Be Shot For Six Pence (12 page)

“But I want to know.”

“Yes, a man went over the mountains.”

“Colin?”

Lady’s laugh sounded spontaneous. “Of course not,” he said. “Why should we send an Englishman, who would be known every time he opened his mouth when we have a dozen home-grown Hungarians with families and back grounds.”

“All right,” I said. “Then what was Colin doing here?”

“He was our liaison.”

“With whom?”

“With our sponsors, of course. With England, and, through England with America.”

That seemed possible enough.

I said, “I am sorry to ask so many questions. I know enough about Intelligence to realise that it is exceedingly bad form. The preferred attitude is one of studied indifference. But whilst you’re in the mood there is one more thing I must know. What has happened to Colin?”

“He disappeared,” said Lady, “three weeks ago. He walked down to Steinbruck one evening, and did not return.”

“Who saw him last, and where?”

“He was at Pleasure Island, with Trüe—Miss Kethely.”

“Yes, I know her.”

“According to her, he made an excuse to leave her, pushed off into the crowd, and did not come back.”

“No one else saw him?”

“No doubt other people saw him. But no one has come forward to say so—yet.”

“And you have done nothing about it?”

“We have done what we could. One of our best local men was put on to the job.”

“Yes,” I said, bitterly. “And in a few months’ time he will report in triplicate to the effect that he has left no stone unturned and no avenue unexplored.”

“He will not report to anyone,” said Lady. “He was picked out of the river three days ago, a mile below the town. It is not clear whether he died by drowning or not. The top of his head was missing.”

I cannot remember what else was said. Lady did not appear at dinner, which was a silent meal, and after it I went up early to my room. I undressed, turned the light out and sat for a long time in a chair in front of the window. I may even have dozed, for I have no idea what time it was when I opened my eyes and saw Trüe.

There was a clear, silver moon, quite full and undimmed by the faintest mist. Trüe had come out of the shrubbery at the foot of the long lawn. She looked like Titania in a belted raincoat. She walked slowly across the grass and I saw that there was no spring in her step. She had come either far or fast. I knew that she must be making for the little side door under the balcony; and that from there three flights of the back stairs would bring her out, into the passage, a few paces from my bedroom.

On an impulse I got to my feet, opened my own door, and stepped out into the carpeted passage.

It was only a minute before I heard her coming. If it had been longer my internal monitor would have told me I was behaving like a fool, and would have sent me back to bed. Dragging feet scuffled the stair carpet. As she came past I put a hand out and touched her am. She came round like a steel spring. Her hand went down, and up again, and a thin point, blue in the moonlight, touched my pyjama jacket.

If you should be so unwise as to touch a sleeping scorpion, just so, on the touch, without the least intermission of time between sleeping and waking, the armoured tail swings round and is fastened to your finger.

Trüe dropped her hand and said, rather breathlessly. “Philip. That was a silly thing to do.” Then she was gone.

I stood, watching her, a tiny cold feeling still tingling on my skin like a drop of iced water. Up the passage a door opened. There was a whisper of voices. A door shut.

Christ’s sake, the place was like a rabbit warren.

I woke up thinking about Trüe. That was a warning, if I needed one.

I didn’t see her until the afternoon, and by the time she came down I saw that twelve hours sleep had performed its customary service. Her eyes were clear and the spring was back in her step.

“Come out into the garden,” she said, “and I will apologise.”

“For what?”

“For last night. If I had not been frightened and tired I would not have done it.”

“I’d like to see you perform when you’re fresh,” I said. “My navel is still tingling.”

“I am adept with a knife,” admitted Trüe. She spoke it in just the casual, self-deprecating way that an English girl might say, “I’m not bad at tennis, really.”

“Let us sit in this summer-house,” I said. “It is designed for confidences. You tell me the story of your life and I’ll tell you mine. And stop Tutti from breathing in my face.”

“Is he not a monster?” She said something in colloquial Hungarian to the mastiff, who removed himself from my chest, grumbled unhappily, and laid himself down across the opening of the summer-house like a sunken tree across a dam.

“I was born,” she said, “in Gyor.”

“Of poor but honest parents.”

“Not at all. They were very rich. We had a summer-house on Lake Balaton, and a town house in the Margit Korut in Buda.”

“Next to the prison.”

“Opposite. Why?”

“It’s not my turn yet. Go on. What was your father?”

“He had estates.”

“But what did he do?”

“Why should he do anything? He had the estates, you see. His people worked. He spent the money. He had a big collection of gramophone records. He said there was a man in America who had more than him, but I could not believe it. He had two whole rooms, quite full.”

“And he spent his working life playing them.”

“Now you are making fun of us. Of course he did other things. In the season we went to the opera almost every night. And in summer we lived at Badacsony on the lake, bathing and boating and—oh, having fun.”

“It sounds lovely. Why did you stop?”

“First the Germans came. That was in 1944 – just before Holy Week. They were very correct, but we did not like to stay in Buda. Besides, there might have been rationing.”

“That, of course, would have been unspeakable. What did you do?”

“We went back to Badacsony. For that summer and autumn it was all right. Except the refugees, at the end, who came and ate up our food when there was not enough for us.”

“And then?”

“Then the Russians came.”

“They were not correct?”

Trüe looked at me to see whether I was joking. Then she laughed herself. But all in all it was not a convincing performance.

“Did your family escape?”

“No. They stayed too long.”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

“Of course I know, they are dead.”

(What a silly question! When the sea comes up either you get away or you are drowned.)

“I had been sent to Sopron with Anna, one of our old servants. She came from Austria, and her plan was to get back there. That was why we chose Sopron. It was close to the frontier. I cannot remember a great deal about that.

It was just before Christmas and we went in a train and it was very, very crowded, and very, very cold. We were in the carriage and we kept warm somehow because we were so many, but people who could not get in, stood on the footboards outside and some of them dropped off. In the end we came to Graz, where Anna lived, and we stayed there.”

“What did you do?”

“I went back to school, of course, and learned History and Geography. Now that is enough about me. Tell me about you.”

“Like you,” I said, “I come of rich and dishonest parents. The only difference is that in England we make our rich men work. My father worked very hard indeed. He still does. It brought him a certain amount of public honour. When I grew up he wanted me to go into politics.”

“Politics? That is defilement.”

“I entirely agree,” I said. “I can only say that it used to be thought to be all right. I’m afraid my father didn’t realise quite how times had changed. So I decided for him that I would go in for the Law and I was called to the Bar. Since I found no work at all I had plenty of time to indulge in my hobbies.”

“Which are?”

“Rock climbing and girls. You would be surprised how complementary the two pursuits are.”

“I do not wish,” said Trüe, with dignity, “to hear about your sexual conquests.”

“I can assure you that I had no intention of mentioning them. I was going to talk about peaks I had climbed.”

“Be serious, and talk to me about the War. You had adventures in the War.”

“How do you happen to know that?”

“Lisa told me. And so did Colin.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s a long story—”

So it was. The odd, sealed, chapter in my life. It had started on one Christmas day and ended on another, and had lasted exactly three years.

I was a ‘Calais’ prisoner and by Christmas 1940 I was, I suppose, as happy as any prisoner of the Reich. My selfish, self-sufficient, temperament found a lot of satisfaction in the life of a prisoner of war. You don’t need me to explain it to you. It’s all in the books.

On that particular day I got drunk and decided to make a speech. I was helped on to the canteen table and spoke my mind for five minutes. It went well. I made the speech again, in Hungarian. This was an indiscretion. Finally, I delivered it in German.

The next morning before I had begun to recover from my hangover, I was on my way to Bolen, in Poland.

Bolen was not a pleasant place; I shared a room with the only other two English-speaking prisoners in the place; a tall mad, Flight-Lieutenant who circled endlessly in his Spitfire over Berlin, picking off prominent Nazi personalities; and a South African, whom I suspected of being a stool-pigeon, though what quarry he hoped to trap in that miserable, damp, snowswept, God-forgotten corner of the Eastern Reich it is beyond my imagination to conceive.

My only friend was a Pole, a brave and delightful seventeen-year-old boy called Karol. With Karol I climbed out of the camp, in the spring of 1941, and walked right through to his home, a farm in Southern Poland, near Wadowice. Here the desire to escape died on me; and I spent a very happy five or six months working in the fields by day and, in the evenings talking to Karol and his family, in my rapidly improving Polish. Long talks, in which we rebuilt the world for our pleasure. They were, I think, the nicest family I had ever known.

I passed as one Stefan, a distant cousin, from Warsaw. This was all right for a time, and I even got some sort of identity documents out of the local authorities. The trouble, as usual, started with neighbours; and specifically, I think, but have no sort of proof, with a girl who had made a proposal to me which I had rejected; more out of fastidiousness than lack of appetite.

I was suddenly bundled into a cabin in the woods with a week’s food and told to lie low. I lay up, safe but badly troubled, for a week, and then crept back at dusk, to the farmhouse. It had been burned out, and the farmer, his wife and Karol nailed up outside it like jackdaws on a keeper’s wall. There was nothing I could do about it. I set out, through the forest, for Czechoslovakia.

It was late summer, and because I did not, at that moment, greatly care whether I lived or died, I made that crossing safely and on my own. It was considered at that time, by refugees and lawless folk, to be one of the most closely guarded frontiers in Europe. There was, of course, an active Czech underground. But because the spectres of Karol and his family still walked behind my shoulder I refused to attach myself for long to any group or family. This may also have ministered to my safety. Resistance workers, like game birds, are easier to shoot if they will sit still. I could not now make out for you any sort of itinerary, but through that autumn I lived in a dozen different towns and cities and stayed with half a hundred people; people who have run together, in my mind, and faded into one composite blur. When a whole country is in opposition, when the active resisters are tens of thousands, they acquire a recognisable personality, fanatical, humourless, reliable, cold, twisted. Living amongst them I reached a stage where I could recognise a resistance worker in the street; could smell one in the dark.

I passed now for a Danziger. My Polish was quite good enough for this. A very few people knew who I was; enough to save me from getting my throat cut if a real Danziger had turned up to denounce me.

Although my moves were zig-zag and haphazard, I found myself drifting to the south; and by November I was ready for my next move, which was into Hungary. It was a trip which took a lot of arranging, and in the end three of us set out, too late, and ran into snow conditions in the South Tatra Mountains that we were not equipped to deal with. The route we chose would have been easy enough for a well equipped team but we had the wrong clothing and boots, one bad axe between us, and practically no rope. I was the only mountaineer in the party and when I realised how things were, I insisted that we turn back. In the end the three of us sat down, in a corrie, and argued it out. When they saw I was adamant the other two drew guns and informed me, in the friendliest way, that if I would not take them over they must shoot me. That is one way of winning an argument. We went on. I bore them no ill-will. The Gestapo had their tickets, and it was worth any risk to them to get across. At least, I hope it was, because less than twenty-four hours later the rotten rope between us parted like a piece of string at the wrong moment and they both fell four or five hundred feet on to the rocks. I reckon they slept more softly than they would have done in one of Heydrich’s prisons. I reached Hungary that evening, with bad frost-bite in both hands.

I managed to get to one of my ‘safe’ addresses. It was a retired dentist, who lived in a pepper-pot villa in the foothills with six dogs. I stayed there for three months. My right hand got better, but my left hand worse. In the end a doctor came out and took off the middle finger. As soon as I was ready to move I started drifting south again.

Hungary was quite different from Czechoslovakia. The Germans were the big influence all right, but they weren’t in military occupation. That didn’t come for another eighteen months, when they walked in at the front door at almost the same moment that the Russians came in at the back; and then things really did get lively.