He swore under his breath in Czech. ‘Suit yourself.’

‘You owe me,’ she repeated stubbornly.

‘Perhaps I do. But maybe you owe me, Laure. Did you ever consider that?’

Astonished, she turned back from her contemplation of the famous boulevard which the now falling snow was dusting with a cold beauty. ‘I hope you know what it’s like to feel almost mad with anguish knowing that someone you love is incarcerated.’ She said simply.

‘I do know,’ he replied. ‘Incarceration comes in many forms.’

‘Oh, please,’ she said.

They sat in silence for the rest of the journey.

The driver nosed the car into the drop-off point of the hotel. Petr leant forward and placed his hand on the door handle. ‘I leave you with this thought. You put me in an untenable position. No regime looks kindly on defectors, let alone a regime that had Russia’s hands around its neck. I was known to be employing someone consorting with dissidents. I was at risk of bringing down my family. They would have killed us. Some of us. One of us.’

‘Yet, you would allow them to take Tomas.’

‘Dog eat dog. Isn’t that a saying in your country?’

With a quick movement, she turned away and he saw that there were tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘If Tomas is dead, I want him to have a grave. I want everyone to know that he loved freedom and was imprisoned and murdered for saying so.’

CHAPTER 17

Prague, 1986

THE HEAT CONTINUED AND IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM AT THE Kobes’ apartment, the stack of clean clothes mounted. There was so much of it that Laure was forced to allocate an hour or so a day on the ironing.

She didn’t give a toss. Ironing was mindless. It gave her time and space to think and to brood over her meetings with Tomas: what he said, what he did.

She felt for him in her pounding heart. In her sleeplessness. She felt for him in her shaky legs and aching arms. The fever in her groin.

What was he thinking? And: was he thinking of her?

She tried to memorize the lyrics which he was setting to the melody he had played to her at the marionette theatre. They had been taken from a satirical pamphlet circulating underground entitled ‘The Seven Wonders of Czechoslovakia’.

‘Although everybody has a job, nobody works,’ she whispered, spraying water over the shirt with which she was wrestling. The cuff needed adjusting and a button had worked loose.

‘Although nobody works, the Plan is fulfilled up to 105 per cent.’

The water left a waterfall of moisture on the skirt of Eva’s cotton dress.

‘Although the Plan is fulfilled up to 105 per cent, there’s nothing in the shops.’

Petr put his head around the door. ‘I thought I would find you here.’