“Where?”
“Not to worry. Only a few feet from here. Just below, on the very stairs you probably climbed to come here.”
The stairway was out in the open. I tried to remember if there had been anything iffy about the switchbacks and terraces along the way, and came up empty.
“Shall we complete this transaction or not?” he said. “If not, I can always throw the book into the Danube for real this time.”
“Let’s trade.”
“You are a shrewd bargainer, Mr. Cage. One of the better ones I have dealt with.”
Meaning I’d probably been a chump, but right then I didn’t care.
“Let us retire to the stairway, then.” he said.
He stood. I reached for my wallet to pay for the tea, but Szondi stayed my hand.
“Please. You are my guest.” He laid a pair of bills on the table. “After you.”
“No. After you.”
He smiled a bit too broadly, then nodded.
“I take no issue with a man who wishes to be careful. I admire it, even.”
We left the cafe and walked to the stairs. Szondi flinched as a tourist camera flashed in passing. I lagged back a few feet, which he didn’t seem to mind. Two flights down, Szondi came to a stop just as the beefy fellow whose photo Laszlo had shown me loomed into view one flight below. He poked a gun barrel from inside his black jacket and smiled crookedly. I stopped, ready to beat a retreat, but when I turned I saw that a second armed thug was trotting down the steps toward us in Szondi’s wake.
“Keep going, Mr. Cage,” Szondi said. “Just a while longer now and it will all be over.”
I wasn’t thrilled with his wording. I looked around for help but the stairs were deserted. Soon they would kill me, perhaps within seconds. I felt certain of that. On the next flight down the first thug stepped off the stairs toward the stone wall that buttressed the hillside.
“Keep following him, Mr. Cage.”
He disappeared beneath the stairway into an alcove built into the wall. My heart was beating way too fast, and I was trying not to show fear in my face or gestures. It was time to make a move, or just run, but there seemed to be no opportunity for either. The thug behind me grabbed my right arm and led me up into the alcove, which stank of urine and damp trash, and as soon as we were inside I Belatedly realized that any hope of escape was now gone. The two thugs moved to block the exit, with Szondi between them. This was where they would do it.
“Hand me the papers, please. Put them on the ground in front of you and back away.”
Szondi kept his distance, which was a bad sign. I held on to the papers.
“Put the book down first.” I said. “You can slide it over to me.”
“And then find out later that the papers are fake? Even if they’re real, how do I know you haven’t made copies? We’ll have to search your room, of course.”
“Then why don’t I take you there now?”
“We know where you’re staying. I’m sure we’ll be able to find the key after we’re finished here.”
Szondi smiled as the import of his words sank in. The thug on the left leveled his gun at me. I rose on the balls of my feet to make a dive for it, and was about to answer when a woman’s voice barked an order from somewhere out in the open-an order that made both thugs freeze. I lost my balance, dropping to my knees on a slurry of wet newspapers and broken bottles, then scrambled to my feet just as Litzi stepped into the opening behind Bela Szondi.
She said something more. This time the thugs dropped their guns, which she kicked out of the way. They backed up a few steps and put their hands on their heads. Her next words were in English.
“Come out of there, Bill.”
“Gladly.” By now my heart was going a hundred beats per second, but I still had enough of my wits about me to remember what I’d come for.
“Tell Bela to give me the book.”
This brought a sneer from Szondi, who seemed far less intimidated than his hired hands.
“You cannot speak to me directly, Mr. Cage? You let a woman do your talking for you?”
“Drop the book,” I said. “Then back away.”
He opened his hand. The book came open as it fell, pages fluttering, and landed facedown in the muck. Even under the circumstances I couldn’t help but wince.
I stepped over toward Szondi to retrieve it.
“Wait!” Litzi said.
Too late.
Szondi pulled a gun, and now I was directly in his line of fire, and shielding him from Litzi. But even as the barrel rose level with my stomach, a wonderful thing happened. Instantaneously, with barely time for a thought, I reacted just as I’d been taught to on that long-ago afternoon when I took the executive survival course, courtesy of Marty Ealing.
My move was from “Lesson Three: Disarming an Attacker.” My left hand shoved aside the barrel while my right clamped his forearm and twisted it until he cried out in pain and opened his fingers. The gun fell, right on top of the book, and I shoved Szondi onto his ass into the filthy muck. I grabbed the book, then the gun, and backed away.
The two thugs, apparently far smarter than their boss, hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Nicely done,” Litzi said. She looked even more surprised than me. Then she pulled a roll of duct tape from her shoulder bag and tossed it to me.
“Tape those two to that pole by the entrance, back to back,” she said.
She motioned the thugs into position, and they seemed in no mood to test her resolve. My hands were shaking as I started unpeeling the tape. Had I really just done that? As I taped the men into place I glanced at Litzi. I’d never seen this look in her eyes-neither rage nor menace; instead, a cold resolve. If either thug had even wiggled a toe, I’m positive she would have shot him. And where had she gotten a gun? Being someone who generally doesn’t know a Glock from a glockenspiel, I couldn’t have told you its make and model. But it was compact and tidy, and black as the night. It fit so comfortably in her hand that it might have been made especially for her.
I kept pulling the tape free with a ripping sound, then wound it around the thugs’ arms and midsections, pinning them together back to back with the pole in between, seven loops in all.
“Get up,” she said to Szondi. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
I then taped Szondi to another pole, eight loops for him.
“That’s enough,” she said. “They’ll be able to get out soon enough, or else someone will hear them down here. But by then we’ll be gone.” Then she spoke one last time to Szondi.
“If you try to have us followed, these documents will be in tomorrow’s newspaper. A reporter I know is already standing by with copies, and if he doesn’t have an all-clear from me by six o’clock then he’s going to print them. Understood?”
He nodded. No more smiles.
Then we left. Just like that. Me and my trusty old girlfriend, who I’d once fancied needed my protection from the bad old East German Volkspolizei. The quiet archivist, my Marian the Librarian with nice legs, sensible glasses, and the maudlin backstory of an expired biological clock. The woman who, when she was seventeen, had been too timid even to do a decent job of spying on my father, yet she had apparently been in league with my handler from the beginning.
But under the circumstances, how could I be anything other than ecstatic to see her, even though she was packing heat and speaking the local language like a native? I kept glancing at her as we briskly descended the stairway toward the river, but she looked straight ahead, as businesslike as ever. By the time we reached the bottom my pulse had nearly returned to normal, and the evaporating sweat on my back was prickling like dried seawater. Glancing over my shoulder, and seeing no one in pursuit, I finally judged it safe to talk.
“I didn’t know you spoke Hungarian.”
“I don’t. I practiced three phrases: ‘Drop your weapon.’ ‘Hands on your head.’ ‘Don’t move or I shoot.’ I’m not
