CHAPTER ONE
Jan Tucek had changed a great deal. The broad shoulders sagged, his brown hair was thinning to baldness and his eyes had retreated into shadowed sockets. It was a shock to see how he had shrunk into middle age. ‘Dick Farrell! So it is you.’ His shoulders squared as he came across to meet me. The hand he held out was soft and white with neatly manicured nails. For a fleeting moment as I shook his hand I caught a glimpse of the Jan Tucek I’d known before. He smiled. ‘I hope I do not keep you waiting.’ In the way he spoke and in the sudden eagerness of his greeting, I found my mind switched back ten years to the sight of a shattered windshield splashed with oil, a burst of flame as I went into a dive and a voice in my earphones saying: I think I get him for you, Dick. For a moment as I held his hand it was the reckless, fanatical Czech fighter pilot I was greeting. Then memory was swamped by the present and I was looking into the tired, withdrawn eyes of Jan Tucek, head of the Tucek Steel works in Pilsen.
‘Sit down, please.’ He waved me to the chair beside his desk. The secretary who had brought me in, a short, dapper little man with an uneasy smile, went out and closed the door. I became conscious then of another person in the room. He stood over against the wall, a gangling, long-limbed man with the face of a seedy intellectual. He stood there with a conscious and studied unobtrusiveness that shrieked his presence aloud. As I glanced at him uneasily, Jan Tucek said, ‘You see to what we are reduced here in Czechoslovakia. This is my shadow. He go with me always.’
The man jerked to life, ‘Mluvte cesky!’ There was a sort of baffled tenseness in the way he spoke.
Jan Tucek looked across at me. ‘You do not speak any other language but English, you understand?’ It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. He knew it to be false and before I could say anything he had turned to the shadow and was speaking rapidly in Czech: ‘Mr. Farrell does not speak any language but English. I was with him when we fought the Germans over England. He is here as representative for a British firm of machine tool manufacturers. There is nothing political in our meeting.’
‘I cannot allow you to talk without an interpreter,’ the man answered.
‘Then you’d better find one,’ Tucek snapped, ‘for I’m not going to treat an old comrade-in-arms as though he is a stranger just because you are so badly educated you do not speak English.’
The man flushed angrily. Then he turned and hurried out.
‘Now we can talk.’ Jan Tucek smiled. The sunlight caught a flash of gold teeth. But the smile did not extend to his eyes. ‘But we must be quick. Soon he will return with an interpreter. Tell me, where do you stay?’
‘The Hotel Continental,’ I answered.