Secret Kingdom (20 page)

‘What will you write about us when you return to London?’ Zsuzanna asked. She was sitting cross-legged beside him.

How could he explain that he could write about none of what he had seen? He couldn’t give the Soviet forces the information they craved, that their enemy was weak, unarmed, unorganized, students and teachers united by a dream. No opposition at all. To put into words what he thought would be a betrayal of innocent lives.

‘I’ve watched you over the last few days,’ she said, not waiting for his reply. ‘This is not what you expected, is it? A few students creeping about the woods, pretending to be soldiers, singing patriotic songs. You think we should be back in our universities studying, don’t you? Waiting for the day when this regime will die of its own accord, as it surely must. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘I expected more,’ he said, choosing his words with care. ‘Or rather, I was led to believe there was more. The truth is, I didn’t know what to expect.’

‘Isn’t it better to die gloriously for what you believe in,’ she said, ‘than to suffer in silence the shame of captivity?’

‘I envy you the freedom to make that choice,’ Leman said. ‘If you were older, it might not be so simple.’

She smiled at him. ‘When you leave us,’ she said, ‘we will return to our universities. We will persuade our friends, anyone who will listen to us, that we are right and prepare for the day when the insurrection comes. As long as the Soviets remain on Hungarian soil, there is no chance of our country becoming free. The revolutionaries of 1848 rose up against their oppressors and so must we rise up against ours, and demand democracy and national independence. We will present our list of actions to every university faculty, to factories, to local officials. We will organize demonstrations and strikes and call for the unconditional removal of Soviet troops. We will demand action.’ She paused for a moment, as if exhausted by her own rhetoric. ‘We will lead our country to freedom.’

‘You can’t succeed on your own.’ It was more than he had intended to say, but the images of the Soviet tanks rising up out of the dead ground of the plain were too strong to deny. ‘You must know that. Without help, you cannot hope to win.’

‘Others will hear us and come to our aid,’ she replied. It was as if she were speaking by rote, giving him the standard replies as if she had been trained to do so.

‘How can you believe that? What do you know of the outside world?’

The look on her face told him he understood nothing.

‘Will the West stand by and see a nation brutally murdered by its conquerors? If it does so, what moral base can it have in future? Our cause is just. That is undeniable by everyone except the Soviets and their puppet government. When we take to the streets, the West
will come to our aid. We will not need to ask for help. It will be provided. The free world will respond to the courage of our sacrifice.’

You’re wrong, he wanted to shout so they could all hear, not just this girl with her porcelain skin and amethyst eyes. Your cries will go unheeded because the West is rich and you are not, and what you have yet to learn is that the rich guard their money first and worry about morality second. She and others had been misled if they believed anyone would come to their aid. They were allowing themselves to be deceived by what they believed the West to be.

‘Help us,’ she said simply. ‘Tell the world about us.’

‘Get me back safely to Vienna,’ he said, ‘and I will do everything in my power. Now I’ve met you, how could I do otherwise?’

It was a lie, of course. What could he do?

She put her arms round him and kissed him. ‘You are one of us,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you came.’

Blood brothers, he thought. Brothers covered in the shroud of our own blood. Now he knew so much, how he wished he had never come.

She lay on the bed, shoes off, hands behind her head, a glass of water by her side. She had pulled one of the curtains to provide some shade against the sunlight that poured in through the window. She was waiting for Martineau.

Why did you never tell me about Moscow? We shared everything. Why not that?

In all their years together, there was no part of her life that she hadn’t shared. She had imagined the same was true for Julia. Until the painful discovery of Moscow. Julia had deliberately hidden that from her. But what was she trying to hide?

Julia had secrets, she saw that now. There were areas of her life that she knew nothing about: her occasional disappearances for which she gave no explanation, a few days at a time, never more than a week, though there was always some excuse when she returned. She didn’t notice anything unusual at the time – she was too busy working, looking after Dora. After each absence, Julia would roar back
into her life, sweeping all before her. There’d be two long blasts on the doorbell followed by embraces, kisses, laughter, shrieks of pleasure from Dora, more kisses and laughter, presents: cakes she had baked or a doll she had sewn, a pot of jam she had made, or flowers she had picked (where had she been?). But most of all it was that whirlwind of her presence drawing you irresistibly into her world, her plans, her adventures. It was always so wonderfully exhilarating. In your pleasure that she was back once more in your life, you quickly forgot your annoyance that you hadn’t seen her for a while, and you only remembered your questions when the moment to ask them had passed.

Was the Julia she knew the only Julia? Was there another woman with a secret life? Was that the truth she refused to face?

‘How absurd,’ she said to herself crossly. ‘For twenty years of my life I knew her better than anyone. I cannot begin to doubt her now. I must remain loyal to my memories because they are all I have left. Of course there was only one Julia.’

But the unanswered questions gathered round her like ghosts at the end of the bed, haunting presences she could dismiss rationally but whose power to destroy remained threateningly close.

She heard his step on the stairs. He always stopped on the floor below. Dora had seen him do it and told her about it. He would wipe his face with his handkerchief, run his hand through his hair (not that the gesture made any difference to his unruly thatch) and catch his breath. He didn’t like to arrive breathless after coming up the stairs, Dora said. She laughed at his vanity.

The mysteries about Julia’s secret visit to Moscow weren’t resolved, they were only postponed because now was not the time to probe more deeply. This moment was about something else entirely.

At 5.40 a.m. a body was spotted floating face down in the Danube near Margit Island by a member of a gang repairing a damaged tramline. Ten minutes later a police launch arrived, its engine spitting erratically as it maintained its position against the current of the river. Just after six a policeman in the prow of the launch was seen leaning forward, marlin spike in hand, prodding the floating object. Soon
after a corpse was dragged from the river. Initial identification at the police morgue showed it to be the body of a man, age uncertain, wearing trousers, shirt but no shoes. No marks of identification were found.

*

The police department telephoned the embassy shortly before ten. The body, Martineau was told, fitted the description of a missing Englishman they’d been notified about. He was asked to comply with police requests to help in the process of identification. He’d been asked by name, which surprised him, but he went because both Randall and the First Secretary were out.

He’d had to identify a body twice before in his career, once in Moscow and once during his exile in Rio. It wasn’t the corpse itself that he minded, he could cope with dead bodies, it was the sight of all the matter-of-fact practicalities of the morgue that upset him: the stone slab with gutters to wash away the blood; the saws, cutters, drills and butchers’ knives; the white enamel bowls into which they dropped bits of bone and brain; the hosepipe for washing down; all the apparatus essential to the opening up of a corpse for a post-mortem and cleaning up afterwards; and the association of the smell of chemicals with death.

You can’t play silly buggers with the Sovs. Leman should have known that. They’re a trigger-happy lot, shooting first and asking questions later. Only a professional could have a chance of outwitting them. How he hated amateurs. They always let the side down.

He felt his gorge rise as he entered the room. The body was lying under a sheet. The official at the morgue, an elderly man wearing a brown rubber apron and to whose lip a cigarette appeared to be glued, with a voice that told all too clearly of the ruination of his lungs, led the way. Peremptorily he pulled back the sheet and stared down at the body. Martineau followed his gaze.

Vardas.

This wasn’t Leman. It was his best Boris. Christ. He felt his heart beat rise. Vardas. Poor sod.

‘How did he die?’ he asked in Hungarian.

The man drew the sheet down lower. There, on the chest, were two entry marks of bullets, black holes on blue waxen skin. ‘Shot, then dumped in the Danube. He was dead before he hit the water.’

Someone had murdered Vardas. He could guess who had done it. He was surprised not to see the initials ‘AVH’ carved on his forehead as a warning to others. Poor bastard.

‘Is this the Englishman?’

‘No,’ Martineau said, ‘it’s not the Englishman.’

That was the moment he felt sick. He hadn’t seen signs of bruising on the body but he could guess what had happened. Vardas had been tortured and then shot. What had he been forced to say before he died? Could they connect Vardas to him? Surely that was why they’d asked for him by name. They’d got him here in order to show him what they did to traitors. Was the cat well and truly out of the bag? Or had Vardas had the strength to remain silent? It was all a bloody mess.

And somewhere out in the country that bloody fool Englishman was probably still at large.

‘How much further?’

By now they had been travelling for nearly two hours. His driver had said little since he had woken Leman soon after six. He had given him a mug of tea and said it was time they got going. It was a clear bright day, and he had to be in the city early.

‘Fifty kilometres. Not more.’

Leman had said he wanted a few hours in Budapest, to meet contacts he asked his students to arrange for him. Those who were looking after him had been reluctant to agree. An argument had broken out. He could follow little of what was said but he guessed some were maintaining that his journey was unsafe; he had enough information, he should go back over the border into the West, now before it was too late, and work for them there. Others were decrying this caution. Only by meeting the leaders in the Writers’ Union could he truly understand what was happening. It was the girl Zsuzanna who had broken the deadlock. She had agreed to accompany him. She was too young to be a threat to anyone, she said. She would be his camouflage, his sister. She had laughed at that, putting her arm through his, flirting with him.

This was not the plan he had agreed with Sykes but by now he
had become involved with these people; Sykes was forgotten. He had to help them, nothing was more important than that. He had to go to Budapest to warn those who wielded some kind of authority that their cries for help would not be answered. Their cause would be betrayed by their own illusions as much as by the political indifference of the West. They had to know that before they took to the streets.

In less than an hour they would be in Budapest. Once there, the girl would introduce him to the first of his contacts, a member of the Writers’ Union, a man, she explained, who was very influential. He would pass him on to his next contact, and so on down the chain during the day. Then at seven he would be delivered once more to a driver whose task it was to get him safely back over the border. He would cross into the West again in the early hours of the morning.

‘There is no danger,’ the girl had said as they set off. ‘No one knows who we are or where we are.’

He felt invigorated. This was his chance to get close to the heart of the revolution, to see if his disillusion was well grounded or not. The people he would meet would be leaders, men who understood the reality of things, not dreamers, the romantic child soldiers he had been with. The girl had understood his concerns, she knew that he had seen through the bragging of the young men. She knew, too, that he needed more proof, and somehow (how?) she had managed to persuade her colleagues that convincing the Englishman was essential if their voice was to be heard outside their country when the time came.

It hadn’t been as difficult as he had expected. Since the appalling start in Vienna when in those first hours his nerve had almost broken, everything had gone like clockwork, connections made all along the line just as he’d hoped. If he was able to get out as easily as he’d got in, he’d be back with Anna in a matter of hours. Provided, of course, she had waited for him. Somehow he never doubted that she would be there, forgiving him as usual. She was so good at forgiving.

As his mind raced forward to Budapest, from somewhere a doubt appeared. Hadn’t it all been too easy, too smooth? Shouldn’t there have been setbacks? Changes of plan? Worry was self-defeating. His anxiety was baseless, he reassured himself. The connections had
worked because that was what these people knew about. Invisible links in an invisible chain. He sat back and closed his eyes, feeling the warming rays of the sun. It was going to be all right. The links in the chain would work. He knew it.

From a distance, the cart appeared to be stationary but as they drew near they saw that it was labouring slowly up an incline, an ancient horse, blinkered, pulling as hard as it could. The driver slowed the car and waited. It was impossible to overtake on the narrow road before they had crested the hill.

Life, Leman contemplated later, is governed by congruence, sometimes of almost geometric precision. What were the odds against their car meeting a peasant’s cart on a slight incline, so that they were unable to have any warning of what might be waiting for them on the other side? A few yards sooner or later and they might have had a chance of escape. As it was, when they overtook the cart and mounted the hill they ran almost immediately into a barrier set up across the road, guarded by armed policemen. They had no chance either to stop or to turn and flee. Beyond the barrier, Leman saw a group of police cars parked at the side of the road. An officer got out of one of the cars and came towards them.