Assignment - Budapest (13 page)

Ilona waved him on ahead and he crossed the road in a low crouch and dropped in the dark shadows near the wire fence. Looking back, he saw the girl rise, ready to run after him. There was no warning when the star shell was fired. One moment there was only the eerie white frost of the night. The next, with a slight popping sound, a signal shell burst overhead and shed a dazzling radiance over the swamp, the road and the watch tower.

He stood in stark brilliance with Ilona against the wire fence.

There was no chance to escape. A man shouted from Durell’s right, and he spun quickly, saw the dimly running shape and the lift of the man’s arms and the glint of the short-barreled automatic weapon. He threw Ilona to the ground as the gun began to chatter. A shallow ditch ran along the side of the road and he followed the girl’s rolling body into it as the slugs kicked up frozen chips of sod where they had been standing. There was only the one burst, and then silence. High overhead, the star shell fell slowly, its unnnatural brightness beginning to fade.

“Are you hit?” Durell whispered.

“No. But it is all over.”

The star shell went out. The strange whiteness of the night seemed darker now, and Durell slid away from the girl, on hands and knees, keeping below the lip of the ditch. Footsteps ciunched on the gravel roadway nearby, pausing cautiously, then moving nearer again. He lay still, his gun in his hand. From the watch tower came the dim shrilling of a whistle, and there was a muttered curse from the border guard easing toward the barbed-wire fence. Durell began to hope that the man was not sure of what he had fired at. Perhaps they had not been identified as anything more than suspicious shadows, and nerves had triggered the guard's finger. A dog barked in irritated, repetitive bursts of nervous sound. Durell waited. The guard’s booted footsteps were very near now. They paused, and Durell came up fast, the gun in his hand as he scrambled up from the ditch. Luck was on his side. The guard’s back was toward him, his great-coated figure formless in the darkness. He wore a fur shako against the bitter cold, and Durell slashed at the base of his skull with the gun. There was no error in the precision of his blow. The guard stumbled forward, dropped his automatic rifle, and sprawled on his face in the middle of the road. Durell picked up the man’s gun and ran back toward Ilona.

“Come on. He’ll be out for a few minutes.”

Her face was pale and ghostly. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Hurry.”

The barbed-wire fence had been put up hurriedy since the return of the Russian troops to the frontier. Durell moved along it until he found a reasonably fair gap in the strands, tramped on one to push it down, and helped the girl slide through. In a moment he followed. They didn’t look back as they ran on through the swamps, heading eastward.

Afterward, when Durell thought about it, he knew he could not have made his way successfully without the girl. She did not lose her sense of direction for a moment. Twenty minutes of alternate trotting and walking brought them out of the swamp into rolling fields. The highway was where she said it would be. The farm she picked, with its peasant house and warm barn, smelling of hay and cattle, was exactly as she had promised. There was a small gray Skoda parked behind the barn. Ilona told Durell to stay in the shadows and walked around the back of the farmhouse. No light came on in the place, but he knew she had knocked and spoken to someone and gone in. She was not absent long. In a few minutes she came running back, carrying a paper sack and the car keys.

“It’s all right. I have some bread and cheese. We are to leave the car at the farm of Tibor’s uncle in Gyor. Can you drive a Skoda?”

Durell nodded. “Didn’t they ask any questions?”

“I told them I was Tibor’s woman.” In the darkness, Durell saw her smile of wry amusement. “I also said I was helping Tibor in his work as a guide. Business has fallen off lately, since a division of Mongolian troops have occupied the frontier area.”

“Did you ask about McFee?”

“He came through with Tibor Szabo last night.”

Durell threw the Russian automatic rifle into the hay loft before they left, and put his own gun on the floor of the car between his feet. The distance to Gyor was less than an hour’s run. The countryside changed from the low marshland along the frontier to rolling hills and fertile plains, scrupulously farmed by the tight-fisted Magyar peasants. They met no traffic on the road for the first part of the run, and when they saw a long line of headlights moving up ahead, Durell pulled off the road into thick brush to let a convoy thunder past. They were T-54 Soviet tanks, low-slung, swift, with sloping, heavily armored sides and semi-automatic cannon. Some of the hatches of the squad leaders were open, and Durell saw the helmeted machine-gunners, their faces dark and anonymous in the starlight. The convoy seemed to go on forever, thunderous and arrogant, and Durell counted over two hundred of the T-54’s before the tail end of the procession roared by with two Russian-made jeeps.

“The conquerors,” Ilona murmured. Her voice was thin. “How I hate them!”

It was almost three o’clock in the morning when they turned into the frozen mud road to the farm of Geza Hegedus, in the outskirts of industrial Gyor. The place was low and rambling, built of stone for the most part, with tidy barns and outbuildings. The city lay in dark slumber only a few miles beyond. Geza Hegedus was a small, wiry man with dark hair and the intense, acute face of the Magyar peasant. He appeared at the back door of the farm in a battered Army overcoat and boots, his thick gray hair awry, his heavy mustache scraggly over a worried mouth.

“Please, do not make any noise, my friends.” Durell’s knowledge of Hungarian was just enough to permit him to get the gist of the man’s whispered words. “You are heading for Austria?”

“We are going back to Budapest for more people,” Ilona told him. “Have you a place for us to sleep tonight?”

“You have papers?”

“They are satisfactory,” Ilona said. “We were hoping to find your nephew Tibor here.”

“He is gone. I don’t know when I shall see the fool again.” The farmer looked at Durell. “Doesn’t this one speak at all?” “He prefers silence, old man,” Ilona said. “You do not see him. You will not remember him. Do you understand?” “You are all crazy. Crazy! The frontiers are sealed tighter than ever, and yet you go on. Fools and cowards run away, pay you to take them to the West. What will happen to Hungary if our people all run away? It was not like this in the old days.”

“We need no lectures from you, only a room for the night. And silence. We will pay you well.”

“I take no money for my services,” the peasant grumbled. He held the door of the farmhouse open, his manner grudging. “You have hidden your car?”

“In the barn.”

“Come in, then. It is cold tonight.”

The kitchen had a stone floor and a huge Russian-type stove in one corner, a massive oak table and equally heavy, worn chairs. Hegedus drew thick curtains over the windows and lit a kerosene lamp. His eyes returned worriedly to Durell’s tall, silent figure.

“I do not trust this one. He looks like a foreigner.”

“He is,” Ilona said. “He searches for the man Tibor brought here last night.”

Hegedus scowled. “Tibor is a fool. This man is worse, if he hopes for success. I kept warning Tibor, over and over again, that this business was too risky now. It was good enough in the first days, when the frontier was open and the AVO was in hiding. But they are all back now, all of them, and worse than ever. Every day I live in fear that they will find the guests Tibor brings me.”

“Where is Tibor now?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the man Tibor was taking to Budapest?”

Hegedus grunted. “He is probably praying for death.” Durell felt a small chill of apprehension at the farmer’s manner. He spoke to Ilona. “Ask him what he means. Ask if anything happened.”

Hegedus looked up sharply at the sound of Durell’s English.

His manner changed. Suspicion flared in his sharp, peasant’s eyes, and then was replaced by fear. “I do not like this one here. The one Tibor brought also spoke English. And it was disastrous. Every moment now, I expect the AVO to be back with more questions.”

“What happened?” Ilona asked sharply. “Were they caught?”

“Tibor escaped. The little man was taken prisoner. Last night, Tibor and the little man stayed here only for a bite of food before going on toward the city. But they did not get far. Tibor pushed his luck like a wild man. I’ve been warning him that the police were suspicious. They were waiting on the road, about a mile from here. The little man was taken, but Tibor escaped.”

“Did you see it happen?”

“My neighbors saw it. It is as I said. Tibor’s friend was captured. Tibor escaped into the woods. He is finished now. They will hunt him like a wild animal, and he will be killed.” 

“And the foreigner?”

Hegedus shrugged. “Who knows what the AVO does to him this minute?” The old man drew a deep breath. “I do not want you here. It is too dangerous. But it will also be dangerous if you move on now. I have only one room to spare, upstairs, in the attic. You will have to stay together, and for the love of God, make no sound, no matter what you may hear down in these rooms. Do you understand?”

Ilona turned to Durell. “Did you get what he said? McFee is caught.” Her eyes were somber. “Do you want to go on?” Durell saw the shadows of fatigue under her eyes. Outside, the night had turned inky dark in the hours before dawn. They would be too conspicuous traveling in the Skoda now, and he knew the girl had pushed herself to the limit of her endurance.

“We’ll stay here and get a few hours of sleep,” he decided.

The attic room that Hegedus showed them to was small and barren and icy cold, with hoarfrost gleaming white and icy on the roughhewn rafters. There was no bed or furniture of any kind except a crude straw mattress in one corner, with two blankets rumpled upon it. A small gable window, partly covered with frost, opened on a shed roof six feet below. Hegedus exchanged a few more words with Ilona, and then closed the batten door and his booted footsteps faded on the crude ladder down to the main floor of the farmhouse. There were no other sounds in the place. Durell prowled the tiny room uneasily. It had the feeling of a trap. He tried the door,, wondering if the old man had bolted it slyly on the outside, but it opened readily and he looked down the ladder into empty darkness. There was a bolt on the inside, however,, and he threw it when he closed the door again.

Ilona stood uncertainly near the mattress in the corner. The farmer had left them his kerosene lamp, and her face looked wan in the pale yellow glow. Durell took his gun from his pocket and put it on the floor beside the blankets and then turned down the wick on the lamp. Darkness folded around them, relieved only by the faint glow of light from the city of Gyor a few miles to the east.

Ilona spoke in the darkness, her voice uncertain. “Should we stay here, do you think?”

“You need the rest. A few hours of sleep will help.”

“But your friend is in the hands of the AVO—”

“There is nothing we can do for McFee right now,” Durell said. He moved through the darkness to her dim figure and told her to sit down and cover up with the blankets. The cold in the room seemed more penetrating than the icy air outside. He felt a shiver move through him and he knew he, too, was more tired than he had wanted to admit. “Do you think Hegedus can be trusted?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t like this place.” He did not want to tell her of his own uneasiness. He heard a strange, faint noise, and he knew her teeth were chattering in the cold darkness, and he drew her gently down onto the straw mattress and pulled the rough blankets over them. Instantly she burrowed against him for warmth, her body movements like that of a small animal. With his arms around her, her control gave way and she shuddered violently, her breath coming quick and warm and irregularly against his cheek.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered. “And you—you are disappointed in me.”

“No, it isn’t that.”

“You are silent, though. You are thinking of something else.”

“There’s a job ahead of us.”

“No, it isn’t that. It is—something—someone else.”

He thought of Deirdre. “Yes.”

“You have lost her? The girl Bela Korvuth shot?”

“I think so.”

“She would not see you at the hospital?’”

“I almost wish she hadn’t,” Durell said.

She was silent for a moment, then whispered: “I am sorry. Sorry for you and for her. She is foolish. A woman who had your love would be a very lucky woman, I think. If she does not understand what made you risk her life to get Bela Korvuth, then she is stupid, too. I am sorry to talk like this about her, but I have thought of this Deirdre woman, too. If you loved me, there would be nothing you could do that I would consider to be wrong. That is the way love should be.” “Perhaps. I’d rather not talk about it.”

“You should,” she whispered fiercely. Her arms were tight around him and she burrowed closer against his body under the blankets. “It is necessary to talk about it. You are unhappy and you think about her all the time, instead of thinking of what we must do here. You know as well as I how dangerous this can be. You may grow careless, or absent, and in one moment, we can both be destroyed.”

He felt warmer now, under the blankets, with the girl twined close to him. He knew that she was right. He had been thinking of Deirdre too much, he had allowed her to haunt his mind when nothing but the mission ahead of them should have occupied his thoughts. They had been lucky so far. But tomorrow, or the next day, or perhaps in the next hour, death could come very easily to both of them.

“She has rejected you,” Ilona whispered. “Why should you care about her now? If she refuses to understand, you must forget her. A man like you must be complete, always, at all times. Not torn apart by a foolish woman’s whims.”

He knew of no answer for her. Her dark hair was soft and perfumed against his face, and he was aware that the closeness of her body was no longer in demand for warmth, but for something more. The imperative, animal movements she now made against him were plain and obvious in their intent. Why not? he thought. There was nothing but bitterness and rejection behind him. The past was dead. He was alive, here and now, in this lonely alien place. The odds for continuing to stay alive were heavily stacked against him. For this brief time, in this small, dark place, there was a moment’s peace, a brief warmth, an offer to give and a demand to receive. He felt Ilona’s arms tighten about him, and then she suddenly released him and he knew by her movements that she was taking off her heavy winter clothing under the protecting warmth of the blankets they shared.