Traitors' Gate (38 page)

He shrugged. ‘It is no good considering might have beens, and all you did was to urge the course that you thought at the time would be best for us. But now we’ve got to resign ourselves to saying goodbye. The only chance of your getting out of this is for you to surrender yourself to the top Arrow-Cross boy and demand that he should take you straight to Szalasi. That should give him the feeling that he’s one up on the Germans, so it’s unlikely he’ll refuse. Szalasi is going to be desperately embarrassed when you are handed over to him. The very last thing he wants is for Ribb to be able to pin it on him that it was he who scuppered you. All the odds are that he’ll apologise for his boys and send you back here in a car. Then you must jump into the Mercedes and get Mario to drive you hell for leather to the frontier.’

‘But what about you?’

‘It is me that Grauber is really after, and there is nothing to be gained by my surrendering to Szalasi’s boys. Ribb might be annoyed at my being caught, but he couldn’t reasonably blame Szalasi for handing me over; so it’s a certainty that he would hand me over, otherwise he’d make Grauber his enemy
for life. All I can do when the time comes is to attempt to shoot my way through, and hope for a chance to get away up some alley in the darkness.’

He tried to keep his voice light, but he knew now that he was really up against it. The odds against his being able to get the better of half-a-dozen Gestapo thugs, aided by scores of Arrow-Cross men, were fantastic. He could only hope that he would meet his end fighting and not get a knock on the head which would result in his being delivered alive into Grauber’s hands.

That the time would soon come when he must take this last gamble with fate was apparent. While he and Sabine had been talking, four more smoke bombs had been pitched through the archway. Pipi had got the fire-hose going again and had succeeded in putting two of them out, but the others were belching their evil black smoke and it was obvious that the hose could not be switched quickly enough to douse all of the swift succession of them that were now coming down in the courtyard. The group of eight or ten servants were starting to cough and splutter, and casting anxious glances at their mistress.

Old Hunyi, the bearded porter, came hobbling up. He was still in pain from the kick he had received in the groin and leaning heavily on a thick stick; but he made an awkward bow to Sabine, and said in Hungarian:

‘Gracious lady, if we remain here we shall soon all be suffocated. I beg that you will deign to accept the shelter of my lodge.’

She translated to Gregory who gave a sad shake of his head and replied in German, ‘That would only be to put off the evil moment. From the street they can lob bombs through the windows of the lodge, and they will as soon as they have made the courtyard untenable. I’m afraid there is no possible way for us to keep out of their clutches.’

Hunyi considered for a moment. He understood German and now spoke in it. ‘If we could find the trap door leading to the caves the
Gnädnige Frau Baronin
and the
Herr Commandant
might get away by them.’

‘The caves!’ Gregory almost shouted. ‘What caves?’

‘The Buda hill is honeycombed with caves,’ the elderly porter replied. ‘There are lakes beneath our feet and many of the mineral springs rise in them. Legend has it that our fore
fathers took refuge down there when the Turks ravished the city in the fifteenth century.
¹
Many of the old palaces have ways down into them; and I recall, when I was a boy and Pipi’s father was Steward here, hearing him say that there was a way into them through a trapdoor in the cellars.’

For Gregory this possibility meant a chance of life and freedom, and for Sabine escape from the threatening attentions of the Gestapo. He did not attempt to keep the excitement out of his voice, as he cried:

‘In the cellars! But where? Could you find it?’

Hunyi shook his head. ‘No,
Herr Commandant
. But Pipi might know where it is.’

Sabine called to Pipi to leave the hose to the footman and come over to them. Quickly they questioned him; but he could not help. He knew of the caves but had never heard his father speak of an entrance to them from the Tuzotlo palace.

Gregory’s heart sank again. If it was there they should be able to find it. But since its existence was not even known to Pipi it would need careful looking for, and in the cellars of a large building like the palace such a search might take hours.

Rushing from place to place, their hasty conferences, and the wear and tear from constant fits of violent coughing made them feel as if the smoke bomb attack had been going on all night; but, in fact, it was less than half-an-hour since Pipi had given the first alarm, and there was a quarter of an hour still to go before it would be one o’clock. Given normal conditions, two or three hours should have proved enough to locate the trap-door. But conditions in the palace were not normal. The rooms on its main floors were now pitch black caverns, and Gregory knew that by this time enough smoke must have seeped down into the basement to asphyxiate anyone who remained there without a mask for more than ten or fifteen minutes.

Nevertheless, as it was that or death outside, and the yard was now becoming thick with smoke, Gregory determined to try it. The air was clearest near the gate; so most of the servants
were now in a huddle by it, under the archway through which the smoke bombs were coming. Mario was among them. Gregory ran over to him and gasped:

‘A pair of goggles! Have you a pair of goggles? I am going into the palace again.’

Mario nodded, and they ran together to the garage. At the back of it there was a motor-cycle that belonged to him. Snatching a pair of goggles from its handlebars he thrust them at Gregory and panted:

‘One moment, I have others. If I can help I will come with you.’ Turning to a box of spares he unearthed two older pairs, the elastics of which were stretched, but not too badly for them to be usable.

As they emerged from the garage, Pipi came running towards them. For the first time that night he was laughing. In his round blackened face his teeth flashed like those of a Negro. Behind him, by the wrist, he was dragging an old woman. For a moment he was seized with a coughing fit, then he spluttered out:

‘I asked the other servants. This is old Ciská, our laundry woman. She knows where it is.’

‘Thank God!’ exclaimed Gregory. ‘Quick! Give her one of those pairs of goggles, Mario.’

As she took them, Pipi snatched the other pair and said. ‘She speaks only Hungarian; I will go with you to interpret.’

Mario shrugged. ‘As you will. You know the cellars better than I do.’

Gregory turned to him. ‘You can help in another way. God alone knows what it will be like in the caves. Anyway, we’ll need torches, candles, matches. Please collect everything of that kind you can while we are gone.’

‘We’ll need a crowbar, too,’ Pipi added. ‘Not having been used for so long, it’s certain the trap will be hard to get up.’ As he spoke he ran into the machine shop and came out carrying a medium-sized jemmy.

Sabine was standing with Magda in an angle of the yard. Hurrying over to her, Gregory told her what he hoped to do, then rejoined the others. Parts of the yard were now two or three inches deep in water from the hose. In it they redamped the scarves and tied them afresh over their mouths and nostrils.

With Pipi leading and old Ciská following beside Gregory, they went through a passage at the back of the garage into the
main block of the house. The smoke was dense, but troubled them much less now that they wore goggles. Pipi fumbled his way along a corridor and found the stairs to the basement. Down in it there was much less smoke, but enough to justify Gregory’s fear that without a mask anyone would be driven from it within a quarter of an hour.

Pipi was snapping the lights on as he advanced and old Ciská kept mumbling to him in Hungarian. They walked in Indian file along several low stone-flagged passages, then came into a broader space along one side of which were trestles supporting a row of casks. There they halted, and after a moment Pipi turned to Gregory.

‘She said it was in the beer-cellar and this is the beer-cellar. But now she says that, although it’s nearly thirty years since she’s been in this part of the basement, she’s sure that the beer-cellar she remembers was not like this.’

‘Probably she has confused it in her mind with a cellar that holds wine casks,’ Gregory suggested. ‘Is there one that does?’

‘Yes,
Herr Commandant
.’

‘Then let’s take her to it.’

For a moment Pipi was silent, then he burst out, ‘St. Stephen’s curse upon it! We cannot. The wine cellars are locked, and I keep the keys in my room upon the second floor. This scarf is not enough protection to go upstairs. I’d be suffocated before I could get back with them.’

‘Perhaps we can break down the door. Anyway, let’s go and see.’

With a despondent shake of the head Pipi turned about, and led them down a corridor at right angles to the one by which they had come to another open space. Giving a helpless shrug, he pointed to an ancient nail-studded door set in a low archway.

Gregory gave vent to a peculiarly blasphemous Italian oath that he used only in times of exceptional stress. The jemmy that Pipi was holding might have been a matchstick for all the good it would have been against such a door. Nothing short of dynamite would have burst its lock or forced it off its hinges.

The wave of evil fury that had rocked his mind was past in a moment. Swiftly he began to assess the chances of his being able to get Pipi’s keys himself. It meant going up three flights of stairs—back stairs that were unknown to him—finding
a room somewhere at the opposite end of the house to the one he had occupied—a room that he had never entered—then in pitch darkness locating solely from its description the right drawer in a bureau or writing table, and finally getting safely back to the cellar again.

‘No,’ he decided. Pipi was no coward and if he, knowing the house from cellar to attic, would not take such a gamble, it would be sheer lunacy for him, to attempt it. The sulphur-laden air would overcome him and he would be choking his life out before he could even find Pipi’s room.

Yet, if they failed to locate the trap door, it could be only a matter of an hour or so and he would be choking his life out in his own blood outside in the street. Either way was going to be extremely painful, and he had an idea that asphyxiation would prove the more so; but it had the advantage that at least he would make sure of not falling alive into Grauber’s hands. And, after all, there was always the chance that by some miracle he might succeed in getting the keys.

Old Ciská had been peering uncertainly round her through the bluish haze. Now she muttered something to Pipi. Turning to Gregory he exclaimed excitedly, ‘She says this is it! That in the old days the beer cellar used to be here!’

The old crone was nodding her head up and down and pointing with a skinny finger to a wide embrasure about fifteen feet away between two great squat pillars that supported a vaulted arch. ‘She says that’s where the scantling used to run,’ Pipi interpreted, ‘and that the trap-door is in the corner by the left-hand pillar.’

Gregory was already staring in that direction; but instead of joy his face held a worried frown. In more recent years the embrasure had been used as a bin for empty bottles. Hundreds of them were stacked in it, six or eight deep and five feet high. To shift enough of them to get at the floor under any part of the stack was going to be a formidable task. In consternation he said, ‘Ask her if she’s certain—absolutely certain.’

Pipi put the question and, with a muffled cackle of laughter from behind her scarf, Ciská began to babble cheerfully. ‘She should know, even after all these years. Béla the pantry-man had brought her there when she was a girl, given her too much beer and tossed her petticoats over her head. Afterwards they came there often. Once they had nearly been caught by the
cellar-master. It was then Béla had shown her the trap-door. He had pulled it up and made her hide crouching on the steps underneath it until the old boy had gone. Soon after that Béla had been taken for the war, and there had been a child. The old Baroness had been very angry and sent her to live in the country. But there had been plenty of fine fellows there. None of them were such lusty chaps as Béla, though …’

Cutting her short, Pipi told Gregory that he felt sure the old woman knew what she was talking about.

‘Come on then!’ Gregory flund himself at the left-hand end of the great stack of bottles and began to throw them into the farthest corner. It was gruelling work and terribly exasperating; for no sooner had a space a foot or so deep been cleared at the side of the pillar than more bottles from the centre of the stack rolled down into it. Soon the pile of bottles and broken glass in the corner threatened to block the passage, so they had to start another pile against the cellar door. Smoke was still seeping down from above through all sorts of unsuspected crannies and the atmosphere was stifling.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes had slipped by since they had left the courtyard. They were still only halfway down the stack, and fresh avalanches set them back every few moments. Gregory began to despair of reaching the floor before they were exhausted. Old Ciská laboured manfully, but Pipi suddenly left them, so Gregory feared he had been forced to throw his hand in. But Pipi returned carrying a bundle of new laths that had been cut for him to bin away the year’s making of
Baratsch
, and with these they succeeded in shoring up the bulk of the remaining bottles in the stack.

After that the work went easier, although Gregory was worried now that soon the courtyard would be getting so thick with smoke that Sabine would either faint from suffocation, or find herself compelled to break out with her servants into the street.

Sweating, half-blinded, and with throats like limekilns, they kept at it until the last dozen bottles in the corner where they were delving had been thrown aside. Gregory gave a grunt of relief and joy. They had uncovered a square stone slab with an iron ring in it.