The Last Frontier (12 page)

So completely had his attitude towards Reynolds changed that he tried to persuade him to share a drink, but Reynolds declined. It was only half past seven, he had plenty of time before his appointment in the White Angel, but he had already pushed his luck to the limit: at any moment now the imprisoned guard might recover consciousness and start to kick the door down, or a supervisor might make his rounds and find him missing. He left immediately, by way of the professor's bedroom window and by means of a couple of sheets which let him climb down far enough to catch the barred grills of a window on the ground story. Even before Jennings had had time to reel in the sheets and close his windows, Reynolds had dropped silently to the ground and vanished wraith-like into the darkness and the snow.
The White Angel Cafe lay just back from the east bank of the Danube on the Pest side, opposite St. Margit Island, and Reynolds passed through its frosted swing doors just as a nearby church bell, muffled and faint through the curtaining snow, struck the hour of eight o'clock.
The contrast between the world outside these swing doors and the one inside was as abrupt as it was complete. One step across the threshold and the snow, the cold, the chill dark silent loneliness of the lifeless streets of Budapest were magically transformed into warmth and brightness and the gaiety of laughing, babbling voices as men and women found an outlet for their natural gregariousness in the cramped and smoky confines of the little cafe and sought to make their escape, however artificial and ephemeral such escape might be, from the iron realities of the world outside. Reynolds' first and immediate reaction was that of surprise, shock, almost, to find such an oasis of colour and light in the grim, drab greyness of a police state, but that reaction was brief: it was inevitable that the Communists, no mean psychologists, should not only permit such places but positively encourage them. If people were to gather in the company of one another, as people would no matter what the prohibitions, how much better that they should do it in the open and drink their coffee and wine and porter under the watchfully benevolent eye of some trusted servants of the state, rather than gather in dark and huddled corners and plot against the regime. Excellent safety valves, Reynolds thought dryly.
He had broken step and paused just inside the door, then moved on again almost at once, but without haste. Two tables near the doors were crowded with Russian soldiers laughing, singing and banging their glasses on the table in high good humour. Harmless enough, Reynolds judged, and doubtless that was why the cafe had been chosen as a rendezvous: no one was going to look for a western spy in the drinking haunt of Russian soldiers. But these were Reynolds' first Russians, and he preferred not to linger.
He moved in to the back of the cafe and saw her almost at once, sitting alone at a tiny table for two. She was dressed in the belted hooded coat the manager had described to Reynolds earlier in the day, but now the hood was down and the coat open at the throat. Her eyes caught his without a flicker of recognition and Reynolds took his cue at once. There were half a dozen tables nearby with one or two vacant places and he stood there hesitating over which seat to choose long enough for several people to notice his presence. Then he moved across to Julia's table.
'Do you mind if I share your table?' he asked.
She stared at him, turned her head to look pointedly at a small empty table in the corner, glanced at him again, then pointedly shifted her body until her shoulder was turned to him. She said nothing, and Reynolds could hear the stifled sniggers behind him as he sat down. He edged his chair closer to hers, and his voice was only a murmur.
Trouble?'
'I'm being followed.' She had turned towards him again, her face hostile and aloof. She's no fool, Reynolds thought, and by heavens she knew how to act.
'He's here?'
A millimetric nod, but nod nevertheless.
'Where?'
'Bench by the door. Near the soldiers..
Reynolds made no move to turn his head. 'Describe him.'
'Medium height, brown raincoat, no hat, thin face and black moustache.' The disdain still registering on her face was in almost comical contrast with the words.
'We must get rid of him. Outside. You first, me last.' He stretched out his hand, squeezed her forearm, bent forward and leered at her. 'I've been trying to pick you up. In fact, I've just made a most improper suggestion. How do you react?'
'Like this.' She swung back her free hand and caught Reynolds across the face with a slap so loud that it momentarily stopped all the hubbub and conversation and turned every eye in their direction. Then Julia was on her feet, gathering up her handbag and gloves and walking haughtily towards the door, looking neither to her left nor right. As if by a signal, the talk and the laughter broke out again -- and most of the laughter, Reynolds knew, was directed against himself.
He lifted a hand and gingerly caressed a tingling cheek. The young lady, he thought ruefully, carried realism to quite unnecessary lengths. A scowl on his face, he swivelled in his seat in time to see the glass doors swinging to behind her and to see a man in a brown raincoat rise unobtrusively from his seat by the door, throw some money on his table and follow close behind her even before the door had stopped swinging.
Reynolds was on his feet, a man obviously bent on leaving the scene of his discomfiture and mortification with all possible speed. Everybody, he knew, was looking at him, and when he pulled his coat collar up and his hat brim down, a renewed chorus of sniggers broke out. Just as he approached the door, a burly Russian soldier, his face red with laughter and drink, heaved himself to his feet, said something to Reynolds, thumped him on the back hard enough to send him staggering against the counter, then doubled up, convulsed with laughter over his own wit. A stranger to Russians and Russian ways, Reynolds had no idea whether anger or fear would be the safer reaction in the circumstances: he contented himself with a grimace that was compounded of a sullen scowl and sheepish grin, side-stepped nimbly and was gone before the humorist could renew the assault.
The snow was very light now, and he had little difficulty in locating both the girl and the man. They were walking slowly up the street to the left, and he followed, keeping the man at the very limit of observation. Two hundred yards, four hundred, a couple of corners and Julia had halted in a tram shelter outside a row of shops. Her shadow slid silently into a doorway behind the shelter and Reynolds went past him, joining the girl in the glass-fronted shelter.
'He's behind us, in a doorway,' Reynolds murmured. 'Do you think you could put up a desperate fight for your honour?' 'Could I -- ' She broke off, and glanced nervously over her shoulder. 'We must be careful. He's AVO, I'm certain, and all AVO men are dangerous.'
'Dangerous fiddlesticks,' Reynolds said roughly. 'We haven't all night.' He looked at her speculatively, then lifted his hands and caught her by the coat lapels. 'Strangulation, I think. Must account for the fact that you're not screaming for help. We have enough company as it is!'
The shadow fell for it, he would have been less than human not to fall for it. He saw the man and woman come staggering out of the tram shelter, the woman fighting desperately to tear away the hands encircling her throat, and didn't hesitate. His feet silent on the hard-packed snow he came running lightly across the pavement, the weapon raised high in his right hand ready to strike -- then collapsed soundlessly as Reynolds, at a warning exclamation from the girl, swung round, elbowed him viciously in the solar plexus and chopped him with the edge of his open hand across the side of the neck. It took only seconds thereafter for Reynolds to stuff the man's blackjack -- a canvas tube filled with lead shot -- in his pocket, bundle the man himself into the tram shelter, take the girl's arm and hurry away along the street.
The girl shivered violently, and Reynolds peered at her in surprise in the almost total darkness of the watchman's box. Confined as they were in a narrow space and sheltered from the snow and the bitter wind they were relatively comfortable, and even through his coat he could feel the warmth of the girl's shoulder against his own. He reached for her hand -- she had taken off her gloves to rub the circulation into life when they had arrived ten minutes previously -- but she snatched it away as from the touch of flame.
'What's the matter?' Reynolds' voice was puzzled. 'Still feeling frozen?'
'I don't know, I -- yes, I do know. I'm not cold.' She shivered again. 'It's -- it's you. You're too inhuman. I'm afraid of people who are inhuman.'
'Afraid of me?' Reynolds sounded incredulous and felt that way. 'My dear child, I wouldn't harm a hair of your head.'
'Don't you "child" me!' A sudden flash of spirit, then a quiet, small voice, 'I know you wouldn't.'
'Then what the devil am I supposed to have done?'
'Nothing. That's the whole point. It's not what you do, it's what you don't do, it's what you don't show. You show no feelings, no emotions, no interest or concern in anything. Oh, yes, you're interested enough in the job to be done, but the method, the how of it is a matter of absolute indifference, just so long as the job is done.
'The Count says you're only a machine, a mechanism designed to carry out a certain piece of work, but without any life or existence as an individual. He says you're about the only person he knows who cannot be afraid, and he is afraid of people who cannot be afraid. Imagine! The Count afraid!'
'Imagine,' Reynolds murmured politely.
'Jansci says the same. He says you're neither moral nor immoral, just amoral, with certain conditioned pro-British, anti-Communist reactions that are valueless in themselves. He says whether you kill or not is decided not on a basis of wrong or right but simply of expediency. He says that you are the same as hundreds of young men he has met in the NKVD, the Waffen SS and other such organisations, men who obey blindly and kill blindly without ever asking themselves whether it is right or wrong. The only difference, my father says, is that you would never kill wantonly. But that is the only difference.'
'I make friends wherever I go,' Reynolds murmured.
'There! You see what I mean? One cannot touch you. And now Tonight. You bundle a man into a hotel cupboard, bound and gagged, and let him suffocate -- he probably did. You hit another and leave him to freeze to death in the snow -- he won't last twenty minutes in this. You -- '
'I could have shot the first man,' Reynolds said quietly. 'I have a silencer, you know. And do you think that lad with the blackjack wouldn't have left me to freeze to death if he'd got in first?'
'You're just quibbling.... And, worst of all, that poor old man. You don't care what you do as long as he goes back to Britain, do you? He thinks his wife is dying, and yet you'd torture him till he must be almost insane with worry and grief. You encourage him to believe, you make him believe that if she goes he'll be her murderer. Why, Mr. Reynolds, why?'
'You know why. Because I'm a nasty, amoral, emotionless machine of a Chicago gangster just doing what I'm told. You just said so, didn't you?'
'I'm just wasting my breath, am I not, Mr. Reynolds?' The tone was flat and dull.
'By no means.' Reynolds grinned in the darkness. 'I could listen all night to your voice, and I'm sure you wouldn't preach so earnestly unless you thought there was some hope of conversion.'
'You're laughing at me, aren't you?'
'A nasty, superior sort of smirk,' Reynolds admitted. Suddenly he caught her hand and lowered his voice. 'Keep quiet -- and keep still!'
'What -- ' Only the one word had escaped before Reynolds clamped a hand tightly over her mouth. She started to struggle, then relaxed almost immediately. She, too, had heard it -- the crunch of footsteps in the snow. They sat without moving, hardly daring to breathe while three policemen walked slowly past them, past the abandoned cafe terraces farther on and disappeared along a winding path beneath the bare, snow-laden beeches, planes and oaks that lined the perimeter of a great lawn.
'I thought you told me this part of Margit Island was always deserted?' His voice was a savage whisper. 'That no one ever came here in the winter?'
'It always has been before,' she murmured. 'I knew the policemen made a round, but I didn't know they came that way. But they wont be back for another hour, I'm sure of that. The Margitsziget is big, and they will take time to go round.'
It had been Julia, teeth chattering with the cold and desperate for a place Where they could talk in privacy -- the White Angel had been the only cafe in the area which was open -- who, after a fruitless search elsewhere, had suggested Margit., Island. Parts of it, she had said, were banned and under curfew I after a certain hour, but the curfew wasn't treated too seriously. The patrolling guards were members of the ordinary police forces, not the secret police, and were as different from the AVO as Chalk from cheese. Reynolds, himself almost as cold as the girl, had readily agreed and the watchman's hut, surrounded by the granite setts, chips and tar barrels of road repairers who had vanished with the onset of the cold weather, had seemed an ideal place.
There Julia had told of the latest happenings at Jansci's house. The two men who had been watching the house so assiduously had made an error -- only one, admittedly, but their last. They had grown overconfident and had taken to walking past on the same side of the street as the garage instead of the opposite side, and, on one occasion, finding the garage door open had gone so far as to let their curiosity get the better of them and peer in, which was a mistake, as Sandor had been waiting for them. Whether they had been informers or AVO men was not known, as Sandor had cracked their heads together rather harder than was necessary. All that mattered was that they were under lock and key and that it would now be safe for Reynolds to visit the house to make final plans for the abduction of the professor. But not before midnight, Jansci had insisted on that.
Reynolds in his turn had told her of what had happened to him, and now, just after.the departure of the three policemen, he looked at her in the gloom of the shelter. Her hand was still in his, she was quite unaware of it: and her hand was tense and rigid and unyielding.
'You're not really cut out for this sort of thing, Miss Hlyurin,' he said quietly. 'Very few people are. You don't stay here and lead this life because you like it?'