CHAPTER FOUR
The inevitable cigarette holder clipped between his teeth, the inevitable Russian cigarette well alight, the Count leaned a heavy elbow on the buzzer and kept on leaning until a shirt-sleeved little man, unshaven and still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, came scurrying out from the little cubicle behind the hotel’s reception desk. The Count eyed him with disfavour.
‘Night-porters should sleep in the daytime,’ he said coldly. “The manager, little man, and at once.’
‘The manager? At this hour of the night?’ The night-porter stared with ill-concealed insolence at the clock above his head, transferred his stare to the Count, now innocuously dressed in a grey suit and grey raglan raincoat, and made no effort at all to conceal the truculence in his voice. ‘The manager is asleep. Come back in the morning.’
There came a sudden sound of ripping linen, a gasp of pain, and the Count, his right hand gripping the bunched folds of the porter’s shirt, had him halfway across the desk: the bloodshot, sleep-filmed eyes, widened first with surprise and then with fear, were only inches away from the wallet that had magically appeared in the Count’s free hand. A moment of stillness, a contemptuous shove and the porter was scrabbling frantically at the pigeon-holed mail racks behind him in an attempt to keep his balance.
‘I’m sorry, comrade, I’m terribly sorry!’ the porter licked his lips suddenly dry and stiff. ‘I — I didn’t know — ‘
‘Who else do you expect to come calling at this hour of night?’ the Count demanded softly.
‘No one, comrade, no one! No — no one at all. It’s just that — well, you were here only twenty minutes ago — ‘ .
‘I was here?’ It was the raised eyebrow as much as the inflection of the voice that cut Short the frightened stammering.
‘No, no, of course not. Not you — your people, I mean. They came — ‘
‘I know little man. I sent them.’ The Count waved a weary hand in bored dismissal and the porter hurried off across the hall. Reynolds rose from the wall-bench where he had been sitting and crossed the room.
‘Quite a performance,’ he murmured. ‘You even had me scared.’
‘Just practice,’ the Count said modestly. ‘Sustains my reputation and doesn’t do them any permanent harm, distressing though it is to be addressed as “comrade” by such a moron. . . . You heard what he said?’
‘Yes. They don’t waste much time, do they?’
‘Efficient enough in their own unimaginative way,’ the Count conceded. ‘They’ll have checked most of the hotels in town by morning. Only a slim chance, of course, but one that they cant afford to neglect. Your position is now doubly safe, three times as safe as it was at Jansci’s house.’
Reynolds nodded and said nothing. Only half an hour had elapsed since Jansci had agreed to help him. Both Jansci and the Count had decided that he must leave there at once: it was too inconvenient, too dangerous. It was inconvenient not so much because of the cramped accommodation, but because it was in a lonely and out of the way place: movements of a stranger at any hour of the day or night, such as Reynolds might be compelled to make, would be sure to draw unfavourable attention: it was too remote from the centre of the town, from the big hotels of Pest, where Jennings might be expected to be staying: and, biggest drawback of all, it had no telephone for instant communications.
And it was dangerous because Jansci was becoming increasingly convinced that the house was being watched: in the past day or two both Sandor and Imre had seen two people, singly and on several different occasions, walking slowly by the house on the other side of the street. It was unlikely that they were innocent passers-by: like every city under a police state rule, Budapest had its hundreds of paid informers, and probably they were just confirming their suspicions and gathering their facts before going to the police and collecting their blood-money. Reynolds had been surprised by the casual, almost indifferent way Jansci had treated this danger, but the Count had explained as he had driven the Mercedes through the snow-filled street to this hotel on the banks of the Danube, The changing of their hideouts because of suspicious neighbours had become so frequent as to be almost routine, and Jansci had a sixth sense which, so far, had always led them to pull out in good time. Annoying, the Count said, but no serious inconvenience, they knew of half a dozen bolt-holes just as good, and their permanent headquarters, a place known to Jansci, Julia and himself, was in the country.
Reynolds’ thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door across the hall opening. He looked up to see a man hurrying across the parquet floor, the tap-tap of his metalled heels urgent and almost comically hurried: he was shrugging a jacket over a crumpled shirt, and the thin, bespectacled face was alive with fear and anxiety.
‘A thousand apologies, comrade, a thousand apologies!’ He wrung white-knuckled hands in his distress, then glared at the porter following more slowly behind him. ‘This oaf here — ‘
‘You are the manager?’ the Count interrupted curtly.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Then dismiss the oaf. I wish to talk to you privately.” He waited till the porter had gone, drew out his gold cigarette case, selected a cigarette with due care, examined it minutely, inserted it with much deliberation in his holder, took his time about finding his matchbox and removing a match, finally lit the cigarette. A beautiful performance, Reynolds thought dispassionately: the manager, already on the tenterhooks of fright, was now almost in hysterics.
‘What is it, comrade, what has gone wrong?’ In his attempt to keep his voice steady, it had been louder than intended, and it now dropped to almost a whisper. ‘If I can help the AVO in any way, I assure you — ‘
‘When you speak, you will do so only to answer my questions.’ The Count hadn’t even raised his voice, but the manager seemed to shrink visibly, and his mouth closed tightly in a white line of fear, ‘You spoke to my men some little time ago?’
‘Yes, yes, a short time ago. I wasn’t even asleep just now — ‘
‘Only to answer my questions,’ the Count repeated softly.
‘I trust I do not have to say that again. . . . They asked if you had any new arrival staying here, any fresh bookings, checked the register and searched the rooms. They left, of course, a typed description of the man they were looking for?’
‘I have it here, comrade.’ The manager tapped his breast pocket.
‘And orders to phone immediately if anyone resembling Chat description appeared here?’
The manager nodded.
‘Forget all that,’ the Count ordered. ‘Things are moving quickly. We have every reason to believe that the man is either coming here or that his contact is already living here or will be coming here in the course of the next twenty-four hours.’ The Count exhaled a long, thin streamer of smoke and looked speculatively at the manager. ‘To our certain knowledge, this is the fourth time in three months that you have harboured enemies of the State in your hotel.’
‘Here? In this hotel?’ The manager had paled visibly. ‘1 swear to God, comrade — ‘
‘God?’ The Count creased his forehead. ‘What God? Whose God?’
The manager’s face was no longer pale, it was ashen grey: good communists never made fatal blunders of this kind. Reynolds could almost feel sorry for him, but he knew what the Count was after: a state of terror, instant compliance, blind, unreasoning obedience. And already he had it.
‘A — a slip of the tongue, comrade.’ The manager was now stuttering in his panic, and his legs and hands were trembling. ‘I assure you, comrade — ‘
‘No. No, let me assure you, comrade.’ The Count’s voice was almost a purr. ‘One more slip-up and we must see to a tittle re-education, an elimination of these distressing bourgeois sentiments, of your readiness to give refuge to people who would stab our mother country in the back.’ The manager opened his mouth to protest, but his lips moved soundlessly, and the Count went on, his every word now a cold and deadly menace. ‘My instructions will be obeyed and obeyed implicitly, and you will be held directly responsible for any failure, however unavoidable that failure. That, my friend, or the Black Sea Canal.’
‘I’ll do anything, anything!’ The manager was begging now, in a state of piteous terror, and he had to clutch the desk to steady himself. ‘Anything, comrade. I swear it!’
‘You will have your last chance.’ The Count nodded towards Reynolds. ‘One of my men. Sufficiently like the spy we are after, in build and appearance, to pass muster, and we have disguised him a little. A shadowed corner of your lounge, say, an incautious approach, and the contact is ours. The contact will sing to us, as all men sing to the AVO, and then the spy himself will be ours also.’