‘I had thought you cleverer, Herr Reichsaussenminister, than to suppose that by getting rid of the others you can get the better of me. The man Sallust is my personal enemy, and I mean to have him. This woman of yours has lied and cheated. She is a traitress and …’
That is enough!’ Ribbentrop exclaimed, going pale with anger.
‘It is the truth!’ Grauber retorted. ‘First she led you to believe that Sallust was a Frenchman; yet all the time she knew he was English and, knowing that, she got him out of prison. Then she lied about having brought him back here, but we forced her to confess that she did. Lastly, she still swears that she has not hidden him in this house; yet we have proof that he cannot have left it. For less I have cut off women’s breasts and chopped them up and made them swallow the pieces.’
‘Stop!’ shouted Ribbentrop. ‘Stop. I forbid you to speak here of your vile practices.’
‘Why should I not?’ Grauber shrilled back. ‘They are for the furtherance of the cause we both serve. But it seems you have forgotten that cause; so I must remind you of it.’
‘I have forgotten nothing! I am as good a patriot and Party man as you!’
‘That we must leave to be judged by my chief, Herr Himmler, when I report to him the way in which you have thwarted me.’
For the past few moments Gregory had been keeping his teeth tight clenched and a finger pressed hard on the bridge of his nose. The dust-like particles into which the soft leather of the ancient surcoat was slowly decaying were now causing acute irritation to his mucous membrane. He feared that at any moment he might give a violent sneeze. If he did he was bound to be discovered; yet he could not bear the thought of missing the denouement of this explosive altercation.
Ribbentrop suddenly seemed to get his temper under control, and said in a more pacific tone, ‘Herr Gruppenführer, I sympathise with your feelings. But there are more ways than one in which we can serve our Führer. For his servants to quarrel among themselves is certainly not one; and subtlety often pays bigger dividends than force. I refrained from asking you to leave with the others because I have a proposal to …’
Gregory heard no more. To have lingered another minute would have been fatal. Now, with his nostrils clamped between finger and thumb, he ducked down below the level of the balustrade and swiftly fumbled his way out round the edge of the curtain. During the whole time he had remained hidden there no one had glanced up in his direction. Now he could only pray that the curtain’s movement would not catch Grauber’s eye and lead after all to a show-down in which he would have lost the advantage.
Hastening along on tip-toe, he managed to reach the far end of the corridor, then the explosive pressure in his head became too much. The awful sneeze, partly muffled by his grip on his nose, snorted and burbled; he choked and then began to cough. Dreading now that he must be heard, he grasped the handle of the nearest door, turned it and thrust the door open a few inches. The room was in darkness. Slipping inside he closed the door behind him and payed his debt to frustrated nature in an awful bout of gasping, sneezing, weeping, coughing, while the water streamed from his eyes.
It was a good five minutes before he had recovered sufficiently to feel safe in returning to his post of observation, then he had to pad softly back down the corridor and exercise great caution to shake the curtain as little as possible while squirming under it; so he reckoned that he had probably lost about seven minutes of the drama being enacted down in the hall.
As he approached, lower voices had already told him that the crisis was over, but it was not until he could again raise his head and peer out from behind the armour that he realised that Grauber had gone. Ribbentrop and Sabine were now sitting side by side on one of the sofas, and he was saying to her earnestly:
‘You are a clever woman, Sabine. I have no fears that you will make a mess of things. By doing as I wish you can save yourself and render me a great service.’
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I do see that it is the only way in which I can save your face. But you can’t expect me to like the idea of leaving everything.’
‘Of course not. Neither do I like the thought of losing you. We can only hope that it will not be for very long.’
‘I suppose it is the only thing to do?’
‘The only thing. I shall have difficulty enough as it is to put over this explanation in the teeth of the report that Grauber will make to Himmler. As you had an affaire with this man Sallust in the past, whatever your true motive in failing to tell us at once that you recognised him, the fact that you did not will make everyone believe you guilty of aiding an English spy. For that you would normally get the death penalty. You know the Führer’s rages, and how he refuses to make the least allowance for other people’s personal feelings. If I tried to protect you, he would break me; perhaps even accuse me of betraying our interests to the British myself. The utmost I dare do openly I have done already. The rest is up to you, if you wish to save your neck and ever see Budapest again. Can I rely on your promise to fall in with my proposal?’
She nodded. ‘All right. I expect I’ll manage to take care of myself, and it will certainly be exciting; but you must brief me very carefully before we start.’
‘I will get everything for you in the morning—special passes from Horthy to prevent the Security Police from holding you up on your dash for the frontier, foreign currency and a permit to take your car out with you. About everything else I can advise you when we get to bed.’
‘You mean to stay here the night, then?’
Smiling, he stood up, took her hand and pulled her to her feet. ‘Why not? This may be the last chance we will get till the war is over.’
Without another word they came up the stairs and passed behind Gregory on their way to her room. When she reached it she pressed a switch which plunged the hall in darkness. For some while Gregory remained where he was, trying to extract all the meaning he could from their conversation.
The gist of it seemed to be that, as Ribbentrop was not powerful enough to protect Sabine, he was sending her abroad for the duration. By ‘briefing’ her, presumably she had meant advising her what line to take with her friends and servants before leaving the country. Her reluctance to do so was quite understandable; but—apart from the fact that her life might depend on it—nothing else could save Ribbentrop from being involved in a first-class political scandal. The only rather puzzling thing was that he had spoken of two special passes, and that she had used the plural when speaking of starting. It seemed to Gregory unlikely that Ribbentrop would be willing to connive at his escape, and almost as unlikely that, if Sabine were to leave Hungary for good, she would take her chauffeur with her; yet for whom, other than one of them, could the second pass be?
When at last he crept back to his room he was wondering again if his best chance did not lie in leaving the house, lying low with Levianski for several days, if the furrier would have him, then making a bid to reach the frontier.
On the other hand, it just might be that Sabine had, by some means, persuaded Ribbentrop to let her take him with her. Holding more promise, there was also her original plan for him to take her chauffeur’s place. If that was still possible and the second pass was intended for the chauffeur, it was he who would reap the benefit of it.
One thing was certain: in an uneven battle Sabine had shown both courage and great skill. She had not lost her head for a single moment, and it was through no fault of hers that she had twice been caught out. She had not known that Cochefert had already blown Gregory’s identity as Tavenier, or that her car had been followed by Puttony. Against ill luck and heavy odds she had stuck to her guns and, in the end, managed to come to some arrangement with Ribbentrop.
In the circumstances Gregory felt that he had no right to suppose that she might have left him out of her latest calculations; and he had promised her that he would not leave the house. That promise could hardly be considered as still binding after all that had happened during the past hour, and Sabine could
not be in any way dependent on his help for getting across the frontier but, all the same, he decided to keep it.
The moon was still up and he undressed by its light, then slipped into bed. But he would rather have spent the night prowling the streets than between those soft sheets, for he knew that his life would not be safe until he was out of Budapest, and the strain of lying inactive was hard to bear.
It was not until morning that he dropped into a doze, and he was only fully woken by Pipi’s tip-toeing in with his breakfast tray. On it there was a note from Sabine, which Pipi said had been passed on to him by Magda. The single line, scrawled on a fly-leaf torn from a book, read:
Make no noise. Stay where you are until I come to you. S.
To abide by her order he denied himself a bath, shaved and dressed with hardly a sound, then sat down in an armchair to wait for her. At a little after half-past-nine, still in a négligée, she came in to him.
‘It’s all right now,’ she said with a smile. ‘Ribb spent the night here. That’s why I couldn’t come up to you; and, Mary be praised, you didn’t come down to me. I was terrified you would. He has just gone, and I’ve fixed everything; but it was touch and go last night.’
‘I know,’ he smiled back. ‘I saw the whole party. I had hidden myself between the curtains and one of the suits of armour in the gallery. You certainly …’
‘What!’ She halted in her tracks, and her eyes grew round as saucers. ‘D’you … d’you mean that you heard everything we said.’
‘Not quite. Some dust got up my nose, and I had to creep away for about six or seven minutes to have a sneezing fit.’
‘When … what was happening when you did that?’
‘The smaller fry had gone. Ribb had been having one hell of a row with Grauber, but was just about to put some proposition to him.’
‘You didn’t hear then … what it was?’
‘No, what was it?’
‘Oh, simply an attempt to bribe him. But all those top Gestapo men have already made fortunes by threats and blackmail; so it didn’t come off. What were we doing when you got back from your sneezing fit?’
‘You and Ribb were alone. He was persuading you to leave the country for his sake and your own. That is damned hard on you. I’m more sorry than I can say to have been the cause of letting you in for this.’
She gave a heavy sigh. ‘It is my own fault for having persuaded you to come back here with me.’
‘Anyhow, you put up a marvellous fight. It was the most accursed luck that that fellow Puttony should have run into us just as we were leaving the police station. What else happened while I was not there to listen?’
‘Oh nothing … nothing much. Ribb and Grauber went on wrangling. You must have heard everything that mattered; so there is no point in my repeating it all to you.’
‘No. The thing I am anxious to hear is what do you propose I should do now?’
Taking a cigarette from the box beside his bed, she went over to him for a light, and said, ‘I swore to Ribb that you really did leave the house soon after we got here, and said that you must have slipped past the Lieutenant while he was telephoning to Szalasi. Ribb believes that. At least I think he does. He wouldn’t want you to be captured anyway because, if you were, my name would be dragged into it and involve him in the scandal he is so anxious to avoid. Anyway he is going to give a cooked-up version of the affair to the Regent, get him to issue an order to the Hungarian Security Police not to pursue the matter for the moment, and will get from him special passes ordering them not to prevent myself and my chauffeur leaving the country. But he told me that I can count only on temporary protection; so I must get out while the going is good. That means leaving tonight; and you, of course, will be my chauffeur.’
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 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.’
15
Anxious Hours
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 counter-offensive had forced them back to positions 120 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 postwar 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, if 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.
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