The Parsifal Mosaic (51 page)

Suddenly the blinding beam of a searchlight shot out from the upper regions of the silo; it was arcing around—toward
him
.

This was the 1980s, but he was standing in front of a symbol of human carnage that went back forty years. It was a concentration camp!

“We wondered how long it would take you,” said a voice behind him.

He spun around, reaching for his weapon. It was too late.

Powerful arms gripped him around the neck, arching him backwards, as a pair of hands plunged a soft, wet, acrid-smelling cloth into his face.

The beam of the searchlight zeroed in on him. He could see it, feel it, as his nostrils began to burn. Then the darkness came, and he could neither see nor feel.

He felt the warmth first; he found it not particularly pleasant but merely different from the cold. When he opened his eyes, his vision blurred, coming into focus slowly, he simultaneously became aware of the nausea in his throat and the stinging sensation on his face. The pungent odor lingered in his nostrils; he had been anesthetized with pure ethyl ether.

He saw flames, logs burning behind a black-bordered screen, in a large brick fireplace. He was on the floor in front of the slate hearth; his topcoat had been removed, and his wet clothes were heating up uncomfortably. But part of the discomfort was in the small of his back; the scaling knife was still in place, the leather scabbard irritating his skin. He was grateful for the pain.

He rolled over slowly, inch by inch, his eyes half closed, observing what he could by the light of the fire and several table lamps. He heard the sound of muffled voices; two men were talking quietly beyond a plain brown sofa at the other end of the room; they stood together in a hallway. They had not noticed his movement, but they were his guards. The room itself was in concert with the rustic structures outside—solid, functional furniture, thick plaited rag rags scattered about over a wide-beamed floor, windows bordered by redcheckered
curtains that might have come from a Sears Roebuck catalogue.

It was a simple living room in a country farmhouse, nothing more or less, and nothing suggesting it might he something else—or someplace else—to disturb a visitor’s eye. If anything, the room was Spartan, without a woman’s touch, entirely male.

Michael slid his watch slowly into view. It was one o’clock in the morning; he had been unconscious for nearly forty-five minutes.

“Hey, he’s awake!” cried one of the men.

“Get Mr. Kohoutek,” said the other, walking across the room toward Havelock. He rounded the sofa and reached under his leather jacket to pull out a gun. He smiled; the weapon was the Spanish Llama automatic that had traveled from a mist-laden pier in Civitavecchia, through the Palatine and Col des Moulinets, to Mason Falls, Pennsylvania. “This is good hardware, Mr. No-Name. I haven’t seen one like it in years. Thanks a lot.”

Michael was about to answer, but was interrupted by the rapid, heavy-footed entrance of a man who walked out of the hallway carrying a glass of steaming liquid in his hand.

“You are very free with odds and ends,” thundered Janos Kohoutek. “Be careful or you’ll walk barefoot in the snow.”

Nie shodz sniegu bex butow
.

Kohoutek’s accent was that of the dialect of the Carpathian Mountains south of Otrokovice. The words alluding to bare feet in the snow were part of the Czech-Moravian admonition to wastrels who did not earn their keep or their clothes.
To understand the cold, walk barefoot in the snow
.

Kohoutek came around the guard and was now fully in view. He was a bull of a man, his open shirt emphasizing the thickness of his neck and chest, the stretched cloth marking the breadth of his heavy shoulders; age had not touched his physique. He was not tall, but he was large, and the only indication of his years was in his face—more jowl than face—deeply lined, eyes deeply set, the flesh worn by well over sixty years of driven living. The hot, dark brown liquid in the glass was tea—black Carpathian tea. The man holding it was Czech by birth, Moravian by conviction.

“So here is our invader!” he roared, staring down at Havelock. “A man with a gun, but with no identiflcation—not even
a driver’s licence or credit card, or a billfold to carry such things in—attacks my farm like a commando! Who is this stalker in the night? What is his business? His name?”

“Havlíček,” said Michael in a low, sullen voice, pronouncing the name in an accent dose to Moravian. “Mikhail Havlíček.”

“Ceský?”

“Ano.”

“Obchodní?”
shouted Kohoutek, asking Havelock his business.

“Má žena,”
replied Michael, answering. “The woman.”

“Co, žena?”
demanded the aging bull.

“The one who was brought here this morning,” said Havelock, continuing in Czech.

“Two were brought in this morning! Which?”

“Blond hair … when we last saw her.”

Kohoutek grinned, but not with amusement.
“Chlípný,”
he said, leering.

“Her body doesn’t interest me, the information she has does.” Michael raised himself. “May I get up?”

“Vžádním případĕ
!” The mountain bull roared again as he rushed forward, lashing his right foot out, the boot catching Havelock in the throat, making him reel back on the slate hearth.

“Proklatĕ
!” shouted Havelock, grabbing his neck. It was the moment to react in anger, the beginning of the words that mattered. “I
paid
!” he yelled in Czech. “What do you think you’re doing!”

“You paid what? To ask about me on the highway? To sneak up on my house in the middle of the night? To carry a gun into my farm? I’ll pay
you
!”

“I did what I was told!”

“By whom?”

“Jacob Handelman.”

“Handelman?” Kohoutek’s full, battered face was stretched into an expression of bewilderment. “You paid Handelman? He sent you?”

“He told me he would phone you, get in touch with you,” said Michael quickly, using a truth from Paris that the halfway man had denied in New York, denied for profit. “I wasn’t to call you under any circumstances. I was to leave
my car on the highway past your mailbox and walk down the road to your farm.”

“The highway? You asked questions about me in a café on the highway!”

“I didn’t know where the Fourforks Pike was. How could I? Did you have a man there? Did he call you?”

The Czech-Moravian shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. An Italian with a truck. He drives produce for me sometimes.” Kohoutek stopped; the menace returned to his eyes. “But you did not walk down my road. You came in like a thief, an armed thief!”

“I’m no fool,
příteli
. I know what you have here and I looked for trip alarms. I was with the Podzemí. I found them and so I was cautious; I wanted no dogs on me or men shooting at me. Why do you think it took me so long to get here from that café on the highway?”

“You
paid
Handelman?”

“Very handsomely. May I get up?”

“Get up! Sit,
sit
!” ordered the mountain bull, pointing to a short deacon’s bench to the left of the fireplace, his expression more bewildered than seconds before. “You gave him money?”

“A great deal. He said I’d reach a point in the road when I could see the farm below. Someone would he waiting for me by the gate, wave me down with a flashlight. There was nobody I could see, no one at the gate. But then the weather’s rotten, so I came down.”

Gripping his steaming glass of tea, Kohoutek turned and walked across the room to a table against the wall. There was a telephone on it; he put down the glass, picked up the phone, and dialed.

“If you’re calling Handelman—”

“I do not call Handelman,” the Czech-Moravian broke in. “I never call Handelman. I call a man who calk another; he phones the German.”

“You mean the Rabbi?”

Kohoutek raised his head and looked at Havelock. “Yes, the Rabbi,” he said without comment.

“Well, whoever … there won’t he any answer at his apartment. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“He told me he was on his way to Boston. He’s lecturing at someplace called Brandese or Brandeis.”

“Jew school said the bull, then talked into the phone. “This is Janos. Call New York. The name you will give is Havlíček, have you got that?
Havlíček
. I want an explanation.” He hung up, grabbed his tea, and started back toward the fireplace. “Put that away!” he commanded the guard in the leather jacket who was rubbing the Llama against his sleeve. “Stand in the hall.” The man walked away as Kohoutek approached the fire, sitting down opposite Michael in a rustic-looking rocking chair. “Now we wait, Mikhail Havlíček. It won’t he long, a few minutes, ten-fifteen perhaps.”

“I can’t he responsible if he’s not home,” said Havelock, shrugging. “I wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have an agreement. I wouldn’t know your name or where to find you if he hadn’t told me. How could I?”

“We’ll see.”

“Where’s the woman?”

“Here. We have several buildings,” answered the man from the Carpathians as he sipped his tea and rocked slowly back and forth. “She’s upset, of course. It is not quite what she expected, but she will understand; they all do. We are their only hope.”

“How upset?”

Kohoutek squinted. “You are interested?”

“Only professionally. I’ve got to take her out and I don’t want trouble.”

“We shall see.”

“Is she all right?” asked Michael, controlling his anxiety.

“Like some others—the educated ones—she lost her reason for a while.” Kohoutek grinned, then coughed an ugly laugh as he drank his tea. “We explained the regulations, and she told us they were not acceptable. Can you imagine? Not
acceptable!
” The bull roared, then his voice dropped. “She will be watched carefully, and before she is sent outside she will understand. As they all understand.”

“You don’t have to worry. I’m taking her.”

“You say that.”

“I paid.”

Kohoutek leaned forward, stopping the motion of the chair. “How much?”

It was the question the Czech-Morvian had wanted to ask several minutes ago, but Carpathian progress was serpentine. Michael knew he was on a tightropes; there would he no answer in New York. He was about to negotiate, and both men knew it.

“Wouldn’t you rather hear it from Handehman? If he’s home.”

“Perhaps I would rather hear it from you,
příteli.”

“How do you know you can trust me?”

“How do I know I can trust the Rabbi? How do you know
you
can trust him?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I found you, found this place. Not in the way I would have preferred, but I’m here.”

“You must represent influential interests,” said Kohoutek, veering quickly, as was the custom of mountain men in negotiations.

“So influential I don’t carry identification. But then you know that.”

The aging lion began rocking again. “Such influence, how—ever, always carries money.”

“Enough.”

“How much did you pay Handelman?” All movement stopped as the question was asked.

“Twenty thousand dollars American.”

“Twenty
 …
?”
Kohoutek’s weathered face lost some of its color and his deep-set eyes squinted through the slits of flesh. “A considerable sum,
přítelí.”

“He said it was reasonable.” Havelock crossed his legs, his damp trousers warmed by the fire. “We were prepared for it.”

“Are you prepared to learn why he did not reach me?”

“With the complicated arrangements you have for contacting one another, I’m not surprised. He was on his way to Boston, and if someone was not by a phone—”

“Someone is always by a phone; he is a cripple. And you were on your way to a trap that would have cost you your life.”

Michael uncrossed his legs, his eyes riveted on Kohoutek. “The trip lights?”

“You spoke of dogs; we have dogs. They only attack on command, but an intruder does not know that. They circle him, barking viciously. What would you have done?”

“Used my gun, of course.”

“And for that you would have been shot.”

Both men were silent. Finally, Havelock spoke. “And the Rabbi has twenty thousand dollars you don’t know about and I can’t tell you because I’m dead.”

“Now you see.”

“He’d
do
that to you—for twenty thousand dollars?”

The mountain bull again started to rock his chair. “There could be other considerations. I’ve had minor troubles here—nothing we cannot control-but this is a depressed area. Certain jealousies arise when you have a successful farm. Handelman might care to replace me, have a reason to replace me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I would have a corpse on my hands, a corpse who might have made a telephone call while he was alive. He could have told someone where he was going.”

“You shot an intruder, a man with a gun, who probably used his gun. You were defending your property, no one would blame you.”

“No one,” agreed Kohoutek, still rocking. “But it would be enough. The Moravian is a troublemaker, we cannot afford him. Cut him off.”

“From what?”

The mountain man sipped his tea. “You spent twenty thousand dollars. Are you prepared to pay more?”

“I might he persuaded. We want the woman; she’s worked with our enemies.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“That I won’t tell you. It wouldn’t mean anything to you if I did … Cut you off from what?”

Kohoutek shrugged his heavy shoulders. “This is only the first step for these people—like the Corescu woman.”

“That’s not her name.”

“I’m certain it’s not, but that’s no concern of mine. Like the others, she’ll he pacified, work out of here for a month or two, then he sent elsewhere. The South, Southwest—the northern Midwest, wherever we place her.” The bull grinned. “The papers are always about to arrive—just another month, one more congressman to pay, a senator to reach. After a while, they’re like goats.”

“Even goats can rebel.”

“To what end? Their own? To be sent back to the place where they came from? To a firing squad, or a gulag, or gar-rote in an alleyway? You must understand, these are panicked people. It’s a
fantastic
business!”