Next day they met again at the Bishop's quarters, which were a sumptuous private suite looking on to a charming cloister garden in a monastery situated in the oldest part of Pest. Gregory's opinion of the prelate as a man of God was not a high one. He was only in his early thirties but very fat and very lazy. At Nagykata Mass had been celebrated every morning by
Count Zapolya's private chaplain in the ornate chapel of the house. The servants all attended as part of their daily routine and a good sprinkling of the family; but, according to the Countess Elizabeth, the Bishop never did so. When telling Gregory this, she had added with a smile that he said that he preferred to perform his devotions in the private oratory adjacent to his bedroom, but she was sure that was only an excuse for him to lie abed.
Nevertheless he was an intelligent man and a fluent talker; and he succeeded in arguing the General round about Austria. But when they went on to discuss Czechoslovakia all five of them united to declare that not only would they retain Ruthenia but they must have back the far larger Slovakia.
The Czechs were to the Hungarians as a red rag to a bull; and Gregory knew enough of European history to be aware of the reason. For many centuries the two great Kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia had been deadly rivals, until Austria absorbed them both. Bohemia had fared worst as, after a crushing defeat in the seventeenth century, nearly the whole of her nobility had been barbarously executed and every vestige of independent power taken from her. Hungary, on the other hand, had remained a Kingdom, and her magnates had been strong enough to exact terms from the Austrians by which they preserved their ancient rights and their own Diet and refused to acknowledge the Emperor except by the title of King of Hungary. Yet the destruction of the Czech nobility had resulted in the rise of a powerful middle class which had developed trade and industry in a way that left Hungary far behind. In consequence, to the ancient hatred of the Hungarians for their neighbours in the north had been added a sour jealousy, coupled with contempt for them as a nation of bourgeois. To have had to surrender Slovakia and Ruthenia to them in 1920 had therefore been the bitterest pill of all and having got these back in 1940 they were determined to keep them.
When it became clear that the Committee would not budge without many hours of further persuasion, the exasperated Gregory suggested that this one question should be left open for the time being, so that he need no longer delay his departure. It then transpired that Colonel Orczy had sent a message to General Lakatos, one of the principal commanders of the Hungarian forces on the Russian front, asking him to return to Budapest for consultation on an urgent matter. The General was known to be violently anti Nazi, so was entirely to be trusted, and they wanted his professional opinion upon the number of Anglo-American divisions it would be necessary to land on the Continent in order to hold the German armour in the West. But the General was not arriving until Friday and Gregory had to agree with the Committee that his report would be of little practical value if he left before he could include in it their stipulations of this highly important point; so it was now obvious that he would not be able to get away until the weekend.
Had he been left to himself except for these meetings he would have been driven nearly mad by frustration, but the members of the Committee made up for their dilatoriness in business by lavish hospitality; for they were all intensely proud of their beautiful city and delighted to do the honours of it.
He had, of course, known that Buda had once been the most important bastion of the Roman world against the savage hordes that inhabited the lands north of the Danube; but he had not realized, until Count Szegenyhaz told him, that the Romans had brought civilization to Hungary long before they had to Britain, and five hundred years before the Germans were slowly emerging from a state of barbarism. The Count, who was a learned antiquarian, had a fine collection of ancient, pottery and weapons and, as Gregory showed much interest in them, took him on a fascinating tour of the National Museum. They also visited the Roman baths at Aquincum, and the thermal establishment at which for close on two thousand years countless sufferers had received relief by being packed in radioactive mud.
The Bishop took him to the Matthias Church to see the sacred relics and to the Bergberg where he had the Coronation regalia in the treasury specially brought out for Gregory to examine. Colonel Janes motored him up to the Fortress of Ofen and the heights of the Bocksberg, then took him to dine with the Officers of the Guard at the Royal Palace. The old General invited him to lunch at the Houses of Parliament and afterwards to witness a session in the Hall of the Magnates, as the Upper Chamber was called.
On Wednesday 27th the Committee did not meet, as on that day the funeral of Stephen Horthy took place. He had been in his middle forties and neither brilliant nor particularly popular, but as the Regent's heir he was given a State funeral.
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Although the soldiers lining the streets were in their drab wartime uniforms the magnates gave the procession a touch of semi oriental splendour, and Ribbentrop and Count Ciano walked side by side at the head of the group of notables representing Axis and neutral countries. Out of sympathy for the mother and father every shop in Budapest was closed and all activities for either pleasure or profit suspended; but on the following day the black streamers had disappeared from the windows and the city returned to normal.
That night Count Laszlo gave Gregory dinner and afterwards they went to the Piccadilly, which had the most glamorous cabaret of the luxury nightclubs on the Margaretenlnsel. They had been there for about an hour, drinking champagne and watching the lively singing and dancing of a bevy of near naked beauties, when there was a sudden hush and many heads were turned towards one of the entrances.
A party of six people was being obsequiously bowed by the maitre d'hotel to a reserved table on the edge of the dance floor. The leading couple v/ere a tall man with a high bald forehead and a strikingly beautiful dark-haired girl.
'There's Ribbentrop,' remarked Count Laszio, 'and his pretty Baroness.'
Gregory turned to look, then caught his breath in surprise and consternation. The girl was his old flame Sabine.
Next moment she glanced in his direction. Their eyes met. Her arched eyebrows went up and her scarlet lips opened a trifle. He knew then that she had recognized him. It was too late to slip away. The danger he had foreseen from an unexpected meeting, when he had thought about her after his bathe on his first afternoon in Budapest, re-entered his mind like the shrilling of an alarm bell.
Playing With Fire
Chapter 9
Gregory had hoped that if he did run into Sabine she would be alone and that, by hinting at the reason for his being in Budapest, he might ensure her sympathetic silence. Anyway he had felt confident that he would be able to overcome any feeling she might have that it was her duty to hand him over to the police.
Even had she had friends with her of her own nationality, and from surprise at seeing him had greeted him with an exclamation in English, dangerous as such a situation would have been he might, with luck, have put up a bluff of some kind which would have stalled off any immediate action.
But to come across her in the company of a Nazi, let alone Hitler's Foreign Minister, was a thing that he had never remotely contemplated. Still worse, from what he had heard she made no concealment of the fact that she was Ribbentrop's mistress, and a convinced Nazi herself.
As they stared at one another from fifteen paces' distance he, kept his face completely immobile. For her English lover to turn up in Budapest during the war was so unlikely that, if he showed no signs of recognition, he thought there was just a chance she might decide that she had been misled by a resemblance. But instead of looking away, while Ribbentrop was motioning the rest of his party to the places at the table where he wished them to sit she touched the maitre d'hotel on the arm and pointed at Gregory.