“That’s not quite true, Maria,” Durell said gently. “Don’t be afraid of me. I’ve come to you because I’m a stranger in Budapest and need help, and you are the only one I can turn to.”
“Get out,” she said. “Get out or I shall call for the police.” Durell said in English: “Endre was killed a few days ago, in the United States.”
She stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. She raised both hands to her mouth, her fingers touching her quivering lips. Then she sat down suddenly, her thin body swaying from side to side, no longer looking at Durell, not looking at anything but a dead past. He moved away from the door and looked out through the window. The square below was quiet and peaceful in the winter sunlight. He saw nothing suspicious.
The apartment was simply furnished, with relics of a past comfort that had steadily deteriorated, like the apartment building itself. The radiators under the windows were almost stone cold. There was a door to the right and he looked through it into a small kitchen. Another door led into a tiny darkened bedroom. He went in there and looked into the ancient bath, saw cotton stockings hanging to dry, opened a closet door and saw three dresses, two cotton and one of red wool, and a woman’s coat with a shabby fur collar, and one pair of flat-heeled woman’s shoes. When he came back to the main room of the apartment, Maria Stryzyk had not moved.
“Maria,” he said gently. “Make some coffee, if you have any.”
“Yes, I have some.”
“Go ahead, make a cup for yourself and for me.”
She looked up at him, her eyes searching his face. “It is true? Endre is dead? He reached the United States, and he is dead now?”
“Yes. He was killed by an AVO agent there. In New Jersey.”
Her mouth moved, then closed tightly. “And you? Who are you?”
“An American.”
“A spy?”
“I do whatever is necessary. I’ve come to save someone. To bring him back to safety with anyone else who would like to join us.”
“How can I trust you?” she whispered.
“You can’t. I need help, and you can only listen to me and decide for yourself if you want to help.”
She whispered: “Endre was only a boy. He was a child yesterday, and suddenly, overnight, when all the trouble started, he was a man, fighting and killing, shouting for freedom. He never knew what freedom was, yet it grew in his heart, planted there from something that lives in all men. I did not know he had escaped from Hungary. The police questioned me over and over again. They took me to the prison in Fo Street and kept me there for two months. I was very lucky. Things were confused. They were frightened, those beasts in the cellar prisons, and not sure of themselves. They broke my arm.” She lifted her left arm and Durell saw that it had been broken and poorly set again. “But I was lucky. I came out of it alive. And poor Endre, just a boy, reached freedom and they followed him and killed him.”
“Freedom is worth dying for,” Durell said quietly. “Go on» get the coffee.”
She stood up wearily. “Yes. I am sorry. You have come a long way, haven’t you?”
“A very long way.”
“If I can help you, I will.”
“It will be dangerous for you,” Durell said. “I can ask it only as a favor.”
“If Endre died for what you work for, surely I can spare a little risk to myself. Life is hardly worth living these days, in any case.” She was crying silently, her thin face tormented. “He was only a boy, do you understand? They were all children—fighting monsters, fighting for something they never had, and dying for it. For what I say to you, the AVO can kill me. They have killed many already who dreamed of a better life. If you came here to trick me, you can take me now. I am not sorry for anything I say or feel. I am only sorry we lost, that we had no help from you in the West, that we fought and died for nothing.”
“It was not for nothing,” Durell said. “It was a beginning.”
“And an end for Endre.”
She went into the small kitchen. Durell turned to the window and looked out at the small square below. A truck rumbled past, grinding up the steep hill in low gear. There were soldiers in it, men armed with automatic rifles, a machine gun mounted on the cab of the truck. The bright winter sunlight seemed to mock the impalpable darkness that shrouded this city. How many were like Maria? he wondered. How many were crushed and hopeless, how many still waited to fight again at some future time?
He went into the kitchen after Maria. She had put a gray enamel coffee pot on to boil and was staring at her hands in wonderment.
“Why was Endre killed?” she whispered. “Why was he hunted down so far away?”
Durell told her the circumstances of that morning in New Jersey. Not all of it, but enough so that it made sense and she understood what had happened. He knew that he was putting his life in her hands, but he had taken so many risks to reach this place that another was of small consequence. Maria listened without interrupting, her small face sober and pale, her dark eyes fixed on his face as if trying to weigh and assess the truth of what he was telling her. She believed him. She understood. When he was finished, the coffee was ready and she poured it into two cups and they went back to the living room.
“They had no right to kill Endre. He had fled, and he was out of it. It was just for revenge, for brutal killing, that he was murdered.”
“Yes,” Durell said.
“I still do not know why you are here, taking such awful chances to come to this city. If you are captured and discovered to be an American—”
“Do you know a family named Tagy?” Durell interrupted. “The family of a Dr. Tagy, who went to America some years ago?”
She nodded. “Yes, we are acquainted.”
“Do you know where they are living now?”
“It is not far from here. Near Szena ter—it is in this section, too. But I have seen none of the family for several weeks.”
“Would they trust you?”
She looked thoughtful. “I think so. You must understand how it is with us in this city. You suspect even your closest friends of being paid informers of the secret police. You never know who can be trusted, and so you say nothing, you speak banalities or you simply repeat phrases from the official propaganda line. And all the time as you look at the faces of your friends, you wonder what they are thinking, if they feel as you do about our terrible life, about the broken promises of the Communists, of the terror of the police and the rumors about the prisons. Yet you cannot speak. You don’t dare.
“You may try, in a roundabout way, to sound out the true feelings of those you know, but even if they respond in a way that is hopeful to you, in hints and small indications that they feel as you do, you draw back suddenly, in quick fright, because it might be a trap.” The dark-haired woman looked broodingly at her coffee. Her hands were restless. “But I have reached a point where I no longer care. When you came in an hour ago, I was like all the rest. And then you spoke in English and now I know that Endre is truly dead, and I have nothing more to lose. I will take you to the Tagy family.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was a half-hour walk through the hilly residential sections of Buda to the house Maria indicated. It was mid-morning now, after ten o’clock, and the city was a little more alive than it had been earlier. Maria walked briskly, her hands in the pockets of her thin, shabby coat, and she talked in aimless fashion about her job as a telephone operator on the night shift, of the days before the futile rebellion, of Endre as he had been as a schoolboy. Durell asked if she knew Ilona Andrassy and Maria’s tone changed.
“I think Endre was in love with her once, but it was only a schoolboy affair, and when she went to work on the newspaper there were stories about her that I didn’t like. It was said that she was an informer for the AVO. I have not seen her lately and I do not care to.”
“She is working with me,” Durell said. “She is here in Budapest. I think she can be trusted. Does that change anything?”
�
�I think you are a fool,” Maria said. “The AVO are all beasts, perverts, sadists. The women who are in the AVO are even worse than the men.”
“Yet she sent me to you, for help,” Durell pointed out. Maria’s pale mouth grew thin. “Then perhaps this is the last day for us to see the sunlight.”
“I don’t think so. She’s going to help us.”
“Are you to meet her again today?”
“At your apartment. At noon.”
Maria drew a deep, tremulous breath. Her thin, dark face was very intense. She could be dangerous now, Durell thought, filled with hatred because of the death of her brother. He hoped she knew how to control herself.
“I keep forgetting,” Maria said. “I have already taken the final step, by accepting you and helping you. There can be no greater danger. If you believe in Ilona Andrassy, then I will take the chance, too. I want only one thing. I do not want to die before I do something, before I can strike one more blow for Endre.”
“Perhaps the chance will come,” Durell told her.
The place she took him to was not an apartment house, but a tall old house squeezed between houses of similar vintage on a narrow side street lined with barren, spidery poplar trees that bent in the cold wind that blew from the east. There was a medieval quality to the ancient street, and Durell knew from the narrow thoroughfares and haphazard layout of the surrounding streets that he was in one of the oldest parts of Buda that dated back to when the plains of Hungary represented the farthest outpost of the old Roman Empire civilization. He could see where the narrow streets and twisting alleys could represent perfect traps for destroying modern tanks.
“How come the Tagys rate a house?” he asked quietly.
“It has been in the family for many years. For generations.”
“And it wasn’t taken from them when Dr. Tagy fled to the West?”
“For a time, yes. But no one else lived in it, and when Eva Tagy was released from prison, along with her children, she was permitted to return here. She has been living here ever since.”
“What about the children?”
“The little girl is gone. She disappeared. Probably she was killed last October. But there is a young son, Janos. About fifteen, I think. He was not involved in any of the fighting, because he was ill in the hospital with pneumonia at the time. It is the only thing that saved him from deportation, I’m sure.”
They walked past the house. There were ornate balconies in front of the bay windows of the stone fagade, and a steeply pitched tiled roof with ornate eave copings. Nothing stirred behind the windows. Like all the other houses in the city, it gave Durell the impression of sullen people hiding in silence behind locked doors.
“Do you think anyone is at home?”
“Mrs. Tagy will be there. The boy might be at school today. There is no place for the mother to go. She is rejected by the state, and refused anything but the most menial, hardest jobs. Someone is in there. We can go in the back way, if you wish.”
They turned the corner into a narrow alley, a slot between high board fences in sad need of repair. Once there had been small, elegant gardens and terraces flourishing here, with views of the city below from this slope of hill; but ugly modern apartment buildings blocked out the view of the river now, and an air of desolation, neglect and decay was everywhere. They waited until a lone passenger car went by, one of the few Durell had seen in the city this morning, and then turned into the alley. Various gates opened into the wide back yards of the houses flanking the Tagy residence.
Maria paused at a small entranceway painted a faded green, and pulled on a small cord that vanished through a hole in the wooden fence. Somewhere a bell tinkled faintly. Nobody came to the gate. She pulled on the bell cord a second time, and then a door opened somewhere and then the gate was pulled open, too.
“Maria Stryzyk ...” A small gray-haired woman huddled in an old pull-over sweater stood facing them. Her face was round and sweet, her eyes a dark gray in which quick fear flamed as her glance touched Durell’s tall figure behind the woman.
“May we come in?” Maria asked quickly.
“Why do you come this way? What do you want?” “We do not wish to attract attention. This man wants to talk to you.”
The woman’s mouth trembled and her hand crept to her throat. “The police? But—”
“Not the police,” Durell said. “Please. We can’t wait here.” Durell pushed open the gate and Maria slid quickly inside the little garden area. The woman stood to one side, an air of helplessness in the way she carried herself. Her face was very white.
“We have done nothing. Nothing at all,” she said quickly. “You have no need to trouble us, we are good citizens—”
“It’s all right, Eva,” Maria said gently. “There is nothing to fear. But it is better if we go inside.”
They crossed a small brick path between the bare tangle of shrubbery into a back door. The white-haired woman closed and locked the door behind them, told them to follow her, and they crossed a large, clean kitchen and went down a hallway to the front of the house.
“It is a long time since you have visited us, Maria.”
“This man wants to talk to you. Is Janos at home?”
“He is upstairs in bed. He has a very bad cold.”
“And no one else is here?” Maria asked.
“Who else is there?”
Durell said: “I am looking for your husband, Mrs. Tagy.” The woman halted in the middle of the front room of the house. A strange little animal sound came from her, but she did not turn to face Durell. Her whole posture was one as if he had suddenly struck at her with a knife. He could not see her face, since she stood with her back to him, but he saw the way her shoulders stiffened and he wondered how she had managed to dissemble and hide her secret as long as now, her nerves being what they were. He disliked frightening her, and he was not even sure that he was using the right approach, since if she distrusted him she could prove stubborn and waste time that was too precious to lose. He walked up to her and took her shoulders gently in his hands.
“It’s all right. I am not of the police. Believe me. I wish no harm to you or your husband. I’ve come here to help him. I’ve come a long way to find him and talk and help him do what he came here to do. Do you understand me?”
'‘No. Dr. Tagy is not here. He has been gone three years. You know that. Why do you ask about him now?”
“Because he is here. We know he is in Budapest. Perhaps he is hiding in this house. He will be safe with me. You will all be safe. I’ll help him get you out of the country. That's what he came back for, isn’t that so?”
He was not quite ready for her reaction. He did not know where she had hidden the knife. But she slipped away suddenly from his hands on her shoulders, and from somewhere inside her bulky sweater, the sweet-faced little woman took the knife and slashed violently at Durell. The blade flickered wickedly in the sunlight coming through the front bay windows. She was transformed, her face convulsed with despair and fear and rage, and a shrill screaming sound came from her open mouth. Durell parried the blow easily. He heard Maria shout something and from the tail of his eye he saw her jump forward, but he twisted the elderly woman’s wrist easily, not wanting to hurt her, and although she struggled on for another moment, still screaming in Hungarian some words he could not understand, he forced the knife from her grip and when it fell to the bare wooden floor, he kicked it aside.
“Please, Mrs. Tagy,” he said. “Believe me. I wish you no harm.”
Her breathing was wild and tumultuous. She stood before him with her eyes closed, her throat moving as she swallowed. “You can kill me, but I will never tell you anything.”
“I will not kill you. I won’t hurt you.”
“You are the police. This woman brought you here. How much did you pay her for the information? Or did you threaten her with your horrible prisons to make her bring you to me?”
“Neither one. Listen to me. Sit down. Didn’t you understand w
hat I said. I know Dr. Tagy came back to Budapest to help you. He was working for us—for America, the same as I do. Now do you understand? I came back here because he did not return with you. I don’t know why he failed, I don’t even know if he was lucky enough to reach you. But I must find him, before the AVO gets on his trail. They sent a man to the United States to kidnap or kill him, whichever suited them best. They didn’t know he had come back here. But they will know soon. They will come here for you, for him and for your son—”
“Get away from my mother!”
It was a boy’s voice, directed at Durell’s back, but there was something in the tone and the words that made him stand quite still. The white-haired woman sank down on a chair and covered her face. Her breath made a tortured sound in the sudden stillness.
“Janos?” Durell said.
“Turn around. Easily. Or you are a dead man.”
The boy stood in the doorway, near the foot of the stairs that led to the upper floor of the house. He was thin and spindly, not more than fifteen, all arms and legs and bony wrists. The snubby-barreled “Russian guitar” in his hands was held competently, and there was on his narrow face a blazing look of furious hatred that left Durell no doubt that he stood dangerously close to death.
Maria whispered, “Janos, don’t!”
“Get away, Maria. I’m going to finish him,” the boy whispered.
“Did you hear what I told your mother?” Durell asked.
Assignment - Budapest Page 13