Traitors' Gate (11 page)

Gregory thanked him for his generous offer. They then shook hands firmly and went their separate ways through the August dusk. As Gregory walked back to the Vadászkürt he decided rather glumly that there now seemed little hope of his being able to take a favourable report back to London. His talk with Levianski had reinforced his own opinion formed that morning, that the Hungarian people were as yet by no means war-weary, and also revealed the fact that even if they had been it would not have made much difference, as the issue of Hungary’s continuing in the war lay entirely with the aristocracy. Naturally, he intended to see and sound Sir Pellinore’s friends, but since the governing classes were not subject to pressure from the masses it seemed unlikely that they would be willing to abandon the pro-Nazi policy which they had evidently decided offered the best prospect of preserving their wealth and estates. And during the past fortnight the Russian situation, worry over which had been the origin of his mission, had been going from bad to worse.

He could only console himself a little with the thought that, anyhow, a fortnight’s holiday in Budapest with good food and good cheer to be had for the asking would be a most pleasant change after the dreariness of London. As he entered the hall of the hotel, he was thinking that for dinner he would order that famous Hungarian dish, chicken stewed with rice and red peppers. He was not expecting any letters so would have walked straight through had not one of the porters called to him from behind the desk, ‘Excuse me, sir!’

When he crossed to the desk the man handed him back his passport and with it a cheap looking envelope addressed to M. le Commandant Tavenier. Tearing the envelope open, he gave a swift glance at the single sheet of paper that it contained. It was a typed note from the French Consul General to the effect
that information having been received from the police of M. le Commandant Tavenier’s arrival in Budapest, it was requested that within twenty-four hours he would attend at 17. Fö Utca in order that his stay in the Hungarian capital might be regularised.

This was something for which Gregory had not bargained. No doubt it was only a routine matter; but all the same he had an uneasy feeling that having to make his number with the Vichy authorities might, sooner or later, land him in just the sort of tricky situation he was very anxious to avoid.

On the following morning Gregory took a cab across the river to 17. Fö Utca and handed the porter at the door the summons he had received. The porter was a Hungarian and after a glance at the letter announced its bearer in bad French over a house telephone to some invisible person. He then showed Gregory into a small sunless room. It was furnished with the sparse economy typical of French officialdom, and occupied only by a dark-haired middle-aged woman. With a cigarette dangling from her lower lip she was thumbing through some dog-eared papers on the narrow desk before her. As he came into the room she gestured towards a wooden bench against one wall, then took no further notice of him.

After sitting there for ten minutes his patience began to wear thin, and he was just about to demand that she did something about him, when a door behind her opened and over her head a tall man gave him a swift scrutiny.

Returning the glance, Gregory was far from favourably impressed by the man’s appearance. He was wearing a dark blue suit with a stiff white collar, out of which arose a scrawny neck, surmounted by a hollow-cheeked face, a long narrow nose, eyes with liverish pouches beneath them and an almost bald head, that together gave him some resemblance to a vulture. With a slight inclination of his bony skull, this sinister looking individual said:

‘Monsieur le Commandant, my name is Cochefert. I regret to have had to trouble you to come here, but there are just a few formalities.… Please to come in.’

Gregory followed him into a somewhat larger but equally bleak room. Monsieur Cochefert gave him a hard chair and sat down in another behind a bare table piled high with bundles of documents. Drawing a printed form towards him and picking up an old fashioned steel-nibbed pen, he asked:

‘May I have the object of your visit to Budapest?’

Had Gregory been less experienced in such matters he would have been tempted to reply, ‘We are not on French soil, so you have no authority here. My business has nothing to do with you, and you can go to the devil.’ But he was much too old a hand needlessly to antagonise any official; so, with pleasant memories of the charming and helpful Diana, he said quite amiably:

‘I own a truffle farm in Périgord and I have come here to investigate the possibility of supplying Hungarian foie-gras makers with truffles after the war.’

‘Indeed!’ Cochefert raised eyebrows having so few hairs in them that they were only just perceptible. ‘That sounds a good idea. The paté made here is excellent, but could be much improved by the introduction of truffles.’ As he made a note on the form, Gregory saw that it already had on it Tavenier’s home address and other particulars; so the Hungarian police must have given the French Consulate a sight of his passport. To give substance to his cover story he said:

‘As a matter of fact, even if I had not had the note asking me to call here I should have done so to ask if I could be supplied with a list of the names and addresses of the principal foie-gras manufacturers.’

‘Strictly speaking, that is a matter for our Commercial Attaché at the Embassy,’ the Frenchman replied, ‘but I will telephone him and ask for a list to be sent to you.’

Gregory made a little bow. ‘Monsieur is most kind.’

‘It is a pleasure. May I ask how long you intend to stay in Budapest?’

‘For about a fortnight.’

‘Good. I see that you obtained your visa for Hungary in Switzerland; so I take it you broke your journey there?’

‘I have been living there for the past three months. Fortunately I am fairly well off and investments that I have
there enable me to do so in reasonable comfort. I find it much more congenial than France, now that our poor country has fallen into such a sad state.’

‘That is very understandable. I, too, am glad to escape the annoyances and privations suffered by everyone in France these days, and I hope to retain my post here until the end of the war. Talking of the war, Monsieur le Commandant, at your age you must have been with your regiment in 1939. I would be interested to hear how you fared?’

‘My battalion formed part of General Blanchard’s Army of the North,’ replied Gregory promptly. ‘As you will know, it was trapped with the British in Belgium and the greater part of it was killed or captured. But several thousand troops of General de la Laurencie’s IIIrd Corps were taken off from Dunkirk, and I was lucky enough to be among them.’

‘I see, and you opted to return to France?’

Gregory shook his head. ‘No; I was one of those who favoured fighting on. Later, like many others, I realised the futility of doing so. Most of them are still stuck in England, but I had the good fortune to get away. I was posted as an Interpreter to one of the Commando units that took part in the St. Nazaire raid last March. Soon after I got ashore I took advantage of the smoke and confusion to slip away and look for a good hiding place. I went to earth in a grain warehouse on the docks and I had brought sufficient iron rations in my haversack to last me several days. When the excitement had died down I took a chance with a dock-foreman. He brought me a suit of civilian clothes and I had enough francs for my railway fare; so four days after the raid I was back at Razac—the village in Périgord where I own the château.’

Cochefert nodded his vulture-like head, and sighed. ‘Ah, Monsieur le Commandant, this war is not like other wars. It has set brother against brother; and often left gallant officers such as yourself no alternative but to adopt such means as you describe to save their honour—and the honour of France.’

‘Yes; the honour of France,’ Gregory repeated piously.

It was the sanctimonious phrase which sprang to the lips of many Frenchmen in those days; in most cases to disguise from themselves the fact that they had been led by their military idol, old Marshal Pétain, into deserting their ally and entering into a pact with Hitler.

On this they both stood up, remained silent for a moment as
though paying tribue to the memory of some highly respected friend who had recently died, then shook hands. It seemed then that Monsieur Cochefert had no further questions to ask for, after exchanging punctilious salutations with his visitor, he showed him out to the front door.

Back in the sunlit street, Gregory felt that he had dealt with a possibly dangerous business very successfully. The line that he had at first thrown in his lot with the Free French but later ‘seen the light’ was, he thought, a nice artistic touch; and the foie-gras story could not have gone down better. Cochefert might lack most of those physical attributes which would have made him the answer to a maiden’s prayer, but he had fulfilled his tiresome function in a friendly spirit and appeared to be entirely satisfied.

The next item on Gregory’s agenda was to get in touch with Sir Pellinore’s old friends. Just in case he ran into any trouble, he thought it wiser not to do so from his own hotel; so he walked along to the Bristol. Going up to the hall-porter’s desk he asked the man to get him Count István Lujza’s telephone number.

The porter looked at him in surprise and said, ‘If you mean the ex-Minister, sir, he has been dead for two years or more.’

Murmuring that he had not been in Budapest since before the war, Gregory asked him to try Count Mihály Zapolya. This time the porter held a short telephone conversation in Hungarian, then reported:

‘I have spoken with the doorman at the palace in the Illona Utcza, and he says that as usual in the summer months His Excellency the Count is living on his estate at Nagykáta.’

Hoping that he would prove luckier with the third string to his bow, Gregory asked for Prince György Hunyadi. The porter gave a dubious shake of his head and replied:

‘I feel almost certain that His Highness is still abroad, sir; but I will ring up the Foreign Office.’ Another telephone conversation followed, and it emerged that the Prince was in Buenos Aires as Hungarian Ambassador to the Argentine.

That left only Count Zapolya as a possible contact; so Gregory enquired where Nagykáta was. He learned to his relief that it was only about thirty miles from Budapest; but the station which served it was no more than a village halt, and there were only two trains that stopped there each day. As it was not yet half-past ten, by hiring a two-horse carriage and
promising its driver a liberal tip, he just managed to catch the morning one, which got him there by half-past eleven.

When he jumped down from the train he could see no sign of a village or a large country house, and there was no conveyance of any kind available. But he had taken the precaution of writing the Count’s name in block letters on an envelope and, on showing this to the solitary porter, the man grinned and pointed up the road towards a slight eminence, crowned by trees, that stood out from the flat plain.

After a half-mile walk he found that beyond the trees lay the village, and that it was a replica of a dozen others that he had seen from the train. To one side of a broad uneven open space stood a small onion-spired church; the rest of the buildings varied little except in size. They were thatched and squat, the eaves of their roofs coming very low down; nearly all of them were whitewashed and had semi-circular arches leading to inner yards. There were no motor vehicles in the street, but a number of huge hay-wains each drawn by a team of four slow-moving white oxen, and flocks of cackling geese straggled in all directions. Not one of the villagers was in any kind of uniform; there were no notices with arrows pointing to airraid shelters or Red Cross huts and, in fact, it made the war seem so immeasurably remote that the bombings, the sinkings and the barrages that were killing thousands every day might have been taking place on another planet.

At the village inn he found a man who could speak German and, while he drank his first
baratsch
of the day, a horse was harnessed for him in leisurely fashion to an ancient carriage. There followed a two-mile drive between the endless fields of rich black earth, which had no boundary banks or hedges and were broken only by an occasional low farm-house with a few barns clustering about it. More trees at length indicated an entrance to a private park. In it, grassy meadows with fine herds of cattle grazing in them sloped down to a long lake, partly covered by bulrushes and with a few swans gracefully sailing about its open spaces.

The house was hideous. Except for one much older wing, the main building was a product of Victorian times and even the green-painted wooden colonial style shutters that flanked its many windows could not redeem it architecturally. Yet in eighty years its lemon-yellow brick had mellowed sufficiently to give it a not unfriendly appearance, and fine magnolia trees,
the flowers of which gave out a heavenly scent, broke up the flatness of its barrack-like walls.

When the carriage pulled up in front of the porch, Gregory got out, signed to the coachman to wait for him, then took an envelope from his pocket. It contained a note that he had thought out during his journey and written in the village inn while the carriage was being got ready for him. It was in French, addressed to Count Zapolya, and read:

I have recently arrived in Hungary, and Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust particularly asked me while here to seek an opportunity of conveying his kindest remembrances to Your Excellency. Owing to the unhappy events which have disturbed so many social relationships in Europe during the past three years, it is possible that Your Excellency may prefer not to receive me; but I trust this will not be the case, as I have proposals to make which might prove to Hungary’s advantage
.

He had written it in French only because that was the
lingua franca
of Sir Pellinore’s generation; he had all but said that he was in Hungary on a secret mission as the agent of an enemy power, and he had signed the note with his own name. His reason for this unusual rashness was his instinct that, should he introduce himself to the Count as a Frenchman, then later have to admit that he was an Englishman, it might so offend the susceptibilities of an old-school Central European nobleman at not having been trusted in the first place that he would refuse to play any further part in the matter.