Be Shot For Six Pence (27 page)

“Surprisingly so. It made me very suspicious. It was a lot too good to be true.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Didn’t know what?”

For a moment the Major looked at me as if he hardly believed in me. Then the leathery face folded up into a grin and the little duck’s eyes positively twinkled.

“You must have been a bit hot under the collar at times,” he said. “Fancy having the Hungarian Police giving you their special number one treatment to find out something you’d never been told about.”

“Quite so,” I said stiffly. “Well, now I think I’ll see if my bed’s still made up.”

“Don’t be stuffy,” said the Major. “And I’m afraid you can’t go to bed yet. There’s a job to be done.” He pottered off down the hall. I thought for a moment of standing on my dignity, but he never looked round, and after a moment I followed him.

We went into the Operations Room.

A tall man was sitting in the chair beside Lady’s empty desk. There were other people at the back of the room, too, but for the moment I had no eyes for them. I was staring at the man.

I thought for a wild moment that it was Colin. He was the same build and had the same pleasant, knobbly face. But as soon as he turned to the light I saw that it was a stranger.

All the same, I had seen that face before.

“David Szormeny,” said the Major. “Head of the Hungarian State.”

“Former head,” said Szormeny. “We can, I think, say that with safety now. Former head.”

I listened, fascinated. It was the same molasses and sour cream voice that I had heard on the wireless, but a shade more human at first hand.

“If you will allow me, sir. This is the gentleman I spoke of, who will act as courier to you and your family until you reach England.”

He introduced me, and now, for the first time, I took in the other people in the room. One was Madame Szormeny, a little fair-haired woman, of half her husband’s size, but with a very friendly smile. And two good-looking children, a girl of about fourteen and a boy of twelve. They were both wearing mountaineering kit and looked as pleased as any couple of kids who have done something naughty and got the grown-ups on their side about it.

“You, too, came over last night?” asked Szormeny.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m afraid I had the advantage of your preparations. It was quite unintentional.”

“I was able to give certain orders at the frontier that proved helpful,” agreed Szormeny.

“If I might suggest it, sir,” said Major Piper, “you have an early start this afternoon. Your host and hostess the Baron and Baronin Milo would wish to receive you. And then to bed.”

He fairly shooed everyone out of the room, but a glint out of the corner of his eye told me to wait. I sat on the edge of a chair, half of me concentrating on keeping awake and the other half trying to sort things out.

It was nearly an hour before the Major came back. He seemed pleased with himself.

“Well,” he said.

“Well?”

“You knew nothing of it?”

“Nothing at all.”

“It was a well-kept secret.” He said it unboastfully. As an art lover might appraise a masterpiece by a painter long dead.

“Do you mean to say that the whole business was designed to get David Szormeny out of his country and over to the west?”

“Yes.”

“The strike and all.”

“The strike was our cover plan, yes. It served both purposes. To keep their minds off our real plan, and to enable certain steps to be taken.”

I remembered what I had read.

“You mean that Szormeny was able to move his family up to the western frontier?”

“That and other things.”

“And it was worth the sacrifice of Lady – and Gheorge and Lisa – and anyone else who may get hurt when the strike is put down.”

The Major paused for a moment before replying. Then he said, “You don’t win a chess match by hanging on to all your pieces. Szormeny’s defection is probably the biggest smack in the eye for the Comintern since Tito. But it isn’t checkmate. Just an exchange of pieces. We’d have liked to do it without giving them Lady, but we couldn’t guarantee the strike, unless he went there in person. That was Szormeny’s own personal view of the situation. In fact I believe you heard him give it.”

“Yes,” I said. “I heard his broadcast. I didn’t understand it, of course.”

“The final sentences – the ones about the long arm of Hungary stretching over the border. It could have been phrased in three pre-arranged ways. The way he actually used meant a straight exchange. Lady and a strike for himself and his family.”

I thought about it for a bit. There didn’t seem to be much to say. “You said that I could help?”

“We want you to look after Szormeny and his family until they reach England.”

“That was to have been Colin’s job.”

“Yes. First impressions are the great thing. Treat them like royalty and you can’t go wrong.”

“I haven’t much experience of escorting royalty,” I said, “but I’ll do my best. Is it just to be opening doors and ordering meals and making conversation? Or do you expect any trouble?”

“I shouldn’t think there’d be any trouble. No. The plain fact is we’ve caught them on the hop. It will take them quite a time to get reorganised. Of course, they’ll get after him in the end. Wherever he goes. Trotsky thought he was safe after ten years in Mexico City. I can lend you a gun if you’re nervous.”

“I’m as nervous as a kitten,” I said, “but I won’t bother you for a gun. I’ve borrowed two in the last few weeks and they’ve neither of them done me a particle of good. I’ll trust to my wits this time.”

“You’re learning,” said the Major.

“I’m beginning to learn,” I said, “among other things, what a blundering nuisance I’ve been. I pictured myself as a hero of romance, jumping in to the aid of his country. Whereas all I really did was to land with both feet into the middle of someone else’s careful plans. It’s a miracle I didn’t do even more damage.

He didn’t pretend not to understand me.

“I’m glad you didn’t come to any real harm,” he said. “And you did us one good turn. If any single man combined the brains and authority to put a spoke in our wheel it was Colonel Dru.

“He hit a telegraph post,” I said. “Swerving to avoid a child.”

“I read about it in the papers,” said the Major. “I also happen to have had a message from Radk. You repaid us good for evil there. My private opinion is that Lady was a little rough on you.”

“No rougher than he was with himself.”

“Oh, no. Quite so. An odd type. All scent and natty suitings on the outside and hard as steel inside.” He added, inconsequentially, “My father, who was born Pfeiffer, was stationed at Constantinople before the First World War. I was quite young, of course, but I can remember being introduced to Enver. He and Lady had a great deal in common. I think I should get off to bed now. I’ll have an Embassy car here at two o’clock. The train goes at half-past. There’s a plane laid on for you at Klagenfurt.”

In fact a thick mist put paid to our plane, and we went on by train to Paris, so I had Szormeny and his family to myself for nearly the whole of their first twenty-four hours in the Western world.

I began to appreciate just why Colin had been laid on for the job. Szormeny had a little German and a working knowledge of Russian, but he was only comfortable in his native Hungarian. And how he wanted to talk!

If you’ve kept a guard on your lips for half a lifetime and suddenly find yourself free you are bound to let rip. Also I suppose that anyone who’s taken a new and decisive step feels an urge to explain and rationalise his conduct. I listened hard, and made unobtrusive notes when I could.

The real trouble, I gathered, was that Szormeny had hitched his wagon to the wrong star at Moscow. This was an occupational risk with Comintern leaders. Not even the most thoughtful of them could forecast which light would wax in the Kremlin and which would wane. And Szormeny had remembered Rajk and Sakasits and had laid his careful plans accordingly.

He was comparatively young. He had free resources in Switzerland; resources which, by means which he explained to me, but which were too complicated for me to follow, he had increased during the years of his power in the Hungarian State. Also he had distant relatives in England who lived at a place which I found it extremely difficult to identify even when he spelt it out for me, but which turned out to be Kingston Bagpuize.

I jotted down what I could and, in my sleeping berth that night, put together my jottings into the form of rough notes. I also, when I got back, wrote a clear and connected account of my whole adventures. No one seemed to get very worked up about my adventures, but my notes went to the Cabinet.

We had an uneventful journey. Madame Szormeny knitted, her husband talked to me, and the two children behaved exactly like any other children on a long train journey.

There was a private plane at Orly. We took off at first light, and landed at Ferryfield a little over an hour later.

Why we didn’t go straight to London Airport I have no idea, and the distinguished Foreign Office types must have left their beds very early to be on the Kent coast at that hour in the morning.

Colin would have been on Christian name terms with all of them, but they were just newspaper faces to me, and I handed my charges over to them, and they bowed and smiled and the Szormenys bowed and smiled, and I even did a bit of bowing and smiling myself; and then the big car doors slammed, and I declined to share a back seat with an Under-Secretary, and went off to find breakfast.

Over my breakfast I read all the papers I could lay hands on. There wasn’t a word in any of them yet about Szormeny’s defection. The situation, I gathered, was now under control. A number of agitators had been rounded up and the Peoples’ Court would soon have the opportunity of showing how Hungary dealt with traitors.

One message stated that, “A man called Lody, an ex-politician with several aliases,” had been arrested.

It seemed a poor sort of epitaph.

I had to change trains twice before I got to London, and the third train I got into was packed with office workers. I squeezed into a first class carriage. Everyone was very excited about something, and since Hungary came into it, it occurred to me that the later editions might have got hold of the Szormeny story; but by listening and peering over people’s shoulders I discovered that it was a Hungarian Soccer team which had played England the afternoon before. The referee, a Pole, had awarded a critical (and much criticised) penalty in the closing minutes from which the Hungarians had scored the only goal in the match.

“In Palmerston’s day,” said an old buffer in the corner, “we wouldn’t have stood for it. We should have sent a battleship.”

I agreed with him heartily; but then blotted my copybook by inquiring whether he suggested we should send a battleship to Hungary or Poland. This got me sent to Coventry for the rest of the journey.

I did not care greatly. Indeed, I found the whole atmosphere intensely reassuring.

All Series titles can be read in order, or randomly as standalone novels

Inspector Hazlerigg

1. Close Quarters
   (1947)
   
2. They Never Looked Inside
   (alt: He Didn’t Mind Danger) (1948)
   
3. The Doors Open
   (1949)
   
4. Smallbone Deceased
   (1950)
   
5. Death has Deep Roots
   (1951)
   
6. Fear To Tread
   (in part)(1953)
   
7. The Young Petrella
   (included) (short stories)(1988)
   
8. The Man Who Hated Banks and Other Mysteries
   (included) (short stories)(1997)
   

Patrick Petrella

1. Blood and Judgement
   (1959)
   
2. Amateur in Violence
   (included) (short stories) (1973)
   
3. Petrella at Q
   (short stories) (1977)
   
4. The Young Petrella
   (short stories) (1988)
   
5. Roller Coaster
   (1993)
   
6. The Man Who Hated Banks and Other Mysteries
   (included) (short stories) (1997)
   

Luke Pagan

1. Ring of Terror
   (1995)
   
2. Into Battle
   (1997)
   
3. Over and Out
   (1998)
   

Calder & Behrens

1. Game Without Rules
   (short stories) (1967)
   
2. Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens
   (short stories) (1982)
   

Non-Series

1. Death in Captivity
   (alt: The Danger Within) (1952)
   
2. Sky High
   (alt: The Country House Burglar) (1955)
   
3. Be Shot for Sixpence
   (1956)
   
4. After the Fine Weather
   (1963)
   
5. The Crack in the Teacup
   (1966)
   
6. The Dust and the Heat
   (alt: Overdrive) (1967)
   
7. The Etruscan Net
   (alt: The Family Tomb) (1969)
   
8. Stay of Execution and Other Stories
   (short stories) (1971)
   
9. The Body of a Girl
   (1972)
   
10. The Ninety-Second Tiger
    (1973)
    
11. Flash Point
    (1974)
    
12. The Night of the Twelfth
    (1976)
    
13. The Empty House
    (1979)
    
14. The Killing of Katie Steelstock
    (alt: Death of a Favourite Girl) (1980)
    
15. The Final Throw
    (alt: End Game) (1982)
    
16. The Black Seraphim
    (1984)
    
17. The Long Journey Home
    (1985)
    
18. Trouble
    (1987)
    
19. Paint, Gold, and Blood
    (1989)
    
20. Anything for a Quiet Life
    (short stories) (1990)
    
21. The Queen against Karl Mullen
    (1992)
    

Published by House of Stratus

After The Fine Weather When Laura Hart travels to Austria to visit her brother, vice-consul of Lienz in the Tyrol, she briefly meets an American who warns her of the mounting political tension. Neo-Nazis are stirring trouble in the province, and xenophobia is rife between the Austrians who control the area and the Italian locals. Then Laura experiences the troubles first-hand, a shocking incident that suggests Hofrat Humbold, leader of the Lienz government is using some heavy-handed tactics. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he is unwilling to let one little English girl destroy his plans for the largest Nazi move since the war, and Laura makes a dangerous enemy.