“Something splendid, I think. Dinner, champagne.”
“And a bottle of mineral water for Kalash?”
Miernik got out his handkerchief again. I watched him go though his wiping ceremony, and when he had his glasses back on his nose I said, “Good night.” He gripped my forearm.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said. It was not a question.
“Miernik, you’re crazy. You want me to cross the frontier without a visa on an American passport into the most efficient police state in Central Europe. Then you want me to stroll into a coffeehouse where every waiter is no doubt in the pay of the secret police, flash a book of German poetry at a girl I’ve never seen in my life, and then escort her across a frontier that’s patrolled by soldiers and dogs, strung with trip wires, seeded with mines, and guarded by watchtowers that have searchlights and machine guns on them— all for a glass of champagne and a wiener schnitzel? I think you’re trying to get me locked up in a Czech jail for the rest of my life. I give you the short answer to your small request for assistance. No.”
“No—listen,” Miernik said. “If I thought for one moment that there was any real danger I would never ask you. But I have made arrangements. First, you will have a visa. That has been arranged. Second, no one in the coffeehouse is going to suspect a thing. You look like a German or an Austrian, which means you look like a Czech. You wear European clothes. You speak German with absolutely no accent; in five minutes of listening you will have the accent of the place perfectly.”
“The
German
accent of the place? There are no fucking Germans in Czechoslovakia—the regime threw them all out after the war.”
“Many people there still speak German. Anyway, you’re not supposed to be a Czech. Everyone will think you’re an Austrian or a German, a tourist or a businessman.”
“For Christ’s sake, Miernik. There are no tourists or businessmen in Bratislava. Czechoslovakia is Khrushchev’s country estate.”
“No, it will be all right. You will only be in public for an hour, at the very most.”
“I agree with that. I’m not likely to be in public again for the rest of my life.”
“Believe me, Paul, that will not happen. You will not have any trouble. Not with the visa, not with the coffeehouse, not with the frontier. The soldiers will not bother you, they will not turn on their searchlights, there are no mines the way you are going. I tell you arrangements have been made. What I am asking for, really, is an act of friendship that will take no more than a few hours.”
“I say it again. No.”
Miernik, in the course of this conversation, underwent a change. He stopped cringing. Now he looked at me with a perfectly steady gaze. “If I could do it myself, I would do it,” he said. “But I
would
spend the rest of my life in prison, and so would Zofia. I ask you because there is no one else I can ask. I trust you, my friend. You must trust me.
He handed me the book of Schiller. When I refused to take it he closed his hand over mine on the table and gave me a confident smile. “I warn you,” he said, “I will not give up. Tomorrow we’ll talk again. I know you will do this thing in the end. And we both know why.”
Miernik opened the book to a page with the corner turned down and put his finger on a line underscored in green ink.
“Alle Menschen werden Brüder,”
*
it read. He patted my arm, cleared his throat as if to say something more, but decided not to speak. With one final squeeze of my biceps, he went upstairs. I heard him pause on the second landing to blow his nose.
13 June.
Rosy-fingered dawn had hardly tapped on my window this morning when Kalash awakened me. He was dressed in walking shorts and a heavy ski sweater. When you travel it’s important to go to bed early,” Kalash said. “Otherwise you are tired in the morning and your reflexes are sluggish. I am trying to get some breakfast but I can’t get that cretin downstairs to understand me. You must come down and speak German to him.”
“What time is it?”
“Five-thirty.”
“You won’t get anything to eat at five-thirty. The dining room opens at half-past seven. Go for a walk, why don’t you?”
“We’re going skiing as soon as we have some hot chocolate.”
I then remembered that we had agreed, near the end of a second carafe of strong Anstrian wine the night before, that we would do some dawn skiing. There is still snow on the Valluga, the high mountain behind our hotel, and it’s possible to have a run down from the cable car station before the sun is too high.
By the time we got downstairs, Collins had organized everything. A table in the lobby was laid with hot chocolate and biscuits, and four pairs of hotel skis leaned against the wall. We found boots that more or less fitted, and went to the cable car station. We rode up with the cooks and waitresses of the mountaintop café. The valley was still in shadow, but as we rose in the cable car so did the sun; the first pink light touched the snowfields and the meadows and the windows of the musical comedy houses with their flower boxes. Miernik put an arm across my shoulders. “It makes one quite sentimental,” he said. “How could such a landscape produce Adolf Hitler?” He spoke in German so that our fellow passengers would be certain to understand. They turned their fascinated gaze from Kalash, who had drawn up one bare black leg and dozed off standing on the other leg like a stork, and stared in unison at Miernik.
At the top we inquired about the ski paths and chose the longest; there are no tows at that height, so it’s necessary to walk the rest of the way down the mountain when you come to the end of the snow. I paired off with Kalash; he is a fine skier, and I did not want to spoil the experience by having to help Miernik down the path-or to listen to him quite so early in the day. Collins, divining my purpose, kicked his feet into his bindings and pushed off first down the long straight run. Miernik followed him, arms flailing, thick body tipping from side to side as he tried to keep his speed down. I waited for five minutes, hoping that would be time enough for him to get far ahead of me, and started down.
The path turns gently on the breast of the mountain, so that it covers a couple of kilometers. It’s a lovely run, with other snowy peaks all around backlit by the sun; the snow was crisp, although there were patches of ice in the shadows of several big rocks. About halfway down I came upon Miernik; he seemed to be all right, leaning on his poles by the side of the path, so I went right by him. Far below I saw Collins dropping down the mountain and a moment later heard Kalash shout something to Miernik. The snow ran out abruptly, but you could see perfectly, so there was plenty of time to stop. Collins was waiting for me with his skis already off when I got to the end. Kalash pulled in a moment after I did. No sign of Miernik. Minutes went by. “Let’s not wait.for the silly bastard,” Collins said, “he’s probably decided to walk down the steep part.”
Collins has not been in one of his better moods since the beginning of the trip. He is pleasant enough to Kalash and me, but he barely speaks to Miernik. I have an idea that this has something to do with Ilona Bentley. In the car yesterday, Miernik asked some innocent question about her and Collins flicked him with a look of contempt and ostentatiously changed the subject. Now, with his skis on his shoulder, he began to walk down the dirt path that leads to the bottom of the mountain.
At this moment, Miernik came into sight above us. His poles were tucked under his arm and he was moving very fast. I swore and Kalash watched impassively as Miernik tried to snowplow, lost control of his skis, dropped one of his poles, and went by us right off the edge of the snow. He flew over a patch of jagged gravel and landed on his shoulders at fifty miles per hour on a small meadow of alpine grass. He lay quite still about a hundred feet below us. “It looks as if he’s broken his bloody neck, doesn’t it?” Kalash said calmly.
By the time we reached him he was up on all fours, feeling in the grass for his glasses. Without the spectacles his face had a naked look. Blood oozed from a scrape on his cheek, and a dribble of pink saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. He was breathing hard. “No matter,” he said, “I have another pair of glasses in my bag.” Collins reached the scene at this moment, out of breath from his scramble up the steep path. “Miernik, you clumsy ass,” he cried, “what do you think you’re doing?”
Miernik, still down on his hands and knees, shook his head from side to side, looking more than ever like a wounded animal. It was almost impossible to feel sympathy for him. If ever a man was born to be injured it is Miernik; it occurred to me that this unconscious masochism is his essential quality. It makes it impossible to like him-or to abandon him. Even when he is all buttoned up in one of his black suits, walking through a quiet park surrounded by harmless children and little dogs on leashes, you have the feeling that something terrible is going to happen to him. When it happens, you find yourself nodding your head—you knew it all along. “You’d better feel his bones,” Kalash said. “He may have broken something.”
Miernik turned his face toward Collins; we hadn’t been able to find his glasses, and no doubt he saw nothing but a blur dressed in a red sweater. It is just as well that he could not see the expressions on any of our faces. Collins’s was a mask of disgust. “I’m sorry to say that I have not killed myself, Nigel,” he said. “Yes, I suppose you are, Collins said. “I’ll get some snow for your face; you’ve got dirt in those cuts.”
Miernik was able to walk. He stumbled down the mountain path between Collins and me, leaning heavily on our arms. He was sweating heavily and trembling. Collins held him upright in cold silence, and when we got to the village, he turned away and started back to the hotel. Miernik got little more sympathy from the local doctor, who seems to have been driven into a state of perpetual annoyance by the stupid accidents of skiers. “If you cannot deal with the mountain, you should not be on the mountain,” he said, poking fingers into Miernik’s stomach and manipulating his limbs. The doctor was still in pajamas. He found a dislocated shoulder and some cracked ribs and bandaged them. “Also,” the doctor said, as he pocketed his fee, “you should not have walked in those ski boots. It ruins them.”
At the hotel we found Nigel and Kalash sitting in the sun on the terrace with the remains of their breakfast in front of them. Miernik sat down heavily, his arm in a sling and the left side of his face painted bright red with Merthiolate. He groaned. “I’m not going to be very comfortable in the car,” he said, “but that can’t be helped.” Kalash asked about Miernik’s injuries; Collins picked up a newspaper and began to read it. Miernik, refusing to eat, stumbled away. When he was out of earshot, Collins put down his paper. “Really, Paul,” he said. “How on earth could he do such a thing?”
I shrugged. “We all know he can’t ski,” I said. “Why did we let him try it?”
“You realize the whole trip is going to be one thing like this after another, don’t you?” Collins said. “We’ll spend all our time helping him across the street and bandaging his wounds.”
Miernik returned, wearing his spare glasses. He had managed somehow to get into a shirt and tie, and he wore a pressed suit coat, the empty sleeve draped over his bad shoulder. Collins said, “I’ll pack for you, Miernik, and have your bags brought down. We ought to leave in half an hour.”
Miernik nodded. I ordered some tea for him and he began to drink it clumsily, sitting far back from the table because of his sling. When we were alone he glanced around him, squealing the legs of his chair on the floor as he turned stiffly to look behind him, and began to talk.
“Did you think any further about our conversation of last night?” he asked. “I had difficulty sleeping. I dreamt of Zofia, waiting in the coffeehouse all alone. No one came for her. Finally a secret policeman came and began to read a book. She went with him. I saw her go with him. A very bad dream.”
“There’s something I’d like to ask you,” I said. “Did you fall off your skis with the idea that I’d be more tenderhearted if you had your arm in a sling?”
Miernik gave me a shocked look. “Of course not,” he said. “I might have killed myself at that speed.”
This is true enough. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing on the conscious level, but he makes me wonder. There was such perfection in his victimhood that I began to take bets with myself that some part of his punished brain told him to have the accident. I have played the role of sympathizer for so long that it’s beginning to have some reality for me. Watching him struggle with his teacup, observing the flashes of pain playing across his injured face, I began for the first time to think seriously about rescuing Zofia for him.
It might be worth the risk just to see what scene Miernik will play next. That, at least, was the thought I had with the part of me that is a professional agent. The situation is very interesting from that point of view: he has left just enough unsaid to intrigue me. (How did Zofia get from Warsaw to Bratislava? How did Miernik, who professes to have no friend in the world, make all those “arrangements” for visas and a quiet stroll across a fortified frontier?) Of course he must know this, and be counting on it. His attempts to outwit me are annoying as hell. I tell myself that I can walk in and out of Czechoslovakia and confound the son of a bitch by doing so. One American is worth any five Communists.
At the same time I have to keep in mind the possibility that he may be exactly what he says he is. This becomes a smaller possibility every day, but it is still there. Going into Czechoslovakia may be the way to find out. The plot is interesting. There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists—except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art. More and more I want to see what I can do with these characters I’ve been given.
34. R
EPORT BY
C
HRISTOPHER’S CASE OFFICER (FROM
V
IENNA
).
1. Christopher made telephone contact at 2345 hours 14 June and reported to my hotel room at 0245 hours 15 June for an operational meeting. He submitted a written report (attached), which despite its poor organization and extraneous matter provides interesting new light on Miernik.