“I’m the Countess Batthyany,” she said.
“Won’t you please come in?”
Professor Dyer and his daughter got out of the car and, following the direction indicated by the Countess’s outstretched hand, walked into the building.
The Countess turned to smile at Fulmar.
“And you must be dear cousin Eric,” she said, dryly.
“How nice to finally meet you.”
Fulmar laughed.
“Hello,” he said.
She turned to Von Heurten-Mitnitz, who had walked around the front of the car.
“I see everything turned out all right,” she said.
“The Gestapo man at the station personally led us past the checkpoint,” he said.
“Oooh,” she said.
“I suppose you could use a drink.”
“I could,” Fulmar said.
She turned to look at him again.
“You look like Manny,” she said.
“You even sound like him. That terrible Hessian dialect.”
He chuckled.
“Let’s hope you are luckier,” the Countess said as she started into the house.
“Let’s hope there’s some of his clothing here, and that it fits,” Fulmar said.
“Particularly shoes.”
She turned and looked at him again, this time appraisingly.
“You’re a little larger than Manny was,” she said.
“But there should be something.
I gather you want to get out of that uniform?”
“They’re looking for an Obersturmfuhrer who looks like me,” Fulmar said.
“There was a Gestapo agent at the border who thought he had found him.”
“That close?” she asked.
“I think it’s been smoothed over,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.
“It was close, but I think it… is smoothed over.”
The Countess considered what he had said and nodded her head.
Heating the enormous old palace had under the best of circumstances always been difficult. Now, without adequate supplies of coal, it had proved impossible.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have coal. There were half a dozen coal mines running around the clock on Batthyany property, and she could have all the coal she wanted. The problem was getting the coal from the mines to Batthyany Palace. That required trucks, and she had been allocated one truckload per month. She didn’t always get that, and even when she did, one truckload was nowhere near enough to heat the palace.
She didn’t even bother to try to heat the entire lower floor of the palace, nor the two upper floors. They had been shut off with rather ugly and really not very effective wooden barriers over the stairwells. Only the first floor was occupied (in America, the second floor). The Countess was living in a five room apartment overlooking Holy Trinity Square, but she often thought she might as well be living in the basement for all she got to look at the square.
Most of the floor-to-ceiling windows had been timbered over to preserve the heat from the tall, porcelain-covered stoves in the corners of the rooms. The two windows (leading to the balcony over the square and the garden in the rear) that were not covered over with timber were covered with seldom opened drapes.
The Dyers, not knowing where to go and looking uncomfortable, waited for the others to catch up with them at the foot of what had been the servants’ stairway to the first floor. The Countess went up ahead of them. They came out in the large, elegantly furnished sitting room overlooking the square.
Fulmar immediately sat down on a fragile-looking gilded wood Louis XIV sofa and began to pull his black leather boots off.
The Countess looked askance at him, but von Heurten-Mitnitz sensed there was something wrong.
“Something wrong with your feet?” he asked.
“These goddamned boots are four sizes too small,” Fulmar said.
“I soaked them with water, but it didn’t help a whole hell of a lot.”
When he had the boots off, he pulled a stocking off and, holding his foot in his lap, examined it carefully.
“Goddamn, look at that! “he said. The skin was rubbed raw, and was bleeding in several places.
The Countess walked to the sofa, dropped to her knees, and took the foot in her hand.
“How did you manage to walk?” she asked.
“Why, Cousin,” Fulmar said, “I simply considered the alternative.”
“You’ll have to soak that in brine,” she said.
“It’s the only thing that will help.”