‘Cathy,’ he whispered, almost whimpering. ‘Jesus, how do we tell Cathy? You’re her father . . . you married . . . Jesus, that’s sick.’ He sat up again and almost screamed. ‘You fucking bastard, you married her, your own daughter, did you know? All this time, did you know? She’ll go out of her mind, she’ll . . . Jesus . . .’
Paul closed his eyes, breathing audibly, his face ashen. ‘Of course I didn’t know. My God, do you think . . .? When I realized who she really was . . . and that was your fault, you lying bastard . . . when I realized what had happened to us, I felt as if a trapdoor had opened under my feet, it was like falling through space.’
‘It’s a lie, it can’t be true, you can’t be him!’ Gowrie screamed.
‘I wish to God I wasn’t. Ever since I found out, I haven’t been able to think straight. I had to be alone to try to think, and that hurt her, I knew I was hurting her, but I couldn’t do anything about it, the whole world had just disintegrated but I wasn’t ready yet to tell her, I didn’t know how to do it.’
Gowrie sat back again, staring at nothing. There was a long silence, then Vladimir said, thinking aloud, ‘I get it . . . the Russians lied? You weren’t killed, they took you away to be interrogated – you poor bastard, how long did they keep hammering on at you? Were they trying to get the names of all the student leaders out of you?’ He frowned, chewing his lower lip. ‘But surely they haven’t kept you locked up all this time?’
‘I wasn’t in that car when it crashed, Vlad,’ Paul said wearily. ‘I’d got out just before we reached the checkpoint. I was going to collect some petrol bombs we had made that afternoon – we were going to attack some Russian tanks with them that night once it was dark. We didn’t realize the Russians had set up a checkpoint round the corner. God knows why my friends didn’t stop. Too damned scared, I suppose. We had some printed leaflets with us in the car. You know the sort of stuff we used to hand out, we printed them in a cellar off Wenceslas Square, below a bakery. I did most of them myself, on an old hand press.’ His face contorted in a grin of mixed amusement and bitterness.
‘What’s funny?’ Vlad asked.
‘Life. It’s just so funny how things work out. I never thought when I was working down in that cellar, printing away, that one day I’d actually own a large printing works.’ Then he shrugged. ‘The leaflets were innocent enough, a lot of talk of freedom, that was all, but freedom was a dirty word after Dubcek fell.’
‘A very dangerous word, too,’ agreed Vlad. ‘If the Russians had found your leaflets they could have used them in a show trial, called you traitors!’
‘But they didn’t need to, because my friends panicked and were killed. I was just sliding quietly down a side-street when I heard the shouting, then shots, and then the explosion when the car blew up. I ran like hell, of course.’
‘But the official verdict was that you were in the car and were killed, too,’ Vladimir protested.
‘I know, I heard later. I went into hiding. An old friend had a tiny space under his roof, not even an attic, just a gap right under the beams. I couldn’t even stand up, and after three days crouched like that I could hardly walk. My friend heard the news about the car crash and told me my name was on the list of those killed, when he brought me water and bread the next morning, but the Russians came for him later that day. He vanished into prison on some trumped-up charge, and died there of a heart attack, so they claimed. The bastards probably tortured him, but he never betrayed me to them, because nobody came looking for me.’
‘How long did you stay hidden? Didn’t anyone know you were there? Was the house empty?’
‘No, his sister lived there too. She took care of me, brought me food and water every day, which was very brave and kind of her, because the body that had been identified as mine was that of her lover – a foreign student at Prague University, Paul Brougham. The irony of it was that he got into the car when I got out – that was why the authorities thought he was me. Nobody had seen us change places.’
‘So that’s where you got that name?’ Steve said flatly, hostility in his face as he watched the other man.
He had always had him down as an opportunistic acquisitive bastard, building his empire by grabbing this and that, even grabbing Steve’s girl, so he wasn’t surprised to hear that the man had snatched his very identity from its real owner.
Paul turned his head to look with wry understanding at him. He had always known Steve hated him; it was mutual, he had detested Steve too. He had been jealous of his old relationship with Cathy. His stomach clenched. He must not think about her. Must not.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘His girlfriend told me he was dead. She was heartbroken, but she still insisted on helping me. For his sake, for our country, she hated the Russians like poison. She brought me all his documents, including his passport, and told me everything she could remember about him, so that I would be word-perfect if I was stopped and questioned. He had been born in France, and had a French mother, but his father was English, so he had dual nationality and two passports. I got out of the country on the French passport.’
‘And nobody suspected anything?’ Vladimir asked with what sounded like admiration. Vlad was always impressed by daring and courage. Steve was too, and couldn’t deny that Pavel Narodni had exhibited both, but he had other reasons for hating the man.
Paul shrugged. ‘I grew a beard, because he had had one. We looked vaguely alike and his passport photo wasn’t very good, it was fuzzy. Our colouring was very similar, and the shapes of our faces. At the airport they hardly gave me a second look. Thousands of foreign students were flocking out of the country. I was just one of the crowd. The Russians had closed the borders and the airports for some days. By the time they let people leave there was a terrific pressure for seats. They weren’t interested in foreigners – just Czechs who might be trying to escape to the West.’
Steve coldly asked, ‘Why didn’t you let your wife know you had survived?’
Giving him an equally hostile look, Paul snapped back. ‘You don’t understand what life was like for us then. You Americans never do understand what life is like for everyone else. You live in a mental Disneyland. But life isn’t like that outside America.’
‘We’re not so innocent any more,’ Steve said. ‘Vietnam and a whole host of other wars have taught us quite a lot. I wish to God they hadn’t.’
Paul said curtly, ‘Well, I couldn’t risk letting Johanna know I wasn’t dead.’ He saw the contempt in Steve’s eyes and bit out, ‘As much for her sake as for my own. If the Russians had found out they might well have arrested her and tried to blackmail me into coming back.’
Vladimir grunted, making a face. ‘I guess they would, at that. It was the way they always worked, Steve. He’s right.’
‘OK, but couldn’t you have let her know later, when it was safer?’
‘I waited too long. I was too busy to think much about her at first. I could only just make enough money for myself to
live on, I couldn’t have sent her any money for the first few years. By the time I did have a good income it was too late.’
‘Oh, come on!’ Steve snarled. ‘What do you mean, too late?’
Paul gave him a look of deep dislike. ‘I mean it was too late. Literally. I got a private investigator to go to the village to look for her. He told me Anya was dead, and Johanna had remarried, some schoolteacher. I knew the baby she had been carrying when I left had been another little girl and the detective got me a photo of her at her first communion, but I couldn’t let Johanna know I was alive, could I? She had a new husband, she was expecting his baby – how could I wreck that for her?’