“It is only sugar-coating on the pill,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to come,” he said. “I want your cooperation and help on a voluntary basis, Ilona. I can send you back to Washington, where you will be safe.”
She looked down at her hands. “There is no safe place in the world for me, Mr. Durell.”
“Sam,” he suggested.
“Very well. Sam.” She smiled weakly. “We will be friends?”
“I hope so.”
“Miss Padgett—I heard them talking—she will be all right?”
“I think so.”
“You are still in love with her, are you not?”
“Yes,” Durell said.
“I am sorry for you, Sam.”
The SAC plane was waiting for them at the Florida airfield, and the transfer took only ten minutes, scarcely time for Ilona to express surprise at the warmth of the sun and the palm trees bordering the field. There were only three men in the bomber crew, and they treated Durell and the girl with military reserve, young men who joked among themselves and spoke with Brooklyn and Mississippi accents. Durell and Ilona had a small storage compartment in the stern of the bomber’s fusilage for themselves, equipped with bucket seats and a small folding table for writing purposes. The co-pilot brought them sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. His eyes were curious, but he knew better than to ask questions. All through the silent, high-level flight across the sea, into the gathering wings of dusk, Durell and Ilona were not interrupted.
The plane bored smoothly through the sky above the seas toward the American airbase in Spain. There was little or no feeling of motion. Time and distance had been annihilated in a shrinking world, Durell thought, and if one man died of tyranny here, it was felt all the way around the globe, because with the shrinking of distance, the responsibility of man for his fellows increased in direct proportion. No man was safe, no home was secure, as long as a portion of this small, tortured globe suffered evil. The world had changed, and was changing even more swiftly. No cry for help was too remote to be ignored, no horrid stench of totalitarian prisons could be dismissed as of no consequence to other men. The quiet backwaters of Bayou Peche Rouge, where the gum and cypress trees towered high over placid, peaceful lagoons, were no safer than the apartments in Central European cities where people cowered and whispered in dread of approaching boots. This girl beside him knew the truth, and he wished briefly that Deirdre, too, could know what he felt and how he could never abandon the task he had begun. He was only one man in a dark, shadowy war whose savagery was none the less because it was silent, where the importance of each small victory or defeat could weigh no less than the bugle-blaring battles of long ago.
He began to question the girl, probing skillfully to learn the sort of person she really was. It was not often that he took such a calculated risk, depending upon another for his own safety. Too many times he had learned the value of solitary vigilance. But he needed her, and the mission could scarcely be accomplished without her. He knew she was afraid; he wanted to know the depths of her fear, how much it had eroded from her store of brave rebellion.
“You do not have to worry about me,” she said finally.
Her hands were tranquil in her lap as they sat side by side in the small compartment. “You can trust me, even though I know that death, or even worse, waits where we are gajpg. But in a way, I am glad to go back. I am a Hungarian, and I want to help my country. Too many of us fled for reasons of personal safety, or because they were exhausted by the demands of the Communist regime, or because they saw no hope for private betterment. I have felt as if I were a coward, planning to stay in the United States. Now it is better. This is what I really wanted to do, I suppose. I want to go back and fight them, in my own country, in my own city, in the ruined streets I used to love.”
“How did you ever get into the AVO, in the first place?” She studied her strong, firm hands. “You have to know what life has been like. I am twenty-eight years old, and I never knew democracy as you know it. And I was cursed with the name of Ilona Andrassy. It is a name of nobility in Hungary, and a curse and blot on the land. We were on the fringe of that clique that resisted every improvement, every forward step of progress, since the first World War. They are the ones who backed the fascist Horthy regime and who collaborated with the Nazis when Hungary was occupied. With a name like that, when the Communists came in, it was almost impossible to survive. There was no place for an Andrassy, however dimly related we were to the real core of the family. There was no work, no place to live, nothing to do. We were not permitted to go, and we were not allowed to live where we were. I remember how it was with my father. There was nothing he could do but let himself be taken into the AVO labor battalions. They killed him there. And that, in turn, killed my mother. Only then, because I was a child who they thought would not know or remember these things, was anything done for me.” She shuddered slightly. “My blood was tainted, according to their standards. They watched me as if I were some alien beast—as if a child of twelve could hurt them. But, you know, I became a good Communist. I studied Marx and Lenin and I could argue with the best of them. At first I worked in a machine factory in Csepel, the industrial district of Budapest. And they watched me. Always, there were eyes upon me. But I was a good Communist, and because I was clever and knew my Marx dialectics, I was finally permitted to attend the University of Budapest. I wanted to work on the newspaper, the Szabad Nep.” Ilona’s smile was bitter. “That means ‘Free People.’ ”
“And the AVO?” Durell asked quietly.
“The Allam Vedelmi Osztag,” she said. Her voice was bitter. “One had no choice. At the university, where I studied journalism, I was asked to act as an informer. You understand, the AVO used everyone, everyone. There are the controls who act as liaison groups between agents and informers and the AVO officials. They can be anyone—nightclub owners, shopkeepers, waiters. The agents are specialists who use false papers to get into factories or newspaper plants to spy on the other workers. The informers, of which I was one, used many women—housewives, workers, prostitutes, it made no difference. When they approached me to spy on my fellow students, I tried to refuse. I was told that my friends would suffer, and so I agreed. But then, when I turned in few or false reports of no harm to anyone, I was told that another member of my classes was assigned to check on me. I had no idea who it was. Life became a hell of suspicion and hatred. I tried to do as little injury to anyone as I could. There was a time when I wanted to kill myself, and they told me that if I chose suicide as a way out, my friends would be put in the labor battalions. There was no way out. None at all. They paid me, you know—they paid everyone, and forced them to sign receipts. And after a time, you begin to give up, a little bit of yourself at a time, until you are as degraded, as brutal, as callous as the others.”
Durrell lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She took it without looking at him. Her face was very pale.
“After I graduated from the university, I got a job on Szabad Nep and I joined the Petoefi Circle—the group of writers and intellectuals who really began the October rebellion. I was still spying for the AVO. By then I knew a great deal about them—the cellar prisons, the sadistic guards. Most of the agents were scum who had also served the Horthy regime and the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation. It made no difference to the Reds. They were trained in brutality and terror, and that was all that was needed. Of course, many of the higher officials, like Bela Korvuth, were dedicated Communists, of high intelligence, well paid, living in luxury, on salaries of ten, twenty thousand forints a month, while a factory worker made eight hundred. I had no choice. I was one of them. And there was no hope for escape until October came and I saw how thousands, millions of others felt. And I was on the wrong side.” She shuddered violently for a moment. “I could feel the hatred of the people for the
AVO. It was like a black, choking poison, pressing all around me. We were detested, feared.
“I was in the hall in Vaci S
treet when it began. I saw the massacres at the Radio Building, the ineffectuality of Nagy Imre at Parliament Square. I saw them burn down the steel statue of Stalin, and I saw the children, the children, fighting the Russian tanks, with fists, pipes, gasoline bottles, grenades strung across the streets. I heard the shouting, the yells for ‘Ruszkik ki! Ruszkik ki!'—Russians, get out! I saw my city destroyed when the Mongol troops came back in the new tanks that could deflect their guns so you couldn’t slip up under them to stuff gasoline rags in the air vents. I ran. I hid.
“I saw the AVO men killed, but most of us survived. I was in the crowd at Koztarsasag Square, where AVO men were hosed out of the cellar prisons—diabolical places—and torn to pieces by the people. I was hurt in the crowd, but nobody identified me then. I woke up in the Szabolcz Street Hospital, and by then it was over. The Soviet tanks had come back, shooting, bombing—oh, so bravely! Tanks, jets and machine guns against a betrayed people who had nothing but their hands to fight with. It was hopeless. There was nothing I could do. And then Major Korvuth visited me and I went back to work in the reconstituted AVO, and finally I was chosen—honored, he said—to accompany him to America for his mission.”
Her mouth curved downward. Durell looked out through the small port. There was nothing to see, only black starry space, the infinite reaches of the stratosphere. No sea, no land, nothing tangible was in sight. He looked back at the girl. She was watching him with an expression of despair in her dark eyes.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she whispered. “You think I am only excusing myself for having worked with the secret police.”
“I believe you,” he said.
“You have heard stories like mine before. Full of excuses, pleading innocence, full of self-reproach. But mine is true.”
“What will they do to you if you’re caught, Ilona?”
Her face was pale. “There was a prison at Recsk. It was an extermination place. It is probably in operation again.” “You can still turn back,” he said.
“Then you don’t believe me?”
“I only hope you’ve told me the truth.”
Chapter Ten
The girl slept until they landed at the U.S. military airfield in western Spain. It was almost dawn here as the bomber touched down, a pale pearly light glowing in the east. The air was cold, with a bitter wind. Durell had been thinking about Deirdre, and of the finality with which she had turned away from him. He knew this distraction with thoughts other than for the mission ahead of him was dangerous, and he tried to push her image from his mind. The days ahead were dangerous enough without the added liability of risk because of carelessness. Death came quickly and greedily for the careless man in his business, and he told himself that if Deirdre did not understand him now, then nothing could be done about it and she belonged to the past. The time to think about was now, and tomorrow, and not yesterday.
In the operations office, Durell was met by a Colonel Smith, who provided him with a set of documents for himself and Ilona, arranged for by coded cable from Washington. There was time to shower and have breakfast at the airfield, in Smith’s office, before a jeep was summoned and they rode for an hour to meet a plane for a commercial flight to Zurich. Veinna had been notified in advance, and a Roger Wyman, from the American Embassy, was waiting for them when they landed late in the afternoon.
Ilona had grown increasingly quiet during their eastward progress, and shortly before they landed in Austria, with the Alps glittering cold and forbidding far below their plane, she said, “One favor I would like to ask. Must we go into the city itself? There are many Hungarian refugees still in Vienna. Someone might recognize me, and that might spoil things for us before we are well started.”
Durell nodded. “We’ll see what Wyman says.”
They used the papers given to them in Spain by Colonel Smith. He was now Janos Derosi, an engineer in the locomotive factory in Csepel, Budapest. Ilona had kept her own name and papers indicating she still worked ostensibly for Szabad Nep, the official Communist newspaper in Budapest.
Roger Wyman met them after they had gone through a routine customs inspection. He was a big blond man from Nebraska, about thirty-three, with a plainsman’s face and pale blue eyes with narrow squint lines radiating from the corners. His grip was strong and hard. His position at the Embassy was that of an Undersecretary, and his manner was smooth and quick, like that of many professional Foreign Service careermen.
“You two must be starved. I’ve made arrangements at Victor’s for dinner for the three of us. I imagine you want to be briefed about McFee. Come this way.”
“We don’t want to go into town,” Durell said. “Ilona doesn’t think it’s wise, and neither do I.”
“Oh?” Wyman looked at the redheaded girl with appreciation. His smile was warm, his teeth big and white. He wore a dark-green, fuzzy Habig hat, a tweedy overcoat, highly polished London cordovans. He frowned slightly. “You might be right, at that, children. Some of the Hungarians spotted an AVO man just the other day. Damned near started a riot. What do you suggest?”
“Somewhere near the border. Can you drive us, say, to Eisenstadt?”
“Sure thing. Smart move. You want to go across tonight?” “If conditions are right,” Durell said.
“It won’t be easy. There’s a real terror campaign going on over there, I hear. Well, come on. I’ve got my car outside.” It was a small Topolino, an Italian car affectionately known as a “little mouse.” It was colder here than it had been at the Spanish airport. Roger Wyman’s big bulk crowded the little vehicle, and his Midwestern drawl began to grate on Durell’s nerves. The big man talked about his job, about the chances he’d had for advancement in the Foreign Service, about departmental politics that had kept several plums from his grasp because, as he put it, he hadn’t come from some swank Boston family with drag in the right quarters. He spoke cheerfully, but under his words Durell sensed a deep resentment at the job he was in. Durel did not bring up the subject of McFee’s disappearance until they were well away from the Vienna Airport, speeding eastward along a wide, concrete autobahn out of the city’s suburbs.
“I took your chief to the border myself,” Wyman told him. “I put him in this inn in Eisenstadt that I’m going to take you to. He wanted me to find the leak in the refugee screening apparatus we set up, and I’ve been working on that all day, checking dossiers on our people here. Of course, we’ve had to hire a great many Hungarian interpreters, and Aus-trians, too, and when we got orders to up the quotas, we had to work fast. Public opinion around here had us on a spot, because we weren’t passing through enough refugees in comparison to other European countries. It’s my feeling that in our hurry, we didn’t check some of the foreign help thoroughly enough. I’ve been doing that all day, but so far nothing has turned up to give me a clue.”
“When did you last see McFee?” Durell asked.
“At the inn, as I told you. He said he wanted to scout around for a day or so before going across the border. I advised him against trying it at all, frankly. The situation over there since the Russians came back is pretty tense. But I suggested the name of a professional guide, when he insisted, and then I had to get back to town. That was the last I saw of him.”
“And he hasn’t made contact since then?”
“Two nights ago. That’s when I left him in Eisenstadt. Funny little chap. Not very talkative. I don’t even know who or what he was after.”
“You don’t have to know,” Durell said.
There was a faint change in Roger Wyman’s broad, good-looking face. Durell wondered if it was resentment at his bluntness. Wyman said: “I tried to find the guide I recommended—Tibor Szabo. Quick youngster, full of beans. He’s gone, too. I can only assume that McFee grew impatient the moment I left and took oS for points east.” Wyman leaned forward at the wheel of the Topolino to look at Ilona’s face in the shadows. “I can recommend another guide, if you’re going in after McFee.”
“We won’t need one,” I
lona said quietly.
“You’re Hungarian?”
“It doesn’t matter what she is,” Durell said bluntly.
There was something about Wyman that irritated him, and this didn’t make sense, except that it might be an expression of his own state of nerves. He had never felt quite as tense and touchy about a job before, and there was no point in gratuitously making an enemy of the man for no good reason at all. Wyman’s next words convinced him the man was only trying to be helpful.
“If you’re going across after McFee, I can tell you something about Tibor Szabo’s usual route. He went by way of Gyor—that’s about sixty miles from Budapest—and usually holed up at a farm in the outskirts of that town. Run by an uncle of Tibor’s, Geza Hegedus. Tibor had quite a system. Chances are if your McFee went across with him, they stopped at Hebedus’s farm for the rest of the night.”
Durell looked at Ilona, and she nodded slightly, indicating that she was familiar with the route. He felt the warm pressure of her body against him as they sat squeezed together in the little car, and he was suddenly impatient to keep going, to be rid of Wyman as soon as possible and get on with the job. There was no reason, actually, to assume that Dickinson McFee had met with personal disaster, despite the desperate risk of probing into Budapest these days. McFee might have decided not to check back until he found some definite trace of Dr. Tagy in the ruined city; or his line of communication may have broken down somewhere. Durell began to feel more optimistic. Ilona’s gloved hand crept into his and he squeezed her fingers lightly against the slight nervous trembling he felt in her. They had arrived here in good time. Even granted that Bela Korvuth, back in the States, got wind of Tagy’s presence here in Hungary, it would take Korvuth days to double back on the physicist’s trail. By that time, Durell hoped, their swift probe behind the Iron Curtain would be successfully finished.
Assignment - Budapest Page 9