by Len Deighton
‘Ho ho to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll save you some black pudding.’ I didn’t take the idea of being sent to Hungary very seriously at first.
There was little I could do. Neither Dalby nor Jean had had a chance to speak to me. I could reckon on little or no help from any other source. Now there was this Hungarian stuff.
I worried about it for two hours then a medic came with a long trolley and an enamel tray containing ether, cotton wool and a hypodermic. He fluffed up the clean white pillow on the trolley and smoothed out the red medical department blanket. He took my pulse, pulled up my eyelids and listened to my chest with a stethoscope. ‘Would you lie on the table, please. Relax completely.’
‘What’s the time?’ I asked.
‘Two-twenty, roll up your sleeve.’ He rubbed a little ether on the skin and eased the sharp shiny needle into the unfeeling flesh with a professional flourish.
‘What time?’ my voice boomed out.
‘Two-twenty,’ he said, again.
‘What, what, what. Time, time, time.’ It wasn’t me talking; it was a curiously metallic echo, ‘Time, time, time.’ I looked up at the white-coated boy and he grew smaller and smaller and smaller. He was standing far away near the door now, but still he was gripping my arm. Was it possible? Time, time, time. Still gripping my arm, arms, I mean, both of them. Both those men, both my arms. So far away; such little men near that tiny door.
I rubbed my forehead because I was slowly going round and round on a turn-table and sinking down. But how did I get up again because I kept going around and down but I was always high enough to go sinking down and around again. I rubbed my forehead with my huge heavy hand. It was as big as a barrage balloon, my hand; you’d expect it to envelop my head, but my forehead was so wide. Wide. Wide as a barn. I was being wheeled along. Towards the door. They’ll never get huge me through that little door. Not me, never. Ha ha. Never, never, never. Thud, thud, thud, thud.
Into my subconscious the drumming of engines brought me almost to the threshold of awakening. But each time there came a body bending low over me. The sharp pointed pain in the arm brought the noisy throbbing nausea breaking over me in feverish waves of heat and intense cold. I was moved on stretchers and trolleys over rough ground and polished wooden corridors, handled like a dust particle and like a dustbin, dropped into trains, helped into planes; but never far away was a blurred moon bending over me, and that sharp pain that pulled the blanket of unconsciousness over my face.
I came up to the surface very, very slowly; from the dark deeps I floated freely towards the dimblue rippling surface of undrugged life.
I hurt, therefore I am.
I hugged close against the damp soil. By the light of a small window I was able to closely inspect the broken wristwatch upon which I was gently vomiting. It said 4.22. I shivered. From somewhere nearby I heard voices. No one was talking, merely groaning.
I gradually became sentient. I became aware of the heavy hot humid air. My eyes focused only with difficulty. I closed them. I slept. Sometimes the nights seemed as long as a week. Rough bowls of porridge-like stuff were put before me, and if uneaten, removed. It was always the same man who came with the food. He had short blond hair. His features were flat with high cheek-bones. He wore a light-grey two-piece track suit. One day I was sitting in the corner on the earth floor — there was no furniture — when I heard the bolts being drawn back. Kublai Khan entered, but without food. I’d never heard his voice before. His voice was hard and unattractive. He said ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’ I looked at him for a minute or so. He said it again, ‘Sky is blue; earth black.’
‘So what?’ I said.
He walked towards me and hit me with his open hand. It didn’t need much to hurt me at that stage of my education. K.K. left the room and the bolts were closed and I was hungry. It took me two days to discover that I had to repeat the things K.K. said after him. It was simple enough. By the time I made that discovery I was weak from hunger and licked my food bowl avidly. The gruel was delicious and I never missed the spoon. Sometimes K.K. said, ‘Fire is red; cloud is white,’ or perhaps, ‘Sand is yellow; silk is soft.’ Sometimes his accent was so thick that it would be hours later when I had repeated the words over and over that I’d finally understand what we’d both been talking about. One day I said to him, ‘Suppose I buy you a Linguaphone course; do I get out of here?’ For that I not only remained unfed by day, but that night he didn’t bother to bring the paper-thin dirty blanket either. I learnt what colour the sky was by the ninth day. By then K.K. merely pointed and I reeled off all the junk I could remember. But I’d done it wrong. Somehow ‘Sky is red; silk is blue.’ K.K. shouted and hit me softly against the face. I had no food or blanket and shivered with the intense cold of the night-time. From then on sometimes I got things right, sometimes wrong, according to the colour K.K. had decided everything was that day. Even with gruel every day I would have become weaker and weaker. I passed the ‘wisecrack stage’, the ‘asking questions’ stage, the ‘do you understand English?’ stage. I was weak and exhausted and on the day I got everything so correct that K.K. brought me a piece of cold cooked meat, I sobbed for an hour without feeling sad — with pleasure perhaps it was.
Every morning the door was opened and I handed out my slop pail; every night it came back again. I began to count the days. With my fingernails I incised a crude calendar in the soft wood of the door, behind it I was out of sight of the peep-hole. Some of the days were marked by means of a double stroke; those were the ones I heard the noises. They were generally loud enough to wake me, the noises, when they happened. They were human noises but difficult to describe as either groans or screams. They were somewhere between the two. Some days K.K. gave me a small slip of paper; typewritten on them there were orders such as ‘The prisoner will sleep with arms above the blankets.’ ‘The prisoner will not sleep in the daytime.’
One day K.K. gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. As I sat back to puff at it he said, ‘Why do you smoke?’ I said I didn’t know and he went away; but the next day Grass was Sepia, and I got beat about the head again.
After I had marked twenty-five days on my calendar K.K. brought me a slip that said, ‘The prisoner will receive a visitor for six minutes only.’ There was a lot of shouting in the corridor and K.K. let in a young Hungarian Army Captain. He spoke reasonably good English. We stood facing each other until he said, ‘You requested a meeting with the Great Britain Ambassador.’
‘I don’t remember it,’ I said slowly.
K.K. pushed me in the chest with force that thudded me against the wall of my cell and left me breathless.
The Captain continued, ‘I don’t question. I say this. You ask.’ He was charming, he never once stopped smiling. ‘A secretary is without. He sees you now. I go. Six minutes only.’
K.K. showed a man into my cell. He was so tall he beat his head against the door jamb. He was embarrassed and awkward. He explained reluctantly that the decision wasn’t his, that he was only the third under-secretary, and that sort of thing. He explained that there was no record of my being a British citizen, although he admitted that I sounded like an Englishman to him. He was so embarrassed and awkward that I almost believed that he was the British official he purported to be.
‘You wouldn’t think me impertinent, sir,’ I said, ‘if I asked you to give proof of identity.’
He looked madly embarrassed and said, ‘Not at all,’ a few times.
‘I don’t mean papers of identity, you understand, sir. Just something to show that you are in regular contact with the old country.’
He looked at me blankly.
‘Everyday things, sir, just so I can be sure.’
He was keen to be helpful; he came back with the everyday things and a load of reasons why the Embassy could do nothing. His greatest anxiety was in case I should implicate Dalby’s group, and he was always fishing for news of any statement I was going to make to the Hungarian Police.
Doing this while mai
ntaining that I wasn’t a British subject was a strain even for old-school British diplomacy. ‘Don’t get sent to a Political Prison,’ he kept saying. ‘They treat prisoners very badly.’
‘This isn’t the YMCA,’ I told him on one occasion. I began to wish he’d stop coming. I almost preferred K.K. At least I knew where I was with him.
Every day seemed hotter and more humid than the previous one, while the nights became more chilly.
Although K.K. knew enough English for everyday needs, that is, to feed me or punch me on the nose, I found I could get a cup of sweet black coffee from one of the guards when I learnt enough Hungarian to ask. He was an old man looking like a bit player in a Ruritanian smaltz opera, sometimes he gave me a small piece of chewing tobacco.
Finally the tall British man came to see me for the last time. They went through the shouting and preliminaries, but this time it was only the Army Captain who spoke. He told me that, ‘Her Magestyries Government’ under no circumstances can regard me as a British subject. ‘Therefore,’ he said, ‘the trial will proceed under Hungarian law.’ The man from the Embassy said how sorry he was.
‘Trial?’ I said, and K.K. smashed me against the wall again, so I kept quiet. The British man gave me a sorry-old-chap look with a flick of the eyes, put on his rolled-brim hat and disappeared.
K.K. had a rare flash of altruism and brought me a black coffee in a real porcelain cup. Surprise followed surprise, for when I sipped it, I discovered it had a shot of plum brandy in it. It had been a long day. I curled my feet as near to my head as possible and curling my arms close, I went to sleep thinking, ‘If I don’t get out of here quickly you fellows are going to miss each other.’
Some nights they left the lights on all night, and on nights when I got every single K.K. colour wrong they sent the old moustachioed guard to keep me awake all night. He talked to me, and if K.K. was there, shouted at me not to lean against the wall. He talked about everything he knew, his family and his days in the Army, anything to keep me awake. I couldn’t translate a word of it, but he was a simple man and easy to understand. He showed me the height of his four children, photos of all his family, and now and again made a flickering movement with his hand that meant I could lean against the wall and rest while he stood half in the corridor listening for K.K.’s return.
Once every third day the Army Captain returned, and although I may have misunderstood, I believe he told me that he was my defence counsel. On the first visit he read my indictment; it took about an hour. It was in Hungarian. He translated a few phrases like ‘enemy of the State’, ‘high treason’, ‘plotting for the illegal overthrow of Peoples’ Democracies’ and there were a few ‘imperialisms’ and ‘capitalisms’ thrown in for good measure.
There were thirty-four marks on my door now. By resting and sleeping in snatches I had put a few of my nerve endings together but I was no Steve Reeves. The diet was keeping me pretty low physically and mentally. Each morning I got up feeling like the first frames in a Horlicks strip. It was pretty obvious that if I didn’t swim against the current there would be nothing left of me I’d known and loved. There was no chance of a ‘Houdini’ through the boltwork and a fighting retreat out of the main gates. It was to be a cool calm slow walk or I wouldn’t be there. Thus did I reason on my thirty-fifth day of isolation and hunger.
The only person around who broke the rules was the old man. Everyone else had the door locked behind them; the old man stood half-way out of it to give me a few minutes’ sleep. There was no alternative. I had no weapon but the door. I wanted to escape at night, so that meant I couldn’t use the light flex. The slop pail was too heavy to be used adroitly. No, it was the door, which meant, I’m afraid, that the old man got it. That night I was all set to try. Pretending to rest I leaned against the wall lining the door up against my target. He didn’t come close enough. I did nothing. When finally I went to bed I shivered until I went to sleep. It was a couple of nights later that the old man brought me a cigarette. I hit him with the door — the bolt mechanism swung against his head and he dropped unconscious to the floor. I dragged him inside the door; his breathing was irregular and his face very flushed. He was an old man. At the last minute my training almost failed. I almost couldn’t hit him as he lay there, the cigarette he’d brought me still in his hand.
I took his wooden HB pencil, relocked the door, and in his guard’s jacket and cap and my dark prison trousers, I softly descended the old dark wooden stairs. A light of low wattage glowed in the main hall, and from under the door to my right a slot of light and soft American music slid across to me. The main door was unguarded from inside, but I decided against touching it. Instead I took the pencil and opened the door[23] of an unlit room to my right. It must have been three and a half minutes at least since I had left my cell, walked the couple of yards to the stairs and negotiated them without causing a creak.
I closed the door behind me. The moonlight showed me the filing cases and books that lined the room. I ran my fingers round the window frame and encountered the electric wire alarm. Then I stood on the desk to remove the electric bulb. There was a loud cracking noise — I had cracked a pencil underfoot. The soft music from the radio in the next room ceased suddenly. I held my breath but there was only a whistle as the tuning control was turned. The exertion of stretching my hands above my head left me shaking and weak.
From my pocket I took the English sixpence that Anthony Eden’s friend had given me and slipped it into the socket before replacing the bulb. Still in the moonlight I got slowly down from the desk. I groped around the floor. I was lucky. There was a big two-kilowatt electric fire plugged into a wall point. The strong rosary that snuggle tooth had brought me as my second English ‘everyday thing’ I wrapped tightly round and round the elements. There was no time for electrical legerdemain. It was the work of a minute to switch on the wall plug and the light switch. There was no emergency lighting system and the flash and bang was pretty good. I could hear people blundering into doors and clicking switches. The main power fuse seemed to have gone, and the window opened easily without bells or buzzers. I slipped through and closed it behind me, although I couldn’t lock it.
I crouched down in the wet grass and I heard the front door open and saw a torch flash in the room I had just left. No one tried the window. I remained crouching. A car started up and I could hear two people speaking loudly close by, but the sound of the engine blotted out the words.
I walked without hurrying towards the rear of the house. I probably put too much reliance on my peaked cap. I fell into some soft earth, and backing out of it grabbed some thorny bushes. A dog barked, too close for comfort. I could see the rear wall now, it was about as high as I was. I ran a tentative finger along it, but there was no barbed wire or broken glass. I had both palms on it but it required more strength than I had, to pull myself up bodily. That damn dog barked again. I looked back at the prison building. Someone was in the conservatory now, with one of those powerful portable lights. They had only to swing it round the walls. Perhaps I should lie down flat in the grass, but when the big beam shot out I managed to get the side of one foot on the wall top. I flexed my leg muscles, and as the light skimmed the wall I rolled my empty belly over and fell down the far side. I knew I mustn’t stay down, although it was very pleasant, breathing long grassy lungfuls of the wet night air. I felt soaked and hungry, free and frightened, but as I started to walk, I found myself entrapped in an intricate framework of slim wooden rods and wires that enmeshed head and limbs; the more I tried to free myself, the more tangled I was. A narrow slit of light ahead of me grew fatter to become a rectangle, and a man’s silhouette was centred in it.
‘Here! Is someone there?’ he called, then, as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, ‘Here, get out of my bloody “runners”, you silly—!’
I heard a clock strike ten P.M.
Chapter 26
It would be easy now, to pretend that I knew all the answers at that stage. Easy to pretend th
at I’d known they were holding me in a big house in London’s Wood Green from the word go. But I didn’t. I half guessed, but the conviction had oozed from my body day by day. As I languished underfed and miserable, it became more and more difficult to think of anything outside of my little cell and K.K. In another ten days the theory that London was just over the garden wall would have been totally beyond my comprehension. That’s why I’d escaped. It was then or never.
Getting away from Mr Keating’s house, ‘Alf Keating’s my name, spelt like the powder’, was relatively easy. I told him I had had a fight with my brother-in-law who was drunk and much bigger than me, and I’d climbed over the garden walls to get away after a neighbour phoned for the police.
‘Uh!’ said Alf, revealing teeth like rusty railings.
To be running away from the police was terrible enough for him not to suspect worse; to admit to being physically inferior and cowardly guaranteed the story’s veracity. I must have been quite a sight. The brambles had drawn blood on my hands, and mud was spattered all over me. I saw Alf looking at the old man’s uniform jacket. ‘I’ve got to get to work,’ I said. ‘I’m on the door at Shell-Mex house.’ Alf stared. ‘Nights,’ I said lamely. ‘I just can’t seem to sleep in the day-time somehow.’ Alf nodded. ‘I’ll pay for the bean frames,’ I said.
Alf growled, ‘Yes, you ought to do that, I reckon.’ Alf took a huge watch out of his greasy waistcoat in order to get at a little bent tin of snuff that had been polished by years of use. He offered me a pinch, but if I sneezed there was a good chance my head would fall off and roll under Alf’s gas stove. I didn’t risk it.
I promised Alf an oil stove at cost price. He let me wash. Would Alf walk down the road with me? My brother-in-law wouldn’t make trouble if I was in company I said.