Free Judgment on Deltchev by Eric Ambler Page A

deductions even from facts. The fantasies that he will make from the falsehoods his case rests upon I leave to your imagination.” ’
    Petlarov showed his white teeth. ‘What a clever lawyer Yordan is!’ he said. ‘Do you not see what he has done, Herr Foster? Oh, certainly he has won the sympathy of the foreign diplomatists and press representatives, and that is very nice; but what else?’
    ‘He made the Prosecutor look a fool.’
    ‘He did more. Consider. He makes the speech in German. Why?’
    ‘Obviously so that he would be allowed to speak. The interpreters didn’t relay what he said, of course. As far as the public was concerned, he was unintelligible. Obviously it was the American and British representatives who mattered to him, and Vukashin and the judges and Prochaska didn’t want to antagonize them unnecessarily byshutting him up. If they don’t care much anyway about Western opinion, they could afford to let him talk.’
    ‘If it was the American and British who mattered, why did he not speak in English? Yordan speaks very good English.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘The educated persons of most small nations need a second language to their own. With us it is mostly German. Many of the Party members in that courtroom speak German, and some of them are not unfriendly to Yordan. Those were the persons who interested him. What he wanted to do – and what he has done, perhaps – is to discredit the Prosecution’s evidence in advance.’
    ‘That’s not difficult. It discredits itself.’
    ‘So far, yes. But perhaps Yordan was wiser than we yet know.’
    ‘I don’t understand you.’
    ‘It is quite simple.’ He leaned forward with a chilling smile. ‘You see, Herr Foster,’ he said, ‘some of the evidence against him may not discredit itself. Some of it may be true.’

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Deltchev’s house was on the edge of the city in an old residential quarter behind the Presidential Park. Petlarov had drawn a sketch map for me of the way there, and after an early dinner I walked to it from the hotel. There was a slight breeze and the air seemed cooler. The main streets and cafés were full of people, the women in their shapeless dresses and cheap wedge shoes, the men in their cloth caps, with their jackets over their arms, and their shirts undone at the neck; but beyond the park, where there were few shops and scarcely any cafés, the streets were almost deserted and the only sounds came from the radios in apartment houses.
    I found the quarter without difficulty. It was off the Boulevard Dragutin; six quiet streets, paved for a short distance from the Boulevard and then ending casually in a hillside wasteland of scrub and tamarisks. The streets were lined with plane trees and with square, solid old houses, each isolated within its own courtyard by a high wall with a heavy wooden door in it. The spaces between the walls of adjacent houses formed narrow lanes, some of which connected parallel streets but mostly were shut off by tall iron gates and choked with wild vines.
    The numbers on the houses were on blue enamel plates over the wall doors, and when I came to the right street I saw that Deltchev’s house must be the last in it. But thesetting sun was in my eyes and I did not see the guards outside the house until I was nearly upon them.
    They were standing in the shadow of the plane tree just by the door. The trunk of this tree was scarred and the lower branches were leafless; the grenade of American manufacture must have exploded just by it. The guards’ faces turned toward me as I approached.
    They were in the uniform of what I referred to in my own mind as the ‘military police’, though perhaps
‘gardes mobiles’
would have contained a more accurate comparison. They wore the same grey-green uniform as the courtroom guards; but these had rifles instead of machine pistols, and instead of tunics they had blouses bunched in at the waist by greasy leather belts with ammunition pouches. From a