‘The Count says you’re only a machine, a mechanism designed to carry out a certain piece of work, but without any life or existence as an individual. He says you’re about the only person he knows who cannot be afraid, and he is afraid of people who cannot be afraid. Imagine! The Count afraid!’
‘Imagine,’ Reynolds murmured politely.
‘Jansci says the same. He says you’re neither moral nor immoral, just amoral, with certain conditioned pro-British, anti-Communist reactions that are valueless in themselves. He says whether you kill or not is decided not on a basis of wrong or right but simply of expediency. He says that you are the same as hundreds of young men he has met in the NKVD, the Waffen SS and other such organisations, men who obey blindly and kill blindly without ever asking themselves whether it is right or wrong. The only difference, my father says, is that you would never kill wantonly. But that is the only difference.’
‘I make friends wherever I go,’ Reynolds murmured.
‘There! You see what I mean? One cannot touch you. And now Tonight. You bundle a man into a hotel cupboard, bound and gagged, and let him suffocate — he probably did. You hit another and leave him to freeze to death in the snow — he won’t last twenty minutes in this. You — ‘
‘I could have shot the first man,’ Reynolds said quietly. ‘I have a silencer, you know. And do you think that lad with the blackjack wouldn’t have left me to freeze to death if he’d got in first?’
‘You’re just quibbling. . . . And, worst of all, that poor old man. You don’t care what you do as long as he goes back to Britain, do you? He thinks his wife is dying, and yet you’d torture him till he must be almost insane with worry and grief. You encourage him to believe, you make him believe that if she goes he’ll be her murderer. Why, Mr. Reynolds, why?’
‘You know why. Because I’m a nasty, amoral, emotionless machine of a Chicago gangster just doing what I’m told. You just said so, didn’t you?’
‘I’m just wasting my breath, am I not, Mr. Reynolds?’ The tone was flat and dull.
‘By no means.’ Reynolds grinned in the darkness. ‘I could listen all night to your voice, and I’m sure you wouldn’t preach so earnestly unless you thought there was some hope of conversion.’
‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’
‘A nasty, superior sort of smirk,’ Reynolds admitted. Suddenly he caught her hand and lowered his voice. ‘Keep quiet — and keep still!’
‘What — ‘ Only the one word had escaped before Reynolds clamped a hand tightly over her mouth. She started to struggle, then relaxed almost immediately. She, too, had heard it — the crunch of footsteps in the snow. They sat without moving, hardly daring to breathe while three policemen walked slowly past them, past the abandoned cafe terraces farther on and disappeared along a winding path beneath the bare, snow-laden beeches, planes and oaks that lined the perimeter of a great lawn.
‘I thought you told me this part of Margit Island was always deserted?’ His voice was a savage whisper. ‘That no one ever came here in the winter?’
‘It always has been before,’ she murmured. ‘I knew the policemen made a round, but I didn’t know they came that way. But they wont be back for another hour, I’m sure of that. The Margitsziget is big, and they will take time to go round.’
It had been Julia, teeth chattering with the cold and desperate for a place Where they could talk in privacy — the White Angel had been the only cafe in the area which was open — who, after a fruitless search elsewhere, had suggested Margit ., Island. Parts of it, she had said, were banned and under curfew I after a certain hour, but the curfew wasn’t treated too seriously. The patrolling guards were members of the ordinary police forces, not the secret police, and were as different from the AVO as Chalk from cheese. Reynolds, himself almost as cold as the girl, had readily agreed and the watchman’s hut, surrounded by the granite setts, chips and tar barrels of road repairers who had vanished with the onset of the cold weather, had seemed an ideal place.
There Julia had told of the latest happenings at Jansci’s house. The two men who had been watching the house so assiduously had made an error — only one, admittedly, but their last. They had grown overconfident and had taken to walking past on the same side of the street as the garage instead of the opposite side, and, on one occasion, finding the garage door open had gone so far as to let their curiosity get the better of them and peer in, which was a mistake, as Sandor had been waiting for them. Whether they had been informers or AVO men was not known, as Sandor had cracked their heads together rather harder than was necessary. All that mattered was that they were under lock and key and that it would now be safe for Reynolds to visit the house to make final plans for the abduction of the professor. But not before midnight, Jansci had insisted on that.
Reynolds in his turn had told her of what had happened to him, and now, just after .the departure of the three policemen, he looked at her in the gloom of the shelter. Her hand was still in his, she was quite unaware of it: and her hand was tense and rigid and unyielding.
‘You’re not really cut out for this sort of thing, Miss Hlyurin,’ he said quietly. ‘Very few people are. You don’t stay here and lead this life because you like it?’
‘Like it! Dear God, how could anyone ever like this life? Nothing but fear and hunger and repression, and, for us, always moving from place to place, always looking over our shoulders to see if someone is there, afraid to look over our shoulder in case someone is there. To speak in the wrong place, to smile at the wrong time — ‘
‘You’d go over to the west tomorrow, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes. No, no, I cant. I can’t. You see — ‘
‘Your mother, isn’t that it?’
‘My mother!’ He could feel her shift against him as she turned to stare in the darkness. ‘My mother is dead, Mr. Reynolds.’
‘Dead?’ His voice inflected in surprise. ‘That’s not what your father says.’
‘1 know it’s not.’ Her voice softened. ‘Poor, dear Jansci, hell never believe that Mother is dead. She was dying when they took her away, one lung was almost gone, she couldn’t have lived a couple of days. But Jansci will never believe it. He’ll stop hoping when he stops breathing.’
‘But you tell him you believe it too?’
‘Yes. I wait here because I am all Jansci has left in the world and cannot leave him. But if I told him that, he would have me across the Austrian frontier tomorrow — he would never have me risk my life for him. And so I tell him I wait for Mother.’
‘I see.’ Reynolds could think of nothing else to say, wondered if he himself could have done what this girl was doing if he felt as she did. He remembered something, his impression that Jansci had seemed indifferent to the fate of his wife. ‘Your father — he has looked for your mother, searched for her, I mean?’
‘You don’t think so, do you? He always gives that impression, I don’t know why.’ She paused for a moment, then went on, ‘You will not believe this, no one believes this, but it is true: there are nine concentration camps in Hungary, and, in the past eighteen months, Jansci has been inside five of them, just looking for Mother. Inside, and, as you see, out again. It’s just not possible, is it?’
‘It’s just not possible,’ Reynolds echoed slowly.
‘And he’s combed a thousand, over a thousand collective farms — or what used to be collective farms before the October Rising. He has not found her, he never will find her. But always he looks, always he will keep on looking and he will never find her.’
Something in her voice caught Reynolds’ attention. He reached up a gentle hand and touched her face: her cheeks were wet, but she did not turn away, she didn’t resent the touch.
‘I told you this wasn’t for you, Miss Illyurin.’
‘Julia, always Julia. You mustn’t say that name, you mustn’t even think that name. . . . Why am I telling you all these things?’
‘Who knows? But tell me more — tell me about Jansci. I have heard a little, but only a little.’
‘What can I tell you? “A little,” you say, but that’s all I, too, know about my father. He will never talk about what is gone, he will not even say why he will not talk. I think it is because he lives now only for peace and the making of peace, to help all those who cannot help themselves. That is What I heard him say once. I think his memory tortures him. He has lost so much, and he has killed so many. Reynolds said nothing, and after a time the girl went on, ‘Jansci’s father was a Communist leader in the Ukraine. He was a good Communist and he was also a good man — you can be both at the same time, Mr. Reynolds. In 1938 he — and practically every leading Communist in the Ukraine — died in the secret police torture cellars in Kiev. That was when it all started. Jansci executed the executioners, and some of the judges, but too many hands were against him. He was taken to Siberia and spent six months in an underground cell in the Vladivostock transit camp waiting for ice to melt and the steamer to come to take them away. He saw no daylight for six months, he didn’t see another human being for six months — his crusts and .the slops that passed for food were lowered through a batch. They all knew who he was and he was to take a long time dying. He had no blankets, no bed, and the temperature was far below zero. For the last month they stopped all supplies of water also, but Jansci survived by licking tine hoar frost off the door of his cell. They were beginning to learn that Jansci was indestructible.’