But Colonel Szendrô was still at the talking stage. He turned round in his seat, lifted Reynolds’ bag from the back, set it on his lap and tried to open it. It was locked.
‘The key,’ Szendrô said. ‘And don’t tell me there isn’t one, or that it’s lost. Both you and I, I suspect, Mr Buhl, are long past that kindergarten stage.’
They were indeed, Reynolds thought grimly. ‘Inside ticket pocket of my jacket.’
‘Get it. And your papers at the same time.’
‘I can’t get at these.’
‘Allow me.’ Reynolds winced as Szendrô’s pistol barrel pushed hard against lips and teeth, felt the colonel slip the papers from his breast pocket with a professional ease that would have done credit to a skilled pickpocket. And then Szendrô was back on his own side of the car, the bag open: almost, it seemed, without pausing to think, he had slit open the canvas lining and extracted a slim fold of papers, and was now comparing them with those he had taken from Reynolds’ pockets.
‘Well, well, well, Mr Buhl. Interesting, most interesting. Chameleon-like, you change your identity in a moment of time. Name, birthplace, occupation, even your nationality all altered in an instant. A remarkable transformation.’ He studied the two sets of documents, one in either hand. ‘Which, if any, are we to believe?’
‘The Austrian papers are fakes,’ Reynolds growled. For the first time he stopped speaking in German and switched to fluent idiomatic Hungarian. ‘I had word that my mother, who has lived in Vienna for many years, was dying. I had to have them.’
‘Ah, of course. And your mother?’
‘No more.’ Reynolds crossed himself. ‘You can find her obituary in Tuesday’s paper. Maria Rakosi.’
‘I’m at the stage now where I would be astonished if I didn’t.’ Szendrô spoke also in Hungarian, but his accent was not that of Budapest, Reynolds was sure of that — he had spent too many agonizing months learning every last Budapest inflection and idiom from an ex-Professor of Central European languages of Budapest University. Szendrô was speaking again. ‘A tragic interlude, I am sure. I bare my head in silent sympathy — metaphorically, you understand. So you claim your real name is Lajos Rakosi? A very well-known name indeed.’
‘And a common one. And genuine. You’ll find my name, date of birth, address, date of marriage all in the records. Also my—’
‘Spare me.’ Szendrô held up a protesting hand. ‘I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt you could show me the very school desk on which your initials are carved and produce the once-little girl whose books you once carried home from school. None of which would impress me in the slightest. What does impress me is the extraordinary thoroughness and care of not only yourself but the superiors who have so magnificently trained you for whatever purpose they have in mind. I do not think I have ever met anything quite like it.’
‘You talk in riddles, Colonel Szendrô. I’m just an ordinary Budapest citizen. I can prove it. All right, I did have fake Austrian papers. But my mother was dying, and I was prepared to risk indiscretion. But I’ve committed no crime against our country. Surely you can see that. If I wished, I could have gone over to the west. But I did not so wish. My country is my country, and Budapest is my home. So I came back.’
‘A slight correction,’ Szendrô murmured. ‘You’re not coming back to Budapest — you’re going, and probably for the first time in your life.’ He was looking Reynolds straight in the eyes when his expression changed. ‘Behind you!’
Reynolds twisted round, a split second before he realized Szendrô had shouted in English — and there had been nothing in Szendrô’s eyes or tone to betray his meaning. Reynold’s turned back slowly, an expression almost of boredom on his face.
‘A schoolboyish trick. I speak English’ — he was using English now— ‘why should I deny it? My dear Colonel, if you belonged to Budapest, which you don’t, you would know that there are at least fifty thousand of us who speak English. Why should so common an accomplishment be regarded with suspicion?’
‘By all the gods!’ Szendrô slapped his hand on his thigh. It’s magnificent, it’s really magnificent. My professional jealousy is aroused. To have a Britisher or an American — British, I think, the American intonation is almost impossible to conceal — talk Hungarian with a Budapest accent as perfectly as you do is no small feat. But to have an Englishman talk English with a Budapest accent — that is superb!’
‘For heaven’s sake, there’s nothing superb about it.’ Reynolds almost shouted in exasperation. ‘I am Hungarian.’
‘I fear not.’ Szendrô shook his head. ‘Your masters taught you, and taught you magnificently — you, Mr Buhl, are worth a fortune to any espionage system in the world. But one thing they didn’t teach you, one thing they couldn’t teach you — because they don’t know what it is — is the mentality of the people. I think we may speak openly, as two intelligent men, and dispense with the fancy patriotic phrases employed for the benefit of the — ah — proletariat. It is, in brief, the mentality of the vanquished, of the fear-ridden, the cowed shoulder that never knows when the long hand of death is going to reach out and touch it.’ Reynolds was looking at him in astonishment — this man must be tremendously sure of himself — but Szendrô ignored him. ‘I have seen too many of our countrymen, Mr Buhl, going as you are, to excruciating torture and death. Most of them are just paralysed: some of them are plainly terror-stricken and weeping; and a handful are consumed by fury. You could not possibly fit in any of these categories — you should, but, as I say, there are things your masters cannot know. You are cold and without emotion, planning, calculating all the time, supremely confident of your own ability to extract the maximum advantage from the slightest opportunity that arises, and never tired of watching for that opportunity to come. Had you been a lesser man, Mr Buhl, self-betrayal would not have come so easily …’
He broke off suddenly, reached and switched off the roof light, just as Reynolds’ ears caught the hum of an approaching car engine, wound up his window, deftly removed a cigarette from Reynolds’ hand and crushed it beneath his shoe. He said nothing and made no move until the approaching car, a barely perceptible blur behind the sweep of its blazing headlights, its tyres silent on the snow-packed road, had passed by and vanished to the west. As soon as it was lost to sight and sound Szendrô had reversed out on the highway again and was on his way, pushing the big car almost to the limit of safety along the treacherous road and through the gently falling snow.
Over an hour and a half elapsed before they reached Budapest — a long, slow journey that could normally have been done in half the time. But the snow, a curtain of great feathery flakes that swirled whitely, suddenly, into the flat-topped beams of the headlights, had become steadily heavier and slowed them up, at times almost to walking pace as the labouring wipers, pushing the clogging snow into corrugated ridges on the middle and at the sides of the windscreen, swept through narrower and narrower arcs until finally they had stopped altogether; a dozen times, at least, Szendrô had had to stop to clear the mass of snow off the screen.
And then, a few miles short of the city limits, Szendrô had left the highway again, and plunged into a mass of narrow, twisting roads: on many stretches where the snow lay smooth and deep and treacherously masking the border between road and ditch, theirs was obviously the first car that had passed since the snow had begun to fall, but despite the care and concentrated attention Szendrô gave the roads, his flickering eyes found Reynolds every few seconds; the man’s unflagging vigilance was almost inhuman.