The Last Frontier. Alistair MacLean

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СКАЧАТЬ bowed and walked out of the room. Jansci turned to his daughter.

      ‘A bottle of wine, Julia. We have some Villányi Furmint left?’

      ‘I’ll go and see.’ She turned to leave, but Jansci called her. ‘One moment, my dear. Mr Reynolds, when did you eat last?’

      ‘Ten o’clock this morning.’

      ‘So. You must be starving. Julia?’

      ‘I’ll see what I can get, Jansci.’

      ‘Thank you – but first the wine. Imre’ – he addressed the youngster who was pacing restlessly up and down – ‘the roof. A walk around. See if everything is clear. Sandor, the car number plates. Burn them, and fix new ones.’

      ‘Burn them?’ Reynolds asked as the man left the room. ‘How is that possible?’

      ‘We have a large supply of number plates.’ Jansci smiled. ‘All of three-ply wood. They burn magnificently … Ah, you found some Villányi?’

      ‘The last bottle.’ Her hair was combed now, and she was smiling, appraisal and frank curiosity in her blue eyes as she looked at Reynolds. ‘You can wait twenty minutes, Mr Reynolds?’

      ‘If I have to.’ He smiled. ‘It will be difficult.’

      ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she promised.

      As the door closed behind her Jansci broke open the seal of the bottle and poured the cool white wine into a couple of glasses.

      ‘Your health, Mr Reynolds. And to success.’

      ‘Thank you.’ Reynolds drank slowly, deeply, gratefully of the wine – he could not recall when his throat and mouth had been so parched before – and nodded at the one ornament in that rather bleak and forbidding room, a silver-framed photograph on Jansci’s desk. ‘An extraordinarily fine likeness of your daughter. You have skilled photographers in Hungary.’

      ‘I took it myself,’ Jansci smiled. ‘It does her justice, you think? Come, your honest opinion: I am always interested in the extent and depth of a man’s percipience.’

      Reynolds glanced at him in faint surprise then sipped his wine and studied the picture in silence, studied the fair, waving hair, the broad smooth brow above the long-lashed eyes, the rather high Slavonic cheekbones curving down to a wide, laughing mouth, the rounded chin above the slender column of the throat. A remarkable face, he thought, a face full of character, of eagerness and gaiety and a splendid zest for living. A face to remember …

      ‘Well, Mr Reynolds?’ Jansci prompted him gently.

      ‘It does her justice,’ Reynolds admitted. He hesitated, fearing presumption, looked at Jansci, knew instinctively how hopeless it would be to try to deceive the wisdom in these tired eyes, then went on: ‘You might almost say it does her more than justice.’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Yes, the bone structure, the shape of all the features, even the smile is exactly the same. But this picture has something more – something more of wisdom, of maturity. In two years perhaps, in three then it will be your daughter, really your daughter: here, somehow you have caught a foreshadowing of these things. I don’t know how it is done.’

      ‘It’s quite simple. That photograph is not of Julia but of my wife.’

      ‘Your wife! Good lord, what a quite extraordinary resemblance.’ Reynolds broke off, hurriedly searched his past sentences for any unfortunate gaffes, decided he had made none. ‘She is here just now?’

      ‘No, not here.’ Jansci put his glass down and turned it round and round between his fingers. ‘I’m afraid we do not know where she is.’

      ‘I’m sorry.’ It was all Reynolds could think of to say.

      ‘Do not misunderstand me,’ Jansci said gently. ‘We know what happened to her, I’m afraid. The brown lorries – you know what I mean?’

      ‘The Secret Police.’

      ‘Yes.’ Jansci nodded heavily. ‘The same lorries that took away a million in Poland, the same in Roumania and half a million in Bulgaria, all to slavery and death. The same lorries that wiped out the middle classes of the Baltic States, that have taken a hundred thousand Hungarians, they came also for Catherine. What is one person among so many million who have suffered and died?’

      ‘That was in the summer of ’51?’ It was all Reynolds could think to say: it was then, he knew, that the mass deportations from Budapest had taken place.

      ‘We were not living here then, it was just two and a half years ago, less than a month after we had come. Julia, thank God, was staying with friends in the country. I was away that night, I had left about midnight, and when she went to make herself coffee after I had gone, the gas had been turned off and she did not know what that meant. So they took her away.’

      ‘The gas? I’m afraid –’

      ‘You don’t understand? A chink in your armour the AVO would soon have prised open, Mr Reynolds. Everybody else in Budapest understands. It is the practice of the AVO to turn off the gas supply to a block of houses or flats before serving deportation notices there: a pillow on the bottom shelf of a gas oven is comfortable enough, and there is no pain. They stopped the sale of poisons in all chemists, they even tried to ban the sale of razor blades. They found it difficult, however, to prevent people from jumping from top storey flats …’

      ‘She had no warning?’

      ‘No warning. A blue slip of paper thrust in her hand, a small suitcase, the brown lorry and then the locked cattle trucks of the railway.’

      ‘But she may yet be alive. You have heard nothing?’

      ‘Nothing, nothing at all. We can only hope she lives. But so many died in these trucks, stifling or freezing to death, and the work in the fields, the factories or mines is brutal, killing, even for one fit and well: she had just been discharged from hospital after a serious operation. Chest-surgery – she had tuberculosis: her convalescence had not even begun.’

      Reynolds swore softly. How often one read, one heard about this sort of thing, how easily, how casually, almost callously, one dismissed it – and how different when one was confronted with reality.

      ‘You have looked for her – for your wife?’ Reynolds asked harshly. He hadn’t meant to speak that way, it was just the way the words came out.

      ‘I have looked for her. I cannot find her.’

      Reynolds felt the stirring of anger. Jansci seemed to take it all so easily, he was too calm, too unaffected.

      ‘The AVO must know where she is,’ Reynolds persisted. ‘They have lists, files. Colonel Szendrô –’

      ‘He has no access to top secret files,’ Jansci interrupted. He smiled. ‘And his rank is only equivalent to that of major. The promotion was self-awarded and for to-night only. So was the name … I think I heard him coming now.’

      But it was the youngster with the dark hair who entered – or partially entered. He poked his head СКАЧАТЬ