Assignment - Budapest (8 page)

“She thinks of everything. We’re halfway across the bay by now, and them roosters on the shore ain’t got the foggiest idea you’re here. You gonna tell me what this is all about, young feller?”

“I thought you might know,” Durell said flatly.

“Don’t know nothing. Go on, drink up. I can always make more.” Tom Yordie watched Durell take another long swallow of the white liquor. “You drink like you’re used to the stuff. I like that. Some of them namby-pamby Washington folk come out here to hunt an’ fish, they fancy their own liquors. Like water. Can’t stand the stuff.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Durell said.

“All I know is some feller come rowing out to my boat late in the day an’ when I invite him aboard, he rewards me with a crack on the head. I wake up tied up and alone, until the girl shows up, maybe an hour ago. She looks at me and then she goes back ashore and then she comes back with you. That’s all. She untied me when she needed help hoistin’ you in. You’re a pretty fair load, even for her.”

“Where is she now?” Durell asked.

“At the wheel.”

Durell swung his legs off the bunk and stood up. The tiny cabin had a low overhead, and he had to duck, clinging to the bunks on either side. Tom Yordie didn’t offer to help him. He had to sit down again after the first try, aware of a cool moisture breaking out all over his body. He took a deep breath and stood up again. This time he remained on his feet.

“You a cop?” Yordie asked suddenly.

“No.”

“Rob a bank?”

“No. Stay here.” Durell made his way to the small hatch and ladder leading up to the stern deck. For a few moments he did not think he would get up the steps. He was weaker than he thought. Then he drew a deep breath and pushed the hatch open and stepped out into the night wind.

They were two or three miles offshore. A deep swell was running with the incoming tide, and the pungy pitched in the uneasy current as it quartered against the thrust of the seas. The wind was cold and sharp, but it had scoured the skies until the stars and the moon were out, and he could see the distant mass of the Maryland shore, the cluster of town lights a little to the south, the regular flash of a beacon not far away. Durell braced himself against the pitch of the deck and looked at the girl. She stood easily at the wheel, watching him', her figure only a slight, dark outline against the stars. Then he saw the gun in her hand.

“Do not come too close to me, please,” she said.

He saw that she had tied the skiff astern and was towing it. He did not go near her. In the moonlight she looked young and defenseless, but he knew that this was an illusion; her shoulders were straight, her stance alert, and the face she turned toward him was a mask that was neither friendly nor inimical.

“How do you feel now?”

“Tom Yordie’s corn helped. You helped, too. Korvuth might have killed me back there on the beach. You yelled and startled him and he took off. Why did you do it?”

“Perhaps I’ve had enough of killing,” she said quietly. “Sit down over there. I don’t trust you.”

“You don’t trust me, but you saved my life and then hauled me out here. Kidnaping, practically.” Durell’s laugh was dry. “You patched me up, got me into a bunk, and sailed out into the middle of the Chesapeake. All this, after following me from New York. Can you tell me why?”

“I want to talk to you. I know who you are, you see.”

“All right, go ahead and talk.”

“It is rather confusing. I am not sure what course of action I should take. But I do not like that old man to hear anything of what I have to say to you. Our talk must be strictly confidential. So I think we should get rid of him.”

Durell said flatly: “He hasn’t done anything to hurt you. He’s just a harmless old fisherman.”

She looked at him with bleak eyes. “I am not a monster. I do not intend to kill him, as you seem to think. But he is strong for an old man, and he can easily row ashore from here in the skiff.”

“So we get rid of him. And then?”

“We talk. I can help you, although it is dangerous for me. And you can help me.”

Durell looked at the skiff and then at the distant shore. It was not too far. There was a bite of decision and command in the girl’s voice, and a way she held her gun, that made him shrug and raise no objections. Curiosity moved in him, more powerful than the sense of defeat and frustration he had felt a few moments before. There were enough men on shore to take care of the hunt for Korvuth.

He nodded, and the girl said, “Get him.”

It took no more than five minutes for Tom Yordie to climb into the skiff, ship his oars, and begin his long row for shore. The old man raised no objections. Once he started to ask a question, then looked at the girl’s face and the gun in her hand and shrugged his bowed shoulders in resignation. He spoke to Durell as he climbed into the skiff. “Take care of my boat, young feller. I don’t know who you are, or what’s happenin’ rightly, but this boat is all I got in the world. It’s my home, and I don’t want her wrecked. You’ll look after her?” “Sure,” Durell said.

“I left you the rest of that bottle.” He looked at the girl again. “I reckon you might need it, at that.”

When he was gone, a small bowed figure bent to the oars of the little skiff, Durell turned back to the girl. “You understand that he will call the police as soon as he gets ashore?” “It will be several hours until then. The matters we must discuss will be decided by that time.” The girl turned the switch on the wheezing old engine, and the pungy was suddenly quiet except for the lapping of water along its white sides. The boat lifted and fell, drifting easily on the tidal current. “I do not think it will be dangerous for us if we simply allow the wind to push us,” she said. “I am cold and I could use a drink. Let us go below and talk.” She moved her gun. “After you, Mr. Durell.”

He went down into the tiny cabin, found the bottle Yordie had left, handed it to her, and then sat down on one of the bunks. It was cold aboard now, with no heating equipment in the cabin with the engine off, and only the planks of the hull to fend off the icy wind blowing over the bay. In the dim overhead light he saw the girl clearly for the first time. She took off the red felt hat and shook her coppery hair free, and he saw it was long and silken, more than shoulder-length. Her face with its prominent cheekbones might have been beautiful except for the lines of exhaustion marked around her mouth and the violet shadows under her dark-brown eyes. Little flecks of gold shone in them as she sat down, the gun beside her on the bunk, and took the bottle from him. She still wore the woolen skirt and sweater and the tweed coat he had seen her in before.

She drank and coughed and he could have taken the gun from her then, but he did not move. She looked up and smiled. “There is no subtlety in American liquor, is there?” “It’s home brew,” he said. “Tom Yordie's own mash. People get to like it, after a while.”

“Another example of American individuality and independence?”

“You could call it that,” he said. “You speak English well. Were you trained in Moscow?”

“Of course. I expected you to recognize that.”

“You did a poor job of shadowing me,” he told her.

“I wanted you to see me and know where I was.”

“Have you split with Bela Korvuth?”

She nodded slowly. “It is definite now. I could not stand it. So much has happened, in only one day.” She ignored the gun beside her and clasped her hands together in her lap and leaned forward toward him. She shivered a little. “I can help you, Mr. Durell. But you must help me in return. That is why I needed this private conference with you. Anywhere else, it would be dangerous. Korvuth would find us, or you would not listen. Here, you and I can talk as two people, apart from everything else.”

“I’m willing to listen.”

“Of course. We know all about you. I thought you would prefer to talk. We consider you one of the most dangerous men against us. I do not know if what I have done so far is right. Perhaps I will be killed for it and perhaps I will deserve it. I will not lie to you. I came over here as part of Korvuth’s apparatus, to kill you, to get you off our books.”

“That wasn’t all of your job,” he said.

“No. Not all of it. Neither was Endre Stryzyk.” She shuddered, and for a moment she looked as if she were going to be sick. Durell reached across the narrow cabin and simply picked the gun off the bunk beside her. She did not move or object. All at once she made a sound of sickness in her throat and stood up and went quickly up the hatch to the deck again. Durell pocketed the gun and sat quietly, waiting for her. His shoulder throbbed, but she had done almost a professional job on the bandaging. His arm would be stiff for a few days, but if he could get a shot of penicillin soon, it shouldn’t trouble him too much. He waited for the girl to come back.

She looked subdued, almost shy, when she climbed down the ladder into the cabin again. She was shivering violently, and he got one of the blankets and put it around her, awkward because of his arm, and then closed the hatch tightly against the wind. The boat rolled with an easy motion now, moving with the tide.

“I am sorry,” the girl whispered. Her American accent was almost perfect, a tribute to her training. “Everything has gone wrong for me, and today has been a nightmare. I saw things I did not believe possible. In New York, in New Jersey, on the train—everywhere. It was so different from what I had been told it would be like.”

“Suppose you tell me why you fell out with Bela Korvuth.” She looked surprised. “Because of Endre, of course.”

“The farmhand in Jersey? The one Bela killed?”

“There was no need to kill him—no reason at all!” she whispered bitterly. “It was a vicious, senseless act. I—I knew Endre back in Budapest, you see. We went to school together. I knew his family.”

Durell was quiet. He knew that this was the first break in the whole thing—something unexpected and unlooked for, and his mind jumped ahead coolly, planning to exploit it. She looked like a lost, forlorn child, huddled in the blanket—not a woman any more, not dangerous. Just a lost, frightened human being, betrayed and hopeless. Drifting as surely as the pungy drifted, without rhyme or reason, without a rudder or a motive to set a course.

“You knew that Endre was with the freedom fighters,” he said.

“Yes, we knew them all, mostly. Endre was a good boy, though. There was nothing mean about him. He was always joking, always laughing—until his father was arrested last year. We had to arrest the old man; he wouldn’t change. He was stubborn, foolishly clinging to the old ways—” Ilona paused and looked up, a look of shock in her eyes changed by a wry little smile that curved her mouth downward. She kneaded her hands together. “It is terrible, what they make of one. A robot, mouthing empty phrases. It is still in me, even after today. They hammer and hammer at you, until you repeat and shout the slogans that have no meaning. But there was no reason to kill Endre today. None at all.” She shook her head violently and looked down. Durell could not see her face. Her long, dark-red hair screened her cheek as she turned her head partly away from him. She was struggling hard, trying not to cry. He wished she would let it all go but he knew better than to put pressure on her. It was only the solitude of being alone on this boat with him, temporarily safe and isolated from the world, that enabled her to talk at all. Her next words surprised him. “I’m so hungry,” she whispered.

“Haven’t you eaten today?”

“Nothing at all. Not since breakfast.”

“And your clothes are wet from the rain before.”

She shivered. “You are no better off than I.”

He got up off the bunk. He felt better now, stronger. Maybe it was Tom Yordie’s liquor, or the expert attention the girl had given to his wound. It didn’t matter. She looked ill, half frozen, hungry, troubled and uncertain in her mind. There was a small galley forward, and her told her to get out of her clothes while he was there and stay wrapped in the blanket, and then he found some cans of soup and primed the little alcohol stove and began heating the soup in a pan. He waited five minutes for her to do as he said, and when he returned, she had strung her wet woolen skirt and her stockings and briefs on a line between the bunks and sat huddled again in the blanket. Her smile was shy.

“You can be kind,” she said. “It is not what they told us about you.”

“Am I supposed to be some kind of an ogre?”

“A tool of the capitalistic warmongers. A methodical killer.” Durell laughed. “And you believed it?”

“I believed everything, until today.”

“Until Korvuth killed Endre Stryzyk?”

“Yes. Until then. He was a good boy. He fought for what he thought was right. And perhaps he was right. I am too confused now to know black from white. Anyway, his people lost, and he ran away. He was entitled to be left in peace, having given up the struggle. He was hurting no one here. And I keep remembering how things were in school—” “Were you in love with Endre?” Durell asked.

“No, no. It was nothing like that. We were just friends.” Her eyes widened slowly, remembering. “He kept looking at me, under that bridge, when Korvuth made him get out of the truck this morning. He remembered me, all fight. But he could not believe I would let Korvuth kill him—not until the last moment. And then he looked at me in a way I wish I could forget, but which I will never get out of my mind. And he said something—he said I was dead, too. Worse than dead. And he cursed me. And then Korvuth laughed and—killed him.” She looked up again, hugging the blanket around her body. Her face was tormented. “Please. I am trusting you. We can help each other, you and I. But you look ill, Mr. Durell. You have been hurt. Your clothes are wet, too.”

“All right,” he said.

He went into the galley and stripped, listening for sounds from her, but the boat, rocking idly in the tidal current, was quiet except for the soothing lap of the sea running along the planking, and an occasional whimper of the cold wind. It felt warmer in the cabin, and he found a coarse towel and rubbed himself down and hung up his damp clothing. There was another blanket in the storage lockers in the galley, and he wrapped it around himself clumsily, saving his injured arm, and went back to the Hungarian girl. She had not moved. She had found a cigarette and sat holding it, looking at something he could not see, staring at a horror he did not know.