The Last Frontier Page 3

  The Andrassy Ut! Even though he had been becoming surer of the identity of the man with the passing of every moment, confirmation of his suspicions still came to Reynolds with a sense of shock and he could feel his face tightening in spite of himself under the speculative gaze of the tall stranger. Headquarters of the dreaded AVO, the Hungarian Secret Police currently reckoned the most ruthless and implacably efficient behind the iron curtain, the Andressy Ut was the one place on earth he wanted at all costs to avoid.

  ‘Ah! I see the name is not new to you.’ The stranger smiled. ‘That bodes no good for you, Mr Buhl, or for your bona-fides: the Andrassy Ut is hardly a name on every western businessman’s lips.’ He turned to the policeman. ‘Well, what are you stuttering about now?’

  ‘The – the telephone.’ The voice was high and squeaking again and faltering badly: he was afraid now to the point of terror. ‘It’s out of action.’

  ‘Inevitably. Matchless efficiency on every hand. May the gods help our unfortunate country.’ He produced a wallet from his pocket, opened it briefly for inspection. ‘Sufficiently good authority for the removal of your prisoner?’

  ‘Of course, Colonel, of course.’ The words tripped over one another. ‘Whatever you say, Colonel.’

  ‘Good.’ The wallet snapped shut, and the stranger turned to Reynolds and bowed with ironic courtesy.

  ‘Colonel Szendrô, Headquarters, Hungarian Political Police. I am at your service, Mr Buhl, and my car at your disposal. We leave for Budapest, immediately. My colleagues and I have been expecting you for some weeks now, and are most anxious to discuss certain matters with you.’

  TWO

  It was pitch dark outside now, but light streaming from the open door and uncovered window of the hut gave them enough visibility to see by. Colonel Szendrô’s car was parked on the other side of the road – a black, left-hand drive Mercedes saloon already covered with a deep layer of snow, all except the front part of the bonnet where the engine heat melted the snow as it fell. There was a minute’s delay while the colonel told them to release the truck driver and search the inside of the truck for any personal luggage Buhl might have been forced to abandon there – they found his overnight bag almost immediately and stuffed his gun into it – then Szendrô opened the front right-hand door of the car and gestured Reynolds to his seat.

  Reynolds would have sworn that no one man driving a car could have held him captive for fifty miles, only to find out how wrong he was even before the car started. While a soldier with a rifle covered Reynolds from the left-hand side, Szendrô stooped inside the other door, opened the glove compartment in front of Reynolds, fetched out two lengths of thin chain and left the glove box open.

  ‘A somewhat unusual car, my dear Buhl,’ the colonel said apologetically. ‘But you understand. From time to time I feel that I must give certain of my passengers a feeling of – ah – security.’ Rapidly he unlocked one of the handcuffs, passed the end link of one of the chains through it, locked it, passed the chain through a ring or eye bolt in the back of the glove box and secured it to the other handcuff. Then he looped the second chain round Reynolds’ legs, just above the knees and, closing the door and leaning in through the opened window, secured it with a small padlock to the arm-rest. He stood back to survey his work.

  ‘Satisfactory, I think. You should be perfectly comfortable and have ample freedom of movement – but not enough, I assure you, to reach me. At the same time you will find it difficult to throw yourself out of the door, which you would find far from easy to push open anyway: you will observe that the pull-out handle is missing from your door.’ The tone was light, even bantering, but Reynolds knew better than to be deceived. ‘Also, kindly refrain from damaging yourself by surreptitiously testing the strength of the chains and their anchors: the chains have a breaking load of just over a ton, the arm-rest is specially reinforced and that ring in the glove box bolted through on to the chassis … Well, what on earth do you want now?’

  ‘I forgot to tell you, Colonel.’ The policeman’s voice was quick, nervous. ‘I sent a message to our Budapest Office asking to send a car for this man.’

  ‘You did?’ Szendrô’s voice was sharp. ‘When?’

  ‘Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Fool! You should have told me immediately. However, it’s too late now. No harm done, possibly some good. If they are as thick in the head as you are, a circumstance of which it is admittedly difficult to conceive, a long drive in the cold night air should clear their minds admirably.’

  Colonel Szendrô banged the door shut, switched on the roof light above the windscreen so that he should have no difficulty in seeing his prisoner, and drove off for Budapest. The Mercedes was equipped with snow tyres on all four wheels, and, in spite of the hard-packed snow on the road, Szendrô made good time. He drove with the casual, easy precision of an expert, his cold blue eyes for ever shifting to his right, very frequently and at varying intervals.

  Reynolds sat very still, staring right ahead. He had already, in spite of the colonel’s admonitions, tested the chains; the colonel hadn’t exaggerated. Now he was forcing his mind to think coldly, clearly and as constructively as possible. His position was almost hopeless – it would be completely so when they reached Budapest. Miracles happened, but only a certain kind of miracle: no one had ever escaped from the AVO Headquarters, from the torture chambers in Stalin Street. Once there he was lost: if he was ever to escape it would have to be from this car, inside the next hour.

  There was no window winding handle on the door – the colonel had thoughtfully removed all such temptations: even if the window had been open he couldn’t have reached the handle on the outside. His hands couldn’t reach the wheel; he had already measured the arc of radius of the chain and his straining fingers would have been at least two inches away. He could move his legs to a certain extent, but couldn’t raise them high enough to kick in the windscreen, shatter the toughened glass throughout its length and perhaps cause a crash at fairly high speed. He could have placed his feet against the dashboard, and he knew of some cars where he could have heaved the front seat backwards off the rails. But everything in this car spelt solidity, and if he tried and failed, as he almost certainly would, all he’d probably get for his pains would be a tap on the head that would keep him quiet till they got to the Andrassy Ut. All the time he deliberately compelled himself to keep his mind off what was going to happen to him when he got there: that way lay only weakness and ultimate destruction.

  His pockets – had he anything in his pockets he could use? Anything solid enough to throw at Szendrô’s head, shock him for a length of time necessary to lose control and crash the car: Reynolds was aware that he himself might be hurt as seriously as the colonel, even though he had the advantage of preparation: but a fifty-fifty chance was better than the one in a million he had without it. He knew exactly where Szendrô had put the key to the handcuffs.

  But a rapid mental inventory dismissed that hope: he had nothing heavier in his pocket than a handful of forints. His shoes, then – could he remove a shoe and get Szendrô in the face with it before the colonel knew what he was doing? But that thought came only a second ahead of the realization of its futility; with his wrists handcuffed, the only way he could reach his shoes in any way unobtrusively was between his legs – and his knees were lashed tightly together … Another idea, desperate but with a chance of success, had just occurred to him when the colonel spoke for the first time in the fifteen minutes since they had left the police block.

  ‘You are a dangerous man, Mr Buhl,’ he remarked conversationally. ‘You think too much – Cassius – you know your Shakespeare, of course.’

  Reynolds said nothing. Every word this man said was a potential trap.

  ‘The most dangerous man I’ve ever had in this car, I should say, and a few desperate characters have sat from time to time where you’re sitting now,’ Szendrô went on ruminatively. ‘You know where you’re going, and you don’t appear to c
are. But you must, of course.’

  Again Reynolds kept silent. The plan might work – the chance of success was enough to justify the risk.

  ‘The silence is uncompanionable, to say the least,’ Colonel Szendrô observed. He lit a cigarette, sent the match spinning through the ventilation window. Reynolds stiffened slightly – the very opening he wanted. Szendrô went on: ‘You are quite comfortable, I trust?’

  ‘Quite.’ Reynolds’ conversational tone matched Szendrô’s own. ‘But I’d appreciate a cigarette too, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘By all means.’ Szendrô was hospitality itself. ‘One must cater for one’s guests – you’ll find half a dozen lying loose inside the glove compartment. A cheap and undistinguished brand, I fear, but I’ve always found that people in your – ah – position do not tend to be over-critical about these things. A cigarette – any cigarette – is a great help in times of stress.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Reynolds nodded at the projection on top of the dashboard at his own side. ‘Cigar lighter, is it not?’

  ‘It is. Use it by all means.’

  Reynolds stretched forward with his handcuffed wrists, pressed it down for a few seconds then lifted it out, its spiral tip glowing red in the faint light from above. Then, just as it cleared the fascia, his hands fumbled and he dropped it on the floor. He reached down to get it, but the chain brought his hands up with a sharp jerk inches from the floor. He swore softly to himself.

  Szendrô laughed, and Reynolds, straightening, looked at him. There was no malice in the colonel’s face, just a mixture of amusement and admiration, the admiration predominating.

  ‘Very, very clever, Mr Buhl. I said you were a dangerous man, and now I’m surer than ever.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘We are now presented with a choice of three possible lines of action, are we not? None of them, I may say, has any marked appeal for me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘Magnificent again!’ Szendrô was smiling broadly. ‘The puzzlement in your voice couldn’t be improved upon. Three courses are open, I say. First, I could courteously bend over and down to retrieve it, whereupon you would do your best to crush in the back of my head with your handcuffs. You would certainly knock me senseless – and you observed very keenly, without in any way appearing to do so, exactly where I put the key to these handcuffs.’ Reynolds looked at him uncomprehendingly, but already he could taste defeat in his mouth.

  ‘Secondly I could toss you a box of matches. You would strike one, ignite the heads of all the other matches in the box, throw it in my face, crash the car and who knows what might happen then? Or you could just hope that I’d give you a light, either from the lighter or cigarette; then the finger judo lock, a couple of broken fingers, a transfer to a wrist lock and then the key at your leisure. Mr Buhl, you will bear watching.’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ Reynolds said roughly.

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps. I have a suspicious mind, but I survive.’ He tossed something on to the lap of Reynolds’ coat. ‘Herewith one single match. You can light it on the metal hinge of the glove box.’

  Reynolds sat and smoked in silence. He couldn’t give up, he wouldn’t give up, although he knew in his heart that the man at the wheel knew all the answers – and the answers to many questions which he, Reynolds, probably didn’t know ever existed. Half a dozen separate plans occurred to him, each one more fantastic and with less chance of success than the previous one, and he was just coming to the end of his second cigarette – he had lit it off the butt end of the first – when the colonel changed down into third gear, peered at the near side of the road, braked suddenly and swung off into a small lane. Half a minute later, on a stretch of the lane parallel to and barely twenty yards from the highway, but almost entirely screened from it by thick, snow-covered bushes, Szendrô stopped the car and switched off the ignition. Then he turned off his head and side lights, wound his window right down in spite of the bitter cold and turned to face Reynolds. The roof light above the windscreen still burned in the darkness.

  Here it comes, Reynolds thought bleakly. Thirty miles yet to Budapest, but Szendrô just can’t bear to wait any longer. Reynolds had no illusions, no hope. He had had access to secret files concerning the activities of the Hungarian Political Police in the year that had elapsed since the bloody October rising of 1956, and they had made ghastly reading: it was difficult to think of the AVO – the AVH, as they were more lately known – as people belonging to the human race. Wherever they went they carried with them terror and destruction, a living death and death itself, the slow death of the aged in deportee camps and the young in the slave labour camps, the quick death of the summary executions and the ghastly, insane screaming deaths of those who succumbed to the most abominable tortures ever conceived of the evil that lay buried deep in the hearts of the satanic perverts who find their way into the political police of dictatorships the world over. And no secret police in modern times excelled or even matched Hungary’s AVO in the nameless barbarities, the inhuman cruelties and all-pervading terror with which they held hopeless people in fear-ridden thrall: they had learnt much from Hitler’s Gestapo during the Second World War, and had that knowledge refined by their current nominal masters, the NKVD of Russia. But now the pupils had outdistanced their mentors, and they had developed flesh-crawling refinements and more terribly effective methods of terrorization such as the others had not dreamed of.

  But Colonel Szendrô was still at the talking stage. He turned round in his seat, lifted Reynolds’ bag from the back, set it on his lap and tried to open it. It was locked.

  ‘The key,’ Szendrô said. ‘And don’t tell me there isn’t one, or that it’s lost. Both you and I, I suspect, Mr Buhl, are long past that kindergarten stage.’

  They were indeed, Reynolds thought grimly. ‘Inside ticket pocket of my jacket.’

  ‘Get it. And your papers at the same time.’

  ‘I can’t get at these.’

  ‘Allow me.’ Reynolds winced as Szendrô’s pistol barrel pushed hard against lips and teeth, felt the colonel slip the papers from his breast pocket with a professional ease that would have done credit to a skilled pickpocket. And then Szendrô was back on his own side of the car, the bag open: almost, it seemed, without pausing to think, he had slit open the canvas lining and extracted a slim fold of papers, and was now comparing them with those he had taken from Reynolds’ pockets.

  ‘Well, well, well, Mr Buhl. Interesting, most interesting. Chameleon-like, you change your identity in a moment of time. Name, birthplace, occupation, even your nationality all altered in an instant. A remarkable transformation.’ He studied the two sets of documents, one in either hand. ‘Which, if any, are we to believe?’

  ‘The Austrian papers are fakes,’ Reynolds growled. For the first time he stopped speaking in German and switched to fluent idiomatic Hungarian. ‘I had word that my mother, who has lived in Vienna for many years, was dying. I had to have them.’

  ‘Ah, of course. And your mother?’

  ‘No more.’ Reynolds crossed himself. ‘You can find her obituary in Tuesday’s paper. Maria Rakosi.’

  ‘I’m at the stage now where I would be astonished if I didn’t.’ Szendrô spoke also in Hungarian, but his accent was not that of Budapest, Reynolds was sure of that – he had spent too many agonizing months learning every last Budapest inflection and idiom from an ex-Professor of Central European languages of Budapest University. Szendrô was speaking again. ‘A tragic interlude, I am sure. I bare my head in silent sympathy – metaphorically, you understand. So you claim your real name is Lajos Rakosi? A very well-known name indeed.’

  ‘And a common one. And genuine. You’ll find my name, date of birth, address, date of marriage all in the records. Also my –’

  ‘Spare me.’ Szendrô held up a protesting hand. ‘I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt you could show me the very school desk on which your initials are carved and produce the once-little girl whose books
you once carried home from school. None of which would impress me in the slightest. What does impress me is the extraordinary thoroughness and care of not only yourself but the superiors who have so magnificently trained you for whatever purpose they have in mind. I do not think I have ever met anything quite like it.’

  ‘You talk in riddles, Colonel Szendrô. I’m just an ordinary Budapest citizen. I can prove it. All right, I did have fake Austrian papers. But my mother was dying, and I was prepared to risk indiscretion. But I’ve committed no crime against our country. Surely you can see that. If I wished, I could have gone over to the west. But I did not so wish. My country is my country, and Budapest is my home. So I came back.’

  ‘A slight correction,’ Szendrô murmured. ‘You’re not coming back to Budapest – you’re going, and probably for the first time in your life.’ He was looking Reynolds straight in the eyes when his expression changed. ‘Behind you!’

  Reynolds twisted round, a split second before he realized Szendrô had shouted in English – and there had been nothing in Szendrô’s eyes or tone to betray his meaning. Reynold’s turned back slowly, an expression almost of boredom on his face.

  ‘A schoolboyish trick. I speak English’ – he was using English now– ‘why should I deny it? My dear Colonel, if you belonged to Budapest, which you don’t, you would know that there are at least fifty thousand of us who speak English. Why should so common an accomplishment be regarded with suspicion?’

  ‘By all the gods!’ Szendrô slapped his hand on his thigh. It’s magnificent, it’s really magnificent. My professional jealousy is aroused. To have a Britisher or an American – British, I think, the American intonation is almost impossible to conceal – talk Hungarian with a Budapest accent as perfectly as you do is no small feat. But to have an Englishman talk English with a Budapest accent – that is superb!’