that suburban station, the last stop before the train crosses the Danube for the main Keleti station in Pest.
I grabbed a suitcase and handed a smaller one to Maria and followed her up the corridor. Then I remembered the envelope. I went into the last compartment, which was vacant, and stuffed Marcel Blaye’s typewritten lists behind the cushions of the seat, wrapped in the newspaper.
We had no difficulty leaving the train. The guard had left the car platform, and there were a good many people getting off with us.
We walked down the station platform and handed in our ticket stubs from the day before to the stationmaster at the gate. He never noticed the difference. We were the last passengers through, and the station plaza was deserted when we came out.
My nerves were on edge, and the only thing I could think of to say to Maria was, “You know, Strakhov got that story about Grigori all wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Maria said.
“Strakhov had the wrong ending. It isn’t ‘or you will die’ at all. It’s ‘or I will die.’ ”
There was a car parked on the far side of the plaza. I thought it might be a cab. I told Maria to wait while I went over to it.
I had gone about ten feet when a figure came out of the station door behind me. It was Dr. Schmidt and he had a gun in his hand. The gun was pointed at my head.
It had snowed steadily all day and now at dusk it had turned bitter cold again. It was hard moving underfoot, and the few trucks and busses churned and skidded in the unswept streets. The first stars had come out in the sky, and the wind had fallen to a whisper. Thin columns of wood smoke hung suspended like exclamation points atop chimney pots on a thousand glistening roofs. The one redeeming feature of the weather was that the snow served as decent covering to the dreary ruins of Buda, the hilly half of the city on the right bank of the frozen Danube. The flickering shadows from the street lamps gave grotesque substance to the endless miles of blackened walls, and for an evening Budapest was whole again. For a bare half hour, the time required by Herr Doktor Schmidt to conduct us to the center of the city, I saw Budapest almost as I had left it a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, almost as it had been before German and Russian armies hammered it to rubble.
I wasn’t surprised to find Otto and Hermann, the pants presser, waiting for Dr. Schmidt in the late Major Strakhov’s staff car. They had evidently started for Budapest on Schmidt’s orders the minute our train left Hegyshalom; it hadn’t required much effort to beat the local. They were wearing Russian uniforms when the doctor marched us up to the car.
Schmidt had wasted no time getting us into the car.
“I must warn you not to make any trouble,” he said in German. It was the first time I had heard his voice. It was clipped, hard, and precise. “I am an excellent shot. If you will be so kind, please pick up your baggage and proceed to the car.”
Although Maria had told me she understood no German, she picked up the bags and came over to where I was standing. There was no sign of emotion in her dark face, none of the terror she had shown when she told me about Schmidt aboard the Orient Express. She had been close to hysterics just because he was on the same train. Now he was facing her with a gun in his hand, and she appeared calm. The only indication of what she could have been feeling was in the tightened lines around her lovely mouth. I suddenly realized how little I knew about her.
Schmidt put me in the front seat with Otto, who behaved as if he’d never seen me before. The doctor and Hermann, with drawn revolvers, sat in back with Maria between them. We drove straight to the Danube, then followed it north, past the winged victory monument of the Russians on Gellert Hill, over the Erzsebet bridge into Pest, and out the broad Rakoczi ut. We passed a dozen traffic policemen, close enough for me to have touched them, but I knew better than to call for help. Even if they had dared inspect a Red Army car, they wouldn’t have believed any story I could tell them. And if they had intervened, the alternative to Dr. Schmidt was the Countess Orlovska—with the murder of Major Ivan Strakhov to explain in addition to that of Marcel Blaye.
For a time I thought Schmidt was taking us into the country. We continued out Thokoly ut, past the Park Club, and over the railway tracks, but Otto made a skidding left turn into Mexikoi ut which parallels the railroad. The street bounds one of the worst slum districts of Budapest with tenements hard against slaughterhouses, oil refineries, and fertilizer factories, the whole area a rabbit warren for criminals, a sort of unofficial sanctuary for the hunted from Istanbul to Berlin.
Otto turned into an alleyway between two dingy tenements, drove fifty feet or so, and swung the car into a junk-littered yard enclosed in a high board fence. He’d driven from Kelenfold without a word from Schmidt; he had covered the route before. I recalled Major Strakhov’s contemptuous dismissal of Otto and his fellow mercenaries. “Just like children.” The Russian had seen Otto talking to Schmidt on the Hegyshalom platform and he’d put it down to Otto’s desire “to get out of work.” If Strakhov had been a little less superior, he would have suspected that something was up and he might have preserved his own existence.
Hermann jumped out of the car and knocked on the battered wooden door of the tenement.
“Schnell,” said Schmidt when there was no answer. “Hurry up.” Otto hit the car horn. “Stop it, you fool,” said Schmidt. “Do you want to tell the whole neighborhood?”
Hermann beat on the door with the butt of his revolver. A window on the third floor was raised, and the head of an old woman appeared, framed in the flickering light from an oil lamp.
“Wie heissen Sie?” screamed the old woman.
“Mein Gott,” said Dr. Schmidt. “The old fool has lost her mind.”
“You’ve lost your mind, old fool,” Hermann shouted.
“Nein, nein,” screamed Schmidt, leaping out of the car and landing in the snow up to his knees. “Dumkopf.” He shoved Hermann, then cupped his hands and shouted to the woman in the window. “Open this door immediately. It is I who command. Do you hear me?”
There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of the window closing, and the light disappeared. Dr. Schmidt went to the door and when it opened an inch he grabbed it with both hands and swung it back on its hinges so that it smashed against the building. The old woman was standing in the doorway with the oil lamp in her hand.
“You knew I was coming,” Schmidt said, waving his finger under her nose. “Why weren’t you at the door? What do you mean keeping me waiting? What is the matter with you?”
“Bitte, Verzeihung, Excellenz,” the old woman said. “Please forgive me. One does not know these days. There have been police raids in the neighborhood. I thought, Excellency, I—”
“Shut up,” Schmidt said. “You are not here to think.” He called to Otto. “Get those two in here immediately.”
I managed to beat Otto out of the car to help Maria down. Her hand brushed my face as I swung her into the snow, and I thought she held my arm longer than necessary, but it might have been to steady herself. There was just enough light for me to see her dark face. The wide-set black eyes were calm, the firm line of her jaw was clearer than ever.
The old woman stood inside the door as Maria and I entered. I took her for well over eighty. She was thin as a skeleton, her eyes sunken and dull, her pinched face streaked with dirt. Her bony arm trembled with the weight of the oil lamp which threw long dancing shadows into the barren hallway.
Schmidt ordered the woman to lead the way, and we followed her in single file up three flights of narrow, rickety stairs at her wheezing pace, a step at a time and with only the lamp in her shaking hand for illumination. The building must have been abandoned for years. The rooms and the hallways were piled high with junk, most of the windows were broken, the walls were running damp.
When we reached the top floor, the old woman led the strange parade to the front of the house, into a room crammed with boxes and barrels and old newspapers. The slanting roof cut the height of the room so that I had to lower my head to enter. There were two dormer windows, and through the broken, grimy panes we could see the
