'That is very understandable. I, too, am glad to escape the annoyances and privations suffered by everyone in France these days, and I hope to retain my post here until the end of the war. Talking of the war Monsieur le Commandant, at your age you must have been with your regiment in 1939. I would be interested to hear how you fared?'
'My battalion formed part of General Blanchard's Army of the North,' replied Gregory promptly. 'As you will know, it was trapped with the British in Belgium and the greater part of it was killed or captured. But several thousand troops of General de la Laurencie's IIIrd Corps were taken off from Dunkirk, and I was lucky enough to be among them.'
T see, and you opted to return to France?'
Gregory shook his head. 'No; I was one of those who favoured fighting on. Later, like many others, I realized the futility of doing so. Most of them are still stuck in England, but I had the good fortune to get away. I was posted as an Interpreter to one of the Commando units that took part in the St. Nazaire raid last March. Soon after I got ashore I took advantage of the smoke and confusion to slip away and look for a good hiding place. I went to earth in a grain warehouse on the docks and I had brought sufficient iron rations in my haversack to last me several days. When the excitement had died down I took a chance with a dock foreman. He brought me a suit of civilian clothes and I had enough francs for my railway fare; so four days after the raid I was back at Razac the village in Perigord where I own the chateau.'
Cochefert nodded his vulture like head, and sighed. 'Ah, Monsieur le Commandant, this war is not like other wars. It has set brother against brother; and often left gallant officers such as yourself no alternative but to adopt such means as you describe to save their honour and the honour of France.'
'Yes; the honour of France,' Gregory repeated piously.
It was the sanctimonious phrase which sprang to the lips of many Frenchmen in those days; in most cases to disguise from themselves the fact that they had been led by their military idol, old Marshal Petain, into deserting their ally and entering into a pact with Hitler.
On this they both stood up, remained silent for a moment as though paying tribute to the memory of some highly respected friend who had recently died, then shook hands. It seemed then that Monsieur Cochefert had no further questions to ask for, after exchanging punctilious salutations with his visitor, he showed him out to the front door.
Back in the sunlit street, Gregory felt that he had dealt with a possibly dangerous business very successfully. The line that he had at first thrown in his lot with the Free French but later 'seen the light' was, he thought, a nice artistic touch; and the foie-gras story could not have gone down better. Cochefert might lack most of those physical attributes which would have made him the answer to a maiden's prayer, but he had fulfilled his tiresome function in a friendly spirit and appeared to be entirely satisfied.
The next item on Gregory's agenda was to get in touch with Sir Pellinore's old friends. Just in case he ran into any trouble, he thought it wiser not to do so from his own hotel; so he walked along to the Bristol. Going up to the hall porter’s desk he asked the man to get him Count Istvan Lujza's telephone number.
The porter looked at him in surprise and said the ex Minister, sir, he has been dead for two years or more.'
Murmuring that he had not been in Budapest since before the war, Gregory asked him to try Count Mihaly Zapolya. This time the porter held a short telephone conversation in Hungarian, then reported:
'I have spoken with the doorman at the palace in the Illona Utcza, and he says that as usual in the summer months His Excellency the Count is living on his estate at Nagykata.'
Hoping that he would prove luckier with the third string to his bow, Gregory asked for Prince Gyorgy Hunyadi. The porter gave a dubious shake of his head and replied:
'I feel almost certain that His Highness is still abroad, sir; but I will ring up the Foreign Office.' Another telephone conversation followed, and it emerged that the Prince was in Buenos Aires as Hungarian Ambassador to the Argentine.
That left only Count Zapolya as a possible contact; so Gregory enquired where Nagykata was. He learned to his relief that it was only about thirty miles from Budapest; but the station which served it was no more than a village halt, and there were only two trains that stopped there each day. As it was not yet half past ten, by hiring a two horse carriage and promising its driver a liberal tip, he just managed to catch the morning one, which got him there by half past eleven.
When he jumped down from the train he could see no sign of a village or a large country house, and there was no conveyance of any kind available. But he had taken the precaution of writing the Count's name in block letters on an envelope and, on showing this to the solitary porter, the man grinned and pointed up the road towards a slight eminence, crowned by trees, that stood out from the flat plain.
After a half mile walk he found that beyond the trees lay the village, and that it was a replica of a dozen others that he had seen from the train. To one side of a broad uneven open space stood a small onion spired church; the rest of the buildings varied little except in size. They were thatched and squat, the eaves of their roofs coming very low down; nearly all of them were whitewashed and had semicircular arches leading to inner yards. There were no motor vehicles in the street, but a number of huge haywains each drawn by a team of four slow moving white oxen, and flocks of cackling geese straggled in all directions. Not one of the villagers was in any kind of uniform; there were no notices with arrows pointing to air raid shelters or Red Cross huts and, in fact, it made the war seem so immeasurably remote that the bombings, the sinkings and the barrages that were killing thousands every day might have been taking place on another planet.
At the village inn he found a man who could speak German and, while he drank his first baratsch of the day, a horse was harnessed for him in leisurely fashion to an ancient carriage. There followed a two-mile drive between the endless fields of rich black earth, which had no boundary banks or hedges and were broken only by an occasional low farmhouse with a few barns clustering about it. More trees at length indicated an entrance to a private park. In it, grassy meadows with fine herds of cattle grazing in them sloped down to a long lake, partly covered by bulrushes and with a few swans gracefully sailing about its open spaces.
The house was hideous. Except for one much older wing, the main building was a product of Victorian times and even the green painted wooden colonial style shutters that flanked its many windows could not redeem it architecturally. Yet in eighty years its lemon yellow brick had mellowed sufficiently to give it a not unfriendly appearance, and fine magnolia trees, the flowers of which gave out a heavenly scent, broke up the flatness of its barrack like walls.
When the carriage pulled up in front of the porch, Gregory got out, signed to the coachman to wait for him, then took an envelope from his pocket. It contained a note that he had thought out during his journey and written in the village inn while the carriage was being got ready for him. It was in French, addressed to Count Zapolya, and read:
/ have recently arrived in Hungary, and Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust particularly asked me while here to seek an opportunity of conveying his kindest remembrances to Your Excellency. Owing to the unhappy events which have disturbed so many social relationships in Europe during the past three years, it is possible that Your Excellency may prefer not to receive me; but I trust this will not be the case, as I have proposals to make which might prove to Hungary's advantage.