The silence was interrupted — one could not say ended, for afterwards it seemed even deeper than before — by a thin, whip-like crack, like a distant rifle shot, and now that Reynolds searched back through his memory he knew that was what had waked him in the first place. He waited, listening, then after a minute or so he heard it again, perhaps closer this time. After even a shorter interval, he heard it a third time and decided to investigate. He flung back the bedclothes and swung his legs out of bed.
Only seconds afterwards he decided not to investigate and that flinging his legs over the side of the cot without due forethought was not to be recommended: with the sudden movement his back felt as if somebody had stuck in a giant hook and pulled with vicious force. Gently, carefully, he pulled his legs back into the cot and lay down with a sigh: most of the trouble, he thought, came from the large area of stiffness that extended even up past his shoulder blades, but the sudden jerking of stiffened muscles could be as agonising as any other pain. The noise outside could wait, no one else appeared unduly worried: and even his brief contact with the outer air — all he wore was a pair of borrowed pyjama trousers — had convinced him that a further acquaintance should be postponed as long as possible: there was no heating of any kind and the little room was bitterly cold.
He lay back, staring at the ceiling, and wondered if the Count and Imre had made it safely back to Budapest last night, after they had dropped the others. It had been essential that the truck be abandoned in the anonymity of the big city: just to park it in some empty lane near at hand would have invited disaster. As Jansci had said, the hunt would be up for that truck this morning over all Western Hungary, and no better place could be found for it than some deserted alley in a large town.
Further, it had been essential that the Count return also. The Count was now as near certain as he could be that no suspicion had fallen on him, and if they were ever to find out where Dr. Jennings had been taken — it was unlikely that the Russians would risk keeping him in a hotel, no matter how heavy a guard they mounted — he would have to return to the AVO offices, where he was due on duty anyway after lunch-time. There was no other way they could find out. There was always an element of risk in his going there, but then there always had been.
Reynolds did not deceive himself. With the finest help in the world — and with Jansci and the Count he believed that he had just that — the chances of ultimate success were still pretty poor. Forewarned was forearmed, and the Communists — he thought of the tape recorder with a deep chagrin that would long remain with him — had been well and truly forewarned. They could block all the roads, they could stop all traffic in and out of Budapest. They could remove the professor to the security of the remote and impregnable fortified prison or concentration camp in the country, they might even ship him back to Russia. And, over and above all that, there was the keystone to the whole conjectural edifice, the overriding question of what had happened to young Brian Jennings in Stettin: the Baltic port, Reynolds was grimly aware, would be combed that day as it had seldom been combed before, and it required only one tiny miscalculation, the slightest relaxation of vigilance by the two agents responsible for the boy’s safety — and they had no means of knowing that the alarm-call was out, that hundreds of the Polish U.B. would be searching every hole and corner in the city — for everything to be lost. It was frustrating, maddening, to have to lie there, to wait helplessly while the net closed a thousand miles away.
The fire in his back gradually ceased, the sharp, stabbing pains finally stopping altogether. Not so, however, the whip-like cracks from just outside the window: they were becoming clearer and more frequent with the passing of every minute. Finally Reynolds could restrain his curiosity no longer, and, moreover, a wash was urgently needed — on arrival that night he had just tumbled, exhausted, into bed and been asleep in a moment. With infinite care he slowly levered his legs over the side of the bed, sat on its edge, pulled on the trousers of his grey suit — now considerably less immaculate than when he had left London three days previously — pushed himself gingerly to his feet and hirpled across to the tiny window above the wash-basin.
An astonishing spectacle met his eyes — not so much the spectacle, perhaps, as its central figure. The man below his window, no more than a youngster really, looked as if he had stepped directly from the stage of some Ruritanian musical comedy: with his high-plumed velvet hat, long, flowing cloak of yellow blanket cloth and magnificently embroidered high boots fitted with gleaming silver spurs all so sharply limned against and emphasised by the dazzling white background of snow, he was a colourful figure indeed, in that drab, grey Communist country, colourful even to the point of the bizarre.
His pastime was no less singular than his appearance. In his gauntleted hand he held the grey-horned stock of a long, thin whip, and even as Reynolds watched he flicked his wrist with casual ease and a cork lying on the snow fifteen feet away jumped ten feet to one side. With the next flick it jumped back to exactly where it had lain before. A dozen times this was repeated, and not once did Reynolds see the whip touch the cork, or go anywhere near the cork, the lash was too fast for his eyes to follow. The youngster’s accuracy was fantastic, his concentration absolute.
Reynolds, too, became absorbed in the performance, so absorbed that he failed to hear the door behind him open softly. But he heard the startled ‘Oh!’ and swung round away from the window, the sudden jerk screwing up his face as the pain knifed sharply across his back.
‘I’m sorry.’ Julia was confused. ‘I didn’t know — ‘ Reynolds cut her off with a grin.
‘Come in. It’s all right — I’m quite respectable. Besides, you ought to know that we agents are accustomed to entertaining all sorts of feminine company in our bedrooms.’ He glanced at the tray she had laid on his bed. ‘Sustenance for the invalid? Very kind of you.’
‘More of an invalid than he’ll admit.’ She was dressed in a belted blue woollen dress, with white at the wrists and throat, her golden hair had been brushed till it gleamed and her face and eyes looked as if they had just been washed in the snow. Her fingertips, as they touched the tender swelling on his back, were as fresh and cool as her appearance. He heard the quick, indrawn breath.
‘We must get a doctor, Mr. Reynolds. Red, blue, purple — every colour you could think of. You can’t leave this as it is — it looks terrible.’ She turned him round gently and looked up at his unshaven face. ‘You should go back to bed. It hurts badly, doesn’t it?’
‘Only when I laugh, as the bloke said with the harpoon through his middle.’ He moved back from the washbasin, and nodded through the window. ‘Who’s the circus artist?’
‘I don’t have to look,’ she laughed. l/I can hear him. That’s the Cossack — one of my father’s men.’
“The Cossack?’
‘That’s what he calls himself. His real name is Alexander Moritz — he thinks we don’t know that, but my father knows everything about him, the same way he knows everything about nearly everybody. He thinks Alexander is a sissy’s name, so he calls himself the Cossack. He’s only eighteen.’
‘What’s the comic opera get-up for?’
‘Insular ignorance,’ she reproved. ‘Nothing comic about it. Our Cossack is a genuine csikos — a cowboy, you would say, from the puszta, the prairie land to the east, round Debrecen, and that’s exactly how they dress. Even to the whip. The Cossack represents another side to Jansci’s activities that you haven’t heard of yet — feeding starving people.’ Her voice was quiet now. ‘When winter comes, Mr. Reynolds, many people of Hungary starve. The Government takes away far too much meat and potatoes from the farms — they have to meet terribly high surrender quotas — and it’s worst of all in the wheat areas, Where the Government takes all. It was so bad at one time that the people of Budapest were, actually sending bread to the country. And Jansci feeds these hungry people. He decides from which Government farm the cattle shall be taken, and where they’ll be taken: the Cossack takes them there. He was across the border only last night.”