At the café door, he paused and nodded at the owner before crossing the road towards the apartment block. Milos Jelen was listed as the resident of flat six. Beside his name was a bell. Paul ignored it. The main door had no lock and he pushed it open. The pervading smell of stale cooking filled the stairwell, the residue of old cabbage and long-boiled meat. A dim light lit the stairs and he began to climb, running his hand along the greasy handrail as he took each step.
52
He had formed a vague notion before arriving that he might be able to recruit one of the heroes of the Legion for London. His first choice would have been Čeček, but Paul discovered the colonel he had first met in Kazan had died relatively young in 1930. There were others, although he suspected he would find they had all had their fill of British machinations while in Russia and be suspicious of committing themselves to yet another Allied cause.
Not all were available. Gajda, a possible candidate, was in prison. He had involved himself in fascist politics in the twenties, attempting to overthrow the government of Thomas Masaryk. It might have been that Kolchak’s Slovak general had rued missing his opportunity of a glorious destiny in Siberia and had made a belated grab for one in the newly formed Czechoslovakia. In the event his fascist sympathies hadn’t even helped him after the German invasion. Although Masaryk had already released him, the Nazis threw him back in prison. Even now, three years after the war he was still there, President Beneš viewing him as a threat to the country.
Neither had the reputation of Jan Syrový, the former commander of the Legion, escaped unscathed during the war. He was presently paying the price of collaborating with the Nazis and was in prison too, having remained in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation as prime minister. It was said he now shared a cell with Gajda.
A sad end to two once illustrious careers but at least they were alive. Paul had not been in the country long before learning that many of the former legionnaires had found themselves hunted men as soon as Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Red Army. Having escaped the Bolsheviks in Siberia, they had finally become victims of Stalin’s long memory and longer thirst for revenge. Some had been murdered, others had flown the country. Those that couldn’t had gone into hiding.
It had been one of these men who had given him the name of Milos Jelen. Jelen had had some dealings with the Legionářská banka. In an unofficial capacity, it was understood. Paul understood.
The Czech bank was rumoured to have been set up by returning legionnaires with Russian gold looted from the treasury they had escorted along with Kolchak from Omsk.
The Bolsheviks had maintained there was a discrepancy of £32 million between the amount taken from the bank in Kazan and the sum handed over to them in Irkutsk. They held the Legion responsible for it. Paul well-remembered the gold bars and currency he had seen lying in the snow after the train wreck in Tatarskaya Station. But if the Bolshevik accusation were true, the theft must have been a more organised affair than the pilfering he himself had witnessed.
The Red Army had no doubts and in May 1945 they, in turn, had looted the Legion bank, shipping its assets back to Moscow.
Or had that merely been an excuse to cover standard practise? Paul didn’t know. What he did know, after walking past the bank on his arrival in Prague, was that the Red Army had taken their revenge on a once-beautiful building. Scenes decorating the façade of the Legion’s retreat through Siberia, and the columns topped by legionnaires sculpted in relief had been defaced. The interior, ornamented in Moravian themes and art deco, had been vandalised.
What was left was like a skull from which the features had been stripped away. Memento mori: a gift to the Czechs from the Red Army.
The door to flat six lay at the end of the corridor. The light was not working and, passing beneath it, Paul saw the bulb had been removed. There was no light showing under the door either, but from its position the flat overlooked the street and the café where he had waited and he had seen a light in the window from the road.
Putting his ear to the door before knocking, he listened to the silence within, then raised his fist and rapped on the wood.
In the bookshop earlier he had asked if they had a Czech-English dictionary. Only a battered copy, for office use, but they said he was welcome to consult it.
‘Jelen’, he found, was the Czech word for deer. Perhaps he had heard the word at some point while living on the Legion trains, or had it merely been a hunch born of past experience?
A light came on and a key turned in the lock. The door opened a few inches. Milos Jelen had changed in thirty years. His face had fattened, his hair thinned and had retreated from his forehead. Lines creased the corners of his eyes and furrowed his pale brow. Like railroad tracks in snow? But that was too fanciful. The face may have been pale but it was not that white. Although, as Paul watched, it had been getting whiter by the moment.
‘Good God!’ Valentine said in Czech.
Paul replied in the same language.
‘You weren’t expecting me?’ He edged past Valentine into the hall of the flat.
Valentine glanced down the corridor and closed the door. ‘Were you followed?’
Paul raised a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Give me some credit after all these years… old man.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘It wasn’t easy,’ Paul admitted reverting to English. ‘Not that I’ve been looking for long.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you the same question.’
The dim light in the hall lit some decent paintings hanging on the walls and a good carpet on the floor. There was a hall table and a stand for umbrellas and canes. Beneath a coat rack a suitcase stood against the wall. Paul looked at it and smiled at Valentine then walked down the corridor towards a lit room.
‘Well, what are you doing here?’ Valentine repeated.
He hobbled after Paul and stood in the doorway of the drawing room. Lit by table lamps, it looked a comfortable room with a sofa and armchairs placed around a fireplace where a coal fire burned. Oriental rugs covered the floor and books lined a glass-fronted case. A scattering of newspapers and journals lay on an occasional table. The room, Paul thought, displayed taste and some degree of affluence, even if its prosperity was looking a little faded. But then much of Prague looked the same way.
‘I had some business here,’ Paul said, taking off his coat and laying it over the back of a chair. ‘In Prague, I mean.’
‘Business?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual thing.’
Valentine limped towards the fire and dropped into an armchair with a grunt.
‘Drinks,’ he said. ‘On the sideboard.’ He waved his cane towards a tray and decanters. ‘Help yourself. Mine’s a cognac, and a big one. You’re a bit of a shock, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘Did you think I was dead?’
‘Had no idea either way.’
‘I rather thought you were.’
‘Oh?’
Paul poured two drinks, a large one for Valentine and a smaller one for himself. He carried them back to the fire, handed Valentine his glass and sat in one of the other armchairs.
‘I found your coat and hat, you see,’ Paul said. ‘After the train wreck outside Omsk. There was blood on it. Besides, no one voluntarily abandons a decent coat in that weather.’
‘Didn’t have much say in the matter,’ said Valentine, gulping down the cognac. ‘Woke up after the crash on one of the trains without it. That’s where I got this.’ He tapped his leg with the cane. ‘It wasn’t too bad to start with. Getting worse the older I get. Tends to play up in cold weather.’