Gregory nodded. 'That looks like an easy get out for me, then.'
She shook her head. 'I'm afraid it may not prove as easy as it sounds. Grauber proved irreconcilable. He will be telephoning to Himmler to exert pressure on the Regent. That is why we must get across the frontier before a new order goes out for our arrest. In the meantime Grauber can raise quite a big bunch of Gestapo men from the Villa Petoefer, and he has a lot of pull with the Arrow Cross people. The last thing he said before he left was that he was convinced that you were still here, and that, dead or alive, he meant to get you; so he may try to intercept us.'
Anxious Hours
Chapter 15
Nothing could have given Gregory greater cause for alarm than the news that Grauber intended to take the law into his own hands. Swiftly he urged that they should start for the frontier at the earliest possible moment, so as to give the enemy the minimum of time in which to take measures that might prevent their leaving the city.
Sabine agreed in theory but was not very helpful in practice. She said that she could not leave without seeing her banker, her solicitor and her jeweller; moreover, as she was not returning to Berlin where she kept a separate wardrobe, but meant to pretend in front of the servants that she was, she must herself pack such clothes as she could take with her.
Gregory deplored the delay but was forced to submit to it; for Sabine pointed out that it would be madness to leave without the papers promised by Ribbentrop, and in order to collect them she had to lunch with him. That meant they would be unable, anyway, to start before mid afternoon; so after some, discussion they decided to put off their departure until early evening, as they would then gain the benefit of twilight, and there would be less likelihood of Grauber's people spotting that the driver of Sabine's car was Gregory dressed up in her chauffeur's uniform.
Again Gregory told her how distressed he was about bringing such trouble upon her and having disrupted her whole life, but she seemed to take the matter with commendable philosophy. Smiling a little wryly, she said that it could not be helped and that, if only they could keep clear of Grauber, she felt sure she would find compensations abroad for all she was being forced to give up. Then she promised to send Gregory something to read, and left him.
Pipi arrived ten minutes later with half a dozen English novels published in the '30s and a German paper printed in Vienna. While he made the bed and tidied the room, Gregory glanced through the paper.
During the past few days a great naval and air battle had been raging in the Solomons between the Americans and the Japanese, and it was now admitted that the Americans had had the best of it.
There were further details about the death of the Duke of Kent, which had occurred on the previous Tuesday. His Royal Highness had been flying in a Sunderland to Iceland on R.A.F. duty when the aircraft had crashed with the loss of all but one of the fifteen men aboard her. Gregory had met the Duke on one occasion and found him charming; so he was able to form an idea of how greatly his loss would be felt by the Royal family.
Colossal battles involving millions of men were still raging in Russia. The Germans admitted withdrawals on the central front, and from the place names mentioned it was clear that General Zhukov's recent counteroffensive had forced them back to positions 320 miles west of Moscow. But Von Bock's offensive across the Don was still making progress, the Germans claimed that their shock troops had broken through the outer defences of Stalingrad, and the threat to the city was now extremely grave.
As Gregory knew only too well, it was Stalingrad that mattered. No successes elsewhere could possibly compensate for its loss. Without it Russia's war economy must collapse, and that could lead to the loss of the war by the Allies or, at' best, a slogging match with no foreseeable end until half the cities in the world were destroyed and the whole of its population starving.
But he wondered now whether, even if he could get back to England safely and quickly, there would still be the time and the means to put his successful negotiations in Budapest to practical use. He had no doubt whatever about the soundness of his plan. If only the Hungarians could be induced to repudiate the Nazis and withdraw their army from the Russian front the Germans, in order to fill the gap, would within a week be compelled to raise the siege of Stalingrad.. First, though, the Hungarians quite reasonably required their guarantees. To secure them meant selling the plan, with all its post-war commitments, to both the Foreign Office and the State Department, then the British and American Chiefs of Staff Committees would have to be consulted on its military implications and, finally, the consent obtained of the War Cabinet and the President. It would mean every person involved in the High Direction of the War on both sides of the
Atlantic being given a chance to have his say at one or more of innumerable committee meetings and the exchange of hundreds of 'Most Secret' cypher telegrams between Washington and London. With the best will in the world on the part of all concerned, a decision could not possibly be hoped for in less than a month.
And that was not the end of it. Given agreement, the operation against Hitler held Europe, demanded by the Hungarians, would still have to be mounted. Even if tentative preparations were begun while the discussions were in progress, could an invasion be launched before the autumn gales rendered the risk entailed too great? Again, had we the forces available and, it we had, after Dieppe, would the Chiefs of Staff be prepared to gamble them in another cross Channel assault?
There could now be no doubt that the Dieppe raid had proved a very costly failure. Apart from the destruction of a few coast defence installations, we had achieved nothing, whereas the enemy had sunk one of our destroyers, accounted for a number of our latest tanks and, worst of all, taken several thousands of our finest Canadian troops prisoner. Even so, those losses might yet pay a handsome long-term dividend by compelling Hitler to keep many divisions, which he would otherwise have sent to Russia, inactive along the European coast. For all Gregory knew, that had been the intention of the operation, and if the initial landings had succeeded, full-scale invasion would have followed. If so, the Chiefs of Staff had already shot their bolt as far as helping Russia was concerned; and, anyway, having alerted the Germans to the dangers of leaving their coast thinly defended was going to make any second attempt to land in force all the more difficult.
Gloomily Gregory decided that the Dieppe raid had probably queered his pitch. Even if Sir Pellinore could get the Hungarian plan adopted it looked as if the odds were all against the required fifteen divisions of Anglo-American troops being launched against the Continent before winter set in, and it now seemed very doubtful whether Stalingrad would be able to hold out until winter. However, he knew that speculating on such matters would get them no further. His job was to reach home as soon as he possibly could in order to submit his report to the people who took the big decisions.
When Pipi left the room, Gregory flung the paper aside and began to think of his own affairs. He and Sabine had got one another into a pretty mess. But for her he would never have gone to the Arizona, and but for that it was very unlikely that he would have come face to face with Grauber. But for him she would never have acted against the interests of the Gestapo, and but for that she would not have been condemned to go into exile.
By bringing them together again Fate had played the very devil with his plans, and had stymied him each time he had tried to wriggle free. That was no fault of hers; it was his for having refrained from following his own judgment and acting with his usual ruthlessness.
He realized now that admiration for the fight she had put up the previous night had led him to act like a sentimental fool. He should not have waited to hear the outcome of Grauber's quarrel with Ribbentrop, or to say goodbye to her, but should have got out while the going was good. He was armed and had plenty of money on him. He should never have listened to her in the first place, after she had got him out of the police station, but gone off on his own. Under cover of darkness he could have got clear of the city at any hour
of the night, and by now would have bribed some lorry driver to give him a lift on the way to the frontier.
Getting up, he crossed to the window, and from behind a' partly drawn curtain, peered out. As he had half expected, a knife grinder whom he had seen down below in the street when he had looked out earlier was still there. The man was not now even pretending to sharpen knives against his treadle wheel, or to secure custom from the palaces opposite, but was just leaning against his barrow smoking a cigarette. Obviously he was a Gestapo agent who had been set to keep watch on that side of the Tuzulto Palace.
Returning to his armchair, Gregory began to wonder just how much pull Grauber had in Budapest, and decided that it was probably considerable. The order to the police that Ribbentrop meant to obtain from Admiral Horthy, that they should not interfere with Sabine, would not apply to him and at best it would make them no more than neutral while he was in her company. As long as he remained with her in her palace he would probably be safe; but she had to leave during the coming night at latest, and once out of it he must expect that Grauber would ignore the law and go to any lengths to get him. To attempt a break out on his own now, in daylight would obviously be suicidal; so it seemed that there was no alternative but to wait and go with Sabine. There was just a chance that her plan might succeed, but he was far from happy about it.
He looked through the books Pipi had brought him with the idea of starting one to take his mind off his anxieties. On the jacket of one there was a picture of a slim dark girl pointing a small automatic at a man in a dinner jacket. The girl had a faint resemblance to Sabine and Gregory's thoughts promptly turned from the picture to the lovely passionate girl who had jumped into his bed the night before.
With a smile he recalled the intensity of her fury when Ribbentrop's arrival had interrupted their lovemaking; although he knew that his own fury would have equalled hers had not the necessity for keeping his mind clear to cope with what might prove a new danger forced him to purge it of emotion. Until he actually had her in his arms he had forgotten the feel of the exceptionally satin like quality of that lovely magnolia skin of hers; and that, although her arms and legs were strong, her torso had a yielding softness which gave the impression that except for her spine she had no bones between her shoulders and her lower limbs. All day they had been steadily stoking one another's fires of desire, and the moment her arms closed round his neck the check administered by his ill-fated meeting with Grauber at the Arizona had been wiped from his mind as though it had never occurred. The scent of her had gone like wine to his head and the dew of her mouth was like honey to his lips.
'What a night we would have had! Perhaps better even than our first,' he thought to himself with a sigh, 'if it hadn't been for Ribbentrop.'
He started three books but after a chapter or two of each found that their stories could not hold him. His mind was too occupied with anxiety about the coming bid to get out of Budapest. It was utterly infuriating to think that less than twenty-four hours earlier he could have left without the least trouble, whereas now, if things went wrong, less than another twenty-four hours would see him shanghaied over the frontier to Austria and being taken to pieces in a Gestapo torture chamber. The thought of the lovely young girl who had given him his passport at the S.O.E. Headquarters in London flickered through his mind. Diana; yes, that had been her name, and he had promised himself that he would bring her back the biggest tin of foie gras he could find. No hope of that now.
Somehow he got through the morning and at half past one Pipi brought him up lunch on a tray. He ate it slowly to kill time and, when Pipi had taken the tray away, lay down on the bed hoping that, as he expected to be up all night, he would be able to get a sleep. But sleep would not come. Thoughts of Grauber still plagued him.
It was certain that the Gruppenführer would be spending the day pulling every gun he had with the Hungarians. No doubt he would do his damnedest to get the Police to cooperate with him and, in spite of the Regent's order, hold up Sabine's car when she left in it. They would be loath to offend him, but might search the car on the pretext that they believed her to be helping a wanted criminal to escape by carrying him off in its boot. If they did hold the car up it was a certainty that his thin disguise as Sabine's chauffeur would never get past Grauber.
Even if the police refused their help there was still the Arrow Cross. As they were Nazis and mostly of German or Austrian blood, their first loyalty was not to Admiral Horthy but to Hitler. Major Szalasi had funked offending Ribbentrop on the previous night but it had been plain where his real sympathies lay. He could keep a clean bill himself by not appearing personally in the business and afterwards denying that he had had any hand in it, yet give Grauber the loan of several troops of his young Jew baiters to block the streets.
Last, but by no means least, there were Grauber's own thugs at the Villa Petoefer. They would stick at nothing, and even if one of them committed murder Grauber would only have to call on Berlin for enough pressure to be exerted to have the matter hushed up.
That he stood little risk of being murdered outright was Gregory's one small rag of comfort. If he was once recognized as Sabine's chauffeur, it would be the easiest thing in the world to shoot him from the pavement; but Grauber wanted him alive. There could be no doubt about that, and it would be a poor lookout for the Gestapo man who killed him, or even did him a serious injury, before he was under lock and key.
A little after four o'clock he was at last relieved from further harrowing daydreams by Sabine's coming in to him. As he sat up with a jerk she made straight for the armchair, gave a sigh of tiredness from her exertions, threw herself into it and kicked off her shoes.
Slipping off the bed, he lit a cigarette for her and after a few puffs she reported that so far all had gone well. Ribbentrop had secured all the necessary papers for her and had explained to the Regent that she had fallen foul of the Gestapo, who might endeavour to have her and her chauffeur arrested on their way out of the country. Horthy had promised to give an order personally to his Chief of Police that she was not to be molested, and one of his secretaries had telephoned instructions to Zagreb that she, her man and her car were to be allowed across the frontier without being subjected to any formalities. But Ribbentrop had again warned her that she must not delay her departure beyond the coming night, as it was certain that Grauber would already have appealed to Berlin for help. By the morning at latest Himmler would be making, a personal issue of it with the Regent that Tavenier must be caught and herself hauled in for questioning by the Gestapo.
She had given her solicitor a power of attorney to deal with her affairs and meet her liabilities during her absence, had taken out from her bank in cash all the money that she had immediately available which amounted to about six hundred pounds and had collected, to take with her, the most valuable, of the Tuzolto family jewels.
'By Jove!' Gregory smiled down at her. 'You have had a day! No wonder you're tired. Was anything said about, er your old friend Commandant Tavenier?'
She nodded. 'Ribb is no fool. I'm sure he believes that you are still here; and he probably guesses that I mean to take you out as my chauffeur. Anyhow, he is extremely anxious that you should not be caught, from fear of what the Gestapo boys might screw out of you. It is a hundred to one they would force you to say that I was an enemy agent and make it appear that he had been guilty of confiding secrets to me that only the inner ring of Nazis are supposed to know. He has told Admiral Horthy that you are one of his private operatives and he has special reasons for not wishing the Gestapo to know that; so the Police are being briefed to ignore any request that Grauber may make for help to catch you.'
'Well, that's some comfort. I suppose the next thing is to fix things up with your chauffeur? I only hope to God he doesn't refuse to play.'
'I've already done that.' She gave a tired shrug. 'I had a talk with Mario first thing this morning. I had to in order to get his passport so that it could be specially visa'd.'
'Of co
urse. I realize that. But do you mean that he has agreed to let me have it, and to hand over his uniform?'
'Yes. I felt sure he would. He was one of Kelemen's most trusted servants, and since his master's death he has transferred his allegiance to me. When I told him that helping you meant a great deal to me he agreed at once; and when he knew that it was the Germans we were planning to do in the eye he was absolutely delighted. I had great difficulty in persuading the old boy even to accept a present.'
'The old boy!' Gregory echoed in alarm. 'I'm not exactly in the junior subaltern class myself, but if you really think of him as old, I may have difficulty in passing for him, even in the distance.'
'He is older than you; but not all that much. It's only his hair's having gone grey early that makes me think of him as of Kelemen's generation. You needn't worry about that though. I mean to lightly powder your hair where it will show beneath the cap.' Picking up her bag, she took a packet of papers from it, picked one out, handed it to Gregory, and added 'Look, here is his passport. You had better keep it.'
Opening it quickly Gregory looked at the photograph. To his relief he saw that Sabine had been right. Mario had at least a superficial resemblance to himself. On close examination they could not possibly have been mistaken for one another, but that did not matter as Sabine had a special authorization for passing the frontier with her chauffeur and they would not have to answer any awkward questions. The important thing was that both he and Mario were of the long faced type, with straight noses and good chins; so, with the chauffeur's cap pulled well down, and seated behind the wheel of a car, Gregory felt that after dark there would be a good chance of the watchers outside taking him for the Italian.
Having expressed his satisfaction, he said, 'Now, tell me, when you left the house did you see any suspicious types lurking about the courtyard entrance?'
'Yes. When I first went out, at about half past ten, there was a man with a barrow of tomatoes; and hawkers don't come into these streets as a rule. When I got back, about midday, he had gone but a pavement artist had taken up his position opposite, and I've never known one choose that pitch before. I've been out and back twice since, and he is still there. There seemed to be one or two loungers farther down the street, too, who didn't quite fit into the usual scene.'
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