Алистер Маклин - The Last Frontier

‘Why are you still up and talking? It’s one o’clock in the morning – it’s after one, and I’d like to get some sleep.’ Suddenly her eyes caught sight of the pile of clothing on the table, and she swung round to catch sight of Reynolds, sitting on the bench and clad only in the old blanket. Her eyes widened, and she took an involuntary step backwards, clutching her wrap even more tightly around her. ‘Who – who on earth is this, Jansci?’

‘Jansci!’ Michael Reynolds was on his feet without any volition on his own part. For the first time since he had fallen into Hungarian hands the studied calmness, the mask of emotional indifference vanished and his eyes were alight with excitement and a hope that he had thought had vanished for ever. He took two quick steps towards the girl, grabbing at his blanket as it slipped and almost fell to the floor. ‘Did you say, “Jansci”?’ he demanded.

‘What’s wrong? What do you want?’ The girl had retreated as Reynolds had advanced, then stopped as she bumped into the reassuring bulk of Sandor and clutched his arm. The apprehension in her face faded, and she looked at Reynolds thoughtfully and nodded. ‘Yes, I said that. Jansci.’

‘Jansci.’ Reynolds repeated the word slowly, incredulously, like a man savouring each syllable to the full, wanting desperately to believe in the truth of something but unable to bring himself to that belief. He walked across the room, the hope and the conflicting doubt still mirrored in his eyes, and stopped before the man with the scarred hands.

‘Your name is Jansci?’ Reynolds spoke slowly, the unbelief, the inability to believe, still registering in his eyes.

‘I am called Jansci.’ The older man nodded, his eyes speculative and quiet.

‘One four one four one eight two.’ Reynolds looked unblinkingly at the other, searching for the faintest trace of response, of admission. ‘Is that it?’

‘Is that what, Mr Buhl?’

‘If you are Jansci, the number is one four one four one eight two,’ Reynolds repeated. Gently, meeting no resistance, he reached out for the scarred left hand, pushed the cuff back from the wrist and stared down at the violet tattoo. 1414182 – the number was as clear, as unblemished as if it had been made only that day.

Reynolds sat down on the edge of the desk, caught sight of a packet of cigarettes and shook one loose. Szendrô struck and held a match for him, and Reynolds nodded gratefully: he doubted whether he could have done it for himself, his hands were trembling uncontrollably. The fizzling of the igniting match seemed strangely loud in the sudden silence of the room. Jansci it was who finally broke the silence.

‘You seem to know something about me?’ he prompted gently.

‘I know a lot more.’ The tremor was dying out of Reynolds’ hands and he was coming back on balance again, outwardly, at least. He looked round the room, at Szendrô, Sandor, the girl and the youth with the quick nervous eyes, all with expressions of bewilderment or anticipation on their faces. ‘These are your friends? You can trust them absolutely – they all know who you are? Who you really are, I mean?’

‘They do. You may speak freely.’

‘Jansci is a pseudonym for Illyurin.’ Reynolds might have been repeating something by rote, something he knew off by heart, as indeed he did. ‘Major-General Alexis Illyurin. Born Kalinovka, Ukraine, October 18th, 1904. Married June 18th, 1931. Wife’s name Catherine, daughter’s name Julia’. Reynolds glanced at the girl. ‘This must be Julia, she seems about the right age. Colonel Mackintosh says he’d like to have his boots back: I don’t know what he means.’

‘Just an old joke.’ Jansci walked round the desk to his seat and leant back, smiling. ‘Well, well, my old friend Peter Mackintosh still lives. Indestructible, he always was indestructible. You must work for him, of course, Mr – ah–’

‘Reynolds. Michael Reynolds. I work for him.’

‘Describe him.’ The subtle change could hardly be called a hardening, but it was unmistakable. ‘Face, physique, clothes, history, family – everything.’

Reynolds did so. He talked for five minutes without stopping, then Jansci held up his hand.

‘Enough. You must know him, must work for him and be the person you claim to be. But he took a risk, a great risk. It is not like my old friend.’

‘I might be caught and made to talk, and you, too, would be lost?’

‘You are very quick, young man.’

‘Colonel Mackintosh took no chance,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘Your name and number – that was all I knew. Where you lived, what you looked like – I had no idea. He didn’t even tell me about the scars on your hands, these would have given me instant identification.’

‘And how then did you hope to contact me?’

‘I had the address of a café.’ Reynolds named it. ‘The haunt, Colonel Mackintosh said, of disaffected elements. I was to be there every night, same seat, same table, till I was picked up.’

‘No identification?’ Szendrô’s query lay more in the lift of an eyebrow than the inflection of the voice.

‘Naturally. My tie.’

Colonel Szendrô looked at the vivid magenta of the tie lying on the table, winced, nodded and looked away without speaking. Reynolds felt the first faint stirrings of anger.

‘Why ask if you already know?’ The edged voice betrayed the irritation in his mind.

‘No offence.’ Jansci anwered for Szendrô. ‘Endless suspicion, Mr Reynolds, is our sole guarantee of survival. We suspect everyone. Everyone who lives, everyone who moves – we suspect them every minute of every hour. But, as you see, we survive. We had been asked to contact you in that café – Imre has practically lived there for the past three days – but the request had come from an anonymous source in Vienna. There was no mention of Colonel Mackintosh – he is an old fox, that one … And when you had been met in the café?’

‘I was told that I would be led to you – or to one of two others: Hridas and the White Mouse.’

‘This has been a happy short-cut,’ Jansci murmured. ‘But I am afraid you would have found neither Hridas nor the White Mouse.’

‘They are no longer in Budapest?’

‘The White Mouse is in Siberia. We shall never see him again. Hridas died three weeks ago, not two kilometres from here, in the torture chambers of the AVO. They were careless for a moment, and he snatched a gun. He put it in his mouth. He was glad to die.’

‘How – but how do you know these things?’

‘Colonel Szendrô – the man you know as Colonel Szendrô – was there. He saw him die. It was Szendrô’s gun he took.’

Reynolds carefully crushed his cigarette stub in an ashtray. He looked up at Jansci, across to Szendrô and back at Jansci again: his face was empty of all expression.

‘Szendrô has been a member of the AVO for eighteen months,’ Jansci said quietly. ‘One of their most efficient and respected officers, and when things mysteriously go wrong and wanted men escape at the last moment, there is no one more terrible in his anger than Szendrô, no one who drives his men so cruelly till they literally collapse with exhaustion. The speeches he makes to newly indoctrinated recruits and cadets to the AVO have already been compiled in book form. He is known as The Scourge. His chief, Furmint, is at a loss to understand Szendrô’s pathological hatred for his own countrymen, but declares he is the only indispensable member of the Political Police in Budapest … A hundred, two hundred Hungarians alive to-day, still here or in the west, owe their lives to Colonel Szendrô.’

Reynolds stared at Szendrô, examining every line of that face as if he were seeing it for the first time, wondering what manner of man might pass his life in such incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances, never knowing whether he was being watched or suspected or betrayed, never knowing whether or not the next shoulder for the tap of the executioner might be his own, and all at once, without at all knowing why, Reynolds knew that this was indeed such a man as Jansci claimed. All other considerations apart, he had to be or he, Reynolds, might even then have been screaming on the torture racks, deep down below the basement of Stalin Street …