Even on the first floor the lights were now made dim by a blue haze thicker than that seen in a night-club at four in the morning, and it was evident that the smoke up there would soon be as dense as it was on the ground floor. Thick wreaths of it were seeping from under the door of Sabine’s bedroom and also from under that of another room, into which a bomb must have been thrown through the window.
Keeping their damped scarves and handkerchiefs pressed over the lower part of their faces, they went on up to the attics. Sabine led them into one which held a big water tank and a wooden ladder leading up to a glass sky-light. Before mounting it Gregory said to her and to Mario:
‘Now, remember; we must stick to the middle of the line of roofs. If we get too near the edge our silhouettes will show up against the sky-line. Then they’ll spot us and the game will be up. So keep low. If necessary, get down on your hands and knees and crawl. Sabine, you stick close behind me. Mario, you turn to the right as soon as you are through the sky-light. Good luck, and a thousand thanks again for the help you are giving us.’
When he reached the top of the ladder, he wrestled for a moment with the rusty lever of the sky-light; then he thrust it up and crawled out on to the roof. Sabine went up after him, her head on a level with his heels. When he had crouched there for a whole minute without moving she called impatiently:
‘Go on! What are you waiting for?’
Instead of replying he gave only a low hiss to silence her, and waved backwards with his hand for her to remain where she was. Then he crawled a few feet across the roof, raised himself to a crouching position, sank down again, crawled back and thrust his feet over the edge of the sky-light with the obvious intention of descending to the attic.
Sabine gave way before him. When he was half way down the ladder he gently lowered the sky-light. As he reached the floor she asked in a voice still made hoarse from the smoke she had swallowed:
‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’
For a moment he did not reply. Then he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, darling, but it’s no good. Grauber’s got one ahead of me. I might have guessed he would. He has either bludgeoned or bribed the caretakers in both the next-door houses to let him send men up to their roofs. On either side there are eight or ten of them just waiting for us to walk into their arms.’
To find their escape route blocked at the very outset was a wicked blow, and against such numbers there could be no possibility of forcing a passage. In deep despondency they made their way downstairs again.
On the last lap they narrowly escaped disaster. Down on the ground floor the atmosphere had become so laden with smoke particles that it was only just possible to see a hand held in front of the face. In the pitch black murk they lost their sense of direction, become separated and, for a few terrifying minutes, could find neither the doors nor one another. To regain contact they had to remove the damped covers from their mouths, so that they could shout, and the acrid fumes rasped their throats like red-hot sandpaper. By luck, a moment later, they stumbled into the vestibule, and from it were able to stagger out into the courtyard, but not before they were whooping as though their lungs would burst.
When they had recovered sufficiently they told Pipi how their plan for getting away over the roofs had been thwarted, and Gregory suggested that as a forlorn hope they should make another attempt to break out in the car. But Pipi shook his head.
‘It would be hopeless, Herr Commandant. Thinking you safely gone old Hunyi, the porter, and I undid the gate a few minutes ago and looked out. The street is blocked both ways by lorries drawn across it and there are the best part of a hundred Arrow-Cross men out there.’
‘Did they make any move to rush the gate?’ Gregory asked.
‘No; they only laughed and jeered at us, and said that they were waiting for the Gnädige Frau Baronin and her Frenchman. And that if both of you did not come out soon, they would have to take steps to make us all do so.’
‘What about the police?’ Sabine enquired hoarsely. ‘Were there none there?’
‘No, Gnädige Frau Baronin, I did not see any. But there were a few firemen, and there is a fire engine farther down the street. I suppose one of our neighbours telephoned for it, and the Arrow-Cross men have refused to let it be brought up to the palace.’
‘That’s about it,’ Gregory agreed. ‘I expect they have told the firemen that they are using only smoke-bombs; so there is no immediate danger of fire, and all they need do for the present is to stand by.’
Sabine stamped her foot angrily. ‘They have no right to prevent the firemen coming in. One of these bombs may quite well start a fire, and in that dense black smoke it might get such a hold before anyone is aware of it that half the block may be burnt down.’
‘You ought to know by now the sort of pull these Fascist organisations have,’ Gregory could not resist remarking with a trace of bitterness. ‘In any country that wants to keep the goodwill of Hitler they are allowed to break up the political meetings of their opponents, and wreck the offices of newspapers that show a tendency to be Left-wing, while police and firemen look the other way.’
She sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right, and that really I should be thankful that they haven’t broken in and wrecked everything in the place. What I don’t understand, though, is why they make no attempt to come in and drag you off to Grauber.’
‘I do.’ He replied quickly. ‘There are still limits to what these types can get away with in Hungary. Throwing smoke bombs can be laughed off as showing disapproval of someone they had been told is concealing an enemy agent; but the Regent might get tough with them if they started taking it on themselves to break into palaces and arrest people. And there is more to it than that. Grauber hoped that his own thugs would catch us in their ambush. When they failed he went to Szalasi and asked for his help. I haven’t a doubt that Szalasi replied more or less like this: ‘No, thank you. I’m not making a deadly enemy of Ribbentrop by snatching his girl-friend and her chum for you; and he’d know that my boys wouldn’t dare do a thing like that without my orders. But I tell you what I will do. I’ll tip off one of my lieutenants that I’d like enough smoke bombs thrown into the palace to drive everyone out of it. Afterwards, it will be no concern of mine if there is a scrap in the street and, of course, you will have your boys outside mingling with the crowd. It will be up to them to nobble the two birds you’re after as soon as they appear, but it should be easy money to do that once they are in the open, and to bring them along to you at the Villa Petoefer.” ’
‘So that’s the game slippery Szalasi is playing!’ Sabine commented indignantly.
‘That, or something very like it.’
‘Since he was willing only to take such half-measures I wonder that Grauber didn’t wait until tomorrow; because it’s almost certain that by then he’ll be able to get the full cooperation of the police.’
‘I don’t suppose he could have raised enough men of his own to man the roofs as well as the streets; so if he had waited till tomorrow, the odds are we should have got away. He did the wise thing in securing any help he could while the going was good.’
‘If you’re right about Szalasi, we may get away yet. When his young men have thrown all their bombs they are going to get bored with waiting about. They’ve driven us from the house but they seem to have overlooked the fact that we could spend the night here in the courtyard. It’s not yet much after midnight. In another couple of hours they’ll be thinking about their beds, and if they are not under Grauber’s orders they’ll pack up and go home. Say it is even three or four o’clock before they throw their hand in; we’ll still have plenty of time before dawn to plan another attempt to break out, either over the roofs or wherever Grauber’s men seem to be fewest.’
Inwardly Gregory groaned. Squeezing her arm, he said, ‘No, darling: I’m afraid it’s not going to be like that. Having rendered the palace untenable, their next act will be to do the same with the courtyard and the servants’ quarters along either s
ide of it. They must know that by now most of your household has been flushed out into the open, and it won’t be long before they start on the job of forcing the lot of us out into the street.’
He had hardly finished speaking when the first tin canister came lolloping through the stone arch above the wooden double gates. It fell near one of the maidservants, who let out a scream, and next moment a spurt of the oily black smoke fountained up from it.
‘Holy Mary!’ Sabine muttered tearfully. ‘What are we to do?’
‘We’ve got to face it,’ Gregory replied grimly. ‘The game is up. I’m desperately sorry to have let you in for this—desperately sorry.’
‘It’s quite as much my fault,’ she admitted huskily. ‘If I hadn’t persuaded you to come back here after I got you out of the police station; if I’d let you take a chance on your own last night as you wanted to; even if I’d listened to you this morning and agreed to make a break for it without delaying to get papers and things, we wouldn’t have been trapped like this.’
He shrugged. ‘It is no good considering might have beens, and all you did was to urge the course that you thought at the time would be best for us. But now we’ve got to resign ourselves to saying goodbye. The only chance of your getting out of this is for you to surrender yourself to the top Arrow-Cross boy and demand that he should take you straight to Szalasi. That should give him the feeling that he’s one up on the Germans, so it’s unlikely he’ll refuse. Szalasi is going to be desperately embarrassed when you are handed over to him. The very last thing he wants is for Ribb to be able to pin it on him that it was he who scuppered you. All the odds are that he’ll apologise for his boys and send you back here in a car. Then you must jump into the Mercedes and get Mario to drive you hell for leather to the frontier.’
‘But what about you?’
‘It is me that Grauber is really after, and there is nothing to be gained by my surrendering to Szalasi’s boys. Ribb might be annoyed at my being caught, but he couldn’t reasonably blame Szalasi for handing me over; so it’s a certainty that he would hand me over, otherwise he’d make Grauber his enemy for life. All I can do when the time comes is to attempt to shoot my way through, and hope for a chance to get away up some alley in the darkness.’
He tried to keep his voice light, but he knew now that he was really up against it. The odds against his being able to get the better of half-a-dozen Gestapo thugs, aided by scores of Arrow-Cross men, were fantastic. He could only hope that he would meet his end fighting and not get a knock on the head which would result in his being delivered alive into Grauber’s hands.
That the time would soon come when he must take this last gamble with fate was apparent. While he and Sabine had been talking, four more smoke bombs had been pitched through the archway. Pipi had got the fire-hose going again and had succeeded in putting two of them out, but the others were belching their evil black smoke and it was obvious that the hose could not be switched quickly enough to douse all of the swift succession of them that were now coming down in the courtyard. The group of eight or ten servants were starting to cough and splutter, and casting anxious glances at their mistress.
Old Hunyi, the bearded porter, came hobbling up. He was still in pain from the kick he had received in the groin and leaning heavily on a thick stick; but he made an awkward bow to Sabine, and said in Hungarian:
‘Gracious lady, if we remain here we shall soon all be suffocated. I beg that you will deign to accept the shelter of my lodge.’
She translated to Gregory who gave a sad shake of his head and replied in German, ‘That would only be to put off the evil moment. From the street they can lob bombs through the windows of the lodge, and they will as soon as they have made the courtyard untenable. I’m afraid there is no possible way for us to keep out of their clutches.’
Hunyi considered for a moment. He understood German and now spoke in it. ‘If we could find the trap door leading to the caves the Gnädnige Frau Baronin and the Herr Commandant might get away by them.’
‘The caves!’ Gregory almost shouted. ‘What caves?’
‘The Buda hill is honeycombed with caves,’ the elderly porter replied. ‘There are lakes beneath our feet and many of the mineral springs rise in them. Legend has it that our fore fathers took refuge down there when the Turks ravished the city in the fifteenth century.1 Many of the old palaces have ways down into them; and I recall, when I was a boy and Pipi’s father was Steward here, hearing him say that there was a way into them through a trapdoor in the cellars.’
For Gregory this possibility meant a chance of life and freedom, and for Sabine escape from the threatening attentions of the Gestapo. He did not attempt to keep the excitement out of his voice, as he cried:
‘In the cellars! But where? Could you find it?’
Hunyi shook his head. ‘No, Herr Commandant. But Pipi might know where it is.’
Sabine called to Pipi to leave the hose to the footman and come over to them. Quickly they questioned him; but he could not help. He knew of the caves but had never heard his father speak of an entrance to them from the Tuzotlo palace.
Gregory’s heart sank again. If it was there they should be able to find it. But since its existence was not even known to Pipi it would need careful looking for, and in the cellars of a large building like the palace such a search might take hours.
Rushing from place to place, their hasty conferences, and the wear and tear from constant fits of violent coughing made them feel as if the smoke bomb attack had been going on all night; but, in fact, it was less than half-an-hour since Pipi had given the first alarm, and there was a quarter of an hour still to go before it would be one o’clock. Given normal conditions, two or three hours should have proved enough to locate the trap-door. But conditions in the palace were not normal. The rooms on its main floors were now pitch black caverns, and Gregory knew that by this time enough smoke must have seeped down into the basement to asphyxiate anyone who remained there without a mask for more than ten or fifteen minutes.
Nevertheless, as it was that or death outside, and the yard was now becoming thick with smoke, Gregory determined to try it. The air was clearest near the gate; so most of the servants were now in a huddle by it, under the archway through which the smoke bombs were coming. Mario was among them. Gregory ran over to him and gasped:
‘A pair of goggles! Have you a pair of goggles? I am going into the palace again.’
Mario nodded, and they ran together to the garage. At the back of it there was a motor-cycle that belonged to him. Snatching a pair of goggles from its handlebars he thrust them at Gregory and panted:
‘One moment, I have others. If I can help I will come with you.’ Turning to a box of spares he unearthed two older pairs, the elastics of which were stretched, but not too badly for them to be usable.
As they emerged from the garage, Pipi came running towards them. For the first time that night he was laughing. In his round blackened face his teeth flashed like those of a Negro. Behind him, by the wrist, he was dragging an old woman. For a moment he was seized with a coughing fit, then he spluttered out:
‘I asked the other servants. This is old Ciská, our laundry woman. She knows where it is.’
‘Thank God!’ exclaimed Gregory. ‘Quick! Give her one of those pairs of goggles, Mario.’
As she took them, Pipi snatched the other pair and said. ‘She speaks only Hungarian; I will go with you to interpret.’
Mario shrugged. ‘As you will. You know the cellars better than I do.’
Gregory turned to him. ‘You can help in another way. God alone knows what it will be like in the caves. Anyway, we’ll need torches, candles, matches. Please collect everything of that kind you can while we are gone.’
‘We’ll need a crowbar, too,’ Pipi added. ‘Not having been used for so long, it’s certain the trap will be hard to get up.’ As he spoke he ran into the machine shop and came out carrying a medium-sized jemmy.
Sabine was standing with Magda in an an
gle of the yard. Hurrying over to her, Gregory told her what he hoped to do, then rejoined the others. Parts of the yard were now two or three inches deep in water from the hose. In it they redamped the scarves and tied them afresh over their mouths and nostrils.
With Pipi leading and old Ciská following beside Gregory, they went through a passage at the back of the garage into the main block of the house. The smoke was dense, but troubled them much less now that they wore goggles. Pipi fumbled his way along a corridor and found the stairs to the basement. Down in it there was much less smoke, but enough to justify Gregory’s fear that without a mask anyone would be driven from it within a quarter of an hour.
Pipi was snapping the lights on as he advanced and old Ciská kept mumbling to him in Hungarian. They walked in Indian file along several low stone-flagged passages, then came into a broader space along one side of which were trestles supporting a row of casks. There they halted, and after a moment Pipi turned to Gregory.
‘She said it was in the beer-cellar and this is the beer-cellar. But now she says that, although it’s nearly thirty years since she’s been in this part of the basement, she’s sure that the beer-cellar she remembers was not like this.’
‘Probably she has confused it in her mind with a cellar that holds wine casks,’ Gregory suggested. ‘Is there one that does?’
‘Yes, Herr Commandant.’
‘Then let’s take her to it.’
For a moment Pipi was silent, then he burst out, ‘St. Stephen’s curse upon it! We cannot. The wine cellars are locked, and I keep the keys in my room upon the second floor. This scarf is not enough protection to go upstairs. I’d be suffocated before I could get back with them.’
Traitors' Gate Page 29
