The Last Frontier (4 page)

'You talk in riddles, Colonel Szendro. I'm just an ordinary Budapest citizen. I can prove it. All right, I did have fake Austrian papers. But my mother was dying, and I was prepared to risk indiscretion. But I've committed no crime against our country. Surely you can see that. If I wished, I could have gone over to the west. But I did not so wish. My country is my country, and Budapest is my home. So I came back.'
'A slight correction,' Szendro murmured. 'You're not coming back to Budapest -- you're going, and probably for the first time in your life.' He was looking Reynolds straight in the eyes when his expression changed. 'Behind you!'
Reynolds twisted round, a split second before he realised Szendro had shouted in English -- and there had been nothing in Szendro's eyes or tone to betray his meaning. Reynold's turned back slowly, an expression almost of boredom on his face.
'A school boyish trick. I speak English' -- he was using English now -- 'why should I deny it? My dear Colonel, if you belonged to Budapest, which you don't, you would know that there are at least fifty thousand of us who speak English. Why should so common an accomplishment be regarded with suspicion?'
'By all the gods!' Szendro slapped his hand, on his thigh. 'It's magnificent, it's really magnificent. My professional jealousy is aroused. To have a Britisher or an American -- British, I think, the American intonation is almost- impossible to conceal -- talk Hungarian with a Budapest accent as perfectly as you do is no small feat. But to have an Englishman talk English with a Budapest; accent -- that is superb!'
'For heaven's sake, there's nothing superb about it.'
Reynolds almost shouted in exasperation. 'I am Hungarian.' 'I fear not.' Szendro shook his head. 'Your masters taught you, and taught you magnificently -- you, Mr. Buhl, are worth a fortune to any espionage system in the world. But one thing they didn't teach you, one thing they couldn't teach you -- because they don't know what it is -- is the mentality of the people. I think we may speak openly, as two intelligent men, and dispense with the fancy patriotic phrases employed for the benefit of the -- ah -- proletariat. It is, in brief, the mentality of the vanquished, of the fear-ridden, the cowed shoulder that never knows when the long hand of death is going to reach out and touch it.' Reynolds was looking at him in astonishment -- this man must be tremendously sure of himself -- but Szendro ignored him. 'I have seen too many of our countrymen, Mr. Buhl, going as you are, to excruciating torture and death. Most of them are just paralysed: some of them are plainly terror-stricken and weeping; and a handful are consumed by fury. You could not possibly fit in any of these categories -- you should, but, as I say, there are things your masters cannot know. You are cold and without emotion, planning, calculating all the time, supremely confident of your own ability to extract the maximum advantage from the slightest opportunity that arises, and never tired ,of watching for that opportunity to come. Had you been a lesser man, Mr. Buhl, self-betrayal would not have come so easily...'
He broke off suddenly, reached and switched off the roof light, just as Reynolds' ears caught the hum of an approaching car engine, wound up his window, deftly removed a cigarette from Reynolds' hand and crushed it beneath his shoe. He said nothing and made no move until the approaching car, a barely perceptible blur behind the sweep of its blazing headlights, its tyres silent on the snow-packed road, had passed by and vanished to the west. As soon as it was lost to sight and sound Szendro had reversed out on the highway again and was on his way, pushing the big car almost to the limit of safety along the treacherous road and through the gently falling snow.
Over an hour and a half elapsed before they reached Budapest -- a long, slow journey that could normally have been done in half the time. But the snow, a curtain of great feathery flakes that swirled whitely, suddenly, into the flat-topped beams of the headlights, had become steadily heavier and slowed them up, at times almost to walking pace as the labouring wipers, pushing the clogging snow into corrugated ridges on the middle and at the sides of the windscreen, swept through narrower and narrower arcs until finally they had stopped altogether; a dozen times, at least, Szendro had had to stop to clear the mass of snow off the screen.
And then, a few miles short of the city limits, Szendro had left the highway again, and plunged into a mass of narrow, twisting roads: on many stretches where the snow lay smooth and deep and treacherously masking the border between road and ditch, theirs was obviously the first car that had passed since the snow had begun to fall, but despite the care and concentrated attention Szendro gave the roads, his flickering eyes found Reynolds every few seconds; the man's unflagging vigilance was almost inhuman.
Why the colonel had left the main road Reynolds couldn't guess, any more than he could guess why he had stopped and drawn off the road earlier on. That he wanted, in the earlier instance, to avoid the big police car racing west to Komarom and now to bypass the police block on the city limits of which Reynolds had been warned at Vienna, was obvious enough: but the reason for these actions was a different thing altogether. Reynolds wasted no time on the problem: he had problems enough of his own. He had perhaps ten minutes left.
They were passing now through the winding, villa-lined Streets and steeply-cobbled residential avenues of Buda, the western half of the city, and dropping down to the Danube. The snow was easing again, and, twisting round in his seat, Reynolds could just vaguely see the rock-bound promontory of the Gellert Hill, its grey, sharp granite jutting through the windblown snow, the vast bulk of the St. Gellert Hotel and, as they approached the Ferenc Jozsef Bridge, the St. Gellert Mount where some old-time bishop, who had incurred the wrath of his fellowman, had been shoved into a spiked barrel and heaved into the Danube. Bungling amateurs in those days, Reynolds thought grimly, the old bishop couldn't have lasted a couple of minutes: down in the Andrassy Ut things would doubtless be much better arranged.
Already they were across the Danube and turning left into the Corso, the one-time fashionable embankment of open air cafes on the Pest side of the river. But it was black and desolate now, as deserted as were nearly all the streets, and it seemed dated, anachronistic, a nostalgic and pathetic survival from an earlier and happier age. It was difficult, it was impossible to conjure up the ghosts of those who had promenaded there only two decades ago, carefree and gay and knowing that another tomorrow would never come, that all the other tomorrow's could only be the same as today. It was impossible to visualise, however dimly, the Budapest of yesterday, the loveliest and happiest of cities, all that Vienna never was, the city to which so many westerners, of so many nations, came to visit briefly, for a day, for two days, and never went home again. But all.that was gone, even the memory was almost gone.
Reynolds had never been in the city before, but he knew it as few of the citizens of Budapest would ever know it. Over beyond the west bank of the Danube, the Royal Palace, the Gothic-Moorish Fisher's Bastion, and the Coronation Church were half-imagined blurs in the snow-filled darkness, but he knew where they were and what they were as if he had lived in the city all his life. And now, on their right, was the magnificent Parliament of the Magyars, the Parliament and its tragic, blood-stained square where a thousand Hungarians had been massacred in the October Rising, mown down by tanks and the murderous fire of the heavy AVO machine-guns mounted on the roof of the Parliament itself.
Everything was real, every building, every street was exactly where it should be, precisely where he had been told it would be, but Reynolds could not shake off the growing feeling of unreality, of illusion, as if he were spectator of a play and all this was happening to someone else. A normally unimaginative man, ruthlessly trained to be abnormally so, to subject all emotion and feeling to the demands of reason and the intellect, he was aware of the strangeness in his mind and at a loss to account for it. Perhaps it was the certain foreknowledge of defeat, the knowledge that old Jennings would never come home again. Or it could have been the cold or tiredness or hopelessness or the ghostly veil of drifting snow that hung over everything, but he knew it was none of these things, It was something else again.
And ,now they had left the Embankment and were turning into the long, broad, tree-lined Boulevard of the Andrassy Ut itself: the Andrassy Ut, that street of well-loved memories leading past the Royal Opera House to the Zoo, the Fun Fair and the City Park, had been an inseparable part of a thousand days and nights of pleasure and enjoyment, of freedom and escape, to tens of thousands of citizens in days gone by and no place on earth had lain nearer to the hearts of the Hungarians: and now all that was gone, it could never be the same again, no matter what befell, not even if peace and independence and freedom were to come again. For now the Andrassy Ut meant only repression and terror, the hammering on the door in the middle of the night and the brown lorries that came to take you away, the prison camps and deportation, the torture chambers and the benison of death: Andrassy Ut meant only the headquarters of the AVO.
And still the feeling of remoteness, of detached unreality remained with Michael Reynolds. He knew where he was, he knew his time had run out, he was beginning to know what Szendro had meant by the mentality of a people who had lived too long with terror and the ever-present spectre of death, and he knew too that no one who ever made a journey such as he was making now could feel exactly the same again. Indifferently, almost, with a kind of detached academic interest, he wondered how long he would last in the torture chambers, what latest diabolical variations of destroying a man lay in wait for him.
And then the Mercedes was slowing down, its heavy tyres crunching through the frozen slush of the street, and Reynolds, in spite of himself, in spite of the unemotional stoicism of years and the shell of protective indifference in which he had armoured himself, felt fear touch him for the first time, a fear that touched his mouth and left it parched and dry, his heart and left it pounding heavily, painfully in his chest and his stomach as if something heavy and solid and sharp lay there, constricting it upon itself; but no trace of any of this touched the expression on his face. He knew Colonel Szendro was watching him closely, he knew that if he were what he claimed to be, an innocent citizen of Budapest, he should be afraid and fear should show in his face, but he could not bring himself to it: not because he was unable to do so, but because he knew of the reciprocal relationship between facial expression and the mind: to show fear did not necessarily mean that one was afraid: but to show fear when one was afraid and fighting desperately not to be afraid, would be fatal.... It was as if Colonel Szendro had been reading his mind.
'I have no suspicion left, Mr. Buhl: only certainties. You know where you are, of course?'
'Naturally.' Reynolds' voice was steady. 'I've walked along here a thousand times.'
'You've never walked here in your life, but I doubt whether even the City Surveyor could draw as accurate a map of Budapest as you could,' Szendro said equably. He stopped the car. 'Recognise any place?'
'Your H.Q.' Reynolds nodded at a building fifty yards away on the other side of the street.
'Exactly. Mr. Buhl, this is where you should faint, go into hysterics or just sit there moaning with terror. All the others do. But you don't. Perhaps you are completely devoid of fear -- an enviable if not admirable characteristic, but one which, I assure you, no longer exists in this country: or perhaps -- an enviable and admirable characteristic -- you are afraid, but ruthless training has eliminated all its outward manifestations. In either case, my friend, you are condemned. You don't belong. Perhaps not, as our police friend said, a filthy Fascist spy, but assuredly a spy.' He glanced at his watch, then stared at Reynolds with a peculiar intentness. 'Just after midnight -- the time we operate best. And for you, the best treatment and the best quarters -- a little soundproof room deep below the streets of Budapest; only three AVO officers in all Hungary know of its existence.'
He stared at Reynolds for several seconds longer, then started the car. Instead of stopping at the AVO building, he swung the car sharp left off the Andrassy Ut, drove a hundred yards down an unlighted street and stopped again long enough to tie a silk handkerchief securely over Reynolds' eyes. Ten minutes later, after much turning and twisting which completely lost Reynolds, as he knew it was designed to do, all sense of place and direction, the car bumped heavily once or twice, dropped steeply down a long ramp and drew up inside an enclosed space -- Reynolds could hear the deep exhaust note of the car beating back off the walls. And then, as the motor died, he heard heavy iron doors clanging shut behind them.
Seconds later the door on Reynolds' side of the car opened and a pair of hands busied themselves with freeing him of the restraining chains and then re-securing the handcuffs. Then the same hands were urging him out of the car and removing the blindfold.
Reynolds screwed up his eyes and blinked. They were in a big, windowless garage with heavy doors already locked behind them, and the brightness of the overhead light reflecting off whitewashed walls and ceiling was momentarily dazzling after the darkness of the blindfold and the night. At the other end of the garage, close to him, was another door, half-open, leading into a brightly-lit whitewashed corridor: whitewash, he reflected grimly, appeared to be an inseparable concomitant of all modern torture chambers.
Between Reynolds and the door, still holding him by the arm, was the man who had removed the chains. Reynolds looked at him for a long moment. With this man available, the AVO had no need to rely on instruments of torture -- those enormous hands could just tear prisoners apart, slowly, piece by piece. About Reynolds' own height, the man looked squat, almost deformed in comparison, and the shoulders above that great barrel of chest were the widest Reynolds had ever seen: he must have weighed at least 250 Ibs. The face was broken-nosed and ugly, but curiously innocent of any trace of depravity or bestiality, just pleasantly ugly. Reynolds wasn't deceived. In his line of business, faces meant nothing: the most ruthless man he had ever known, a German espionage agent who had lost count of the number of men he had killed, had the face of a choirboy.