Assignment - Budapest

by Edward S. Aarons

  She looked subdued, almost shy, when she climbed down the ladder into the cabin again. She was shivering violently, and he got one of the blankets and put it around her, awkward because of his arm, and then closed the hatch tightly against the wind. The boat rolled with an easy motion now, moving with the tide.

  “I am sorry,” the girl whispered. Her American accent was almost perfect, a tribute to her training. “Everything has gone wrong for me, and today has been a nightmare. I saw things I did not believe possible. In New York, in New Jersey, on the train—everywhere. It was so different from what I had been told it would be like.”

  “Suppose you tell me why you fell out with Bela Korvuth.” She looked surprised. “Because of Endre, of course.”

  “The farmhand in Jersey? The one Bela killed?”

  “There was no need to kill him—no reason at all!” she whispered bitterly. “It was a vicious, senseless act. I—I knew Endre back in Budapest, you see. We went to school together. I knew his family.”

  Durell was quiet. He knew that this was the first break in the whole thing—something unexpected and unlooked for, and his mind jumped ahead coolly, planning to exploit it. She looked like a lost, forlorn child, huddled in the blanket—not a woman any more, not dangerous. Just a lost, frightened human being, betrayed and hopeless. Drifting as surely as the pungy drifted, without rhyme or reason, without a rudder or a motive to set a course.

  “You knew that Endre was with the freedom fighters,” he said.

  “Yes, we knew them all, mostly. Endre was a good boy, though. There was nothing mean about him. He was always joking, always laughing—until his father was arrested last year. We had to arrest the old man; he wouldn’t change. He was stubborn, foolishly clinging to the old ways—” Ilona paused and looked up, a look of shock in her eyes changed by a wry little smile that curved her mouth downward. She kneaded her hands together. “It is terrible, what they make of one. A robot, mouthing empty phrases. It is still in me, even after today. They hammer and hammer at you, until you repeat and shout the slogans that have no meaning. But there was no reason to kill Endre today. None at all.” She shook her head violently and looked down. Durell could not see her face. Her long, dark-red hair screened her cheek as she turned her head partly away from him. She was struggling hard, trying not to cry. He wished she would let it all go but he knew better than to put pressure on her. It was only the solitude of being alone on this boat with him, temporarily safe and isolated from the world, that enabled her to talk at all. Her next words surprised him. “I’m so hungry,” she whispered.

  “Haven’t you eaten today?”

  “Nothing at all. Not since breakfast.”

  “And your clothes are wet from the rain before.”

  She shivered. “You are no better off than I.”

  He got up off the bunk. He felt better now, stronger. Maybe it was Tom Yordie’s liquor, or the expert attention the girl had given to his wound. It didn’t matter. She looked ill, half frozen, hungry, troubled and uncertain in her mind. There was a small galley forward, and her told her to get out of her clothes while he was there and stay wrapped in the blanket, and then he found some cans of soup and primed the little alcohol stove and began heating the soup in a pan. He waited five minutes for her to do as he said, and when he returned, she had strung her wet woolen skirt and her stockings and briefs on a line between the bunks and sat huddled again in the blanket. Her smile was shy.

  “You can be kind,” she said. “It is not what they told us about you.”

  “Am I supposed to be some kind of an ogre?”

  “A tool of the capitalistic warmongers. A methodical killer.” Durell laughed. “And you believed it?”

  “I believed everything, until today.”

  “Until Korvuth killed Endre Stryzyk?”

  “Yes. Until then. He was a good boy. He fought for what he thought was right. And perhaps he was right. I am too confused now to know black from white. Anyway, his people lost, and he ran away. He was entitled to be left in peace, having given up the struggle. He was hurting no one here. And I keep remembering how things were in school—” “Were you in love with Endre?” Durell asked.

  “No, no. It was nothing like that. We were just friends.” Her eyes widened slowly, remembering. “He kept looking at me, under that bridge, when Korvuth made him get out of the truck this morning. He remembered me, all fight. But he could not believe I would let Korvuth kill him—not until the last moment. And then he looked at me in a way I wish I could forget, but which I will never get out of my mind. And he said something—he said I was dead, too. Worse than dead. And he cursed me. And then Korvuth laughed and—killed him.” She looked up again, hugging the blanket around her body. Her face was tormented. “Please. I am trusting you. We can help each other, you and I. But you look ill, Mr. Durell. You have been hurt. Your clothes are wet, too.”

  “All right,” he said.

  He went into the galley and stripped, listening for sounds from her, but the boat, rocking idly in the tidal current, was quiet except for the soothing lap of the sea running along the planking, and an occasional whimper of the cold wind. It felt warmer in the cabin, and he found a coarse towel and rubbed himself down and hung up his damp clothing. There was another blanket in the storage lockers in the galley, and he wrapped it around himself clumsily, saving his injured arm, and went back to the Hungarian girl. She had not moved. She had found a cigarette and sat holding it, looking at something he could not see, staring at a horror he did not know.

  “Ilona, you’d better just answer my questions,” he said. “We’ll get ahead further that way.”

  “I'm so cold/’ she whispered.

  “Finish the soup.”

  “I can’t swallow it.”

  He sat down on the bunk beside her. “Korvuth and Zoltan Ske and you were sent over here as a team, weren’t you?”

  “Yes."

  “Somebody in our Austrian offices helped you get through our immigration checks, didn’t he?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t know the details.”

  “Dunstermeir, in Jersey, was one of your contacts?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t know Endre Stryzyk was there?”

  “I think Korvuth knew. But I never suspected—”

  “All right,” he said quickly. “Don’t think about Endre right now. It’s enough that he made you see the truth about things. You want to help us now, don’t you?”

  “Yes. There is nothing else for me to do. I couldn’t go on with Bela—not after that, not after seeing what he did. If it had been necessary, for our mission, I might have understood.”

  “Just what is your mission, Ilona?”

  She looked at him. Her dark brown eyes were wide. “To kill you, Mr. Durell.”

  “And who else?”

  She shivered and was silent, struggling with herself. Durell felt impatient, but he curbed the questions in him and waited her out. She made a small sound and shook her head. “I feel as though I am doing wrong.”

  “By talking to me?”

  “It is a matter of training and habit.” She sighed. “All my life I worked for the State. I have known nothing else. The war and the Russian occupation happened when I was a child. But when I saw the people fighting and rioting, when I saw that it was only by Soviet tanks firing on the working men and women of Budapest, and when the Mongolian troops came into my city to crush and kill and stamp upon and terrorize . . . when I saw the hatred, Mr. Durell—” She paused again and swallowed. There was a clean, clear attraction to her face, Durell thought, now that she had lost her dedicated, efficient look. She was only a frightened, confused girl, not knowing where to turn. “Korvuth was sent over here to kill you, Mr. Durell. But that was only a side issue. His real aim was to kill or kidnap Dr. Anton Tagy.”

  “Tagy?” The name meant nothing. “Anton Tagy?”

  “He is working for you as a physicist. A Hungarian, one of my people, who escaped when the Russia
ns came in first, years ago. I believe he is in California now. It is known by us that he has solved, or nearly solved, the problem of using the hydrogen bomb reaction for peaceful purposes. The Russians want to know this, too. They want the information from him. It is Korvuth’s mission to find Dr. Tagy and get that information or stop his work for you.”

  “But that’s not all,” Durell said.

  She looked up quickly. In the dim glow of the lamp in the cabin overhead, she looked startled. “You are very clever.” “The other mission is to set up a sabotage ring among the stooges you managed to slip through among the innocent refugees, isn’t that so?”

  “’Yes,” she said, nodding.

  “You know the names of the members of this apparatus?” “No. Only Korvuth knows. He has memorized them.” “He never mentioned any of them?”

  “No. Believe me. He never did. I was only a very minor member of the group organization. Perhaps Zoltan Ske, if you caught him—”

  “We caught him. He’s dead,” Durell said grimly.

  She made another small sound. “I am not sorry.”

  “What else do you know about Dr. Tagy?” he asked. “Nothing. Only his name, really; his reputation. That is all.”

  Durell got up and went into the galley and took a damp pack of cigarettes from his trousers hanging there, lit two of them, and returned to give Ilona one. She inhaled gratefully, then looked up and smiled, shyly again. “You do not know what this hour has meant. Peace. And safety. Even though it is only an illusion.”

  “I’ll help you, Ilona. You won’t have to be afraid any more.”

  “I want to stay in this country.”

  “I’ll see that it’s arranged that way.”

  Then her eyes darkened, the gold flecks fading in the deep brown. “No. I have a feeling it will not be the way I wish. You do not know the kind of man Bela Korvuth is. He is a monster. I was always a little afraid of him, when I would see him in the AVO offices, in Budapest. There is something about him that makes the flesh creep, the blood run cold— the way he looks at you, not as one human looks at another, but as if you were a specimen of some strange form of life, whose fate is unimportant to the master scheme he works for.” She looked down at her hands. The blanket had slipped from her shoulders, and Durell saw that her skin was smooth and fair. “I am afraid of him. He will kill me. He knows I have deserted him, because I helped you a little while ago. He will hunt me down. He will always be a shadow behind me, until he does what he wants.”

  “We know all about Bela Korvuth,” Durell said. “We won’t let him touch you.”

  The girl watched him in silence as he stood up again. It was almost midnight. His head ached, and he felt cold, but he got his clothing in the tiny galley and dressed, resenting the clammy touch of the damp wool. There was a dull pulsing in his arm, and he held his side stiffly to keep the wound from bleeding again. A vision of Deirdre moved through his mind. He lit a cigarette and told himself she would be all right; she had to be all right. And when she felt herself again, she would listen to him and understand that he had done what had to be done. She would know he hadn’t wanted it; she would realize he would rather a hundred times take the pain and danger for himself, rather than have her so much as scratched.

  He heard a sound from the narrow doorway to the galley and the redheaded girl squeezed in quickly, then pressed back against the weathered and worn bulkhead. Her eyes were somber, dark.

  “I have been selfish. I meant to ask—about your woman. Did Bela reach her? Did he—”

  “She’s badly injured,” Durell said shortly.

  “I am sorry. Very sorry.”

  “We’ll go back now, Ilona.”

  She nodded slowly, caught her lower lip in small, white teeth. “Yes, I can see you must. Do not look at me like that, Mr. Durell. I did not want Bela Korvuth to hurt her.”

  The pungy lifted and fell in the tidal current. The girl swayed, lost her balance, and caught at him for support with a murmur of apology. Her blanket fell away and for a moment he glimpsed her slender, lithe body before she caught it up again. She flushed. “I had better dress, too. You have my gun. I have surrendered myself to you. Am I under arrest, Mr. Durell?”

  “We’ll discuss it in Washington,” he said.

  She nodded and went back into the cabin for her clothing. Durell leaned against the galley cabinets and smoked his cigarette. His face was hard and bleak. There was so much to do, and so little time in which to do it. He kept seeing Deirdre’s face, and heard her voice reject him as she turned away from him. He looked at his hands and saw they were shaking a little. He needed a doctor for himself. He needed sleep, rest, several days in bed.

  But there was so little time.

  Chapter Eight

  Durell reached his bachelor’s apartment in Washington at almost four o’clock in the morning. He had checked the hospital where Deirdre had been taken and learned that she was resting comfortably after an emergency operation to remove the bullet. After that he had taken Ilona to No. 20 Annapolis Street, headquarters for K Section of the CIA, and sat in on an emergency session there in the innocent-appear-ing graystone building that bore a plaque indicating it was the office headquarters of a commercial enterprise. Several facts emerged from the meeting, the primary one being that Bela Korvuth had again eluded the men Durell had hastily organized for a search throughout the Prince John area. Korvuth had once more vanished into thin air, with the elusiveness of a fox. A routine inquiry was sent through AEC channels to contact Dr. Tagy, at the California laboratory of UCLA, where his experiments were being conducted. AEC Security was peculiarly tight-lipped about the inquiry, promising nothing, and Durell was too tired to press it at four in the morning. A coded message was sent to Dickinson McFee in London. Ilona was held in custody. There was an apartment on the top floor of No. 20 Annapolis Street designed for such transient purposes, and Durell saw to it that she was made comfortable there.

  “Will you come back tomorrow?” she asked Durell. “First thing. Don’t worry, now. Get some rest.”

  “Will I be imprisoned? Or executed?”

  “Executed? We don’t do things that way over here.”

  She smiled wanly. “I won’t worry if you promise to help me.”

  When he left her, he submitted to the attentions of a medical officer summoned to the dispensary. His wound was probed, sterilized, and bandaged again, and he was ordered to stay in bed for a week. Durell didn’t argue with the doctor about it. He went home.

  He slept restlessly. He got up at ten and took a hot shower, feeling awkward because of the bandages on his shoulder that kept his arm stiff, and made his own breakfast in his kitchenette, bacon, eggs, and a strong pot of Louisiana coffee. The shoulder holster did not fit well over the bandages when he dressed, and he settled it by keeping the snubby-barreled .38 in his pocket. The telephone rang while he was drinking his third cup of coffee. It was Sanderson, temporary sub-chief at K Section.

  “Sam? Can you get down right away?”

  “I was just coming,” Durell said. “Anything kicking?” “Joint Chiefs. And AEC. The boss himself is at the White House. How do you feel?”

  “Like the product of a meat grinder.”

  Sanderson said: “Well, we might get along without you, Cajun—”

  “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up and finished his coffee. It was a bright winter day in Washington. Yesterday’s storm was gone and the sky was a pale, flawless blue. He finished dressing, wearing a sober blue suit, a button-down white shirt, and a dark figured maroon necktie. When he took a long look at himself in the mirror, he did not like what he saw. He kept hearing Deirdre’s whispered, broken accusations, and he kept seeing the remoteness in her eyes when she had looked at him last night. Before he went out, he telephoned the hospital and asked for Deirdre Padgett’s condition. The nurse sounded cheerful.

  “Very good this morning. Would you like to speak to her?” “Yes, please. Tell her it’s Durell.”

&
nbsp; There was a long pause, a few vague sounds in the receiver, and then the nurse came back on the telephone. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Durell.”

  “What is it? Can’t she talk?”

  “She would rather not. Miss Padgett asked me to tell you not to telephone again.”

  “Look, I—”

  “I’m so sorry, sir.”

  He hung up. There was a florist’s shop in the lobby of his apartment house, and he stopped in there and ordered a dozen roses sent to the hospital. He debated sending a card along with it, and rejected the idea, and then walked around the corner to the parking lot and got his car and drove to Annapolis Street. The day did not seem as bright as it had.

  Sidonie Osbourn was at the outer desk in his office. She was a small, pert French girl, the widow of an agent Durell had worked with as a partner two years ago, before Lew was killed. Durell and Deirdre were frequent visitors to her small, neat home in an Alexandria suburb, and Durell was always warmly welcomed by Sidonie’s twin girls. But he found no warmth or welcome in Sidonie’s large, questioning eyes this morning.

  He smiled. “You here, too, on Sunday, Sid?”

  “Top priority meeting. They’re waiting for you, Sam.” “Another moment or two won’t tarnish their brass.”

  She looked down at her typewriter, unsmiling. “As you wish.”

  He paused. “What is it, Sidonie? Why the cold shoulder?” “You ought to know, Sam.”

  “Because of Deirdre? You think I wanted her to get hurt?” Sidonie began typing furiously. “I don’t want to discuss it. I’m sure you saw your duty and did it.”

  “Look,” he said, “have you seen Deirdre this morning?” “I was at the hospital all night. Where were you?”