Assignment - Budapest (16 page)

He pocketed Durell’s lighter, as if in absent-minded gesture. Durell did not ask for its return. The big man turned and strode away, his new boots ringing on the cold cobblestones. Durell let out his breath slowly and walked after him to the comer, and when the other man turned left, Durell turned the other way.

The apartment house at No. 14 Tisza Square was five stories high, with ornate balconies of fat, rounded balustrades, carved gray stone lintels, and a grilled doorway. Tisza Square was little more than a wide area in the narrow street sloping up toward the crest of Castle Hill. Far away and down, he could see the Danube, and the smoke of factories on Csepel Island, the heavy-industry district, and the bridges where so much fighting had taken place. A cold wind blew from over the plains to the east. He searched the directory under the polished brass mailboxes, none of which contained any mail that he could see, found Maria Stryzyk’s name, and thumbed the bell. The apartment number was 4-A and he did not wait for any response, but turned at once to the dark stairway and climbed to the fourth floor. The building was very quiet, and he met no one on his way up.

The door to Number 4-A was closed. He knocked, listened, heard nothing, and knocked again, a little more imperiously. Nobody appeared in the shadowed hallway, where elegance of wallpaper had deteriorated into faded patterns, peeling paint, and scarred plaster. The air felt cold and damp. He knocked again, more loudly, and called softly: “Maria, open up!”

This time he heard a hesitant footstep, then someone approached the door quickly and he heard bolts being withdrawn and then the door opened about two inches. He glimpsed a woman’s face, pale with sudden fear as she saw his big figure, and he put a hand against the door panel and shoved hard, driving her back with a little gasp of terror as he forced his way in. He closed the door quickly behind him, threw the bolt again, and said: “Don’t be afraid. I am not the police. I’m a friend.”

The woman backed away from him. “I have no friends.” “Nevertheless, I am a friend. I mean you no harm.” Durell saw her quick, terrified breathing and said suddenly in English: “I bring you news of your brother Endre.”

He knew that what he had said was cruel; but it was necessary. Maria Stryzyk was a slender, dark-haired woman in her middle thirties. She might have been pretty once, and some of the fine contours of her facial structure still remained. Her eyes were wide and dark, bright with sudden hope, her mouth still shaken by quick fear. Her dark hair was pulled back severely from her oval face, and she clutched a faded gray flannel robe around her thin figure, as if she had been asleep or about to turn in. Then he saw suspicion replace the sudden hope in her dark eyes, and she spoke flatly, in Hungarian: “You are trying to trick me. My brother Endre was killed some time ago, here in Budapest, and he was buried with all the rest of them in a common grave.”

“That’s not quite true, Maria,” Durell said gently. “Don’t be afraid of me. I’ve come to you because I’m a stranger in Budapest and need help, and you are the only one I can turn to.”

“Get out,” she said. “Get out or I shall call for the police.” Durell said in English: “Endre was killed a few days ago, in the United States.”

She stared at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. She raised both hands to her mouth, her fingers touching her quivering lips. Then she sat down suddenly, her thin body swaying from side to side, no longer looking at Durell, not looking at anything but a dead past. He moved away from the door and looked out through the window. The square below was quiet and peaceful in the winter sunlight. He saw nothing suspicious.

The apartment was simply furnished, with relics of a past comfort that had steadily deteriorated, like the apartment building itself. The radiators under the windows were almost stone cold. There was a door to the right and he looked through it into a small kitchen. Another door led into a tiny darkened bedroom. He went in there and looked into the ancient bath, saw cotton stockings hanging to dry, opened a closet door and saw three dresses, two cotton and one of red wool, and a woman’s coat with a shabby fur collar, and one pair of flat-heeled woman’s shoes. When he came back to the main room of the apartment, Maria Stryzyk had not moved.

“Maria,” he said gently. “Make some coffee, if you have any.”

“Yes, I have some.”

“Go ahead, make a cup for yourself and for me.”

She looked up at him, her eyes searching his face. “It is true? Endre is dead? He reached the United States, and he is dead now?”

“Yes. He was killed by an AVO agent there. In New Jersey.”

Her mouth moved, then closed tightly. “And you? Who are you?”

“An American.”

“A spy?”

“I do whatever is necessary. I’ve come to save someone. To bring him back to safety with anyone else who would like to join us.”

“How can I trust you?” she whispered.

“You can’t. I need help, and you can only listen to me and decide for yourself if you want to help.”

She whispered: “Endre was only a boy. He was a child yesterday, and suddenly, overnight, when all the trouble started, he was a man, fighting and killing, shouting for freedom. He never knew what freedom was, yet it grew in his heart, planted there from something that lives in all men. I did not know he had escaped from Hungary. The police questioned me over and over again. They took me to the prison in Fo Street and kept me there for two months. I was very lucky. Things were confused. They were frightened, those beasts in the cellar prisons, and not sure of themselves. They broke my arm.” She lifted her left arm and Durell saw that it had been broken and poorly set again. “But I was lucky. I came out of it alive. And poor Endre, just a boy, reached freedom and they followed him and killed him.”

“Freedom is worth dying for,” Durell said quietly. “Go on» get the coffee.”

She stood up wearily. “Yes. I am sorry. You have come a long way, haven’t you?”

“A very long way.”

“If I can help you, I will.”

“It will be dangerous for you,” Durell said. “I can ask it only as a favor.”

“If Endre died for what you work for, surely I can spare a little risk to myself. Life is hardly worth living these days, in any case.” She was crying silently, her thin face tormented. “He was only a boy, do you understand? They were all children—fighting monsters, fighting for something they never had, and dying for it. For what I say to you, the AVO can kill me. They have killed many already who dreamed of a better life. If you came here to trick me, you can take me now. I am not sorry for anything I say or feel. I am only sorry we lost, that we had no help from you in the West, that we fought and died for nothing.”

“It was not for nothing,” Durell said. “It was a beginning.”

“And an end for Endre.”

She went into the small kitchen. Durell turned to the window and looked out at the small square below. A truck rumbled past, grinding up the steep hill in low gear. There were soldiers in it, men armed with automatic rifles, a machine gun mounted on the cab of the truck. The bright winter sunlight seemed to mock the impalpable darkness that shrouded this city. How many were like Maria? he wondered. How many were crushed and hopeless, how many still waited to fight again at some future time?

He went into the kitchen after Maria. She had put a gray enamel coffee pot on to boil and was staring at her hands in wonderment.

“Why was Endre killed?” she whispered. “Why was he hunted down so far away?”

Durell told her the circumstances of that morning in New Jersey. Not all of it, but enough so that it made sense and she understood what had happened. He knew that he was putting his life in her hands, but he had taken so many risks to reach this place that another was of small consequence. Maria listened without interrupting, her small face sober and pale, her dark eyes fixed on his face as if trying to weigh and assess the truth of what he was telling her. She believed him. She understood. When he was finished, the coffee was ready and she poured it into two cups and they went back to the living room.

“They had no right to kill Endre. He had fled, and he was out of it. It was just for revenge, for brutal killing, that he was murdered.”

“Yes,” Durell said.

“I still do not know why you are here, taking such awful chances to come to this city. If you are captured and discovered to be an American—”

“Do you know a family named Tagy?” Durell interrupted. “The family of a Dr. Tagy, who went to America some years ago?”

She nodded. “Yes, we are acquainted.”

“Do you know where they are living now?”

“It is not far from here. Near Szena ter—it is in this section, too. But I have seen none of the family for several weeks.”

“Would they trust you?”

She looked thoughtful. “I think so. You must understand how it is with us in this city. You suspect even your closest friends of being paid informers of the secret police. You never know who can be trusted, and so you say nothing, you speak banalities or you simply repeat phrases from the official propaganda line. And all the time as you look at the faces of your friends, you wonder what they are thinking, if they feel as you do about our terrible life, about the broken promises of the Communists, of the terror of the police and the rumors about the prisons. Yet you cannot speak. You don’t dare.

“You may try, in a roundabout way, to sound out the true feelings of those you know, but even if they respond in a way that is hopeful to you, in hints and small indications that they feel as you do, you draw back suddenly, in quick fright, because it might be a trap.” The dark-haired woman looked broodingly at her coffee. Her hands were restless. “But I have reached a point where I no longer care. When you came in an hour ago, I was like all the rest. And then you spoke in English and now I know that Endre is truly dead, and I have nothing more to lose. I will take you to the Tagy family.”

It was a half-hour walk through the hilly residential sections of Buda to the house Maria indicated. It was mid-morning now, after ten o’clock, and the city was a little more alive than it had been earlier. Maria walked briskly, her hands in the pockets of her thin, shabby coat, and she talked in aimless fashion about her job as a telephone operator on the night shift, of the days before the futile rebellion, of Endre as he had been as a schoolboy. Durell asked if she knew Ilona Andrassy and Maria’s tone changed.

“I think Endre was in love with her once, but it was only a schoolboy affair, and when she went to work on the newspaper there were stories about her that I didn’t like. It was said that she was an informer for the AVO. I have not seen her lately and I do not care to.”

“She is working with me,” Durell said. “She is here in Budapest. I think she can be trusted. Does that change anything?”

“I think you are a fool,” Maria said. “The AVO are all beasts, perverts, sadists. The women who are in the AVO are even worse than the men.”

“Yet she sent me to you, for help,” Durell pointed out. Maria’s pale mouth grew thin. “Then perhaps this is the last day for us to see the sunlight.”

“I don’t think so. She’s going to help us.”

“Are you to meet her again today?”

“At your apartment. At noon.”

Maria drew a deep, tremulous breath. Her thin, dark face was very intense. She could be dangerous now, Durell thought, filled with hatred because of the death of her brother. He hoped she knew how to control herself.

“I keep forgetting,” Maria said. “I have already taken the final step, by accepting you and helping you. There can be no greater danger. If you believe in Ilona Andrassy, then I will take the chance, too. I want only one thing. I do not want to die before I do something, before I can strike one more blow for Endre.”

“Perhaps the chance will come,” Durell told her.

The place she took him to was not an apartment house, but a tall old house squeezed between houses of similar vintage on a narrow side street lined with barren, spidery poplar trees that bent in the cold wind that blew from the east. There was a medieval quality to the ancient street, and Durell knew from the narrow thoroughfares and haphazard layout of the surrounding streets that he was in one of the oldest parts of Buda that dated back to when the plains of Hungary represented the farthest outpost of the old Roman Empire civilization. He could see where the narrow streets and twisting alleys could represent perfect traps for destroying modern tanks.

“How come the Tagys rate a house?” he asked quietly.

“It has been in the family for many years. For generations.”

“And it wasn’t taken from them when Dr. Tagy fled to the West?”

“For a time, yes. But no one else lived in it, and when Eva Tagy was released from prison, along with her children, she was permitted to return here. She has been living here ever since.”

“What about the children?”

“The little girl is gone. She disappeared. Probably she was killed last October. But there is a young son, Janos. About fifteen, I think. He was not involved in any of the fighting, because he was ill in the hospital with pneumonia at the time. It is the only thing that saved him from deportation, I’m sure.”

They walked past the house. There were ornate balconies in front of the bay windows of the stone fagade, and a steeply pitched tiled roof with ornate eave copings. Nothing stirred behind the windows. Like all the other houses in the city, it gave Durell the impression of sullen people hiding in silence behind locked doors.

“Do you think anyone is at home?”

“Mrs. Tagy will be there. The boy might be at school today. There is no place for the mother to go. She is rejected by the state, and refused anything but the most menial, hardest jobs. Someone is in there. We can go in the back way, if you wish.”

They turned the corner into a narrow alley, a slot between high board fences in sad need of repair. Once there had been small, elegant gardens and terraces flourishing here, with views of the city below from this slope of hill; but ugly modern apartment buildings blocked out the view of the river now, and an air of desolation, neglect and decay was everywhere. They waited until a lone passenger car went by, one of the few Durell had seen in the city this morning, and then turned into the alley. Various gates opened into the wide back yards of the houses flanking the Tagy residence.