He looked slightly nonplussed. ‘I thought we had sorted this out. I have another appointment.’
‘It’s either you or the newspapers,’ she told him.
That focused him. ‘Very well,’ he said, his voice suddenly colder.
Half an hour later, she found him and another Russian waiting for her in the office. The latter was hovering at Tulpanov’s shoulder like a teacher intent on keeping close watch on a potentially unruly pupil.
‘I wanted a private conversation,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘That will not be possible.’
‘All right. Did you know that the makeup artist on the film you just watched was kidnapped last weekend from her flat in the American sector?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Well she was. By two men who said they were policeman. One was German, the other probably Russian. From the description someone gave me they sound very much like the two who tried to arrest me. And I can find no record of her being taken to any police station in Berlin, in any sector. I will take the matter to the press, but because I respect you and all you have done for the arts in this city, I wanted to speak to you first, and see if you can shed any light on my friend’s disappearance.’
He said nothing for a few moments, as if carefully gauging his response. ‘We do not kidnap makeup artists,’ he said eventually. ‘Why on earth would we?
‘She was a friend of Sonja Strehl, and she’s been making enquiries into Sonja’s death-she doesn’t believe it was suicide, and the people she was harassing may have decided that giving her a scare would shut her up.’
While Tulpanov considered this, the other Soviet official just stared at Effi. He wasn’t looking at a woman, she though, just at a piece of meat.
‘I will look into this,’ Tulpanov said, with obvious reluctance. ‘In the meantime, I strongly advise you not to repeat these anti-Soviet accusations in public. And especially not to the Western press. As tonight’s film showed, you have done wonderful work for us-for DEFA, I mean-and I would hate to see such a mutually beneficial relationship come to an end. Let me look into it, before you do anything which can’t be undone.’
It was all she was going to get. She wanted to explode with anger, but that wouldn’t help Eva, so she thanked him for talking to her, and promised to hold fire until she heard from him again.
Tulpanov took her hand and kissed it. ‘I hope we shall meet again,’ he said, the stiffly spoken words starkly at odds with an almost fatherly look of warning. He would have made a good actor, she thought.
‘Any success?’ Thomas asked, once they were in the limousine.
‘Not really. He promised to investigate, but I got the feeling that he doesn’t have that sort of clout anymore, if he ever did. The man who was leaning over him on the other hand …’
‘MGB?’
‘I suppose so. Thomas, what else can I do?’
‘When’s John back?’
‘Sometime this week.’
‘His Soviet friends might be able to help.’
‘They might,’ Effi agreed, with more hope than conviction.
The final session of Strohm’s conference was concerned with Culture and Sport, two subjects which would normally have interested him. This time though, he gave them a miss, and went for a walk on the beach. A couple teaching their infant son to swim reminded him of his own impending fatherhood, and brought a smile to his face. At first he had wanted a boy, but over the past few days the idea of a daughter had become more appealing.
Cilly had been on his mind lately; Cilly, the first love of his life. The Gestapo might have hurled her to her death from a fourth-floor window, but she still lived on in his memory, and, through the influence she retained over him, still played her part in the world. Strohm wondered what she would think of their Party now, and how she would judge his own increasing uncertainty. She wouldn’t want him to walk away, to give up-that much he knew. But neither would she want him to lose touch with those gut feelings which had anchored their shared beliefs-the hatred of injustice, of a system in which the pleasures of the few were bought with the pain of the many.
Somewhere in all of this was a line he couldn’t cross without betraying her, without betraying himself. He still wasn’t yet clear where that line was, but he now had no doubt it existed. My Party, right or wrong, was no longer an option.
Russell’s train pulled into Prague’s Wilson Station-named after the US president who had sponsored Czechoslovak independence-soon after three on Friday afternoon. The Nazis had called it something else during the war, but he couldn’t remember what.
Both here and at the border crossing, the number of men in uniform had tripled since his last visit, and considering the swastikas hanging everywhere back then, that was some achievement. So far icy politeness was the worst he had suffered, but there was plenty of time. And it wasn’t the ones in uniform, he reminded himself, who constituted the real enemy. The Statni bezpecnost, or StB, had built itself a fearsome reputation when the post-war coalition was still in charge, and now that the communists were ruling alone, the gutter was presumably the limit.
It was a cool spring afternoon, the sun flitting between clouds. He walked across to Wenceslas Square, then down the wide Vaclavske Namesti to the Europa Hotel, already aware of being followed. When he’d stayed there in 1939 the desk clerk had been a male fan of Kafka’s; now it was a stick-thin woman who looked like she’d just eaten a lemon. But she agreed to his renewing his acquaintance with his old room, which overlooked the boulevard from the third floor. He had survived his previous stay there, which might be a good omen. With any luck he’d be in Berlin by Wednesday, back where at least a few people loved him.
After a bath he dressed and went back down in the lift, intent on seeking out a restaurant he remembered, but was accosted halfway across the lobby by a smartly dressed woman in her twenties, with short black hair and a catlike face.
‘John Russell?’ she asked, though he didn’t imagine she had any doubt. ‘My name is Petra Klima, from the Ministry of Culture. Could we talk for a few minutes?’ She gestured towards a couple of armchairs in the farthest corner of the lobby.
‘Of course,’ Russell said equably. Her English was excellent.
‘I know you have your schedule,’ she said, once they were seated, ‘and nothing has changed in the arrangements which the Ministry agreed with your magazine The Lampadary, so you have no reason to worry.’ She smiled. ‘Which is good.’
‘It is,’ Russell agreed, wondering exactly where this was going.
‘If there are any problems, or if you have any special needs, then call me on this number.’ She passed across a hand-cut piece of cardboard on which some figures had been scrawled.
‘Thank you.’
‘That is all I need to say. But for my own curiosity, I wonder if I could ask you a question about your magazine. The name-what does it mean?’
‘In the old Greek church a lampadary carried a flaming taper to light the way for his patriarch,’ Russell explained. This had been included in his CIA briefing sheet, along with other information about the Agency’s newly created-and paradoxically long-standing-arts journal.
‘I see,’ Klima said. ‘Whose idea was that-the owner’s?’
Which was seamless enough for a Hollywood script, Russell thought. ‘The Lampadary doesn’t have one,’ he told her, following his own. ‘It’s owned by a cooperative-a group of Americans who believe that art transcends politics, and can act as a unifying force.’
‘But how can art not be political?’ she wanted to know.
‘Mozart? Van Gogh?’
Klima looked doubtful. She probably thought despair at the condition of the Dutch proletariat had taken Vincent out to the cornfield. ‘Perhaps music and painting,’ she reluctantly conceded, ‘but poetry, literature?’