should tell you,” he said, “it probably means nothing, but the girls visited Hell, and the place is run by a man called Kroupa, a client -.”

“Yes, I know,” Olga said, “the devil banks with you!”

“You have done your homework!” Harbinger said. “I have no interest in Kroupa, beyond the account for Hell - none whatsoever. In fact, I don't trust him. He plans to turn the old monastery crypt into a goldmine for tourists.”

Tomáš realised that Harbinger’s client must be no good, that this banker was the best judge.

“Your client is really a devil?” he said.

“He’s no angel,” Harbinger said, “and I dislike the man intensely! But the point I was making is that Kroupa also rents some land out by Slapy, along the eastern shore... I’m certain, he rented it about a month ago. It includes a house he makes use of at the weekend.”

"Do you think Kroupa will be there?" Olga said to Tomáš.

“Who is this Kroupa?” Tomáš asked the banker. “What else does the devil get involved with, apart from that old Strahov crypt he has renamed ‘Hell’?”

“Your guess would be as good as mine!” Harbinger said. “He lived in Spain after Sixty-eight. He has come home a very wealthy man! Kroupa is involved in all sorts of things, other than his plans to develop Hell as some kind of grim attraction for tourists! I thought it was odd, when I noticed that he had rented the place at Slapy. First, he can afford to buy land if he needs it; and second, I don’t even go to Slapy, it’s a bit down-market, and there are better places, easily accessible to a man with a Mercedes -.”

“Egerton is meeting Milan in Hell, tonight,” Tomáš said. “Milan Procházka is another suspect. I don’t suppose you handle his account as well?”

“Who’s Milan?” the banker said.

“Milan worked for Ivan,” Tomáš explained, “and Ivan arranged for him to meet Kate Ashe at the airport; then they went on to some kind of an exhibition of Milan's photography in Hell. Egerton and Milan are meeting down there in the dark as we speak.”

"Do you think they're in danger?" Olga asked Harbinger.

The banker shook his head. “I don't like it,” he said. “This talk about murder at Slapy is making me nervous! Presumably, Milan knows Kroupa; he must have rented or borrowed the place from him for his own exhibition. And as you say, Milan is himself a suspect. Your friend Egerton may be in danger!”

Hell’s banker seemed to have identified the risk, and Tomáš was confident that Harbinger’s projections were usually sound. “Then, of course, we should go to Hell!" he said. "And quickly!"



The banker’s vehicle was a sleek black Tatra, a car formerly reserved for members of the Party elite. He had parked near the front porch, naturally: old habits died hard. They swung round on to the bridge connecting the island to the street, quickly climbed the road around the Castle and were soon driving alongside the tall white walls of the Strahov Monastery. Harbinger drove right up to the gate, where a piece of paper was caught in the headlights.

“Open only for functions,” Harbinger read.

Inside, the courtyard was dark and empty of life. They walked up the path to the door. There was another sign, and the door was locked.

“Are you sure they came here tonight?” Harbinger said. "If they met here, it looks like they are long gone!"

Tomáš began to pound hard on the door with his fist. The knocking was muffled so that it was unlikely that anybody would hear, as the heavy oak seemed to absorb any sound from his knuckles, transferring the glancing blows silently through the frame to Hell.

Tomáš looked at his watch in the gloom by the locked door. It was almost midnight. “The police?” he suggested, and Harbinger laughed.

“Might as well call a priest!” he said.

“What about the monastery?” Olga asked. “Surely the priests are back!”

The old communist banker began to stride down the path towards the monastery courtyard, and they followed him. “That must be the caretaker’s house, there by the gate!” he said. “I know the Church makes a charge on Kroupa for maintenance.”

“There’s still a light!” Olga said.

There was a doorbell as well, and after Harbinger had been ringing it for several minutes, an old man came to the entrance in his slippers. He was wrapped in a dressing-gown and clearly fresh from his comfortable bed.

“What in the hell do you want?” he asked Harbinger angrily.

“I want that place opened, immediately!” Harbinger told him.

“Are you crazy?” the caretaker shouted.

As he tried to close the door, Harbinger put his foot in the gap and swept off his glasses. “Now listen!” he said. “I aim to look in there!”

Avoiding his eyes, the old man looked at the black Tatra by the gate, and then at the banker's red sling, slowly shaking his head, and clearly frightened. “I can’t let you go in there,” he said. “Those days are over! It’s a private club.”

Harbinger’s voice began ringing with practiced authority through the old caretaker’s hallway. “You may think the Communist Party has lost its power, my friend,” he concluded bitterly, “but let me tell you, sir, that with one simple phone call I could make sure that you’re out of this pretty little house and moved onto the worst housing-estate in all Europe!”

The old man looked uncertain, but also less frightened: this Catholic church caretaker seemed to be an old Communist, now fixed in a totalitarian glare he had not had to face for months, yet still hoped existed; Harbinger, a Party and Prague National Committee member, represented the face of the familiar, a fear he could deal with! He would have helped, if he could. But today, the caretaker worked for the church of Rome, not the Party; and ‘Hell’ was no longer within the jurisdiction of either authority; the world had turned upside-down.

“I don’t have the keys...” he mumbled, apologetically.

“I give you my word, as a banker of many years,” Harbinger said, “that very shortly, you’ll be directed yourself to a place far worse than Hell!”

“One moment,” he said, slightly bowing to Hell's banker, “I’ll have to get my boots on; and see if I can find any spare keys!”

Harbinger led the way down the stairs of Hell, as the trembling caretaker followed the banker in dread of what he might find. The lights inside had been left on, but the larger cavern was empty.

“What a waste of power!” the caretaker muttered. “Like the old days, except it’s expensive! I suppose Mr. Kroupa can afford it.”

Tomáš noticed that the place had changed only a little since he was last here.

Harbinger reemerged from the empty kitchen. “Nothing,” he said.

They walked through to the lesser cavern, and the banker peered behind the bar. There was an eerie emptiness. One table lay overturned.

“They were here!” Tomáš said. “They haven’t tidied up!”

"This looks like fresh blood," Harbinger said, examining the floor.

"My God!" Olga said.

Tomáš's glance passed across the bar, and then the brightly lit, but impenetrable surface of the pool beside it - the pool beside it: the brightly lit surface, a blackened, impenetrable skein. He was chilled as it occurred to him that the dark water could hide a body, and thinking of the lake at Slapy, he began to cross the room.

"The floor's wet over here," he said. "There are splashes!"

He looked into the water and then he remembered the tunnel beyond. They had installed brighter lights since his day, and he searched the small cavern for any sign of the mouth of a passage, but nothing was visible in the shadows thrown back in the folding curtains of rock. Then, he saw what looked like a jacket, half submerged in the pool by the wall. It was cold down here, and the idea of wading through the black water was almost unthinkable, but Tomáš took off his shoes and socks.

"Tomáš!" Olga cried. "What the hell are you doing?"

"There's something out there!" he shouted.

Tomáš splashed through the pool and lifted out the jacket. "It's his coat!" he shouted, holding it up. "Egerton's coat! There's a passage. Ask the caretaker! There's a passage back here, and Egerton has taken it!"

"Can you see it?" Harbinger shouted.

“No, and anyway,” Tomáš shouted back, his voice sounding far off and hollow, “it's a mile long! But I know where it comes out on the other side of Petrin - at the top of the Hunger Wall."

He waded along the cold stretch of water, one hand moving against the slime of the rock. The pool came up around his knees, soaking the bottom of his trousers where he had them rolled up. He found the mouth of the tunnel easily.

“Hell-o!”

The sound of Tomáš's shout expanded into the lesser cave without echo; and there was no reply through the dark, as it silently swallowed his single word. The black pool lapped against his knees.

“He’s in there!” he said quietly, finally breaking their tense silence.

The caretaker stepped on to the low wall by the pool. "Here, let me help you out of there!" he said to Tomáš. "This is a terrible state of affairs! I had imagined you might want a drink, but I wasn't counting on a baptism! And now all this to boot! I know of a passage you speak of, but I can tell you it’s impossible! Only one man ever did it, and he was legendary Strahov monk; he left a warning - not to follow. And that was two hundred years ago.”

"Let's go!" Harbinger said.

Following them as far as the monastery gate without bothering to lock the door, the old man watched them as they got into the sleek black Tatra; the banker took the plaster cast out of its red sling, and hardly fumbled with the keys. There was no doubt about it: he was a Party man. The lights of the government limousine burst out, filling the Monastery forecourt, and then they roared away along the road that would take them round to the other side of Petrin. Hell's caretaker stood in the darkness, scratching his head.


13. The Tunnelling of Prague

Egerton almost adorned the stone as over the years he had come to love it. The industry grown up around the sport recognised its essential element of display. His climbing gear was a whole range of vivid colours, bright and eye-catching against the rock. But he had been thrown down from his element and here under Petrin lay hidden and jammed tight in the dark throat of the stone and closer to its heart, its being, its sense of loss, than he had ever wanted to be or imagined possible; and in the discomfort of this intrusion into the rock, there could be no memory of past adornment; there were only the painful cuts and the immediacy of pain-filled stone he felt around him. In places, sharp pieces broke away or survived as knives to rip into their violator. Rounded hard, boned knobs of stone butted him as he tried to pass; the rocks of the bitter passage beat and cut and squeezed the climber, the pitch dark their ancient ally against any skill of his own. And the water that had formed this katabothron was a threatening enemy to them both, though now in his growing thirst, he would gladly have drunk that filthy pool dry!

He felt like an unlucky emissary sent down from above, as he scratched through the rock, which sought its revenge, as much against his father, Miroslav, who had left his homeland, as against him! His hands were sore with it, wet with it, chill with it. They bled; they chilled; they left their flesh scraped along the stone and his tiny bones wore down, his joints frozen, as much by fearfulness as cold. The debilitating tang of chemical-spray had left a dull burning through those inward tubes of nose, throat and lung; and he felt as though he tried to swallow ash, as he breathed.

Sometimes, his fingers touched the sanded bubbles of quartz-like stone or was it fluorite? His eyes were dead and his fingers unsure. But this was hard, fragmental stone - rock made up of many older rocks and healed as one. This water-cut passage was lined long ago with older intruders, ancient slanted slivers of original being, which had desperately sought the surface against which more recent blocks had formed, finding uneven compromise in heated merger; now chill, the merged, fragmental rocks remembered, they bore down as one against the ephemeral warmth of flesh and bone, which had broken, so rudely, a long healing peace. Kate. Kata, 'down'. Where was she secreted?

Kate? The often lonely theft of satisfaction from the rock had helped to shape Egerton Krac, and the rootless climber in Prague crawled on against its hardness with new determination, trying hard to think of something else: the tightness of anxiety below his infrasternal notch; anything, other than what he had lost! He mustn't give up! Try harder! Quartz rated higher on the Mohs’ scale than fluorite, he thought... This was really diamond, sharp and superlative hardness. Ten.

The steady climb seemed to have ended and the passage had begun to ease him down; kata, down, bothron, hole; I'm down a hole, he thought, where the slope's at least benign, gravity on my side and faster movement possible! He was starting to flow. He would get through! Clima from ‘slope’, he thought, and ‘climax’ for ‘ladder’. 'Axis'; pivot. Plots... But the ClimAxis, whatever that was, had been a false trail! It had been Milan and his gypsy friends! Kate! he thought, 'pure'. The mongrel rock became more and more fractured with sharp or blunted cleavages coming at him regularly at right angles. His knees jammed in painful corners; and perhaps this was only a simple orthoclase - six on the Mohs’ scale. Klasis, fracture... 'Orthoclase', straight fracture. But it was more likely nine -corundum, rubies, emeralds... He was being cut to shreds by jewels!

Again, he thought of Kate, and a cold sweat chilled through his inwardness in the dark, his partition from Kate, and hers from him; there was only this nine, the interminable movement, the alternative to terminal rest; no end, no beginning: only Egerton himself, his bare movement through his own abrasive roots in the innermost heart of dark descent, the blood again run down to his buried head, the bone of which was angling to scrape forward tissue that this new slope had drained - his brain fuzzed and heavy, like this partition in an alien clime: kata, descent... maintained. Going down. Still down! Maybe he had crossed beneath the summit; now, he had crossed beneath the summit! He was going down; he had to have crossed...

The Eiffelesque tower lay somewhere above him on Petrin - and behind: behind. It was now behind him... The map: he somehow snatched at the lines of a map, thin lines but somehow framing some clearer meaning: the Hunger Wall would be running down the hill, and a little way further down, the mouth, the ruin - a hundred metres ahead? He remembered his thirst that morning, up on Petrin, and thought how that had been as nothing; he was dying down here from thirst! The painter imagined himself in a much larger vault of the katabothron, still dark around him, those sharp crystals of corundum in igneous rock at a safer distance; he was almost hallucinating; but he was living the sharpness of nine tightly in the dark; and cut and hurting, he was dead weight now.

At least he was falling; he was going down.

Egerton lay still a moment in the darkness, his fingernails scratching the fine grit of the axial rock in its partition from the light. He felt deep inside his pocket and took out Kate's engagement ring. Nothing else was moving, and nothing here would move, without his fingers... Kate! he thought, his throat now gagging in his thirst. There wasn’t a sound, but for the gold in his hand, the scratch of metal against jewel. Hard diamond! Accursed ring! Had there been any life left in Kate's fingers when they had ripped this off? The painter scored through the darkness beneath him, leaving no mark. The water-fractured rock stretched dry and healed and closing. But he was sure that drop through the nine of Mohs would end before it tore him apart! He would break through like chill mountain water.



Harbinger drove very fast around the hilltop, taking the first bend with a swerve that was more a sliding clatter on the cobbles than a screech. At the top of the steep road, they turned back on to tarmac.

“We should really phone the police,” Tomáš said. “They should be told that Egerton is missing!”

“I’ll phone them from Petrin,” Harbinger said. “I carry a portable.”

They raced down, leaning into the bends of the steep hill above Prague, and at the bottom, Harbinger swerved left at the Soviet Tank. For a moment his headlights caught the incongruous monument.

“This time, a group of parliamentarians have painted it pink,” Harbinger said, “in broad daylight! After they arrested the young artist...”

They had reached the park at the bottom of Petrin Hill, and without slowing at all, he swerved rapidly up a pedestrian pathway, flicking on his beam as they left the road. Trees and bushes flashed by them in the dark.

“The opening from Hell is beside a ruin up to the left,” Tomáš said to the banker as he slowed down at an intersection of paths, and he took the steepest up to the left. The Tatra strained, struggling with the new gradient.

“If your friend got into that passage," he said, "nobody in their right mind would have followed him; they’d wait for him up here!”

As he spoke, Harbinger had to swerve to avoid hitting a man in the path of their vehicle; for a moment, a frightened face appeared. He was wearing what looked like a field-grey Nazi German uniform. Olga and Tomáš both looked back and Harbinger glanced in his mirror, but the apparition was already lost in the darkness, as he wound down his window.

“Was that a German?” the banker said in astonishment.

“The westerners are making a film,” Olga said, “about a group of children fighting the Nazis in the Second World War. A Disney film, I think! It's based in Prague. One of the extras must have wandered up here -.”

"There's light up ahead!" Tomáš said.

They fell silent, as they saw what had become a film's main prop, the great partition of the Hunger Wall, bathed in Disney's powerful lights. There seemed to be a whole battalion of actors, or invaders in the dark, and as they approached more slowly along the path, faces were turned towards the car and a few Nazis came forward into the lights, waving at them with their guns to go back. One even saluted, his right arm up in the air.

Harbinger dodged around them, and drove straight across the grass.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The shout had come from an American, who they could see striding straight into their path from the Wall. Reluctantly, the old communist banker braked, and stopped the car. The Disney director was the only person up here wearing a Yankies' baseball cap, not a helmet, and floral Hawaiian colours, instead of field-grey.

Harbinger got out, leaving the black Tatra’s engine running and the beam pointing up the hillside into a copse of trees.

“You can’t drive up here!” the American shouted at them angrily. He turned back to his own lights. “Hey, tell them, they can’t park in the park!”

Czech voices were raised in support of the American director.

The Czech director raised his good hand, and for only the second time that night he took off his sunglasses. Stepping from the headlights of his Tatra into their spotlight, the banker was momentarily blinded on the improvised stage and screwed up his eyes. Then he glared at the Czechs who had spoken. The effect was like lightning, and the extras fell silent; they might have found freedom and regained their own power, but Harbinger's eyes were still electric, at once dangerous and commanding.

“Walt Disney will have to wait!” he shouted. “I’m Otto Harbinger of the Prague National Committee!” He had repeated this in English, but then spoke to them again in Czech. He told them that he was also a representative of the bank and, therefore, the remnants of the state, and demanded their full cooperation. Without bothering to look down, he had replaced his injured arm and smoothed the red sling around the plaster cast; and the American film director was now looking at him aghast. “We may be here on a matter of life and death!,” the banker said to him.

“What the devil do you know about life -.” The American director turned back to his own lights. “Can somebody explain to me exactly what's going on? We’re cleared to shoot... We have all night if necessary! Is this joker up here looking for more money?”

Some of the extras were shaking their heads.

Tomáš ran up the hill and the Disney director turned to face him.

"Excuse me," Tomáš said, “I think I can clear this up. I'm Tomáš Lovas. Mr. Harbinger is the director of the Central Bank of Czechoslovakia. He's helping me and Olga. You see, there’s been a murder; and an Englishwoman has gone missing. Our friend is also in danger! There are passages through this rock, underneath this wall you’re filming, and we’re pretty sure he is coming through here - escaping something... We’re here to meet him!”

“Jesus Christ!” the director said. “What! Are you making your own movie? There are no underground passages up here!”

“This isn’t Disneyland!” Harbinger shouted. “And it isn't Absurdistan! This is our city! We say where there are, and aren't passages!”

The Czech director had walked around to the back of the car to open his boot, and was almost in shadow.

“I’m calling for help,” he said.

He lifted out a huge portable telephone, and the American director laughed. “Hey Tinkerbell," he called out, "you have some props department back there! We could use that one in our film!”

Harbinger spoke briefly on his mobile unit, and once finished, he took a handgun out of the boot of the Tatra, put it in his pocket and then grabbed a huge torch.

“Hey, is that thing for real?” the American said, glancing nervously back at the others. "This guy's armed! Your banker's got a gun!"

“It is properly licensed,” Harbinger said. He turned to Olga. “I practice regularly... I manage market transition, and these days need a weapon; but if necessary, I would shoot Snow White, against that wall!”

"It's this way," Tomáš said, "we're nearly there!"

They began walking uphill.

“The police did believe you?” Tomáš said to the banker.

“Will they join Disney at the back door to Hell?” he said. "You bet they will! They know Disney are shooting up on Petrin. And they’re as concerned as we are about Egerton Krac!”

They pushed on through the trees into the darkness and Harbinger switched on his torch, finally picking around the rubble of the ruined building. There was no sign of the tramp.

The American director and a few of his company had followed them into this hideaway in a thicket and he seemed a lot more subdued. "I didn't know this was here, either," he said to Tomáš quietly.

“The police are on their way,” Tomáš said. “We wouldn't make anything like this up! We're sorry to have spoilt your film.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it!” the Disney director said, suddenly smiling. “This Commie guy is real cool, whichever way he parks; - and hey, those eyes! They’d be just great in the interrogation scene... Do you think he’d audition?”

“His job's secure, for the present!” Tomáš said. “Shine that thing on the tunnel mouth, Mr. Harbinger, it's over there!"

The Czech bank director was stepping over a broken wall into darkness, but he swept his torch through the foliage, and the weak beam drew their eyes, as finding the barred entrance to the narrow tunnel the light began to pick around a broken archway, before trying to penetrate its dark interior.

“Jesus!” the Disney director said with disbelief. “You’re expecting company, through there?”

The Czech director turned towards his American counterpart, who could not see his eyes; but as well as the huge torch emerging from the red sling, he was now holding the gun in his good hand. It was pointed to one side of the hole. The Disney director nodded at him.

“Hey! drag some of our lights up here!” he bawled, turning towards the film crew standing around him.



Egerton heard nothing. He rested, his head in his arms. He couldn't go on! The tunnel had begun to climb again, and steeply. Exhaustion was overcoming even his ability to think; and he desperately needed something to drink! Nothing else mattered. Just crawl - just to keep on crawling! But he felt that he was done!



The lighting was soon rigged up and switched on to flood the mouth of the passageway and the ruins. Harbinger had put away his gun; the Prague police had arrived, and after some words with Hell's banker, together with their Axis allies, they had begun combing the hillside.

Tomáš found Olga in the dark. “It’s a bit of luck, bumping into Disney!” he said. She looked towards the American director, Harbinger and the ruin. “The film crew may be handling the lighting,” he told her, “but the bank director has been calling all the shots! Can you imagine us trying to do this on our own? Our bank chief has just met a colleague, somebody who used to work for him - a young Gestapo officer... and they’re covering the exit! Let's get over there!”

“Do you think Egerton is really down there?” she said.

“We're going to look awfully silly if he isn’t,” Tomáš said, "especially Mr. Harbinger; what a performance! I am just praying that he makes it!"

Green and grey figures slipped in and out of the trees, blending in the dark, as Czech police and dummy-armed ‘Germans’ performed their macabre dance. The sound of a helicopter had broken over the hillside behind them, and Olga and Tomáš looked up. The helicopter hovered low overhead, a roaring wind buffeting down from its rotors. There was no searchlight, but the lights were on inside, and some faces could be seen peering down at them; and Tomáš thought that he recognised Poláček from the Interior. It wasn’t a police 'copter: in the lights from Disney, they could see a red cross painted on its side.

“They’re going to land!” Olga shouted, and the air-ambulance backed away from the slope and climbed the hillside, skirting the trees, before touching down, somewhere just beyond.

In the glare of the re-rigged film lights, a few Nazi extras sat around, rubbing their hands against the cold, and beyond the shelter formed by the plastic sheeting, a dishevelled old man stood shock still, blinded by the lights; the tramp was holding on to the bole of his tree with all his might, staring down with animosity at a Gestapo officer who was crouching by the remains of his fire, as though he needed warmth.

Tomáš and Olga walked towards him, and the tramp looked across at them and put a finger to his lips, moving silently back into the thicket like some guerilla-fighter in his battered fatigues. Olga climbed over the wall to intercept him, and Tomáš saw Poláček climbing towards them through the bushes.

"Hello, Mr. Poláček," he said.

“Really, Mr. Lovas," he said, "you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble!”

“Thank Walt Disney!” Tomáš said.

“I know that this is a joint-venture,” the investigator said. “It's certainly some spectacle! You know, you can see this from the other side of Prague? The kids have been out all night with telescopes up in places like Trojská. A few of them called in! Vinohrady. Strašnice. Even Vršovice! The movie gets real... A desperate gunman drives into Disney’s lights, spoiling a whole night of filming!"

“This may turn out to be a catastrophe!” Tomáš said; he was pale under the lights. “I should never have told Egerton about this tunnel!”

“Well, you’ve probably saved his life,” Poláček said, “that is, if he is down there at all! Of course, we have no way of knowing for sure!”

"Is there any news of Kate?" Tomáš asked, and Poláček frowned.

“We were trying to contact you at the hotel,” Poláček said, “when Mr. Harbinger reported in... Kate Ashe has been found, tonight, in Slovakia.”

“Is she alright?” Tomáš asked.

“The information so far is garbled,” Poláček told him. “They either have a body, or the girl alive - at least the Slovaks have something! ‘Missing girl found’ is the message sent on to us by the local police."

“Can’t somebody go down?” Tomáš asked the investigator. "If he isn't dead, himself, down there, already, he may need some help getting out!"

“We’re looking for a volunteer,” Poláček told him. “There’s supposed to be somebody coming up from Černošice Mountaineering Club, but to be honest, we can’t force any of our own men to go down there and extract your English friend! This is the strangest business, Tomáš Lovas! I thought I knew every inch of Prague - surface and interior - yet I’d never come across this particular passage!”

When they reached the tunnel mouth, a Gestapo officer was twisting and trying to pull a bar from the small archway. Though rusted, it seemed to want to hold. Somebody had brought up a cassette player, and wild gypsy music had filled the air. Olga had brought the tramp into the brighter light by the barred entrance to the cave, where he stood, slightly pacified, but still regarding the Germans with open contempt. The Gestapo officer, Harbinger’s former employee, threw one freed bar into the bushes and then held out his hands to the Czech banker, red with dry rust in Disney’s lights.

"They have found Kate Ashe!" Tomáš told Olga. "But what on earth has become of Egerton Krac?


14. Absence of Highlights

As he looked into the black tunnel, Tomáš recalled their ascent earlier in the day, wondering now whether he would every see Egerton Krac again on Petrin Hill. Sitting on one of the plateau garden’s benches, a gypsy had been entertaining a group of children with his pet; Egerton had stood for a while, watching them, no doubt feeling sympathy for the uncertain, jerky, little monkey on a fine chain of gold. Tomáš knew that Kate made jewellery too. Despite the sun, there had not been many people in the gardens; nor in the grounds beyond. Tomáš had decided to sidetrack into the Mirror Maze, where maybe some feat of distortion would extend this pause without reflection, and help maintain a lightness against the pull of a worsening reality; but they had passed through the labyrinth quickly, their blundering shapes captured differently in each new katoptron; then, the painter had paused rather longer before the diorama, looking back towards the town, back through time to a battle-scene lit from behind: the Charles Bridge, defended against the Swedes in 1648.

Though the morning sun had been shining brightly, the towering trees had shaded them, as Tomáš had led the way towards the fourteen Stations of the Cross, set at intervals around the garden; and looking around those high stone tablets, Egerton had said that they looked like the untended gravestones of giants, robbed of their inscriptions. He had stopped before one of these intimations of Jotunheim, but only traces of gilt could be found in its chiselled number and title, and the stain of the picture was weathered beyond recognition.

A gentle breeze on high had moved the shielding sky of trees so that almost involuntarily Tomáš had looked up, seen the ruffled panoply, and felt caught, motionless, at the heart of its contrary movements, with the light heave of great axial branches and the roll in the chains of the leaves, as those lesser limbs tried to go with the wind, then bent back and strained towards their anchored neighbours.

Tomáš had stood before a huge stone tablet, which had been cruelly smashed by vandals, only a jagged triangle remaining planted, and the rest strewn in large fragments behind its broken, accusative finger. They had walked on in silence and had not paused at the next Station, which was also broken. Egerton had seemed lost in thought.

Tomáš had suggested they go up their ‘Eiffel Tower’, and he had silently counted off the first twelve steps on its spiral stair. A family had passed, descending, and Egerton had disappeared round the central pillar and up around those corkscrew steps. This had been their final pitch together, and they had spiralled on, up and out of the trees, boring into the sky with the coiling staircase.

Would he ever see his friend again?

They had felt the breeze, which had started to cut in through the iron struts of the structure. The sound of Egerton’s feet had stopped and Tomáš had known he was coming to the top. As he had mounted the last step onto the viewing platform, Egerton had been standing with his back to Tomáš, his head stuck out through a ragged hole in the wire netting. He looked like he was making his final confession to the air, having escaped priests, and gravity. He had pulled back his head with care, and taken a hold of the ladder, which hung from a small, padlocked trapdoor in the ceiling.

“Can’t we get any higher?” he had asked Tomáš, stepping onto the first rung and pressing hard against the small square door with his fingers.



Egerton saw the light, before he heard the music. At first, it was very faint, so that it had barely registered with him, but as vague outlines were suggested in the dark he stopped crawling; it was a faint light! The pitch dark had finally been robbed of its mastery, and there were the first vaguest hints of the substance beyond. Egerton flexed his fingers, not yet seeing them, but sensing them becoming visible just beyond the reach of his vision. It was hard to believe, but it must be morning! The light strengthened as he crawled on, until it was strong enough to see by, and Egerton rested again, immensely grateful, as he lay outstretched, with his cheek against stone, his sore eyes filled with a beautiful grainy roughness, and even the thirst almost bearable. He couldn’t believe that he had crawled through the entirety of a night; yet there it was: the sunlight; unless he was dreaming!

The music got louder, as he crawled the last few metres, and the faint din crept along the passageway to meet him, finally forming distinct and recognisable notes. The light grew immensely strong and shutting his eyes, he could almost hear the foreign lyrics of the song. His heart beat faster. They were waiting for him! Then, he remembered the tramp. He must have gotten hold of an old radio; but where did he find the power?

In the end, there was a brilliance of white light flooding into the passageway to blind him. This, he couldn’t explain! He had never seen such brightness! Could he be lost in a dream? Was he nowhere near escape? And where was Kate? He moved into the light without fear, but feeling his strength ebbing away.

His eyes shut tight against it, still it blinded him! Egerton’s brain reeled and he felt faint. Did this mean that he was awake? He pushed on towards what he believed to be the sun, to the strain of a gypsy guitar, and a stange woman’s spirited voice in some final broken-hearted meaning.

“Get the fucking lights out of his eyes!”

It was Tomáš’s voice straight out ahead, a strong shout amidst violins, and even as he heard again his Slovak friend, Egerton felt the straight edge of a low man-made wall at the very edge of his reach. He gripped the ledge with the chilled fingers of both hands, and dragged his body forward in what seemed the longest movement he had made.

Bloodied and blinded in the light, the young climber, emerging from the tunnel from Hell, appeared to Tomáš a horrific sight; his arms were grazed and scratched and his clothes were torn and covered in dust; his face was badly grazed as well, and he had what looked like a yellow secretion underneath his eyes, which were terribly bloodshot, as he blinked out at them. The lights were turned away and people began to talk in hushed voices. The Gestapo officer had Egerton’s arm, helping him through the arch, and on hands on knees, he crawled into the open. He couldn’t stand, and Tomáš grabbed his other arm, and together with the Nazi extra lifted him. Egerton looked back at the black-clad German, then at Tomáš; and then he dropped his head, seeming to faint.

“Some water, or something!” Tomáš shouted.

The painter looked up again. It was still the night. Beyond the helpful Gestapo officer stood a plainclothes henchman, wearing sunglasses in the dark, a plastered arm in a sling.

“He’s only an actor, Egerton!”

Egerton freed himself and sat down clumsily, gratefully accepting a carton of orange-juice from the caterer and tearing into it with his teeth. Now he recognised the man with the dark glasses: Otto Harbinger. He couldn’t speak; but he tried to stop grimacing at the old communist banker from the Czecho-Slovak borderland. His throat was cracked and burning. He shook the emptied, upturned carton in front of him, asking for more.

“Egerton, can you go on a bit further?” Tomáš said. “We’re going to Slovakia! We know they’ve found Kate over there! But for now, we can only pray they've found her alive!”

“I am sure she will be all right!" Poláček said. "We’ll take the air-ambulance, as far as the airport. Miss Slídlová, Mr. Lovas, Mr. Harbinger, you want a ride?”

“Shouldn’t Egerton be seen by a doctor, first?” Olga said.

“The doctor’s here somewhere,” Poláček said, looking around for the medics. “But now, surely, we can leave this till we’re in the air?”

Minutes later, as the helicopter rose from Petrin Hill, Egerton watched the spectacle on the ground he had barely paused upon, fall away beneath them. Below, in their own lights, the film crew were waving, the long partition of the Hunger Wall brightly illuminated. He wondered how they would find Kate: how she was faring? If she was even alive! As a medic cleaned and dressed a cut on his face, the air-ambulance swung round, away from the lights of Prague, whirling past his eyes, so he was forced to close them. When he opened them again, he saw that Eiffelesque tower dark against the sky, its red light winking. It was hard to believe he had been standing up there, only that morning!

They gathered speed and passed low beside the tower, before heading for the Strahov Monastery, ‘Lenin’ boulevard, and the airport out beyond. He thought of Ivan Krac in his office down below, as he had been losing definition against that gleaming partition of glass. Surely, he couldn't be involved! If his cousin had doubted Milan, he would have said something!

After picturing the lines of Prague in the dark some for hours, Egerton seemed to be able to visualise the map more clearly now; he had been lost beneath it, where it had meant nothing, but he had still made these lines them work for him. It had been difficult to make this city real, the painter thought, even through its history. They had passed far above his finally realised map, and Egerton looked down, glad to be on top! Nobody spoke on the brief remainder of the journey to the airport at Ruzyně. The sound of the rotors filled the air-ambulance and the sleeping city fell away. Black, open fields swallowed up the earth, above them racing cloud, and behind that only an endlessness of space without a star; there was nothing much to hold on to! Egerton touched the side of the helicopter for its warmth, the gentle vibration comforting, and finding some resonance in the pain he felt below his infrasternal notch; but Kate's engagement ring lay in his fist and he tightened his grip on that.


15. Red Cast on Lime

The dusty, red-plated number '32’ sat atop the first highly polished signs of private enterprise: SlovaKable countered the faded old red with a shining new plaque, lettered in blue. Inside the passage, an old porter sat in a glass shack, deaf to enquiries as he played with the thick frayed cord of a Fifties’ telephone. Finally, he began to dial a number.

"These old fools hate the changes," Ivan Krac told Clara Skálová in English. "It isn’t dementia; they like to forget that we’re here!" He signed the visitor’s book, which had been unceremoniously pushed out at him.

"Fourth floor," the porter said in English.

They walked to the ramshackle lift, a ‘Paternoster’, one of those continuously revolving ‘confessionals’, into which they had to leap, side-by-side. "Bless me Father, for I have sinned!" Ivan said. "I swear, if you don’t want to be understood these days, you’d be better off using Slovak! English is taking over... Two’s next." The cabin juddered up slowly, scraping the sides of the shaft, and the second and third floors slipped by with a slight jarring. Other cabins were returning to the ground, having been upended at the top of the shaft, their jamming revolutions in a narrow tube rumbling noisily around them.

Then, they jumped as one.

Vašek Zupa and Honza Sismis were there to meet them, alerted from below by the old concierge. "You made it!" Vašek said. "This is Mr. Krac, Honza."

"I’m pleased to meet you," Honza said, offering his hand.

"This is Clara Skálová."

"Please, come this way," Vašek said.

"You’ll have to excuse me," Honza Sismis said, "if I seem to be in a bit of a state! I’ve spent the whole day battling with the state apparatus downstairs... The ancients in our old building’s outdated exchange have been telling all callers that we’re out of the office, laying cable in the Carpathians! They’ve only allowed us four numbers on an exchange of nine hundred lines. The buffoons who work that damn museum-piece in the basement seem to think they can cut down their work by denying SlovaKable’s up here!"

"Tell me about it!" Ivan said, laughing.

"It will only end when we get direct lines," Honza said, "and we’re further from those than you are in Prague!"

"Dire communications," Ivan said. "Dialling out is sometimes -."

"Dialling out?" Honza practically screamed. He seemed wound as tight as a reeled cable. "Dialling-out, the parting-gift of the dying state! You have to dial each digit, waiting for that inevitable tone that tells you that you’ve failed between numbers! I’m sure one of those old buffoons at our exchange always lets me through to the final digit, then maliciously cuts the connection! The problem is that if I leave a call to my secretary, she will just give up: it has sometimes taken her two days to get me a connection!"

Honza was full of energy; his wiry frame tapered into a gaunt face which expressed an intensity stretched to its limit. As they entered his office, a telephone began to ring in the next room and he sprang out of the room.

"Honza’s secretary has been parachuted downstairs," Vašek said, as though reading their thoughts. "She’s been dropped on a mission, trying to find a route into the telephone exchange!"

"Is she armed?" Ivan asked, laughing.

"There’s to be no killing," Vašek said. "If anything, the exchange staff will be hit with a bribe - a bottle or something..."

Honza burst back into the room, slamming the door behind him.

"That was the porter," he told them. "Says he forgot to tell you: he’s married to an Englishwoman! They met in Wiltshire during the war and they were married here in Forty-six. Also: he fully supported the Communists!"

"I’m glad something’s getting through!" Ivan said, laughing.

"Isn’t it amazing!" Honza said. "They’ll give you the story of their lives at the drop of a hat, but ask them to put a call through to Vienna and you’ll be waiting forever!"

The phone in the next room began ringing. "I’ll leave it," he said.

"It might concern that Carpathian propaganda," Vašek warned. "You want to scotch the rumour that you’re digging up our mountains -."

Honza swept open the door, but they saw his secretary pick up the ‘phone. "No luck downstairs," she told him.

He came back in and gently closed the door.

"Jesus Maria!" he said. "That’s probably one of the cleaners informing us that her daughter’s getting married in Normandy and she has a son in Argentina!"

"Shall we get started?" Vašek said.

Honza slumped into his chair.

"As you know," Vašek said, "this is an informal meeting. Honza knows what P.S. faces -."

"And I also know Gor," Honza interrupted. "The man takes what he wants. He’s snapping up everything in sight -."

"That’s as maybe," Vašek said, "but Ivan Krac wants to fight back! For my part, 'Slo-Invest' is living up to its name; we've been dragging our feet and growth is sluggish. ‘Slo-Invest’ is interested in finding a buyer, though Ivan doesn't have that sort of capital -."

"But SlovaKable is also interested in publishing," Honza said, "and my company would be capable of buying 'Slo-Invest', several times over - if we were a bunch of fools!"

"That’s what we're counting on," Vašek said, "not that you’re a bunch of fools, of course; but that, given a wish to grow your company, you might be ready for a backwards merger, an exchange of shares between S.K. and P.S., through which you would be expand in the publishing field, and be diversifying into advertising and publicity under P.S.! Both to support Ivan Krac against the threat from that Czech gargantuan, Gor, and to allow his take-over of ‘Slo-Invest’!"

"You’d want Vašek's slowcoach?" Honza asked Ivan.

"This is a quick scenario," Ivan said. "It isn’t a matter of ‘want’; it’s a matter of needs! My aim is to battle on with P.S. in Prague and use the new, much larger company to establish a base in Bratislava. I want to be on both sides of that disputed hyphen, in case the feared partition pushes Czecho-Slovakia apart! If that happens, I want to be far better positioned on this side... Long-term, the aim would be to run my affairs here."

"A pretty big shift," Honza said, "for you, as well as us!

"By then, your telephones might even work," Ivan said.

"It was always Ivan's hope," Vašek explained, "to return to our homeland; Gor may be only forcing his hand. So, I say, God bless GorPress!"

"Bratislava is a perfect base," Ivan said. "The cost advantage together with rationalisation of our activities would place the new company in an ideal position to expand eastward. ‘Slo-Invest’ would be a display-case for that expansion. I'd expect to supe up its performance, and follow on with further acquisitions in publishing... Even so, we’d still be paying a dividend!"

"And you’d become a Slovakian businessman!" Honza said.

"I am a Slovak businessman!" Ivan said. "Prague has offered me a home for a while. I’d retain most of my interests over there, but with the possibility of partition, I see my future in the media back here. And with your support, and the exchange of shares, the take-over of ‘Slo-Invest’ would be viable!"

"Mergers aren’t my field," Honza said, "but isn’t it unusual to think about a merger when you’re being targeted for take-over yourself?"

"My only hope lies in a reverse take-over," Ivan said, "a defensive merger, or whatever you choose to call it: our new, much larger company would be safe from the clutches of Gor, acquire your first stake in advertising and publicity with P.S., and could immediately buy up ‘Slo-Invest’." Ivan handed him a folder. "These are the share exchange proposals in full, a company breakdown and the statements of account. I’d like you to consider it carefully."



When Clara left Ivan Krac in the lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in Bratislava, thick cloud had poured up along the Danube, crossing the Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, where it hung suspended over the rush of the river. She pulled up her collar, thinking of partition. The high Danube where everything races! Bratislava’s sunny face had slipped, and here was the eastern chill. Would their federation really break apart? she wondered. Or could their faith overcome the sudden surge towards partition? It was still early, and she was heading for the riverside café, as arranged, to meet her husband, Miloš, and their friend, Pat Macdonald, her hands pushed deep inside her pockets. When she arrived, Clara Skálová saw her husband’s bike, the Jawa, outside, and a couple of helmets on top of his distinctive wicker panniers. They had stayed in a hotel overnight, planning to do some sightseeing for the rest of the day.

“You made good time!” Pat Macdonald said. “Krac is obviously a quick worker! Miloš is in the toilet. How did your meeting go?”

“Honza Sismis will let Ivan know by the end of next week,” Clara told him. “From what Ivan Krac says, it’s the only hope! If your man, Milan Gor, succeeds, there’s no knowing what he will do with P.S.!”

Miloš had joined them with a resigned smile. Once seated, he leant across and kissed Clara on the cheek. “I won’t ask,” he said. “Keep your secrets!”

“It’s no secret,” she said, “we’re now at war!”

"I'm a neutral party, surely," Pat said, smiling, "but you do know my true sympathies or you wouldn't be so frank with me!"



Clara had chosen the 1968 Škoda 1100MB, rather than her husband Miloš's sidecar. It was a further fifty miles to Čachtice. At first as they drove north, they kept Miloš's bike in sight behind them, but as the rain came in close, and broke around them into sheets of spray, he disappeared. Her friend Pat had decided against hiring a new car, but his Sixties' Škoda had been serviced for their journey east, and at first he drove quickly through the worsening storm.

“We’re in vampire country, already!” Clara said. “Of course, this was once part of Transylvania, before the great partition!” They were heading for the ruined castle, which had been the home, and then later the prison of Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess of Čachtice. She had killed and mutilated hundreds of peasants; and during her prime, the surrounding valleys had been filled with the maimed and the fearful. Outside, the rain beat down so heavily that Pat was forced to drive at forty, peering forward through a neverending series of cascades, like curtains, for the poorly painted white lines through the flooding road ahead.

“The Blood Countess was so wicked,” she said, “that whenever it snowed she would tie somebody to her waterwheel and pour icy water over them until they froze into blocks! She used to drain the blood of her victims and have it poured into a bath; she said it was good for her complexion - and it was true: they say she had the clearest skin in all Slovakia!”

“Stop it now,” Pat said. “You’re frightening me!” He laughed as he switched off the wipers.

The storm had passed, the clouds spent, and dispersed, and the drenched landscape lay under a fine covering of mist, when they arrived at Čachtice. Clara liked talking to Pat; and they were walking, some distance behind Miloš. As they had climbed up the track towards the ruined castle, a light rain had begun to fall. “Do you know the word ‘roke’?” Clara asked, and Pat shook his head. “This is a roke,” she told him. “It’s an English word... I’m sorry, I can’t get away from him! It’s Ivan Krac. ‘Roke’ was one of a few words he taught me. ‘Rökr’ is Scandinavian for ‘darkness’ - and in your language ‘roke’ can be mist, or this kind of rain.”

“You're some tour-guide!” Pat said. “Teaching English to a Scotsman in the Slovakian wilds!”

He wiped his face with his hand. It was one of those clinging sprays that covered you in seconds, like a fine perspiration. As they followed a limestone wall around the curve of the hillside, the white remains of the castle came into view. The hilltop was empty of life, the ruined walls clinging remorselessly to a damp crest of green. Pat turned. All about them, the hills stood out as islands, and below them the valleys stretched away, wreathed in roke, and drifting, sloping dunes of white, across the treetops; the sun escaped into a blue patch of sky, and as he watched, it touched the mist, which suddenly seemed to shine with a fine deathly radiance in its hope of approaching release. In wisps and strands, the mist hung coldly through the forest, but the warming ground was opening up to clearer partitions in little streams and faraway lakes.

“This didn’t come from Scandinavian ‘dark’,” he said.



It wasn’t far from Čachtice to Ivan Krac's place at Sandovisko, but by the time they had driven out of the valley and into the woods, the night was closing in. “Watch out for a beam in the forest!” Clara joked to Pat, and as they began to climb the hill, Miloš’s light trailed them up the track through the gloom between the trees.

The bigger light turned out to be in complete darkness. When they arrived, the tower stood black against the forest sky.

“Some guesthouse!” Miloš said.

“I’ll see if it’s open,” Clara said, “but I doubt it.”

She could see Sandovisko had weathered badly, since she had visited in Sixty-eight. Dull red in the twilight, no trace of paint remained. The stone was cracked and crumbling, and at some point in the past twenty-six years, the ruined outbuildings had been cleared away.

Standing beside the car, Miloš watched his wife with a feeling almost of sadness. Somehow, that past with Krac would never be escaped! Clara stood talking to a woman in the doorway. Above their figures, the dark house stretched up, the unlit glass and the summit barely visible in the twilight. What a folly! Miloš thought, wishing she had never met the photographer; or found this strange light in the dark of Slovakia.

“Ask them if they know one nearby!”

Pat’s shout to Clara Skálová split the air.

The long hollow scream that followed was eerie, as if it were Sandovisko itself that had broken silence. It came from deep within.

The dark skinned woman pushed Clara away from the door and slammed it shut. Then there was nothing but the silence. It was almost as if they had imagined it.

Pat got out of the Škoda. Miloš was still standing by his Jawa. The night itself was windless, as if surprised.

“You hear that?” Miloš said.

"Open up!" Pat shouted, banging on the door.

“That's solid oak,” Clara said to Pat. “But there’s a window up there!”

“Too high!” Miloš said.

Pat walked along the wall of the lighthouse, feeling its soft red sandstone with his fingers. It was hopeless! It would be like climbing a cube of sugar! The fine grit rolled beneath his fingers on the smooth, slippery stone.

“Park your Jawa underneath that window!” he said.

Even with the extra height of the bike, the climb would be difficult. “Get it in close to the wall!” he said. “You’re going to stand on the bike; and I’ll have to stand on your shoulders!"

Miloš was coming back from the car, carrying a wheel spanner. “You might need this,” he told Macdonald, who pushed the spanner into the back of his trousers.

“Right, up you get, Miloš!” the Scot said.

The bike was quite stable on the flat, but climbing on to another man’s shoulders is a challenge at the best of times. He fell to the ground on three attempts, and once Miloš joined him.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Just dig in, like you’re riding a horse!”

It took some doing, but eventually Pat stretched up the sandstone wall, his feet maintaining their hold; and as he achieved the vertical, he looked up. He could just reach the sill of the window with his fingers, but not its top. “I’ll have to jump,” he said, looking down. “As soon as you feel me going, you can jump off the bike... If I come down, I don’t want to tangle with the both of you!”

“Got you!” Miloš told him, and Pat looked up.

He only needed four inches. He tensed and relaxed, testing the spring in preparation through his body. “Get a move on,” Miloš whispered below, trying to hold him steady. Pat jumped and his fingers caught the weather-beaten sandstone sill. After hanging free for a second, he dragged his body, lurching upwards, elbows parting, as his face mounted the frame of the window. It was too narrow and for a moment he was tempted to drop back. His arms shook.

“Use your elbow!”

Pat had moved as Miloš shouted, skewing his body, and scraping one elbow into the mouth of the window; with his free hand, he found the side and pressed himself back, passing his weight along the wall; his feet scraped the sandstone, scrambling for better purchase. He could see nothing through the partition of glass, but above it was what looked like a thin groove in the rusted iron, a bare finger-hold; he slipped his hand up the stone and reached it. Breaking three or four nails, he levered himself onto the sill, sitting at last in safety.

"Damn!" He dragged out the spanner, and broke the glass, knocking the shards away with his hand.

“Somebody’s come to the door!” Clara called.

As Pat looked down, he was struck heavily from the darkness within. As he left the window, he had time to give himself a final push with his feet, hoping that way to clear the bike. Unfortunately, he put too much force into it, tumbling out of control. As he rolled on to the hard ground, he felt a pain shoot through his leg, where fractured bone had escaped the flesh.

Clara went to him, as Miloš was running back towards the car. They had no telephone. Beyond the Škoda, the hillside plunged away, forestry tumbling into partitions of escarpment, and deep in the void lay a valley with further hillsides beyond.

Even in the dark, Miloš could see this ‘sea’ was populated; the distant homesteads were like the tiny lights of 'rescue-vessels', and they needed to raise the alarm! He jumped into the car and drove up beside the lighthouse, so Clara thought for a moment that he was about to drive over the edge of the escarpment! He parked the Škoda at a steep angle, jerking up the hand break, and switching on the hazard lights, he began to flash the beams, improvising a lighthouse, and blaring the injured Scot's horn across the roof of the valley. The car was ramped, as if for take-off, but would the clarion and flashing lights be noticed through the motes and beams of the silent forest sky?