He had at first wondered whether the albums had been purchased–they looked professionally done–or whether the Counts Batthyany had been unusually skilled amateur photographers. But when he got into the second volume, he recognized the huge fireplace in the main room of the lodge behind three dark-haired beauties and a hairy, skinny, mustachioed gentleman.
The thought passed through his mind that it might be fun to peel several of the neatly matted photographs free of the albums and take them home for Ann. It might brighten her day, he thought. But then he decided against that.
Ann took sex very seriously. But then he was sure that as far as Ann was concerned, dirty pictures would be as high on her taboo list for him as carrying on with Her Gracefulness, the Duchess of Stanfield.
The next thought he had was that he would bring some of the dirty pictures back with him, to include them with his official report.
“The photographs attached as Enclosures 16 through 26 are included in the belie that they might suggest exploitable character laws in the Hungarian aristocracy possibly useful in future operations.”
That would shake up the system. Dave Bruce’s near-glacial dignity would crack; he might even blush. He would certainly hem, haw, and stammer.
And then he realized that he was already in enough trouble for having come to Hungary, without adding fuel to the fire. Did he need another demonstration that he didn’t have the right attitude? Hardly.
Obviously, he thought, suddenly chagrined, he did not have the right attitude.
Instead of sitting here drooling over dirty pictures like some high-school junior, he should be wondering how to get Eric Fulmar and Professor Dyer out of St. Gertrud’s prison without having to “terminate” them.
He put the leather-bound albums back in their case and went to sleep thinking over what he had just about decided to do–the final decision to be made after talking it over with Ferniany and whoever London sent in to command the team.
Ferniany would be here tomorrow, probably around noon. He would have with him two of his people, Hungarians he had recruited, and the signal panels, and the radio, and the Sten gun Captain Hughson had loaned him just before he left Vis. Canidy would be glad to have that back. There was plenty of room in the Lodge to put Ferniany and his men up for however long it took London to get off its ass and send him the team, and the worst possible scenario for that was five days.
Von Heurten-Mitnitz and the Countess would return to Budapest tomorrow.
Canidy saw no problem with that. He didn’t need the Countess now: She had told her servants they were to do what he asked. And he didn’t think there would be any suspicion directed toward the Countess and von HeurtenMitnitz for having been in Pecs several days before the prisoners had escaped from St. Gertrud’s. Or several days before an unexplained explosion had destroyed a mine shaft in the Batthyany coal mine.
It would be a coincidence, nothing more, that His Excellency had been enjoying the overnight hospitality of the Countess at the Countess’s rustic love nest ten or so miles away.
The most serious potential problem, Canidy had gone to sleep thinking, was not how to get Eric and the professor out of the hands of Hungarians, but how to do it without calling a hell of a lot of attention to the operation. He had been disturbed by Standartenfuhrer Muller’s report that the SS not only had not grown bored with looking for Fulmar and the professor, but quite the reverse, had intensified the examination.
St. Gertrud’s prison would be swarming with SS and Gestapo just as soon as word got out that two prisoners had not only escaped but had been rescued by what it would take them about five minutes to figure out was a highly skilled team under the hands of either the SOE or the
OSS.
When he woke up smelling like a Hungarian courtesan, Canidy rested on his back in the dark for several minutes in the hope that, as sometimes happened, his subconscious had been working on the problem while he slept and that there would be new solutions, or new questions, or both.