The Last Frontier

Colonel Szendrô was standing beside the table, leaning over towards the man seated behind it. The face of the latter was hidden in deep shadow, but both hands, holding some of Reynolds’ papers, were exposed to the pitiless glare of the lamp. They were terrible hands, Reynolds had never seen anything remotely like them, had never imagined that any human being’s hands could be so scarred, crushed and savagely mutilated and still serve as hands. Both thumbs were crushed and flattened and twisted, fingertips and nails were blurred into a shapeless mass, the little finger and half of the fourth finger of the left hand were missing, and the backs of both hands were covered with ugly scars surrounding bluish-purple weals in the middle, between the tendons of the middle and fourth fingers. Reynolds stared at these weals, fascinated, and shivered involuntarily, he had seen these marks once before, on a dead man: the marks of crucifixion. Had these been his hands, Reynolds thought in revulsion, he would have had them amputated. He wondered what manner of man could bear to live with these hands, not only live with them but have them uncovered. He was suddenly possessed of an almost obsessive desire to see the face of the man behind these hands, but Sandor had halted several paces from the desk and the blackness of the shadow by the lamp defeated him.

The hands moved, gesturing with Reynolds’ papers, and the man at the desk spoke. The voice was quiet, controlled, almost friendly. ‘These papers are interesting enough in their own way – masterpiece of the forger’s art. You will be good enough to tell us your real name.’ He broke off and looked at Sandor who was still tenderly massaging his neck. ‘What is wrong, Sandor?’

‘He hit me,’ Sandor explained apologetically. ‘He knows how to hit and where to hit – and he hits hard.’

‘A dangerous man,’ Szendrô said. ‘I warned you, you know.’

‘Yes, but he’s a cunning devil,’ Sandor complained. ‘He pretended to faint.’

‘A major achievement to hurt you, an act of desperation to hit you at all,’ the man behind the desk said dryly. ‘But you mustn’t complain, Sandor. He who expects that death comes with the next breath but one is not given to counting the cost … Well, Mr Buhl, your name, please.’

‘I’ve already told Colonel Szendrô,’ Reynolds replied. ‘Rakosi, Lajos Rakosi. I could invent a dozen names, all different, in the hope of saving myself unnecessary suffering, but I couldn’t prove my right to any of them. I can prove my right to my own name, Rakosi.’

‘You are a brave man, Mr Buhl.’ The seated man shook his head. ‘But in this house you will find courage a useless prop: lean on it and it will only crumble to dust under your weight. The truth alone will serve. Your name, please?’

Reynolds paused before replying. He was fascinated and puzzled and hardly afraid any more. The hands fascinated him, he could scarcely take his eyes off them, and he could see now some tattooing on the inside of the man’s wrist – at that distance it looked like a figure 2, but he couldn’t be certain. He was puzzled because there were too many off-beat angles to all that was happening to him, too much that didn’t fit in with his conception of the AVO and all that he had been told about them: there was a curious restraint, almost a cold courtesy in their attitude to him, but he was aware that the cat could just be playing with the mouse, perhaps they were just subtly sapping his determination to resist, conditioning him to be least prepared for the impact of the blow when it came. And why his fear was lessening he would have found it impossible to say, it must have arisen from some subtle promptings of his subconscious mind for he was at a conscious loss to account for it.

‘We are waiting, Mr Buhl.’ Reynolds couldn’t detect the slightest trace of an edge through the studied patience of the voice.

‘I can only tell you the truth. I’ve already done that.’

‘Very well. Take your clothes off – all of them.’

‘No!’ Reynolds glanced swiftly round, but Sandor stood between him and the door. He looked back, and Colonel Szendrô had his pistol out. ‘I’ll be damned if I do it!’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Szendrô’s voice was weary. ‘I have a gun in my hand and Sandor will do it by force, if necessary. Sandor has a spectacular if untidy method of undressing people – he rips coats and shirts in half down the back. You’ll find it far easier to do the job yourself.’

Reynolds did it himself. The handcuffs were unlocked and inside a minute all his clothes were crumpled heaps about his feet, and he was standing there shivering, his forearms angry masses of red and blue weals where Sandor’s vice-like fingers had dug into his flesh.

‘Bring the clothes over here, Sandor,’ the man at the desk ordered. He looked at Reynolds. ‘There’s a blanket on the bench behind you.’

Reynolds looked at him in sudden wonder. That it was his clothes they wanted – looking for giveaway tags, probably – instead of himself was surprising enough, that the courtesy – and on that cold night, the kindness – of a covering blanket should be offered was astonishing. And then he caught his breath and utterly forgot about both of those things, because the man behind the desk had risen and walked round with a peculiarly stiff-legged gait to examine the clothes.

Reynolds was a trained judge, very highly trained, of faces and expressions and character. He made mistakes and made them often, but he never made major mistakes and he knew that it was impossible that he was making a major one now. The face was fully in the light now, and it was a face that made these terrible hands a blasphemous contradiction, an act of impiety in themselves. A lined tired face, a middle-aged face that belied the thick, snow-white hair above, a face deeply, splendidly etched by experience, by a sorrowing and suffering such as Reynolds could not even begin to imagine, it held more goodness, more wisdom and tolerance and understanding than Reynolds had ever seen in the face of any man before. It was the face of a man who had seen everything, known everything and experienced everything and still had the heart of a child.

Reynolds sank slowly down on to the bench, mechanically wrapping the faded blanket around him. Desperately, almost, forcing himself to think with detachment and clarity, he tried to reduce to order the kaleidoscopic whirling of confused and contradictory thoughts that raced through his mind. But he had got no farther than the first insoluble problem, the presence of a man like that in a diabolical organization like the AVO, when he received his fourth and final shock and almost immediately afterwards, the answer to all his problems.

The door beside Reynolds swung open towards him, and a girl walked into the room. The AVO, Reynolds knew, not only had its complement of females but ranked among them skilled exponents of the most fiendish tortures imaginable: but not even by the wildest leap of the imagination could Reynolds include her in that category. A little below middle height, with one hand tightly clasping the wrap about her slender waist, her face was young and fresh and innocent, untouched by any depravity. The yellow hair the colour of ripening corn, was awry about her shoulders and with the knuckles of one hand she was still rubbing the sleep from eyes of a deep cornflower blue. When she spoke, her voice was still a little blurred from sleep, but soft and musical if perhaps touched with a little asperity.

‘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?’

THREE

‘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, them 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 answered 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 …

‘It must indeed be as you say, General Illyurin,’ Reynolds murmured. ‘He runs incredible risks.’

‘Jansci, if you please. Always Jansci. Major-General Illyurin is dead.’

‘I’m sorry … And to-night, how about tonight?’

‘Your – ah – arrest by our friend here?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is simple. He has access to all but a few secret master files. Also he is privy to all proposed plans and operations in Budapest and Western Hungary. He knew of the road-block, the closing of the frontier … And he knew you were on the way.’

‘But surely – surely they weren’t after me? How could –’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, my dear Reynolds.’ Szendrô carefully fitted another brown and black Russian cigarette into his holder – Reynolds was to discover that he chain-smoked a hundred of these every day – and struck a match. ‘The arm of coincidence is not all that long. They weren’t looking for you, they weren’t looking for anyone. They were stopping only trucks, searching for large quantities of ferro-wolfram that are being smuggled into the country.’

‘I should have thought they would have been damned glad to get all the ferro-wolfram they could lay their hands on,’ Reynolds murmured.

‘And so they are, my dear boy, and so they are. However, there are proper channels to be gone through, certain customs to be observed. Not to put too fine a point on it, several of our top party officials and highly-respected members of the government were being deprived of their usual cut. An intolerable state of affairs.’

‘Unthinkable,’ Reynolds agreed. ‘Action was imperative.’

‘Exactly!’ Szendrô grinned, the first time Reynolds had seen him smile, and the sudden flash of white, even teeth and the crinkling of the eyes quite transformed the cold aloofness of the man. ‘Unfortunately, on such occasions as these some fish other than the ones we are trawling for get caught in the net.’

‘Such as myself?’

‘Such as yourself. So I have made it my practice to be in the vicinity of certain police blocks at such times: a fruitless vigil, I fear, on all but very few occasions: you are only the fifth person I’ve taken away from the police inside a year. Unfortunately, you will also be the last. On the previous occasions I warned the country bumpkins who man these posts that they were to forget that I or the prisoner I had taken from them ever existed. To-night, as you know, their headquarters had been informed and the word will be out to all block posts to beware of a man posing as an AVO officer.’

Reynolds stared at him.

‘But good God, man, they saw you! Five of them, at least. Your description will be in Budapest before –’

‘Pah!’ Szendrô flicked off some ash with a careless forefinger. ‘Much good it will do the fools! Besides, I’m no imposter – I am an AVO officer. Did you doubt it?’

‘I did not,’ Reynolds said feelingly. Szendrô hitched an immaculately trousered leg and sat on the desk, smiling.

‘There you are, then. Incidentally, Mr Reynolds, my apologies for my rather intimidating conduct on the way here to-night. As far as Budapest, I was concerned only with finding out whether you really were a foreign agent and the man we were looking for or whether I should throw you out at a street corner and tell you to lose yourself. But by the time I had reached the middle of the town another and most disquieting possibility had struck me.’

‘When you stopped in the Andrassy Ut?’ Reynolds nodded. ‘You looked at me in a rather peculiar fashion, to say the least.’

‘I know. The thought had just occurred that you might have been an AVO member deliberately planted on me and therefore had no cause to fear a visit to the Andrassy Ut: I confess I should have thought of it earlier. However, when I said I was going to take you to a secret cellar, you would have known at once what I suspected, known I could not now afford to let you live and screamed your head off. But you said nothing, so I knew you were at least no plant … Jansci, could I be excused for a few minutes? You know why.’

‘Certainly, but be quick. Mr Reynolds hasn’t come all the way from England just to lean over the Margit Bridge and drop pebbles into the Danube. He has much to tell us.’

‘It is for your ear alone,’ Reynolds said. ‘Colonel Mackintosh said so.’

‘Colonel Szendrô is my right hand, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Very well. But only the two of you.’

Szendrô bowed and walked out of the room. Jansci turned to his daughter.

‘A bottle of wine, Julia. We have some Villányi Furmint left?’

‘I’ll go and see.’ She turned to leave, but Jansci called her. ‘One moment, my dear. Mr Reynolds, when did you eat last?’

‘Ten o’clock this morning.’

‘So. You must be starving. Julia?’

‘I’ll see what I can get, Jansci.’

‘Thank you – but first the wine. Imre’ – he addressed the youngster who was pacing restlessly up and down – ‘the roof. A walk around. See if everything is clear. Sandor, the car number plates. Burn them, and fix new ones.’

‘Burn them?’ Reynolds asked as the man left the room. ‘How is that possible?’

‘We have a large supply of number plates.’ Jansci smiled. ‘All of three-ply wood. They burn magnificently … Ah, you found some Villányi?’

‘The last bottle.’ Her hair was combed now, and she was smiling, appraisal and frank curiosity in her blue eyes as she looked at Reynolds. ‘You can wait twenty minutes, Mr Reynolds?’

‘If I have to.’ He smiled. ‘It will be difficult.’

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she promised.

As the door closed behind her Jansci broke open the seal of the bottle and poured the cool white wine into a couple of glasses.

‘Your health, Mr Reynolds. And to success.’

‘Thank you.’ Reynolds drank slowly, deeply, gratefully of the wine – he could not recall when his throat and mouth had been so parched before – and nodded at the one ornament in that rather bleak and forbidding room, a silver-framed photograph on Jansci’s desk. ‘An extraordinarily fine likeness of your daughter. You have skilled photographers in Hungary.’

‘I took it myself,’ Jansci smiled. ‘It does her justice, you think? Come, your honest opinion: I am always interested in the extent and depth of a man’s percipience.’

Reynolds glanced at him in faint surprise then sipped his wine and studied the picture in silence, studied the fair, waving hair, the broad smooth brow above the long-lashed eyes, the rather high Slavonic cheekbones curving down to a wide, laughing mouth, the rounded chin above the slender column of the throat. A remarkable face, he thought, a face full of character, of eagerness and gaiety and a splendid zest for living. A face to remember …

‘Well, Mr Reynolds?’ Jansci prompted him gently.

‘It does her justice,’ Reynolds admitted. He hesitated, fearing presumption, looked at Jansci, knew instinctively how hopeless it would be to try to deceive the wisdom in these tired eyes, then went on: ‘You might almost say it does her more than justice.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes, the bone structure, the shape of all the features, even the smile is exactly the same. But this picture has something more – something more of wisdom, of maturity. In two years perhaps, in three then it will be your daughter, really your daughter: here, somehow you have caught a foreshadowing of these things. I don’t know how it is done.’

‘It’s quite simple. That photograph is not of Julia but of my wife.’

‘Your wife! Good lord, what a quite extraordinary resemblance.’ Reynolds broke off, hurriedly searched his past sentences for any unfortunate gaffes, decided he had made none. ‘She is here just now?’

‘No, not here.’ Jansci put his glass down and turned it round and round between his fingers. ‘I’m afraid we do not know where she is.’

‘I’m sorry.’ It was all Reynolds could think of to say.

‘Do not misunderstand me,’ Jansci said gently. ‘We know what happened to her, I’m afraid. The brown lorries – you know what I mean?’

‘The Secret Police.’

‘Yes.’ Jansci nodded heavily. ‘The same lorries that took away a million in Poland, the same in Roumania and half a million in Bulgaria, all to slavery and death. The same lorries that wiped out the middle classes of the Baltic States, that have taken a hundred thousand Hungarians, they came also for Catherine. What is one person among so many million who have suffered and died?’

‘That was in the summer of ’51?’ It was all Reynolds could think to say: it was then, he knew, that the mass deportations from Budapest had taken place.