Deadspeak

He arrived in a skidding of tyres, jumped from the car and ran headlong into the one-room, chalet-style building. The border policeman behind his elevated desk picked up his peaked, flat-topped hat and rammed it on his head. He glared at Zharov and the Russian glared back. Beyond the dusty, fly-specked windows, the last caravan was just passing under the raised pole.

'What?' the Russian yelled. 'Are you some kind of madman? What are you, Hungarian or Romanian?'

The other was young, big-bellied, red-faced. A Transylvanian village peasant, he had joined the Securitatea because it had seemed easier than farming. Not much money in it, but at least he could do a bit of bullying now and then. He quite liked bullying, but he wasn't keen on being bullied.

'Who are you?' he scowled, his piggy eyes startled.

'Clown!' Zharov raged. 'Those Gypsies - do they simply come and go? Isn't this supposed to be a checkpoint? Does President Ceausescu know that these riff-raff pass across his borders without so much as a by your leave? Get off your fat backside; follow me; a spy is hiding in those caravans!'

The border policeman's expression had changed. For all he knew (and despite the other's harsh foreign accent), Zharov might well be some high-ranking Securitatea official; certainly he acted like one. But what was all this about spies? Flushing an even brighter red, he hurried out from behind his desk, did up a loose button on his sweat-stained blue uniform shirt, nervously fingered the two-day-old stubble on his chin. Zharov led him out of the shack, got back into his car and hurled the passenger-side door open. 'In!' he snapped.

Cramming himself into the small seat, the confused man blusteringly protested: 'But the Travellers aren't a problem. No one ever troubles them. Why, they've been coming this way for years! They are taking one of their own to bury him. And it can't be right to interfere with a funeral.'

'Lunatic!' Zharov put his foot down hard, skidded dangerously close to the rearmost caravan and began to overtake the column. 'Did you even look to see if they might be up to something? No, of course not! I tell you they have a British spy with them called Harry Keogh. He's a wanted man in both the USSR and Romania. Well, and now he's in your country and therefore under your jurisdiction. This could well be a feather in your cap - but only if you follow my instructions to the letter.'

'Yes, I see that,' the other mumbled, though in fact he saw very little.

'Do you have a weapon?'

'What? Up here? What would I shoot, squirrels?'

Zharov growled and stamped on his brakes, skidding the car sideways in front of the first horse-drawn caravan. The column at once slowed and began to concertina, and as the dust settled Zharov and the blustering border policeman got out of the car.

The KGB man pointed at the covered caravans, where scowling Gypsies were even now climbing down onto the road. 'Search them,' he ordered.

'But what's to search?' said the other, still mystified. 'They're caravans. A seat at the front, a door at the back, one room in between. A glance will suffice.'

'Any space which would conceal a man, that's what you search!' Zharov snapped.

'But... what does he look like?' the other threw up his hands.

'Fool!' Zharov shouted. 'Ask what he doesn't look like! He doesn't look like a fucking Gypsy!'

The mood of the Travellers was ugly and getting worse as the Russian and his Securitatea aide moved down the line of caravans, yanking open their doors and looking inside. As they approached the last in line, the funeral vehicle, so a group of the Szgany put themselves in their way.

Zharov snatched out his automatic and waved it at them. 'Out of the way. If you interfere I won't hesitate to use this. This is a matter of security, and grave consequences may ensue. Now open this door.'

The Gypsy who had spoken to Harry Keogh stepped forward. 'This was our king. We go to bury him. You may not go into this caravan.'

Zharov stuck the gun up under his jaw. 'Open up now,' he snarled, 'or they'll be burying two of you!'

The door was opened; Zharov saw two coffins lying side by side on low trestles where they had been secured to the floor; he climbed the steps and went in. The border policeman and Gypsy spokesman went with him. He pointed to the left-hand coffin, said: 'That one... open it.'

'You are cursed!' said the Gypsy. 'For all your days, which won't be many, you are cursed.'

The coffins were of flimsy construction, little more than thin boards, built by the Travellers themselves. Zharov gave his gun to the mortified border policeman, who fully expected the next curse to be directed at him, and took out his bone-handled knife. At the press of a switch eight inches of steel rod with a needle point slid into view. Without pause Zharov raised his arm and drove the tool down and through the timber lid, so that it disappeared to the hilt into the space which would be occupied by the face of whoever lay within.

Inside the coffin, muffled, someone gasped: 'Huh - huh - huh!' And there came a bumping and a scrabbling at the lid.

The Gypsy's dark eyes bugged; he crossed himself, stepped back on wobbly legs; likewise the border policeman. But Zharov hadn't noticed. Nor had he noticed the high smell, which wasn't merely garlic. Gri

And from within, someone pushed it the rest of the way... but it wasn't Harry Keogh!

Then-

- Even as the Russian's eyes stood out in his pallid face, so Vasile Zirra coughed and grunted in his coffin, and reached up a leathery arm to grasp Zharov and lever himself upright!

'God!' the KGB man choked then. 'G - G – God!' His knife fell from his slack jaws into the coffin. The old dead Gypsy king took it up at once and drove it into Zharov's bulging left eye - all the way in, until it scraped the inside of his skull at the back. That was enough, more than enough.

Zharov blew froth from his jaws and stepped woodenly back until he met the side of the caravan, then toppled over sideways. Falling, he made a rattling sound in his throat, and, striking the floor, twitched a little. And then he was still.

But nothing else was still.

At the front of the column a Gypsy drove Zharov's car into the ditch at the side of the road. The Securitatea lout was reeling back in the direction of his border post, shouting: 'It had nothing to do with me - nothing -nothing!' The Szgany spokesman stepped over Zharov's body, looked fearfully at his old king lying stiff and dead again in his coffin, crossed himself a second time and manhandled the cover back into place. Then someone shouted, 'Giddup!' and the column was off again at the trot.

Half a mile down the road, where the roadside ditch was deep and grown with brambles and nettles, Nikolai Zharov's corpse was disposed of. It bounced from caravan to road to ditch, and flopped from view into the greenery...

Even as Harry had drained the soup in the bowl to its last drop, drug and all, so he'd brought Wellesley's talent into play and closed his mind off from outside interference. The Gypsy potion had been quick-acting; he hadn't even remembered being bundled into the funeral caravan and 'lain to rest' in the second coffin.

But his mental isolation had disadvantages, too. For one, the dead could no longer communicate with him. He had of course taken this into account, weighing it against what Vasile Zirra had told him about the short-term effect of the Gypsy drug. And he'd been sure he could spare an hour or two at least. What the old king hadn't told him was that only a spoonful or two of drugged soup would suffice. In draining the bowl dry, the Necroscope had dosed himself far too liberally.