'You know her well, then?'
'Oh yes. I have known her since shortly after she left her Convent. In fact, I might even claim to have contributed a little to her education; although that came a year or two later when she had become bored with the limited conversation of handsome young officers.'
Into Gregory's mind there flashed a picture of the enormous bed at Count Laszlo's discreet apartment in the suburbs. But his gaze was riveted on Sabine, She had read the note and was talking to Ribbentrop; then she spoke to the Arrow Cross man. Gregory was on tenterhooks for what seemed an age while he watched them conferring together, but actually it was only two minutes before she beckoned to the waiter again and sent him over with a message. Hurrying between the tables he bowed and delivered it:
'Gentlemen, the Herr Reichsaussenminister presents his compliments and asks that you will join his party.'
Count Laszlo half covered his mouth with a hand that held a cigarette, and murmured quickly behind it in French, 'This is Hungary, not Germany; so you do not have to go. Walk out if you like. I will express your regrets and tell them you had to leave because you have a date with a lady.'
'No,' Gregory replied in the same language, as he stood up. 'If she has given me away they'd have the police after me in ten minutes. Better to face the music and hope things will turn out all right. If not, please don't involve yourself. Say you hardly know me that we met in the bar and as we were both alone decided to share a table.'
A few moments later they were bowing in turn over Sabine's hand. To Gregory's great relief she greeted him in French. Then she introduced them to the others at her table, explaining that the Arrow Cross man was their host. He proved to be Major Szalasi, the leader of the Hungarian Nazi Party, and the red-haired woman was his wife. The third man, a tall blond fellow, was Ribbentrop's aide-de-camp, Captain Von Trott, and his companion, a girl whose looks were a little marred by a mouth as wide as a letter box, was a Fraulein Weiss.
The bull necked Szalasi had shown no dangerous reaction when Sabine, having asked Gregory's present rank, had presented him as Commandant Tavenier; so, this second hurdle being behind him, he took one of the extra chairs that had been brought up, accepted the glass of champagne Szalasi poured for him, and entered with zest into his part.
For the first minute or two Sabine regarded him with a coolly detached expression, but with truly Gallic exuberance he launched into an invented account of how he had taken her boating on the lake at Vincennes and fallen in, and she had nearly brained him with an oar while trying to help him out, upon which her dark eyes began to brim with merriment. Mischievously she enquired after his mythical aunt and was hard put to it to maintain a suitable expression of sorrow when he told her in a tragic voice that in the first year of the war the poor lady had had the tip of her nose bitten off by her pet poodle, and that as a result she had died of sepsis.
For the benefit of the others he changed from French to heavily accented German; as he described his agony of indecision as to whether it was his duty to shoot the poodle as the murderer of his aunt. Then, breaking off abruptly, he declared that this was no place in which to talk of death, and soon he and Sabine were outbidding one another in absurd, entirely fictitious, stories beginning, 'Do you remember,' and everyone at the table was laughing with them.
It was Ribbentrop who turned the conversation to more serious matters by saying, 'I understand, Herr Major, that you were evacuated from Dunkirk and spent some time in England. It would be interesting to have an eye witness's account of that operation as the enemy saw it, and to have your impressions of London under war conditions.'
About Dunkirk Gregory had no need to call on his powers of invention, as for the best part of twenty-four hours he had sat on the beach watching the troops taken off; although, his own mission being uncompleted, instead of going home with them he had then got into an abandoned tank and driven off in the direction of Paris.
About London he exaggerated both the bad and the good with the intent of depressing his audience. He described the results of the bombing as frightful beyond belief, which delighted the Germans; but then went on to say how, all the unreliable elements having fled from the capital, those who remained had displayed the pigheadedness for which those accursed islanders were notorious. They had suddenly begun talking to their neighbours in buses and trains and sung a silly song about rolling out a barrel and’ pardon, but you will understand I speak of the filthy British’ gone about greeting one another with laughing cries of 'To hell with Hitler!'
Having despatched this barbed arrow, he swiftly returned to his own adventures, telling how he had skilfully managed to desert from a British Commando at St. Nazaire and that as, alas, France had not yet actively entered the war against the perfidious English he had come to Budapest in the hope of selling truffles.
He then paused to await with some curiosity their reaction to this admission of his pseudo commercial activities. Ribbentrop had been widely sneered at by the world Press because in pre Nazi days he had earned his living as a champagne salesman. Why, Gregory had never been able to understand, for it seemed to him that few trades could be more civilized and pleasant than selling wines; and, although he had no right to the 'von' he claimed, as only his mother's family had been noble, he came of respectable people. Moreover, he had been no ordinary commercial traveller, as he had married Anneliese Henkel, the heiress of the great German Sparkling Wine House. But nobody made any comment on Gregory's commercial activities, and a moment later the band started up a new number.
Standing up, Sabine smiled at Ribbentrop, then said to Gregory, 'Come and show me if you still dance as well as you used to when we were in Paris.'
'With the utmost pleasure,' he replied gaily, and led her out, on to the floor. But as they moved smoothly off among the throng of dancers, her manner changed and she asked abruptly:
'Now! What are you really up to here?'
'Surely you can guess,' he replied lightly. 'I am assessing the weight of bombs it will take to blow Budapest off the map; and how many Hungarian girls we can hope to save from the ruins to supply the brothels we maintain for the coloured troops of the Empire.'
'The Allied bombers will never get as far as Budapest, and…"
'I wouldn't be too certain of that,' he cut in with sudden seriousness.
Her voice was low and soft but held no note of friendliness as she replied, 'That, as I was about to add, is beside the point. I want a sensible answer to my question.'
'Let's say then that, my poor old bones now being racked with arthritis, I have come to do the cure at your famous mud baths.'
'Gregory!' She gave the back of his hand a sharp dig with her nails. 'Stop fooling! You are as fit and lithe as ever you were. And anyway…'
'Softly, my sweet, softly,' he chided her. 'Please remember that my name is now Etienne.'
'You will have exchanged your name for a number in a cell if you exasperate me much further. And I am not your sweet!'
Ignoring the threat, he smiled down at her. 'Alas, no. I fear that your taste has deteriorated since the wonderful time we had together in Paris, of course. About that you played up marvellously, and I am most grateful to you.'
Without returning his smile, she replied. 'Yes, it was all very amusing; but I am no longer in the mood for comedy. For the sake of old times I refrained from denouncing you, and I am now giving you an opportunity to explain yourself. Take it, or I shall get Major Szalasi to send for a policeman.'