“He’s a bad man.”
5
Rikki looked around the room, and slipped off her coat and Jeff put it on a hanger in the closet. From the closet shelf he took a half loaf of round brown bread, a box of crackers, jars of cheeses, a can of chicken, and tinned butter.
Jeff marveled at how she ate. She ate like a puddler off the night shift. When they finished, and Rikki was wiping the crumbs from the table, Madame Angell came in and said she’d heard them talking, and would they like tea. The water was already boiling. Rikki said Madame Angell was very kind.
Madame Angell brought the tea, and said Radio Lyon was very exciting that night. Radio Lyon reported a coup in Azerbaijan, and Russian troops in the area, and also massing on the Kars frontier. It certainly looked as if war could not be far off. Jeff said that was very interesting. Madame Angell wondered whether Jeff and the young lady cared to listen to Radio Lyon. Jeff said no thanks. Madame Angell said the situation was critical, and they should listen. This week had been like the week of Munich. Jeff found a box of hard candies he had concealed between his shirts, and presented it to Madame Angell. She went away.
Rikki climbed on the bed, and piled the pillows against the wall, and leaned back against them. “Now what is this private thing of which you wish to speak?” she asked, jibing at Jeff with the word, “private.”
“This business of your going to America,” Jeff told her. “Suppose it falls through? Suppose you have to stay here, and you are still here when war comes?”
“When war comes—how lightly you say it! You know only one side of war, you Americans. You cannot imagine how it is to lose your cities, your people, your country, to be degraded like slaves and hungry like beasts. I think you made a mistake with your atom bombs. The second one, you should have dropped on Chicago.”
“If war comes,” Jeff amended. Twice this day he had said, “when war comes,” and it worried him.
“What will I do? I will try to live, and survive, as I did before. Also I will wish for an American victory. It would be better.” She reached across the bed, took an ash tray from the table and placed it beside her, and then added, with candor and simplicity, “You see, my Jeff, I was raped by a Russian. Perhaps rape is not the right word. A Russian came into my home, and there was nothing else to do, although I think in the end he did not enjoy it much. I think in the end he was ashamed. It did not harm me, except the embarrassment for my mother and younger brother. They were also at home.”
Jeff thought, now any American brother would have beaten that Russky into a pulp. He said, “Your brother—didn’t he—”
“No. I am glad. My brother still lives.”
Jeff sat on the edge of the bed, close to her. The time had come for the question. “Rikki, would you do more than wish for an American victory? Would you act? Would you fight for our freedoms—yours and mine—after I was gone?”
“Do you mean would I be an espione—an agent?”
“Perhaps not that.” Here he must choose his words carefully. She knew what he was doing too. He was asking her to lay her life on the line. “If there was a Hungarian underground, would you be in it? Would you help us? Would you be on the side of the West?”
She looked at him out of the corners of her Asiatic eyes, and Jeff wondered whether any man could long hold a secret from her. He thought, what an intelligent, what a perfect agent she would be. “I will answer you,” she said, “but before I answer there are things I must say to you that you will not like.”
“Go ahead. I can take it.”
“Not about you. About your country.”
He was silent. He didn’t like people to be critical of his country when they had never been in his country, and he knew she was going to be critical.
“In the beginning,” she said, “I must tell you how I once felt about America—like the Moslem dreams of Heaven, like that. I came here from Debrecen, a town in the east. You know it?”
“No.” He wished she wouldn’t get so serious so fast. She was like other European girls he’d known. They took their love affairs casually, but their politics seriously, which was just the opposite of most girls back home.
“It is a place of mud and swine and wheat. It is necessary to Pest, but it is not known to Pest. So why should you know it? I had danced in Debrecen—I was queen of the czardas—and an uncle gave me the money to come to Pest. First I danced at a little place which like the Arizona is on the Nagymëzo Utca. I danced there five years. Ten years I have been at the Arizona. I am thirty-four. Do I look it?”
“No. You look much younger.” This was true.
“All this time I thought of America. You know how it is in my profession, Jeff. You can be the greatest dancer in the world outside of New York, but until you dance in New York you are nobody. So I thought of America, and I studied America—yes, your history, written in English—and I talked to Americans who came to the Arizona. They were so happy, so generous, so impetuous. They had such truth in them. Some were from New York and Hollywood, seeking talent. There is much talent in Hungary. I was offered jobs. I did not take the first offers. I had advice from Hungarians already in America. They would write me, do this; don’t do that. Finally I took an offer. A year’s contract. In that same week the borders closed. We became a province of Germany.”
Jeff rebuked her. “That wasn’t America’s fault. That was your own lack of guts.”
“You people—” said Rikki. “You have never had the pistol against your head! Anyway now I do not feel the same. We have talked much about me going to America, Jeff, but I do not know truthfully whether I wish to go. If I knew I could go tomorrow, I might not go.”
“Why not?”
“You have changed. Something has happened to you. You are not the same.” Rikki moved angrily. “All at once it seemed to happen. I was in Linz for a special engagement—yes, you Jeff, for a Nazi—when your troops came there. They were so wonderful, Jeff. You have no idea.”
She put her hands over her breasts, and shook her head as if to toss out words that would not come easily. “What happened to those men, Jeff? Where did they go? Do you keep all your good ones at home? You will not answer me, no?”
Jeff didn’t say anything. He could not help comparing the quiet dignity of the men of the 339th with the uncertain boys, afflicted with a conqueror complex, whom he had seen in the Vienna occupation.
“Later that same year—it was 1945—” Rikki went on, “I walked into your finance office—yes, the finance office here in the Mission on Szabadzag-tér—and I saw one of your officers. Do you know what he was doing, Jeff? He was looking at rough diamonds through a jeweler’s glass. And the shelves of the office were lined with cameras, and watches, and binoculars like a pawn shop. This was the time for the pengo inflation, when we were stripping our fingers and our closets so as to eat, and it was possible for one with dollars to make a profit on our misery. I was sick. I cannot forget.”
Jeff Baker had always believed in the intrinsic goodness of his country and his countrymen. America might make mistakes, but they were mistakes of judgment, not of the heart. This girl, Rikki, was saying his heart wasn’t right, and he didn’t like it. But all he could think of to say was, “There are bad apples in every barrel.”
Rikki said, “It is not money that we ask from America, Jeff. It is something of the spirit. You had it once. Where did it go? You were climbing to the stars, and stretching out your hands to pull us up with you. But now, your eyes are on the ground just before you—not a meter more.”
Jeff was growing angry. “What about ERP? What about that? You’ve been listening to Soviet propaganda, Rikki.”
“Of course I listen to Soviet propaganda, to British propaganda, to American propaganda, to all other propaganda. We Europeans understand propaganda. We have learned to separate the fact, the motive from what we hear. We can smell what is hidden. We have been educated in propaganda by a master, Jeff—by Goebbels.”
“Well, what about ERP?”
&
nbsp; “It sounds good,” Rikki said, “until one remembers the speeches in your Congress. One remembers how they haggled and bickered not only on how much should be given, but what should be demanded in return. I do not speak for Hungary. We have no right to your help, because we are in the Soviet orbit, and our stinking government would not and could not accept help and friendship if it was offered. I speak for your Western friends. What do you want of them? Would not peace and stability, payable to your children, be a fair rate of interest?”
“My Department isn’t responsible for what is said in the Senate, as you are smart enough to know. You Europeans can never understand our free speech. You never believe that anyone in or out of public life, except in my Department and the Army and Navy, can say whatever he wishes about policy. That’s what confuses you people.”
Rikki made a face. “Your Department! Do you think anyone trusts your Department now? There were people who believed you. I did. What happened to the Four Freedoms? And the Atlantic Charter? And the United Nations? Do you know what I think now? I think your Department betrayed the United Nations.”
“Rikki!”
“It is what I think. Your Department has no policy except the expedient, and fear of the Soviets. You can even be blackmailed by the Arabs. Your Department is the upholder of Franco, and the Argentine dictator. All over the world you support bad people. In China the corrupt ones, in Greece the worst of the reaction, in Turkey a police state as bad as we have here. Is it that your leaders are all old men, or cynics?”
“You like the Russkies better?” Jeff snapped.
“Don’t be silly. There is one thing more. You. I thought you brought me here for one thing, and it is something else. Perhaps it is only my pride, but I did not come here to be enlisted as a spy.”
He recognized that there was nothing more to say. He tried to keep his temper, but he said, “Okay, I guess this is where you get off.” He took her coat from the closet, and she wormed into it with angry movements of her shoulders, and without speaking. They walked down the steps, she remaining one step ahead of him.
He helped her into the jeep, and then he got in himself, and wrestled with the heavy lock on the chain.
Finally he had the stubborn chain off the wheel, turned the key in the ignition, and jammed his foot down on the starter.
His next conscious action was raising his head and asking for water.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
IT WAS NOT a big bomb. It was an absurdly small bomb. It was a petard, of no more power than an old-fashioned July Fourth giant cracker, and perhaps not as much as the plastic Red Devil grenades used by the Italians, so it is said, to frighten the enemy to death.
Its repercussions were felt in New York and Washington, but they were muffled by greater events and bigger bombs. For the world over, this was a bad week. The Journal-American got an eight-column banner out of it for one edition.
REDS BOMB U.S. DIPLOMAT
BUDAPEST, Dec. 17 (INS)—(delayed by censor)—Red goon squads today were blamed for last night’s bombing of an American Legation automobile, and the wounding of J. W. Baker, of Washington, D. C., Legation Third Secretary. The bomb was planted in Mr. Baker’s car while it was parked in front of his home on Revay Street. Baker will survive.
Admiral Randolph Blakenhorn, American Minister to Hungary, said, “This is an obvious attempt to frighten us out of the country. They won’t get away with it. Baker is one of the most valuable members of my staff.”
Admiral Blankenhorn will visit the Foreign Ministry to lodge a formal protest. He indicated . . .
The Daily Worker gave a different version, in a small box on page three.
BRITISH CAUSING TROUBLE?
BUDAPEST, Dec. 17—British agents provocateurs, or an aroused member of the Hungarian proletariat, were responsible for the bomb which damaged an American Legation limousine last night, Budapest police believe. J. W. Baker, a Third Secretary who was in the car, was unhurt.
Baker, police pointed out, was accompanied by Rikki Telredy, an actress. The bomb could have been thrown by a Hungarian patriot angered by Baker’s attention to Telredy, or it could have been the work of British agents seeking to create an excuse for a diplomatic and economic attack on Hungary, according to the police theory.
The Minister of the Interior said the matter was of little consequence.
The Herald Tribune had the most complete story.
by Seymour Freidin
BUDAPEST, Dec. 17—(delayed by censor)—An American Legation jeep, clearly painted with American flags, was booby-trapped last night. Jeff W. Baker, Legation Third Secretary, suffered shock. His companion, actress. Rikki Telredy of the famous Arizona Club, was uninjured.
A bomb was planted under the jeep’s hood while it was parked in front of Baker’s Revay Street residence. When he put his foot on the starter it exploded, blowing the hood back, and cracking but not splintering the windshield.
It is impossible to place responsibility for the bombing, and it is doubtful if the Communist-controlled Budapest police will make much of an effort. Anti-American Hungarians could have done it, or Red Army troops, or the police themselves. Or it could have been done by a gang of young hoodlums, or by frustrated car thieves who found the jeep securely chained.
Admiral Randolph Blankenhorn said . . .
2
When the explosion came Rikki could not see for a minute, and her nose and mouth were filled with smoke and fumes, and she was deafened, and if she screamed she did not know it. Then the first shock passed, and she thought of fire, and she groped for and finally found the lever that opened the canvas door and threw herself outside. Not until then did she think of Jeff. She didn’t see him at the wheel so she looked in the back thinking he might have been blown backwards on the floor, and he was not there. She cried, “Jeff! Jeff!” and while she could not hear anything except a jumbled ringing in her ears she knew she was screaming as loud as she could.
She walked around to the other side of the jeep and she saw him. He did not look or act like Jeff. He did not look or act like any man she had ever seen. He was on his belly in the gutter and he was clawing at the dirt and stones in jerky, digging motions. He was saying words but what they were she could not understand, and in between the rush of words high-pitched sobbing sounds came out of his throat. She kneeled beside him in the slime and raised his head and talked to him in Hungarian as a panicky mother talks to a hurt child. She stopped talking in Hungarian, suddenly, and talked in English. “What’s the matter, Jeff? What’s the matter? Oh, be quiet, Jeff. Be quiet! I am here. I am here. It is all right. I am here. Oh, Jeff! Jeff! Please be quiet, Jeff. Please, please stop! Stop!”
He tore his head away from her hands and buried his face in the dark place between curb and gutter and Rikki rose and began to shout for help.
She shouted first towards St. Stephen’s, at one end of the street, and then turned and shouted towards the Opera House at the other end, and then screamed at Jeff’s house. In the short, dark length of Revay Utca there was no movement, no new light, no answering sound. There was only the babbling man, and the echo of her terror. She stopped screaming. She realized that the people of Budapest do not stir from their beds when there are loud and sudden noises in the night. When the lion roars in his kill, do the small creatures of the jungle venture out to see what has happened?
She turned to Jeff, and the noises still issued from him. She tried once again to lift his head, failed, and fell across his body, sobbing.
3
It was thus that the police from the station at 60 Andrássy found them. There were six policemen in this emergency squad. It was the squad that always went to the scene of bombings and shootings, and they knew how to handle it. They dropped off their truck alongside the jeep. Two men with rifles paid no attention to the jeep, but concentrated on the street and the surrounding houses, to guard against a trap.
The leader of the squad, a corporal, glanced at the girl huddled over the ma
n. By his sound, the man was badly hurt. The corporal looked inside the hood of the jeep, smelled, examined the wires of the bomb, one twisted around a spark plug and the other attached to the starter wire. He saw how the explosion had blown the hood back against the windshield. The explosion had created its own armor, and he wondered how it was that the man was hurt. Perhaps he was shot. He saw the American flags painted below the windshield. This was going to be something, he could see. With this, he would have to be careful.
He took the woman by the waist and lifted her up and stood her on her feet, and when she continued to sob he shook her shoulders. “Shut up!” he said. She was quiet. Then he knelt on one knee beside the man and tried to turn him. The man resisted, and the man was tall and very strong. “Hey, I need help,” he called. Two of his men came and the three of them forced the man over on his back, holding the arms so they would not be clawed. The man was a mess, and his eyes were wide in madness, and his arms and legs jerked and shook, but there was no blood. “I have seen this,” one of the policemen said. “This is shellshock. This is battle fear.”
“Yes,” another said, “I have seen this too.”
The corporal turned to the girl. “Were you in this Willys with him?”
“Yes.”
“He is an American, is he?”
“Yes, he is American. This is his home here. Help me take him inside. He needs help at once.”
“Not so fast,” the corporal said. “He will live. How did this happen? Who is he? What were you doing in this Willys with him? Who are you?”
“I will tell you all that later. Help me get him inside. He must have a doctor.”
“No, we will put him in the truck and take him to the station. A doctor can attend him there. We will take you too.”
“Mafla—stupid ass,” the woman said. “I am Rikki Telredy. I know Rajk. I know the whole government. You will do what I say or there will be trouble. I promise you.”