Traitors' Gate (32 page)

The bulky Arrow-Cross leader looked desperately uncomfortable. Gregory had no doubt at all that his sympathies were with Grauber, who was obviously carrying out his duty; but Ribbentrop’s prestige outweighed that of any Nazi other than Hitler, Goering and Himmler. After a moment’s hesitation the Major said:

‘
Herr Reichsaussenminister
. No one can dispute your ability to judge what is right in such a matter. You may rely on my discretion.’

With a quick bow, and another to Sabine, he made a sign to Puttony, who gave a hand to the almost comatose Cochefert, and the three of them left the room.

Gregory was suddenly conscious that his forehead was damp with perspiration. Stuffing the automatic back into his pocket, he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe his face. As he raised his hand, his elbow brushed against the leather surcoat of the armoured figure immediately behind which he was standing. Unseen by him in the darkness, it gave off a small cloud of dust. A moment later he felt a slight tickling in his nostrils.

Ignoring it, he continued to stare down into the hall, still anxious not to miss a single word, but fairly confident that Sabine had now spiked Grauber’s guns. She had proved right in her contention that Ribbentrop would not allow the house to be searched; but, at the same time, she had landed both him and herself in an appalling mess. There could be no laughing off the fact that she had aided and concealed, and was presumably still concealing, a British secret agent; and that Ribbentrop had deliberately used his authority to prevent that agent’s arrest. He might be able to stop Szalasi’s mouth, but he could not stop Grauber’s. What a story it would make;
and, perhaps, what a nail in his coffin if, next time he had done something to annoy Hitler, Himmler produced it with juicy trimmings as proof that the Foreign Minister was so under the thumb of his Hungarian mistress that he could no longer be trusted to act in the best interests of Germany and the
Parti
.

No sooner had the door of the vestibule closed upon Puttony than Grauber, made bold by the knowledge of the whip hand he held, put Gregory’s thoughts into words. He no longer bothered even to refer to Sabine by her title. His chin thrust forward aggressively, he sneered:

‘I had thought you cleverer,
Herr Reichsaussenminister
, than to suppose that by getting rid of the others you can get the better of me. The man Sallust is my personal enemy, and I mean to have him. This woman of yours has lied and cheated. She is a traitress and …’

That is enough!’ Ribbentrop exclaimed, going pale with anger.

‘It is the truth!’ Grauber retorted. ‘First she led you to believe that Sallust was a Frenchman; yet all the time she knew he was English and, knowing that, she got him out of prison. Then she lied about having brought him back here, but we forced her to confess that she did. Lastly, she still swears that she has not hidden him in this house; yet we have proof that he cannot have left it. For less I have cut off women’s breasts and chopped them up and made them swallow the pieces.’

‘Stop!’ shouted Ribbentrop. ‘Stop. I forbid you to speak here of your vile practices.’

‘Why should I not?’ Grauber shrilled back. ‘They are for the furtherance of the cause we both serve. But it seems you have forgotten that cause; so I must remind you of it.’

‘I have forgotten nothing! I am as good a patriot and Party man as you!’

‘That we must leave to be judged by my chief,
Herr
Himmler, when I report to him the way in which you have thwarted me.’

For the past few moments Gregory had been keeping his teeth tight clenched and a finger pressed hard on the bridge of his nose. The dust-like particles into which the soft leather of the ancient surcoat was slowly decaying were now causing acute irritation to his mucous membrane. He feared that at any moment he might give a violent sneeze. If he did he was bound to be discovered; yet he could not bear the thought of missing
the denouement of this explosive altercation.

Ribbentrop suddenly seemed to get his temper under control, and said in a more pacific tone, ‘
Herr Gruppenführer
, I sympathise with your feelings. But there are more ways than one in which we can serve our
Führer
. For his servants to quarrel among themselves is certainly not one; and subtlety often pays bigger dividends than force. I refrained from asking you to leave with the others because I have a proposal to …’

Gregory heard no more. To have lingered another minute would have been fatal. Now, with his nostrils clamped between finger and thumb, he ducked down below the level of the balustrade and swiftly fumbled his way out round the edge of the curtain. During the whole time he had remained hidden there no one had glanced up in his direction. Now he could only pray that the curtain’s movement would not catch Grauber’s eye and lead after all to a show-down in which he would have lost the advantage.

Hastening along on tip-toe, he managed to reach the far end of the corridor, then the explosive pressure in his head became too much. The awful sneeze, partly muffled by his grip on his nose, snorted and burbled; he choked and then began to cough. Dreading now that he must be heard, he grasped the handle of the nearest door, turned it and thrust the door open a few inches. The room was in darkness. Slipping inside he closed the door behind him and payed his debt to frustrated nature in an awful bout of gasping, sneezing, weeping, coughing, while the water streamed from his eyes.

It was a good five minutes before he had recovered sufficiently to feel safe in returning to his post of observation, then he had to pad softly back down the corridor and exercise great caution to shake the curtain as little as possible while squirming under it; so he reckoned that he had probably lost about seven minutes of the drama being enacted down in the hall.

As he approached, lower voices had already told him that the crisis was over, but it was not until he could again raise his head and peer out from behind the armour that he realised that Grauber had gone. Ribbentrop and Sabine were now sitting side by side on one of the sofas, and he was saying to her earnestly:

‘You are a clever woman, Sabine. I have no fears that you will make a mess of things. By doing as I wish you can save yourself and render me a great service.’

‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I do see that it is the only way in which I can save your face. But you can’t expect me to like the idea of leaving everything.’

‘Of course not. Neither do I like the thought of losing you. We can only hope that it will not be for very long.’

‘I suppose it is the only thing to do?’

‘The only thing. I shall have difficulty enough as it is to put over this explanation in the teeth of the report that Grauber will make to Himmler. As you had an affaire with this man Sallust in the past, whatever your true motive in failing to tell us at once that you recognised him, the fact that you did not will make everyone believe you guilty of aiding an English spy. For that you would normally get the death penalty. You know the
Führer’s
rages, and how he refuses to make the least allowance for other people’s personal feelings. If I tried to protect you, he would break me; perhaps even accuse me of betraying our interests to the British myself. The utmost I dare do openly I have done already. The rest is up to you, if you wish to save your neck and ever see Budapest again. Can I rely on your promise to fall in with my proposal?’

She nodded. ‘All right. I expect I’ll manage to take care of myself, and it will certainly be exciting; but you must brief me very carefully before we start.’

‘I will get everything for you in the morning—special passes from Horthy to prevent the Security Police from holding you up on your dash for the frontier, foreign currency and a permit to take your car out with you. About everything else I can advise you when we get to bed.’

‘You mean to stay here the night, then?’

Smiling, he stood up, took her hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘Why not? This may be the last chance we will get till the war is over.’

Without another word they came up the stairs and passed behind Gregory on their way to her room. When she reached it she pressed a switch which plunged the hall in darkness. For some while Gregory remained where he was, trying to extract all the meaning he could from their conversation.

The gist of it seemed to be that, as Ribbentrop was not powerful enough to protect Sabine, he was sending her abroad for the duration. By ‘briefing’ her, presumably she had meant advising her what line to take with her friends and servants before leaving the country. Her reluctance to do so was quite
understandable; but—apart from the fact that her life might depend on it—nothing else could save Ribbentrop from being involved in a first-class political scandal. The only rather puzzling thing was that he had spoken of two special passes, and that she had used the plural when speaking of starting. It seemed to Gregory unlikely that Ribbentrop would be willing to connive at his escape, and almost as unlikely that, if Sabine were to leave Hungary for good, she would take her chauffeur with her; yet for whom, other than one of them, could the second pass be?

When at last he crept back to his room he was wondering again if his best chance did not lie in leaving the house, lying low with Levianski for several days, if the furrier would have him, then making a bid to reach the frontier.

On the other hand, it just might be that Sabine had, by some means, persuaded Ribbentrop to let her take him with her. Holding more promise, there was also her original plan for him to take her chauffeur’s place. If that was still possible and the second pass was intended for the chauffeur, it was he who would reap the benefit of it.

One thing was certain: in an uneven battle Sabine had shown both courage and great skill. She had not lost her head for a single moment, and it was through no fault of hers that she had twice been caught out. She had not known that Cochefert had already blown Gregory’s identity as Tavenier, or that her car had been followed by Puttony. Against ill luck and heavy odds she had stuck to her guns and, in the end, managed to come to some arrangement with Ribbentrop.

In the circumstances Gregory felt that he had no right to suppose that she might have left him out of her latest calculations; and he had promised her that he would not leave the house. That promise could hardly be considered as still binding after all that had happened during the past hour, and Sabine could not be in any way dependent on his help for getting across the frontier but, all the same, he decided to keep it.

The moon was still up and he undressed by its light, then slipped into bed. But he would rather have spent the night prowling the streets than between those soft sheets, for he knew that his life would not be safe until he was out of Budapest, and the strain of lying inactive was hard to bear.

It was not until morning that he dropped into a doze, and he was only fully woken by Pipi’s tip-toeing in with his breakfast tray. On it there was a note from Sabine, which Pipi said had been passed on to him by Magda. The single line, scrawled on a fly-leaf torn from a book, read:

Make no noise. Stay where you are until I come to you. S
.

To abide by her order he denied himself a bath, shaved and dressed with hardly a sound, then sat down in an armchair to wait for her. At a little after half-past-nine, still in a négligée, she came in to him.

‘It’s all right now,’ she said with a smile. ‘Ribb spent the night here. That’s why I couldn’t come up to you; and, Mary be praised, you didn’t come down to me. I was terrified you would. He has just gone, and I’ve fixed everything; but it was touch and go last night.’

‘I know,’ he smiled back. ‘I saw the whole party. I had hidden myself between the curtains and one of the suits of armour in the gallery. You certainly …’

‘What!’ She halted in her tracks, and her eyes grew round as saucers. ‘D’you … d’you mean that you heard everything we said.’

‘Not quite. Some dust got up my nose, and I had to creep away for about six or seven minutes to have a sneezing fit.’

‘When … what was happening when you did that?’

‘The smaller fry had gone. Ribb had been having one hell of a row with Grauber, but was just about to put some proposition to him.’

‘You didn’t hear then … what it was?’

‘No, what was it?’

‘Oh, simply an attempt to bribe him. But all those top Gestapo men have already made fortunes by threats and blackmail; so it didn’t come off. What were we doing when you got back from your sneezing fit?’

‘You and Ribb were alone. He was persuading you to leave the country for his sake and your own. That is damned hard on you. I’m more sorry than I can say to have been the cause of letting you in for this.’

She gave a heavy sigh. ‘It is my own fault for having persuaded you to come back here with me.’

‘Anyhow, you put up a marvellous fight. It was the most accursed luck that that fellow Puttony should have run into us just as we were leaving the police station. What else happened
while I was not there to listen?’

‘Oh nothing … nothing much. Ribb and Grauber went on wrangling. You must have heard everything that mattered; so there is no point in my repeating it all to you.’

‘No. The thing I am anxious to hear is what do you propose I should do now?’

Taking a cigarette from the box beside his bed, she went over to him for a light, and said, ‘I swore to Ribb that you really did leave the house soon after we got here, and said that you must have slipped past the Lieutenant while he was telephoning to Szalasi. Ribb believes that. At least I think he does. He wouldn’t want you to be captured anyway because, if you were, my name would be dragged into it and involve him in the scandal he is so anxious to avoid. Anyway he is going to give a cooked-up version of the affair to the Regent, get him to issue an order to the Hungarian Security Police not to pursue the matter for the moment, and will get from him special passes ordering them not to prevent myself and my chauffeur leaving the country. But he told me that I can count only on temporary protection; so I must get out while the going is good. That means leaving tonight; and you, of course, will be my chauffeur.’