Ride a Pale Horse Read Online Free Page B

declare it inviolate.
    She could riffle through the corners of the envelopes, though, and check their numbers. All present. Including Tuesday: Village Visits, coffee stains and all. She hesitated. She couldn’t extract that envelope without risking a loosening of the tape, even a break in its seal. Better leave it virgin-pure until she reached Vienna; it looked a nicely official package as it was. Censors’ approval had even been stamped on the lower left-hand corner of each envelope.
    She still hesitated. Don’t look inside that envelope. Why? The less she knew, the safer she would be? And yet—she ought to know what she was carrying out of this country, she ought to know, even for the sake of a possible story. She was torn three ways: responsibility as a journalist; responsibility as a citizen (You will be helping your country, too); responsibility to a human being (My life is in your hands).
    But was all that really true? How would she know if it was? Only a quick reading of the letters—and were they letters?—could tell her the real facts.
    She didn’t have time to find out. A knock at the door, a maid waiting to take down her luggage, ended all temptation. For the time being, certainly. Hurriedly, she locked the envelopes into her briefcase, reached for her white tweed jacket in the wardrobe, shouldered her purse. “One bag, one typewriter,” she told the woman. “No, not the briefcase! I carry that myself.”
    With a sigh, she inspected herself in the mirror. She looked perfectly normal. A good thing that the beating of her heart didn’t show through her Chanel-type suit. You’ll do, she told herself. She wished at this moment that she hadn’t thought, quite suddenly, of Tony Marcus. Her hand tightened on her briefcase. Inwardly, she flinched as she entered the crowded elevator and found two uniformed officials jammed close to her. Outwardly, she seemed oblivious to any attention paid to her profile by the men, to her clothes by the women, accepting their stares as she always did.
    She saw Vasek in the distance, pretending not to notice her safe departure. It was exactly half past four and the car waiting.
    “What’s the difference between Switzerland and Czechoslovakia?” she asked its driver, who would no doubt see her loaded right onto the plane, making sure she had no quiet conversation with any stranger or accepted any package.
    He shook his head, looked blankly at her as if he were lost in the woods they had now left behind.
    “There, the trains run on time. Here, the people run on schedule.”
    It took him almost a minute before he said stiffly. “We are efficient. You have noticed?”
    How could I help it? “Most efficient,” she assured him. And what about Switzerland?
    He relaxed into a smile. Lucky I had the sense, she thought, not to say “people are made to run on schedule.” I nearly did: it was tempting. And now, on the straight highway, she was being given an explanation of such efficiency. It was because of their education, the best there was. No illiteracy, here. In his third year of elementary school, he had even started a foreign language—obligatory.
    “Russian?”
    He nodded. “Later, we have German or English—often both.”
    In that case, with all those linguists walking the streets, why did I need to have an interpreter as my escort? But she was on her best behaviour, resisting all temptation, and the journey to the airport went without incident. Her passage through the checkpoints was without incident, too. Fortunate, she thought, that all these X-ray machines did not register her dry mouth and racing pulse.

4
    A summer afternoon in Vienna, a successful meeting completed with a most likely candidate for high political office, and now a peaceful hour or two to sit at a café table and relax. Karen Cornell’s mood was improving. She slowed her pace to enjoy the enticing shop windows, the people strolling as leisurely as she was, listening to their voices, watching