Claim the Crown

by Carla Neggers

  “Think Barky busted his leg for him?”

  “I don’t know what in hell to think.”

  “But you believe in Mac enough to deceive me.”

  Jeremy looked at her without guilt. “And you’re so pristine? You believed in your uncle enough to give him a fortune in jewels.”

  “Correction.” She slammed down her tea glass. “Believe—not believed. Present tense. And I’d give him the jewels all over again if he asked me to.”

  “Hell, Ashley, does he have to kill someone before you’ll accept the fact that, at the very least, he has some difficult questions to answer? I’ve known you just a few days and lied to you out of concern for your safety and the safety of a good friend of mine—and you’re ready to damn me to hell and back. Your precious Barky’s probably been lying to you for years.”

  She didn’t want to hear the truth in his words. “You lied to me because you believe in MacGregor Stevens just as blindly as I believe in Bartholomew Wakefield. And who the hell says Stevens hasn’t been deceiving you for years?”

  The anger went out of Jeremy—she could see the muscles in his face relax and his eyes warm with honesty and sympathy. Now, unexpectedly, she wished the anger had stayed. She didn’t want him to care. She didn’t want his pity. He was getting too close.

  “Mac has been deceiving me,” he said simply.

  “Then he has his own deep dark secrets, hmm? Is he an ex-jewel thief?”

  “No, he’s an ex-American intelligence officer. He was in Eastern Europe in the mid-fifties.”

  Ashley felt the shock snapping her head up sharply; it hurt. “Oh, wonderful. Terrific. Fabulous. I’ve been chasing jewel thieves the past few days while you’ve been chasing spies. Why tell me? No. Let me get carted off by the KGB or something and have me put in irons and have my fingernails torn off by some sadistic creep. How dare you not tell me?”

  “I doubt this is a professional case,” Jeremy said with equanimity. “It must be a personal thing between Mac and your uncle—”

  “Barky’s a farmer. He’s not a spy.” She couldn’t listen to any more and started past him, just to get away, to think, to digest. A spy. Good God.

  But Jeremy grabbed her in the doorway and spun her around. “What happened here today, Ashley?” His look was intense; she felt his breath warm on her face. “What did you learn—”

  “So you can report back to Mac? Forget it.”

  His eyes seemed to melt into her, and she realized, with a pang, that he was just as confused as she was. He didn’t know whether to yell at her or charm her or be grave and distant with her. But nothing, she thought, would work. “Ashley—” He broke off, started again. “Ashley, I’m doing my damnedest to look at this objectively—”

  “And failing.” She gave him an icy smile and tossed her head back, aware of every line in his face, every tensed muscle in the arm encircling her waist. “I know: I’m a pain in the ass. A rich bitch. Difficult. Judgmental. Rash.”

  “Unforgiving,” he added with a small smile.

  “I don’t trust you—and I won’t.”

  “We don’t have to be enemies.”

  “We don’t have to be friends, either.”

  She jerked herself out of his hold and turned away.

  Nelle was in the kitchen weaving an explanation of the goings-on out on the sun porch for her husband, a polished, fair-skinned man with horn-rimmed glasses and an easy drawl that belied his perpetual seriousness. Ashley had never pretended to understand or even like Oliver Milligan, Jr., but she thought she could rely on him now.

  “I know I owe you both my thanks and an explanation,” she said, holding herself as regally as she could, refusing to think. “But right now I have to get out of here. You saw this week’s You? Well, Jeremy Carruthers is a sleazeball reporter who’s after the ‘real’ story behind my so-called mysterious fortune. He’s been harassing me since Friday. I’d appreciate it if you could get me to the airport—”

  Oliver was already looking ominously toward the sun porch. “Nelle,” he said, “get the car.”

  Nelle was looking dubious. “Ashley, are you sure there’s not more to this?”

  “Nelle, please—I promise I’ll call you and tell you everything.”

  “Nelle,” Oliver said imperiously. “I’ll keep Mr. Carruthers occupied while you get Miss Wakefield out of here. What publication does he work for?”

  Ashley named a particularly disreputable tabloid.

  Oliver winced: no doubt he was seeing his own name splashed across its front pages, his reputation sullied, his candidacy for the state senate derailed. “Be assured,” he said, “he won’t follow you.”

  Ashley met Nelle out back in the family Mercedes station wagon. Nelle pursed her lips at her friend. “Honey, you are the worst liar.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t you dare be sorry. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when your Jeremy Carruthers tracks you down again. Sweet cheeks, I have a feeling he’s the man for you.”

  Ashley twitched uncomfortably in her seat. “I have a feeling after this he won’t be.”

  “Nonsense. A man like that loves a good chase. He wouldn’t want you if you weren’t your own woman. Trust me, Ashley. I understand these things.”

  That certainly was true, Ashley thought. “I hope Oliver won’t be furious. If I cause another rift between you two—”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that.” Nelle laid on an exaggerated amount of Southern belle coy. “I’ve never seen Oliver so...so mean. I just love it. This senate candidacy could be more fun than I thought. If all that energy translates itself in bed, I’ll be all set.”

  For the first time that day, Ashley threw back her head and laughed.

  It wasn’t until she was thirty thousand feet above Virginia that she wondered if she’d been a perfect jackass. Again. Perhaps she’d fled from Jeremy not because she didn’t trust him, not because she was too hardhearted to give him another chance, but because she didn’t trust herself. There were too many sparks between them. She couldn’t be thinking about sex and romance now. Her head hurt and her brother was in the hospital with a broken leg and her uncle was out skulking around the countryside with a fortune in diamonds and pearls. And there was an ex-spy involved now. And muttering about mad monks. And a desperate Houston socialite and executive.

  How could she possibly think about screwing with Jeremy Carruthers? Because she couldn't can’t help it. Well, tough. She was practical and self-possessed. Besides which, she’d undoubtedly alienated Jeremy for the last time. She sighed with regret. There was nothing to be done about it now.

  As Barky would say, the egg was broken, and there’d be no putting it back together again.

  19

  The next morning was warm and bright in Boston. Ashley had spent the night, alone but in luxury, at the Four Seasons Hotel, in a room overlooking the Public Gardens. She registered under the name Phyllis Mysticeti, mysticeti being the Latin name for baleen or “whalebone” whales, the largest animals in the world and one of two suborders of cetaceans, i.e., dolphins, porpoises and whales. It was as good a name as any, she thought. Certainly as good as Wakefield. And the clerk didn’t bat an eye.

  More to the point, no one had found her—not Barky, not Mac Stevens, not reporters, not Jeremy Carruthers. She’d called David, but that was all. He’d promised, this time, to keep his mouth shut about her whereabouts.

  She breakfasted in the elegant Four Seasons dining room, reminding herself that until a few days ago she had led a very different kind of life, and then she ventured over to lower Chestnut Street. Rumpled red jumpsuits weren’t appropriate attire for the president of a prestigious communications firm. Stifling an unexpected pang of loneliness, she put on a jade linen suit.

  Afterward, she stood outside on her steps and looked around. But there was no indication that Jeremy Carruthers was anywhere in the neighborhood. And even the interest of the gossip journalists was fading: there was nary a reporter or photog
rapher to be seen.

  She walked to the waterfront. Caroline Kent was there, and they shut themselves up in Ashley’s office and began what Caroline called “Hungarian History 101.” For more than an hour, she briefed Ashley on what she had learned during her intensive study at the Boston Public Library.

  Like those of so many countries in central and eastern Europe, Hungary’s borders had changed radically over the centuries. Historic—or Greater—Hungary is two-thirds larger than modern Hungary, which had been chopped up under the punitive measures of the Treaty of Trianon after World War I. Located in the Carpathian Basin, with the Danube River bisecting it, Hungary has traditionally been the breadbasket of the region.

  “They’re not Slavs,” Caroline said. “In fact, Hungarians are linguistically and ethnically different from their Slavic neighbors. They first arrived in the Danuqbian area in the ninth century and were a nomadic people from Central Asia.

  “They were your basic barbarians,” Caroline went on as she consulted her steno pad filled with notes. “They became the scourge of Europe. People heard them coming, they cried, ‘On ogur!’ Nice little phrase, huh?”

  Ashley regarded her with a dry look. “I’ll remember it.”

  “They marauded, pillaged, raped, took slaves—did what barbarians do, I guess. In the middle of the tenth century, they got their asses kicked by the Germans. By the year 1001, when the first Christian king, Stephen, was crowned, Hungary was ready to usher in an era of peace. The people were forcibly Christianized and their leaders identified theirs as a Western culture. The geographical location of their lands was tempting—not only were they largely flat and difficult to defend, but also fertile, easy to get to, and smack where East meets West.

  “They have a long history of being conquered,” Caroline said.

  “In 1241, the Mongols invaded and destroyed most of the city of Buda. Budapest was two cities then, Buda on one side of the Danube, Pest on the other.”

  Ashley brought her fingers together in a pyramid and placed her elbows on her desk top. “I know that much, Caroline.”

  She grinned. “I didn’t. I thought Budapest was the capital of Yugoslavia.”

  “Liar,” Ashley said, laughing.

  “No, seriously. All the history I took in college, and we never seemed to get to Eastern Europe. I always figured we’re talking fat peasants in bright-colored scarves. You know: Hungary has paprika, Poland has kielbasa, Rumania has gymnasts—unjust and inaccurate stereotypes. Hungary has produced some of the world’s greatest poets, composers, painters—”

  “Now I know why you went into P.R.”

  She resumed. “After the Mongols came the Turks and the Hapsburgs, each getting their own chunk of Hungary. Finally, in 1686, the Turks were kicked out—again Budapest was devastated—and the country came entirely under the rule of the Hapsburgs.

  “In 1848,” Caroline said dramatically, “Hungary revolted.”

  Ashley blinked. “I asked you to find out about 1956.”

  She held up a silencing hand. “Any Hungarian will tell you that 1848 and 1956 have a lot in common. Both were revolts that were nationalistic in spirit: Hungarians wanted to run their own country without foreign interference, they wanted national determination and sovereignty—the usual good-guy political stuff. In 1849, the revolution was crushed by the Hapsburgs with the help of the Russians—which the Hungarians, of course, never forgot. These guys have long memories. And the heroes of the 1848 revolution—the patriot Lajos Kossuth, the martyred poet Sándor Petofi— were widely quoted during the 1956 uprising. They’re still national heroes.

  “Following disaster in 1849, the Hungarians did eventually win some reforms from the Hapsburgs, and in 1867 the dual monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed. Thus, in World War I, the Hungarians again found themselves on the losing side. The country came out of the war one-third its original size, but in control of its own destiny.

  “Or I should say,” Caroline corrected herself, “the aristocrats, landed gentry and the clergy of Hungary were in control of everybody else in Hungary’s destiny. The country remained pretty much a semifeudal state. A small percentage of the people owned a large percentage of the land; there were great numbers of landless peasants, though some peasants did hold small tracts of land. There were no real democratic traditions, no universal suffrage and little middle class. The aristocrats—who ruled—resisted reform. There were a few who cried out for change, but most were willing to maintain the status quo. As regimes of the interwar period go, theirs wasn’t as appallingly authoritarian as some, but it certainly wasn’t anything to brag about.

  “When Hitler came to power in Germany, he agreed with Hungarian revisionists that their country had been robbed under the terms of Trianon, and Hungary was seduced into collaborating with him. Germany returned some of the territories Hungary considered rightfully its own. In turn, Hungary participated in the German war, but as little as possible.

  “They were trying to play both sides against the middle,” Caroline concluded. “The Hungarian fascists—the Arrow Cross Party—didn’t come to power until Hitler finally invaded in late 1944.

  “In 1945, Germany made what amounted to its last stand against the Russians, and Budapest—yet again—was largely destroyed in the bloody battle.

  “And the Russians stayed.

  “Between the end of World War II and the uprising in 1956, the Communists consolidated their power— viciously. Under the Stalinist-styled personal dictatorship of Mátyás Rákosi, Communist Hungary was set up precisely on the Soviet Union model. It didn’t matter whether the Soviet model fit the circumstances of the country or the wishes of the people; that was the way it was going to be. There were excesses and abuses of every kind—arrests, tortures, show trials, executions, forced collectivization, forced industrialization. Even churches were made subservient to the state. Church-sponsored schools were abolished, priests were arrested, religious orders were dissolved—and, in a vastly unpopular move, the Roman Catholic cardinal was imprisoned.

  “The terror against the people was carried out by the state secret police, the Államvédelmi Hivatal, or the ÁVH.

  “Then, in 1953, Josef Stalin died, and the thaw began.”

  Caroline said, “Rákosi, being Stalin’s most devoted student, was more or less out on his ass, but nothing happened overnight. Attempts were made at reforming the system, but they were either too moderate or short-lived, and Hungarians became increasingly fed up with Soviet interference in their affairs. When, in 1956, Poland stood up to Khrushchev with some success, Hungarians began to believe they might actually be able to oust the Russians. Fat chance.”

  As Caroline explained, events leading up to the outbreak of violence in October were many and complicated: “Numerous books have been written on this period. From what I could gather, though, what actually happened depends in large part on who’s doing the telling. If you’re a Communist, you believe it was a counterrevolution inspired by revisionists, capitalists, warmongering fascists—anybody and anything but yourselves and mistakes you might have made. If you’re a democratic socialist, you believe it was a revolt against the excesses of communism, but no one wanted to return to the conservative governments of the past. If you’re a conservative, you believe it was a heroic struggle for freedom, a battle to oust communism and restore democracy. I don’t know, Ash. It was probably all those things. What’s clear is Hungarians wanted the Soviets out.

  “On the night of October 23, 1956, at a mass demonstration for the reading of demands over Communist-controlled radio, violence erupted, and what’s known as ‘the thirteen days that shook the Kremlin’ began. It was a spontaneous revolt of noble intent, virtually without organization or leaders—and,” she added, “it nearly succeeded.

  “And it was a Hungarian affair. There was no help from the West.

  “In those two weeks,” she went on, “Hungary went from being a totalitarian state to a popular democracy back to a totalitarian state. It must
have been a terrifying time to live through.

  “Imre Nagy, a longtime Communist popular with the people, was placed in power. Through popular pressure and Russian intransigence, he was forced to radicalize Hungarian demands. He took steps to establish a multiparty coalition—anathema to hard-core Communists. He declared Hungarian neutrality, withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, did what he could to draw support from the West, condemnation of the Soviet Union from the United Nations, and to keep the Russians at bay.

  “But he was a Communist, and the West, especially the United States, didn’t trust him—or really understand Hungarian nationalism. Besides which, the Suez Crisis erupted at the same time.” Caroline stretched out on the couch. “So they waffled. The Soviets said screw this, and sent in the tanks.”

  Ashley grimaced. “End of revolution.”

  “But not an easy end. The Hungarians put up a hell of a fight, against incredible odds—and a far better-equipped enemy. Homemade gasoline bombs can disable only so many tanks. Estimates of the dead range from three thousand on up to thirty thousand and even higher, the most credible being on the higher side. Some two hundred fifty thousand fled over the borders to Austria and Yugoslavia. Thousands were arrested, and many were executed—most notably Imre Nagy himself.”

  “A heavy price to pay.”

  Caroline rose slowly from the couch. “Yeah. But some say that Hungary bought a few decades of Russia walking on eggs with the revolution and now they’re even experimenting with limited free enterprise. I’d like to take a trip over there, check out the place.”

  Ashley smiled. “We can go together. Thanks, Caroline—you’ve done a terrific job.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t no magna cum laude for nothing.” She shut her steno pad. “But I know I’ve oversimplified. As I said, I don’t know much about that period or that region.”

  “Neither do I. Do you recall any mention of the Balatons?”

  “There’s Lake Balaton, but that’s it.”

  Having received word of Sarah Balaton’s visit yesterday, Ashley was hoping the Texas heiress was still in the city. Patti was checking with hotels, hoping to track her down. Ashley desperately wanted to talk to the woman who said her family owned the Balaton jewels.