Fulmar and Whittaker had given him a quick course in assassination. Neither of them liked the garrote. (“What if the wire gets bung on a button or something?” Fulmar had calmly argued.
“Or if be gets his fingers under the wire before you can bury it in his neck? Put your hand over his mouth and stick him behind the ear. As soon as you scramble his brains, you can let him go. It takes a hell of a long time to strangle somebody.”) Whittaker’s preferred technique of assassination was throat-cutting (“Once you cut into the throat, all they can do is gargle,” Whittaker had said don’t trust the itty-bitty point on the Fairhairn, especially the little one. You hit a bone or something, and it breaks, and there you are with your hand over the mouth of some highly pissed-off character you can’t put down.”) Canidy had decided the Fairhairn was best, because it was far more concealable than a throat-cutting knife, and because Jimmy Whittaker had somewhat reluctantly conceded that there was a lot of blood when you cut someone’s throat and very little when you scrambled his brains Canidy felt bile in his throat at the prospect that he might now have to put theory into practice, but it did not become necessary. The policeman helped himself to a tub of butter from Ferniany’s rucksack and waved them on They rode to the end of the bridge and then crossed Margit Island. He could see what looked to him like an amusement park closed for the winter: small wooden shacks in a line; an oblong building that could have concealed a dodger ride, a larger round building that almost certainly contained a merry-go-round There was no policeman at the Buda end of the Margit Bridge Two blocks into Buda, the cobblestone street became too steep and too slippery to pedal the bicycles, and they got off and pushed. And for some reason, here the slush had begun to melt (Canidy wondered about this and decided they were over a tunnel of some kind, maybe a sewer, that gave off enough heat to melt the frozen slush). So his feet, in rough leather work shoes and thick cotton socks, quickly became wet and then even colder than they had been Between the Margit Bridge and Batthyany Palace, they passed two more policemen, but neither of them showed any interest in the bicyclists When Ferniany finally pushed his bicycle off the street and onto the sidewalk before the facade of what looked like a museum, Canidy was sweat soaked from exertion and annoyed that Ferniany seemed immune to both fatigue and cold.
The doorbell was just that, a handle which when pulled caused a bell somewhere inside the building to just audibly tinkle
By the time a small door built into the larger door opened a crack, Canidy had his breath back, but his sweat-soaked clothing had chilled, and he was shivering and his feet hurt.
A small old man with white hair and very bright eyes exchanged a few words with Ferniany, then opened the door to let them pass.
There were more cobblestones inside the door, and at the end of a passageway a courtyard. The little old man led them into a huge kitchen and said something to Perniany, apparently an order to wait. The kitchen, Canidy saw, was not in use. There was a huge icebox, and each of its half-dozen doors was wedged open. More important, none of the three wood-burning stoves held a fire.
A door opened, and a rather startling redhead came into the kitchen. Her hair, a magnificent mop of dark red, hung below her shoulders. She was wrapped in an ankle-length, somewhat bedraggled, Persian lamb coat. The hem of a woolen nightgown was exposed at the bottom, and her feet were in what Canidy at first thought were half Wellington boots, but which he saw after a moment were really sheepskin-lined jodhpurs.
She shook Ferniany’s hand, and they had a brief exchange. Then she turned to Canidy. She spoke British-accented English.
“I am the Countess Batthyany,” she said.
“How may I be of service, Major?”
“I’m Pharmacist,” Canidy said.
Her eyebrows rose in genuine surprise.