“I brought him here.”
“Where did you put him?” she asked.
“In my bed,” Canidy said.
The Countess slid out from under the comforter, modestly turned her back to Canidy, and wrapped herself in a dressing gown. She found shoes, worked her feet into them, and, brushing her magnificent mop of red hair off her face, walked out of the room.
Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz got out the other side of the bed and started to dress. Naked, Canidy thought, and in his underwear–a sleeveless undershirt and baggy drawers, plus stockings held up by rubber suspenders on his skinny calves–von Heurten-Mitnitz was not at all impressive.
“We have one dead man, too,” Canidy said.
“What happened?” von Heurten-Mitnitz asked.
“Natural causes,” Canidy said.
“A heart attack.”
Von Heurten-Mitnitz didn’t seem at all surprised by that announcement, which surprised Canidy.
“What are you going to do with the body?” von Heurten-Mitnitz asked.
“Or the man with the injured… leg, you said?”
“Ankle,” Canidy said.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet. The first priority, I think, is for you and the Countess to get back to Budapest.”
“I think you’re right,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
Canidy returned to his room.
“You landed the airplane,” the Countess greeted him, looking up from the bed, where she was prodding and pulling on the ankle of the now unconscious Janos.
Alois had apparently told her, and she would now certainly tell von HeurtenMitnitz.
“Yes,” Canidy said.
“I will remain here while Herr von Heurten-Mitnitz returns to Budapest,” she said.
“It would be better, if I were here when… if… the authorities come.”
“I think it would be better if you went to Budapest,” Canidy said.
“Just as soon as you can.”
She ignored him.
“I have sent for rubber bandage,” she said.
“I’m sure there’s some here. I think about all we can do for this man is to wrap the ankle tightly, then stiffen the ankle. You take my meaning?”
“Splint it,” Canidy said, nodding.
“Thank you.”
Alois came into the room with von Heurten-Mitnitz on his heels.
“Their airplane landed,” the Countess said.
Von Heurten-Mitnitz looked at Canidy, surprised.
“Intact?” he asked.
“Yes,” Canidy said.
“And you plan to use it to leave?” von Heurten-Mitnitz asked.
Canidy nodded.
“If we can.”
“I think it would be best if you took Beatrice with you,” von HeurtenMitnitz said.
“No,” the Countess said.
“I am staying here to do what I can while you go to Budapest. But I am not leaving with them.”
“I don’t see any way that what has happened here can be hidden,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“Then you leave, too,” the Countess said.
“There is a good chance that no one knows about either the drop or the plane landing,” Canidy said.
“I think that is highly unlikely,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“You and the Countess slept through two passes and the landing itself,” Canidy said.
Von Heurten-Mitnitz grunted, reluctantly granting the point.
“I don’t want to have to worry about you, Countess,” Canidy said, “while we’re getting Eric and the professor out of St. Gertrud’s. I want you to go to Budapest, and now.”
She met his eyes for a moment.
“All right,” she said finally.
“Just let me do what I can for him.”
Twenty minutes later, the Opel Admiral drove away from the lodge. By then, it had stopped snowing. Canidy wondered if enough snow had fallen to conceal the tracks the C-47 had made on the meadow, or to obscure the outline of the aircraft under the pine boughs.
Since Ferniany hadn’t shown up, there was nothing else to do, so he went to see.
Ferniany drove up to the hunting lodge at the wheel of a small, canvas-bodied Tatra truck about the size of an American pickup. Canidy, summoned from the kitchen by Alois, went out to meet him. Ferniany had three men from the Hungarian underground with him, but that was about all.
There had been “a little trouble,” he told Canidy. The Germans, or maybe even the Hungarians, he didn’t know which, had had radio direction-finding trucks in operation, and they had located the radio transmitter from which he had radioed the drop-zone coordinates.
There had been enough “warning that the trucks were moving around, together with cars full of police, for him to get away before the police got to the hidden transmitter, but he had had to leave everything behind.