The Company: A Novel of the CIA (41 page)

"Could such claims still be filed?" Ebby asked.

"The legal deadline established by law expired on December 31, 1950," the Hungarian responded.

"Who had passed that law?" Ebby asked.

"The legitimately elected government of the People's Republic Hungary," the bureaucrat replied.

"In other words," Ebby said, "having confiscated assets, your government then passed a law ex post facto denying compensation to those had fled the country."

"We never denied compensation to those who left the country," Hungarian insisted. "We denied compensation to those who failed to claims before the legal deadline."

"You need to simmer down," the head of the State Department delegation, an old hand at dealing with the Communists, told Ebby at an embassy reception that evening. "We're just going through motions here. The United States is not about to hand over gold ingots to a Soviet satellite so they can build more tanks and planes."

Saturday morning Ebby ordered a car with an English-speaking chauffeur and set out (with the small blue Skoda trailing behind him) to see some thing of Budapest. He roamed the Buda hills, inspecting the Buda Cast where Hungarian Kings and Habsburg royalty had once held court; visited the Coronation Church that had been converted to a mosque during the Ottoman period; he peered over the ramparts of the Fishermen's Bastiti at the massive Parliament building, a neogothic relic from the Austria-Hungarian epoch that loomed across the Danube in the Pest skyline. At one thirty in the afternoon he dismissed the driver and ducked into an old coffee house on the Pest side of the river for an open sandwich and a beer. He shared a table with a bird-like old woman who wore a frayed fox twisted around her gaunt neck and a ski cap on her skull. Sipping a glass of Tokaj, a white wine from the slopes of the Carpathians, she whispered something t0 Ebby in Hungarian. Seeing his confusion, she inquired politely in German if he was a foreigner. When he said yes, he was an American, she became flustered. "Oh, dear, you will have to excuse me," she whispered. Leaving her wine unfinished, she dropped some coins on the table and fled from the coffee house. Through the plate-glass window Ebby could see one of the men in the blue Skoda gesturing toward the old lady as she hurried cross Stalin Avenue. On the other side of the street, two men in dark anklelength overcoats and fedoras approached her. The old woman rummaged in her handbag for documents, which were snatched out of her hand. One of the men stuffed the woman's papers in a pocket and, with a snap of his head, indicated that she was to come with them. The two men, with the tiny woman almost lost between them, disappeared down a side street.

Ebby had a pang of concern for the old woman whose only crime was that she had found herself sharing a table with an American. Or was there more to it than that? Obviously a team of AVH men had been assigned to keep tabs on him. But were they following him because they routinely kept track of every American on Hungarian soil, or had they been alerted to his presence—and his identity—by one of the dissidents he had come to meet? Slipping a bank note under a saucer, Ebby pulled on his overcoat and set off up Stalin Avenue, stopping now and then to window-shop—and use the window to see what was happening behind him in the street. The blue Skoda was following him at a crawl but there was only one figure in it now; Ebby spotted the second man walking ahead of him. A younger man in hiking boots stopped to study a newspaper every time Ebby stopped. A middle-aged woman window-shopping across the street proceeded up the avenue at a pace that matched Ebby's.

With a tight knot forming in the pit of his stomach—a sensation he first felt the night he parachuted behind German lines during the war—Ebby continued along Stalin Avenue. He hesitated at an intersection called Octagon to consult the fold-out map in his guide book. At the top of the avenue he skirted Hero's Park, where an enormous statue of Stalin stood on a pink marble pedestal. Off to the left he could see the Fine Art Museum. He stopped to check his guide-book again, then went up the steps; as he reached the top he saw, in the glass door, the reflection of the Skoda easing t0 the curb in the street below.

Inside, Ebby queued at the booth to buy a ticket. A sign in English taped to the window confirmed what he had been told back in Washington: there was an English-language tour of the museum daily at 2:30 P.M. Ebby joined the dozen or so English tourists milling at the foot of the staircase.

Promptly at 2:30 a door opened and a slim young woman emerged from an office. Somewhere in her early thirties, she was dressed entirely in black--, skin-hugging ribbed turtleneck sweater, a flannel skirt flaring around delicate ankles, thick winter stockings and solid shoes with flat heels—and had a mop of unruly dirty-blonde hair that looked as if it had been hacked off at the nape of her neck by a shearing scissors. As far as Ebby could make out she wore no makeup. Pinned to the sweater over her left breast was a nametag that read: "E. Nemeth."

"Hullo—I am to be your guide," she announced in the crisp, flawless English of an upper-class Sloane Square bird. A nervous trace of a smile appeared on her face as she let her eyes flit over the crowd; they lingered for an instant, not longer, on Ebby before moving on. She said something in fluent Hungarian to the man guarding the turnstile, and he swung it back to let the tourists through. "If you will be kind enough to follow me," said E. Nemeth. With that, she turned on a heel and set off into the long hall filled with enormous canvases depicting in gory detail some of the epic battles Hungarians had fought against the Ottoman Turks.

Ebby trailed along at the fringe of the group, catching bits and pieces of the battles and the painters. Climbing the steps to the second floor, he overheard one of the tourists, a matronly woman who walked with the aid of a cane, ask the guide, "My dear, wherever did you learn to speak English so beautifully?'

"I am half-English," E. Nemeth told her. "I was born in Tuscany, raised and educated in Britain." She glanced quickly over her shoulder and her eyes grazed Ebby's. Again the tense half-smile flickered on her face, a look that seemed to announce the existence of anxiety and her determination not give in to it.

"And may I ask how an English woman like you wound up living in Budapest?"

"I married in," E. Nemeth replied.

"Bully for you, my dear. Bully for you."

When they reached the last room in the guided tour, fifty minutes later, E. Nemeth turned toward her charges. "Here you see six paintings by the renowned Spanish artist El Greco," she announced. "There is actually a seventh painting but it is currently in a basement workshop for cleaning. The museum is very proud of these paintings—this is the largest collection of Grecos in the world outside of Spain. El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the Greek island of Crete in 1541. He studied under Venetian master Titian before establishing himself in Toledo. Over the years his use of vibrant colors and deep shadows, his distorted figures, contributed to his reputation as a master painter of religious ecstasy. Many of the figures we see here were actually Spanish noblemen—"

Ebby stepped around the side of the group. "Is there any truth to the notion that El Greco's eye trouble led him to see—and to paint—his figures with elongated faces?"

Her head angled slightly, several fingers (with the nails bitten to the quick, Ebby noticed) kneading her lower lip, E. Nemeth slowly focused on Ebby. "I have, of course, heard that theory," she replied evenly, "but as far as I know it is based on guesswork, not medical evidence."

As the group started down the long staircase toward the main entrance of the museum, Ebby found himself trailing behind, alongside the guide. He detected the scent of attar of roses in the air.

"You seem to know a good deal about El Greco," she remarked.

"I am a great admirer of his work."

"Would it interest you to see the El Greco that is being restored in the basement workshop?"

"Very much."

They were halfway down the long flight of steps and passing a narrow door on the landing. The guide glanced back. Seeing no one behind them, she stepped quickly to the door, opened it, pulled Ebby through, and jammed it closed behind him. "You were followed when you arrived at the museum," she informed him. "I saw them through the window. There seemed to be an entire team spread out behind you—a car, at least three people on foot."

"I saw them, too," Ebby said. "It is probably standard operating procedure for them to keep tabs on visiting Americans."

E. Nemeth started down a wooden staircase no wider than her body and lit by weak bulbs on every landing. Under her feet the raw wood of the floorboards in the little used stairs creaked. At the bottom she pushed open another door and stuck her head through. Seeing the coast was clear, she motioned for Ebby to follow her. They made their way across the cement floor of a vast storage room filled with busts and paintings to a door locked and bolted on the inside.

"What does the E stand for on your nametag?" Ebby whispered.

"Elizabet."

"My name is Elliott."

She fixed her dark eyes on him. "I was sure you were the one even before y0u spoke the prearranged sentence," she told him. She grabbed a duffle coat off a hook and flung it over her shoulders as if it were a cape. Producing a large skeleton key from a pocket, she threw the bolt on the door. As they emerged from the basement into a sunken patio at the rear of the museum she locked the door behind them, then led the way up a flight of steel steps to a door in the high iron fence, which she unlocked with a second skeleton key and locked again when they had passed through it. Crossing the street, she led the way down a narrow alleyway to a beat-up two-door Fiat parked in a shed. Elizabet unlocked the door, slid behind the wheel, then reached across to unlock the passenger door. Gunning the motor, she set off down the alley and melted into the traffic on the thoroughfare at the end of it.

Elizabet piloted the tiny car through the crowded streets of Pest in utter concentration. After a while Ebby broke the silence. "Where are taking me?"

"Arpad and his friends are waiting for you in an apartment in Buda behind the South Station."

"What will happen back at the museum when I don't turn up at front door?"

"They will wait a while and then come looking for you. When they realize you are no longer in the museum, they will return to the Gellert Hotel and wait for you to show up there. We have seen this sort of thing many times—to protect themselves from the wrath of their superiors, they are unlikely to report your disappearance. After your meeting with Arpad I will drop you at one of the bridges and you can make your way back to the Gellert on foot as if nothing out of the ordinary has taken place."

"I heard you tell that woman in the museum that you were married to Arpad."

She glanced quickly at him. "I did not say I was married to Arpad. I am married to another Hungarian. I am Arpad's mistress."

Ebby winced. "I didn't mean to pry—"

"Of course you did. You are a spy from the Central Intelligence Agency. Prying is your business."

Gusts of icy wind knifing in from the Danube buckled the mullions and rattled the panes in the corner apartment on the top floor of the house lost in the labyrinthine streets of the Buda hills. When Ebby appeared at the door, a heavyset man in his late thirties, with a mane of prematurely grey hair and the flat forehead and knuckled nose of a Roman Centurion, strode across the room to greet him. He was wearing the heavy lace-up shoes, rough corduroy trousers and worn woolen pullover of a laborer. "I welcome you with all my heart to Budapest," he declared, burying the visitor's outsized hand in both of his, scrutinizing him with dark, restless eyes.

"This is Arpad Zeik," Elizabet murmured.

"It is an honor to meet such a distinguished poet," Ebby said.

Arpad snorted bitterly. "As I compose my poems in my native Tinearian, a language spoken by a mere ten million of the two and a half billion people on the planet Earth, my distinction resembles that of a bird chirping at the top of his lungs in a soundproof cage."

Arpad turned away to hold a hurried conference in Hungarian with Flizabet and the two young men sitting at the glass-covered dining table. Ebby took in the room: there was an enormous 1930s radio (big enough to house a small dog) on a table, wooden beams overhead, heavy rug-like drapes drawn across the windows, a fireplace stuffed with paper waiting to be burned, two buckets filled with coal, a small mountain of pamphlets stacked against a wall. Elizabet glanced back at Ebby. "Excuse me for a moment—I am telling them about the AVH men who were following you. Arpad wants to be sure they did not follow us here."

Arpad switched off the overhead light and went to a window, where he parted the heavy drapes the width of two fingers and surveyed the street below. "It does not appear that you were followed," he announced. "In any case I have people watching the street from another apartment—they will alert us by telephone if there is danger." Arpad motioned for Ebby to take the empty chair at the table. He nodded toward the two other men sitting around it and pointedly introduced them by their first names only. "Meet, please, Matyas; meet, also, Ulrik," he said. "They are comrades in the Hungarian Resistance Movement."

Ebby reached to shake the hand of each man—Matyas wore the distinctive short jacket of a university student; Ulrik, the suit and vest and detachable-collar shirt and steel-rimmed eyeglasses of a white-collar worker—and then sat down in the empty chair. Elizabet settled onto a couch.

Arpad filled a demitasse with a pale liquid and pushed it across the table to his guest. "Are you familiar with our Magyar Torkoly? Ah, I did not think so. It is a brandy fabricated from the skins of grapes after they have been crushed to make wine. Egeszsegedre he said, hoisting his own demitasse.

"Egeszsegedre," the two men at the table echoed, saluting Ebby with raised glasses.

"Cheers," Ebby said.

They downed their cups. The brandy scalded Ebby's throat. He opened his mouth wide and exhaled and pulled a face. The others smiled.