Алистер Маклин - Circus

The man left. Bruno went back to his table and showed the trophies. He said: ‘Let’s try it.’ He lifted the tiny meshed metal oval to his ear. Maria turned her mouth towards the collar of her coat.

She murmured: ‘I love you. Truly. Always.’

Bruno removed the earphone. ‘It works just fine, although it doesn’t seem to know what it’s saying.’ He put the equipment away. ‘A persistent lot, aren’t they. But so very, very obvious.’

‘Not to me. I think you should be doing my job. But did you have to let him know we were on to him?’

‘They know anyway. Maybe now they’ll stop shadowing me and let me move around in peace. Anyway, how could I talk to you with that character invading my privacy?’

‘What is there to talk about?’

‘My brothers.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – why were they taken, Bruno?’

‘Well, for one thing, it’s given that hypocritical, twisting, sadistic liar–’

‘Sergius?’

‘Are there any other hypocritical, twisted, sadistic liars around? He had the perfect excuse to fingerprint every man in the circus.’

‘How will that help him?’

‘Apart from giving him a feeling of power and making him feel very clever, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They’re my hostages to fate. If I step too far out of line things will happen to them.’

‘Have you talked to Dr Harper about this? You can’t risk their lives, Bruno. You just can’t. Oh, Bruno, if I lose you and they’re lost and all the others in your family gone–’

‘Well, really, you are the biggest crybaby I’ve ever met. Who on earth picked you for the CIA?’

‘So you don’t believe this story about the kidnapping?’

‘Love me?’ She nodded. ‘Trust me?’ She nodded again. ‘Then don’t discuss anything I discuss with you with any other person at all.’

She nodded a third time. Then she said: ‘Including Dr Harper?’

‘Including Dr Harper. He has a brilliant mind, but he’s orthodox and doesn’t have the central European mentality. I’m not brilliant, but I’m unorthodox and I was born right here. He might not care for some improvisations I might care to make.’

‘What kind of improvisations?’

‘There you are. The perfect wife. How come that red stain on your handkerchief? How should I know what improvisations? I don’t even know myself yet.’

‘The kidnapping?’

‘Rubbish. He had to have a story to explain their disappearance. You heard him say he knew who a couple of the gang were but could prove nothing? If Sergius knew them he’d have them in Lubylan in nothing flat and he’d have the entire truth out of them in five minutes before they died in screaming agony. Where do you think you are – back home in New England?’

She shivered. ‘But why the threats? Why say they’d cut off your brothers’ fingers? Why ask for that money?’

‘Background colour. Besides, liberally rewarded though Sergius may be for his nefarious activities, fifty thousand bucks in the hip pocket gives a man a very comfortable feeling of support.’ He looked at his untouched coffee in distaste, put some money on the table and rose. ‘Like some real coffee?’

They returned to the exhibition hall looking for transport to the train, which was almost immediately arranged. As they moved out again into the darkness and the cold they met Roebuck coming in. He was pinched-looking, bluish and shivering. He stopped and said: ‘Hi. Going back to the train?’ Bruno nodded. ‘A lift for your tired and suffering friend.’

‘What are you suffering from? Been swimming in the Baltic?’

‘Come winter, all the cab-drivers in this town go into hibernation.’ Bruno sat silently in front on the way to the station. When they alighted at the siding opposite the passenger coaches Bruno sensed as much as felt something being slipped into his jacket pocket.

After the coffee, sweet music and sweet nothings in Bruno’s living-room, Maria left. Bruno fished out a tiny scrap of paper from his pocket. On it Roebuck had written: ‘4.30. West entrance. No question. My life on it.’ Bruno burnt the note and washed the ashes down the hand-basin.

It was during the last performance on the following night – it was officially billed as the opening night, although, in fact, there had already been two performances, a free matinée for school children and a somewhat shortened version of the full show in the afternoon – that the accident happened. Such was the rapturous enthusiasm among the huge audience that the effect was all the more shocking when it came.

The Winter Palace had not one empty seat left, and over ten thousand applications for tickets, made in advance over the previous two weeks, had had to be regretfully refused. The atmosphere at the beginning was gay, festive, electric in anticipation. The women, who gave the lie to the western concept of Iron Curtain women being habitually dressed in belted potato sacks, were dressed as exquisitely as if the Bolshoi were visiting town – which indeed it had done, thought not to so tumultuous a welcome – and the men were resplendent in either their best suits or in bemedalled uniforms. Sergius, seated next to Wrinfield, looked positively resplendent. Behind the two of them sat Kodes and Angelo, the latter tending slightly to lower the whole tone of the atmosphere. Dr Harper, as ever, sat in the front row, the ever-present black bag unobtrusively under his seat.

The audience, suitably primed by all the wildly enthusiastic reports that had preceded the circus, were prepared for magnificence and that night they got it. As if to make up for the absence of The Blind Eagles – a broadcast announcement before the start of the performance had regretted that two members were indisposed, what Sergius didn’t want to get into the papers didn’t get into the papers – the performers reached new heights that even astonished Wrinfield. The crowd – there were eighteen thousand there – were entranced, enthralled. Act merged into act with the smooth and flawless precision for which the circus was justly famed and each act seemed better than the one that had preceded it. But Bruno that evening surpassed them all. That night he was not only blindfolded but hooded as well and his repertoire on the high trapeze, helped only by two girls on the platforms, who handled the two free trapezes in timing with the strict metronomic music from the orchestra, had an almost unearthly magic about it, a sheer impossibility that even had the most experienced circus artistes riveted in a stage halfway between awe and outright disbelief. He climaxed his act with a double somersault between two trapezes – and his outstretched hands missed the approaching trapeze. The heart-stopping shock throughout the audience was a palpable thing – unlike the crowds at many sports ranging from auto-racing to boxing, circus audiences are always willing the performers to safety – and equally palpable was the sigh of incredulous relief when Bruno caught the trapeze with his arched heels. Just to show that there was no fluke about it, he did it all over again – twice.

The crowd went hysterical. Children and teenagers screamed, men shouted, women cried in relief, a cacophony of noise that even Wrinfield had never heard before. It took the ringmaster three full minutes and repeated broadcast appeals to restore a semblance of order to the crowd.

Sergius delicately mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. ‘No matter what you pay our young friend up there, it must always be only a fraction of what he is worth.’

‘I pay him a fortune and I agree with you. Have you ever seen anything like that?’

‘Never. And I know I never will again.’

‘Why?’

Sergius cast about for an answer. He said: ‘We have an old saying in our country: “Only once in a lifetime is a man permitted to leave himself and walk with the gods.” Tonight was such a night.’