A Place to Stand

by Ann Bridge

  Here Bill Hershey was quite right—only he picked on the wrong young man. Running over Hope’s admirers, Tibor stuck out about a mile. They had been pretty thick. And reluctant, incredulous as he was to think such a thing of little Hopey, it seemed to him just possible that in a moment of madness she had decided to go back to see him again. Bill was very observant, and he had noticed the girl’s eyes at her Mother’s cocktail party—at once starry, and somehow desolate; and her nervous restlessness and abstraction during those last minutes on the platform had not escaped him either. It must be that; there wasn’t anyone else—except Sam Harrison. She and Sam had been pretty close, too; but she had never looked like that while Sam was around, nor after he left. But it was a Hell of a thing to do, to ring up Tibor and ask if he’d got her tucked away somewhere! Still, he’d got to find her—and he had actually stretched out his hand to the receiver when his desk telephone rang loudly in front of him. “Yes?”

  It was his clerk.

  “Mr. Hershey, Sir, I have the Kecskemét police on the line. They traced the taxi-man who met the young lady at the station. She did not go to the hotel at all; she drove round to several garages, till she found a car to take her back to Budapest.”

  “The Hell she did!” Bill ejaculated. “Where did the car put her down in Budapest?”

  “Excuse a moment, Sir—I ask.” There was a pause, while the clerk chattered in Hungarian on another line, and Bill thought, rather wretchedly, that this confirmed his reluctant guess at Tibor. Then the clerk came on again.

  “They do not know this—but they can find out. The taxi-driver knows the garage where the young lady took the car.”

  “Well, tell them to get hold of that driver, and find out exactly where he put her down in this town—the street, and the number. And tell them to hurry.”

  Bill sat back. That must be it, he thought—she’d run back to see Tibor. Only it wasn’t a bit like Hope, a nice, well-brought-up American girl, to go and do a thing like that. Still, he’d have to call the young man and find out—there was no way round it.

  Like most young Hungarians of the upper classes between the wars, Tibor Zichy worked for his living, and worked quite hard for it, too; his day at the Bank where he functioned as a clerk started at 8 a.m. In spite of this, he usually lunched late, and Hershey’s call caught him before he went out. His exclamation of horrified surprise when Bill, trying to be tactful, began, “Did you know that Hope Kirkland is missing?” carried complete conviction.

  “Missing? Miss Hope? But how? She travelled with her parents! What has happened?”

  “We don’t know, really,” Bill said, a little set back by this. “But she wasn’t on the train when they got to Belgrade, so they called me and asked me to make enquiries; it’s all rather mixed-up down there, with the military pretty well monopolizing the telephone service.”

  “But this is awful!” Tibor interrupted. “Not on the train? And with all these armies about, and she so pretty! Bill, this is perfectly terrible!—she must be found at once. Have you done something?”

  “Yes. I had all stations down the line rung, where the express stopped, and she got off at Kecskemét.”

  “At Kecskemét? Impossible! Why on earth at Kecskemét? No one lives there,” said Tibor. (By no one, he meant no one he knew.)

  “I guess because it was the first stop. She took a car and drove back to Budapest.”

  “And where to? This is all quite mad! Where did she go, in Budapest? And how did she get through the cordon?”

  “We don’t know any of that, yet. I’ve had the Kecskemét police rung, and told them to trace the car and the chauffeur—well, maybe they know that; I’m getting muddled,” said poor Bill. “But they’re going to ask the chauffeur where he put her down, and then call back and let me know.”

  Tibor’s voice had quite a grave note when he spoke next.

  “Look, Bill, 1 am coming round at once. This is serious. That child alone on the roads at night?—and then the Germans at the cordon. You are at the Consulate yes?”

  “Yes, I am, I’ll wait for you. I have to wait for this call, anyway.”

  So Tibor was already in Bill Hershey’s room, speculating with deepest concern as to what could have moved Hope Kirkland to this inexplicable madness when the call from the Kecskemét police came through, transmitted as before by the little Hungarian clerk. “I speak with them,” the young man exclaimed, when he heard what was going on, snatching the receiver from Bill. “Put them through to this extension!” he said in Hungarian to the clerk. There followed a long and explosive interchange of question and answer in that most intractable of languages, which Hershey was quite unable to follow—at last Tibor put the receiver down and turned to him.

  “I have spoken with the chauffeur himself; he was at the Police Station. He says he put her down, at her request, in Pest, at a cross-roads—where the St. Stefan utca crosses the Apponyi utca. What a place!—not near anything—it is quite a business quarter. He says she paid him, and then walked away, and he drove back to Kecskemét.”

  “Well, what a thing! What does that tell us?” Bill asked.

  “Nothing, so far. But I do know that there is a policeman on duty all night at this particular place, always. I think we had better get hold of the one who was there last night, and go and interview him—yes?”

  “By all means,” said Bill. “You ring them—my chap will put you on. But you’ll be far better at handling your own nationals than me.”

  Tibor gave the subtle and indescribable Hungarian smile, almost a smirk, at that; then he lifted the receiver and gave some rapid instructions to the clerk. At intervals during the next little while the telephone rang; Tibor talked down it emphatically in Hungarian, and rang off again; at last, the instrument still in his hand, he turned to Bill.

  “They found him, this policeman—dug him out of bed! They have got him at the station. He says he did see the young lady. Shall we go and speak with him ourselves? I think it is better—and this is the most recent information.”

  “Yes, let’s go!” said Hershey, rising from his chair. Tibor nattered again into the receiver, banged it down, and they went out together and drove, Tibor directing, to the Police Station.

  The point policeman, when they questioned him, was quite definite and clear. Yes; very early that morning a car had driven up, and a young lady—very pretty, and all dressed in grey sheepskin—had got out; she had some argument with the chauffeur, and called him, the officer, over to intervene—she had arranged to pay 125 dollars for the drive from Kecskemet, and the man was asking now 200. “I think 125 dollars sufficient for this journey, so I admonished the chauffeur; and then the young lady took the American notes from her purse, and I counted them, 125 good American dollars, and he was paid—and then he drove away, and she thanked me, very prettily, in beautiful Hungarian, and walked away herself. She was a most charming young lady—beautiful!” said the policeman, who was obviously much impressed by the whole unusual performance.

  “Smart girl, Hopey! I bet she had the car stop just there in case the chauffeur tried to pull a fast one on her,” said Bill.

  “Yes, probably,” said Tibor abstractedly. “But where did she go after that? That is what we want to know.” And he turned to the policeman again and asked him in which direction the young lady had walked?

  “Towards the Danube,” the man said.

  Tibor stood for a moment, frowning in thought.

  “Look, Bill,” he said then, “the garage where the Kirklands kept their cars is more or less towards the Danube from this man’s night point; I know the place. I think we should go there and ask if by any chance she came in. What do you say?”

  Bill agreed. “It’s a chance, anyway. We might pick up something.” So they got into his car again and drove round to the garage. There the manager knew at once which of his hands would have been on duty between 5 and 7 a.m., which was all Tibor asked him—Gyury, he said, and a youth was despatched forthwith on a motor-cycle to coll
ect the man. While they waited Tibor and Bill went to a nearby café and had a barack.

  “It is so strange, this,” Tibor said reflectively, lighting a cigarette and blowing out a cloud of smoke—“To leave her parents in such a fashion, without a word! She is such a dutiful daughter, Hope—and such a rangée young girl.”

  “Could there be anyone she specially wanted to come back and see?” Bill asked tentatively. Now that Tibor was in the hunt with him he felt that he could risk the question; and he really needed the answer, if he was to find Hope.

  “Anyone? For whom would she so distress her parents? Do you mean some man?” A sort of light, amused and malicious, broke over Tibor’s face as he spoke—he wagged a forefinger at his companion. “Bill, Bill, so this is why you rang me up! Oh, but what a monster you are, to think this of me!” Bill writhed in embarrassment, and Tibor watched him with the utmost pleasure—it was the sort of situation that Hungarians relish immensely. “No—you can come and search my Mother’s house, but you will not find her there,” the young man went on—“and I have no love-nest in the town, I assure you.”

  “Oh, come off it, Tibor!” Bill protested. “Well yes, I did think that she saw more of you than she did of anyone else, after Sam Harrison left. And I have to find her, haven’t I?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Tibor said, suddenly grave again. “We must find her. But you have quite misread her, Hershey; that is what surprises me. Miss Hope is tremendously idealistic; she would never put her Father and Mother in an agony of anxiety for her own pleasure. Whatever her reason was for leaving them and returning here, it was something other than that.”

  At this point a boy from the garage ran across to say that the night hand was there awaiting them; the two men went back. Tibor of course did the questioning, and reported to Bill.

  “Yes, she did come in this morning, a little before six, on foot. So there you are! She took out her car, had the tank filled, and asked for six two-gallon cans to be filled and put in the back.”

  “Six cans! She could drive to Nish on that, pretty well, with the tank full as well,” Bill exclaimed. “A Dodge tank holds a lot. Well, and what did she do then?”

  Tibor spoke again with Gyury, and then turned to Bill with a rather delightful, pleased smile.

  “He says that she gave him a splendid tip, and said goodbye to him very prettily, and drove away,” he said.

  “Yes, but my God, where to?”

  “He has no idea. But that was so charming, don’t you think? How they all love her!”

  “Charming nothing! We’re at a dead end again—that’s all I see!” Bill exploded in exasperation. “Have I got to call her Father and tell him I can’t find her?—if I can get through, that is? Oh, what the Hell do we do next?”

  14

  For at least four individuals that day, April the 5th, 1941, closed in frustration, gloom, and wretchedness. It did so for Bill Hershey, who spent the entire afternoon and evening sitting by the telephone in the Consulate, vainly struggling to get through to the Kirklands in Belgrade—a score of times he was told “There is no communication.” When at last, after 10 o’clock, his little clerk screamed excitedly—“Here it is, Mr. Hershey, Sir—we have them!” and he took up the receiver, he got no further than saying—“Hershey here,” and hearing a familiar voice, not John Kirkland’s, say “Oh, that you, Bill? Look, Hope Kirkland seems to have got out in her car, but she hasn’t”—and then the call was cut off. After frenzied recallings, protests, and complaints, all Bill got was a curt—“All Yugoslav lines are required for military purposes.” And after eating a belated dinner which he couldn’t digest he went gloomily to bed, still wondering what Hope “hadn’t” done, and why the attaché in Belgrade should have said that she “seemed” to have got out in her car. That smelt phoney, somehow—either she had or she hadn’t and if she had, why wasn’t she with her parents, and why hadn’t young Norris said so? Where the devil was she, the poor child?

  It did so for the Kirklands, too, spending the evening in the Majestic in a misery that cannot easily be imagined. And it did so for Hope herself, who after further rough handling and questioning by Captain Revicsky and his men, followed by a supper of black bread and soup so smelly that she couldn’t eat it, cried herself to sleep on a pallet bed in a cell in the Deuxième Bureau headquarters, hungry, despairing, and chilled through under the thin, stinking blankets. Hope Kirkland that night tasted a full dose of the bitterness of Hitler’s Europe; she had taken on a European identity, and had a chance to learn something of what that meant.

  Of the four, John Kirkland was the first to awake. His wife was still heavy with all those Seconals when at about 6.30 a.m. the whole structure of the Majestic was shaken by a series of shattering explosions. The American sprang out of bed and ran to the window. The hotel stood high, in a city of low buildings—in the bright morning blue of the sky overhead planes were circling low, and as he watched he saw, incredulously, three houses only a couple of streets away go up in clouds of dust, and lumps of broken masonry shoot skywards. Bong!—another cloud rose up; bong!—bong!—bong! He put his hands to his ears, instinctively, to keep out the noise. A plane swept overhead, so low that he could see its markings as the small dark blob of the bomb dropped—the black and white cross on the wings was clear and plain. He ducked quickly, expecting crash, collapse, annihilation; but the bomb missed the hotel and exploded somewhere out of sight close by, shaking the room—he heard the heavy rattle of falling masonry, and now, clearly, the whining hum of the machine. Released for a moment from the fear of death, some strange compulsion drew him to the window again. A number of beige-pink birds were flying up into the air, circling in agitated manœuvres, tiny replicas of the sinister planes in shape, but with half-moons of white on their tails—Belgrade’s innumerable turtle-doves; they moaned a startled sweet complaint as they flew. Then another plane swooped into his field of vision. “God rot, damn, and blast them to Hell!” John Kirkland exclaimed, looking at their wings. “So that was what the bastards were up to! This is an open town.” (He had heard a good deal of talk on the political situation during his long sessions at the Legation the previous day.) But as yet another bang shook the room he ran over to his wife’s bed. “Come on, Alice—wake up and get some clothes on,” he said, giving her a shake. “We’d better get downstairs.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?” Mrs. Kirkland said drowsily.

  “We’re being bombed by the god-damned Boches, that’s all,” returned her husband, hastily beginning to pull on some clothes as he spoke. “We’d be better on a lower floor—we’re pretty near the roof here. Hurry, Alice, for goodness’ sake.”

  Mrs. Kirkland, once she had grasped the situation, dressed herself quite fast, dabbed some powder on her face, slipped her rings, pearls, and brooch into her small jewel-case and snapped it to. “Right, John, I’m ready. I suppose we’d better leave our packing.”

  “Leave everything, and come along down. Bring the Alka-seltzer, if you have it.”

  Mrs. Kirkland fished that admirable remedy out of her dressing-case, reached her mink coat down out of the wardrobe and threw it over her shoulders, and followed her husband downstairs. That bright morning of death from the sky was chilly. “My, that was close!” she exclaimed, as another explosion rocked the building. “What a mercy Hopey isn’t here!”

  Downstairs they found the other inmates of the hotel huddled together near the bar, well away from the street, all manifestly suffering from fear, and a good many from hangover too. The manager was busy pushing sheets of newspaper in among his rattling bottles; Mr. Kirkland got a glass of water from him, and took his fizzing tablets—his vigil the night before had been far from dry, and he was feeling the effects of the slivovitz. After a while he asked if they couldn’t have some coffee. The manager would see, and presently produced some; the kitchen staff were apparently carrying on; he apologized for the stale bread—“One cannot use the streets much this morning, so the baker has not come.” John Kirkland applau
ded the man in his heart.

  After a time there came a pause in the bombardment. When there had been no more bangs or explosions for a quarter of an hour Mrs. Kirkland said—“Darling, why don’t we go round to the Legation? It seems pretty quiet now. They may have some news of Hopey.”

  The manager was against this. “The streets are blocked with fallen houses, Madame—and at any moment they may return, these demons.” But Mrs. Kirkland was obstinate—not for the only time that day.

  “John, we’ll never get news of Hopey here; she won’t know where we are. If she calls any place, it will be to the Legation. Do please let’s go.”

  So they stepped out into the bright deadly sunshine. The manager was quite right: many of the streets were completely blocked by fallen buildings, and they saw pitiable and terrible things as they worked their way, by many detours, towards the Legation. A newly-bombed city is an appalling sight, and that first German onslaught on defenceless Belgrade was devastating to a degree. Shuddering at what she saw, but undaunted, Mrs. Kirkland picked her way round mounds of rubble, steered away from collapsing houses, and kept steadily on. They really didn’t know their way very well, and John Kirkland was just beginning—“Look, Alice, I think we’d better go back,” when his wife said, turning a corner—“Why, this is the right avenue, I’m certain! Look the house is just up there.”

  At that moment the whine of a plane became audible again; Kirkland seized his wife by the hand and fairly raced for shelter; they came up to the house just as the bombs, in another quarter of the city, began to fall once more.