‘But of course, of course.’ The other was cordiality and understanding itself. ‘Whatever else happens, we must have you fit and well for the opening speech on Monday.’ A few platitudes of sympathy, a word of farewell and the man in the brown suit was gone.
The bedroom door clicked shut and the soft sound of his footfalls faded in the distance. Jennings, his face a nice mixture of indignation, apprehension and expectation, made to speak but Reynolds held up his hand for silence, went to the bedroom door, locked it, withdrew the key, tried it in the bathroom corridor door, found to his relief that it fitted, locked it and closed the communicating door leading to the bedroom. He produced his cigarette case and offered it to the professor, only to have it waved aside.
‘Who are you? What are you doing in my room?’ The Professor’s voice was low, but the asperity in it, an asperity just touched with fear, was unmistakable.
‘My name is Michael Reynolds.’ Reynolds puffed a cigarette alight: he felt he needed it. ‘I left London only forty-eight hours ago, and I would like to talk to you, sir.’
‘Then, dammit, why can’t we talk in the comfort of my bedroom?’ Jennings swung round, then brought up abruptly as Reynolds caught him by the shoulder.
‘Not in the bedroom, sir.’ Reynolds shook his head gently. ‘There’s a concealed microphone in the ventilation grill above your window.’
‘There’s a what – How did you know, young man?’ The professor walked slowly back toward Reynolds.
‘I had a look around before you came,’ Reynolds said apologetically. ‘I arrived only a minute before you.’
‘And you found a microphone in that time?’ Jennings was incredulous and not even politely so.
‘I found it right away. It’s my job to know where to look for such things.’
‘Of course, of course! What else could you be? An espionage agent, counter-espionage – damned things mean the same to me. Anyway, the British Secret Service.’
‘A popular if erroneous –’
‘Bah! A rose by any other name.’ Whatever of fear there was in the little man, Reynolds thought dryly, it certainly wasn’t for himself: the fire of which he had heard so much burned as brightly as ever. ‘What do you want, sir? What do you want?’
‘You,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Rather, the British Government wants you. I am asked by the Government to extend to you a most cordial invitation –’
‘Uncommonly civil of the British Government, I must say. Ah, I expected this, I’ve been expecting it for a long time now.’ If Jennings had been a dragon, Reynolds mused, everything within ten feet of him would have been incinerated. ‘My compliments to the British Government, Mr Reynolds, and tell them from me to go to hell. Maybe when they get there, they’ll find someone who’ll help them build their infernal machines, but it isn’t going to be me.’
‘The country needs you, sir, and needs you desperately.’
‘The last appeal and the most pathetic of all.’ The old man was openly contemptuous now. ‘The shibboleths of outworn nationalism, the catchpenny phrase words of the empty-headed flag wavers of your bogus patriotism are only for the children of this world, Mr Reynolds, the morons, the self-seekers and those who live entirely for war. I care only to work for the peace of the world.’
‘Very good, sir.’ The people at home, Reynolds thought wryly, had badly underestimated either Jennings’ credulity or the subtlety of Russian indoctrination: even so, his words had seemed a far-off echo of something Jansci had said. He looked at Jennings. ‘The decision, of course, must rest entirely with you.’
‘What!’ Jennings was astonished, and could not conceal his astonishment. ‘You accept it? You accept it as easily as that – and you have come so far?’
Reynolds shrugged. ‘I am only a messenger, Dr Jennings.’
‘A messenger? And what if I had agreed to your ridiculous suggestion?’
‘Then, of course, I would have accompanied you back to Britain.’
‘You would have – Mr Reynolds, do you realise what you are saying? Do you realise what – you – you would have taken me out of Budapest, through Hungary and across the frontier …’ Jennings’ voice slowly trailed away into nothingness, and when he looked up at Reynolds again, the fear was back in his eyes.
‘You are no ordinary messenger, Mr Reynolds,’ he whispered. ‘People like you are never messengers.’ All of a sudden certainty struck home at the old man, and a thin white line touched the edges of his mouth. ‘You were never told to invite me back to Britain – you were told to bring me back. There were to be no ‘ifs’ or ‘maybes,’ were there, Mr Reynolds!’
‘Isn’t that rather silly, sir?’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Even if I were in a position to use compulsion, and I’m not, I wouldn’t be such a fool as to use it. Supposing you were to be dragged back to Britain tied hand and foot, there’s still no way of keeping you there or making you work against your own will. Let’s not confuse flag wavers with the secret police of a satellite state.’
‘I don’t for a moment think you’d use direct force to get me home.’ The fear was still in the old man’s eyes, fear and sickness of heart. ‘Mr Reynolds, is – is my wife still alive?’
‘I saw her two hours before I left London Airport.’ There was a quiet sincerity in every word that Reynolds spoke, and he had never seen Mrs Jennings in his life. ‘She was holding her own, I think.’
‘Would you say – would you say she is still critically ill?’
Reynolds shrugged. ‘That is for the doctors to say.’
‘For God’s sake, man, don’t try to torture me! What do the doctors say?’
‘Suspended animation. Hardly a medical term, Dr Jennings, but that’s what Mr Bathurst – he was her surgeon – calls it. She’s conscious all the time, and in little pain, but very weak: to be brutally frank, she could go at any moment. Mr Bathurst says she’s just lost the will to live.’
‘My God, my god!’ Jennings turned away and stared unseeingly through the frosted window. After a moment he swung round, his face contorted, his dark eyes blurred with tears. ‘I can’t believe it, Mr Reynolds, I just can’t. It’s not possible. My Catherine was always a fighter. She was always –’
‘You don’t want to believe it,’ Reynolds interrupted. His voice was cold to the point of cruelty. ‘Doesn’t matter what the self-deception is, does it, as long as it satisfies your conscience, this precious conscience that would let you sell your own people down the river in exchange for all this claptrap about co-existence. You know damned well your wife has nothing to live for – not with her husband and son lost for ever to her beyond the iron curtain.’
‘How dare you talk –’
‘You make me sick!’ Reynolds felt a momentary flash of distaste for what he was doing to this defenceless old man; but crushed it down. ‘You stand there making noble speeches and standing upon all these wonderful principles of yours, and all the time your wife is in a London hospital, dying: she’s dying, Dr Jennings, and you are killing her as surely as if you were standing by her side and throttling –’
‘Stop! Stop! For God’s sake stop!’ Jennings had his hands to his ears and was shaking his head like a man in agony. He drew back his hands across his forehead. ‘You’re right, Reynolds, heaven only knows you’re right, I’d go to her tomorrow but there’s more to it than that.’ He shook his head in despair. ‘How can you ask any man to choose between the lives of his wife, who may be already beyond hope, and his only son. My situation is impossible! I have a son –’
‘We know all about your son, Dr Jennings. We are not inhuman altogether.’ Reynolds’ voice had dropped to a gentle, persuasive murmur. ‘Yesterday Brian was in Poznan. This afternoon he will be in Stettin and tomorrow morning he will be in Sweden. I have only to receive radio confirmation from London, and then we can be on our way. Certainly inside twenty-four hours.’
‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ Hope and disbelief struggled pitifully for supremacy in the old, lined
face. ‘How can you say –’
‘I can’t prove a thing, I don’t have to prove a thing,’ Reynolds said wearily. ‘With all respect, sir, what the hell’s happened to this mighty intellect? Surely you know that all the government wants of you is that you should work for them again, and you also know they know what you’re like: they know damned well if you returned home and found your son still a prisoner in Russia that you’d never work for them as long as you lived. And that’s the last thing in the world they’d ever want.’
Conviction had come slowly to Jennings, but now that it had come it had come for keeps. Reynolds, seeing the new life come into the professor’s face, the determination gradually replacing the worry and the sorrow and the fear, could have laughed aloud from sheer relief: even on himself, the strain had been greater than he had realised. Another five minutes, a score of questions tumbling out one after the other, and the professor, afire now with the hope of seeing his wife and son in the course of the next few days, was all for leaving that very night, at that very instant, and had to be restrained. Plans had to be made, Reynolds explained gently, and much more important, they had first to get news of Brian’s escape and this had brought Jennings to earth immediately. He agreed to await further instructions, repeated aloud several times the address of Jansci’s house until he had completely memorized it, but agreed never to use it except in extreme emergency – the police might have already moved in as far as Reynolds knew – and promised, in the meantime, to carry on working and behaving exactly as he had been doing.
So completely had his attitude towards Reynolds changed that he tried to persuade him to share a drink, but Reynolds declined. It was only half past seven, he had plenty of time before his appointment in the White Angel, but he had already pushed his luck to the limit: at any moment now the imprisoned guard might recover consciousness and start to kick the door down, or a supervisor might make his rounds and find him missing. He left immediately, by way of the professor’s bedroom window and by means of a couple of sheets which let him climb down far enough to catch the barred grills of a window on the ground storey. Even before Jennings had had time to reel in the sheets and close his windows, Reynolds had dropped silently to the ground and vanished wraith-like into the darkness and the snow.
The White Angel Café lay just back from the east bank of the Danube on the Pest side, opposite St Margit Island, and Reynolds passed through its frosted swing doors just as a nearby church bell, muffled and faint through the curtaining snow, struck the hour of eight o’clock.
The contrast between the world outside these swing doors and the one inside was as abrupt as it was complete. One step across the threshold and the snow, the cold, the chill dark silent loneliness of the lifeless streets of Budapest were magically transformed into warmth and brightness and the gaiety of laughing, babbling voices as men and women found an outlet for their natural gregariousness in the cramped and smoky confines of the little café and sought to make their escape, however artificial and ephemeral such escape might be, from the iron realities of the world outside. Reynolds’ first and immediate reaction was that of surprise, shock, almost, to find such an oasis of colour and light in the grim, drab greyness of a police state, but that reaction was brief: it was inevitable that the Communists, no mean psychologists, should not only permit such places but positively encourage them. If people were to gather in the company of one another, as people would no matter what the prohibitions, how much better that they should do it in the open and drink their coffee and wine and porter under the watchfully benevolent eye of some trusted servants of the state, rather than gather in dark and huddled corners and plot against the régime. Excellent safety valves, Reynolds thought dryly.
He had broken step and paused just inside the door, then moved on again almost at once, but without haste. Two tables near the doors were crowded with Russian soldiers laughing, singing and banging their glasses on the table in high good humour. Harmless enough, Reynolds judged, and doubtless that was why the café had been chosen as a rendezvous: no one was going to look for a western spy in the drinking haunt of Russian soldiers. But these were Reynolds’ first Russians, and he preferred not to linger.
He moved in to the back of the café and saw her almost at once, sitting alone at a tiny table for two. She was dressed in the belted hooded coat the manager had described to Reynolds earlier in the day, but now the hood was down and the coat open at the throat. Her eyes caught his without a flicker of recognition and Reynolds took his cue at once. There were half a dozen tables nearby with one or two vacant places and he stood there hesitating over which seat to choose long enough for several people to notice his presence. Then he moved across to Julia’s table.
‘Do you mind if I share your table?’ he asked.
She stared at him, turned her head to look pointedly at a small empty table in the corner, glanced at him again, then pointedly shifted her body until her shoulder was turned to him. She said nothing, and Reynolds could hear the stifled sniggers behind him as he sat down. He edged his chair closer to hers, and his voice was only a murmur.
‘Trouble?’
‘I’m being followed.’ She had turned towards him again, her face hostile and aloof. She’s no fool, Reynolds thought, and by heavens she knew how to act.
‘He’s here?’
A millimetric nod, but nod nevertheless.
‘Where?’
‘Bench by the door. Near the soldiers.’
Reynolds made no move to turn his head.
‘Describe him.’
‘Medium height, brown raincoat, no hat, thin face and black moustache.’ The disdain still registering on her face was in almost comical contrast with the words.
‘We must get rid of him. Outside. You first, me last.’ He stretched out his hand, squeezed her forearm, bent forward and leered at her. ‘I’ve been trying to pick you up. In fact, I’ve just made a most improper suggestion. How do you react?’
‘Like this.’ She swung back her free hand and caught Reynolds across the face with a slap so loud that it momentarily stopped all hubbub and conversation and turned every eye in their direction. Then Julia was on her feet, gathering up her handbag and gloves and walking haughtily towards the door, looking neither to her left nor right. As if by a signal, the talk and the laughter broke out again – and most of the laughter, Reynolds knew, was directed against himself.
He lifted a hand and gingerly caressed a tingling cheek. The young lady, he thought ruefully, carried realism to quite unnecessary lengths. A scowl on his face, he swivelled in his seat in time to see the glass doors swinging to behind her and to see a man in a brown raincoat rise unobtrusively from his seat by the door, throw some money on his table and follow close behind her even before the door had stopped swinging.
Reynolds was on his feet, a man obviously bent on leaving the scene of his discomfiture and mortification with all possible speed. Everybody, he knew, was looking at him, and when he pulled his coat collar up and his hat brim down, a renewed chorus of sniggers broke out. Just as he approached the door, a burly Russian soldier, his face red with laughter and drink, heaved himself to his feet, said something to Reynolds, thumped him on the back hard enough to send him staggering against the counter, then doubled up, convulsed with laughter over his own wit. A stranger to Russians and Russian ways, Reynolds had no idea whether anger or fear would be the safer reaction in the circumstances: he contented himself with a grimace that was compounded of a sullen scowl and sheepish grin, sidestepped nimbly and was gone before the humorist could renew the assault.
The snow was very light now, and he had little difficulty in locating both the girl and the man. They were walking slowly up the street to the left, and he followed, keeping the man at the very limit of observation. Two hundred yards, four hundred, a couple of corners and Julia had halted in a tram shelter outside a row of shops. Her shadow slid silently into a doorway behind the shelter and Reynolds went past him, joining the girl in the glass-fronted shelter.
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‘He’s behind us, in a doorway,’ Reynolds murmured. ‘Do you think you could put up a desperate fight for your honour?’
‘Could I –’ She broke off, and glanced nervously over her shoulder. ‘We must be careful. He’s AVO, I’m certain, and all AVO men are dangerous.’
‘Dangerous fiddlesticks,’ Reynolds said roughly. ‘We haven’t all night.’ He looked at her speculatively, then lifted his hands and caught her by the coat lapels. ‘Strangulation, I think. Must account for the fact that you’re not screaming for help. We have enough company as it is!’
The shadow fell for it, he would have been less than human not to fall for it. He saw the man and woman come staggering out of the tram shelter, the woman fighting desperately to tear away the hands encircling her throat, and didn’t hesitate. His feet silent on the hard-packed snow he came running lightly across the pavement, the weapon raised high in his right hand ready to strike – then collapsed soundlessly as Reynolds, at a warning exclamation from the girl, swung round, elbowed him viciously in the solar plexus and chopped him with the edge of his open hand across the side of the neck. It took only seconds thereafter for Reynolds to stuff the man’s blackjack – a canvas tube filled with lead shot – in his pocket, bundle the man himself into the tram shelter, take the girl’s arm and hurry away along the street.
The girl shivered violently, and Reynolds peered at her in surprise in the almost total darkness of the watchman’s box. Confined as they were in a narrow space and shelterd from the snow and the bitter wind they were relatively comfortable, and even through his coat he could feel the warmth of the girl’s shoulder against his own. He reached for her hand – she had taken off her gloves to rub the circulation into life when they had arrived ten minutes previously – but she snatched it away as from the touch of flame.
‘What’s the matter?’ Reynolds’ voice was puzzled. ‘Still feeling frozen?’
The Last Frontier Page 11