It was eleven o’clock when they arrived in the small town of Eisenstadt. Durell felt no sense of weariness, despite the vast distance they had traveled since noon in Washington that day. His sense of time had become slightly distorted by their race eastward, into the night, away from Washington’s Sunday calm. His wounded arm felt cramped and stiff from being crowded in Wyman’s little car, but it was not enough to trouble him seriously. He was more concerned about Ilona’s growing tension as they neared the border. It was not easy for her to go back into a terror she knew so intimately.
The inn Wyman took them to in Eisenstadt was small and unobtrusive, and Wyman, in poor German, ordered a late supper for them. Durell did not object as Wyman cheerfully went on to arrange for two rooms for their use that night. The place was not crowded. The dining room was rustic, dimly lighted, and they were the only occupants at the tables, although a small bar across the common room was noisy with several men in rough clothing, drinking beer. Except for the first curious glances at them, nobody paid much attention. Durell tried to spot anybody who might have a more than usual interest in a couple who looked like Hungarians in the company of an obvious American like Wyman, but he didn’t see anything to alert him and he relaxed gratefully over the hot food served by a plump and cheerful hausfrau.
For some minutes he probed Wyman about McFee, looking for anything that might yield a hint of trouble for the little man; but Wyman’s impression of McFee was mostly negative, even resentful of the way McFee had shut him out of information. Durell got Wyman to talk about himself, mainly to set Ilona at ease, and Wyman was not averse to yielding his history as a Nebraska farmboy, a football star, a scholarship man whose ambitions in the Foreign Service had come up against the grueling reality of bureaucracy and frustration. Yet the man seemed competent and able, efficient in the manner he sketched in his preliminary efforts to probe the screening personnel for anything suspicious.
“Will you be taking off tonight?” Wyman asked finally.
“I haven’t decided yet. Ilona is rather tired.”
“You both look a little beat. After all, another night shouldn’t crack too many eggs. Is something wrong with your arm, Durell?” he asked suddenly.
Durell felt a swift rise of alarm and anger. His voice was quietly savage. “You know what my name is here.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry. But this place is safe as a church. Nothing to worry about. But you’re holding your arm as if it troubles you.”
“It does,” Durell said. “I got a bullet in it recently.” Wyman looked flustered under Durell’s steady, dark stare. “You don’t have to get sore. It was just a slip. Nobody heard us.”
“I think you’d better take off,” Durell said.
“Well, all right. I’m really sorry.” Wyman stood up, smiling. There was a burst of heavy laughter from the bar, but the backs of the men there were all turned toward them. “If you’d like, I’ll leave my car. There’s a bus back to Vienna at midnight. If there’s anything I can do—by the way, you have your money changed to forints, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” Durell said. There had been a packet of thick Hungarian currency among the papers Colonel Smith gave him at the Spanish airport. “We’ll take the car, with thanks. I’m sorry I snapped. It’s a touchy business.”
“My fault, entirely.” Wyman looked grateful as Durell relaxed. “I’m always talking too much. Big fault. Not the sort of thing a man in the Foreign Service should have on his record. I guess it’s just that you people intrigue me—• I often wish I were in your branch, instead of doing the routine paperwork they give me.” He flushed and broke off again. “There I go once more. I’d better leave before you think I’m a complete ass.”
He went out quickly, waving to the fat waitress who brought Durell and Ilona their coffee. Durell watched the big blond man out of sight, and he was silent until the waitress left the vicinity of their table. He saw that Ilona was very pale again.
“A few more minutes with that man,” she said, “and we might as well have worn some signs around our necks.” “Take it easy,” he told her. “You’re too keyed up.”
“I can’t help it. I didn’t like Mr. Wyman.”
“Are you nervous about staying here tonight?”
“I think the sooner we move on, the better.”
“We can use Wyman’s car to get near the border, anyway. Do you know the road?”
“Quite well. It will not be easy.”
Durell looked at the fine bones of her face, the softness of her mouth when she smiled, even though the smile was forced. He touched her hand.
“None of it will be easy. Let’s go.”
Chapter Eleven
A thin, cold mist lay along the swamps of the border. The night was white and frozen, with hoarfrost on the brittle reeds and the still, bare branches of clumps of birch trees. The ground felt like iron, frozen underfoot. Durell ran the Topolino into a barn a mile from the boundary and hoped it would still be there when they returned—if they were lucky, and if they returned. From the barn, they walked along a progressively deteriorating lane, picking their way by means of the cold blue starshine that gave an unearthly aspect to the landscape. Somewhere far off a dog barked and barked. To the south, across the rolling fields of Burgenland, a spotlight suddenly shot straight up, probing the sky, and then swept down in a leveling arc and blinked out. Durell walked along with the girl in silence. She seemed familiar enough with the road. It was past midnight, and nothing living stirred in the frozen white stillness around them.
“We are almost there,” Ilona said, halting. “See, you can make out the banks of the canal—that wall of earth there. It is in Hungary. About a quarter of a mile to the noith, you will see the wooden watchtower.”
“Is it manned?”
“With the new R Troops—the old AVO personnel. And probably the Russians, set to watch the AVO. Two miles beyond the canal, if we get through the marshes, there is a rather good road and some farms where we might be able to borrow a cart or a truck. But the swamps ahead are difficult.”
The girl’s voice was quiet and firm now. Now that they were on the move, she seemed to have lost some of the tension that had possessed her earlier. In the starlight, her face was calm, her glance objective. Durell looked toward the watch tower. For a moment he could not define it, then it came clearly through the white mists that gave the night a strange luminosity. There was no sign of movement in the tower, and he could not tell if it were occupied. Ilona made a sign with her hand and they moved forward toward the bank of the canal.
It was little moie than a wide ditch at this point, and the temperature fortunately had frozen the surface. Durell tested the ice with his weight, then walked quickly across, with Ilona behind him. The marshes below the canal embankment stretched in every direction, seemingly limitless, with reeds clashing softly, taller than his head. He had heard how some refugees, fleeing from the return of the Russian terror, had wandered lost, for days, without a guide. But Ilona moved forward with confidence, every aspect of her changed. She turned left, slid down the canal embankment, and indicated a footpath that was swallowed up by the reeds ahead. Durell nodded and signaled her to lead the way.
The strange white night was perilous in its silence. Now and then Ilona paused and they listened. From far away came a faint, rapid thudding noise, and he knew a machine gun was being fired.
“A Russian guitar,” Ilona whispered. “We will have to be on the watch for patrol dogs.”
There was nothing to see. The footing was uncertain and treacherous as the path meandered from hummock to hummock in the frozen swamps. Now and then a breeze stirred and the reeds clashed and rattled in brittle reply. But if the marsh reeds cut off his vision, it served equally well to screen them from the eyes of the border patrol. They went about a quarter of a mile and rested for a few moments.
“A road begins up ahead. We will have to cross it,” Ilona whispered. “I think you had better be ready for trouble.”
Durell t
ook his gun out. It felt clumsy in his gloved hand, and he pulled the glove off with his teeth and held the gun in his bare fingers, feeling the quick bite of the cold.
“After you.”
An opening appeared in the reeds ahead. Mist moved in thin, tenuous streamers over a graveled road, and from a distance not far off, Durell heard the sudden sound of a car or truck engine starting up. He could see the watch tower now, a gaunt, spidery structure of heavy timbers, topped with a machine-gun platform, two spotlights, and a small enclosure with glass windows. Directly ahead, on the other side of the road, was a heavy fence of barbed wire. He knew that this would be their most formidable barrier. He could not tell if it were electrified, and he was not equipped with wire cutters. They would have to get through the best way they could.
Ilona waved him on ahead and he crossed the road in a low crouch and dropped in the dark shadows near the wire fence. Looking back, he saw the girl rise, ready to run after him. There was no warning when the star shell was fired. One moment there was only the eerie white frost of the night. The next, with a slight popping sound, a signal shell burst overhead and shed a dazzling radiance over the swamp, the road and the watch tower.
He stood in stark brilliance with Ilona against the wire fence.
There was no chance to escape. A man shouted from Durell’s right, and he spun quickly, saw the dimly running shape and the lift of the man’s arms and the glint of the short-barreled automatic weapon. He threw Ilona to the ground as the gun began to chatter. A shallow ditch ran along the side of the road and he followed the girl’s rolling body into it as the slugs kicked up frozen chips of sod where they had been standing. There was only the one burst, and then silence. High overhead, the star shell fell slowly, its unnnatural brightness beginning to fade.
“Are you hit?” Durell whispered.
“No. But it is all over.”
The star shell went out. The strange whiteness of the night seemed darker now, and Durell slid away from the girl, on hands and knees, keeping below the lip of the ditch. Footsteps ciunched on the gravel roadway nearby, pausing cautiously, then moving nearer again. He lay still, his gun in his hand. From the watch tower came the dim shrilling of a whistle, and there was a muttered curse from the border guard easing toward the barbed-wire fence. Durell began to hope that the man was not sure of what he had fired at. Perhaps they had not been identified as anything more than suspicious shadows, and nerves had triggered the guard's finger. A dog barked in irritated, repetitive bursts of nervous sound. Durell waited. The guard’s booted footsteps were very near now. They paused, and Durell came up fast, the gun in his hand as he scrambled up from the ditch. Luck was on his side. The guard’s back was toward him, his great-coated figure formless in the darkness. He wore a fur shako against the bitter cold, and Durell slashed at the base of his skull with the gun. There was no error in the precision of his blow. The guard stumbled forward, dropped his automatic rifle, and sprawled on his face in the middle of the road. Durell picked up the man’s gun and ran back toward Ilona.
“Come on. He’ll be out for a few minutes.”
Her face was pale and ghostly. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Hurry.”
The barbed-wire fence had been put up hurriedy since the return of the Russian troops to the frontier. Durell moved along it until he found a reasonably fair gap in the strands, tramped on one to push it down, and helped the girl slide through. In a moment he followed. They didn’t look back as they ran on through the swamps, heading eastward.
Afterward, when Durell thought about it, he knew he could not have made his way successfully without the girl. She did not lose her sense of direction for a moment. Twenty minutes of alternate trotting and walking brought them out of the swamp into rolling fields. The highway was where she said it would be. The farm she picked, with its peasant house and warm barn, smelling of hay and cattle, was exactly as she had promised. There was a small gray Skoda parked behind the barn. Ilona told Durell to stay in the shadows and walked around the back of the farmhouse. No light came on in the place, but he knew she had knocked and spoken to someone and gone in. She was not absent long. In a few minutes she came running back, carrying a paper sack and the car keys.
“It’s all right. I have some bread and cheese. We are to leave the car at the farm of Tibor’s uncle in Gyor. Can you drive a Skoda?”
Durell nodded. “Didn’t they ask any questions?”
“I told them I was Tibor’s woman.” In the darkness, Durell saw her smile of wry amusement. “I also said I was helping Tibor in his work as a guide. Business has fallen off lately, since a division of Mongolian troops have occupied the frontier area.”
“Did you ask about McFee?”
“He came through with Tibor Szabo last night.”
Durell threw the Russian automatic rifle into the hay loft before they left, and put his own gun on the floor of the car between his feet. The distance to Gyor was less than an hour’s run. The countryside changed from the low marshland along the frontier to rolling hills and fertile plains, scrupulously farmed by the tight-fisted Magyar peasants. They met no traffic on the road for the first part of the run, and when they saw a long line of headlights moving up ahead, Durell pulled off the road into thick brush to let a convoy thunder past. They were T-54 Soviet tanks, low-slung, swift, with sloping, heavily armored sides and semi-automatic cannon. Some of the hatches of the squad leaders were open, and Durell saw the helmeted machine-gunners, their faces dark and anonymous in the starlight. The convoy seemed to go on forever, thunderous and arrogant, and Durell counted over two hundred of the T-54’s before the tail end of the procession roared by with two Russian-made jeeps.
“The conquerors,” Ilona murmured. Her voice was thin. “How I hate them!”
It was almost three o’clock in the morning when they turned into the frozen mud road to the farm of Geza Hegedus, in the outskirts of industrial Gyor. The place was low and rambling, built of stone for the most part, with tidy barns and outbuildings. The city lay in dark slumber only a few miles beyond. Geza Hegedus was a small, wiry man with dark hair and the intense, acute face of the Magyar peasant. He appeared at the back door of the farm in a battered Army overcoat and boots, his thick gray hair awry, his heavy mustache scraggly over a worried mouth.
“Please, do not make any noise, my friends.” Durell’s knowledge of Hungarian was just enough to permit him to get the gist of the man’s whispered words. “You are heading for Austria?”
“We are going back to Budapest for more people,” Ilona told him. “Have you a place for us to sleep tonight?”
“You have papers?”
“They are satisfactory,” Ilona said. “We were hoping to find your nephew Tibor here.”
“He is gone. I don’t know when I shall see the fool again.” The farmer looked at Durell. “Doesn’t this one speak at all?” “He prefers silence, old man,” Ilona said. “You do not see him. You will not remember him. Do you understand?” “You are all crazy. Crazy! The frontiers are sealed tighter than ever, and yet you go on. Fools and cowards run away, pay you to take them to the West. What will happen to Hungary if our people all run away? It was not like this in the old days.”
“We need no lectures from you, only a room for the night. And silence. We will pay you well.”
“I take no money for my services,” the peasant grumbled. He held the door of the farmhouse open, his manner grudging. “You have hidden your car?”
“In the barn.”
“Come in, then. It is cold tonight.”
The kitchen had a stone floor and a huge Russian-type stove in one corner, a massive oak table and equally heavy, worn chairs. Hegedus drew thick curtains over the windows and lit a kerosene lamp. His eyes returned worriedly to Durell’s tall, silent figure.
“I do not trust this one. He looks like a foreigner.”
“He is,” Ilona said. “He searches for the man Tibor brought here last night.”
Hegedus scowled. �
�Tibor is a fool. This man is worse, if he hopes for success. I kept warning Tibor, over and over again, that this business was too risky now. It was good enough in the first days, when the frontier was open and the AVO was in hiding. But they are all back now, all of them, and worse than ever. Every day I live in fear that they will find the guests Tibor brings me.”
“Where is Tibor now?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the man Tibor was taking to Budapest?”
Hegedus grunted. “He is probably praying for death.” Durell felt a small chill of apprehension at the farmer’s manner. He spoke to Ilona. “Ask him what he means. Ask if anything happened.”
Hegedus looked up sharply at the sound of Durell’s English.
His manner changed. Suspicion flared in his sharp, peasant’s eyes, and then was replaced by fear. “I do not like this one here. The one Tibor brought also spoke English. And it was disastrous. Every moment now, I expect the AVO to be back with more questions.”
“What happened?” Ilona asked sharply. “Were they caught?”
“Tibor escaped. The little man was taken prisoner. Last night, Tibor and the little man stayed here only for a bite of food before going on toward the city. But they did not get far. Tibor pushed his luck like a wild man. I’ve been warning him that the police were suspicious. They were waiting on the road, about a mile from here. The little man was taken, but Tibor escaped.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“My neighbors saw it. It is as I said. Tibor’s friend was captured. Tibor escaped into the woods. He is finished now. They will hunt him like a wild animal, and he will be killed.”
“And the foreigner?”
Hegedus shrugged. “Who knows what the AVO does to him this minute?” The old man drew a deep breath. “I do not want you here. It is too dangerous. But it will also be dangerous if you move on now. I have only one room to spare, upstairs, in the attic. You will have to stay together, and for the love of God, make no sound, no matter what you may hear down in these rooms. Do you understand?”
Assignment - Budapest Page 10