Army car wouldn’t excite suspicion and someone who had access to official documents at the same time. It seemed to me we were looking for a Red Army officer and a fairly high one at that.
“I think we’ll find that Doctor Schmidt’s agent, the Felix who is stooge for the Nazi Bruderschaft, is pretty close to the commander of the Russian air base right here in Matyasfold.”
“How do you know Schmidt brought Maria out here?” I said.
“I don’t,” Hiram said, “but we’ve got to start looking somewhere, don’t we?”
I had visions of Hiram, Teensy, Walter, and me driving up to the main gate of the air base to attack the garrison. The six-foot Teensy with her bleached-blond hair, little Hiram in his coonskin cap, Walter, the perpetually smiling ex-prizefighter with a bum leg, and John Stodder alias Marcel Blaye alias Jean Stodder, the involuntary watch and clock salesman whose bandaged hands couldn’t hold a gun. Coxey’s Army would have looked like a West Point color guard alongside us. It was the strangest American expeditionary force on record.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Hiram.
“Call on a friend of mine for a cup of coffee.”
Hiram told Teensy to turn off the main highway into the Kossuth Lajos utca, about half a mile short of the air base. The car skidded and spun wildly in the narrow, rutted road, but we had less than half a block to go. The street was lined on both sides with identical cracker-box bungalows, the Hungarian equivalent of a hundred communities along the Long Island Rail Road.
“It’s all right,” Hiram said. “Let’s go in.”
I couldn’t figure how he knew until I noticed the shade was half raised in one of the windows of the bungalow we were entering.
“You’re a new member of the agricultural attache’s staff,” Hiram said.
“I don’t know the difference between timothy and trailing arbutus,” I said.
“Never mind,” said Hiram. “Neither do I. Your hands and feet were frostbitten when you went skiing. That’s how Walter hurt his leg.”
“That gives American skiers a fine reputation,” I said. “Incidentally, what’s my name?”
“John Stodder,” he said. “I’ve got papers to prove it.”
I couldn’t understand why the briefing, if we were visiting one of Hiram’s agents, until we went inside the house. We were introduced in turn to Bela Szabo, his wife and seven children, the wife’s mother, somebody’s brother-in-law, and the serving girl who insisted on kissing everybody’s hand.
It seemed that Mrs. Szabo sewed for Teensy, and there were a couple of dresses ready to try on. The two women vanished into a back room, Hiram and Papa Szabo, a gaunt, bearded, melancholy man, repaired to the small porch to smoke a cigar, and Walter and I were left with the seven children, Mrs. Szabo’s mother, and the unidentified brother-in-law who volunteered to play the accordion. The serving girl, who answered to the name of Lilli, passed the apricot brandy.
I tried to answer Mrs. Szabo’s mother’s questions about America, but my mind was on Maria. Now that there was a possibility I might see her again, perhaps within a few hours, my feelings were uncertain. I’d thought of little else since I left her outside the coffeehouse with Schmidt. With reunion perhaps close at hand, I was filled with misgivings.
After all, what did I know about Maria Torres except what she herself had told me? How did I know she hadn’t voluntarily left the coffeehouse with the German doctor without waiting for me? What proof did I have, aside from the background she had given me, for believing she was a prisoner of Schmidt and not an accomplice?
I remembered how surprised I’d been when she’d responded to Schmidt’s command in German at Kelenfold to “Pick up your baggage,” although she’d told me she understood no German. There was no sign of emotion in her lovely face at that moment, none of the terror she’d displayed when she’d first sighted Schmidt aboard the Orient Express. I remembered how calm she’d been in the warehouse on Mexikoi ut and how I’d mistrusted her show of nerves when we’d met on the Orient. I’d started to put her down as a girl with too much imagination and too little control of herself. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe it had been clever acting.
But that didn’t make sense, either. She’d followed me off the Orient, with all the danger that involved. She’d played my game with Major Strakhov. She’d stuck by me when I decided to leave the train at Kelenfold. And hadn’t she thrown her arms around my neck and kissed me when I left her to enter the Keleti yards? Hadn’t she tried to go with me?
“I don’t get it.” I said it out loud in English because Mrs. Szabo’s mother said in Hungarian, “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. You were asking me about the Brooklyn Bridge?” The unidentified brother-in-law promptly pumped out an off-key rendition of “The Sidewalks of New York,” and Papa Szabo stuck his head in the door to tell him to be careful because the People’s Democracy does not favor fraternization with foreigners. Then Walter, who didn’t speak a word of Hungarian, told the fascinated children, who didn’t understand a word of English, the story of Br’er Rabbit.
I stood by during endless handshaking and the patting of small heads, toasts in apricot brandy, and more hand kissing by the serving girl who got the customary quarter from each of us in tips. Then we left.
Hiram turned the car around after some difficulty, and we drove back to the main highway to head in the direction of the Russian air base.
“I thought you said we were going for a cup of coffee,” I said.
“There isn’t any coffee in the whole of Hungary,” Hiram said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“How would I notice?” I said. “Except for a warehouse, a nightclub, several assorted homes, and a country inn, I might as well have gone through Budapest in a fast train. I’d like to see what the city’s like these days.”
“Not this trip,” Hiram said. He started to add something but he shut up. He wasn’t kidding me. I knew the chances were pretty slim I’d ever get out of the country alive, much less see the sights of Budapest. He and Teensy had diplomatic status. At the worst, they’d be jailed until Washington locked up a Russian diplomat and arranged an exchange. Walter and I came under the heading of common criminals for a firing squad. At least Carr could tell my family what had happened.
Hiram said, “We’ll ditch the car about two blocks from the air base. Walter knows how to mess up the carburetor so it’ll look as if we had to abandon it.
“There’s a group of houses just outside the main gate of the field. The street is only a block long, from the highway we’re on to the gate. There are twelve houses on each side. We want the fifth house from the highway on the south side. Have you got it?”
We said we understood. Hiram asked us to repeat what he’d said, and we did in turn. Then he asked us to see that our watches agreed.
“That’s what they do in the comic strips,” I said. “They’re always synchronizing watches.” Nobody thought it amusing. It’s the kind of thing you say when your nerves are hopping.
Hiram said, “There are three doors to the house, front and back and one on the side away from the air base. I’ll take the front door, Teensy the back, and Walter the side.”
“What do I do?” I said.
If Hiram thought Maria was a prisoner inside that house, I wanted to go in.
“We’ve got to have a lookout, John.” It was the first time he’d addressed me as anything but Mr. Stodder. “You take the side nearest the air base. Get in the shadow of the next house. Can you whistle?”
I said I could, either straight or with two fingers.
“You don’t have to be fancy,” Hiram said with a grin. “If you see anyone heading for the house, whistle ‘Dixie.’ If they go past, stop whistling. If they come inside the grounds, whistle ‘Reveille.’ ”
“What do I do then?” I said.
“Run like hell,” Hiram said.
“May I ask who we are about to visit?”
