The Company: A Novel of the CIA (48 page)

Ebby was less optimistic. There had been too much killing, he told her. It was true that the two Russian divisions had pulled back from Budapest. But if the Russians returned in force, the AVH and the Communists would come back with them, and there would be a bloody reckoning.

Elizabet bridled. "For years they tortured us, they imprisoned us, they slaughtered us," she said with great passion, "and you talk of them settling scores with us!" Since her imprisonment she tended to break into tears easily and took several deep breaths to head them off now.

Stepping around open suitcases on the sidewalk, set out to collect donations for the wounded, they strolled on past walls plastered with poems and caricatures and the omnipresent slogan "New Kelt Komunizmus"—"We don't want Communism!" At one corner, Elizabet stopped to chat with two young journalists who were handing out free copies of one of the four-sheet independent newspapers that had sprung up in the early days of the revolution. Coming back to Ebby, she held up the hand-set Literary Gazette and translated the headline over the front page editorial: '"In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end'—de Tocqueville." Crossing a street, Elizabet stopped to look at the two rows of fresh graves in a small triangle of grass at the middle of the intersection; each of the dozen or so mounds of earth was piled high with flowers and red-white-and-green ribbons. Tacked to sticks hammered into the ground at the heads of several graves were photographs of smiling young boys and girls, some dressed in school uniforms, others in makeshift battle fatigues.

"The Russians won't invade," Elizabet predicted emotionally, "for the same reason they didn't invade Yugoslavia all these years: because they know our young people are ready to die for the revolution, and they'll take a lot of Russian soldiers with them." Again her eyes teared; again she flung the tears away with the back of her finger. She looked across the river at the statue of the martyred Archbishop Gellert, his crucifix raised high, atop one of the Buda hills. "Purgatory is not big enough to contain all the Russian soldiers who will go to hell if the Soviets make the mistake of returning," she said.

She slipped a hand inside the duffle coat to massage her mutilated breast. Again her eyes filled with tears. "The truth is that I am afraid to cry," she confessed.

"You've earned the right to a good cry," Ebby said.

"Never," she said, spitting out the word. "I am terrified that if I start I will never be able to stop."

While the wound on her breast cicatrized, Elizabet took to prowling the Corvin Cinema. She sat in on Council sessions in the movie theater or impromptu committee meetings in the rooms off it, or pulled Ebby after her down the long tunnel that connected Corvin with the Kilian Barracks across the street to chat with the officers of the 900-man construction battalion that had gone over to the revolution. Evenings they listened (with Elizabet providing a running translation) to the endless bull sessions raging in hallways that had been transformed into dormitories for the hundreds of students crowded into Corvin. Arpad occasionally was called upon to read one of his poems, but for the most part the discussions revolved around how fast and how far the students and workers dared push the new leadership, headed by the reformer Nagy, to break with the Soviet Union and the country's Communist past.

According to the radio, negotiations were already underway concerning the departure of all Soviet forces from Hungary; the Russian delegation, headed by the tall, humorless Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Andropov, and the Soviet Politburo idealogue, Mikhail Suslov, was demanding only that the troops be allowed to quit the country with their banners flying and bands playing to avoid humiliation. In the hallways of Corvin, the few voices brave enough to question the wisdom of withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and calling for free elections, two moves that were bound to test the patience of Moscow, were shouted down. The revolution had triumphed, Arpad proclaimed during one of the hallway discussions. What was the point of making concessions that undermine this triumph?

"What if the Russians decide we have gone too far and invade Hungary?" a boy with long blond hair asked.

"We will defeat them again," Arpad responded.

"And if they return with two thousand tanks?" another student persisted.

"The Americans," Arpad promised, stabbing the air with a hand-rolled cigarette to emphasize his point, "will come to our assistance. NATO planes will bomb the Russian tanks before they reach Budapest. NATO airdrops will supply us with anti-tank weapons to deal with the few that get through the bombardment." Arpad gazed over the heads of the students to stare defiantly at Ebby. "If we don't lose our nerve," he said, "we will soon live in a free and democratic Hungary." Then, his Roman face burning with pious fervor, he pumped his fist in the air. "Ne Bdntsd a Magyart!" he cried. And the students, clapping in unison, took up the refrain.

"With soldiers like these," Elizabet shouted into Ebby's ear, "how can we possibly lose?"

Ebby could only shake his head. He hoped to God that Arpad had gotten it right; hoped to God the Russians stayed in Russia. If they did come back, they would return in overwhelming numbers and with overwhelming fire power. And the world would not lift a finger to help as Arpad and others like him led the courageous Hungarian lambs to the slaughter.

In the darkness one night, Ebby could hear Elizabet flinging herself from one side of the mattress to the other in the hunt for a position that would ease the ache of her injury. He wondered what time it was. A cheerful young mason with a bandaged ear had bricked in the sniper's hole in the wall, which had the advantage of making the room less drafty but the disadvantage that Ebby was no longer woken up by the daylight. From time to time he could hear members of the Corvin Battalion stirring in the hallway, but that didn't necessarily mean it was sunup; small groups of them came and went through the night, relieving others on guard duty or heading out to patrol the city on foot or in one of the commandeered taxi cabs. On the other side of the room, Elizabet scraped her mattress across the floor and propped half of it against the wall to create a makeshift chair; she seemed to suffer less pain when she slept in a sitting position.

"Elliott—"

Ebby propped himself up on elbow. "What is it?"

"It hurts. I hurt. Can't sleep. Can't not sleep. Worried sick."

Ebby pulled his mattress over to the wall alongside hers. He felt her hand groping for his in the darkness and twined his fingers through hers.

"I'm glad you're here," she confided in a whisper.

"Want to talk?" he asked.

"I have a child... a daughter..."

"What's her name?"

"Her Christian name is Nellie. She will be six in January."

"Is Arpad her father?"

"Yes." Ebby could hear her brushing tears from her eyes. I was still living with my husband when Arpad and I... when we..."

"You don't need to go into details," Ebby said. "Where is your husband—what was his name again?"

"Nemeth. Nandor Nemeth. His father was a high-ranking Communist. When we married, Nandor was an undersecretary in the Ministry for External Affairs. He was posted to the Hungarian embassy in Moscow two years ago. He knew about Arpad by then. I decided not to go with him..."

"What happened to Nellie?"

"She's living with Nandor's sister on a collective farm near Gyor, about ninety kilometers from Budapest. Until all this started"—Elizabet sighed into the darkness—"I used to drive out to see her every other weekend. Before Arpad went underground, the AVH used to pick him up once or twice a month; sometimes they would question him for an entire week. When Arpad was in prison I used to bring Nellie back with me to Budapest for days at a time."

"Why didn't you bring her to Budapest when Arpad was here?"

Elizabet thought about that for a moment. "You have to understand Arpad—he is an ardent fighter for the freedom of people in general, but individual freedoms, the right to bring your daughter to live with you, are subject to his veto." She cleared a lump from her throat. "The fact is he doesn't like children around. I was free to leave him, of course. I tried to several times. But in the end I always came crawling back. I am addicted to Arpad—he is like a drug habit that is impossible to kick..."

The hollowness Ebby detected in the timbre of Elizabet's voice frightened him. To distract her he told her he had a son three years older than Nellie. "His name is Manny, which is short for Immanuel. He's a bright boy, bright and serious. He lives with my former wife... I don't really know him all that well... I spend so much time abroad."

"It must be difficult for you— "

Ebby didn't say anything.

Elizabet tightened her grip on his hand. "When all this is finished—the revolution, the killing, the hurting, the exhilaration—we must both of us spend more time with our children."

"Yes. We'll find a way to do that."

"You look like you've been run over by a steam roller," the young embassy counselor Jim Doolittle remarked to Ebby. It was Friday evening and the two were gazing out of a window on the second floor of the Parliament Building, which had a splendid view of the vast square. There had been a trace of a sunset earlier in the evening; now the last pigments of color in the sooty sky had been blotted up by the darkness. A bonfire burned in the middle of the square and a pick-up Tzigane orchestra stood around it playing Gypsy melodies. Every now and then a small open truck would pull up and the gypsies would unload chairs swiped from neighborhood Communist Party offices, smash them on the pavement and feed the wood into the fire. Ebby could make out Zoltan dancing around the flames as he sawed away at the violin jammed into his collarbone.

Did Zoltan have his own sources of information? Was the gypsy violinist warming up to lead the Hungarians into battle against the Russians?

Doolittle turned away from the window to watch the American ambassador, along with his political charge d'affaires (Doolittle's immediate superior) and the Company's chief of station talking in urgent undertones with the Hungarian premier, Nagy, on the other side of the large mirrored reception hall. In a corner one of Nagy's aides fed documents into the fire burning in a marble fireplace. "Washington ought to have warned us you were Company," Doolittle told Ebby. "We could have kept closer tabs on you. When you went missing we could have started ringing the gong sooner."

Ebby touched his eye, which was still tender. "Wouldn't have changed anything," he remarked.

"I guess not," Doolittle conceded.

Arpad and a tall, lanky officer in a crisp uniform of the armored corps appeared at the double doors of the reception room and walked in lockstep across the marble floor to join Nagy and the Americans. "Who's the guy with Zeik?" Ebby asked.

"That's Nagy's minister of defense. Pal Maleter, the commander of the Kilian Barracks. He's the one who's been negotiating the Soviet pullout with the Russians."

The chief of station waved for Ebby to join them. Nagy was talking to Maleter in Hungarian. The premier turned to the Americans. "If you please, Mr. Ambassador, tell him what you told me."

The ambassador, an old-school diplomat who agonized over the situation in Hungary, tugged a message blank from the inside pocket of his double-breasted suit jacket. Pasted across the paper in strips was a deciphered top secret cable that had come into the embassy earlier in the day. "We have reports—" he began. He cleared his throat; he felt as if he were reading out a death sentence. "—reports that two trains filled with the latest model Soviet tank, the T-54, crossed the Hungarian frontier at Zahony, then offloaded and dug in around Szolnok and Abony. We have intelligence that old Soviet T-34 tanks that pulled out of Budapest a few days ago went no further than Vecses, nine miles from the city, where they turned around and blocked roads. French diplomats who flew out of Budapest in the last twenty-four hours reported seeing Soviet tanks closing in on the three Budapest airports—Ferihegy, Budaors, and Tokol. Finally, one of our own reconnaissance aircraft flying from a base in Austria spotted two hundred tanks and long column of new Soviet armored personal carriers, designated BTR-152 heading in the direction of Budapest near Vac and Cegledopen."

Nagy puffed agitatedly on an American cigarette. Ashes tumbled onto one of the lapels of his brown suit jacket but he didn't appear to notice. "We also have had information," he told the ambassador, "indicating that a great many Soviet tanks have crossed the Tisza into Hungary." He turned to his Minister of Defense and, speaking in English for the benefit of the Americans, asked, "Did you raise the subject of these sightings with the Soviet side at tonights negotiations?"

"I did, Mr. Prime Minister," Maleter replied. "Ambassador Andropov became enraged—he claimed it was a provocation of the American CIA designed to ignite full scale fighting between the Russian side and the Hungarian side before we could conclude the terms of the Soviet withdrawal. He cautioned us against falling into the American trap."

"Whom do you trust," Ebby asked bluntly, "Andropov or us?"

Maleter sized up Ebby. "I can say that we are obliged to trust him. The alternative is too tragic to contemplate. If the Soviets invade Hungary we will of course fight. But for us there can be only one issue—death with honor."

Arpad Zeik added grimly, "We harbor no illusions about surviving— without American intervention we have no possibility of defeating the Russians if it comes to full scale war."

"Do you, sir, believe the Russians will invade?" the American charge d'affaires asked Nagy.

The premier took his time before answering. "If one judges from history, he said finally, "the response must be yes. The Russians always come in."

"Let us look at this realistically," Maleter said. "There are bound to be some in the Soviet superstructure who will argue that if Hungary is permitted to remove itself from the Soviet sphere, other satellite states will follow."

Nagy became aware of the ashes on his lapel and flicked them away with his fingernails. "History will judge us harshly if we went too far, too fast," he confided in a gruff voice. He concentrated on his cigarette for a moment. "It comes down to this: In the event of war what will the Americans do?