Tales of Adventurers Read online

  I am surprised that these unusual absences did not worry her, especially since he avoided all discussion. Still, his character appeared to have changed. She might easily have thought him obsessed, like any other solid citizen in his middle forties, by some dull and technical affair such as patent rights. And lawyers are indestructible; they continue to function under the milder forms of communism so long as there is any private property left in the deed boxes.

  No, there was nothing to arouse a wife’s suspicion until Marton began to take an interest in history. History, he insisted, would judge their period as one of necessary but too drastic reforms. It was the duty of a loyal citizen not to allow all the links with the past to vanish. For example the Hungarian Nobility should not be forgotten. Whatever its sins in the past, it might again – in a hundred years perhaps – be needed.

  I expect that at first Sarita merely listened from one tolerant little ear, and received these magnificent lectures with a proper pleasure that her husband was enjoying his dinner. It was hardly tactful to point out that in the ten years of their marriage she had never heard Marton allow to the hereditary Nobility any value whatever.

  He held his great-grandfather to be disgracefully typical of the whole class. Great-grandfather had lost every cent of the Hevessy money at cards, and was left with nothing but an entailed estate which he couldn’t sell. He returned his estate and barony to the Emperor with a request – and a model it was of dignified Hungarian prose – that his Imperial and Royal Majesty should be pleased to pay the Hevessy debts and save the Hevessy honor. He then dressed himself in full regalia and galloped his favorite hunter over a cliff, with the reins – so far as rigor mortis permitted an opinion – still lightly grasped in his left hand. It was a death in style which should have appealed to Marton, but did not.

  So when Marton’s sudden passion for aristocracy grew and flourished before as well as after dinner, Sarita at last took it very seriously and connected it, quite rightly, with the mysterious visits to his lawyers. She couldn’t help assuming that her disappointingly sober husband was engaged in some crazy plot to restore the old regime and – though no doubt preserving the motherly smile on her delicious face – she panicked. She began, all unknown to Marton, the long series of intrigues and letters and pullings of gossamer wire by invisible hands, which were to take the Hevessy family out of Hungary and into your office files, Jo. She should have remembered that Marton’s revolts were always personal and unlikely to draw upon him the wrath of governments – even communist governments – but her haste was forgivable. Of every four men she had known in 1939, at least one must have been killed by politics. That omits, of course, those who were killed by war.

  While Sarita was worrying herself sick over state trials and searching the papers for news of any arrests which could possibly lead to her own circle, Marton, I have no doubt, preserved an exasperating complacence – until one evening, in the midst of a terrifying week of militant communism on the march, he came home from the office and kissed Sarita’s hand with gay, exaggerated deference and addressed her as Baroness Hevessy.

  She was. That was his business with the lawyers. He had been proving to the satisfaction of the High Court that great-grandfather, when he so flamboyantly paid his debts, had a son two years old, the existence of whom, in all that dignified excitement, he had omitted to mention to the Emperor. Consequently the Imperial and Royal action was void. The entail could not be broken. The barony could not revert to the Crown.

  There was nothing at all that Sarita could do about it. The case was simple and, for the courts, a joyous holiday from legalizing the dictates of dictators. The lawyers had all gone to work with immense professional zest to settle a claim that was satisfyingly constitutional and wholly useless. Beyond a shadow of doubt Marton and Sarita were Baron and Baroness Hevessy.

  Their friends – and believe me, Jo, every one of them will be grateful to you for giving him the chance to speak – were as delighted with Marton as at his solemn circumcision. I am told that even hardened communists took a careful look round and laughed. There is still a wry sense of fun in Budapest.

  I can hear you remarking sternly that he doesn’t call himself Baron Hevessy. But of course he doesn’t! The title was only for use in reddest Hungary. It was his personal protest. He wouldn’t dream of using it in a country where it might be of some use to him.

  I don’t know how Sarita got him to leave his (in spite of everything) beloved country when her schemes came to fruition. My personal opinion is that the government unofficially expelled him. He was too well known in low cafés and high, and his exquisite, unpunishable gestures might have started a fashion. However that may be, there they are in your hands. Sarita, Marton and the children.

  He had a good job in America, too, you say regretfully. It must have been, if his employers bothered to make him declare whether he had ever been a communist or not.

  And so he refused to answer, did he? And Sarita refused to answer for him. God, there’s loyalty for you!

  Well now, Jo, I admit these questions have to be asked, for one can’t run a great country with gloves on. But at the same time I know what the effect would be on myself if I were asked to declare my politics as a condition of employment. I should answer like a wide-eyed sheep, and be ashamed of myself afterwards for not having had the guts to tell the questioner to go to hell.

  But then I am not a citizen in the magnificent class of Marton Hevessy. Nothing on earth would induce me to become a Jew in a swarm of Nazis, or to provoke confession-forcing commissars by creating myself a baron, or to pass myself off as a possible communist in the America of 1951. What courage the man has for doing the right thing at the wrong time – the wrong time for his own personal benefit, that is.

  Jo, what do you know of Marton Hevessy?

  The Hut

  THERE WAS a matter which they did not at first discuss, those two; for it was not until repeated doses of gin had deadened sensitivity that they were able to look each other in the eyes without uneasiness. Meanwhile their store of common memories, past misadventures that were always good for a laugh whenever two ex–security officers met, was rich enough to support unthinking conversation. Their enigmatic trade had been far fuller of the comic than of inhumanity. It was their job to suspect, but they were thankful when – with perhaps one yearly grim exception – their suspicions were proved lamentably wrong.

  “Fayze was a bastard,” said the older man suddenly.

  “He was. But I can’t say he bothers me at this distance.”

  Virian meant to say “it bothers,” but couldn’t quite manage the word. The other, however, understood him.

  “No. Nor me. But it did. Spoilt my sleep for a bit. I don’t mind saying so now. How did you – well, get on afterwards?”

  “Sat on it,” answered Virian noncommittally.

  He was obviously a man with a fine tradition of mental discipline behind him. His thin, dark face was mellow, and implied that he drew his strength from knowledge of human limitations and acceptance of human tragedy. He might have been twenty-five or so at the beginning of the war, that far-off period of which the two were talking, and a promising officer – a shade indecisive, perhaps, but slow to blame and much beloved by his men.

  Medlock, the older man, was of a more plebeian type, with no more molding about his face than the accidental contours of a chunk of rock. The hammer of fate could smash him into smaller pieces than Virian, and he knew it. He was contented, however, to be as he was, and hadn’t much use for complications. He was convinced – or once had been – of his own essential decency.

  “I didn’t like it,” he muttered. “Didn’t like it at all. I’d been a regular sergeant-major and just got my commission, you see.”

  “That was why you didn’t protest?” Virian asked.

  “What about yourself?” Medlock retorted, catching the irony. “And why didn’t you?”

  “Oh, obedience,” answered the other easily. “As an amateur soldi
er I felt I had to do what I was told. It’s a bit hard to analyze. The enemy outclassed us in skill and material. Well, all that was left in which we could equal him was an obstinate Teutonic obedience. His not to reason why, his but to do and die. A good many of us felt like that. You, as an old soldier, were far too sensible to find romance in mere obedience any longer.”

  “Hell of a thing to do,” grumbled the ex–sergeant-major. “Order us to go out and shoot a civilian!”

  “They only asked us to see that he was shot,” Virian corrected him.

  “Wouldn’t do you much good to tell that to the judge! We were present at a murder. Accessories. You get hung just the same.”

  They began to go through the happenings of that day all over again, proper old soldiers (or old murderers) recalling every foot of the terrain, every hour of agony and disapproval since they had emerged from Colonel Fayze’s secretive office with set faces and a feeling that their integrity, their little personal shares in Christendom and civilization had been outraged.

  The newly commissioned sergeant-major had been the more horrified of the two. He was accustomed to see his instructions in black and white before he paid serious attention to them. War had to be orderly, and not for nothing was his temple called the orderly room. He claimed now, ten years later, that he had been on the verge of refusal, that he hadn’t seen any necessity for violence at all.

  “You did. You saw it,” Virian insisted. “Don’t make things worse for your conscience than they need be. It had to be done. What was the name of that fat crook we bumped off?”

  “God, you don’t have to put it like that!”

  “But what the devil was his name?”

  “I don’t remember,” Medlock answered impatiently.

  “Nor do I. Revealing, isn’t it? Gallant memory, always in the breach, always protecting us from night starvation! Well, it was some very common French name, so let’s call him M. Dupont.

  “Dupont had betrayed – and don’t you forget that! – a whole honeycomb of French resistance cells. As a direct result, the Gestapo shot twenty-seven men and women, and sent Dupont to Spain for his own safety. Fayze’s organization kidnaped him there, and brought him to England in a submarine chaser. You knew that. And then they dressed him up in uniform and put him in a military prison as if he were an Allied soldier being held for suspected espionage.

  “All very neat work! Secret-service stuff right out of the books! But Fayze and the fool who did his dirty jobs in Spain hadn’t worked out what was to happen next. They couldn’t bring Dupont to trial because he hadn’t committed any offence under English law. And they couldn’t intern him because at that period in the war there wasn’t any quiet spot where no questions at all were asked. So they had to get rid of him, and persuade the Free French to do the shooting. I don’t wonder you forget why Dupont’s death was necessary. He was a sacrifice to inefficiency. But inefficiency is a much more potent factor in war than logic.”

  “Do you remember that dam’ tough with the blood on his boots whom they sent with us?” asked Medlock with a movement of the shoulders that had been turned from a shiver into a shrug.

  The dam’ tough had been the only man in the party who really looked as if he had been employed on this sort of mission before. A mysterious commando lad. At least they supposed he was commando, or from someone’s private army – though he wore a gunner’s badges on his neat, new battledress. He never said a word about himself, and asked no questions. The uniform, which lacked the individuality given by daily use, made it difficult to guess what he had been in civil life. He had a simple, unimaginative face, knocked about a bit by boxing or some other violent exercise, and it was firmly set to the job in hand. Virian and Medlock had been glad that they were accompanied by an apparent professional to whom as much as possible might be left.

  They knew him only by the assumed name of Smith, and it was he who drove the car – a big, black saloon with two extra seats in the back. There were five of them altogether in the car when they went to fetch M. Dupont: Virian, Medlock and two Free French. One of the Frenchmen, who was the – well, it was understood that he had a personal score to settle with M. Dupont – was a small, sad, determined man in civilian clothes; the other, in uniform, was very much an officer of the French regular army. He was of their own sort, keyed up to the inevitable by a sense of duty, and with distaste clearly mapped upon his humane and honorable countenance.

  They drove to the prison. Medlock and Virian signed for the body of M. Dupont, who was officially being held as a doubtful Free French soldier until his antecedents could be investigated. Dupont had gladly accepted and lived up to this fiction. He was clever enough to realize that the longer he was kept, the harder it would be to dispose of him.

  When he was in the car, Dupont’s nerve began to fail. He asked Virian hesitatingly what their intentions were. They had the answer ready for that. Dupont must be reassured. If he were to put his head out of the window and yell for help, the law of England would automatically be on his side, war or no war. Keep him quiet till the end – those were Virian’s and Medlock’s orders.

  Virian told M. Dupont that he was being handed over to his compatriots: that they were driving to a rendezvous out in open country where a Free French detachment would take charge of him. This made Dupont less apprehensive. He could have little doubt what his own countrymen would do to him sooner or later, but he was also very well aware that, being good Frenchmen, they would have to invent a show of legality – which would be difficult when they were guests in a country with a tender conscience. A formal handing-over meant, for a time, reprieve.

  M. Dupont sat on the back seat between Virian and the French major. Facing them, on one of the extra seats, was the sad, determined personage, looking determinedly out of the window. In front were Medlock and the uncommunicative Smith. Dupont and Virian kept up a polite and desultory conversation.

  “Never been able to understand, I haven’t,” said Medlock, “how you could sit there chatting away. In French, too,” he added, as if an assassin’s proper language should be English.

  “It was easier than sitting grim, and saying nothing,” Virian explained. “And Dupont helped. He was a very civilized creature. He didn’t like social embarrassment either. Good Lord, if I hadn’t known his record, I should have put him down as just a bland, fat Frenchman! All for peace and decent living, he was. That was probably what made him take the Vichy side – that and money.”

  They drove away over the sweep of the Wiltshire downs in the direction of Bath. It was a golden day of late autumn, with just enough wind to ripple the massed spearheads of dying grass and to check the high hovering clouds from ever settling on the sun. M. Dupont, released from the discipline and scrubbing soap of a military prison, was enchanted, and lavished courteous praise upon the English countryside. It reminded him, he said, of Picardy.

  Their destination was a disused mine-shaft with a tumble-down building above it. Colonel Fayze had given them the map reference, assuring them that Smith had visited the spot already and that the building was unlocked. Two of the planks which covered and completely hid the mouth of the shaft had been loosened, said Fayze with an obscene wink, and could be lifted out. He had shown pride – a legitimate pride from the point of view of his office chair – in the excellence of his arrangements. The disposal of Dupont on paper had had his personal attention.

  After an hour’s run, Smith stopped the car below the mine-shaft. Nothing was to be seen but an isolated hut of timber and corrugated iron, with a strong door from which the padlock had recently been wrenched loose; no derrick or abandoned machinery revealed the purpose of the building and the dark emptiness beneath the floor. Fayze had well chosen his theater for the operation. There was no need for any bumping through country lanes into a suspicious remoteness, or for scrambling on foot through dense woods with a reluctant victim. The hut was within fifty yards of a main road. A carful of men could stop on the verge for a short while without arousing u
neasiness in Dupont or other curious but less essentially interested travelers.

  The only disadvantage was the frequent passing of traffic on the road which ran, level and clear, for a hundred yards past the hut and a little below it. At one end of the straight was a blind hill, and at the other a corner. To ensure privacy, both those points would have to be watched.

  Dupont was left in the car with Smith, while the four others got out for consultation at a decent distance.

  “If Medlock stays at the corner,” said Virian, “and I go to the top of the hill, we shall be able to signal to you when the road is empty.”

  The French major appeared suddenly forlorn, his face that of a man who had known all along that he was an unreasoning optimist.

  “I thought that you …” he began.

  “No,” Virian answered firmly. “My instructions are just to keep the ring. It was definitely understood that you …”

  “I could not myself … my honor as an officer …”

  “Naturally, mon commandant,” Virian replied, and looked questioningly at the other, so sad and wirily small and determined.

  “I have had my orders,” that second Frenchman murmured, “to accord to M. Dupont the justice he has so richly merited. I shall obey. I beg you to believe that I do not say it with pleasure. But –” he sought their eyes with a simple honesty that, in the circumstances, was monstrous “– he is a heavy man, and I shall need some help.”

  “This Smith,” Medlock suggested. “The colonel said he was to make himself useful.”

  True, Fayze had airily assured them that the mysterious driver was ready to do whatever he was told; but Virian was unwilling to force such responsibility upon any human being till there was some evidence of a real lack of sensitivity.