Alistair MacLean - The Last Frontier

‘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 fleshcrawling 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!’