by S. T. Haymon
‘Pretty close.’ Jurnet’s voice was firm with a confidence he did not feel. He directed his gaze pointedly at the open box. ‘Don’t tell me you’re at it again!’
‘Suspicious, eh?’ The man’s broad chest heaved with suppressed laughter, ‘Next thing I know, eh, if I’m not careful enough, I shall find myself down at the police station, as they say in the papers, helping the police with their inquiries!’
‘I hope you’re always ready to help the police without having to be carted down to Headquarters to do it.’
‘Headquarters! Then I must be important!’ The Hungarian looked intently at the detective, thrusting his big head forward. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, and with an abrupt end to raillery, he stated calmly: ‘I am here, as a matter of fact, not only to take away, but also to bring: to make sure that the papers are not Laz Appleyard, authorised version, nor yet Laz Appleyard, revised version, but Laz Appleyard the complete omnibus edition, unexpurgated and unabridged.’
The man took a step or two about the room, moving with an indecision that seemed foreign to his nature. He came to a stop with his back to the window, a position that bothered Jurnet who preferred the people he was interviewing to place themselves where the light fell full on their faces.
The detective said: ‘So long as it isn’t Laz Appleyard, the plausible lie.’
‘Ha!’ the other exclaimed, throwing up his hands in a gesture Jurnet classified as foreign. ‘You remember my own words against me, eh, when all I wanted, at the party, seeing the poor young man so cocksure he could clap my old friend Laz between hard covers like a bluebottle you only have to stay very still till it is inside, then bang! you have squashed it dead on the page, was to prick his conceit, if that were possible; sow a seed of becoming doubt. St George of England, Lawrence of Arabia, Appleyard of Hungary – all three, I think equally fairy stories: legends, useful like a double Scotch for stiffening the spirits in times of national emergency. But Laz Appleyard the man, not the hero –’ into Ferenc Szanto’s voice had come a note of deepest melancholy – ‘the devil, not the man – that is another story altogether.’ ‘I think,’ said Ferenc Szanto, ‘you wonder if I have not killed Mr Shelden in fear he might put into his book something I do not want written there.’ With a palm upraised to stop Jurnet, who was on the point of making an interjection: ‘Unless, perhaps, with your renowned British justice, you are prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt until Mr Biographer Two, and Three, and Four are also found dead at the bottom of the ramparts. You see how absurd it is. So, though it is partly for my own protection, it is chiefly to bring you closer to the person you seek that I tell you now that other story – the story of the real Laz Appleyard. At the end of it, if you believe me, there will be one less name on your list.’
‘You called him devil.’
‘Ah! I am glad I have caught your attention!’ The Hungarian resumed his seat, now in full light; the shallowness of shadow accentuating the Asiatic cast of his broad features. ‘What strange things you discover in this beautiful place, eh? – so peaceful in the English way, so well-bred about keeping its secrets in the family. First you learn that Queen Anne Boleyn slept with her brother like any feeble-minded peasant. Now you hear that Appleyard of Hungary –’ The man broke off and sat for a moment motionless, looking down at his hands splayed on the desk top. Jurnet, the man trained to listen, said nothing. Waited.
At last Ferenc Szanto raised his head. Looked past the detective, out of the window.
‘It was magic, those childhood days at Kasnovar, the estate the old countess brought to the Appleyards as her marriage portion. Magic not just because I was a boy and the world seemed an apple that was mine for the picking; but because Laz Appleyard was my friend. That I was only the son of the Kasnovar blacksmith and he the heir to land and riches I knew very well, but, to a child, what do such things matter? Together we galloped the half-wild horses of the puszta, climbed trees, swam naked in the lakes and rivers, rode on top of the great hay-waggons, half-drugged by the scent of the hay.’ The man regarded the detective with a quizzical smile. ‘A pastoral idyll, eh?’ Shaking his head: ‘Not so. Because, young as I was, I knew even then that there were things wrong with my friend – a cruelty, a love of destruction for its own sake which both repelled and intrigued me. Once he climbed a tree that was as skinny as a pole – not a single branch from the ground to its sprouting head, you would have said not even a monkey could climb such a tree – but up he went, up and up, until he had climbed to a great, untidy nest a stork had made at the very top. The nest was full of baby birds a few days old, and I watched from below as Laz reached in, and picked them up, and threw them down, one after the other. Their little bones were so frail they splintered to nothing on the hard ground. Then the mother bird came back to the nest, and she went for Laz with her great beak, squawking like a demon. But he had a knife in his belt, a beautiful curving dagger one of his ancestors had taken from the Turks, and in another minute the great bird was lying dead at the foot of the tree along with what remained of her chicks.
‘Shall I tell you something?’ The Hungarian shook his head in a kind of awed disbelief. ‘I knew he had done something unforgivable, yet it only bound me to him more closely than ever. We were friends. Whatever he did, I was part of it. The blood of the stork and her brood was on my head also. I was captivated by his terrible audacity, joined to him by dark forces I could not understand.’ A sigh. ‘And still do not understand after all these years.’
With a shake of the head Ferenc Szanto set the insoluble problem aside, and returned to his narrative.
‘Well, Inspector Jurnet, as you may have heard, the war came and childhood ended. I hardly know which was the greater tragedy. For you in England the war, eh, was to beat Hitler, and, when you had beaten him, the war was over. So simple! For Hungarians, nothing is ever simple. Some people – like the English, I think – have learnt to control their own history, to canalise it, build locks and weirs which regulate its flow. For Hungarians, history is a devouring flood which sweeps everything before it, good and bad alike. The most an individual can hope to do is find a convenient rooftop to straddle, or a piece of wreckage to cling to, while the waters rage past.’
‘Laz Appleyard,’ Jurnet reminded him.
‘My friend Laz,’ said Ferenc Szanto. Again there was a moment of quiet before the man began to speak again. ‘Some of it is true,’ he said. ‘Some of that stuff they have put in the Appleyard Room for visitors to see. During the uprising, he got more than a hundred people out of the country.’
‘That must have taken some doing.’
‘A great deal of doing.’
‘Including his wife, I understand.’
‘Mara.’ The man pronounced the name like a benediction. ‘Mara Forro, the daughter of my employer and benefactor, Janos Forro, who was himself the righthand man of Imre Nagy, our Prime Minister. Except that Mara wasn’t Laz’s wife in those days. She was going to marry me.’
‘I see.’
‘You see nothing,’ said Ferenc Szanto, without animus. ‘No Englishman makes a fool of himself for love unless he is a fool already; and you, Inspector, are no fool. So: suddenly my friend Laz comes back to Hungary. How happy I am to meet him again! At once we are so close, we could have been children again. Except that he has grown tall and beautiful, a fairy prince, and I – even though, thanks to Janos Forro, I too have got on in the world – I still looked like what I was, the son of the Kasnovar blacksmith. The surprise would have been if my Mara had not fallen in love with the young god who had appeared out of the blue to help Hungary in its fight for freedom.’
‘You must still have been surprised to see him.’
‘Surprised?’ The man repeated, as if the point had never before been put to him. ‘I do not think so. It was a time when nothing could have surprised us, when everything that happened was strange and wonderful, as in a dream. Until the day the Russian tanks rolled back into Budapest, and we woke up.’
; Jurnet remarked inadequately: ‘We heard all about it on the radio.’
‘I hope you found us sufficiently entertaining.’ The Hungarian’s lips twisted with uncharacteristic bitterness. ‘We screamed help! to the world, and the world answered with a deafening silence. The Russians trapped our General, Pal Maleter: they tricked Prime Minister Nagy and Janos Forro into leaving the Yugoslav Embassy where they had taken refuge, and they took all three to Romania and imprisoned them in the palace at Sinaia. I had Laz to thank they hadn’t caught me along with the other lesser fry. Already, at his urging, we had gone underground. Mara was safe in England, Hungary was back under Red tyranny, and I was a child again, playing cops and robbers with my friend. Except that, this time, the cops and the robbers were on the same side – the Avos and the Red soldiers who were going about the city stripping it of everything of value that wasn’t actually bolted to the floor. And I was so happy!’ The man’s eyes, aslant in his head, widened at the absurdity of it all. ‘Can you believe it? My country in ruins, I had lost the woman who, to me, was the joy of life, and I was happy, playing games with my friend – only this time, games in which men got killed nastily and silently, none of your English nicety for the Queensberry Rules. But I tell you, I lived life, in that time as a hunted and a hunting animal, as I have never lived it since. And when my friend said one day, why not get Imre Nagy and Pal Maleter and Janos Forro out of that Romanian palace where they are locked up, I answered light-heartedly, why not? If my friend Laz says it can be done, it can be done.’
Jurnet said: ‘I saw what it said about the escape in the Appleyard Room. You almost pulled it off.’
‘You think? We were seven kilometres from the Yugoslav border, in a forester’s hut deep in the hills. Laz had gone to spy out the little river that was the frontier crossing. Pal and Janos were playing cards with a pack they had picked up somewhere on our travels. The courage of those two men! They could have been on a picnic. I was the uneasy one. So near to safety, yet so far! I am country born and bred, and in spring a countryman expects the country to be noisy with birdsong and the many small noises animals make as they find their livings after the winter cold. But not a sound.’ The Hungarian looked bleakly at the detective. ‘As a countryman, then, I was not really surprised when, all of a sudden, the hills were full of soldiers, Russian voices shouting commands; grenades, guns firing. We had settled among ourselves that if the Reds came we would each go our own way, as offering the best chance of escape; and I found for myself a pond in which I crouched below the surface, breathing through a hollow reed until the noises died away, and at last the birds began to sing. When I dared to come out from my hiding place I was so cold from the water I could not walk. Somehow I crawled back to the hut. Empty: but blood on the cards. I have them still. I would not exchange them for the riches of all the Rothschilds.’
This time the silence was so prolonged that Jurnet asked at last: ‘And that’s the end of the story?’
‘The end and also the beginning.’ The man’s face was sombre. ‘Laz came back and found me, and for two weeks he nursed me night and day, or I would have surely died. When I was well enough to walk a little, he got me across the border to Yugoslavia, carrying me for most of the way on his back. And from there we came to England, to Bullen Hall where he was the English milor and Mara was already waiting for him.’
‘They married.’
The other nodded agreement.
‘They married, my loved one and my friend. In Bullensthorpe Church the bells rang out. But alas they did not, those two, as should happen with fairy princes and princesses, live happily ever after. No one woman was ever enough for Laz Appleyard. Once possessed – finished! He was on to the next one, and the next one, and the one after that. I watched Mara’s beauty fade away, and after Istvan – Steve – was born, her bodily strength also. The child that could have been a consolation was only an additional torment. I do not know if Laz truly loved him, or if he only acted love to bind the boy to him and hurt the mother further; but bind him he did, with bands of steel. The boy lived for his father. My poor, pale Mara had no place in his world.’ In an even tone, carefully colourless, Ferenc Szanto said: ‘I did not think I could ever be glad that Mara should be dead. But when she died, when Steve was six years of age, I, who had never believed in Him until that day, thanked God for it.’
Jurnet commented: ‘I wonder you stayed on.’
‘I have not yet told you the worst thing. Eighteen months after Laz and I came back from Hungary, the news came for certain that Imre Nagy and Pal Maleter and Janos Forro had been executed. Six months after that, information came to me from sources which are quite unimpeachable that Laz Appleyard, for money paid into a Swiss bank account, had sold Pal and Janos to the Reds. That charade in the forester’s hut had all been prearranged.’
‘I wonder even more that you stayed on. Surely you had it out with Appleyard? Why didn’t you expose him for what he was?’
‘Questions! Questions! I said nothing, did nothing. Does that surprise you? Then this will surprise you more – that, despite everything, Mara still loved her husband with all the love of a passionate woman. I could not add to her griefs by letting her know that this devil, her husband, had sent her own father to his death and taken money for it, like Judas Iscariot. And after she was dead, how could I tell Steve the true nature of the hero-father he worshipped like a god? Especially as I gradually came to see, with the passing years, that justice does not exclusively fall to be administered in courts of law. Much as Steve looked like his father all over again, that was the whole of the resemblance. Everything that mattered – his loving nature, his inability to hurt any living creature – was all from Mara. So, I stayed on at Bullen to be a shield to Mara’s son. And when his father was killed, I stayed on to take the dead man’s place, so far as I could, and to undo such harm as might have been done to him.’
Ferenc Szanto fell silent. Jurnet, having pondered what he had heard, said: ‘Quite a story. Except that I still don’t see it adding up to you wanting it written up in a book for all the world to read – above all, for young Steve to read. You said yourself you’ve kept it dark so far to protect him from the truth. So what’s changed?’
‘Time is what’s changed, my friend. Steve is no longer a boy. It is time to grow up.’ The Hungarian smiled, a smile of great sweetness. ‘Don’t think I have any illusions about him. He is a decent, ordinary young man, only moderately clever, who, providing he is allowed to, will lead a decent, ordinary life. That is what he must be given the chance to do – to stand on his own feet without forever measuring himself against that heroic father figure who never existed. I give you an instance –’ The man jumped up and began to pace the room again. ‘I hear from Jessica that when Steve saw Mr Shelden’s body in the water with the eels, he was sick, he nearly fainted. What is wrong with that, such a horrible thing? It is only natural in a person of sensitivity. But no: the boy is ashamed. It is not the way the son of Appleyard of Hungary should behave. You see? For more than two years now I know it is time to destroy this pernicious myth if Steve is to have a proper life. This I do not tell Elena – only that it is high time a definitive biography should be written. And at last, when it is Mr Coryton’s time to go, she makes arrangement with Mr Shelden.’
‘You’re not telling me Miss Appleyard actually wants to have all the dirt about her brother spread around? Or doesn’t she know all you’ve told me?’
‘Unless she has information not told to me, the betrayal in Hungary she does not know. All the documents relating to it are in Hungarian which she – unlike Laz – could never be bothered to learn. And the reason I am here today is to remove these documents before Jessica notices anything out of place, and translate them into English, so that they will be ready and waiting when Mr Shelden’s successor comes to Bullen.’
‘Miss Appleyard will never allow them to be used!’
‘Is possible,’ the Hungarian readily admitted. ‘But I think yes, she will allow. Elena
is a very remarkable lady, and I think she too is tired of this Appleyard of Hungary who is the real ghost of Bullen Hall. When she was a child, at Kasnovar, she was very close to her brother. I was the one she did not like, because Laz would rather be with me, doing boys’ things. But after they grew up, it was different. Elena is also a very correct lady, with much pride of family; and although she did not, I think, regard Mara as a grand enough match for an Appleyard, neither did she like the womanising and the wild parties, the drinking and gambling – oh, I haven’t told you the half of it! Only enough, I trust, to convince you that I did not push Mr Shelden off the roof, nor shall I any future biographer who may be so reckless as to come to Bullen.’
Jurnet digested what he had been told. Plainly not satisfied, he demanded: ‘What I don’t get is – why hang about waiting? If Steve’s the one it’s all in aid of, who says it has to be in book form? What’s stopping you from taking him aside, man to man, show him your proofs, tell him the story as you’ve told me?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But I am a coward. I admit it.’ The Hungarian sighed deeply, rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I cannot bear the thought of Steve’s face when he learns the truth about his so wonderful father. Ah yes, in later years he may bless me, but how will that pay for losing his love now? And who could blame him? So –’ with a fatalistic shrug – ‘only at second hand, the printed page. Black and white doing my dirty work for me. In spite of all, I cannot forget that I owe Laz Appleyard my life. Even though I know it was all a play-acting, the hiding in the hills, the stealing out at night to get food, even the carrying me over the border. He could have handed me over to the Reds and been rid of me. True, I was no Maleter or Forro, but still I was someone the Reds would have been happy to get their hands on. They might even have paid money for me. Yet he chose to save me. He threw the baby storks to the ground from the sheer pleasure of killing, yet he chose to save me, his friend.’ The Hungarian sighed once more. ‘He is not the only Judas.’