Dennis Wheatley - Traitors' Gate

The next item on Gregory's agenda was to get in touch with Sir Pellinore's old friends. Just in case he ran into any trouble, he thought it wiser not to do so from his own hotel; so he walked along to the Bristol. Going up to the hall porter’s desk he asked the man to get him Count Istvan Lujza's telephone number.

The porter looked at him in surprise and said the ex Minister, sir, he has been dead for two years or more.'

Murmuring that he had not been in Budapest since before the war, Gregory asked him to try Count Mihaly Zapolya. This time the porter held a short telephone conversation in Hungarian, then reported:

'I have spoken with the doorman at the palace in the Illona Utcza, and he says that as usual in the summer months His Excellency the Count is living on his estate at Nagykata.'

Hoping that he would prove luckier with the third string to his bow, Gregory asked for Prince Gyorgy Hunyadi. The porter gave a dubious shake of his head and replied:

'I feel almost certain that His Highness is still abroad, sir; but I will ring up the Foreign Office.' Another telephone conversation followed, and it emerged that the Prince was in Buenos Aires as Hungarian Ambassador to the Argentine.

That left only Count Zapolya as a possible contact; so Gregory enquired where Nagykata was. He learned to his relief that it was only about thirty miles from Budapest; but the station which served it was no more than a village halt, and there were only two trains that stopped there each day. As it was not yet half past ten, by hiring a two horse carriage and promising its driver a liberal tip, he just managed to catch the morning one, which got him there by half past eleven.

When he jumped down from the train he could see no sign of a village or a large country house, and there was no conveyance of any kind available. But he had taken the precaution of writing the Count's name in block letters on an envelope and, on showing this to the solitary porter, the man grinned and pointed up the road towards a slight eminence, crowned by trees, that stood out from the flat plain.

After a half mile walk he found that beyond the trees lay the village, and that it was a replica of a dozen others that he had seen from the train. To one side of a broad uneven open space stood a small onion spired church; the rest of the buildings varied little except in size. They were thatched and squat, the eaves of their roofs coming very low down; nearly all of them were whitewashed and had semicircular arches leading to inner yards. There were no motor vehicles in the street, but a number of huge haywains each drawn by a team of four slow moving white oxen, and flocks of cackling geese straggled in all directions. Not one of the villagers was in any kind of uniform; there were no notices with arrows pointing to air raid shelters or Red Cross huts and, in fact, it made the war seem so immeasurably remote that the bombings, the sinkings and the barrages that were killing thousands every day might have been taking place on another planet.

At the village inn he found a man who could speak German and, while he drank his first baratsch of the day, a horse was harnessed for him in leisurely fashion to an ancient carriage. There followed a two-mile drive between the endless fields of rich black earth, which had no boundary banks or hedges and were broken only by an occasional low farmhouse with a few barns clustering about it. More trees at length indicated an entrance to a private park. In it, grassy meadows with fine herds of cattle grazing in them sloped down to a long lake, partly covered by bulrushes and with a few swans gracefully sailing about its open spaces.

The house was hideous. Except for one much older wing, the main building was a product of Victorian times and even the green painted wooden colonial style shutters that flanked its many windows could not redeem it architecturally. Yet in eighty years its lemon yellow brick had mellowed sufficiently to give it a not unfriendly appearance, and fine magnolia trees, the flowers of which gave out a heavenly scent, broke up the flatness of its barrack like walls.

When the carriage pulled up in front of the porch, Gregory got out, signed to the coachman to wait for him, then took an envelope from his pocket. It contained a note that he had thought out during his journey and written in the village inn while the carriage was being got ready for him. It was in French, addressed to Count Zapolya, and read:

/ have recently arrived in Hungary, and Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust particularly asked me while here to seek an opportunity of conveying his kindest remembrances to Your Excellency. Owing to the unhappy events which have disturbed so many social relationships in Europe during the past three years, it is possible that Your Excellency may prefer not to receive me; but I trust this will not be the case, as I have proposals to make which might prove to Hungary's advantage.

He had written it in French only because that was the lingua franca of Sir Pellinore's generation; he had all but said that he was in Hungary on a secret mission as the agent of enemy power, and he had signed the note with his own name. His reason for this unusual rashness was his instinct that, should he introduce himself to the Count as a Frenchman, then later have to admit that he was an Englishman, it might so offend the susceptibilities of an old school Central European nobleman at not having been trusted in the first place that he would refuse to play any further part in the matter.

A servant in livery had hurried out of the house as the carriage drove up. He ushered Gregory into a hall panelled in pine and hung with ibex antlers and other trophies of the chase, bowed him to one of half a dozen big ebony elbow chairs, then put the note on a silver salver and hurried away with it.

Five minutes later he returned to lead Gregory through an even larger hall in which there were some fine suits of armour and several very beautiful Ming vases on tall carved stands, then down a long dim corridor to a pleasant sunny room at the southwest corner of the house. As Gregory was shown in an elderly man stood up, moved out from behind a desk, bowed slightly and said:

'Zapolya.'

Returning the Continental greeting by saying his own name, Gregory took swift stock of Sir Pellinore's old friend. The Count's hair was still thick and dark, except for white feathers just above his ears, but his lined face gave the impression that he must be seventy or more. He still held himself very upright and, from his prominent nose, chin and dark velvety eyes, it was apparent that as a young man he must have been very good-looking. Another legacy of his youth that he retained was the fashion of wearing short side-whiskers and an upturned waxed moustache. He smelt faintly of eau de Cologne and fine Havana cigars, and was wearing country tweeds that had the cut of Savile Row. Having offered Gregory a chair, he sat back in his own and said in French:

'It is now quite a few years since I have seen Sir Pellinore, but I am always delighted to have news of him. I trust that he is well, and that even the war has not robbed him of his remarkable capacity for enjoying life?'

'When I left London ten days ago he was in excellent health and spirits,' Gregory smiled. 'And over our last dinner together he told me with tremendous zest of some of the marvellous times he had with you here in Hungary.'

'Ah, we were both younger then,' the Count smiled back, 'but such memories keep the heart young even in old age. So you have come from London, eh? May I ask your nationality?'

'I am an Englishman; but I came here from Switzerland on a French passport.'

'You are, then, a member of the British Secret Service?'

'No. If I were caught I should expect to be treated as a spy, and shot. But I give you my word that I have not come here to ferret out Hungary's military secrets. I am the personal emissary of Sir Pellinore, and my object is to find out if there is any chance of detaching Hungary from her alliance with Nazi Germany.'