Assignment - Budapest (2 page)

The farmer was thin, with wispy gray hair, a rather long nose, and a harsh, lipless mouth. His wife, equally angular, stood with her hands folded under her apron, a step behind him in the big country kitchen. A huge pot of soup bubbled on the old iron coal stove.

“They came in this Army car,” Dunstermeir said. He spoke with just a faint German accent. “They said they wanted to make a telephone call. And the next thing I know, they have my guns, the two men. The woman, she said nothing. She looks frightened. They ask for my truck, the new one in the bam. I was frightened by the smaller man. There was something terrible about the way he acted. I remember—twenty years ago, in Nazi Germany, when we saw the trouble coming and Hilda and I decided to get out— he was something like those men who killed and looted and dragged people from bed at night—”

“Take it easy,” Breagan said again.

“So I do what they demand,” Dunstermeir said thinly. “Nothing more or less. I did not want to be hurt. I did not want Hilda hurt. We obeyed. We gave them what they wanted.”

“Just the truck?”

“Some food. Fifty dollars. And they used the telephone.” Breagan looked at McEneny. “You’re checking that?” “Johnson is looking into it. It’s a rural party line. We’ll find out who and where,” McEneny said.

“All right.” Breagan spoke to Dunstermeir. “Did they say anything more to you? Give you any idea who they were and what they wanted?”

“They asked for the truck. They made Endre go with them.”

“Who is Endre?”

McEneny said, “The hired hand. Young fellow, one of the Hungarians. The Dunstermeirs took him in out of the first batch.”

Breagan and McEneny looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. He asked the farmer: “Where is Endre now?”

“He is not yet back. Nor is the truck.”

There was something wrong here. Breagan had been in the business long enough to learn not to discount intuitive hunches completely. Dunstermeir looked away from him when he tried to meet the man’s eye. The fear in this couple went beyond the immediate incident that had shaken their lives. It was something deeper and more fundamental. It could have been caused by old memories and a revival of halfforgotten terrors that had brought them here originally; but Breagan did not think so. There was an immediacy to the fear he smelled in this house now.

He lit a cigarette, took off his hat, and brushed back his thick gray hair. He found the warmth of the kitchen welcome, but none of his tiredness eased up. Through the windows he saw the thin, sleety snow flying every which way in the dooryard between the house and the dairy barn. Nothing moved out there to disturb the Currier and Ives aspect of this place. It was almost too perfect, Breagan thought, in its nostalgic reconstruction of a more peaceful time. Maybe that was it. The place and the Dunstermeirs were too good to be true. McEneny, with his bland, quick mind, hadn’t seen it, obviously, although he had caught some of Breagan’s disturbed reservations.

“What exactly did Bela Korvuth say to you?” Breagan asked quietly.

"I do not know which one was Korvuth,” Dunstermeir said.

“The leader. The one in charge.”

“The smaller man? The one who frightened Mama?”

“That’s probably he,” Breagan said, nodding. “Didn’t he say anything out of line at all?”

Dunstermeir and his wife exchanged a quick glance, and Breagan felt a quickening in him. There was something here, all right. He forgot the way he had been wakened at dawn to get out into this frozen morning. But he didn’t rush it. When the woman offered him a cup of coffee, he accepted quietly, his manner gentle, knowing McEneny, too, felt it at last, and was waiting for his move.

“What else did Korvuth say?” Breagan insisted.

The woman spoke. “He took Endre with him. Endre recognized him—perhaps from the fighting in Budapest. They took the guns. I felt sorry for the girl. She looked nice. She was afraid of him.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“It is a feeling I had. And then Korvuth told us—”

“Hilda, be quiet,” the man said.

“But he ordered us to tell these men!” she insisted. “And we should. You say it is none of our business, but we should, Papa.”

It was too good, too pat, this little quarrel between them.

It might have been a clever bit of play-acting. Breagan wasn’t sure. He still rode his intuition, and he still kept his voice gentle, as if he knew them and trusted them and understood their fears.

“Go on, Mrs. Dunstermeir. It may be important. Do I get you right, that Korvuth gave you a message for us?”

“For a man named Durell,” the woman said.

“Sam Durell?”

“A man in Washington by that name, yes.”

“What exactly did Korvuth say?”

The Dunstermeirs exchanged another quick look. The fear wasn’t there any more. Something else glittered in the pale blue eyes that watched Breagan’s heavy, tired movement across the kitchen. Was it triumph? Violence? Hatred? He wasn’t sure. He could be imagining all of it.

The woman spoke quietly.

“Korvuth said he came to this country to kill two men. He wanted the police—the CIA, he said—to know that. He would not name one of the men. But the other he named. It was Durell.”

McEneny made a small, vague sound and looked at Breagan. “Isn’t he the one who worked with our New York office on the Stella Marni case?”

“Yes,” Breagan said.

“We’ve got to let him know.”

Breagan exhaled softly. He found that his hands were clenched at his sides, and Mr. Dunstermeir was looking at them, aware of the explosive impact of his words. But the farmer’s stony face gave nothing away now. I’m getting too old for this, Breagan thought again. Too old and tired, when a man like this can read me so easily.

“I’ll call Washington,” he said quietly.

Durell put the telephone away and walked down the hall back to Deirdre. A thin rain was falling, turning the Chesapeake, glimpsed beyond the village of Prince John, in Maryland, into a dimpled plate of sullen gray steel. It was ten-thirty on that Saturday morning. He had driven over from Washington for breakfast with Deirdre Padgett, with a long winter’s weekend ahead of them, alone here, just the two of them. That was gone now, but he didn’t let the disappointment trouble him after the first few moments.

“It was Dickinson McFee,” he said to Deirdre, and sat down at the table again.

“Do you have to go?” she asked quietly.

“Yes. There will be a plane at the local airport soon. We have half an hour.”

“Oh, Sam . . .”

“Forget it, hon,” he said. “Where were we?”

“What does it matter?” Her words were toneless. “We could talk about it forever, and nothing would materialize out of it. One phone call from your little general, and all the talk in the world between us goes up in smoke and remains just that—idle, wishful thinking. Talk, smoke, nothing at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t ask where you’re going, or why.”

He smiled. “You know I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Yes, I know. I know it only too well.”

He watched her fill his coffee cup again. The kitchen of this fine old Maryland house was quiet and peaceful. A small fire that he had built burned cheerfully in the red brick fireplace set into the kitchen wall, opposite the modem stove and the shining antique copperware that Deirdre loved. Through the twelve-over-twelve windows, he could see the sweep of wet lawn from the house to the water’s edge. A man was out there in the chill rain, dredging for Chincoteagues from an ancient, dirty-white pungy in a cove of the bay, just north of the beach here. Durell knew the ways of the bay oystermen, in their bugeyes and pungies, and there was nothing really unusual about a crew of two or three going out in this weather. But he saw only one man, bent over on the narrow deck, forward of the small pilothouse. He wondered if it meant anything, and he sat very quietly while he considered it, his suspicion and alertness silencing him for the moment.

He was a tall man, black of hair, just over thirty, with a small dark mustache and a taut, competent mouth. His blue eyes often appeared black when he was angry or especially thoughtful. They were very dark just now. There was a fine coordination in the way his lean body moved. His hot Cajun temperament had been carefully honed and controlled by the years of his training and silent warfare he had experienced since his boyhood in the Louisiana bayous, far from this place. It had been necessary to learn that often the difference between the quick and the dead was patience, silence, and watchfulness. A long series of ghosts, of dead men he had once known and worked with, were grim evidence of the price one paid for a mistake or a miscalculation. The war that Durell fought was not one that rang with bugles or trembled to the beat of drums. It was dark and silent, fought with nerve and skill; the war of espionage; and its battlefield was only too often the dirty streets and black slum alleys of faraway corners of the troubled world. The weapons of this war were more often cunning and vigilance rather than strength, although occasionally knife or gun came into swift, explosive play. The years in which Durell had served in this war had left their mark upon him in indefinable ways. He had survived until now, when so many others had failed or broken or died, and this spoke for itself as to what he was and what he had become.

Deirdre saw him watching the man in the pungy.

“It’s only old Tom Yordie,” she said quietly.

“From Prince John?”

“He’s been around ever since I was a child. He’s perfectly harmless.” Deirdre sighed. “You never relax, do you, darling? What is it with you? A perfectly fine old man, who’s never missed a day oystering in his life, and you look at him with such suspicion. How long does such dedication to your job go on?”

“I can’t afford to relax, Dee,” he told her.

“Well, that’s what I mean,” she said.

He looked away from the fisherman in the cove. “It’s too late for me,” he said. “I can’t get out of it now. It's all I know.”

“And is it too late for me? For us? Look at me, Sam. Is it?”

He saw her in all her quiet, solemn loveliness, the one woman who had broken through his barriers and touched the emotions he thought he had buried and forgotten. He knew women better than most men, loved them and used them and forgot them. Deirdre Padgett was quite different. She had reached something in him that he had tried to destroy, and breathed life back into it; and sometimes he was sorry about this, not for himself, but for her, because there was no answer to the question she was asking him.

She got up and moved toward the brick kitchen fireplace.

Her back was straight and slim, her fine hips pliant and curved under the soft jersey dress she wore. Her dark black hair shone with luster in the gray morning light. Her eyes were somber. He had been attracted originally by the inner peace and composure she possessed, by the tranquillity of her, some of which he had destroyed by allowing their relationship to reach this point. He knew her as intimately as any man could know a woman. There were no secrets between them, except those of his profession, and it was this that constantly created a barrier between them that no amount of patience or understanding could overcome.

She spoke with her back to him. “Did you talk to McFee about me yesterday?”

“Of course. But I didn’t tell him I would resign. I can’t do that, Dee. I’ve been in this game too long, and I’m getting old in it.”

“Like an old fox, or a wolf, in the wilderness.”

“Yes, it’s a wilderness, all right,” he admitted.

She turned now to look directly at him. “But you love it, don’t you, old fox?”

“It’s my job. I love you, too, Dee.”

“But never the twain shall meet,” she said.

“It wouldn’t be fair to you if we married,” he told her. “Not to you or me or to McFee.”

“Does he come into our private life, too?”

“He comes into everything. I couldn’t do my job properly then. Not if I had to worry about you and know how you were worrying, too.”

“But you know I’m willing to accept all that,” she said tightly. “I don’t want you to become a machine, like some of the others. Always suspicious, always living under some sort of cover personality so that sometimes when we’re together and I look for you, I see someone else, not you, someone you make yourself into for the job. And I don’t know that someone at all.”

“It has to be that way. It’s a question of survival.”

“I know all that, too,” she said. She came back to the table, picked up the silver coffee pot, looked at it, and put it down again. Durell was still watching the oysterman in the pungy. A touch of sleet hissed against the windows beside the dining table. The Chesapeake looked cold and ominous, and he suddenly held in his mind, for just an instant, the vignette of Bayou Peche Rouge, hot in the steaming sunlight, dark and secretive and green, all mysterious and wonderful in his boyhood. He watched a fish-hawk float into a small grove of pines near the point to the north.

Deirdre said: “Sam, I love you. It’s just that I want to share everything with you. Didn’t you ask McFee about a job for me?”

“No. I don’t want you in it.”

“That’s for me to decide,” she pointed out. “I could work with you, and—”

“No. Never.” There was suppressed violence in him. “Why not?”

He looked at her and wanted her and cherished her and felt the grievous sadness of the pain he constantly gave her. He wished he could be free to stay with her this weekend, here in this peaceful old house, just the two of them alone, to make love and talk of things remote from his work.

“Don’t you know what might happen, Dee?” he said. “There might come a time and a place whan I would have to drop you. Abandon you, sooner or later, in some crisis or emergency. Or you might have to leave me somewhere, with no way out. To die, you understand?”

Her face was pale. “I couldn’t do that to you.”

“But I would, to you,” he said harshly. “I’d have to. And if you wanted to live in this game, you’d have to do the same to me.”

“No,” she said. “No, no.”

He stood up. “There you are. That’s what I mean.” Deirdre searched his lean, dark face and shivered and hugged herself as if she had suddenly gone cold because of what she saw in him. She was so beautiful that he ached all over for her.