Jeff knew from the way Collingwood started, and from the Admiral’s face, which lost all its affability, that he had said the wrong thing.
“Where did you hear Atlantis Project?” the Admiral demanded.
“In Washington, sir.”
“God damned fumbling fools!” the Admiral said, slowly shaking his head from side to side. “Here we break our necks to insure security and those blabbermouthed bastards talk about it all over the place!”
“I was warned that it was extremely confidential,” Jeff protested. “Naturally I wouldn’t ever mention it except, well, here.”
“Confidential hell! It’s classified top secret! They had no right to tell anybody!”
The Admiral let out his breath, almost in a whistle, and said, “Well, I guess there’s no damage, because I’m going to use you on the job. But it’s just as I’ve always said—it’s a mistake to have generals running the State Department. They don’t know what security means. Ought to have Navy men.”
The Admiral slapped his palm on the desk and capsized the cruiser. “Now look, Baker, from now on I never want you to mention the word Atlantis. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’ll be at my place at seven. Todd will see to your transportation.”
“I’ll be there, sir.” He was glad to get out of the Admiral’s office.
2
Jeff spent the rest of the day with Quincy Todd. Todd was a stocky man with pink, round, beardless cheeks, and brows and lashes so blond and pale that they offered no concealment to his eyes, and forced him to stare out upon the world in perpetual astonishment. His face looked five years younger than Jeff’s, but his double-breasted suit strained to conceal a paunch, and Jeff guessed he was older. He also was a Third Secretary and Vice-Consul, but he had slipped into the job that some missions call “stableboy” and others “donkey boy.” This meant that he did a great many chores that had nothing to do with diplomacy, except that if they were not done the machinery of the Legation would stop.
He wheedled gasoline out of the Hungarian Ministry of Transport, argued exchange with the Finance Minister, and fought the Ministry of the Interior, when employes of the Legation fell into the hands of the police, or simply disappeared. He knew his way around the Russian Kommandatura, and the intricacies of the Soviet bureaucracy. If a truckload of canned food, or a correspondent, or a typewriter, or a courier vanished on the road from Vienna to Budapest, he knew where to find it, or him. He did all these odd jobs so well that there was no thought of replacing him. He was a square peg tightly wedged into a square hole, and not an hour passed that he didn’t curse his knowledge of the Hungarian tongue, and his talent for trouble-shooting.
He shepherded Jeff from office to office, presenting him to the staff. As he introduced the men, and a few women, he identified them by their jobs. He said, “This is Mr. Kovacs, our chief disbursing officer,” or, “This is Captain Reedy, our Assistant Air Attaché.” But some he introduced simply by their names, without referring to their jobs, and Jeff knew that this was because for one reason or another their affiliations or assignments were considered confidential. Eventually he would grow to know all of them, and something of what they were doing, but in the beginning they would be mysterious. These men seemed as much in a pattern as those in blue suits, and those in uniform. They all appeared to own gabardine trench coats and pork pie hats. And while their ages must have differed, they all seemed the same age, like stones in a wall.
His mind blurred with the strange faces tagged with new names, few of which he remembered. He knew this would soon change. In a few weeks the faces would become all too familiar, like fellow passengers on a long cruise. When it was finished Todd said, “Let’s have a drink.”
Jeff said, “I need one.”
Todd said, “There’s an espresso around the corner where I can always get fair cognac. I’ll cut you in on it.”
He knew he was going to like Todd, but if he had been asked why he knew this he would only have been able to say, “He speaks my language.” He hoped that as soon as they were seated behind their drinks Todd would brief him on the Legation. What he had seen was much more complex than indicated by the table of organization charts in Washington. Yet it had probably formed itself to meet the challenge of place and time. He was eager to know all about it, and become part of it, as quickly as possible.
Out on the street he put aside his preoccupation to begin his assessment of the city and its people. Pest was not a ruin like Buda. Here in Pest the streets were free of rubble. New plaster and unpainted boards, ugly as scar tissue, had grown across the wounds in the buildings. The people seemed as well dressed, generally, as you would see in the poorer sections of Brooklyn, or Baltimore, or Boston. But this was not a poor section of Budapest. This was the center of finance, and culture, and government. On the Bathory Utca he and Quincy Todd were by far the best dressed, the most prosperous of men. He was conscious that people noticed them, some with respect, some with envy or irritation or even a hatred open and hot. They were conspicuous. They were Americans. They had been born in a land that had picked this time to erupt its riches, and this accident of birth made them members of the time’s aristocracy. His passport was the century’s patent of nobility.
They turned into the broad Vaczi Korut, and then into an alley, and there was the espresso with its sign in flaked gold on the glass, “Café Molnar.” They sat at a table with a top no bigger than a checkerboard, an elaborate steel and silver urn on the counter hissed and spat and produced thick Turkish coffee, and a girl brought them the coffee in tiny cups, along with the cognac. Jeff sipped the cognac, and then the coffee, and the combination was rich and warming. “It’s good,” Jeff said. “What do they charge?”
“Just one thing,” Todd said.
“One thing?”
“A forint. When they changed from the pengo to the forint everybody called the forints things and I still call them things. You want to keep this place quiet. It’s the only place in the whole section where you can get a drink for a reasonable price, and we don’t want it overrun by the Dick Tracys.”
“The who?”
“The Dick Tracys. You met some of them.”
“Oh, I see. What do they do?”
“Oh, they do everything. We’ve got the MIS, the ONI, the CIC, the FBI, the CID, G-2 from USFA, Central Intelligence Agency, assorted Treasury agents, and our own security people. We’re supposed to have more Dick Tracys,” Quincy Todd added with some pride, “than any other Mission in Europe. Except, of course, Berlin and Vienna, and you can’t count them, really, because they’re occupation zones.”
“Don’t they get in each other’s hair?”
“Well, they spy on each other, and they read each other’s mail, and they try to scoop each other on hot intelligence, but they don’t exactly get in each other’s hair. Theoretically, the Admiral coordinates their activities. But they do get in my hair. They use all the transport, and eat all the food, and drink all the Scotch at the Park Club, and every once in a while one of them investigates me. It’s the price I pay for the maintenance of democracy and Western civilization.”
“The world being what it is,” Jeff said, thinking of the Atlantis Project, and wondering whether Todd knew anything of it, “I suppose they’re necessary.”
“I guess so, but you can’t be sure, because nobody knows exactly what they all do, because everything they do is secret.”
Todd talked of the routine of the Legation. The Legation had a motor pool and a garage, and on the Kossuth Lajos-tér it maintained a mess. The mess was a carry-over from the days, back in 1945, when only a Military Mission had been in Budapest. But with the resumption of diplomatic relations it had been wise and expedient to continue it. “The Admiral,” Todd said, “likes everybody to eat at the mess at lunch. The Admiral doesn’t want people straying around in restaurants. He likes to keep his finger on things. You can have dinner any place you want, but it’s best to turn up at the
Park Club some time during the evening, so you can be seen. The Park Club is like a country club without golf. It was a hangout for British and Americans and French before the war and it still is but now it’s mostly American. It once was somebody’s palace, and it’s very lush. The food and liquor are good and we’ve got a fair band and there’s dancing every night. Now about women—”
“Before we start about women,” Jeff suggested, “how about telling me about the Admiral? Why an admiral in Budapest anyway?”
“Nobody knows,” Todd said. “Maybe it’s because the Hungarians are used to admirals. They had Horthy, you know.”
“That’s not reasonable.”
“All I know,” Todd said, “is that when I came here we had a general, and then we had a regular Career Minister, and now we have an admiral. Maybe it’s because they’ve got generals everywhere else, and the Navy thought it was being discriminated against, and so they put an admiral in Budapest.”
“I never heard of him until I joined the Department.”
“Didn’t you? Out in the Pacific we heard of him. He had a task force. Lost a carrier and a transport. The Army claimed he screwed things up.”
“Then what?”
“Then he was promoted to COMYDDOCSOUWESPAC.”
“What’s that?”
“Why, that’s Commander of Yards and Docks, Southwest Pacific. He fought the battle of Sydney in Prince’s and Romano’s. Then he became a wheel in Navy Intelligence, and now he’s here. He’s not a bad guy. Just security-happy.”
Todd signaled with his eyes, and the girl brought more cognac. She had strong legs that were flattered by her brief dirndl, and she weaved between the tables, her body erect but her hips moving as if she danced. She spoke to Todd in a language that Jeff had never heard before, with a few French phrases surprisingly dropping out of the sentences. Todd replied in Hungarian, and the girl said, “Okay, okay,” and smiled at Jeff, her teeth vivid white against dark lips, and patted his shoulder.
“What’s going on?” Jeff asked. He’d heard tales in Vienna about the Budapest women. But way back in Naples, they’d talked about the women in Rome. When he got to Rome it was the women in Florence, and in Florence it was the women in Milan, and then the women in Vienna. The women were always more beautiful and more eager in the next city.
“She was just asking about you. She wants to know if you’re going to be in Budapest long, and whether you’ll come here often, and whether you have a woman. I told her you already have a woman.”
“As a matter of fact I do have a woman,” Jeff said. “At least I think I have.”
“If you’re not absolutely certain,” Todd said, “you’ll soon know it in this town.” He smiled up at the girl as if they were discussing her beauty. “You’ve got to be careful about these women in Pest. Now you take Marina, here. She’s a dish, all right, but she’s a Rumanian gypsy, and if you ever got in the hay with her you’d find yourself involved with her six brothers, three sisters, and maybe her whole tribe. Anyway, she’s a social impossibility. Morgan Collingwood would swoon. He’d have you shipped to the Ivory Coast, with a recommendation to file and forget.”
“I guess you have the same trouble here,” Jeff suggested, “that we had in Vienna. They all want cigarettes and chocolate and CARE packages.”
Todd spoke to the girl, and she took away their empty coffee cups. “No,” he said then, “that isn’t it.” He looked down at his glass. “All they want in Pest is a little happiness, and a little kindness. Those have become the rarest luxuries in Eastern Europe.”
“I see.”
“I don’t like to be sentimental about it. You can’t be sentimental about women in Budapest. When you find a girl, first be sure she’s politically safe, and then be sure she hasn’t got syphilis. The Russkies used Mongol divisions to take Budapest, and they ran wild. When I got here there were a hundred thousand untreated cases of syphilis in the city. Since then the hospitals have been getting some penicillin, and other drugs, but it’s still a definite hazard of course.”
“Very interesting, and instructive,” Jeff said.
“The safest thing is to find a girl within the Mission. That won’t be easy. Girls join the FSS for one of two reasons. Some of them want travel and adventure, and the others think it’s a virgin forest for husband hunting. Most of those who want adventure have already been grabbed by the Dick Tracys, and the ones who want to marry have found out by now that there’s practically a closed season on Foreign Service Officers.”
“Well, I’m not going to let it worry me.”
“You’re not going to be a dedicated man like your boss, are you?”
“My boss? Who?”
“Fred Keller.”
“How do you know he’s going to be my boss?”
“My boy, in a Mission like this everybody knows everything. A Legation is a New England village transplanted into the middle of somebody else’s country.”
“Do you know what my job’s going to be?” Jeff asked, in what he hoped appeared innocence.
“I’ve only a vague idea, except that it must be interesting, because it’s been kept so quiet. I thought I was going to get it, and that you were going to have my job. But it looks like I’m stuck forever. Well, that’s what I get for learning Hungarian, God damn that Berlitz!”
They left after another drink, and Todd dropped him at his hotel. “I’ll have transportation for you at six-thirty,” he promised. “Most of our vehicles are jeeps, but I’ll pry loose a staff car for you tonight, because you’re messing at the Admiral’s. When you’re finished with it, send the driver back to the motor pool.”
3
While he shaved Jeff wondered what it was about Quincy Todd’s speech that seemed so familiar, and yet so irritating and strange. It was not until he was on the way out the Andrássy Utca, which slices the city from the river to the suburbs straight as a sword cut, that it came to him. He had been taking stock of the passing traffic, noting that the cars and trucks were shabby as the people. Fenders were rusted out of the lend-lease Studebakers that the Red Army still used, and the Red Army’s jeeps were misshapen as if by battle damage. The civilian automobiles looked as if they had been dragged from the back of used car lots. In all of Budapest there seemed nothing new, nothing fresh, nothing gay. And while he had been in Budapest only once before, and then only for a few days, he remembered this of the city—that it had lived and that it had smiled. Now the city had turned down its mouth, and gone into mourning for its past, and the color of its mourning was gray—the gray of unpainted boards and unsanded stone and unsmiling faces, the gray of Russian uniforms and Russian trucks and cars. In the whole length of Andrássy Utca, only the political posters splashed color, and red alone is depressing and monotonous.
Then he realized what it was that was familiar and yet queer about the way Quincy Todd talked. Automobiles weren’t automobiles. They were vehicles, or transportation. A garage was a motor pool. He would lunch at a mess. Hell, he thought, it’s like being back in the Army.
4
The Admiral lived in the austere Legation residence, standing behind its stately poplars and circular driveway in the embassy section that adjoins the Városliget, the big park that was like Rock Creek Park in Washington. A uniformed doorman bowed him out of the sedan, and a butler took his topcoat and black homburg and said, “You’re Mr. Baker, sir? The Admiral is waiting for you in the library.” He led Jeff down a long hallway, deeply carpeted, rich with murals and statuary that reflected the good taste of some former occupant, some peacetime appointee, who had inclination and money to furnish this dwelling so that it might properly advertise the wealth and culture of his country. The manner of his reception, and the grace and grandeur of the hallway, impressed Jeff, so that he experienced a pleasing sensation of excitement, and of being part of something important. Now his rank limited him to a hotel room, or a small apartment, but one day his government might make him master of a residence like this. One day he might be the United
States of America in a foreign land.
The butler slid open a pair of double doors, Jeff walked through them, and his dreams were scattered by a quarterdeck bellow: “Watch where the hell you’re putting your feet!”
Shocked into awkward immobility, he stood like a crane with one foot in the air. He looked down. He had almost stepped on a model battleship. It was one of a fleet that sailed through a narrow channel of leather-bound books across an isthmus of Oriental runner. The Admiral was on his hands and knees in the middle of another fleet on the other side of the room, glaring up at him like an angry bulldog. “All right, Baker, come in,” he growled. “Don’t stand staring like you never saw me before.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Admiral sat back and crossed his legs. That morning he had been wearing a tweed suit, but now he was Navy, his uniform coat across the back of a chair. Jeff guessed that he changed into uniform at the end of a day, for comfort, the way some men put on a dressing gown. “I’m working out a problem,” the Admiral said. “Want to join me? Move some of these ships around?”
“I’ll try,” Jeff said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”
“That’s all right. I’ll tell you what to do. Take that fleet there.”
“The one between the books?”
“Yes. The one in the Bosporus. You’ve got the American fleet, which is in the Bosporus, and I’ve got the Russian fleet, over here in the Black Sea.”
Jeff sat down on the floor, cross-legged like the Admiral, wondering what to do next. It occurred to him that some men play with electric trains, and others collect stamps, or ancient automobiles, and some men whittle, and play chess by mail, and do double-crostics, so he should not consider the Admiral childish simply because his hobby was holding maneuvers on the library floor. He picked up a carrier, admiring the workmanship, and said, “This is the Midway class, isn’t it? It looks just like the Midway”