He raised the garage door for me and I put the car to bed. If we needed it, it would be there. If not, it would still be there. And, in any case, it would be where no one would report it as an abandoned vehicle, and where no passing cop would take any special notice of its license number.

I collected Greta where I had left her. “I was afraid you would not come back,” she said. “What happened to the car?”

“I left it to be repaired. Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“I’d like to have a look at that castle.”

“At this hour? We should find a place to sleep. I’m exhausted.”

“You have to sleep now?”

“Darling, it is the middle of the night.”

“Oh.”

“The morning will be time enough to look at the castle.”

“I’m too keyed up to sleep, Greta. I want to see where they’re holding Kotacek. I want to-”

“I know a way to help you relax.”

“No, not now.” I thought for a moment. “But you need a place to sleep, and we can’t use a hotel. Do you have friends in Prague?”

“Yes, a few.”

“Can you trust them?”

“No.”

It was a bad country for trusting one’s friends, it seemed. I closed my eyes and thought about Prague. There were various political friends of mine, but none of them struck me as ideal hosts for a young Nazi maiden. Then I remembered Klaus Silber.

“There is a man we can stay with,” I said. “A man here in Prague, a friend of mine. He will give you a bed for the night, and then I will join you in the morning.”

“Won’t you sleep?”

“Perhaps I’ll return in time to sleep a few hours. It doesn’t matter.”

“Will this man help us?”

“No. He is not sympathetic to our cause.”

“Then why go to him?”

“Because he will pay no attention to us,” I said. “He is a scientist, and a great one. An astronomer.”

“A professor?”

“They do not allow him to teach anymore.”

“Ah, I see. For political reasons?”

“No, he is not a political man. He will probably not want to talk with you at all. If he does, you might pretend to have difficulty with his language. No, that won’t do. He must speak a dozen languages. Let me think…”

“Is something wrong with this man?”

“No, not really. He was in a concentration camp during the war. It changed his view of the world. He’s a Jew, so it might be better if he didn’t know you were a German. What other languages do you have?”

“Just German and Czech.”

“Oh. Well, be a German then, if he asks, but don’t hand him any Nazi doctrine.”

“I am not a fool, darling.”

“I know. If he says anything that strikes you as strange, just pretend to agree with him. Tell him you are traveling with Evan Tanner, that I am on dangerous business. Tell him they are after us.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“He will not ask. That will be explanation enough for him. Tell him that I am very much taken with his moebius-strip theory and feel it might offer an acceptable rebuttal to the Blankenstein Proposition. Can you remember that?”

“If I could understand it…”

“You can’t, I don’t think. A moebius strip is a band with a twist in it, so that it only has one side. Can you follow that much?”

“No.”

“Good. Just memorize what you are supposed to tell him. Can you get it straight? Evan Tanner is very much taken with your moebius-strip theory and-”

She was a reasonably fast study. Once she had her lines down pat I tucked her into a cab and gave the driver Klaus Silber’s address. I put the luggage in the cab with her and watched her disappear into the night.

Hradecy Castle was not terribly hard to find. I could have taken a cab there, but I didn’t want anyone wondering why a man would want to look at a castle-turned-prison-turned-castle-turned-prison in the middle of the night, so instead I went looking for the place myself. I took a taxi to a hotel in Wenceslas Square and had little trouble finding the Vltava from there. I had a fair idea which direction would lead me to the castle. I headed in that direction, and there it was.

Even at that hour the structure was impressive. A broad base, about the size of a downtown bank. Long narrow windows trimmed with rococo gingerbread. Sixty feet up, the squarish base of the building gave way to a central peaked cathedral apex, with four rectangular towers at the corners. The towers extended perhaps another sixty feet or more, with narrow slits for windows. I could imagine how they were constructed on the inside. A taut spiral staircase running up each tower to the tiny roomlet at the top.

The defensive value of the design was obvious enough. Men posted in the tower rooms could remain quite safe while guarding the castle from all directions. Even a traitor within the gates would be hard put to knock out the marksmen in the towers. The spiral staircases were easily defended.

The towers made good dungeons, too. In one of them, I thought, Janos Kotacek awaited his trial and execution. There would be a guard posted at his door at the top of the long staircase. Perhaps there would be another guard halfway down the stairs. Perhaps not. But there would surely be a guard or two at the foot of the staircase, just as there were guards in the castle courtyard and in front of the castle gates.

Even if one got over the fence that surrounded the castle grounds, even if one managed the impossible feat of getting inside the castle walls, the whole business was still unworkable. It would be impossible to get up the staircase, impossible to get into Kotacek’s cell, and profoundly impossible, once in, to get oneself and Kotacek out of there. The only possible exit would involve the removal of a couple of iron bars and a plunge of some hundred fifty feet into the water of the Vltava River.

All out of the question.

I shouldn’t have come in the first place, I told myself. I should have told the soft pudgy madman from Washington to go to hell for himself. I was not one of his boys. Just because I had used him once to get the CIA off my back, just because he had been gull enough to believe I was one of his agents, the man was handing me idiot assignments. And I, idiot, was taking them. Go to Prague. Storm a castle. Save a Nazi. Come home and await further instructions.

Bah.

Well, it simply could not be done. I would have to find some way to get out of the country and back to the States. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to stay a week or so with Greta and Klaus Silber until the government had a chance to forget me. Then out of the country, without Kotacek but with my head still fastened to my shoulders, and back to New York. Then, if my puffy little chief ever condescended to contact me (“Don’t ever try to get in touch with us, Tanner. We’ll always be the ones to make contact”) I could tell him the job went sour. Or that it was easy, but I blew it – that might be best, because it would put him off the idea of using me in the future.

I felt a good deal better having decided all this. With all that taken care of, I slipped across the road and moved alongside the castle gate for a better look at things. Was the gate electrified? I studied it and couldn’t tell. I squatted down a foot from it and looked through it at the guards. There were three of them in the front yard of the castle, one on each side of the massive door, one at the head of the walk. The two on the door were talking, but I couldn’t catch any of the words.

Assuming one was fool enough to try, I thought, one would have to find some way to get the guards out of the castle. It wouldn’t be possible to get past them, and without an army it wouldn’t be feasible to take the citadel by storm. There would have to be some way to goad them all out and deal with them one by one, and all without arousing suspicion from any quarter.

Nonsense.

I moved back from the fence, slipped around the side toward the river. There was a light burning in the turret at the left rear corner of the castle. Kotacek’s light? Impossible to tell. Imagine negotiating each of those spiral staircases in turn, hunting for the right one. Climbing all the way up, then begging pardon when one stumbles on some arsonist or murderer, then heading down again and pressing on once more in the search for the Slovak Nazi.