Assignment - Budapest (18 page)

He wondered how much time he really had. He did not know, actually, if McFee had let anything slip to Roger Wyman in Vienna, but a report from Wyman to AVO headquarters here, yielding his own identity, would set the wheels in motion, connecting him to Bela Korvuth’s mission, and in turn, bringing Dr. Tagy’s name into it. He did not underestimate the enemy. The top echelons of the secret police were fanatic, intelligent, dedicated men. On the surface, his hope for success was too small even to consider. Yet he had to try. He had come this far, somehow, with luck and Ilona’s help, and he had found willing hands to carry on, in Maria and the Tagy family. Yet when he thought of Roger Wyman and of Dickinson McFee in some prison, being questioned and tortured, he felt the nerves tense in the back of his neck and he paused until the wave of anger passed and he felt calm again.

Dr. Tagy was on his feet when he returned. The man was short; even Maria stood taller than he. He looked haggard and confused, but his eyes sharpened as Durell approached down the tunnel.

“You are the American?”

“Yes. How do you feel?”

“Well enough to go, with a man’s help. I have been a fool. All this time lost because I was unlucky enough to catch a bullet in my leg at the frontier, and then fell sick, like a weakling.”

“You could have told our security people how you felt about your family,” Durell said. “Some arrangements could have been made to help get them out to you.”

Dr. Tagy groped for his glasses on the bunk and put them on. His wife supported his weight as he limped and stumbled. “I am a man of science, and perhaps not very practical when it comes to simple human relations. I simply wanted to make sure for myself that my wife and son were safe. Instead, I bungled everything. I risked my own life and put them in gravest danger. Now, of course, you have come to help and everything will be all right.”

Durell did not want to tell him he was being overopti-mistic. They were a long way from being safe. And when he saw that Dr. Tagy could make only slow and painful progress on his feet, his concern was doubled. His son supported him now, indicating that they should proceed down the tunnel away from the direction they had come.

Dr. Tagy spoke again, pausing for breath after they had gone only a short distance. “I am grateful to you, sir, but I begin to think that what you are trying to do is impossible. Perhaps I had better stay here for a few weeks more, until my strength has returned.”

“No, Papa,” Janos said. “You come with us.”

“I can bring only disaster to you, this way.” Dr. Tagy halted, swaying. “Perhaps you, sir, will take my wife and son to the frontier.” He looked at Durell in resignation. “At least, then, I will know they are safe.”

“I am afraid we consider you more important than anyone else.”

“But you see how I am. It is a long way, and dangerous, to the frontier. I will only cause you all to be caught. Leave me here, sir, I beg you. Take my wife and Janos.”

“We all get out, or none of us,” Durell said. “There is no time to argue. Janos, where does this tunnel take us?”

“We can climb out in an empty house the Russians shelled. There were snipers there, and the tanks fired point-blank at the building. No one will see us.”

“Do you think you can possibly find a car?”

The boy nodded. “We hid one during the fighting. I think it belonged to some AVO men. It is behind a wall in the rubble, near the tunnel exit.”

“Go ahead then, and get it. Bring it around so we get your father into it.”

The boy shifted the gun in his hand and looked uncertain. His father nodded. “Go, Janos.”

“I don’t like to leave you, Papa.”

“I will be all right with the American.”

The exit from the tunnel required less contortions than the entrance in the Tagy cellar. There was a sharp tunnel in the brick-lined walls and then a glimpse of pale white sunlight. Janos pushed aside some heavy planking and then stepped free, onto a vast pile of shattered brick, stone and timbers. Durell saw that they stood inside the shell of a shattered building, one wall of which had completely collapsed, the others being only skeletal fragments standing precariously in the bright sunshine. Nobody else was in sight. He helped Dr. Tagy climb free, and then Eva Tagy and Maria. Janos silently handed his Russian gun to Durell, and then went scrambling out of sight among the rubble. Durell looked at his watch. It was almost eleven o’clock. The sun stood high in the morning sky. A small sparrow landed with a flutter of gray wings and perched on a splintered timber and cocked its small head at him, eyes bright and inquiring. Durell sat down, aware of a new, pulsing ache in his wounded shoulder; he wished for a cigarette, but he knew it was impossible, and he contented himself with drawing in deep breaths of the cold, fresh air. Maria started to say something and he beckoned her to silence. There was no telling who might be passing by on the other side of the ruined walls.

They waited five minutes. And then ten.

Durell moved to a gaunt window opening and risked a glimpse of the street beyond. It was narrow, slanted and twisting, like all the old streets in this hilly part of Buda. Two men stood talking and smoking at the far corner, near the splintered remains of a tree. He saw trolley tracks and wires at the intersection, but while he watched there were no trolleys that passed, and only one truck and one car. The car was moving fast, and it turned out of sight at the corner, going downhill, and he could not see who was in it except for the impression that it was crowded with men.

Durell looked back at the trio sitting on the rubble, waiting with him. The two women were whispering, Maria’s dark face thin and intense. Dr. Tagy sat with his hands dangling limply between his knees. He looked broken and defeated. Durell turned his head as the sound of a car came grinding up the cobblestone street from the bottom of the hill. The two men talking on the corner were gone. There were no other signs of life in the street. When he saw the car, his hopes sagged for a moment. It was an old Zis sedan, Russian-made, battered and bullet-scarred. It would be too conspicuous on the streets. Yet there was no other choice. Dr. Tagy was too weak and feeble to hope to walk to Maria Stryzyk’s apartment, and public transportation was out of the question. They would have to risk it.

Janos looked flushed and jubilant as he rejoined them. “I have been thinking about everything. We will take Papa and Mama to Maria’s right now, and I will return the car to its hiding place. Then, tonight, we will use it to get to the frontier. We are armed, there are enough of us to help each other. It is best that we get out of the city quickly.”

Durell had no intention of leaving until he found out from Ilona what had happened to Dickinson McFee; but he did not mention this. There were two or three long, tight minutes when they had to leave the shelter of the ruined house and cross the paving to the parked sedan. If anyone saw them, there was no immediate alarm. Janos ran around to the driver’s side and slid happily behind the wheel. The boy seemed different, excited by the action after all the weeks of hiding and struggling to keep his father’s presence a secret from prying neighbors. Yet he drove competently, not too fast to attract attention, and not too slow to waste time.

There was another hurdle to be passed in getting them all up to Maria’s apartment. It was decided that they would go one or two at a time. Maria and Eva Tagy got out of the car first, around the corner, and walked into the building while Janos circled the block in the car and doubled back. ^ Then Durell helped Dr. Tagy, supporting him as inconspicuously as possible until they crossed the sidewalk into the building. Janos drove the car away and promised to be back in twenty minutes, after hiding it again.

Inside the apartment, Dr. Tagy was made to rest in Maria’s bedroom. Maria made more coffee and set out bread and cheese for their lunch. Mrs. Tagy sat beside her husband on the bed.

Durell checked the apartment doors again, studied the view from the window, and settled down to wait. At eleven-thirty Maria came toward him, smiling, and suggested he bathe and shave, and he was glad of the chance. By noon he was watching from the window again, waiting for Ilona.

Janos did not come back.

Neither did Ilona.

Durell drank coffee and ate a sandwich and went in to look at Dr. Tagy. The little physicist was asleep. He seemed slightly feverish. His wife regarded Durell with anxious eyes. “Didn’t Janos say he would be back at once?”

“He’ll be all right. He’s a fine boy, Mrs. Tagy. We can count on him to take care of himself.”

“But it is the hate in him that makes me worry. His hatred makes him do reckless things. He does not stop and think or count the cost. He should have been back by now.” “He’ll be back,” Durell said gently.

At one o’clock there was no sign of either Ilona Andrassy or the boy.

It was nothing to jump the rails about, Durell thought. In this business there were times of waiting and times of action, and it was necessary to be able to do one as well as the other. You can’t afford to think or dwell on what might be happening to those you were waiting for. Either they showed up or they didn’t. You gave them a reasonable time, and then a little extra time, and then if it was necessary to change your plans, you did so.

He had waited like this many times before, and it was never easy. Sometimes your patience was rewarded. At other times, you had to accept the grim evidence before you and retreat, abandon the ones you hoped to see again, and go on. You always had to go on, one way or another, and not look back and wonder if this could have been done, or if that course might have worked better, or if this one would be alive today if you had acted, somehow, in a different manner. You planned and you carried out the plan, and if some of it didn’t work, you tried something else.

Ilona would come back. She had to.

He remembered how she had been the night before, in the attic room of the Hegedus farm. There was something fine and wonderful in the simple relationship that had built up so quickly between them. He wanted very much for her to come through this safely, to find what she wanted, to hold this thing she sought that she had never known in all her life. She had not been forced to come back here with him, to this place of terror and death. She had known the risks, the special dangers for herself, and she had agreed to his question with a simple nod, swallowing her fear. There was a strength in her that he marveled at, thinking about the painful conclusions she had reached alone in her own soul. Freedom was something Ilona had never known. It had been within her grasp, back in Washington; she could have been safe there. But she had returned to Budapest with him, and she was his responsibility, no matter what denials she might make about it.

The street was empty. She did not come back. There was no sign of Janos, and it was two o’clock now, two hours late, and it was time to think of what he could do without her.

Dr. Tagy was asleep. His wife sat in quiet terror beside him. Maria joined Durell at the window, her thin figure severe and prim, her voice quiet.

“What if Ilona doesn’t come back?” she asked quietly. “She is very late now. If it is known that she works for the West now, and is regarded as a traitor by her former associates in the AVO, it will go very very hard with her if she is caught.”

“We’ll have to do without her, if she doesn’t meet us here.”

“And the boy? What about Janos? We need the car.”

Durell looked at her. “You talk as if you’re willing to come with us.”

“There is nothing left here for me in Budapest. I have no relatives, no friends. If you will take me, I will go to the West with you.”

“Do you know of another car we might be able to use?” She shook her dark, narrow head. “No. And I do not think you could persuade Dr. Tagy and his wife to flee without their son."

“We’ll wait until dark before we decide,” Durell said. “I have been watching you. You need Ilona. There is something else you want to do here in Budapest, besides rescue Dr. Tagy. Isn’t that so? Something, perhaps, more important than the doctor. Are you really a spy? Are there any secrets you wish to take with you?”

“No. No secrets, Maria.”

“Don’t misunderstand me. I hate the Russians. I hate what they have done to my poor country. Our men who are in the government are only pawns, paying lip service to the conception of their being independent, but all the time the Russians sit behind them and pull the strings and tell them what to say and do. If you can hurt them in any way, I will help you.” 

“That’s not my job here,” Durell said. “I have to find a friend. I’m sure he’s in one of the AVO prisons here, and Ilona set out to learn which one.”

Maria’s mouth thinned. “She went back to the AVO?”

“I think so.”

“Then they have her, and there is no use waiting for her. You can only pray that she will die quickly.”

“We’ll wait and see,” Durell said.

He didn’t like it. In the past, when he had to wait like this, he had been able to sit with measured patience, ignoring the time, the dragging hours, the uncertainty. Here, in this place, he felt trapped and futile. He had the feeling that things were moving beyond his reach and control, and every now and then he wondered about Dickinson McFee, in the hands of the AVO. He had known the little man for almost ten years, and while he would not have admitted it to anyone, he felt almost a love for McFee, for the little gray man’s devotion, intelligence, dedication to the job he did. McFee had been good to him more than once, had helped him at times when cool and calculating reason should have ordered his abandonment. He could not leave here without McFee. If McFee were already dead, that was one thing. But if he were alive, if he was being tortured at this moment, Durell had to help him. He had to do something, and yet he could not move for these long, desperate hours of the afternoon, there was no place he could go or start until he definitely gave up hope for Ilona.

It was late afternoon before he saw Janos’s battered old car. Nothing had changed in the apartment. Dr. Tagy had wakened, eaten some soup that Maria prepared for them all, and then he went back to sleep again. Nobody had disturbed them, and it was growing dark, with a thin overcast in the western sky over the city, when Durell saw the old Zis turn the corner.