The Last Frontier (19 page)

But the commandant overestimated. It was not three minutes, it was less than thirty seconds before the door opened, and it opened to admit not Jennings but half a dozen armed swift-moving guards who had Jansci and Reynolds pinned helplessly to their seats before they had recovered from their state of lulled security and could properly begin to realise what was happening. The commandant shook his head and smiled sadly.
'Forgive me, gentlemen. A subterfuge, I fear -- unpleasant as are all subterfuges, but essential. That document I signed was not for the professor's release but your arrest.' He took off his pince-nez, polished them and sighed. 'Captain Reynolds, you are an uncommonly persistent young man.'

CHAPTER EIGHT

Reynolds, in those first few minutes of shock, was conscious of nothing but the entire absence of all emotion, of all feeling, as if the touch of the metal fetters on his wrists and ankles had somehow deprived him of all capacity to react. But then came the first slow wave of numbed disbelief, then the shocked disbelief and chagrin that this should have happened to him again, 'then the bitter, intolerable realisation that they had been effortlessly and absolutely trapped, that the commandant had been toying with them and had deceived them completely, that they were prisoners now within the dreaded Szarhaza and that if they ever emerged they would do so only as unrecognisable zombies, as the broken, empty husks of the men they had once been.
He looked across at Jansci, to see how the older man was taking this crushing blow, the final defeat of all their plans, the virtual sentence of death on themselves, to see what his reaction was. As far as he could judge, Jansci wasn't reacting at all. His face was quiet and he was looking at the commandant with a thoughtful, measuring gaze -- a gaze, Reynolds thought, curiously like the one with which the commandant was regarding Jansci.
As the last metal shackle clipped home around a chair leg, the leader of the guards looked questioningly at the commandant. The latter waved a hand in dismissal.
They are secure?'
'Completely.'
'Very well, then. You may go.'
The guard hesitated. 'They are dangerous men -- '
'I am aware of that,' the commandant said patiently. 'Why else do you think I deemed it necessary to summon so many to secure them? But they are shackled to chairs that are bolted to the floor. It is unlikely that they will merely evaporate.'
He waited until the door had closed, steepled his thin fingers and went on in his quiet, precise voice.
'This, gentlemen, is the moment, if ever there was a moment, for gloating: a self-confessed British spy -- that recording, Mr. Reynolds, will create an international sensation in the People's Court -- and the redoubtable leader of the best organised escape group and anti-Communist ring in Hungary both in one fell swoop. We shall, however, dispense with the gloating: it is useless and time-wasting, a fit pastime only for morons and imbeciles.' He smiled faintly. 'Speaking of such, it is, incidentally, a pleasure to deal with intelligent men, who accept the inevitable and who are sufficiently realistic to dispense with the customary breast-beating lamentations, denials and outraged expostulations of innocence.
'Nor do theatricalism, prolonged climaxes, the creation of suspense or unnecessary secrecy interest me,' he continued. 'Time is the most valuable gift we have, and its waste an unforgivable crime.... Your first thoughts, naturally -- Mr. Reynolds, be so good as to follow your friend's example and refrain from doing yourself an unnecessary injury in testing these shackles -- your first thought, I say, is, how has it come about that you find yourself in this melancholy position. There is no reason why you should not know, and at once.' He looked at Jansci. '1 regret to inform you that your brilliantly gifted and quite incredibly courageous friend who has been masquerading so long, and with such fantastic success, as a Major in the Allam Vedelmi Hatosag, has finally betrayed you.'
There was a long moment's silence. Reynolds looked expressionlessly at the commandant, then at Jansci. Jansci's face was quite composed.
'That is always possible.' He paused. 'Inadvertently, of course. Completely so.'
'It was,' the commandant nodded. 'Colonel Josef Hidas, whose acquaintance Captain Reynolds here has already made, has had a feeling -- he could call it no more than that, it was not even a suspicion -- about Major Howarth for some little time.' It was the first time Reynolds heard the name by which the Count was known to the AVO. 'Yesterday the feeling became suspicion and •certainty, and he and my good friend Furmint prepared a trap baited with the name of this prison and convenient access to Furmint's room for a length of time sufficient to secure certain documents and stamps -- these now on the table before me. For all his undoubted genius, your friend walked into the trap. We are all human.'
'He is dead?'
'Alive, in the best of health and, as yet, in blissful ignorance of what is known. He was despatched on a wild goose chase to keep him out of the way during the course of today: I believe that Colonel Hidas wishes to make the arrest personally. I expect him here this morning -- later in the day. Howarth will be seized, given a midnight court-martial at the Andrassy Ut and executed -- but not, I fear, summarily.'
'Of course.' Jansci nodded heavily. 'With every AVO officer and man in the city present he will die only a little at, a time, so that no one else will be tempted to emulate him. The fools, the blind, imbecilic fools! Do they not know that there can never be another?'
'I'm afraid I agree with you. But it is no direct concern of mine. Your name, my friend?'
'Jansci will serve.'
'For the moment.' He removed his pince-nez and tapped them thoughtfully on the table. 'Tell me, Jansci, what do you know of us members of the Political Police -- of our composition, I mean.'
'You tell me. It is obvious that you wish to.'
'Yes, I'll tell you, though I think you must already know. Of our members, all but a negligible fraction are composed of power-seekers, morons who find our service intellectually undemanding, the inevitable sadists whose very nature bans them from all normal civilian employment, the long-time professionals -- the very people who dragged screaming citizens from their beds in the service of the Gestapo are still doing precisely the same thing for us -- and those with a corroding grievance against society: of the last category, Colonel Hidas, a Jew whose people have suffered in Central Europe agonies beyond all imagining is the prime example in the AVO today. There are also, of course, those who believe in Communism, a tiny minority only, but nevertheless certainly the most feared and dangerous of all inasmuch as they are automatons pervaded by the whole idea of the state with their own moral judgements either in a state of permanent suspension or completely atrophied. Furmiat is one such. So, also, strangely enough, is Hidas.'
'You must be terribly sure of yourself.' Reynolds was speaking for the first time, slowly.
'He is the commandant of the Szarhaza prison.' Jansci's words were answer enough. 'Why do you tell us this? Did you not say waste of time was abhorrent to you?'
'It still is, I assure you. Let me continue. When it comes to the delicate question of gaining another's confidence, all the various categories in the list I have given you have one thing in common. With the exception of Hidas, they are all victims of the idee fixe, of the hidebound conservatism -- and somewhat biased dogmatism -- of their unshakable convictions that the way to a man's heart -- '
'Spare us the fancy phrases,' Reynolds growled. 'What you mean is, if they want the truth from a man they batter it out of him.'
'Crude, but admirably brief,' the commandant murmured. 'A valuable lesson in time-saving. To continue in the same curt fashion, I have been entrusted with the task of gaining your confidence, gentlemen: to be precise, a confession from Captain Reynolds, and, from Jansci, his true name and the extent and modus operandi of his organisation. You know yourselves the almost invariable methods as practised by the -- ah -- colleagues I have mentioned? The whitewashed walls, the brilliant lights, the endless, repetitive, trip-hammering questions, all judiciously interspersed with kidney-beatings, teeth and nail extraction's, thumb-screws and all the other revolting appurtenances and techniques of the medieval torture chamber.'
'Revolting?' Jansci murmured.
'To me, yes. As an ex-professor of nerve surgery in Budapest's University and leading hospitals, the whole medieval conception of interrogation is intensely distasteful. To be honest, interrogation of any kind is distasteful, but I have found in this prison unsurpassed opportunities for observation of nervous disorders and for probing more deeply than ever before possible into the intensely complicated workings of the human nervous system. For the moment I may be reviled: future generations may differ in their appraisal.... I am not the only medical man in charge of prisons or prison camps, I assure you. We are extremely useful to the authorities: they are no less so to us.'
He paused, then smiled, almost diffidently.
'Forgive me, gentlemen. My enthusiasm for my work at times quite carries me away. To the point. You have information to give, and it will not be extracted by medieval methods. From Colonel Hidas I have already learnt that Captain Reynolds reacts violently to suffering, and is likely to prove difficult to a degree. As for you...' He looked slowly at Jansci. 'I do not think I have ever seen in any human face the shadows of so many sufferings: suffering for you can now itself be only a shadow. I have no wish to flatter when I say that I cannot conceive of a physical torture which could even begin to break you.'
He sat back, lit a long, thin cigarette and looked at them speculatively. After the lapse of over two minutes he leaned forward again.
'Well, gentlemen, shall I call a stenographer?'
'Whatever you wish,' Jansci said courteously. 'But it would grieve us to think of wasting any more of your time than we have already done.'
'I expected no other answer.' He pressed a switch, talked rapidly into a boxed microphone, then leant back. 'You will, of course, have heard of Pavlov, the Russian medical psychologist?'
'The patron saint of the AVO, I believe,' Jansci murmured.
'Alas, there are no saints in our Marxist philosophy -- one to which, I regret to say, Pavlov did not subscribe. But you are right insofar as your meaning goes. A bungler, a crude pioneer in many ways, but nevertheless one to whom the more advanced of us -- ah -- interrogators owe a considerable debt and -- '
'We know all about Pavlov and his dogs and his conditioning and breakdown processes,' Reynolds said roughly. This is the Szarhaza prison, not the University of Budapest. Spare us the lecture on the history of brainwashing.'
For the first time the commandant's studied calm cracked, a flush touched the high cheekbones, but he was immediately under control again. 'You are right, of course, Captain Reynolds. One requires a certain, shall we say, philosophical detachment to appreciate -- but there I go again. I merely wished to say that with the combination of the very advanced developments we have made of Pavlov's physiological techniques and certain -- ah -- -psychological processes that will become apparent to you in the course of time, we can achieve quite incredible results.' There was something about the man's detached enthusiasm that was chilling, frightening. 'We can break any human being who ever lived -- and break him so that never a scar shows. With the exception of the incurably insane, who are already broken, there are no exceptions. Your stiff-upper-lipped Englishman of fiction -- and, for all I know, fact -- will break eventually, like everyone else: the efforts of the Americans to train their Servicemen to resist what the western world so crudely calls brainwashing -- let us call it rather a reintegration of personality -- are as pathetic as they are hopeless. We broke Cardinal Mindszenty in eighty-four hours: we can break anyone.'
He stopped speaking as three men, white-coated and carrying a flask, cups and a small metal box, entered the room and waited until they had poured out two cups of what was indubitably coffee.
'My assistants, gentlemen. Excuse the white coats -- a crude psychological touch which we find effective with a large majority of our -- ah -- patients. Coffee, gentlemen. Drink it.'
'I'll be damned if I will,' Reynolds said coldly.
'You will have to undergo the indignity of nose-clips and a forcible tube feed if you don't,' the commandant said wearily. 'Do not be childish.'
Reynolds drank and so did Jansci. It tasted like any other coffee, but perhaps stronger and more bitter.
'Genuine coffee,' the commandant smiled. 'But it also contains a chemical commonly known as Actedron. Do not be deceived by its effects, gentlemen. For the first minutes you will feel yourself stimulated, more determined than ever to resist: but then will come somewhat severe headaches, dizziness, nausea, inability to relax and a state of some mental confusion -- the dose, of course, will be repeated.' He looked at an assistant with a syringe in his hands, gestured at it, and went on to explain. 'Mescaline -- produces a mental state very akin to schizophrenia, and is becoming increasingly popular, I believe, among writers and other artists of the western world: for their own sakes, I trust they do not take it with Actedron.'
Reynolds stared at him and had to force himself not to shiver. There was something evil, something abnormally wrong and inhuman about the quiet-talking commandant with the gently humorous professorial talk, all the more evil, all the more inhuman because it was deliberately neither, just the chillingly massive indifference of one whose utter and all-exclusive absorption in an insatiable desire for the furthering of his own particular life's work left no possible room for any mere consideration of humanity.... The commandant was speaking again.
'Later, I shall inject a new substance, my own invention but so recently discovered that I have not yet named it: Szarhazazine, perhaps, gentlemen -- or would that be too whimsical? I can assure you that if we had had it some years ago the good Cardinal would not have lasted twenty-four hours, much less than eighty-four. The combined efforts of the three, after perhaps two doses of each, will be to reduce you to a state of absolute mental exhaustion and collapse. Then the truth will come inevitably, and we will add what we will to your minds, and that, for you, will be the truth.'
'You tell us all this?' Jansci said slowly.
'Why not? Forewarned, in this case, is not forearmed: the process is irreversible.' The quiet certainty in his voice left no room for any doubt. He waved away the white-coated attendants and pressed a button on his desk. 'Corns gentlemen, it is time that you were shown your quarters.'
Almost at once the guards were in the room again, releasing legs and arms one at a time from chair arms and legs, then reshackling wrists and ankles together, all with a swift and trained efficiency that precluded all idea of escape, much less escape itself. When Jansci and Reynolds were on their feet, the commandant led the way from the room: two guards walked on either side and a third, with a pistol ready, behind each of the two men. The precautions were absolute.