“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Jeff said. “Should I put the question to her? I’m seeing her tonight.”
Keller smiled. “Seeing quite a bit of her, aren’t you? All business, Jeff?”
Jeff wondered whether he had been poaching on private property in seeing Rikki so often. Sounded like it. Yet she always seemed willing to date him. “Well, you see,” Jeff explained, “Miss Genghis Khan is especially useful because there isn’t anybody she doesn’t know.”
“Now don’t worry, Jeff,” Keller said. “See her as often as you like. All of us have to sacrifice something, and I guess I can sacrifice Rikki.”
Keller knew that Jeff would consider him most magnanimous. Baker would consider him a man who had so many women that he could give up a girl as beautiful and interesting as Rikki casually as he would hand a package of cigarettes to a guest who was out of cigarettes. Baker would look up to him as a man of the world, a man who was irresistible to women.
That was exactly what Jeff thought when he left the apartment.
CHAPTER TEN
1
JEFF WENT HOME and got his hat. He also changed his shirt from blue to white, and his tie to polka dot, and his suit from tweed to the best blue. Miklös Zukats, who owned five cinemas in the city, a stack of gold Swiss francs in a vault in Geneva, and a packet of RKO and Paramount stock in another vault in New York, regarded Jeff as a special emissary to him from Washington, and so Jeff dressed the part.
The masquerading always made him feel a little shabby, a little dirty. Along the Rakoczi and Andrássy Utcas Jeff had allowed it to become known that he was attached to the American State Department’s Office of Information and Educational Exchange. He was interested in the showing of Hollywood’s product, and the Department’s own documentary films, in Hungary. He was interested in the exchange of theatrical talent, an enterprise that had once been normal and mutually profitable for both countries, but which now had become difficult and usually impossible. After the seizure of government by the Magyar Communists, the trickle of travel reopened in 1945 had steadily congealed, year by year, in the cold war.
Since his cover was readymade, perfectly fitted, and in the fashion of the times—for cultural propaganda was openly practiced by both sides—he was accepted without question for what he pretended to be. This made Jeff feel guilty, although he knew there was no reason for it. A cover was a normal device of political warfare. One couldn’t go around announcing, “I’m trying to get people to form an anti-Communist underground.” If you did that, all your friends would soon be dead.
2
Jeff was always welcome in Zukats’ office in the Rakoczi, although sometimes Jeff suspected it was only because his presence boosted the exhibitor’s ego. Zukats regarded himself as a cosmopolite and citizen of the world. His office was decorated in Italian modern, which is perhaps more modern and extreme than Los Angeles modern. Copies of Life and the London Illustrated News were carefully exhibited on the chrome-legged table. He read Variety every week, and consequently was considered the Hungarian authority on advancements in the English tongue and affairs of the theater in New York and London. If an American diplomat visited his office to talk films, then the darkness could not be closing in around him. The world wasn’t going to pot. It was only his imagination.
“Well,” Zukats greeted Jeff this day, “did you hear what’s happened now?”
“You mean the fighting in the Near East?” Jeff said. “That’s hardly news.”
“Oh, that business!” said Zukats, waving it away with a gesture of two fingers. “Let’s not talk about it. No. I meant Lana Turner.”
When Zukats met a political subject face to face he averted his mind, and his conversation crossed the street. This annoyed Jeff, but Jeff knew he could not afford to be annoyed. Zukats was important. He was important because of his money power in the Budapest theater and his connections with Broadway and Hollywood. Jeff saw him as a potential financial clearing house for the cell Jeff hoped to plant within the city’s organism—a cell that would come to life on the day when neither he nor any other American remained in Budapest. Jeff said, “I didn’t hear about Lana Turner.”
“Again she is in trouble with her studio,” Zukats said. “And me twitching for her!”
“You what?”
“As you say, I have a twitch for her. I like her. She draws. She is B.O. Also in Hollywood three years ago I met her personally. Such gams. At the same party I met the great producer Goldwyn. Such a great man! Never plays the red board.”
“What do you mean?” Jeff asked, and told himself he’d have to start reading Variety. He’d ask Quincy Todd to make some sort of deal with the airline, so he could get Variety.
“It is not money alone he wants. He is hep to art.”
Jeff opened a plastic cigarette box on the desk and took out a Camel. “Do you mind?”
“Please. Every week I have them shipped especially.” Zukats winked. “There are ways.”
Jeff congratulated himself. The communications lines of business always have a way of bridging the fissures of world disorder. But his instinct reined him in. “You know, Mr. Zukats, I think you ought to follow Goldwyn’s example. If he makes good American pictures, you ought to show good American pictures.”
“Oh, that again.”
“That again. From the crap you show in your theaters the people of Budapest must have a peculiar opinion of America. They must think that one third of us are gangsters who own night clubs, and the other third cowboys, and the rest of us the dipsomaniac sons and daughters of millionaires.”
Zukats shrugged. “It’s good B.O.”
“It isn’t good propaganda. You’re making it easy for the Communists. When you show pictures like that you’re making Moscow’s line sound true.”
“You know how it is,” Zukats said. “All your big stars are barred. They go and yap about the Communists, so they get barred here. It is their own fault. Why don’t they clam up—Cooper and Taylor and the rest?”
“Something called the right of free speech,” Jeff said. “Remember?”
“Does it do any good to have free speech, and no foreign grosses?”
Jeff tried his technique of testing loyalty by forcing a decision. “I can get you good pictures if you’ve got the courage to show them.”
“What? Documentaries? Do you want me to go dark?”
“We’d rather have you show no American pictures than the ones you show now.”
Zukats leaned back in his chair and folded his plump, pink hands across his stomach. “You know that I am your friend. Why, I am almost an American. You know that without American pictures half the houses in Budapest would go dark. Do you want to ruin your friends?”
“The time has come,” Jeff said carefully, “when every man must take his stand. What will happen to you if war comes—or even if relations are broken? Where will you get your films then? What will happen to you when the state not only tells you what pictures to show, but owns all the theaters, and takes all the profits?”
Zukats’ hands jumped nervously. “When war comes, I may not be here.”
“You’ll be here. Do you think that even now Rajk’s police will let you out of the country?”
Jeff knew he had touched a sensitive spot deep inside Zukats’ shell, for his dumpy body came out of the chair, and when he settled back again his usually pliable mouth was thin and tight. Jeff guessed that Zukats had already tried to leave Hungary—and failed.
At last Zukats said, “Now I will speak to you truly.”
“That’ll be a switch.”
“Six months ago I applied for an exit permit. You know our exit permits?”
“Yes.” No Hungarian could cross his border without one.
“I said I had to go to Hollywood to arrange for more pictures. They said no. I tried, then, with money. One hundred thousand forints! They still said no. So then I asked myself, What would the big men in Hollywood do if they were in my position?’ I thought
about this much, and I found the answer. Do you know what it was?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion.”
Zukats rocked in his chair, and half smiled. “They would do what was safe. They would go with the tide. For five years after Hitler came to power did Hollywood notice him? No. Does Hollywood attack Franco, or Trujillo, or Perón? No. It is not safe. It hurts the B.O. At this moment it is safe for Hollywood to be against Communism, just as ten years ago it became safe for Hollywood to be against Fascism. But if there was a Communist government in Washington, what would they do? Why, they would make and show Communist pictures, of course. They would say to themselves, ‘If we do not do it, somebody else will.’”
“I don’t believe it,” Jeff said, but in his heart he did believe it.
“Ah, I know them,” said Zukats. “So I will tell you what I am going to do. So long as I can book American pictures, I will take them. Also I hope this talk of war comes to nothing. After all, I have more funds in dollars than in rubles. But if war comes, if the government takes over my theaters, it will be so arranged that I can still run them. I will do what is safe.”
Jeff put his hand on his leg and squeezed until it hurt, because a diplomat never lost his temper. “Suppose, Mr. Zukats, that I recommended that my department request the American producers to stop sending you films of any kind?”
Zukats didn’t stop smiling. “Nothing would happen, my boy. I don’t think the producers would pay to your Department any attention. True, the best American films I cannot show. But we have still a good market here, and Hollywood will think of its foreign grosses.”
Jeff rose. “Goodbye, Mr. Zukats,” he said. It was disappointing, and surprising too, in a way. Zukats had such close connections with America. He dropped Zukats into the slot marked bad.
3
That night Jeff didn’t call for Rikki until eleven because the floor show bored him except for her number. The Arizona’s time of ascendancy had been the late ’20’s and middle ’30’s, and in this period it had been described as being resplendent as Ziegfeld’s Follies, cosmopolitan as Zelli’s in Paris, and wicked as a Port Säid dive. During the war it survived as a safety valve for Nazi and Hungarian officers on leave from the Russian front, and it enjoyed a brief revival in the wild days of the ’45 inflation when American and Russian officers bombed the stage with bundles of million-pengo notes. Now it had assumed the city’s gray mourning in this taut, still period while Pest waited in the eye of the hurricane. For two decades it had not been redecorated. Its draperies and furnishings bore the stains of six thousand nights of revel. All that had been spilled—champagne, cognac, Scotch, raki, vodka, Kentucky bourbon and Munich beer, many tears and some blood—all in time made the same brown stain.
The first three times he had seen Rikki dance his eyes had not left her, but on this night he watched the others who watched her. While she danced nothing moved except the pulse and throb of the music and Rikki. The dance she did was called new, and original, but it was old as woman. It is done, in variations, by many races, from the Ivory Coast to the Central Pacific. It is a simple dance. It has a clear and simple story, the inception, progress, and climax of an act of love. After Rikki did it in the Arizona it was her custom to remain for fifteen minutes in her dressing room, alone. It was her claim that otherwise she would not be safe, for the Arizona was still wicked. It was Jeff’s belief that the dance exhausted her emotionally. She did it that way.
The Arizona was amphitheater-shaped, the tables rising terrace by terrace from the circular dance floor. Jeff was seated at a table three terraces above the floor, a table that he now regarded as his table. For minutes before he could expect her, he kept his eyes on the curtained door to the left of the stage. Finally she came out, conspicuous in the silver lamé, her well-kept but by no means new broadtail coat over her arm. She moved directly to his table. When Jeff rose and pulled back her chair he knew that all those in the Arizona—the too-loud and buoyant operators on the Bourse, the Russian captains and lieutenants, the gloomy Finnish importers, dark and suspicious Turks, the Jugoslav delegation from Cominform, the Russian propagandists of Agitprop, the sleek and effeminate Rumanians more interested in conversation than in their women—all these were watching him, and envying and hating him.
“Well, where tonight?” she greeted him, “The Park Club, I hope. I am hungry.”
“You’re always hungry, Rikki.”
“If you did my dance every night, and other dances also, and rehearsed the new show two afternoons a week, and carried everything up and down five flights of stairs because of no elevator, and walked everywhere because of no car, you would be hungry, too. It is true that I eat three thousand calories a day—four thousand when I can get butter or fats. But do you see any fat on me? Look! Look, you Jeff!”
Jeff looked, and said, “Don’t get me wrong, Rikki. You’re not fat.”
“I will have a drink—a raki—and then we will go to the Park Club and have one of those wonderful club sandwiches with ham, chicken, and turkey. Is that possible?”
“You know, Rikki, I never see you alone. We never have a chance to talk alone, and I have important things to say to you, Rikki. You know that.” In her way Rikki could be as important to Atlantis as Zukats could have been in his. She was known to all the city, had entrée to every circle, and possessed the faculty of accumulating information. News and gossip never flew past her. But what he had to say to her, and ask her, he could say and ask over this table so long as the waiters didn’t overhear.
“You can see me alone if you wish, Jeff. I think you have misunderstood me” She raised her eyes, so queerly slanted, so wise and yet so sensitive to hurt. The music started, and Jeff took her hand and led her down the terraces.
The Arizona’s dance floor revolved, and this created a pleasant illusion for the dancers. Even when standing still, they had the sensation of smooth movement, and the faces at the tables whirled past without effort. So Jeff stood still now, and tightened his arm around her, so that her face pressed against his shoulder, and the perfume of her hair was in his nostrils, and he could feel the whole lithe length of her body against his. She put her hand on his chest and eased him away. “Take it easy,” she said. “No hurry. If you want me, Jeff, I will go to your place tonight. But first we will eat. You have food there?”
“Canned stuff,” Jeff said. “And it isn’t much of a place. It isn’t like Fred Keller’s. It’s only one room.”
“One is all that is necessary.”
“I’m not rich, like Fred.”
“Are you really worried about Fred? Have you jealousy?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so.”
“Do you know what I do when I go to Fred Keller’s? You will laugh.” He could feel the laughter inside her under his hand. “But do not tell him I told you. He would be furious, and I could not go there any more. I take sun baths.”
“No!”
“It is truth. Fred has the only American sun lamps in Pest. How do you think I keep my brown? Can I go to the Riviera, or Yalta, or the islands on the Marmara? And how do you think Fred keeps his wonderful brown? Every day he has his lamp.”
Jeff was irritated, and he thought he must be jealous after all. “Is that all you do there?” he asked, again standing still and allowing the floor to dance for him. “Doesn’t he look at you—or something?”
“No. Not even that. Fred is a dear.”
Jeff wondered where he had heard that before, and he remembered that Susan had said the same thing, and he wished he hadn’t thought of Susan. “So he’s a dear,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Rikki ducked an elbow and guided him expertly to an open space in the floor’s center, where the movement was not so giddy. She said, “It is not something one should say unless one is certain. Usually a woman can tell instantly, but about Fred I cannot decide. This I know, that he does not make love to women. He has such a polite way. He i
s always so gentle with women. Women seem necessary to him, yet he does not love women. Everyone must love someone. So who and what does he love?”
“Beats me, Lieutenant,” Jeff said.
4
There were shadows along the Revay Utca. Some of the shadows were black and solid and poised for movement, so Jeff carefully chained his jeep. Unless one chained his jeep it would certainly vanish. Even with chains, sometimes a jeep vanished, piecemeal, or entirely if one left it in the streets the whole night. He drove his own jeep now. He had discovered it was simpler, and perhaps more secure considering his job, to drive the jeep himself instead of using a Hungarian driver from the Legation pool.
Jeff rang the night bell for the elevator, and it made a great clangor, and Sandor came out from his room under the stairs, belting up his trousers. Ordinarily Sandor was surly and disgruntled when disturbed after midnight, but when he saw Rikki his eyes became bright and observant, and he pretended courtesy. This was the first time the American had taken a woman to his room. It was therefore, for Sandor, an important piece of news. In the morning—or perhaps this night by telephone—he would inform his district supervisor, who in turn would report the matter to secret police headquarters. Rajk’s organization would turn it over, since it was an international as well as an internal matter, to the Russian Ministerstvo Vnutryennik Del. In time he would get an extra ten or twenty forints, and a good mark.
“If you need me later,” Sandor said in German as they reached Jeff’s floor, “do not hesitate to ring.”
“Oh, we’ll use the stairs. It’s not bad walking down,” Jeff said.
“It is not necessary. Always I am at your service, Herr Baker.”
“We’ll see.”
They went into the room, and Rikki said, “I don’t like that man. He has bad eyes.”