Even more amusing than doing things to Fuchs was doing things to his briefcase. He had acquired a very sober, expensive leather briefcase through a family belief that such an accoutrement would boost his scholastic achievement. Because the briefcase was pompous, very expensive and above all belonged to Fuchs it came in for a lot of attention. Fuchs had a curious spiritual oneness with this briefcase that transcended merely trying to protect it. Since it was kicked on sight Fuchs had to walk around with the briefcase clutched to his chest, but as he couldn’t maintain such tight security all day, the briefcase would disappear. Invariably, the moment it fell into hostile hands, no matter how distracted he was, Fuchs was telepathically alerted and he would have to be sat on while his briefcase was filled with liquids, trampolined on, nailed to a wall, or on one memorable occasion during one of Solyom-Nagy’s chocolate gluts in early ’44, topped up with chocolate melted over a bunsen burner to the accompaniment of Hidassy’s discourse on the spectrum.
They were sitting on the window ledge at the rear of the classroom where Keresztes pawed the grenades much to Pataki’s discomfiture. The lab was on the second floor and there was a drop of twenty feet to the pavement. A vogue was sweeping the school for jumping off the top of the music block, which was a twelve foot drop onto grass, started by Gomboc, whose elder brother had been a paratrooper, resulting in an epidemic of sprained and broken ankles. Keresztes lobbed a grenade up and down thoughtfully: ‘I tell you what. I bet you this grenade that you can jump out this window and walk away.’ Keresztes never explained what he was going to put up but in any case Pataki wasn’t having it, since whether or not Keresztes broke his neck, such an escapade could only add to Pataki’s detention time, which was already heavily curtailing his rowing on the Danube.
Pataki had already said no three times when Keresztes, who needed to be told things six times as a minimum, threw Fuchs out of the window. Fuchs looked surprised at the physics lesson having run away from him but had got up swiftly and dusted himself off. ‘See,’ said Keresztes, ‘my grenade.’ Whereupon he pulled out the pin. Row upon row of boys ducked under their benches as awareness of the unpinned grenade spread.
After a good three or four minutes, Pataki crawled out from underneath the neighbouring bench to see Keresztes holding the grenade up to the light. ‘All right, how did you know it was a dud?’
‘I didn’t,’ replied Keresztes. Just then Fuchs walked back into the classroom. Hidassy, who hadn’t missed a word of his eulogy on the electron during the grenade scare, rounded on Fuchs. ‘How dare you leave the classroom without my permission? Double detention.’ That lesson was the last time they saw Keresztes. Two rumours made the rounds. One that the headmaster had Keresztes on a retainer to stay away from school; the other that Keresztes’s vanishing was due to having bet someone at Kobányá railway station that he could headbutt the 4.15 from the Keleti, which didn’t stop at Kobányá, into submission. Pataki definitely preferred the latter version and found the detail verisimilar.
Fuchs had been doubly depressed by the double detention: he had never had a detention and Hidassy, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, had never given a detention.
As they left their punishment, Fuchs bent double with woe, his briefcase pressed to his chest, Pataki, since there was no one else around to witness it, felt compassion and tried to cheer Fuchs up. ‘It’s no use,’ moaned Fuchs, ‘I’ll never do the great stuff like you, selling grenades. No one sits on you.’ Pataki strived to play down the kudos of arms-dealing but as they waited for the tram, his sense of humour pushed in front of his compassion when Fuchs suggested: ‘Look, couldn’t I help you sell some?’ Pataki looked contemplative for a theatrical moment, then agreed. ‘Okay,’ he said.
Pataki outlined the hidden underground German arsenal he had discovered which was brimming over with top SS gear, ammunition, weapons, grenades etc., which would make the two of them a fortune.
‘What you need to bring is rope… a lot of rope, fifty feet. A miner’s helmet or if you can’t get one, a very powerful torch. And lots of sorrel.’
‘Sorrel?’
‘Yes. You know, the green stuff. Sorrel is the best thing to pack explosives in; it relaxes them,’ elucidated Pataki with an infallibly serious face. The rest of the way home, after he had farewelled Fuchs, Pataki kept lapsing into laughter at the thought of Fuchs working his way through the shopping list. And on the appointed Thursday, when Fuchs showed up at school hidden under enormous coils of rope, a miner’s helmet at a rakish angle on his head, carrying two huge baskets full of fresh green sorrel, Pataki was truly afraid that he was going to injure himself or pass out. He had also primed the rest of the class about the proposed weapons-quest, so there was universal merriment, but it was the touch of the miner’s helmet, which must have potently taxed Fuchs’s ingenuity, that finished Pataki off. He couldn’t control himself and earned three detentions for inexplicable spasms of mirth. By the next afternoon he had managed to compose himself as he read his Tompa.
The schoolish atmosphere at number 60 Andrássy út was further heightened by an instruction, after he had been standing in the corner for hours, to cover two sides of paper with his curriculum vitae. Pataki was calm now, if not utterly confident of talking his way home that night. The grenades he had actually sold would be long gone, deniable. A blanket refusal to acknowledge them was the tactic there, and as for the subterranean German arms cache, since there wasn’t one, he could reveal it as a schoolboy prank, apologise profusely and go home. It was a pity he hadn’t had a chance to liaise with Fuchs to harmonise their narratives, but he polished various emotional stages, fear, incredulity, repentance, with a few stand-by lies in reserve. Mentally, he adjusted the tones of denial and set the level of horrified innocence he wanted to draw on at key junctures.
They were interrogated separately. Pataki was allowed to sit, and this he did as respectfully and helpfully as humanely possible. His interrogator was wearing the new blue-insignia uniform of the AVO and he started off the session with: ‘Of course, we know all about you, Pataki.’ Pataki paid no heed to the contemptuous tone and smiled steadily, working on the theory that smiling might reduce the chances of getting hit. The interrogator looked at his life story with conspicuous disgust. He put it down with what Pataki as a consummate dissimulator instantly spotted as an artificial hiatus; he had the feeling that his interrogator wanted to go home. It was nine o’ clock after all. ‘Fuchs has confessed everything about the weapons. He told us you wanted to be his assistant in organising an armed struggle… ‘No,’ said Pataki as uncontradictorily as possible, ‘there aren’t any weapons, it’s…’ ‘What’s this then?’ asked the interrogator, slapping a German sub-machine gun on the table. He counted the beats and said: ‘An oversized and extremely impractical toothpick? Part of a lawnmower perhaps?’
Pataki found himself, for the first time in his life, out of stock of any suitable fabrications. Were they going to frame him? Whatever was going on he realised he wasn’t going to get any of the good lines. ‘But as I said,’ continued the interrogator, ‘Fuchs has turned on his mouth. He explained that you didn’t know anything, that he was just bringing you in to help distribute. We’ve nipped this one in the bud, which is as well for you.’ Here it is, thought Pataki seeing it coming, he wants to go home. ‘We know all about you. That’s our job. But you’re young. We’re going to overlook this mistake though it’s a weighty offence. We’re going to give you another chance.’ Whatever you say, thought Pataki. ‘You’re in the scouts, aren’t you?’ It wasn’t a question.