‘Nearly all. The remnants, the Count among them, were taken off to the Auschwitz gas chambers. The German guards let them nearly all go, no one yet knows why – but not before they branded them. The Count has his number inside his forearm, running from wrist to elbow, all scarred, raised lumps.’ She shivered. ‘It’s horrible.’
‘And then he met your father?’
‘Yes. They were both with Vlassov’s men, but they didn’t stay long. The endless, senseless killings sickened them both. These bands used to disguise themselves as Russians, stop and board the Polish trains, make the passengers get out and shoot all who held Communist Party cards – and many of the holders had no option but to have these cards, if they and their families were to survive: or they would move into towns, ferret out the Stakhanovites or would-be Stakhanovites and throw them among the ice blocks of the Vistula. So they left for Czechoslovakia and joined the Slovak partisans in the High Tatra.’
‘I’ve heard of them, even in England,’ Reynolds acknowledged. ‘The fiercest and most independent fighters in Central Europe.’
‘I think Jansci and the Count would agree,’ she said feelingly. ‘But they left very soon. The Slovaks weren’t really interested in fighting for something, they were just interested in fighting, and when things were dull they were just as happy to fight among themselves. So Jansci and the Count came to Hungary – they’ve been here over seven years now, most of the time outside Budapest.’
‘And how long have you been here?’
‘The same time. One of the first things Jansci and the Count did was to come to the Ukraine for us, and they took my mother and me here by way of the Carpathians and the High Tatra. I know what it must sound like, but it was a wonderful journey. It was high summer, the sun shone, they knew everybody, they had friends everywhere. I never saw my mother so happy.’
‘Yes.’ Reynolds steered her away from the topic. ‘The rest I know. The Count tips off who’s next for the axe and Jansci gets them out. I’ve talked to dozens in England alone who were taken out by Jansci. The strange thing is that none of them hated the Russians. They all want peace, Jansci has talked them all into preaching for peace. He even tried to talk to me!’
‘I told you,’ she said softly. ‘He’s a wonderful man.’ A minute passed in silence, two minutes, then she said suddenly, surprisingly: ‘You’re not married, are you, Mr Reynolds?’
‘What’s that again?’ Reynolds was startled at the sudden switch.
‘You haven’t a wife, have you, or a sweetheart or any girls at all? And please don’t say “No, and don’t bother applying for the vacancy,” for that would be harsh and cruel and just a little cheap, and I don’t really think you are any of these things.’
‘I never opened my mouth,’ Reynolds protested. ‘As to the question, you guessed the answer. Anybody could. Women and my kind of life are mutually exclusive. Surely you can see that.’
‘I know it,’ she murmured. ‘I also know that two or three times this evening you have turned me away from – from unpleasant subjects. Inhuman monsters just don’t bother about that kind of thing. I’m sorry I called you that, but I’m glad I did, for I found out I was wrong before Jansci and the Count did. You don’t know what it’s like for me – these two – they’re always right, and I’m always wrong. But this time I’m right before them.’
‘I’ve no doubt you know what you’re talking about …’ Reynolds began politely.
‘And can’t you just see their expressions when I tell them that I sat for ten minutes tonight with Mr Reynolds’ arm around me.’ The voice was demure, with bubbling undertones of laughter. ‘You put it round me when you thought I was crying – and so I was crying,’ she admitted. ‘Your wolf’s clothing is getting a little threadbare, Mr Reynolds.’
‘Good lord!’ Reynolds was genuinely astonished. For the first time he realised that his arm lay along her shouders, he could just feel the touch of her hair on the back of his almost numbed hand. He muttered some discomfited apology, and was just starting to lift his arm when he froze into perfect stillness. Then his arm fell back slowly and tightened round her shoulder as he put his lips to her ear.
‘We have company, Julia,’ he murmured.
He looked out of the corner of his eye, and this confirmed what his abnormally keen ear had already told him. The snow had stopped, and he could clearly see three people advancing softly towards them. He would have seen them a hundred feet away if his vigilance hadn’t slipped. For the second time that night Julia had been wrong about the policemen, and this time there was no escaping them. That soft-footed advance was a sure acknowledgement of the policemen’s awareness of their presence in the little hut.
Reynolds didn’t hesitate. He brought his right hand over, caught her by the waist, bent down and kissed her. At first, as if by reflex instinct, she tried to push him off, to turn her face away, her whole body stiff in his arms. Then all at once she relaxed, and Reynolds knew that she understood. She was her father’s daughter, and she caught on fast. Her arm came up around his neck.
Ten seconds passed, then as many again. The policemen, Reynolds thought – and it was becoming difficult to keep his thoughts on the policemen – were in no hurry to make their presence known, but it was no punishment, and he could have sworn that the pressure of her arm around his neck was beginning to tighten when a powerful flashlight clicked on and a deep, cheerful voice spoke.
‘By heaven, Stefan, I don’t care what people say, there’s nothing wrong with the young generation. Here they are, the thermometer twenty degrees below zero, and you’d think they were lying on the beaches of Balaton in a heatwave. Now, now, not so fast, young man.’ A large hand reached out of the darkness behind the torch beam and pushed Reynolds, who had been struggling to his feet, back down again. ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know this place is forbidden at night?’
‘I know it is,’ Reynolds muttered. His face was a nice mixture of fear and embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry. We had nowhere else to go.’
‘Nonsense!’ the hearty voice boomed. ‘When I was your age, young man, there was nothing better in wintertime than the little curtained alcoves of the White Angel. Only a few hundred metres from here.’
Reynolds began to relax. There was little to fear from this man. ‘We were at the White Angel –’ ‘Show us your papers,’ another voice demanded, a cold, hard, mean little voice. ‘You have them?’
‘Of course I have them.’ The man behind that voice was a different proposition altogether. Reynolds reached inside his coat, his fingers folding over the butt of his automatic, when the first policeman spoke again.
‘Don’t be silly, Stefan. You really will have to be careful – all those terrible thrillers you read. Or maybe you think he’s a western spy sent to find out how much co-operation they can expect from the young ladies of Budapest when the next rising comes.’ He roared with laughter, bent over and slapped his thigh, all but overcome by his own wit, then slowly straightened. ‘Besides, he’s as Budapest born and bred as I am. The White Angel you said,’ his voice suddenly thoughtful. ‘Come out of there the two of you.’
They rose stiffly, and the torch shone so close to Reynolds’ face that he screwed his eyes shut.
‘This is him, all right,’ the policeman announced jovially. ‘This is the one we heard about. Look, you can still see the mark of every finger on his cheek. No wonder he wouldn’t go back. It’s a wonder his jaw wasn’t dislocated.’ He swung his torch on to a blinking Julia. ‘Looks as if she could do it too. Built like a boxer.’ He ignored the outraged gasp, turned to Reynolds, and waving a warning forefinger, his voice solemn with the solemnity of a comic vastly enjoying himself. ‘You want to be careful, young man. Beautiful, but – well, you can see for yourself. If she’s as plump as this in her twenties, what’s she going to be like in her forties? You should see my wife!’ His laugh boomed out again, and he waved a hand in dismissal. ‘Be off, my children. Next time it’s the dungeon for you.’
Five minutes later
they parted on the shore side of the bridge, just as the snow began to fall again. Reynolds glanced at his luminous watch.
‘Just after nine o’clock. I’ll be there in three hours.’
‘We will be expecting you then. That should give me just about enough time to describe in detail how I almost dislocated your jaw, and how the ice-cold calculating machine had his arm round me and kissed me for a whole minute without coming up for air once!’
‘Thirty seconds,’ Reynolds protested.
‘A minute and a half at least. And I won’t tell them why. I can hardly wait to see their faces!’
‘I’m at your mercy,’ Reynolds grinned. ‘But don’t forget to tell them what you’re going to look like by the time you’re forty.’
‘I won’t,’ she promised. She was standing close to him now, and he could see the mischief in her eyes. ‘After what has passed between us,’ she went on solemnly, ‘this counts even less than a handshake.’ She reached up on tiptoe, brushed her lips lightly across his cheek and hurried away into the darkness. For a full minute Reynolds stood looking after her, long seconds after she had vanished, thoughtfully rubbing his cheek: then he swore softly to himself, and made off in the opposite direction, head bent forward and hat-brim pulled far down against the snow in his eyes.
When Reynolds reached his room in the hotel, unobserved and by way of the fire-escape, it was twenty minutes to ten and he was very cold and very hungry. He switched on the central heating, satisfied himself that no one had been in the room during his absence, then called the manager on the phone. There had been no message for him, no callers. Yes, he would be delighted to provide dinner even at this late hour: the chef was just going to bed, but would consider it an honour to show Mr Rakosi just what he could do in the way of an impromptu meal. Reynolds rather ungraciously said that speed was of the essence and that the culinary masterpieces could wait till another day.
He finished an excellent meal and the best part of a bottle of Soproni just after eleven o’clock and prepared to depart. Almost an hour, yet, to his appointment, but what had taken only six or seven minutes in the Count’s Mercedes would take far longer by foot, the more so as his route would be wandering and devious. He changed a damp shirt, tie and socks and folded them neatly away, for he did not then know that he was never to see either that room or its contents again, jammed the key in the door, dressed against the winter night and left once more by the fire-escape. As he reached the street, he could hear a telephone ringing faintly, insistently, but he ignored it, the sound could have come from a hundred rooms other than his own.
By the time he had arrived at the street of Jansci’s house it was a few minutes after twelve. Despite the brisk pace he had kept up throughout he was half-frozen, but satisfied enough for all that, he was certain that he had neither been followed nor observed since he had left the hotel. Now, if only the Count still had some of that barack left …
The street was deserted and the garage door, when he came to it was, as by arrangement, open. He turned into the darkness of its interior without breaking step, angled confidently across to the corridor door at the other end, and had taken perhaps four paces when the garage was flooded with light at the touch of a switch and the iron doors clanged shut behind him.
Reynolds stood perfectly still, keeping both hands well clear of his clothes, then looked slowly around him. In each corner of the garage, a submachine-gun cradled under his arm, stood a watchful, smiling AVO man, each in his high peaked cap and long, sweeping belted trench-coat. There was no mistaking these men, Reynolds thought dully, there was no mistaking the real thing when you saw it, the coarsened brutality, the leering, expectant sadism of the lowermost dregs of society which automatically find their ways into the Secret Police of Communist countries the world over.
But it was the fifth man, the little man by the corridor door with the dark, thin, intelligent Jew’s face that caught and held his attention. Even as Reynolds looked at him, he put away and buttoned up his pistol, took two steps forward, smiled and bowed ironically.
‘Captain Michael Reynolds of the British Secret Service, I believe. You are very punctual, and we sincerely appreciate it. We of the AVO do not like to be kept waiting.’
SIX
Without moving, without speaking, Reynolds stood in the middle of the floor. He stood there, it seemed to him, for an eternity of time, while his mind first of all asborbed the shock, then the bitter realisation, then hunted frantically for the reason for this, for the presence of the AVO and the absence of his friends. But it was no eternity, it was probably no more than fifteen seconds altogether, and even as the seconds passed Reynolds let his jaw fall lower and lower in shock while his eyes slowly widened in fear.
‘Reynolds,’ he whispered, the word coming awkwardly, with difficulty as they would to a Hungarian. ‘Michael Reynolds? I – I do not know what you mean, comrade. What – what is wrong? Why are these guns –? I swear I have done nothing, comrade, nothing! I swear it!’ His hands were clasped together now, wringing each other till the knuckles stood white, and the tremor in his voice was the quaver of fear.
The two guards that Reynolds could see wrinkled their heavy brows and stared at each other in slow, puzzled wonder, but not even a shadow of doubt touched the dark, amused eyes of the little Jew.
‘Amnesia,’ he said kindly. ‘The shock, my friend, that is why you forget your own name. A remarkable effort, none the less, and had I not known your identity beyond any doubt, I too – like my men here who do not yet know who you are – would have been more than halfway towards belief. The British Espionage Service do us a great compliment, they send us only their best. But, then, I would have expected nothing else but the best where the – ah – recovery, shall we say – of Professor Harold Jennings is concerned.’
Reynolds could feel the sickness deep down in his stomach, the bitter taste of despair in his mouth. God, this was even worse than he had feared, if they knew this, they knew everything, it was the end of everything. But the stupid, fearful expression remained on his face: it might have been pinned there. Then he shook himself, a person throwing off the dark terror of a nightmare, and looked wildly around him.
‘Let me go, let me go!’ His voice was high-pitched now, almost a scream. ‘I’ve done nothing, I tell you, nothing, nothing! I am a good Communist, I am a member of the party.’ His mouth was working uncontrollably in a strained face. ‘I am a citizen of Budapest, comrade, I have my papers, my membership cards! I will show you, I will show you!’ His hand was reaching up to go inside his coat, when he froze at a single word from the AVO officer, a soft-pitched word, but cold and dry and cutting like the lash of a whip.
‘Stop!’ Reynolds arrested his hand just at the lapels of his coat, then let it fall slowly to his side. The little Jew smiled.
‘A pity you will not live to retire from your country’s secret service, Captain Reynolds. A pity, indeed, that you ever joined it – I feel convinced that a notable Thespian has been thereby lost to the boards and the silver screen.’ He looked over Reynolds’ shoulder at a man standing by the garage door. ‘Coco, Captain Reynolds was about to produce a pistol or some such offensive weapon. Relieve him of the temptation.’
Reynolds heard the tread of heavy boots on the concrete floor behind him, then grunted in agony as a rifle butt smashed into the small of his back, just above the kidney. He swayed dizzily on his feet, and through the red haze of pain he could feel trained hands searching his clothes, could hear the little Jew’s apologetic murmur.
‘You must excuse Coco, Captain Reynolds. A singularly direct fellow in his approach to these matters, always the same. However, experience has taught him that a sample of what misbehaviour will inevitably bring, when he is searching a prisoner, is much more effective than even the direst threats.’ His voice changed subtly. ‘Ah, Exhibit A, and most interesting. A Belgian 6.35 automatic – and a silencer – neither of which is obtainable in this country. No doubt you found them lying in the streets …
And does anyone recognize this?’
Reynolds focused his eyes with difficulty. The AVO officer was tossing in his hand the blackjack Reynolds had taken from his assailant earlier in the evening.
‘I think so, I think I do, Colonel Hidas.’ The AVO man whom his superior called Coco moved into Reynolds’ line of sight – a mountain of a man, Reynolds could now see, six foot four if an inch, and built accordingly, with a broken-nosed, seamed and brutalized face – and took the blackjack, almost engulfing it in his huge, black-haired paw. ‘This is Herped’s, Colonel. Without a doubt. See, it has his initials on the base. My friend Herped. Where did you get this?’ he snarled at Reynolds.
‘I found it along with the gun,’ Reynolds said sullenly. ‘In a parcel, at the corner of Brody Sador Street and –’
He saw the blackjack whipping across, but too late to duck. It smashed him back against the wall, and he slipped down to the floor and pushed himself groggily to his feet. In the silence he could hear the blood from his smashed lips dripping on the floor, could feel teeth loose in the front of his mouth.
‘Now, now, Coco.’ Hidas spoke soothingly, reprovingly. ‘Give that back to me, Coco. Thank you. Captain Reynolds, you have only yourself to blame – we do not know yet whether Herped is Coco’s friend or was Coco’s friend: he was at death’s door when he was found in that tram shelter where you left him.’ He reached up and patted the shoulder of the scowling giant by his side. ‘Do not misjudge our friend here, Mr Reynolds. He is not always thus, as you can judge from his name – not his own, but that of a famous clown and comic of whom you have doubtless heard. Coco can be most amusing, I assure you, and I have seen him convulsing his colleagues down in the Stalin Street cellars with the interesting variations in his – ah – techniques.’
Reynolds said nothing. The reference to the AVO torture-chambers, the free hand Colonel Hidas was allowing this sadistic brute were neither unconnected nor accidental. Hidas was feeling his way, shrewdly assessing Reynolds’ reaction and resistance to this line of approach. Hidas was interested only in certain results, to be achieved by the swiftest means, and if he became convinced that brutality and violence were a waste of time with a man like Reynolds, he would desist and seek out more subtle methods. Hidas looked a dangerous man, cunning and embittered, but there was no sadism that Reynolds could see in the dark, thin features. Hidas beckoned to one of his men.
The Last Frontier Page 13