The Last Frontier - Alistair MacLean

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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.

      Why the colonel had left the main road Reynolds couldn’t guess, any more than he could guess why he had stopped and drawn off the road earlier on. That he wanted, in the earlier instance, to avoid the big police car racing west to Komarom and now to bypass the police block on the city limits of which Reynolds had been warned at Vienna, was obvious enough: but the reason for these actions was a different thing altogether. Reynolds wasted no time on the problem: he had problems enough of his own. He had perhaps ten minutes left.

      They were passing now through the winding, villa-lined streets and steeply-cobbled residential avenues of Buda, the western half of the city, and dropping down to the Danube. The snow was easing again, and, twisting round in his seat, Reynolds could just vaguely see the rock-bound promontory of the Gellert Hill, its grey, sharp granite jutting through the windblown snow, the vast bulk of the St Gellert Hotel and, as they approached the Ferenc Jozsef Bridge, the St Gellert Mount where some old-time bishop, who had incurred the wrath of his fellowman, had been shoved into a spiked barrel and heaved into the Danube. Bungling amateurs in those days, Reynolds thought grimly, the old bishop couldn’t have lasted a couple of minutes: down in the Andrassy Ut things would doubtless be much better arranged.

      Already they were across the Danube and turning left into the Corso, the one-time fashionable embankment of open-air cafés on the Pest side of the river. But it was black and desolate now, as deserted as were nearly all the streets, and it seemed dated, anachronistic, a nostalgic and pathetic survival from an earlier and happier age. It was difficult, it was impossible to conjure up the ghosts of those who had promenaded there only two decades ago, carefree and gay and knowing that another to-morrow would never come, that all the other to-morrows could only be the same as today. It was impossible to visualize, however dimly, the Budapest of yesterday, the loveliest and happiest of cities, all that Vienna never was, the city to which so many westerners, of so many nations, came to visit briefly, for a day, for two days, and never went home again. But all that was gone, even the memory was almost gone.

      Reynolds had never been in the city before, but he knew it as few of the citizens of Budapest would ever know it. Over beyond the west bank of the Danube, the Royal Palace, the Gothic-Moorish Fisher’s Bastion, and the Coronation Church were half-imagined blurs in the snow-filled darkness, but he knew where they were and what they were as if he had lived in the city all his life. And now, on their right, was the magnificent Parliament of the Magyars, the Parliament and its tragic, blood-stained square where a thousand Hungarians had been massacred in the October Rising, mown down by tanks and the murderous fire of the heavy AVO machine-guns mounted on the roof of the Parliament itself.

      Everything was real, every building, every street was exactly where it should be, precisely where he had been told it would be, but Reynolds could not shake off the growing feeling of unreality, of illusion, as if he were spectator of a play and all this was happening to someone else. A normally unimaginative man, ruthlessly trained to be abnormally so, to subject all emotion and feeling to the demands of reason and the intellect, he was aware of the strangeness in his mind and at a loss to account for it. Perhaps it was the certain foreknowledge of defeat, the knowledge that old Jennings would never come home again. Or it could have been the cold or tiredness or hopelessness or the ghostly veil of drifting snow that hung over everything, but he knew it was none of these things, it was something else again.

      And now they had left the Embankment and were turning into the long, broad, tree-lined Boulevard of the Andrassy Ut itself: the Andrassy Ut, that street of well-loved memories leading past the Royal Opera House to the Zoo, the Fun Fair and the City Park, had been an inseparable part of a thousand days and nights of pleasure and enjoyment, of freedom and escape, to tens of thousands of citizens in days gone by and no place on earth had lain nearer to the hearts of the Hungarians: and now all that was gone, it could never be the same again, no matter what befell, not even if peace and independence and freedom were to come again. For now the Andrassy Ut meant only repression and terror, the hammering on the door in the middle of the night and the brown lorries that came to take you away, the prison camps and deportation, the torture chambers and the benison of death: Andrassy Ut meant only the headquarters of the AVO.

      And still the feeling of remoteness, of detached unreality remained with Michael Reynolds. He knew where he was, he knew his time had run out, he was beginning to know what Szendrô had meant by the mentality of a people who had lived too long with terror and the ever-present spectre of death, and he knew too that no one who ever made a journey such as he was making now could feel exactly the same again. Indifferently, almost, with a kind of detached academic interest, he wondered how long he would last in the torture chambers, what latest diabolical variations of destroying a man lay in wait for him.

      And then the Mercedes was slowing down, its heavy tyres crunching through the frozen slush of the street, and Reynolds, in spite of himself, in spite of the unemotional stoicism of years and the shell of protective indifference in which he had armoured himself, felt fear touch him for the first time, a fear that touched his mouth and left it parched and dry, his heart and left it pounding heavily, painfully in his chest and his stomach as if something heavy and solid and sharp lay there, constricting it upon itself; but no trace of any of this touched the expression on his face. He knew Colonel Szendrô was watching him closely, he knew that if he were what he claimed to be, an innocent citizen of Budapest, he should be afraid and fear should show in his face, but he could not bring himself to it: not because he was unable to do so, but because he knew of the reciprocal relationship between facial expression and the mind: to show fear did not necessarily mean that one was afraid: but to show fear when one was afraid and fighting desperately not to be afraid, would be fatal … It was as if Colonel Szendrô had been reading his mind.

      ‘I have no suspicion left, Mr Buhl: only certainties. You know where you are, of course?’

      ‘Naturally.’ Reynolds’ voice was steady. ‘I’ve walked along here a thousand times.’

      ‘You’ve never walked here in your life, but I doubt whether even the City Surveyor could draw as accurate a map of Budapest as you could,’ Szendrô said equably. He stopped the car. ‘Recognize any place?’

      ‘Your H.Q.’ Reynolds nodded at a building fifty yards away on the other side of the street.

      ‘Exactly. Mr Buhl, this is where you should faint, go into hysterics or just sit there moaning with terror. All the others do. But you don’t. Perhaps you are completely devoid of fear – an enviable if not admirable characteristic, but one which, I assure you, no longer exists in this country: or perhaps – an enviable and admirable characteristic – you are afraid, but ruthless training has eliminated all its outward manifestations. In either case, my friend, you are condemned. You don’t belong. Perhaps not, as our police friend said, a filthy Fascist spy, but assuredly a spy.’ He glanced at his watch, then stared at Reynolds with a peculiar intentness. ‘Just after midnight – the time we operate best. And for you, the best treatment and the best quarters – a little soundproof room deep below the streets of Budapest; only three AVO officers in all Hungary know of its existence.’

      He stared at Reynolds for several seconds longer, then started the car. Instead of stopping at the AVO building, he swung

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