Assignment - Budapest

by Edward S. Aarons

  “They may think you are Russian,” Ilona said. “It will be all right. I’m just nervous, that’s all. A little shaken up.” “Who did it?” Durell asked. “Who tipped off the secret police that an American was hiding at Hegedus’s farm?”

  “I wish I knew,” she murmured. “I’m frightened by it.”

  "Could it have been Tibor Szabo?”

  “How could he have known you would follow so soon?” “That’s right,” Durell said. “Not even McFee knew I was coming in after him. Even if Hegedus’s was betrayed, say, by Tibor—if Tibor has been captured—they wouldn’t be looking for me there last night, would they?”

  “We don’t know that Tibor has been caught. But McFee —perhaps he has talked.”

  “He hasn’t,” Durell said flatly. “He wouldn’t.”

  “You are very sure of your man,” the redheaded girl said. “Yes. McFee is the one element I am sure of.”

  She looked down at her cup of coffee. She had taken only one sip of it. “You are not sure of me, Sam?”

  “I don’t know how you could have tipped off the police we were here. And you could have stopped me when we got out of that damned attic room.”

  She flushed slightly. “Thank you. Thank you for your trust.”

  “I’m just trying to look at it from every direction.”

  “It will go worse for me, if I am caught, than for you.” “We’ll both die,” Durell said. “That’s true.”

  “But they will see to it that I die slowly,” Ilona said.

  One of the men at the next table was staring at her. Durell reached forward and patted her hand and smiled. “Drink your coffee, darling.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “It will do you good. It’s a cold morning.'”

  “All right.”

  The man at the next table looked away and resumed his conversation with the other two men and the stout woman with them. It was not very warm in the coffee shop, and the station was inadequately heated, and everyone at the tables wore their overcoats and hats. It was remarkably quiet in contrast to the subdued, constant waves and echoes of sound in an American railroad station, Durell thought. It was the quiet of sullen, despairing terror, of a people afraid to laugh and talk. Durell broke his roll and ate it and finished his coffee. Ilona drank her coffee slowly, her dark brown eyes .reflecting angry, golden glints.

  “How can you suspect me after last night?” she asked angrily. “Do you regret anything?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It was nothing. You owe me nothing, I owe you nothing, for last night. You must not make anything out of it. We needed each other and we were good for each other, were we not?”

  “I’m still thinking of who betrayed us,” Durell said..

  Her fingers moved nervously over the porcelain table top. “I think you know,” she whispered. “I think we both know. I’m sorry I mentioned the other thing. I didn’t intend to. I’m afraid, that’s all.”

  “So am I,” he said. “Maybe it’s a good thing.”

  “Please forgive me. I just don’t want you to suspect me, that’s all. We must trust each other. Our lives depend on it.”

  “I know that. Are you thinking of Roger Wyman?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He is the only one who knew our route, and who knew where we would stop to rest.”

  He nodded. “Roger Wyman.”

  It was there and he could not deny it, as much as he hated to think about it. Truth had an ugly face sometimes. All treachery and betrayal was ugly. But Dickinson McFee had been betrayed night before last, a few minutes after leaving Geza Hegedus’s farm. He had been caught by the secret police a mile from the farm. Yet Tibor Szabo had escaped somehow, if the old farmer’s word could be trusted. Maybe it was Tibor. But he didn’t believe it, even though he had never met the young freedom fighter who had found a way to fight by guiding people to safety over the frontier. And it was difficult to believe that his uncle, Geza Hegedus, had betrayed him, too. He knew that one of the strongest Magyar traits was the intense feeling of family solidarity. It was not likely that Hegedus had betrayed his nephew. Or McFee. It could not be discounted completely, but his mind kept turning back to Roger Wyman. If a traitor explained the influx of a Red apparatus among the refugees admitted to the United States, Wyman was in a perfect position to organize it through the screening personnel. McFee had contacted only Wyman, and McFee had been arrested, caught almost as soon as he had crossed the frontier. And the same thing would have been his own fate, except for a bit of luck.

  He suddenly remembered that Geza Hegedus had volunteered the information that McFee had been caught and arrested. Would Hegedus have offered that knowledge, knowing it would alert Durell, if he planned to call in the secret police an hour or two later? Not likely. Hegedus could be eliminated, so it left no one else but Wyman. The big Nebraska farm boy, frustrated career diplomat, big and handsome and flat broke, aware of talents in himself, perhaps, that were not recognized, that were lost in the sluggish bureaucracy in which he had tried to carve a career for himself. There was no one else.

  Ilona said: “Please, darling. Don’t look at me like that.”

  He had not been aware that he was staring at her. “I’m sorry. I was thinking of Roger Wyman.”

  “It is not easy to accept the knowledge of a traitor,” she said.

  “Wyman knows that McFee isn’t an ordinary agent. He knows that McFee would come here only on something of top priority. He’ll put two and two together, and come up with Dr. Tagy. And that means Bela Korvuth, back in the States, will be informed. Bela will come streaking back as fast as he can make it. It cuts down our time considerably.”

  “Should we go back after Wyman?” Ilona asked.

  “No. He can wait.”

  “He will make things even more dangerous for us.”

  “It can’t be helped.”

  There was an announcement over the loud-speaker in the waiting room, and Ilona nodded and they stood up. Durell paid the waiter with his forints and they moved toward the Budapest train. Nobody stopped them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Budapest still carried all the scars of bitter fighting and destruction in the bright winter sunlight. From the station in Buda, on the west bank of the Danube that flowed north and south through the twin city, Durell and Ilona walked across Parliament Square, where much of the heaviest fighting and slaughter had taken place. The big, ornate neo-Gothic Parliament building, with its gray walls and balconies, looked busy and normal except for shell and bullet scars. A gang of laborers was repairing the paving where tank treads and grenades had torn up the street. There were a great many blue-uniformed police everywhere. The populace looked sullen, hurrying about their morning tasks, with little conversation and no laughter. It was a city scarred by destruction, condemned to terror. Soviet troops still patrolled the sidewalks, and Durell did not miss the alien, Mongolian cast to their features. Their voices were loud and arrogant—the harsh assurance of the conquerors. From Parliament Square they walked three kilometers to the Radio Building, where the first serious fighting had begun back in October. Here the destruction of shot and shell was more in evidence. The purpose of his walk was not aimless. He wanted to be sure there was no one on their trail, and he took his time about it, strolling quietly with Ilona, doubling back around the block now and then or pausing to watch the reflections of the street in shop windows. They seemed safe enough.

  Ilona talked brightly all the while they walked, clinging to Durell’s arm as if they were lovers with no thought or consequence to their surroundings. Yet he knew her dark brown eyes missed none of the faces they passed, and once when he turned a corner and started walking right her fingers tightened convulsively on his arm.

  “Not this way, darling,” she smiled. “AVO headquarters are just down the street. Someone might recognize me and wonder what I’m doing here when I’m supposed to be overseas.”

  They turned and walked the other way. On the train they had dec
ided on a course of action if their arrival in Budapest seemed safe enough. It was necessary for them to split up. There was no chance of their going to a hotel together, or even of finding a room somewhere that they might share. That sort of thing, Durell had decided, was far too dangerous. It was Ilona who had suggested that they each select an objective. She had a friend, she said, a man who had worked on the newspaper, Szabad Nep, who lived not far from the newspaper’s office building in Pest, near Rakoczi Street and Jozsef Boulevard. She would contact him, using her old AVO papers, and try to learn in which prison McFee was being held. McFee was to be her target, because of her AVO connections. Dr. Tagy’s whereabouts, if indeed the man were still alive, was Durell’s objective.

  “We’re not far from where Endre Stryzyk’s sister lives,” Ilona said. “I’ll take you there. She worked as a telephone operator on the night shift, and she may be at home at this hour. She may be able to help you. There’s no use looking in the telephone directory for any of Tagy’s family; they wouldn’t be listed these days. But I’ll check the police register, if I can get into the files, and see what I can find out. Maria Stryzyk, I think, knew the Tagy family. I don’t know where her sympathies may be, and you will have to be careful with her. She speaks English, but she may still believe in the Communist regime. So don’t take any chances with her.”

  “Where will we meet?” Durell asked.

  “At Maria Stryzyk’s apartment,” she said.

  “When?”

  It was eight o’clock in the morning. “At noon?”

  “All right. But I don’t like your heading back into any AVO office.”

  She smiled. “I’m in less danger, after all, than you are. If you try to say one complicated sentence, you’ll be spotted as a Westerner. At least, I can get around without attracting attention to myself, as long as I stay away from Deak Ferenc Square. That’s the headquarters of the AVO where I used to report to, and where I was summoned to work with Bela Korvuth.”

  “Be careful,” Durell said.

  She gave him the address of the Stryzyk apartment on Gel-lert Hill, in the residential section of old Buda. “You can take the trolley from here. Don’t talk to anyone. If someone tries to stop you, do anything to get away. Don’t let them take you and find your wounded shoulder. They’ll either assume you fought in the revolution, as an American, and that would break things wide apart; or they’ll—”

  “I know what they might do,” Durell said. “I’m worried about you.”

  “At noon,” she said. “Here comes your trolley.”

  She kissed his cheek lightly, smiled, and walked away.

  The trolley Durell took was not very crowded. There was only one woman aboard, three men sitting apart from each other, and a uniformed police agent with the blue metal tabs of the AVO sitting in the farthest seat back. Durell seated himself halfway down the rocking car and watched the ruined streets speed by the window. He knew that what she was about to do was more dangerous than his immediate job, and he felt a deep admiration for her, and sympathy for the hours ahead of her. It was not easy for her to come back here where every hand was lifted against her, where her friends hated her as a member of the dreaded secret police, and where the police themselves would regard her as a traitor if she were discovered. He remembered her calm courage during their walk just now, and how she had been in the attic room during the night—a simple, frank and wonderful girl, hungry for love and security. An easy comradeship had been established between them, and he was no longer in doubt about whether he could trust her now. . . .

  Buda, on the western bank of the Danube, was high and hilly, the residential, cultural side of the city as opposed to Pest, which had grown from a mud village in Roman times to a vast industrial and commercial complex. Now and then, from the narrow, hilly streets, Durell glimpsed the Danube itself, and the famous bridges—and everywhere were bombed and shelled houses, the rubble of destruction in the fierce, fantastic street fighting where youngsters tackled monstrous tanks with lengths of pipe, gasoline bottles, grenades, bricks, anything. Many of the fine trees lining the boulevards had been blasted to shattered stumps. And here and there, in the narrow cul-de-sacs among houses a thousand years old, were still the rusting ruins of tanks lured into traps between the ornate old buildings.

  Durell got off at the street Ilona had indicated, and as he stepped off the trolley he was suddenly aware of movement behind him. In the reflection of the glass of the folding exit door he saw the uniform of the AVO man who had been sitting in the rear of the car. He did not turn around. Crossing to the sidewalk, he turned right immediately, in the opposite direction he wanted to go, his stride direct and certain, as if he knew his destination by rote. He found himself on a narrow, quiet residential street that had by some chance missed the worst of the fighting. Only a few chipped scars in the stone fagades of the apartment houses indicated a few sniper’s bullets had found their way here. The trees were bare, a delicate tracery of clean limbs overhead, making a shadow pattern on the old sidewalks.

  Measured, booted footsteps followed him.

  The street was empty in the bright, cold sunlight, except for a woman bundled in an old cloth coat, hurrying along the opposite sidewalk. It slanted sharply upward toward the ruins on Castle Hill, and Durell turned the next corner, a full block now from where the trolley had dropped him. The footsteps still trod in measured pace behind him. He saw that the street he had entered was a dead end, cut across the opposite end by a massive rococo apartment house. The windows had been shot out and the place looked empty and desolate. He went unhesitatingly to the front door.

  “You, there!”

  The AVO man’s voice cut harshly across the sunny stillness. Durell turned on the steps. The man looked big, bulky and ominous in his warm uniform. His eyes were small under heavy, bushy black brows, and there was an arrogance in his deliberate tread as he closed the distance between them. “You. Come down here.”

  Durell came down the steps from the empty apartment house.

  “What are you doing here?” the AVO man asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You live here?”

  He gave the address of a building that,was not that of Maria Stryzyk. “I live at No. Twenty-eight Tisza Square.”

  His accent was noticed. The man’s eyes narrowed. “You are not from Budapest?”

  “No. I come from Pecs. I am ill, that is why I am not working.”

  Pecs was where the Hungarian uranium mines were located.

  The AVO man didn’t like it. His mouth widened in a false smile. “Well, then, perhaps it is all right. Have you a match, comrade?”

  “Of course.”

  Durell took out a small, engine-turned lighter. It was a cheap lighter of Swiss manufacture. The guard turned it over in thick, blunt fingers. “Where did you get this?”

  “From a Russian soldier. He had many of them. We were drinking together one night, and he gave it to me as a gift.” “You speak strangely. You are a foreigner, aren’t you?” “Yes. I was brought in to work in the mines. I worked there for three years, until I got sick.”

  “Your papers,” the AVO said bluntly.

  Durell took out the papers he had been furnished in Spain. He looked beyond the man’s bulky, uniformed figure and saw no one on the sunlit, cobblestoned street. There was faint movement at one of the windows nearby, but it vanished almost immediately. He looked at the agent’s thick, brutal neck. There, he thought, is where I’ll hit him. Just above that pulsing artery.

  The guard returned his papers. “Everything seems in order. You are directed to stay out of empty buildings, do you understand? There is to be no more looting.”

  “Yes. I am sorry. I just thought I’d look around.”

  “Go home and stay there,” the man said.

  He pocketed Durell’s lighter, as if in absent-minded gesture. Durell did not ask for its return. The big man turned and strode away, his new boots ringing on the cold cobblestones. Durell let out his breath slowly
and walked after him to the comer, and when the other man turned left, Durell turned the other way.

  The apartment house at No. 14 Tisza Square was five stories high, with ornate balconies of fat, rounded balustrades, carved gray stone lintels, and a grilled doorway. Tisza Square was little more than a wide area in the narrow street sloping up toward the crest of Castle Hill. Far away and down, he could see the Danube, and the smoke of factories on Csepel Island, the heavy-industry district, and the bridges where so much fighting had taken place. A cold wind blew from over the plains to the east. He searched the directory under the polished brass mailboxes, none of which contained any mail that he could see, found Maria Stryzyk’s name, and thumbed the bell. The apartment number was 4-A and he did not wait for any response, but turned at once to the dark stairway and climbed to the fourth floor. The building was very quiet, and he met no one on his way up.

  The door to Number 4-A was closed. He knocked, listened, heard nothing, and knocked again, a little more imperiously. Nobody appeared in the shadowed hallway, where elegance of wallpaper had deteriorated into faded patterns, peeling paint, and scarred plaster. The air felt cold and damp. He knocked again, more loudly, and called softly: “Maria, open up!”

  This time he heard a hesitant footstep, then someone approached the door quickly and he heard bolts being withdrawn and then the door opened about two inches. He glimpsed a woman’s face, pale with sudden fear as she saw his big figure, and he put a hand against the door panel and shoved hard, driving her back with a little gasp of terror as he forced his way in. He closed the door quickly behind him, threw the bolt again, and said: “Don’t be afraid. I am not the police. I’m a friend.”

  The woman backed away from him. “I have no friends.” “Nevertheless, I am a friend. I mean you no harm.” Durell saw her quick, terrified breathing and said suddenly in English: “I bring you news of your brother Endre.”

  He knew that what he had said was cruel; but it was necessary. Maria Stryzyk was a slender, dark-haired woman in her middle thirties. She might have been pretty once, and some of the fine contours of her facial structure still remained. Her eyes were wide and dark, bright with sudden hope, her mouth still shaken by quick fear. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her oval face, and she clutched a faded gray flannel robe around her thin figure, as if she had been asleep or about to turn in. Then he saw suspicion replace the sudden hope in her dark eyes, and she spoke flatly, in Hungarian: “You are trying to trick me. My brother Endre was killed some time ago, here in Budapest, and he was buried with all the rest of them in a common grave.”