EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE

There was a strange driving rule then which has gone now, and it was called "the rule of the right." At least that is how Dad explained it while we were driving to school one day. It meant that when you wanted to turn left at an intersection, you first pulled into the street coming in from the right before turning hard to the left and waiting for the traffic lights to change. That way, you never turned left across the oncoming traffic or the trams, which had right-of-way on the rails that ran down the center of the streets.

We would wait for the lights to change, the wipers going swoosh-swoosh, watching the cars go by. Quite a few of them were Tatras, the biggest of the Communist cars, and they were a riveting sight. They looked like no other car I had ever seen, and, having been living abroad with my family, I had seen more than most. Tatras looked like sharks on wheels, long black sharks. They often had black windows too. The shape was humpbacked and completely smooth, with the headlights set behind glass panels that ran the whole way across the front. There were no visible wheel arches as the tires disappeared completely beneath the vehicle's great streamlined bulk, and the back, where the engine was, sloped away like a stretchedout Volkswagen Beetle. But the thing that really set this car apart was this: running down that sloping back, set between twin rear windows, was a great big shark's fin.

"They're all secret police cars," Dad explained. "Ordinary people never get them."

Mother said: "Can you just imagine the sort of things that happen in them? The sort of things they do in those cars?" I tried. I thought of secret policemen strangling someone behind the smoked glass, strangling someone with a rope wrapped around his neck.