Judgment on Deltchev by Eric Ambler

should meet again with the Anglo-American representatives and urge them to delay the final decision on the proposals previously made.’ The prosecutor’s witnesses declared that the ‘discussion’ in question had been an effort by Deltchev and hishenchmen to stampede the Committee into accepting a set of Anglo-American proposals it had not even seen and that the Committee’s decision had made Deltchev ‘grind his teeth with rage’. The judges had a word or two to say and even the defendant’s counsel, Stanoiev, felt it safe to join in this sort of argument. At one point, indeed, there was a fair simulation of a legal battle between the two advocates – a battle between two clowns with rubber swords – and, in the approved fashion, high words were exchanged.
    The only effective witness was Lipka. He was one of those angry, embittered men who bear the news of their defeat in their faces; prepared always for hostility, they succeed in provoking no more than weary impatience. A talentless but ambitious man, he had been an Agrarian Socialist deputy for many years without achieving office, and his membership on the Committee had seemed to him the long-awaited recognition of his worth and the beginning of his period of fulfilment. In fact, his value to the unconstitutional Committee had resided simply in his status as an elected deputy, and when posts in the Provisional Government were being allotted he had been passed over without a thought. From that moment he had nursed an almost pathological hatred of Deltchev. At one time that hatred had been something over which people smiled and shrugged. Now, at last, the People’s Party had turned it to account. His mode of attack was stupid but damaging.
    Most of those whose work is directly related to the moods and behaviour of the public are inclined to refer to it on occasion in disparaging, even insulting terms. But, while a gibe at popular stupidity from a harassed bus conductor may be amusing, the same gibe from the mouthof a leading politician has, for many, an uglier sound. What Lipka did was to quote Deltchev’s private comments on various matters and contrast them with public utterances made by him at the same time.
    ‘Papa’ Deltchev had made a speech officially regretting an incident in which some peasants, misunderstanding or ignoring a Red Army order to keep out of a certain area, had been shot down by Russian sentries. In private he had said, ‘It might not be a bad thing if a few more of the damn fools were shot.’ After a speech congratulating the farmers on their public-spirited efforts to send more food to the towns ‘Papa’ Deltchev had said privately, ‘Thank God, they’ve had sense enough at last to find the black market.’ On his own proposals for dealing with the fuel shortage ‘Papa’ Deltchev had remarked, ‘And if they’re still cold we can always print a few more copies of the regulations for them to burn.’
    There were altogether about a dozen examples given of the prisoner’s ‘contemptuous disregard of the welfare of the people whose interests he pretended to have at heart’. No doubt there were, as Lipka claimed, many others that could have been quoted. The muttered asides of an overworked Minister of State grappling with administrative chaos are unlikely to be distinguished for their sweetness or reason, and if he is an impatient man with crude notions of humour, they may be better forgotten. Certainly they cannot fairly be used as evidence of his true mind and intentions.
    In his only interruption of the day Deltchev made this point himself. He said, ‘The doctor called out in the middle of a cold night may privately curse all mankind, but that curse does not prevent his doing his best for the patient.’
    This remark was immediately excluded from the record as irrelevant. It had its effect in court, but I was beginning to see that it was not in the court that Deltchev was being tried.
    Petlarov’s comments were not