‘Car?’ they said as he shook his head. ‘Where you like go, sir?’
He ignored them and stuck to Eva’s instructions, walking towards the great glassed roof of the station in search of Miklos. There was a bench fifty metres along the platform, positioned just a few feet from the ticket inspectors. Sitting on it, exactly as she had described, was a man with a beard wearing a green jacket. Gaddis could see a bottle of Vittel in the man’s left hand. At that moment, Miklos looked up and caught Gaddis’s eye, smiling broadly. Gaddis knew immediately that he would like him: the Hungarian, who was about fifty, had quick, lively eyes, mischief in his face and the aura of a man who was lucky and self-assured.
‘Mr Sam?’ he said, reaching to shake his hand.
Gaddis took it. Miklos was wearing brown leather gloves. The palm was sticky and cold against his own.
‘Will you forgive me if I ask who sent you here?’ Gaddis asked.
‘Of course I will forgive you.’ Miklos was still smiling, still pumping his hand. ‘It is important to be certain about these things, no? My name is Miklos. I was sent to meet you by our mutual friend, Eva, in Vienna, who was in turn acting for the woman you once knew as Josephine Warner.’
Gaddis felt a wave of relief. Miklos took his bag, against Gaddis’s protestations, and walked past the ticket inspectors without a glance. They went outside to a four-door Seat parked just a block from the station.
‘We go to my apartment first,’ Miklos explained. Gaddis thought that there was nothing unusual about this. ‘Your aeroplane, it does not leave for a few hours.’
He had opened the rear door of the car, as if hiring a taxi, but realized his mistake and moved to the passenger seat. Outside, Budapest felt a world away from Vienna, churning and chaotic and still touched by the faded grandeur of Communism. Gaddis was reminded of the grey, dirty light in Moscow; there was that same blanket smell of bitumen and diesel on the air and he felt the kinship of a world with which he was far more familiar. Miklos drove quickly, swerving and leaning on the horn, down film noir boulevards that, to Gaddis’s romantic eye, were full of all the bustle and wonder and threat that had been scoured clean from modern Vienna. For a blessed instant he felt free. Then he thought of Wilkinson and the screaming crowds in the Kleines Cafe and knew that he was far from safe.
‘So I am to understand that you have been through a very difficult trauma,’ Miklos said.
The word ‘trauma’ sounded excessive, even melodramatic, but Gaddis found himself replying: ‘Yes.’
‘Well, do not worry. It is all right now. You are in good hands. I take you to my apartment quickly. My wife, she fix you the soup. I will hand you your new passport, also some money. By sunset you are back in London.’
‘You’re very kind.’ He wanted to ask the same questions that he had tried to put to Eva. How did you come to be working for MI6? How often do you do this kind of thing? But he knew now that it was best to allow these angels of the secret world the privilege of their anonymity.
‘Are you from Budapest?’ he asked instead. It was an unimaginative question, but a little conversation seemed important.
‘I am,’ Miklos replied. ‘I give you the language lesson, OK? Quick guide to Hungarian.’
‘All right.’
They were turning down a narrow street, heavy brown-stone buildings weighing down on all sides. Gaddis was amazed to see a small branch of Tesco on one corner.
‘You order cheeseburger, you say “Shiteburger”.’ Miklos was laughing. It occurred to Gaddis that he must have used the same line on every foreigner who crossed his path. ‘Is funny, no?’
‘It’s funny.’
‘And the nipple we call the “mellbimbo”. Male bimbo. Crazy language, Hungarian. You like it? Crazy.’
Soon they had parked on a wide avenue beside a pile of neatly chopped wood, around which had been thrown a makeshift fence of orange plastic. Miklos retrieved Gaddis’s bag from the boot and led him down a passageway which ran between an electrical shop and a small restaurant. They emerged into the large internal courtyard of a nineteenth-century apartment building. A creaking lift carried them to the third floor.
‘I live just down here,’ Miklos said, steering Gaddis down a corridor which was open to the courtyard on the eastern side. He took out a set of keys and opened the door of his flat.
Inside, there was a large, modern kitchen with a staircase at one end, unprotected by banisters. A woman was standing at the stove, chopping mushrooms.
‘Let me introduce you to my wife,’ said Miklos.
‘Viki.’ Viki was an attractive woman, at least fifteen years younger than her husband, with long, dark hair and a slim figure partly concealed by a navy-blue apron. Gaddis raised a hand in greeting but did not approach her; she had indicated that her hands were dirty from cooking and it did not seem appropriate to kiss her on the cheek. He felt as though he had popped round to a neighbour’s house for lunch; there was no sense of anxiety in the room, no undercurrent of alarm. Was Viki in on the situation? Was she another Hungarian on the MI6 payroll? Miklos spoke to her briefly in their native tongue then offered Gaddis a stool at a breakfast bar in the centre of the room.
‘You have a beautiful place,’ he said, setting his bag on the floor.
‘Thank you. The building is very typical, but we make some adjustments. You will take a coffee? A shower?’
‘At the same time?’
Viki laughed, turning to catch her husband’s eye. There were expensive pots and pans on butcher’s hooks above the stove, black-and-white prints in frames, an iPod hooked up to some Bose speakers on a shelf adorned with paperback novels. A dog wandered into the kitchen, glided past Viki’s legs and settled beneath a deep ceramic sink.
‘Bazarov,’ said Miklos. ‘Our best friend.’
‘After Turgenev?’
His face lit up. ‘You know Fathers and Sons? You are an educated man, Mr Sam.’
Gaddis explained that he was a lecturer in Russian History and, before long, he had a cup of coffee in front of him and was knee-deep in a conversation about nineteenth-century Russian literature. Viki produced some bread and a bowl of soup and they sat together, at the breakfast bar, pinging opinions about Tolstoy back and forth while Gaddis wondered why he felt so relaxed.
An hour after he had first sat down, he was offered ‘a good hot shower and a nice change of clothes’. He duly went upstairs, armed with a white towel which smelled of chemical pine, and stood under the torrent of a steaming shower, cleaning away all the sweat and the worry and the rage of his long night in Vienna. Miklos had laid out a shirt and a jumper in a small bedroom nearby, as well as a pair of blue jeans which appeared never to have been worn. All three items fitted him perfectly; it occurred to Gaddis that MI6 even knew his sizes. He shaved and changed in front of a faded poster of Steven Gerrard brandishing the European Cup. The bedroom presumably belonged to Miklos and Viki’s son.
By half-past twelve Gaddis had made his way downstairs. Viki complimented him on his appearance and helped to pack his dirty clothes in the bag given to him by Eva. Miklos advised him to change his jacket — ‘in case a witness from the Kleines Cafe has described it to the police’ — and in its place provided a long black overcoat which was slightly tight at the shoulders. Gaddis found a tweed cap in the pocket, but did not want to put it on, arguing that it would draw unnecessary attention to him at the airport.
‘You are probably correct,’ Miklos replied, rolling the first jacket into a ball and stuffing it into the bag. ‘You look good anyway, Mr Sam. You look normal.’
They went into a sitting room cluttered with books and lamps. Viki did not follow them. There was a chess board on a low coffee table in the centre of the room, the black king toppled over. Beside the board, resting on a copy of the Economist, was a battered British passport and 40,000 Hungarian florints, the equivalent of about?200. Miklos handed them to Gaddis.
The passport seemed a perfect fake. There were stamps from Hong Kong, a stamp from JFK, even an exact copy of the photograph which appeared in Gaddis’s regular passport, taken eight years earlier. How had Tanya acted so quickly? Where the hell had the passport been printed? The British Embassy in Budapest must have been involved. He flicked through the watermarked pages and looked up at Miklos.
‘Astonishing,’ he said.
‘I have seen better.’
The Hungarian now produced a mobile phone from his pocket and handed it across the chess board. A number by which he could reach Miklos was listed under the name ‘Mike’. Gaddis knew now that the hard part was to come. The long journey home was ahead of him.
