Traitors' Gate (18 page)

Getting up, Gregory went over to her table, made a formal bow to the man who was with her, and asked if he might ask her for a dance. Her companion looked far from pleased but,
taken by surprise and seeing the smile with which she greeted the invitation, he mumbled his consent. Gregory led the blonde on to the floor, grasped her firmly and began to tell her how, as a visitor to Budapest, he found the city enchanting and her the loveliest thing in it. Her name was Terézia and she was a model in a smart dress shop. He secured her address and telephone number, and said he would ring her up next day; a promise that he had no intention of keeping. Then he took her back to her table and returned to his own, hoping that Sabine, who must have observed the incident, would conclude from it that no spy who had been detected would have the nerve to remain within call acting the rôle of a play-boy.

Ribbentrop’s party had now re-sorted themselves. He was dancing with a statuesque red-headed woman and Sabine, who had evidently declined further dancing for the moment, was back at the table with the Arrow-Cross man. As Gregory gave her an anxious sidelong glance, he saw that her dark head was bent over the table. Count Lászlo had paid the bill, and ogling the blonde then dancing with her had occupied a good quarter of an hour; so he murmured to the Count, ‘I think we might go now.’

As they stood up, he saw that Sabine was bending over the table because she was writing a note. At that moment she lifted her head, saw that he was about to leave, and made a gesture with her hand that he should stay where he was. He responded with a look of blank surprise appropriate to receiving a signal from a complete stranger; but she beckoned up a waiter, folded her note and pointing out Gregory sent the man over with it.

It was impossible for him to ignore the approaching waiter. Another few moments and he might have been out of the place, but now he had been caught. Cursing under his breath, he sat down, then took the note from the plate the waiter held out to him. Unfolding it he read the single line in her well-remembered spidery writing:

You can’t fool me. What are you doing in Budapest?

So much for his bluff that he was not who she thought him. It was clearly futile to attempt to maintain it any longer. And there was now no escape from giving her some explanation. All he could hope to do was temporarily to stall her off from
telling her friends that he was English by inducing her to play up to one of his cover stories until they could talk together alone.

For him to pretend to be Fritz Einholtz with Ribbentrop in the offing would be a suicidal risk, as the Foreign Minister might have known the Gestapo Colonel. On the other hand, if he posed as Tavenier there was just a chance that the Arrow-Cross man might be Puttony’s chief, and that the Lieutenant had confided to him that Tavenier was really only a cover name for
Obersturmbannführer
Einholtz.

Ribbentrop was just returning to the table, so would see Sabine receive the reply to her note. It was certain that he would question her about it, and if she said Gregory was a Frenchman of her acquaintance the Arrow-Cross man might try to show how well-informed he was by telling her that she was mistaken and revealing what he believed to be the truth. For a moment Gregory contemplated fabricating an entirely new identity for himself. But that would not do either, as scores of people in Budapest now knew him as Commandant Tavenier and it was quite possible that one of the other women at the table had been at some party he had attended and heard him addressed by that name.

His mind turning over like a dynamo, he decided that the lesser risk was to continue to pose as Tavenier; so he picked up a menu and wrote on the back of it in French:

My dear Baroness
,

Only the fact that you are in such illustrious company prevented me from reclaiming your acquaintance. I still treasure the memory of Paris when you were staying there as the guest of my aunt in 1936. Permit me, I beg, to call upon you tomorrow morning, so that I may tell you of my adventures after my recall to the army and how, after being evacuated from Dunkirk, I succeeded in getting back to France. I rejoice to see that these few years have made you more ravishingly beautiful than ever
.

With my most distinguished compliments
,

Etienne Tavenier
.

Folding the menu over, he gave it to the hovering waiter to take to her. Then he said in a low voice to Count Lászlo, ‘I only hope to God that will do the trick. If her memories of
our affaire are as delightful as mine, it should—unless that Arrow-Cross chap knows that the real Tavenier is still living in France.’

The Count smiled. ‘You are most fortunate to have had an affaire with her. Not only is she very beautiful, but she is one of the most intelligent and amusing women I have ever counted among my friends.’

‘You know her well, then?’

‘Oh yes. I have known her since shortly after she left her Convent. In fact, I might even claim to have contributed a little to her education; although that came a year or two later when she had become bored with the limited conversation of handsome young officers.’

Into Gregory’s mind there flashed a picture of the enormous bed at Count Lászlo’s discreet apartment in the suburbs. But his gaze was riveted on Sabine. She had read the note and was talking to Ribbentrop; then she spoke to the Arrow-Cross man. Gregory was on tenterhooks for what seemed an age while he watched them conferring together, but actually it was only two minutes before she beckoned to the waiter again and sent him over with a message. Hurrying between the tables he bowed and delivered it:

‘Gentlemen, the
Herr Reichsaussenminister
presents his compliments and asks that you will join his party.’

Count Lászlo half covered his mouth with a hand that held a cigarette, and murmured quickly behind it in French, ‘This is Hungary, not Germany; so you do not have to go. Walk out if you like. I will express your regrets and tell them you had to leave because you have a date with a lady.’

‘No,’ Gregory replied in the same language, as he stood up. ‘If she has given me away they’d have the police after me in ten minutes. Better to face the music and hope things will turn out all right. If not, please don’t involve yourself. Say you hardly know me—that we met in the bar and as we were both alone decided to share a table.’

A few moments later they were bowing in turn over Sabine’s hand. To Gregory’s great relief she greeted him in French. Then she introduced them to the others at her table, explaining that the Arrow-Cross man was their host. He proved to be Major Szalasi, the leader of the Hungarian Nazi Party, and the red-haired woman was his wife. The third man, a tall blond fellow, was Ribbentrop’s aide-de-camp, Captain
Von Trott, and his companion, a girl whose looks were a little marred by a mouth as wide as a letterbox, was a Fräulein Weiss.

The bull-necked Szalasi had shown no dangerous reaction when Sabine, having asked Gregory’s present rank, had presented him as Commandant Tavenier; so, this second hurdle being behind him, he took one of the extra chairs that had been brought up, accepted the glass of champagne Szalasi poured for him, and entered with zest into his part.

For the first minute or two Sabine regarded him with a coolly detached expression, but with truly Gallic exuberance he launched into an invented account of how he had taken her boating on the lake at Vincennes and fallen in, and she had nearly brained him with an oar while trying to help him out, upon which her dark eyes began to brim with merriment. Mischievously she enquired after his mythical aunt and was hard put to it to maintain a suitable expression of sorrow when he told her in a tragic voice that in the first year of the war the poor lady had had the tip of her nose bitten off by her pet poodle, and that as a result she had died of sepsis.

For the benefit of the others he changed from French to heavily accented German, as he described his agony of indecision as to whether it was his duty to shoot the poodle as the murderer of his aunt. Then, breaking off abruptly, he declared that this was no place in which to talk of death, and soon he and Sabine were outbidding one another in absurd, entirely fictitious, stories beginning, ‘Do you remember,’ and everyone at the table was laughing with them.

It was Ribbentrop who turned the conversation to more serious matters by saying, ‘I understand,
Herr Major
, that you were evacuated from Dunkirk and spent some time in England. It would be interesting to have an eye witness’s account of that operation as the enemy saw it, and to have your impressions of London under war conditions.’

About Dunkirk Gregory had no need to call on his powers of invention, as for the best part of twenty-four hours he had sat on the beach watching the troops taken off; although, his own mission being uncompleted, instead of going home with them he had then got into an abandoned tank and driven off in the direction of Paris.

About London he exaggerated both the bad and the good with the intent of depressing his audience. He described the
results of the bombing as frightful beyond belief, which delighted the Germans; but then went on to say how, all the unreliable elements having fled from the capital, those who remained had displayed the pig-headedness for which those accursed islanders were notorious. They had suddenly begun talking to their neighbours in buses and trains and sung a silly song about rolling out a barrel and—pardon, but you will understand I speak of the filthy British—gone about greeting one another with laughing cries of ‘To hell with Hitler!’

Having despatched this barbed arrow, he swiftly returned to his own adventures, telling how he had skilfully managed to desert from a British Commando at St. Nazaire and that as, alas, France had not yet actively entered the war against the perfidious English he had come to Budapest in the hope of selling truffles.

He then paused to await with some curiosity their reaction to this admission of his pseudo-commercial acitivities. Ribbentrop had been widely sneered at by the world Press because in pre-Nazi days he had earned his living as a champagne salesman. Why, Gregory had never been able to understand, for it seemed to him that few trades could be more civilised and pleasant than selling wines; and, although he had no right to the ‘von’ he claimed, as only his mother’s family had been noble, he came of respectable people. Moreover, he had been no ordinary commercial traveller, as he had married Anneliese Henkel, the heiress of the great German Sparkling-Wine House. But nobody made any comment on Gregory’s commercial activities, and a moment later the band started up a new number.

Standing up, Sabine smiled at Ribbentrop, then said to Gregory, ‘Come and show me if you still dance as well as you used to when we were in Paris.’

‘With the utmost pleasure,’ he replied gaily, and led her out on to the floor. But as they moved smoothly off among the throng of dancers, her manner changed and she asked abruptly:

‘Now! What are you really up to here?’

‘Surely you can guess,’ he replied lightly. ‘I am assessing the weight of bombs it will take to blow Budapest off the map.’ and how many Hungarian girls we can hope to save from the ruins to supply the brothels we maintain for the coloured troops of the Empire.’

The Allied bombers will never get as far as Budapest, and …’

‘I wouldn’t be too certain of that,’ he cut in with sudden seriousness.

Her voice was low and soft but held no note of friendliness as she replied, ‘That, as I was about to add, is beside the point. I want a sensible answer to my question.’

‘Let’s say then that, my poor old bones now being racked with arthritis, I have come to do the cure at your famous mud baths.’

‘Gregory!’ She gave the back of his hand a sharp dig with her nails. ‘Stop fooling! You are as fit and lithe as ever you were. And anyway …’

‘Softly, my sweet, softly,’ he chided her. ‘Please remember that my name is now Etienne.’

‘You will have exchanged your name for a number in a cell if you exasperate me much further. And I am not your sweet!’

Ignoring the threat, he smiled down at her. ‘Alas, no. I fear that your taste has deteriorated since the wonderful time we had together—in Paris, of course. About that you played up marvellously, and I am most grateful to you.’

Without returning his smile, she replied, ‘Yes, it was all very amusing; but I am no longer in the mood for comedy. For the sake of old times I refrained from denouncing you, and I am now giving you an opportunity to explain yourself. Take it, or I shall get Major Szalasi to send for a policeman.’

He gave her a look of shocked surprise. ‘Surely you wouldn’t do that?’

‘Why not? Our countries are at war and I run into you here posing as a Frenchman. It is obvious that you are an enemy secret agent.’

‘Then why not snatch up a champagne bottle from the next table we pass and bash my head in with it?’

A slight shudder ran through her slender body, and she exclaimed, ‘What a horrible idea!’

‘I suppose it is rather—particularly when you remember that you used to enjoy running those slim fingers of yours through my hair. Yet the effect of a real good crack from a bottle would be precisely the same as if my head were smashed in by the bullets from a firing party; and that would probably be my fate if you gave me away. So you see you would simply be getting somebody else to do your dirty work.’

Her skin was flawless, with the matt texture of magnolia petals, but a worried frown creased her broad low forehead, and a warmer note crept into her voice as she said, ‘God knows, I would hate to bring about your death. But don’t you see that meeting you like this has placed me in an impossible position?’

By first making light of his own situation then just touching on the grimmer side of it, Gregory had played his cards skilfully. Few women can resist the appeal of a man who is in great danger yet instead of asking help talks gay nonsense about it: and he judged from Sabine’s softened expression that he now had her patriotic scruples on the run. Stooping his head a little he murmured in her ear:

‘I would not say impossible, but exciting. How could it be anything else when you recall the last time we danced together here. I find it incredibly thrilling that fate should have brought us together again like this. You have no idea how often I have thought of you.’