Traitors' Gate (22 page)

‘Worse things than that could happen to her.’

‘Does that mean that you have become a Nazi?’

‘No. They go too far. I have no love for the Jews, but this wholesale massacre of them simply does not bear thinking about. Neither do the things that go on in the concentration camps. Of course, putting cranks and trouble-makers behind the bars until they come to their senses is entirely justified, because it is for the good of the majority. It is the only way to nip in the bud riots and disturbances which might otherwise bring injury, loss and hardship to thousands of people. But that can be done the way the Fascists did it in Italy. As I told
you, I lived there for quite a time, and I became a great admirer of Mussolini.’

‘So was I,’ Gregory admitted frankly. ‘There is no doubt about it, he saved Italy from going Communist and afterwards did a fine job of work in cleaning the country up. There was a good case too for his going into Abyssinia. The trade in slaves that was carried on from there across the Red Sea to Arabia was nobody’s business, and conditions were still so barbarous that in the prisons men and women convicted of petty theft were chained to big logs. No one else wanted the place, so why we couldn’t let Musso bring a little daylight into it and colonise it with some of his surplus population goodness only knows.’

‘If you thought that, it seems you differed from most of your countrymen.’

Gregory shrugged. ‘Oh, we aren’t all woolly-minded idealists. Quite a lot of us, and myself included, were all for Franco in the Spanish War. If he had lost, Madrid would be controlled from Moscow by now. Franco has proved a cleverer man than Musso, though, in keeping out of the present struggle. By remaining neutral the Duce had all to gain and nothing to lose. He could have turned Italy from a poor into a rich country by putting his whole population on to manufacturing the goods and growing the food that they could have sold to both sides for pretty well any price Italy liked to ask; whereas he is now committed to maintaining armed forces which will bankrupt his country, and when the end comes he’ll be lucky if he gets away with his life.’

‘There you go again with your absurd idea that the Allies are going to win.’ Sabine gave him a slightly pitying smile. ‘It really is only wishful thinking, and Mussolini knew quite well what he was doing when he threw in his lot with Hitler. He couldn’t expect to get something for nothing, but now he will get Malta as a stepping stone across the Mediterranean, and Egypt, the Sudan and Kenya; so he’ll have the whole of North East Africa from Tripoli to Zanzibar as a new Roman Empire.’

‘He won’t while Churchill has a kick left in him,’ Gregory declared firmly. ‘But we are getting away from the point.’

‘At least we are agreed that Communism is the great Evil.’

‘Yes, I’m with you there. But Hitler is nearly as bad.’

‘The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know;
and Hitler is by no means all devil. About many things he is a great idealist. Anyhow, much as we Hungarians would like to enjoy complete independence, Hungary will be a paradise with Hitler as her nominal overlord compared to what she would be under the Soviets. That is why we must stick to Germany and do every mortal thing we can to speed her victory. Only one thing matters. The complete and utter destruction of Communist Russia. If we fail in that it will be the end, not only for us here in Central Europe, but sooner or later for you in Britain too.’

Gregory had always been intensely anti-Communist, and he had a horrible feeling that she might be right. But it was not for him to question whether Britain would not ultimately find Russia a more deadly enemy than the Nazis. It was a case of first things first and Hitler represented an evil which must be destroyed. But he felt that he had no further arguments by which he might hope to win Sabine’s approval of his mission; so he said:

‘Well, there it is. We must agree to differ about immediate ends. However, I hope I have convinced you that, as my mission has met with no success, I am doing no harm here.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I am not convinced of that. You are an enemy agent and a would-be saboteur. You are an intelligent and resourceful man; so highly dangerous. And I have only your word for it that you are not ferreting out all sorts of secrets which might be helpful to the Allies—and to Russia. It is impossible for me to refrain from taking any action about you.’

He suddenly sat forward. ‘Sabine! You can’t really mean that you intend to have me arrested?’

‘I would, without hesitation, if you were anyone else,’ she replied seriously. ‘I may have to, and I certainly will if you refuse to accept the way out for you that I have thought of to square matters with my conscience. From here we are going straight back to the Vadászkürt. There you will pack your bags under my supervision. Then I intend to see you off on this evening’s non-stop express to Vienna.’

Gregory smiled, but only to cover his inward consternation. Since she had allowed him to persuade her to come up to the Hármashatárhegy he had been ‘counting his chickens; but this showed her to be a much tougher proposition than he had bargained for. If he agreed, he would not be able to attend the Committee meeting fixed for next day, and would have to go home without learning their final decision after hearing General Lakatos’s opinion about the number of Allied divisions needed to hold the Nazis in the West. He would be able to report nothing more than that prospects of getting the Hungarian magnates to force their government into breaking with Germany seemed good, instead of bringing back, as he had excellent reason to hope, cut and dried terms. After having stayed on for the past week, and by great tact during the long wrangles of the Committee got them so near agreement, he did not mean to be robbed of his triumph if he could possibly help it. Realising that his only chance now lay in temporising, he said lightly:

‘As I have already learned that my mission has no prospect of success, I’ve nothing against leaving Budapest—except …’ His smile deepened and his brown eyes looked straight into hers. ‘Well, you can guess that one.’

‘I take it you mean me.’ She gave him a half-smile then quickly looked down and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Thanks for the compliment, but I accept it with reserve. I’m not quite such a fool as to fail to realise that you chose this place for lunch because I brought you here on our first evening together in Budapest.’

‘Of course,’ he admitted, ‘and what a wonderful night that was. We stood hand in hand by the railing, here, watching the million twinkling lights in the city, and the blue-black vault above it sprinkled with a million stars. Then we were driven down the hill back to the Donau Palota to become lovers.’

‘You needn’t go on. As I was just going to say, I realised at once that by arousing such memories you were hoping to overcome my scruples about you. But it hasn’t worked; and it won’t.’

‘That’s not quite fair. On my word of honour those memories are very precious to me; and I have already accepted your decision that I must leave Budapest. I was only expressing how greatly I regret that it must be tonight, as that robs us of the chance to put back the clock for a day or two.’

‘Yes, I do believe you about that,’ she admitted in a softer voice. ‘And I feel the same. Terrible as it is to know that as we sit here in the sunshine thousands of Englishmen and Hungarians are being killed and wounded fighting on opposite sides in this terrible war, that doesn’t make any difference to personal relationships. I would have loved to revisit with you all the places where we had such happy times together. But it just can’t be done. I made up my mind in the small hours of this morning about how I must handle this, and I’m not going to change it.’

Her frank admission that she was still drawn to him gave him a gleam of hope. If only he could persuade her not to insist on his departure until the next day, he would somehow manage to see Count Lászlo that night and learn from him the all-important final decision of the Committee. But for the moment he refrained from pressing her, and said instead:

‘I quite understand; but why do you wish me to go to Vienna?’

‘Because it is the quickest way out of the country.’

‘Maybe; but I have no visa for Germany.’

‘I can fix that. It is only half-past three so there’s plenty of time and I’ll go with you to the Passport Office.’

‘They’ll take twenty-four hours at least to get a visa from the Germans.’

She shook her head. ‘Not if I go with you. There are advantages, you know, in being Ribb’s special friend. There are very few things that I couldn’t get done in any of the Ministries. We’ll have it back in a couple of hours.’

He grinned. ‘It’s nice to have a pull like that; but I’d very much rather not go to Vienna. The Gestapo are a pretty bright lot, and heaven help me if I slipped up while in their home territory. I would much rather go out through Yugoslavia, as I came in that way. Surely you’ve no objection to my leaving via Zagreb?’

‘Yes, there is a snag to that. The Vienna express stops only at the frontier. I intend to get the Passport Control people to telephone and have you met there, and seen across it. I don’t
mean as an undesirable, but with special courtesies as a V.I.P. That will ensure you really leave Hungary. The train down to Zagreb makes several stops on the way; so you might get out at one of them and come back.’

‘Why should I? As I have already satisfied myself that I can do no good here, there would be no point in my returning.’

She smiled at him quizzically. ‘I have only your word for that. Apart from the mission you told me of you may be collecting all sorts of valuable information.’

‘I promise you, I’m not. And even if I were, as I have already been here a fortnight, what could another night or two matter?’

‘It wouldn’t,’ she said slowly. ‘That is, if I could keep an eye on you.’

‘Darling, that is the very thing I am asking you to do.’ At that sign of her weakening his response had been immediate; although in making it he set a course that if followed up would put an end to his hope of being able to remain faithful to Erika. Somehow he had got to remain in Budapest overnight—so as to see Count Lászlo before leaving—and he could think of only two ways in which he might manage to do that.

One was to get tough with Sabine. He had few scruples, but his sense of what one could or could not do with a clear conscience forbade him luring her into the woods then binding and gagging her, and leaving her there until he put through an anonymous call to the police next morning telling them where they could find her. Gags had an annoying way of being either too loose or too tight. If the former, after a quarter of an hour’s hard jaw-working the victim could shout for help; if the latter, within an hour or two the victim died a most painful death from slow suffocation—and he certainly was not prepared to gag Sabine in a way which would cause her more than temporary discomfort. But he could either leave her sitting here while he drove off in her car, or put her out of it on the way back. The snag was that if he used any of these ways of freeing himself from her, within an hour she would have every policeman in Budapest hunting for him, and several hours must elapse before it was any good going to see Count Lászlo; so he would have to run a high risk of arrest in order to do that and a still greater one before he could get out of the city and across the frontier.

The other possibility of pulling his chestnuts out of the fire was to persuade Sabine that he was in earnest about wanting to remain in Budapest solely on her account. If he could do that, he felt confident that a chance would occur for him to slip away from her for an hour or two and get his business settled. It was unquestionably the sounder plan and now that he was launched upon it he went on quickly:

‘Listen! There is an alternative route to Zagreb which runs along the south shore of Lake Balaton. Why not let’s go down for the weekend to that little hotel where we stayed before? That is two-thirds of the way to the frontier; so after we’ve had a lovely reunion it would mean only an hour in the train for you to come down and see me over it yourself.’

‘You have forgotten about Ribb.’

‘But I thought you said that he was going back to Berlin tomorrow afternoon. We could still get down to that little hotel in time for dinner; and we’d have all Sunday—or a whole week there together if you liked.’

‘That is out of the question. I must leave for Berlin on Wednesday in any case; but it is really tonight that I was thinking of.’

It was ‘tonight’ that he was thinking of too; but the fact that she was now giving serious consideration to his proposal made his heart beat a little faster, as he said: ‘You told me that you expected Ribb to be tied up with Admiral Horthy this evening, and you as good as promised to dine with me; so why shouldn’t you?’

‘He will be, and I could.’ She pulled hard on a newly-lit cigarette. ‘But I won’t be entirely free to do as I like until he is on the train for Berlin. He is staying with the Regent at the Palace, of course; and all these top men work themselves so desperately hard that it is unlikely that he will come to my house in the Szinháy Utcza to say good-bye to me until lunch-time tomorrow. But one never knows.’

‘Damn him!’ Gregory muttered, with a scowl. But actually he was thinking ‘This could not suit my book better. If I can get the hours between midnight and dawn to work in there will be no excuse for me to stay on and go down with Sabine to Balaton.’ At the same time a small devil was telling him insistently that he would be behaving like a lunatic and always regret it if he left her in the lurch and ran away from this lovely gift the gods were now offering him. Quickly he quieted
the devil with the thought that he was not forced to decide either way as yet, then he said:

‘Anyhow, there is nothing to stop us dining and dancing together, and meeting again tomorrow afternoon after Ribb has gone.’

‘Oh, but there is!’ came her quick rejoinder. ‘I had made up my mind not to lose sight of you until I saw you on to the train for Vienna. After all, I can’t ignore the possibility that you have made useful contacts during your fortnight here, and that a last talk with them before you go might enable you to take valuable information back to London.’