brought me to Hungary on a murdered man’s passport. But that was before I learned my brother’s fate from the bitch who had betrayed him. It was before Schmidt had “entertained” me at Orlovska’s. It was before I had stood in the doorway of that room in the tenement and seen what Schmidt had done to the woman I loved.
“You go to hell,” I said to Hiram. “I’m in this to stay.”
“You mustn’t worry about Maria,” he said. “Come look at this map, and I’ll tell you why.”
He pointed to the location of the country inn. Then he moved his finger about a mile to the west.
“There’s a dirt road about a hundred yards north of the inn. A little over a mile down that road there’s a long stretch of flat, open field.”
He glanced at his watch.
“Exactly at dawn, in slightly more than five and a half hours, a United States Air Force plane will land in that field. It will take off with Maria, Millie, and Teensy aboard. I hope it will take off with Marcel Blaye’s envelope. I think it possible that either you or Walter or I will be alive at dawn, at seven forty-four.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I might deliver the envelope to the plane but that I wasn’t leaving Hungary until I’d had a final settlement with Schmidt. It occurred to me, though, that I would be insulting him by assuming I’d be the one still alive in five and a half hours.
Hiram called Walter into the room, and we located Jozsefvaros freight station on the map. We couldn’t get away from the cemetery. Where Keleti station, the coffeehouse, and the tenement were on the northern edge of the burying ground, Jozsefvaros bordered it on the south. The layout resembled a huge letter D with Keleti at the top, Jozsefvaros at the bottom, and the curving part the connecting tracks. The cemetery took up most of the inside, and the vertical line represented Fiumei ut, one of the city’s main thoroughfares.
The freight station and the yards paralleled the cemetery’s length of four city blocks. The station took up a quarter of that distance, with six loading platforms on as many tracks.
I noticed something else. Right where the tracks entered the station, there was a large building, the army barracks which houses the Budapest garrison.
Hiram nodded. “And something the map doesn’t show,” he said, “is that the station is surrounded by a high stone wall. The only way to enter uninvited is to walk the tracks from a point well outside the yards.”
I went upstairs to say goodbye to Maria. I knocked but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, and I went in to find her sleeping soundly, the raven-black hair framing her lovely dark face against the white of the pillow.
I bent over and kissed her forehead. I started out the door and then, because the book says you keep a sense of humor in such cases, I took Ilonka’s charm against the evil eye from my pocket and laid it on Maria’s pillow next to her head.
The car that followed us to Hiram’s trailed us again when we left the house for the last time.
We had decided to separate in order to shake them. After dropping me near the Danube Corso, Hiram would drive Walter to Buda, then return to Pest to abandon the car. We agreed to meet at three o’clock near the railway tracks, a quarter mile from the Jozsefvaros yards.
Hiram had said the chances were that one of us would come out of the yards. There would be a car in an alley at 188 Asztalos Sandor ut which borders the tracks from Keleti to Jozsefvaros and was close by our three- o’clock meeting-place. Hiram estimated forty minutes to reach the makeshift flying-field, which meant that whichever of us got to the car would have to get there by seven o’clock.
I found before leaving the house that I could handle a gun, although with some difficulty and at the risk of opening the wounds on my hands. Each of us carried two ammunition clips for our Lugers. With one cartridge already in each chamber, that gave us seventeen shots apiece, which Hiram suggested should be enough to take over the city.
When I left the car it was the first time I’d been alone and on foot in the center of Budapest in more than nine years. I found myself in front of the old redoubt. Across the square and facing the Danube had been the Hangli Gardens, traditional afternoon drinking spot for American and British newspapermen. Now the Hangli was gone. In its place was a tall stone shaft with a tiny stone airplane on top, Russia’s memorial to her pilots who died in the city’s capture from the Nazis. The square had been renamed in honor of Molotov.
I walked through the Vaci utca, a glittering shopping center before the war. The old familiar names were on the stores but nearly every one bore the sign
There were pictures of Generalissimo Stalin everywhere. It gave me the chills to see the mustachioed dictator’s face side by side with the yellow posters inviting my capture.
I walked past the Belvarosi coffeehouse, and the gypsy band was playing the melody that reminded me of Maria just when I wanted to forget how much she had come to mean to me. I knew what lay ahead and how little chance there was that I should ever see her again.
I won’t pretend my nerves were calm. I fancied I saw an MVD agent in every man and woman I passed. It was the same on the bus; each new passenger seemed vaguely familiar. I’d seen their faces before. I sat in the back of the bus; I expected at any moment to feel a gun in my ribs.
There was one heavyset man I was sure had been on the train to Budapest. He left the bus behind me; for two blocks the crunching of heavy footsteps in the snow told me I was being followed.
I checked an impulse to run. Instead, I turned into a side street, off the avenue that would take me to Hiram and Walter. The footsteps were louder than ever.
The night was bitter cold and clear. The moon had not yet risen, but there was sufficient light from the stars to tell me, when there was no possibility of turning back, that I had entered a dead-end street.
Three chimneys standing against the sky at the end of the street meant three houses wall to wall in front of me. There was no alley, no passage for further retreat.
There was a short stretch of sidewalk cleared by the wind. Before my feet hit the snow again I heard the relentless pounding behind me.
The three houses at the end of the street were dark. They could be apartments with unlocked front doors. They could be private houses, ending my flight on the doorstep.
I passed the first house. If I reached for my gun with my bandaged hands, I’d get a bullet in my back. The footsteps, echoing against the buildings from the hard-packed snow, were scarcely ten feet behind.
I passed the second house, and the door of the third house opened under my hand. I stepped inside and pulled the door behind me. I was in the hallway of a tenement, like the one in which we’d found Maria. There was a dim night light.
I’d taken several steps toward the stairs when I heard the door opening. I turned and flattened myself against the wall, in back of the door.
The door swung open very slowly, so slowly that I managed to get out my gun. I held it by the barrel and when the head appeared I brought down the butt of the gun as hard as I could. He sank to the floor with a crash and lay still.
I pulled him over to the wall, then ran through his pockets. I expected to find a gun, but there wasn’t one. There was only a broken bottle in the back pocket, the apricot brandy soaking his clothing and running in a little trickle across the bare wooden floor.
Then I heard a door open somewhere upstairs and a woman’s voice said, “Jeno, Jeno. Is that you?” When there was no answer, there were footsteps descending the stairs and the woman said, “Drunk again.”
I think I must have run through the snow all the way back to the main avenue, then the three blocks to the meeting place.
We started down the tracks toward Jozsefvaros after Hiram had cut away the bandage from the fingers of my
