The Last Frontier (17 page)

Reynolds winced as the liniment burnt in through his skin, and he could feel the sweat coming to his brow. The doctor seemed pleased.
'What did I tell you? Fit as a fiddle tomorrow! Just swallow a couple of these White tablets, my boy -- they'll ease the pain internally -- and the blue one. Make you sleep -- if you don't, you'll have that poultice off in ten minutes. Quick-acting, I assure you.'
They were indeed, and Reynolds' last conscious recollection was of hearing the doctor loudly declaiming against those damned Communists as he went down the stairs. After that, he remembered nothing more for almost twelve hours.
When he awoke night had come again, but this time his window had been curtained and a small oil lamp was burning. He awoke quickly and completely, as he had long trained himself to do, without movement or change in his rate of breathing, and his eyes were on Julia's face, a face with an expression he had not seen on it before, for a full second; she was aware he was awake and looking at her. He could see the dull colour touching throat and face as she slowly withdrew from his shoulder the hand that had been shaking him awake, but he twisted his wrist and glanced at his watch, a man who had observed nothing unusual.
'Eight o'clock!' He sat up abruptly in bed, and it was only after he had done so that he remembered the agony that had followed the last precipitate move he had made. The surprise on his face was obvious.
'How does it feel?' she smiled. 'Better, isn't it?'
'Better? It's miraculous!' His back felt almost as if it were on fire, but the pain was quite gone. 'Eight o'clock!' he repeated incredulously. 'I've been asleep for twelve hours?'
'You have indeed. Even your face looks better.' Her composure was back again. 'The evening meal is ready. Shall I bring it up?'
'I'll be down in a couple of minutes,' Reynolds promised.
He was as good as his word. A cheerful wood fire was burning in the small kitchen, and the table, set for five, was over against the fire. Sandor and Jansci greeted him, were pleased to hear of the progress made in his recovery, and introduced him to the Cossack. The Cossack shook hands briefly, nodded, scowled, sat down to his bread soup and said nothing, not a word throughout the course of the meal: he kept his head lowered all the time so that though Reynolds had an excellent view of his thick, black Magyar hair, brushed straight back from the forehead, it was not until the Cossack rose with his last mouthful and left, with a muttered word to Jansci, that Reynolds caught his first sight of the open, good-looking, boyish face, with its ill-concealed expression of truculence. That the expression was meant for him, Reynolds was left in no doubt. Seconds after the door was slammed, they heard the roar of what seemed to be a powerful motorcycle that swept past the house and faded swiftly away in the distance, soon to be lost in silence. Reynolds looked round the others at table.
'Will somebody please tell me what I'm supposed to have done? Your young friend just tried to incinerate me by will power alone.'
He looked at Jansci, but Jansci was having trouble in getting his pipe to light. Sandor was staring into the fire, lost apparently in his own thoughts. When the explanation finally came, it came from Julia, her voice edged with an irritation and annoyance so foreign to her that Reynolds glanced at her in surprise.
'Very well, if these two cowards won't tell you, it seems I must. The only thing about you that annoys the Cossack is the fact that you're here at all. You see, he -- well, he fancies he's in love with me -- me, six years older than he is.'
'What's six years, after all,' Reynolds began judicially. 'If you -- '
'Oh, do be quiet! Then one night he got hold of the remains of a bottle of szilvorium the Count had left lying around and he told me. I was surprised and confused, but he's such a nice boy and I was wanting to be kind so like a fool I said something about waiting until he was grown up. He was furious....'
Reynolds wrinkled his brow. 'What has all this -- ?'
'Don't be so dense! He thinks you are a -- well, a rival for my affections!'
'May the best man win,' Reynolds said solemnly. Jansci choked on his pipe, Sandor covered his face with one massive hand, and the stony silence from the head of the table made Reynolds think that he himself had better look elsewhere. But the silence stretched out, he felt compelled to look eventually, and when he did so he found neither the anger nor the blushing confusion he had expected, but a composed Julia, chin on hand, regarding him with a thoughtfulness and just possibly the faintest trace of mockery that he found vaguely disquieting. Not for the first time, he had to remind himself that underestimating the daughter of such a man as Jansci might be foolish in the extreme.
Finally she rose to clear away the dishes and Reynolds turned to Jansci.
'I take it that was the Cossack we heard departing. Where has he gone?'
'Budapest. He has a rendezvous with the Count on the outskirts of the town.'
'What! On a big powerful motor-bike you can hear miles away -- and in those clothes that can be seen from about the same distance?'
'A small motor-bike only -- the Cossack removed the silencer some time ago because not enough people could hear him coming.... He has the vanity of extreme youth. But the loudness of both machine and clothes is his surest safeguard. He is so conspicuous that no one would ever dream of suspecting him.'
'How long?'
'On good roads, he'd be there and back in just over half an hour -- we're only about 15 kilometres from the town. But Tonight?' Jansci thought. 'Perhaps an hour and a half.'
It took in fact two hours -- two of the most unforgettable hours Reynolds had ever spent. Jansci talked nearly all the time, and Reynolds listened with the intentness of a man aware that he was being accorded a rare privilege which might never come his way again. The mood of expansiveness, Reynolds divined, came seldom to this man, so much the most remarkable, the most extraordinary man Reynolds had ever met in a chequered and dangerous lifetime that all others, with the possible exception of Jansci's alter ego, the Count, seemed to fade away into insignificance. And for two unbroken hours Julia sat on a cushion by his side: the mischief and laughter that were never long absent from her eyes were gone as if they had never been, and she was grave and unsmiling as Reynolds had imagined she could never be: during these hours her eyes left her father's face hardly at all, and even then only to gaze at the scarred and shattered ruins that were Jansci's hands before seeking his face again. It was as if she, too, shared Reynolds' irrational presentiment that this privilege would never come her way again, as if she were seeking to memorise every detail of her father's face and bands so that she would never forget them: and Reynolds, remembering the strange, fey look in her eyes in the truck the previous night, felt queerly unaccountably cold. It cost him almost physical effort to shake off this abnormal feeling, to dismiss from his mind what he knew could only be the first tentative stirrings of superstitious nonsense.
Jansci spoke of himself not at all, and of his organisation and its method of operation only where necessary: the only concrete fact that Reynolds gathered in the course of the evening was that his H.Q. was not here but in a farmhouse that lay in the low hills between Szombathely and the Neusiedler See, not far from the Austrian frontier -- the only frontier of any interest to the great majority of those escaping to the west. He talked instead of people, hundreds of people whom he and the Count and Sandor had helped to safety, of their hopes and fears and terrors of this world. He talked of peace, of his hope for the world, of his conviction that that peace would ultimately come for the world if only one good man in a thousand worked for it, of the folly of imagining that there was anything else in the world worth working for, not even the ultimate peace, for that could only come from this. He spoke of Communists and non-Communists, and of the distinctions between them that existed only in the tiny minds of men, of the intolerance and the infinite littleness of minds that knew beyond question that all men were inescapably different by virtue of their birtihs and beliefs, their creeds and religions, and that the God who said that every man was the brother of the next man was really a pretty poor judge of these things. He spoke of the tragedies of the various creeds that knew beyond doubt that theirs was the only way that was the right way, of the religious sects that usurped the gates of heaven against all comers, of the tragedy of his own Russian people who were perfectly willing to let others do this, for there were no gates anyway.
Jansci was wandering, not arguing, and he drifted from his own people to his youth amongst them. The transition seemed pointless, inconsequential at first, but Jansci was not an aimless wanderer, almost everything he did or said or thought was concerned with reinforcing and consolidating, both in himself and all his listeners, his almost obsessive faith in the oneness of humanity. When he spoke of his boyhood and young manhood in his own country, it could have been any person, of any creed, remembering with a fond nostalgia the happiest hours of a happy land. The picture he painted of the Ukraine was one touched, perhaps, with the sentimentality felt for that which is irrecoverably lost, but none the less Reynolds felt it to be a true picture, for the sadly remembered gladness in those tired and gentle eyes could never have arisen from self-deception, however unaware. Jansci did not deny the hardships of the life, the long hours in the fields, the occasional famines, the burning heat of summer and the bitter cold when the Siberian wind blew across the steppes: but it was essentially a picture of a happy land, a golden land untouched by fear or repression, a picture of far horizons with the golden wheat waving into ' the blurred and purpling distance, a picture of laughter and singing and dancing, of jingling horse-drawn, fur-collared troika rides under the frozen stars, of a steamboat drifting gently down the Dnieper in the warmth of a summer's night and the soft music dying away across the water. And it was then, when Jansci was talking wistfully of the night-time scents of honeysuckle and wheat, of jasmine and new-mown hay drifting across the river that Julia rose quickly to her feet, murmuring something about coffee and hurried from the room. Reynolds caught only a glimpse of her face as she went, but he saw her eyes were dimmed with tears.
The spell was broken, but somehow a trace of its magic lingered on. Reynolds was under no illusion. For all his apparently aimless generalisations, Jansci had been talking directly to him, trying to undermine beliefs and prejudices, trying to make him see the glaringly tragic contrasts between the happy people whose portrait he had just drawn and the sinister apostles of world revolution, making him question Whether so complete reversal lay within the bounds of credulity or even possibility, and it had been no accident, Reynolds thought wryly, that the first part of Jansci's rambling had been devoted to the intolerance and wilful blindness of humanity at large. Jansci had deliberately intended that Reynolds should see in himself a microcosm of that humanity, and Reynolds was uncomfortably aware that he had not entirely failed. He did not like the unsettling, questioning half-doubts that were beginning to trouble him, and pushed them deliberately aside. For all his old friendship with Jansci, Colonel Mackintosh, Reynolds thought grimly, would not have approved of Tonight's performance: Colonel Mackintosh did not like to have his agents unsettled, they were to keep their thoughts on the ultimate objective, the job on hand and only the job on hand, and not concern themselves with side issues. Side issues, Reynolds thought incredulously, then pushed the matter from his mind.
Jansci and Sandor were talking now, in low, friendly tones, and as he listened Reynolds realised that he had misjudged the relationship between these two men. There was nothing of the master and the man, the employer and the employed about it, the atmosphere was too easy, too informal for that, and Jansci listened as carefully and considerately to what Sandor had to say as Sandor did to him. There was a bond between them, Reynolds realised, unseen but no less powerful for that, the bond of a devotion to a common ideal, a devotion which, on Sandor's side, made no distinction between the ideal and the man who was the inspiration of it: Jansci, Reynolds was slowly beginning to discover, had the unconscious gift of inspiring a loyalty which barely stopped this side of idolatry, and even Reynolds himself, uncompromising individualist that nature and training had inescapably made him, could feel the magnetism of its subtle pull.
It was exactly eleven o'clock when the door was flung open and the Cossack strode in, bringing with him a snow-laden flurry of freezing air, dropped a large paper parcel in one corner and clapped his gauntlets vigorously together. His face and hands were blue with cold, but he affected to be unaware of it, not even seeking the warmth of the fire. Instead, he sat at the table, lit a cigarette, rolled it into the corner of his mouth and let it stay there. Reynolds noted with amusement that though the smoke laced upward and brought tears to one eye, the Cossack made no attempt to remove it: there he had placed it and there it would stay.
His report was brief and to the point. He had met the Count as arranged. Jennings was no longer in his hotel, and already a precautionary rumour was circulating to the effect that he was unwell. The Count did not know where he was -- he certainly had not been removed to the AVO H.Q. or any of their known centres in Budapest: he had either been taken directly back to Russia, the Count thought, or to some place of safety outside the city, he would try to find out where, but he had little hope. The Count, the Cossack said, was almost certain that they would not be taking him directly home: he was much too important a figure at the conference: they were probably hiding him in a place of absolute security until they heard from Stettin, and if Brian was still there the Russians would still let him participate in the conference -- after letting him hear his son on the phone. But if Jennings' son had escaped, then Jennings himself would almost certainly be immediately removed to Russia. Budapest was too near the frontier, and the Russians couldn't afford the incalculable prestige loss of having him escape.... And there was one other extremely disquieting bit of information. Imre had disappeared, and the Count could not find him anywhere.