Gregory was wondering if this was Mr. Leon Levianski. However, he had no intention of asking, as the approach had to be made with, the greatest circumspection. It was a possibility that one of Levianski's more recent letters to his cousin in New York had fallen into wrong hands. If so, it was quite on the cards that he would have been arrested for conveying useful information to the enemy. Any stranger enquiring for him thereafter would at once be suspect; and the last thing Gregory wanted was to have a description of himself in such a connexion turned in to the police.
The dark man came forward and said in passably good English: 'If you please, sir, I have no French. Speak with me please in English and tell me what you wish.'
In broken English Gregory once more enquired for fur which would make a warm collar to a travelling coat.
The furrier shrugged his broad shoulders and spread wide his hands, T regret. I have little to offer, sir. This time last year, yes. I could have given you choice of a dozen Sea Otter. Smartest and best wearing fur for gentleman's coat. But now, some odd pieces of Persian Lamb which we could make up; otherwise nothing.'
'Why have you become so short of stock?' Gregory enquired.
'Russia,' came the prompt reply. 'Our Hungarian troops, they go properly clothed for the war we fight. But the Germans, no. Hitler is everyone say a very clever man. Perhaps, but his judgment is not good when he expects to conquer Russia in one summer campaign. Winter comes and many thousand Germans they shiver, get frostbite, die. Their Fraus and Fräuleins make sacrifice of vanity and send them fur coats. But it is not enough. Our Government orders that we hold nothing back from the German Mission that comes to purchase.' After an almost imperceptible pause he added, 'And as they are our Allies it is right that we should give best help. But it has left us deplete, very deplete.'
'I quite understand,' Gregory replied, 'It was a Sea Otter that I wanted though; so I think I had better try elsewhere. Still, I'm sorry, as furs are tricky things; and I was assured by a Mr. Levianski of New York that your firm was a reliable one.'
'You know my cousin, then!' exclaimed the furrier. 'But this is different. For you I will enquire of my friends in the trade, and somehow a Sea Otter find for you.'
'Would you, perhaps, be Mr. Leon Levianski?' Gregory now felt it safe to ask.
'Why, yes. And that you should know my cousin is of much interest. Has it been long, please, since you see him in New York?'
Gregory held the dark eyes only a few feet from his own with a steady glance, and said in a low voice. 'I have never met your cousin; but I know about the letters that you write to him.'
Levianski's face blanched slightly, then he essayed a not very convincing laugh. 'My letters! I am surprise that he should think it worth while to show to anyone. They are gossips only of things here which I think might interest him.'
'Your gossip has been found interesting by good friends of his who wish well to Hungary,' Gregory swiftly sought to reassure him. 'And I would greatly like to talk to you about this. Could you meet me for a drink somewhere this evening?'
'Yes, I could do that,' Levianski agreed after a moment's hesitation. 'Where have you to suggest?'
Gregory smiled. 'It is always safer to discuss this sort of business in a crowd. Would six o'clock at the Cafe Mignon on the Corso suit you?'
'Thank you. Yes, please. I am happy to make acquaintance.' Returning his smile, the furrier bowed him out of the door.
As it was a heavenly afternoon, Gregory decided to have a bathe. The Hungarians have a passion for bathing and, it is said, there are no less than one hundred and sixty public baths in Budapest to choose from. But he had no hesitation in having himself driven in another old fiacre across the bridge to the Margareten lnsel.
The oblong pool there was as large as a small lake. Its sides for twenty feet out, sloped very gradually so that hundreds of children could splash about along them without danger; yet there was still ample room in the middle of the pool and at its deep end for an equal number of good swimmers to enjoy themselves without undue crowding.
Gregory dived and swam for about half an hour, then came out and lay sunning himself on the sand which had been brought from the shores of Lake Balaton as a surround for the pool. It was delightful there in the warm windless air, with the faint hum of conversation and occasional laughter coming from the groups nearby. The fact that millions of men, from the arctic to the deserts of Egypt and the remotest islands of the Pacific, were at that moment desperately endeavouring to kill each other, when they might be enjoying something similar to this, struck him as both tragic and crazy.
Yet his bliss was not entirely unalloyed, for he was subconsciously a little lonely. He would have given a lot to have had Erika there or Sabine. A mental picture of the latter, as she had once sat beside him not many yards from where he was lying now, flashed into his mind. Only the more intimate parts of her slender golden brown body had been encased in a white satin swimsuit, and she had been sitting with her hands clasped round her bent knees, from time to time shaking the dark hair which fell to her shoulders, because its ends had got a little wet under the bathing cap she had just taken off.
As he thought idly of the fun they had had together he wondered where she was now, and if he would run into her. Then, with a little shock, he realized that such a meeting could prove highly dangerous. She knew him to be an Englishman, and her country was at war with Britain. She knew, too, that he had acted as Sir Pellinore's secret agent in getting to the bottom of at least one conspiracy to sabotage British interests; so she would immediately jump to the conclusion that he had come to Budapest as a spy. Women who have parted with their lovers as good friends are, he knew, more prone to be ruled by pleasant memories than patriotic considerations; so he thought the odds were that she would not turn him over to the police, but one could never tell. There was, too, the nasty possibility that should they suddenly come face to face in the presence of other people she might, from astonishment at seeing him, give him away inadvertently.
Much as he would have liked to spend a few hours with her again and hear from her what she had made of her life, he decided that he must keep a sharp lookout for her and, should he see her, beat a quick retreat before she had a chance to recognize him.
While in the pool he had seen that there were many more women than men bathing and among them quite a number of pretty girls, some of whom had looked at him more than once with the sort of glance which invites conversation. But he had no intention of becoming involved in anything of that kind, even temporarily. It was just such dalliance with young women about whom one knew nothing which could have the most unexpected repercussions and, at times, lead men employed on his sort of work to an extremely sticky end.
In due course he dressed, drank a baratsch at the pool bar, then had himself driven to the Corso. Sitting down at one of the tables in front of the Cafe Mignon, he ordered himself a stein of dark lager, and soon afterwards saw Levianski coming towards him.
With a wave of his hand and a smile he called out as if to an old acquaintance, 'Wei geht es Ihnen Was wollen Sie irinken?'
The broad shouldered little Jew returned his greeting, said that he too would like a dark lager, then, sitting down, added in a lower voice, 'So you do speak German?'
Gregory answered in an equally low tone, 'My pretending not to was only a ruse aimed at getting your assistant to fetch, someone who spoke French or English. I hoped it might be you; and I was lucky. But we will speak German together from now on, so as not to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves.'
Nodding agreement, Levianski said, 'Now tell me, please, how you came to see my letters, and what you want with me.'
That he could not be expected to talk freely, unless he was trusted to some extent, was obvious. But Gregory did not mean to reveal his true identity. With disarming candour he replied:
'My name is Etienne Tavenier, and I am a retired Major of the French Army. For some time I have been living in Switzerland. I am not a de Gaullist but
my sympathies are with the Allies. Naturally they have an information centre there. I have an English friend who works in it, and he asked me if I would make this visit to Budapest. I agreed, but I do not come as a spy, to pry into military matters. I assure you of that. Although I have been a soldier I am at heart a man of peace; and my one wish is to help in any way I can to stop this terrible war before it destroys all Europe.'
Having paused to light a cigarette, he went on, 'Evidently the letters you wrote to your cousin were passed on by him, as I feel sure you must have intended them to be. Anyhow, copies of them were sent to the Middle Europe Section of the Allies' information centre in Switzerland. That is how your name came to be given to me as a man I could trust, and one who might be able to help me with the answers to certain questions that I have come here to investigate.'
Levianski's dark eyes were quite expressionless as he asked, 'What are those questions?'
'They can really all be embodied in one. What is the attitude of the Hungarian people towards the war?'
'That is not simple to answer. The fact that I am a Jew does not make me any the less a Hungarian; but my attitude is very different from that of the average Catholic priest, big landowner or peasant.'
'Naturally. But what I mean is, do you believe that the bulk of the people are convinced of the Tightness of the cause for which they are fighting?'
'I can only repeat that the views of the main elements which make up our population vary greatly. You see, Hungary is quite different from most other nations. Her classes are not integrated in the same way. By that I do not mean that we are torn by class warfare. In fact, in peace time, we suffer very little from labour troubles, and in all classes there is a high degree of patriotism. But, where international relations are concerned, there is no unity of opinion to bind us together; as, for example, the mutual hatred of the French and the Germans which is common to all classes in both countries.'
'Please go on, and tell me about these conflicting interests.'
'Well, to start with, Hungary has not yet really emerged from feudalism. The greater part of the land is still divided into vast estates which are owned by a hundred or so families. They lost them after the First World War, but the Bolshevik revolution led here by Beia Khun lasted only six months. That was not long enough to destroy the attitude of mind of the peasants, which had been engrained into them through many centuries. When the magnates returned from temporary exile their peasants received them joyfully, restored their lands and went back to work for them.
'By the Treaty of Trianon the size of Hungary was reduced by half. In that way many of these great magnates lost some of their estates; but most of them retained enough land and wealth for their way of life to remain almost unaltered. In their great country houses they keep staffs of up to fifty servants, and as many more outside to run their stables and their shooting parties. Up there, opposite to us, on the hill of Buda the great stone buildings that you can see are their town palaces. All of them hold priceless art treasures and fine libraries, for the Hungarian aristocracy is a highly cultured one; but it has the faults as well as the virtues of all feudal aristocracies.
'The Magyar nobility is brave, open handed and casually kind to those who are dependent upon it, but it is also proud, cynical and immoral. They despised the Austrian aristocracy because in most cases Austrian family trees do not go back, by several hundred years, as far as theirs. They regard Hitler and his Nazi Gauleiters as the scum of the gutters. Yet, for their own ends, they received the Austrians as equals and treat these jumped-up Germans with most considerate politeness. As for their morals, those of cats are better. The tittle-tattle of their servants on that aspect of their lives is so consistent that it cannot be doubted. Within their own small circle husbands, wives and even unmarried girls take and exchange paramours with a freedom which would be considered utterly shameful did they occupy a less exalted station.
'You will appreciate, therefore, that they are concerned only to maintain their privileged position. But naturally they also have a heavy bias towards any policy which, while protecting their present sources of wealth, might lead to their getting back the estates which they lost in 1920 by the creation of Poland, Czechoslovakia and a greatly enlarged Rumania.'
Levianski took a long pull at his lager, then went on. 'You will now expect me to speak of the middle classes. Well, there are none. At least not as there are in other countries. The noble Magyars would not soil their hands with commerce, or allow even their remotest relatives to do so. That is, until 1920, After the revolution some of the younger ones who had become impoverished through it became motor salesmen, travel agents and so on; also the general spread of education qualified a few thousand of the younger peasants to move into the towns and replace the Austrians who had previously acted as our petty officials, but neither group is sufficiently numerous to form a class. It was the void between lord and peasant which attracted my people to Hungary. That was many centuries ago, of course, but the Jews gradually established themselves here and by their industry made themselves indispensable.
'Today in Pest there are three hundred thousand of us nearly a third of the population of the capital. Many of our families have grown rich on the proceeds of doing the things that the aristocracy was too proud or too lazy to do; but we have served Hungary well. We are the doctors, the lawyers, the industrialists, the importers of the things that Hungary must have and the exporters of the things she has to sell. Without us the country would fall into a state of chaos overnight. The Magyar lords have always recognized that; therefore they have not only given us their protection through the centuries, but treated us generously. Whether they would be strong enough to continue to do so with Europe at peace and Hitler its overlord is a very different question.
'We watch with awful fear what is happening in the lands where Hitler has only to give an order for it to be obeyed. Himmler is, if possible, even more demented in his racial theories than his master. From the Germanic part of Poland he deported a million Jews, and to fill the void he has been dragging from all parts of Europe people, many of whom cannot even speak German, just because they are of German blood. For them it means loss of homes, properties, friends and occupation; but these Nazis are too fanatical to care even for the welfare of their own race.
'For my people, of course, matters are infinitely worse. They are despoiled of everything except the clothes in which they stand up. Last winter thousands of the women, children and old folk who were despatched to East Prussia, packed into cattle trucks, did not survive the journey. They were frozen stiff hours before they reached their destination.
'In Austria things are no better. Within a week of the Anschluss, at the order of Heydrich, Karl Adolf Eichmann set up in Vienna his "Office for Jewish Emigration". A very few, like Mr. Louis de Rothschild who ransomed himself by signing away his steel rolling mills, were allowed to emigrate; 180,000 others were not so fortunate. Most of them are dead; the rest tortured skeletons in huge concentration camps, like Dachau and Mauthausen.
'Eichmann's "Office" already has a branch in Budapest. It has been spending enormous sums in stirring up anti Jewish feeling here. As the Government would find it almost impossible to carry on its war industries without us, we are still protected. But if Hitler and Himmler were freed from their war commitments…'
'You would not have a hope,' Gregory cut in. 'They would send in their Germans to take over your businesses; and it could only be a matter of time before you suffered the same terrible fate as the Jews in Germany, Poland and Austria. Now, what about the peasants?'
'The Germans and the Russians are both hereditary enemies of the Hungarian people,' Levianski replied, 'but they dislike the Germans more because for so long they were bullied by the German speaking Austrian petty officials and tax gatherers. In their case, though, there is a more important factor than race prejudice; it is religion. Roman Catholicism still has a firm hold on Hungarians both rich and poor. The country people are devout and their villa
ge priests are looked up to by them. They are told from the pulpits that Stalin is anti Christ and that they must think of the war against the godless hordes of Russia as a crusade. Therefore, much as they dislike the Germans, they are fighting beside them, for the most part, willingly.'
'To sum up, then,' said Gregory, 'the nobility will continue to support Germany because they fear that a Russian victory would lead to their losing everything, and the peasants will fight on in defence of their religious beliefs; but your people would rather see the Russians win, as the lesser evil.'
Levianski pulled a face. 'It would be only a lesser evil. Things were bad enough during the Bela Khun revolution. The Sovietization of Hungary would mean the loss of our businesses and private fortunes. But at least our lives would be spared; and that is more than we could hope for under a Nazi controlled government.'
'I think you are right that the Russians would plunder Jewish and Christian capitalists alike, if Hungary fought on to the end and Germany is defeated. But it would be a very different state of affairs if she decided to make a separate peace now. I feel sure that, pressed as they are at the moment, the Russians would be only too glad to guarantee Hungary's independence, and that the other allies would underwrite that guarantee.'
'Ah, yes,' Levianski sighed. 'If only that could be brought about how happy we should all be. But I see no prospect of it. Besides, if Hungary deserted her allies, it is quite on the cards that the Nazis would march in, and we would then be at the mercy of their Gestapo murder squads.'
'I don't think that would happen. Hitler has his hands full in Russia. He couldn't spare the divisions to open up another front; and that is what he would have to do if he were opposed by the Hungarian army.'
'Perhaps you are right.'
'I'm sure I am; and think what such a move could lead to. If Hungary made a separate peace and withdrew her troops from the Russian front, that might be the beginning of the end. Hitler is in a relatively strong position now, but he must know that he will have to face up to America next year. He might very well decide that he could get a better peace by opening negotiations in 1942 than if he continues the struggle in '43 or '44. As I have told you, my one desire is to see peace restored before Europe becomes a shambles. But I am convinced that neither Britain nor Germany will make a first move; so the only hope is that one of the smaller countries will do so and set the ball rolling. It was for that I came to Hungary; to find out if there was any chance of her Government entering into a secret understanding should it be approached by the British.'
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