“The unbekannte Menschen,” the driver replied without turning his head. “The unknown men, so the papers call them.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Russian deserters. At this season they stop fools who are out at this hour, and strip them of their clothes. So then they can hide in civilian clothes, and perhaps try to escape to the West. Always the papers call these clothes bandits the unbekannte Menschen, because the papers do not dare to mention Russian deserters, but all Pest knows what is meant.”
“Are there many of them?”
The driver moved his shoulders. “Who can tell?”
8
Jeff relaxed against the back of the seat, and lit a cigarette, and then lit another for the driver. He discovered that his hands were shaking, and he was glad when they stopped under the marquee lights of the Astoria. He told the driver to return to the motor pool, as Quincy Todd had instructed. He went to the desk, and the night porter gave him his key, and a brown envelope. He turned it over in his fingers, and saw that all that was written on it was “J. W. Baker” printed with pencil. “Who left this?” Jeff asked.
“I don’t know, sir. A man, sir.”
“What kind of a man? Someone from the Legation?” Ever since the war’s end the Astoria had been used as a transient hotel by Americans, so the hotel people would recognize the Mission’s couriers and drivers.
“No. I think a Hungarian, sir.”
“Is the elevator running?”
“Oh, no, sir.”
Jeff put the envelope in his pocket and walked upstairs, his legs heavy and aching. Their stiffness, he thought, was the result of his deep sleep in the plane the night before. A plane’s reclining chairs are comfortable, but you cannot fully stretch out your legs, if the legs are extra long.
In his room he stripped off his clothes impatiently, climbed into his pajamas, and pulled back the covers of his bed. He remembered the letter, swore, and debated whether to fall into bed, or to walk across the room and open it. Then he recalled he had left his cigarettes in his vest, and he would want them on his bed table. He often woke in the night, suddenly, and when he did he always needed a cigarette. So he had to cross the room anyway.
He found his cigarettes, and then ripped open the envelope. Inside was a letter, neatly printed, but some of the letters looked queer, as if written backwards, or backhanded.
“If you are the Captain Jeff W. Baker who was at the Oriente Hotel in Bari,” it read, “I would very much like to see you. If you are that Baker please be so kind as to leave a note at the apartment of János Donat, at Lovag Ut. 25, and assign a place of meeting. Any place of meeting will be okay with me but I do not wish to be embarrassment to you.”
The letter was signed, “Leonides.”
Jeff knew only one Leonides, and he was Leonides Lasenko, a major in the Russian Air Force.
Jeff read the note again, and shoved it under his pillow. He was too tired to think about it. He snapped out the light, and stretched his body until his feet touched the footboard. He rubbed his head into the pillow and thought how strange it was that the last time he had been in bed it had been Susan Pickett’s bed in Washington. He tried to recall it, but he could not imagine how it was, for it was so long, long ago. She was two days and one world away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
QUINCY TODD FOUND him an apartment. It was only a room and bath, with its private entrance into the hallway, in Madame Angell’s flat on the fourth floor of a reddish stone house on Revay Utca. Madame Angell had been letting out this room to British and Americans since the twilight years after the first World War. Her third husband had been an Englishman, and he had willed her his name and his nationality, which was her distinction and her pride. Madame Angell was an Istanbul-born Greek. Her first husband had been a Turk, her second an Armenian, and her fourth an Austrian, but she considered herself English, and kept a faded blue British passport conspicuous on the parlor table, alongside a photograph of Mr. Angell. While Mr. Angell had been something of a rake, and had never found it expedient or perhaps even possible to return to Britain, as the years passed she magnified his virtues, and made light of his peccadilloes. In that section of Budapest she was known as “the Englishwoman who lives on Revay Utca,” and every year, in times of peace, she attended the King’s birthday party at the British Embassy. During the war she had let the room to a German economic specialist, but nobody spoke of this now.
Quincy Todd had warned him of all this, and more. The building superintendent, Sandor, who also functioned as elevator operator, was a police spy. But that was to be expected anywhere in Europe. Madame Angell would use Jeff as a sounding board against which to exercise her favorite among her ten or twelve tongues. Hot water would appear only at sporadic intervals, and heat would be unpredictable. He was not to leave candy in the room, for while Madame Angell was completely honest, she could no more resist chocolate than a drunkard could resist whiskey. And he should not leave whiskey in his room, because Sandor would search the room at least once a week, and Sandor was a drunkard.
However, there were compensations. His rent was six hundred forints a month, which was within his living allowance. The house on Revay Utca was fifteen minutes’ walk to the Legation, and less to Keller’s establishment. The furniture was comfortable, although old-fashioned. It had a telephone. This was important, since for ten years no new telephones had been installed in Budapest.
And it was a large room with plenty of wall space for his maps. When his friends the maps were on the walls he felt at home.
He discovered that Madame Angell stayed up all night maneuvering the dials of a large and intricate radio. Madame Angell was a propaganda fan. She maintained herself in a narcotic state of tension and excitement by absorbing the whole world’s cacophony of violence—threats of war and rumors of war, news of fighting, bombings, assassinations, revolutions, plots, riots, coups, and the verbal marches and counter-marches of the heads of states. For her the end of civilization was something breathlessly postponed from day to day.
She was a soap opera addict on an international scale. For Madame Angell the troubles of Hungary were dwarfed by the monumental crises of greater nations, just as the troubles of the American housewife are dispelled as she is anesthetized by the agonies of Ma Perkins, Stella Dallas, Young Widder Brown, Helen Trent, Our Gal Sunday, Young Doctor Malone, middle-aged Dr. Jordan, the Second Mrs. Burton, and Portia facing life. Once daily her receptacle of disaster overflowed, she had to relay her tidings of impending doom to someone, and when he was at home Jeff was always closest to hand.
2
He had requisitioned a portable typewriter from the Legation, and each Wednesday and Saturday evening he wrote to Susan, for the diplomatic air pouches closed for personal mail at noon on Thursdays and Sundays. On the Wednesday of his third week in Budapest he was in his room, writing to Susan, when Madame Angell rapped, and jostled her way through his door, carrying a tea tray.
“A little tiffin, Mr. Baker,” she said, “but no sugar. It would be nice if you could get some sugar.”
“I’ll try,” Jeff promised reluctantly. He had provided her with five pounds of sugar, magically produced out of the mess by Quincy Todd, only two weeks before.
“Tiffin isn’t tiffin without sugar, is it, actually?”
“I suppose not.”
Madame Angell fitted herself into the big chair. She was a ponderous and billowy woman, and she must once have been even larger, for the flesh folded loose from her face. She was like a balloon that has been inflated almost to bursting, but from which some air has been allowed to escape, so that the surface is wrinkled and out of shape. “Poor Mr. Baker,” she said. “Poor, poor Mr. Baker. I don’t wonder that you look worried.”
“Do I?” Jeff asked in surprise. He had been worrying, at that. He had not answered Leonides’ note, and he could not push Leonides out of his mind. He had been enriched by Leonides’ friendship, and now the Russian was calling the loan, an
d he could not be ignored. Jeff was, frankly, afraid of being seen with a Russian, or in any way becoming entangled with a Russian. Nobody in the Legation ever spoke to a Russian. It had been two years since a Russian had had a drink, or even attended a formal diplomatic dinner, at the Minister’s residence or the Park Club. No single thread remained of the strands of mutual purpose that once bound them together as allies. All this he was writing to Susan. He found that his thoughts and logic clarified as he set them down on paper.
Madame Angell made a clucking sound with her lips, and shook her head. “Poor young man! Your country torn to pieces while you sit here. Who could ever imagine a revolution in America? Fancy!”
“A what!”
“The revolution. Surely you’ve heard of it?”
“No. Why, that’s incredible.”
“I’ve been listening to it all evening. All your southern provinces—the whole southern part of your country—is in revolt. The senators and governors of your southern provinces—or do you call them states?—have called for the overthrow of the President. The details are unclear, but it seems the revolt is led by a southern leader named Jim Crow. All the southern governors and senators have sworn they will uphold him.”
“I begin to see,” Jeff said.
“The revolt seems to have resulted from something called the Lynch Law. I think an attempt was made to declare this law not in accordance with your Constitution. I am not sure, except that everything is a bloody mess.”
“That isn’t a revolution,” Jeff told her. “That’s just politics inside a party. It’s as if—” He searched for a simile in the political life of Hungary that would be understandable to her, and found that there weren’t any. “Where did you hear this?” he demanded.
“First I heard it from Radio Sofia. I think they quoted a dispatch from Washington by way of Stockholm printed in Pravda. It was very plain. There is a revolution in America. My flaming oath!”
“Don’t you listen to the ‘Voice of America’?” Jeff asked.
“Certainly. I hear New York every night. I hear it between the BBC and Bucharest.”
“Well, what did they say about it?”
“Nothing. That’s why I know it’s true. When I want to discover what’s happening in Washington I listen to Moscow, and when I want to find out what’s happening in Moscow I listen to New York. Isn’t the world in a beastly state!”
“You must think so!” Jeff said.
He finished his tea, and Madame Angell picked up his tray, and then put it down again. “How forgetful of me,” she said. “How bloody forgetful.” She located a pocket in the folds of her dress and drew out an envelope. “Sandor brought this up as I was bringing the tiffin.”
He put the envelope beside his typewriter. He could guess what was in it. “Thanks, Madame Angell.”
She kept her eyes on the envelope, as if in hopes that Jeff would open it while she remained there. “Sandor didn’t say who brought it, or when. Sandor is a bad type, you know. Sandor may have—”
“I know.”
She shrugged her heavy shoulders. “You Americans have grown secret like all the rest. But with the troubles in your homeland, I can hardly blame you. Bloody awful, these revolutions. Now I must listen to Belgrade. Belgrade is always good. Did you know that Tito has his own atomic bomb? God’s truth. Heard it on Belgrade last night.”
3
Jeff waited until he heard her door close, and then he opened the envelope. The note, this time, was curt.
“You go often to the Espresso Molnar. I beg you to be there tonight. I will wait until midnight.”
He re-read the last page of his letter to Susan.
“I met this Russian in Bari,” he had written, “at the Fifteenth Air Force Headquarters. We were both there as liaison officers, and we were billeted together in the Hotel Oriente.
“I think I’d better explain a little more about why I was there, and why he was there. After I left the rest camp they didn’t send me back to Division, but assigned me to Fifth Army Headquarters in Florence. I was the captain who moved the maps in the briefing tent—about as useful as a magician’s assistant. Then, when they were planning the Spring offensive in 1945, they decided to use heavy bombers in tactical support of Fifth Army in the attack on Bologna. Since I knew the ground fairly well, they sent me to Bari, and we figured out ways for the heavies to identify our forward positions so they wouldn’t bomb our own troops. Leonides was in Bari for exactly the same reason, except his job was to protect the Russian army operating on the other side of the Adriatic. I remember now what a devil of a time he had wheedling a bomb line out of his own generals.
“But he did his best, and he was a swell guy. Everybody liked him, and he was the best poker player in the Oriente.”
Jeff wondered why he had written to Susan that this Russian was the best poker player in the Oriente, and he guessed it was because there was no way of knowing a man like sitting at a table with him, night after night, and examining his play at poker. From these poker games at the Oriente Jeff could attest to Leonides’ character. He could swear that Leonides was intelligent, and a keen student of human nature. He knew he was ordinarily patient, but at times impetuous and daring. Since Leonides did not gloat when he won, or lament overmuch when he lost, Jeff knew he was a gentleman, although he had been born in the slums of Moscow. He knew, further, that Leonides was honest and courageous.
The last paragraph he had written said: “Much as I would like to see him, I don’t see how I can risk it. It would be sure to become known, and the Legation would consider me most indiscreet, and perhaps dangerous.”
Jeff ran a string of x’s through this paragraph, and wrote: “Although I know it is indiscreet, I am going to see him tonight. I just received another note from him. I think he’s in trouble and needs my help. Anyway, what the hell, I’m a free American citizen, am I not, and can talk to whoever I choose? Or is that anarchism?”
4
Now that he had made his decision, he was in a hurry to go. He would finish the letter later, or in the morning. He put on his overcoat, stepped into the hallway, and went through the useless gesture of locking his door. Almost any key would fit it, and he was fairly certain his room had been visited on several occasions while he was absent. He remembered the letter, and swore at himself for his carelessness. He went back into the room, swept the first three pages of the letter off the table, plucked the fourth from the typewriter, folded them and put them in his inside coat pocket.
He rang three times for the elevator, and was about to use the stairs when he heard it grumbling its way upward.
Sandor Patek was fifty, bent and slight, with watery blue eyes and faded yellow hair that curled raggedly at the ends. He had a daughter in St. Louis. When Jeff was in the elevator he usually talked of her. For a year he had received no letters. He wished she would send him CARE packages. She had married a very rich man, and had an automobile and a house with two baths. “You go out this night?” he asked in German, as the elevator descended. “Is not this Wednesday, the night you remain upstairs? Perhaps the note I brought had something to do with it, nicht wahr?”
“You are absolutely right,” Jeff said. “The note is from a beautiful woman. She needs my help.”
“So?” Sandor said, blinking expectantly.
“She was seized by Rajk’s secret police and now hangs suspended by her toes from the Franz Josef Bridge. I am on my way to rescue her.”
The elevator jerked to a stop, and Sandor opened the door, his face showing anger and shock, as if Jeff had committed a desecration. Rajk was the Communist Minister of the Interior, and therefore Sandor’s boss, and his name was not used loosely nor was the secret police ever ridiculed, although it might be hated. Sandor said something nasty in Hungarian, for he knew Jeff did not have the language. All the way to the espresso Jeff felt pleased when he recalled Sandor’s face. People turned to stare at the tall American in the warm overcoat speeding on long legs past St. Stephen’s, chuck
ling out loud to himself and incongruously wearing no hat.
5
He walked through the door of the Café Molnar and he saw Leonides immediately, for his was the only uniform there. Somehow Jeff had expected that Leonides would be in civilian clothes, and that the clothes probably would be shabby and ill-fitting, and that Leonides would be shielding himself in the darkest corner.
Altogether there were eight tables in the espresso, and there were groups of three or four around each one, for while there were few calories in the Molnar’s fare, still there was quick warmth, and conversation, and the illusion of Kaffee klatsch relaxation. Only Leonides sat alone. He was at the most conspicuous table, the table closest to the window. His uniform was immaculate, the blouse smooth until it reached the belt, and evenly pleated below. His boots were black and shining, the stiff epaulets on his shoulders soft yellow. He was not so tall as Jeff, but built compactly, and when he rose he gave the impression of endurance and power, like a locomotive that has been still on the track, and then moves slowly ahead.
Thus he rose as Jeff threaded his way towards him, and held out his broad hand, and grinned so that the four steel teeth in the front of his mouth, which he used to display so proudly to the poker players at the Oriente, gleamed silver. “So you old bastard!” Leonides said. “You came! You have not declared war on me.”
“Not yet,” Jeff said, grasping Leonides’ hand in both his hands. He was conscious that his words rang louder than they should. As he seated himself he heard no other sound in the espresso except the scrape of his chair. It is the custom, in a Budapest café, for the patrons to be openly and pleasantly curious about those around them. But not as curious as this. Not paralyzed. The espresso was hushed as in the emptiness of a Sunday morning. Jeff felt embarrassed, like a man who goes to the theater and is suddenly dragged out on the stage.