Schmidt put me in the front seat with Otto, who behaved as if he’d never seen me before. The doctor and Hermann, with drawn revolvers, sat in back with Maria between them. We drove straight to the Danube, then followed it north, past the winged victory monument of the Russians on Gellert Hill, over the Erzsebet bridge into Pest, and out the broad Rakoczi ut. We passed a dozen traffic policemen, close enough for me to have touched them, but I knew better than to call for help. Even if they had dared inspect a Red Army car, they wouldn’t have believed any story I could tell them. And if they had intervened, the alternative to Dr. Schmidt was the Countess Orlovska—with the murder of Major Ivan Strakhov to explain in addition to that of Marcel Blaye.
For a time I thought Schmidt was taking us into the country. We continued out Thokoly ut, past the Park Club, and over the railway tracks, but Otto made a skidding left turn into Mexikoi ut which parallels the railroad. The street bounds one of the worst slum districts of Budapest with tenements hard against slaughterhouses, oil refineries, and fertilizer factories, the whole area a rabbit warren for criminals, a sort of unofficial sanctuary for the hunted from Istanbul to Berlin.
Otto turned into an alleyway between two dingy tenements, drove fifty feet or so, and swung the car into a junk-littered yard enclosed in a high board fence. He’d driven from Kelenfold without a word from Schmidt; he had covered the route before. I recalled Major Strakhov’s contemptuous dismissal of Otto and his fellow mercenaries. “Just like children.” The Russian had seen Otto talking to Schmidt on the Hegyshalom platform and he’d put it down to Otto’s desire “to get out of work.” If Strakhov had been a little less superior, he would have suspected that something was up and he might have preserved his own existence.
Hermann jumped out of the car and knocked on the battered wooden door of the tenement.
“Schnell,” said Schmidt when there was no answer. “Hurry up.” Otto hit the car horn. “Stop it, you fool,” said Schmidt. “Do you want to tell the whole neighborhood?”
Hermann beat on the door with the butt of his revolver. A window on the third floor was raised, and the head of an old woman appeared, framed in the flickering light from an oil lamp.
“Wie heissen Sie?” screamed the old woman.
“Mein Gott,” said Dr. Schmidt. “The old fool has lost her mind.”
“You’ve lost your mind, old fool,” Hermann shouted.
“Nein, nein,” screamed Schmidt, leaping out of the car and landing in the snow up to his knees. “Dumkopf.” He shoved Hermann, then cupped his hands and shouted to the woman in the window. “Open this door immediately. It is I who command. Do you hear me?”
There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of the window closing, and the light disappeared. Dr. Schmidt went to the door and when it opened an inch he grabbed it with both hands and swung it back on its hinges so that it smashed against the building. The old woman was standing in the doorway with the oil lamp in her hand.
“You knew I was coming,” Schmidt said, waving his finger under her nose. “Why weren’t you at the door? What do you mean keeping me waiting? What is the matter with you?”
“Bitte, Verzeihung, Excellenz,” the old woman said. “Please forgive me. One does not know these days. There have been police raids in the neighborhood. I thought, Excellency, I—”
“Shut up,” Schmidt said. “You are not here to think.” He called to Otto. “Get those two in here immediately.”
I managed to beat Otto out of the car to help Maria down. Her hand brushed my face as I swung her into the snow, and I thought she held my arm longer than necessary, but it might have been to steady herself. There was just enough light for me to see her dark face. The wide-set black eyes were calm, the firm line of her jaw was clearer than ever.
The old woman stood inside the door as Maria and I entered. I took her for well over eighty. She was thin as a skeleton, her eyes sunken and dull, her pinched face streaked with dirt. Her bony arm trembled with the weight of the oil lamp which threw long dancing shadows into the barren hallway.
Schmidt ordered the woman to lead the way, and we followed her in single file up three flights of narrow, rickety stairs at her wheezing pace, a step at a time and with only the lamp in her shaking hand for illumination. The building must have been abandoned for years. The rooms and the hallways were piled high with junk, most of the windows were broken, the walls were running damp.
When we reached the top floor, the old woman led the strange parade to the front of the house, into a room crammed with boxes and barrels and old newspapers. The slanting roof cut the height of the room so that I had to lower my head to enter. There were two dormer windows, and through the broken, grimy panes we could see the lights of the Danube Corso and the long beams of the Russian antiaircraft searchlights in the Varosliget, the city park a few blocks away.
There was a broken-down armoire, covered with dust, against the wall, on the side of the building away from the alley. The door, its glass front shattered, hung drunkenly from one rusted hinge. When the old woman had recovered her breath from the climb, she kicked the door open and stuck her head inside. When she stepped back, we could see that the back panel of the armoire had slid aside; there was an entrance to the warehouse next door.
Schmidt elbowed the old woman aside and squeezed his squat body through the armoire. A few moments later the narrow opening was flooded with light, then Schmidt reappeared.
“Hermann.”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.” The pants presser clicked his heels.
“I shall need Otto here with me to help entertain our friends. But I want that car moved from here immediately. It is much too dangerous. You will drive it to Felix in Matyasfold, Verstehen Sie?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
“You will give your uniform to Felix. He will return your civilian clothes and the necessary documents. He will also give you clothes and documents for Otto. You will return here promptly in one hour. If you are stopped by police, you will tell them you are Frau Hoffmeyer’s nephew.”
“God forbid,” said the old woman.
“Shut up,” said Schmidt. “You will say you are to visit Frau Hoffmeyer. Your papers will bear you out. Do you understand, Hermann?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
“As soon as we are inside, you will help Frau Hoffmeyer replace the dust on this armoire and you will pile some junk in front of the door. Verstehen Sie, Hermann?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
“Gut,” said Schmidt. “Gehen Sie schnell.” He raised his hand with the palm outstretched. “Heil Hitler.” Hermann clicked his heels for the tenth time. “Heil Hitler.”
The old woman cackled. “In my day we said, ‘Hoch der Kaiser.’ ”
“Shut up, old fool,” Schmidt said. “Who cares about your day? Your day is gone forever.”
Otto herded Maria and me into the warehouse room, and the armoire panel closed behind us.
The room into which we moved I took to be the repair shop for the warehouse. There were wooden benches against the three outer walls of yellow brick and without windows. The benches were cluttered with tools of every description from screwdrivers to power lathes. The fourth wall, opposite the entrance, was of rough, unpainted wood and also windowless. At one time there must have been a stairway from the floor of the warehouse, some forty feet below, but there existed no sign of it. The only ventilation came from a big skylight under which was stretched a blackout curtain on wires. The room was lighted by electricity, and in one corner there was a tank with water taps.