Traitors' Gate

Dennis Wheatley

Traitor’s Gate

A Small Buff Form for Gregory

Chapter 1

Late on the night of July 25th 1942 a little group of senior staff officers stood talking together in a small underground room. They all looked tired and a little pasty. That was hardly to be wondered at as they worked, on average, sixteen hours a day and seldom emerged from the fortress basement in which, as members of the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet, they had their quarters.

The semi circular cellar in which they stood had been converted into a mess only as an emergency convenience during the worst air raids of 1940. In its centre two card tables put together enabled six officers to sit down to a meal. One angle was curtained off and behind it a Royal Marine heated soup or knocked up an egg dish as required; against the wall in the other stood a steel filing cabinet; but, instead of papers, its shelves carried an assortment of bottles and glasses. Crowded into the small space in front of it, the Planners were imbibing stiff whiskies and sodas before betaking themselves to their bunks in a still lower basement.

Usually their off duty chatter was as light as that of other men, but they had just come from a midnight conference at which a momentous decision had been announced and instructions for intensive detailed planning given to them by their masters, the Chiefs of Staff.

'Well, Mr. Marlborough has got his way,' remarked a tall Air Commodore, 'but God alone knows how it will pan out.'

A Captain, R.N., nodded. 'Pity we couldn't have postponed the issue till 1943. Having to go over to the offensive so early means risking everything we've got.'

'Roosevelt's insistence that American troops should be employed against the Germans in 1942 left us no option,' shrugged a Gunner Colonel. 'Since the Washington Conference it has only been a question of whether we did Sledgehammer or Gymnast.'

'The Cherbourg job would have been murder,' declared a Brigadier of Royal Marines. 'And, even if we could have established ourselves on the peninsula, we haven't got the weight of trained troops to break out. It would have become a wasting sore.'

The sailor nodded. 'At least we can console ourselves with the thought that we stopped Marshall and Harry Hopkins forcing that one on us, and have all along backed the P.M.'s preference for North Africa.'

'If it comes off it will pay tremendous dividends,' put in a Group Captain who always appeared to be a little sleepy, but was never quite as sleepy as he looked. 'With the whole of the south side of the Med. in our hands convoys will be able to go through again; and Malta, instead of being a drain on us, will become a dagger aimed at what the old man calls "the soft underbelly of the Axchis".'

The tall Air Commodore took him up quickly. 'Now that Rommel has given the Auk such a bloody nose there can be no hope of the Eighth Army doing Acrobat this year; and it will be months before we can achieve a big enough build-up in Algeria to attempt an advance into Tripolitania. Any idea of a linkup in 1942 is now only wishful thinking.'

'We can't expect the Germans to take this show lying down either,' said the Colonel. 'I'd give pretty well any odds that the moment they learn that the Americans and ourselves have gone into Morocco and Algeria they'll scrap their agreement with the Vichy French and pour troops into Tunisia.'

'And put every aircraft they can spare into Sicily and Sardinia,' added the Air Commodore.

'It could be worse than that,' the Brigadier declared grimly. 'If there's a leak they'll take measures beforehand. Then our convoys will sail straight into a trap. Just think of it. Scores of transports crammed with troops coming through the Straits of Gib. with a submarine pack lying in wait for them, And Kesselring's dive-bomber thick as locusts coming in for the kill. It could be a massacre before we even had a chance to get ashore at all.'

At the awful picture he conjured up the others fell silent for a moment. All of them knew that shipping tonnage we could not possibly afford to lose, hundreds of escort vessels manned by the cream of the Navy, and many thousands of our best troops in fact everything that Britain could scrape together short of sufficient squadrons of the R.A.F. to protect her from invasion must be gambled in this great operation.

While they still stood silent a Lt. Colonel, his fair hair slightly ruffled and his blue eyes a little blurred from having sat up till one in the morning reading staff papers, joined them, Smiling round, he said, 'Well, chaps; what's cooking?'

The Brigadier gave him a twisted smile. 'We've headed the Yanks off from getting themselves and us slaughtered on the French beaches; but Gymnast is on. That's definite. The P.M. has given it a new code name, though. In future it is to be known as "Operation Torch". At best, in about a year from now, we'll have the whole of North Africa. At worst, the chaps we got off from Dunkirk, and God knows how many thousands more, will be in Davy Jones's locker. Everything depends on the Germans being kept in the dark up till the very last moment. Even when our convoys are reported going through the Straits of Gib. the Boche must be led to believe that we intend to land the troops anywhere other than in Algeria. Thank God that's not my headache. It's yours, Johnny; so here's good luck to you!'

The Brigadier finished his whisky and added, 'You'll need it., This is about the toughest assignment any man has ever had.'

At the time of the above conversation no one could possibly have foreseen that Fate had designated Gregory Sallust to play a key role in this tough assignment, and even less that his uninvited participation would make him liable to court-martial, imprisonment and disgrace.

To explain how this came about it is necessary to go back four months. To be precise, to the morning of Monday, March 30th, when at the breakfast table Gregory opened a buff envelope.

After one glance at the flimsy it contained, he sat back and roared with laughter. It was a 'call-up' paper, notifying him that he must report for a medical examination within fourteen days or become liable to grievous penalties.

His mirth was understandable seeing that for the past two and a half years he had been in closer and more constant conflict with the Nazis than had any member of our Fighting Services. As a secret agent he had been parachuted into Germany in September 1939. Since then he had pitted his wits against Herr Gruppenführer Grauber the dreaded chief of the Gestapo's Foreign Department in Finland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France and Russia.

On the other side of the breakfast table the Countess von Osterberg raised her tapering eyebrows. It was largely those eyebrows and her high cheekbones that gave her such a startling resemblance to Marlene Dietrich, and caused her still to be spoken of by those who had known her before her marriage as 'the beautiful Erika von Epp'.

In response to her look of interrogation, Gregory flicked the paper over to her and said, 'Early this month the Government extended the call-up to include men aged 41 to 45. It never crossed my mind that the measure would apply to me but, of course, it does.'

Having glanced at the paper, Erika smiled. 'But surely, darling, your name is on some special list; and all you need do is to let the people who sent this know that?'

'No. I'm privately employed by Sir Pellinore. For many years past the old boy has used a part of his millions to throw spanners in the works of the enemies of Britain, and on several occasions I have been the spanner. It was natural enough that when the war came he should ask me to carry on with the good work, and I've always preferred to play the part of a lone wolf. If one gets caught then it can only be through one's own ill luck or stupidity.'

'Whenever you set off on a mission, though, the military authorities give you every assistance, and when you went to Russia you were accredited to the British Embassy.'

'Old Pellinore is persona grata with everyone who matters, from the King down, and he often pulls strings to get things done for the War Cabinet that they prefer not to appear in themselves; so it is easy for him to get me any help I require. But the fact remains that I am not even unofficially associated with any of our Intelligence Services.'

'Sir Pellinore could soon arrange that for you.'

'No doubt. But I don't want to be. I would be under orders then, and perhaps be roped in to play a part in some cloak and dagger job that I thought ill-conceived. When it is my life I am gambling with I prefer to make my own plans and keep them to myself. Besides, twice in the past year old man Grauber has as near as damn it got me; so I don't feel inclined to give him another chance. At least, not yet, anyway.'

Erika needed no reminding how near a shave Gregory had had last time, for she had been with him, and it still made her flesh creep to think of the sort of death that Grauber would have meted out to them. Yet, even so, death had reached out grisly fingers after their escape. That had taken place early in December and, as a result of exposure to the bitter cold, both of them had gone down with pneumonia while Gregory, in addition, was suffering from two cracked ribs.

Fortunately they had been met on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance by their devoted friend Stefan Kaporovitch, the ex Bolshevik General with whom they had fled from Finland in April 1940. Stefan had secured prompt medical aid, stood by until they became convalescent, then arranged for them to be flown back to England.

Sir Pellinore had sent them up to Gwaine Meads, a great rambling mansion situated on the Welsh border that had been in the possession of his family since the Wars of the Roses. The greater part of it was now an R.A.F. hospital maintained by him out of his private fortune; but he had retained one wing for his own use, although he never found time to stay in it himself. At the moment Erika and Gregory were its only occupants as there had been no newcomers since the end of February, when Sir Pellinore had arranged for Stefan to become a consultant to the Russian Section of the War Office; so he and his charming French wife, Marie, had gone to live in London.

By then Erika had sufficiently recovered to resume the duties she had undertaken at Gwaine Meads before she had been tricked into returning to the Continent. Technically she ranked as an enemy alien, but Sir Pellinore had saved her from internment by vouching for her, and she had since played a dual role, giving her able brain to the financial administration of the hospital and her ravishing presence to lightening the boredom of the convalescing officers.

Gregory, on the other hand, was lazy by nature and, in spite of the acute shortage of staff on the estate caused by the war, refused to be inveigled into any regular commitment. He knew little of mechanics and practically nothing about electricity; he had never used a spade, detested weeding, and considered that the only thing more soul-destroying than looking after horses was to look after cows, pigs or chickens. So he was useless in garage, stables, garden and farmyard. But he did spend a lot of his time yarning with the gallant young men who were knocking hell out of the Luftwaffe and, occasionally, he would labour furiously from dawn to dusk for several consecutive days on some suddenly self imposed task, such as painting. the summer house or reputtying the vinery.

It was now the end of March and, although for well over a month past he had again been reasonably fit, as he had just said to Erika, he felt no urge as yet to get back into the war.

Standing up, he walked over to the sideboard to pour himself a second cup of coffee. As he did so, Erika surveyed him critically. He was lean and loose limbed; of medium height but actually somewhat taller than he looked from his habit of walking with his head thrust forward, which made him appear to have a permanent stoop. His lantern-jawed face had two deep laughter lines etched like brackets on either side of his thin-lipped, resolute mouth. His eyes were brown and his eyebrows slightly bushy. From the outer end of the left one a white scar ran up towards the dark smooth hair that made a 'widow's peak' in the centre of his forehead. On occasions such as the present, when something had occurred to worry him, he always reminded Erika of a very dangerous caged animal plotting to break free. After a moment she said:

'Each time you go abroad means months of agony for me, and the risks you have already run are far greater than most men have to take in a war. You would have nothing with which to reproach yourself if you decided against ever going again on a secret mission. Why not accept this as a kindly decree by Fate that, for the rest of the war, your chances of coming through should be no worse than those of any other Army Officer?'

Officer, eh!' Gregory gave a cynical laugh. 'My sweet, you don't understand. This is not like the old war in which chaps such as myself could volunteer at the age of seventeen and were commissioned straight from our Public Schools. Now, people are called up in batches as required the gallant, the cowards, the intelligent and the morons and pushed through the military machine like so many sausages. Under this crazy system it takes a year at least for even the most promising young man to become a Second Lieutenant.'

Erika was descended from a long line of Generals and in Germany the 'officer caste' was still more sharply divided from the rank and file than it had ever been in Britain. Her big blue eyes wide, she stared at Gregory and exclaimed:

'You don't… you can't mean that they would put a man like you in the ranks?'

'They certainly would. Having held a commission in the last war counts for nothing in this one. And, as I am over forty, I'd probably find myself employed as a grave digger, or as an orderly in the Sanitary Corps. But I won't have it! I'm damned if I will! I don't mind danger but I've always loathed drudgery and discomfort.'

For a moment he glowered down at the small buff form, then he tapped it angrily with his forefinger. 'Still, I can't ignore this. Old Pellinore must get me out of it somehow. I'd better pack a bag and take the first train to London.'

Dark Days for Britain

Chapter 2

Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust was one of those remarkable products which seem peculiar to Britain. In his youth he had been a subaltern in a crack cavalry regiment and during the Boer war he had won a well deserved V.C. A few years later, his ill luck at some of the little baccarat parties that friends of his gave for King Edward VII, and his generosity towards certain ladies of the Gaiety chorus, made it necessary for him to leave the Army and he accepted a seat on the Board of a small private Bank which operated mainly in the Near East.

His acquaintances thought of him as a handsome fellow with an eye for a horse or a pretty woman, and an infinite capacity for vintage port, but very little brain an illusion which he still did his utmost to maintain so the Directorship had been offered to him solely on account of his social connexions. To the surprise of those concerned he took to business like a duck to water.

Under his bluff, jovial manner there lurked a most subtle mind, and his transparent honesty seemed to have such an hypnotic effect on Orientals and Levantines that they usually failed to realize that he had got the best of the deal until they were well on their way home. Other Directorships had followed. By 1914 he was already a power in the City; after the war he had refused a peerage on the grounds that there had been a Gwaine-Cust at Gwaine Meads for so many centuries that if he changed his name his tenants would think he had sold the place; foresight had enabled him to bring his companies safely through the slump of the early 1930'sand he had emerged from it immensely rich.

Although his name was hardly known to the general public, it had long been respected in Government circles. To his great mansion in Carlton House Terrace, Diplomats, Generals, Colonial Governors and Cabinet Ministers often came to consult him privately on their problems and they rarely left without having drawn new strength from his boundless vitality and shrewd common sense.

He was well over seventy, but the only indication of his age was the snowy whiteness of his hair, his bushy eyebrows and luxuriant cavalry moustache. His startlingly blue eyes were as bright as ever, he stood six feet four in his socks and could still have thrown most men of forty down his staircase.

When Gregory arrived at Carlton House Terrace he was told that Sir Pellinore was at a meeting in the City; but, knowing that he would be expected to stay the night, he had his bag carried up to the room he usually occupied, then went into the library to await his host's return.

It was a fine lofty room at the back of the house with a splendid view across St. James's Park to the Admiralty, the Horse Guards and the other massive buildings in which throbbed the heart of Britain's war machine. For a few minutes he stood looking out at the tender green of the young leaves now breaking on the trees of the park, then he took from one of the shelves a copy of James Hilton's Lost Horizon and became immersed once more in that wonderful story until heavy footfalls sounded on the landing and Sir Pellinore came marching in.

'Hello, young feller! Glad to see you!' he boomed, grasping Gregory's hand in his leg of mutton fist. 'So you're fed up already with kickin' your heels in the country, eh? Well, I'd hoped you'd continue to take it easy for a bit, but we're a long way from having won the damn war yet; so if you're spoilin' to have another crack at the Nazis it's not for me to stop you.'

Gregory gave a wry grin. 'You're off the mark for once. I didn't come here to ask about another mission and I do want another few months of idleness. But, unless you can pull a fast one for me, I'm not going to get them. I've been called up.'

'Well, I'll be jiggered!' Sir Pellinore slapped a mighty thigh encased in pinstriped trousers. 'What a lark! Strap me, but this is the funniest thing I've heard for years.'

'It struck me as funny too, to begin with. But it is no laughing matter. D'you realize that they would bung me in the ranks and perhaps make me a mess waiter?'

'Not to start with! That's promotion!' The elderly Baronet's bright blue eyes glinted merrily, and he gave a great guffaw of laughter. 'At least it was in my day. Job given to steady chaps who could be trusted not to pinch the sherry or pour the soup down one's neck. After one glance at that truculent jaw of yours, any Sergeant Major who knows his business would put you on to cleaning out the latrines. That's about what you can expect!'

'But seriously, you must get me out of this.'

The under butler had followed Sir Pellinore into the room with a tray of drinks. Turning, his master waved a hand towards them. 'What'll you have? I keep most of this muck for visitors who haven't the sense to respect their guts. Stick to good wine topped off with a spot of old brandy and you'll still be chasin' the gels round the gooseberry bush when you're near as old as I am.' As he spoke he poured himself out a tumbler full of Manzanilla, then drank half of it off in a couple of gulps.

Having annexed a slightly more modest ration, Gregory asked, 'Now, what about it?'

Sir Pellinore carried his glass over to an armchair, sat down, stretched out his long legs and muttered: 'Damned if I know.

If you were a Colonel and wanted to be a Brigadier, I don't doubt I could get you transferred to a job that carries that rank. If you wanted to shift a quarter of a million in gold from Arabia to Peru, I could fix it for you. If you had a yen for an O.B.E. I'd have your name pushed in well up in the next Honours List. But this is a very different kettle of fish. You have received a summons under an order decreed by Parliament, and even Cabinet Ministers can't monkey with the law.'

'Oh come! Miners, factory workers, agricultural labourers, and all sorts of other people get exemption; but their bosses have to make the application for them, and you are mine.'

'What would you have me put you down as? Olga Petrovsky, my beautiful spy? Be your age, boy! We couldn't let the little office wallahs who handle these sort of things get even an inkling of the truth.'

'You could say that I was your confidential secretary.'

'No damn fear. Too many people are aware that you are not.'

'Well; what's to be done, then?'

'The obvious thing is for me to get you put on the strength of one of the cloak and dagger outfits; then a chit would be sent from the War House putting you in the clear. Of course, these shows are under bureaucratic control just like all the rest, as far as their establishments are concerned; so you'd be graded, paid accordingly and expected to earn the money.'

'Then I'd probably have to work in an office sifting other people's reports for hours on end every day, or find myself bundled off abroad to some place that I have already made too hot to hold me. No, thank you.'

Sir Pellinore took another gulp of sherry. 'Does that mean you've had your fill of spying? Be a thunderin' pity seeing you're so good at it. Still, after all the coups you've pulled off no one could blame you if you decided to swallow your vest pocket camera or whatever is a spy's equivalent for a sailor's anchor.'

'No. It's the most exciting game in the world; and any time that you want me to undertake another mission I'll go back into Germany for you. But I've got some common sense, and I'd like still to be alive at the end of the war. If I let myself be made into a small time operator and make a regular job of sticking my neck in the noose, all the odds are that I shan't be.'

'That's fair enough. Trouble is though that you're now in an age group in which every man jack has to have a regular job of some kind. No evading that unless you want to end up in a police court. It really would be best for you to go into one of the Services. I'd have no trouble about hoiking you out then, when required.'

'Most convenient for you, dear master. Just drop me a postcard whenever you next wish me to risk being castrated by Grauber and Co. In the meantime, I'll be in the seventh heaven alternately swabbing dishes and lavatory seats.'

'Insolent young devil,' rumbled Sir Pellinore, brushing up his white moustache. 'It won't be as bad as all that, though. I'd get you fixed up in some white-collar occupation. Pay Corps perhaps, or interviewing cooks for the Army Caterin' Service.'

'Either would drive me off my rocker within a month; and I've already told you that I flatly refuse to serve in the ranks.'

"Very understandable in a man of your attainments. I'd feel the same myself. Glad I did my service while old Vickie was on the Throne. When I joined I took my own chargers, valet and groom, and they gave me a trumpeter to ride behind me. Now if the trumpeter has been in longer it's you who have to ride behind him even if he couldn't get ten per cent marks in an average general knowledge paper. That's democracy; but there's another name for it race suicide. Mark my words, Gregory; Hitler will never smash the British Empire, but our socialist minded bureaucracy will.'

Gregory nodded, refilled his glass from the decanter, and muttered, 'Let's stick to my personal problem. You know that I wouldn't ask for a commission unless I felt justified in doing so. Damn it, I held one for two years in the last war and a score of times led men into battle. Surely there is some way you can fix it for me.'

'I know of none. Anyhow, as far as the Army is concerned. Still, I'm dining with the Castletowns tonight. Old Maudie told me that Pug Ismay will be there, if he can get away. Hope he is. Great fun listening to Pug at a mixed party. Everyone hangs on his words while he talks about the high direction of the war and gives away the most deadly secrets. At least, that's the impression he conveys. He's a genius at it. But later, of course, if one takes the trouble to analyse it all, one realizes that he hasn't said a damn thing that anyone couldn't have read in the previous morning's paper. If he turns up I'll have a word with him about you.'

'Thanks. What is the latest low-down on the war?'

'The St. Nazaire raid proved a winner.'

'Good; that's fine.'

'Full details only just been issued. Complete surprise achieved. Navy broke the boom, then ran in an old U.S. destroyer packed full of T.N.T. and blew the dock gates with her. Meanwhile the Commandos got ashore and gave the wursteaters bloody hell.'

'That's splendid news. The very thing the Navy needed to set its stock up again after that shocking business last month.'

'You mean Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen breaking out of Brest and cocking a snook at Dover as they sailed up Channel?'

'Yes. I wonder Nelson didn't rise from his grave at the very idea of an enemy squadron being allowed to pass the Straits without a battle.'

Sir Pellinore shrugged. 'The Boche were both patient and lucky. Waited for the worst possible weather, and it happened to coincide with a breakdown in our air reconnaissance. They weren't spotted till they were off the Kent coast, and Dover is too vulnerable these days for us to keep any war craft there. The real blunder was our attempt to retrieve the situation by attacking with aircraft so late on a February afternoon. The planes had to go in low down and practically blind. The hits they scored were at the price of suicide.'

'Surely there was still time to despatch some units of the Home Fleet, from farther north, to intercept the Germans before they reached their ports?'

'They were covered by successive wings of Luftwaffe the whole way up the coast. After the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse last December we dared not expose any more of our capital ships to possible annihilation.'

Gregory nodded glumly. 'The news from the Far East continues to be pretty shattering, doesn't it?'

'Lord, yes! Hong Kong, Malaya, Java, Sumatra, Borneo all gone in little more than three months. And we haven't seen the end of it by a long chalk. The Yanks have made a great stand in the Philippines, but they're now at the end of their tether. Same applies to our chaps in Burma. It's going to be a toss up if we can even save India.'

'If things are as bad as that it's a comfort to know that its defence now rests with General Sir Harold Alexander.'

'True! It couldn't be in better hands. Trouble is, it's barely a fortnight since they sent him out there; and there can't have been much for him to take over only a tangle of broken units composed of poor devils half dead from having fought their way back right up the peninsula. Still, there's a sporting chance that those little yellow apes may be sufficiently extended for Alex to hold them by the time they get to the Chin river.'

'And how about Australia?' Gregory enquired. 'That should be our worst worry at the moment.'

'It would be, if the U.S. were not prepared to take Australia under her wing. There's some reason, too, to believe that the Jap effort down in that direction is petering out. The United States Navy made them pay a very heavy price for their landings in New Guinea; and Australia is too big a mouthful for them to try to swallow. That is, unless they're prepared to go over to the defensive on all their other fronts.'

'The Australians don't seem to see things that way.'

'They would if it wasn't for that Socialist feller Curtin that they've saddled themselves with as Prime Minister. He's usin' the crisis as a political weapon telling them all that Churchill and his Tory pals would rather not risk the skin off a little finger than raise a hand to save Australia from the Japs. It's a thunderin' lie, of course. All their troops have been released from the Middle East; and when Churchill was in Washington he secured a positive assurance from the President that, if need be, American troops should be sent to Australia instead of to Europe, and would defend the country to the last ditch. The lies that are being put out are Australian Labour's cover-up for their party's criminal negligence in having refused to introduce National Service, although it was clear that the Japs might enter the war against us at any time.'

Gregory nodded. 'It's good to think that our folk down under are in no real danger. Now; what's the latest low-down about Russia?'

'Oh, they never stop yellin' that they'll have to chuck their hand in unless we can take the pressure off them by openin' a Second Front.'

'Our new commitments against the Japs must have ruled that out for the time being.'

'Lord, yes. Having to make good the gaps left in the Middle East by the withdrawal of the Australian divisions, and putting some teeth into the defence of India, forced us to scrape the bottom of the bucket.'

'Still, the Russians must know that American troops have been arriving in Northern Ireland for the past two months; so it's very understandable that they should be calling for an Anglo-American landing on the Continent. And I suppose the build-up might become big enough to justify that some time this summer?'

'Not a hope. It takes more than a lot of bodies to launch a great amphibious operation. You ought to know that. They've got to be specially trained; Then there's the Q side. Think of all the millions of tons of ammunition and stores required.'

'Now the huge industrial plants in the United States are fully geared for war, surely they can take care of all material requirements?'

'Ah, that's what the public think. Fact is we've more headaches about equipment and supplies than we had last year. Before the Yanks came in they’ were giving us everything they'd got. Now they are having to think of themselves as well, and the war they're fightin' in the Pacific. It's meant that we'll not have anything like the numbers of aircraft and tanks we had hoped to have by the summer. Then there's the question of all these newfangled landin' craft. Hundreds would be required, and as yet we've got 'em only in dozens. That and shipping are the worst snags. Even if the Yanks could let us have the goods it's doubtful now if we could get them over.'

Ts the shipping situation really all that desperate?'

'Desperate's the word or will be if sinkings continue at their present rate.'

'I thought the convoy system had taken the worst sting out of the U-boats.'

'So it has, in British controlled waters. But we haven't yet persuaded our friends on the other side of the wisdom of adopting it. Doenitz is cashin' in on that. Since Christmas his U-boat packs have been operating almost within sight of New York harbour. In January he was getting three ships a day; now it's up to nine. This month he's made a record killing. Eight hundred thousand tons sunk already. If he can keep that up God knows if we'll ever be able to launch an assault against Hitler's Europe. Anyhow, you can count it out for 1942.'

Getting to his feet, Sir Pellinore added in a more cheerful tone, 'Only comforting thought is that the British people are running true to form. We always have won the last battle in every war. That's what really matters. Can't stop gossiping here all night with you, though. Got to have a bath and freshen myself up. Sorry I've got to go out; but if you like to dine here I'll tell Crawshay to get up a bottle of the Roederer '28 for you to drink with your dinner.'

'Thanks; that's a temptation to stay in,' Gregory grinned, 'But after our chat I feel I need a little cheering up; so I'll see if I can find a few blissfully ignorant and optimistic types at my club. It would be nice, though, if we could split that bottle in the morning.'

'Good idea. Eleven o'clock, eh? I often take a pint at that hour. Learnt the habit from my Colonel when I was a youngster. He used to call it "a little eleven o'clock," and always asked one of his subalterns to join him. Stuff cost only six bob a bottle in those days. Well, don't break your neck in the blackout. Poor sort of endin' for a feller like you.'

On the following morning, knowing that his host’ liked to have a clear hour in which to deal with his most urgent affairs, Gregory tactfully refrained from going to the library until eleven o'clock. On his entering it Sir Pellinore told his secretary to go and get on with the letters, then pointed to the bottle which already reposed in an ice bucket on the drinks table. Gregory opened it, and for a few minutes, while enjoying the first fragrance of the wine, they exchanged pleasant platitudes; then, no longer able to restrain his impatience, he asked;

'Well; was General Ismay there last night?'

'What, Pug?' Sir Pellinore's voice was casual. 'Oh yes, he was in great form. I had a word with him about you. As I supposed, direct Commissions into the Army are absolutely out. Still, steps are being taken to fix you up right away on most favoured nation terms.'

'What exactly does that mean?' Gregory asked, a shade suspiciously.

Sir Pellinore's slightly protuberant bright blue eyes regarded him with faintly cynical amusement. 'Pug and I decided that, as you had been called up, the sooner you got through doing your stuff on the barrack square the better, so this time next week you'll be jumping around to the orders of a Sergeant Major.'

The Leopard Does Not Change His Spots

Chapter 3

Gregory came slowly to his feet. His brown eyes were hard and the scar on his forehead showed white with anger as he exclaimed, 'I would never have believed that you, of all people, would have sold me down the river. Surely you could have got me into the Interpreters Corps, or some sort of halfway house which did not call for me to be shouted at to form fours at my age.'

Sir Pellinore allowed himself a suggestion of a smile. 'R.A.F. never form fours. They use the old cavalry drill. Of course, if, as an ex-Army Officer, you have any prejudice against taking a commission in the R.A.F…"

'You old devil!' Gregory's anger had evaporated in an instant. 'Any man would be honoured to wear that uniform. But how does a commission square with being ordered around by an N.C.O.?'

'The R.A.F. is the only service which is still granting direct commissions to applicants with certain qualifications technicians, paymasters, schoolmasters, legal wallahs, and so on. They go in as officers but have to do a fortnight's Intake Course before being posted. There's a long waiting list, but if you sign your application this afternoon the Director of Plans, Air, will have it pushed in at the top; then you can start getting through this inescapable spell of square-bashing next week.'

'And what is to happen to me when I'm through it?'

'I felt you wouldn't mind becoming a Staff Officer in the War Room at the Cabinet Offices."

Gregory's mouth fell slightly open. 'You… you're not fooling?'

T never fool,' replied Sir Pellinore with mock severity. 'But you must thank General Ismay when you see him, not me. Of course, I've told him from time to time of the very valuable services you have rendered; so he knows of you already. After Maudie Castletown's dinner party I went back to his office with him. We had a word with Ian Jacob. Son of the old Field Marshal. Known him since he was a boy. He's a bright young

26

man. Colonel now, and in charge of War Cabinet communications. War Room is a three service show and comes under him. At Pug's request Jacob agreed to get the D. of Plans, Air, to take you nominally on his staff.'

'But this is terrific. In my wildest dreams I would never have hoped for anything so thrilling.'

'Ah, well,' Sir Pellinore took a good swig of the Roederer, 'since you have to be in regular employment there are many worse jobs. It is a Wing Commander's post, but they have some fool regulation now that no one can be put up by more than one rank a month; so you'll have to go in as a Pilot Officer. Still, your promotion will be automatic and you'll be a Colonel de l' Air before the autumn.'

'I can't ever thank you enough.'

'Never mind that. Be at the Great George Street entrance to the War Cabinet Offices at three o'clock this afternoon and send your name up to Colonel Jacob.'

A few hours later Gregory was sitting on a bench ‘in a dim hallway of the great block which forms the north side of Parliament Square. Seeing the special importance of the offices in this corner of the building, he had been surprised to find that the only obvious security precautions were that the Home Guards checking passes on the door wore revolvers, and that, compared with the constant bustle in great headquarters which he had entered when on the Continent, they seemed almost deserted.

After a wait of a few minutes an elderly messenger took him up in an old fashioned lift to the second floor, then along a lofty corridor. It was here, well above the noise of the traffic, and with fine views over the lake in St. James's Park, that the principal offices were situated. Among the names on their doors Gregory noticed that of General Sir Hastings Ismay and Brigadier L. C. Hollis, then he was shown in to a secretary who took him through to Colonel Jacob.

The Colonel dark, round-faced, young looking gave him a cigarette and at once disclosed that he knew all about his mission to Russia in the previous summer. After they had talked for a few minutes, he said with a smile:

'In view of your previous activities, I'm afraid you may find life here rather dull. Are you quite sure that you Wouldn't prefer me to give you a chit passing you on to the chief of our Secret Operations Executive?'

'No, thank you,' Gregory replied promptly. 'I've had enough excitement to last me for quite a time.'

'Very well, then.' The Colonel stood up. 'I had a word with the D. of Plans, Air, about you this morning, and he is expecting us; so we'll go over and see him.'

The Operational Departments of the Air Ministry were in the same vast building, on its far side overlooking King Charles Street. After walking through seemingly interminable and almost deserted corridors they reached the Director of Plans' office. There the Colonel introduced Gregory to a short, broad shouldered Air Commodore who received them with cheerful briskness.

Tm sorry we have to send you to Uxbridge,' he said. 'As you had a commission in the last war it's an absurd waste of time to lecture you on the elementary stuff that every subaltern picks up in a couple of months; but it's a hard and fast regulation that there is now no escaping. Just sign these papers I have had prepared and they will attend to the rest of the formalities at Adastral House.'

Half an hour later Gregory arrived at the big corner building in Kingsway which housed the Administrative Departments of the Air Ministry. He had a brief interview with a Group Captain, signed some more papers, was medically examined and passed fit. A little before five o'clock he was out in the Strand again and, short of being officially gazetted, was now Pilot Officer Sallust, R.A.F.V.R., under orders to report at the R.A.F. Intake Depot at Uxbridge on the coming Saturday afternoon.

When he reflected that at eleven o'clock that morning he had not even remotely contemplated such a step, it was borne in on him how swiftly the people at the top could get things done if they had a mind to it.

He was just in time to reach his tailor's before they closed and they promised, by hook or by crook, to get two sets of uniform and a greatcoat made for him by Saturday morning. Then he telephoned to Erika to tell her what had happened to him and asked her to take a few days off, so that they could hit it up in London for the last half of the week before he went into uniform.

She arrived next day and for once was able to enjoy a hectic time with him unmarred by secret nagging thoughts that this was the prelude to his going on another mission and these might be the last nights they would ever spend together.

On the Saturday afternoon she drove out with him to Uxbridge and was much amused to find that he showed a nervousness he would never have displayed had he been going to make a parachute drop into Hitler's Europe. The fact was that, although he rather liked himself in his smart new uniform, he was uncomfortably aware that, when putting it on, he had said goodbye to his independence. For the next fortnight, anyhow, his actions would be governed by bugle calls he would, too, be given orders by numerous masters, some of whom might be fools or malicious, yet he would have to suppress the desire to tell them to go to the devil.

At the gate of the camp Erika had a twinge of conscience at her mirth, for his long face suddenly made her feel like a mother seeing her small boy off for his first term at a prep, school. But her belated display of sympathy did little to lighten his gloom and, his mind filled with pessimistic thoughts, he followed the airman who took his baggage through into the wired enclosure.

Uxbridge proved in some respects far worse, and in others much better, than he had expected. The accommodation left much to be desired. It consisted of old dormitories built to hold forty airmen, but with only eight basins and two bathrooms to each, and an antiquated hot water system the vagaries of which were unpredictable. However, the food served in the big mess was hot, varied and of an excellence far beyond anything that Gregory had hoped for. On the ether hand it was announced by an Instructor on the first night that officers were strictly forbidden to keep any form of alcoholic liquor in the barrack rooms.

As drink had already become far from easy to obtain, Gregory had brought a suitcase full with him. He was quite prepared to share his drink with others, but not to forgo it. Greatly as he respected and admired King George VI he would even have defied the Monarch on this issue, as he considered the order a most unwarrantable infringement of the liberty of a Briton. No sooner had the Instructor left the room than, producing a bottle of brandy, Gregory invited his neighbours to join him in a nightcap.

This, and the fact that he was one of only six, out of the several hundred who formed the intake, wearing First War medal ribbons, led to his new companions regarding him with mingled awe and respect. By far the greater part of them had never worn a uniform of any kind before, so they crowded round him asking questions and automatically giving him the unofficial status which might have been accorded to a prefect. Knowing, too, the manner in which N.C.O.s expected to be treated by an officer, and being capable himself of drilling a squad at a distance of a quarter of a mile, he soon also had the drill sergeants exactly where he wanted them.

His flagrant disregard of the regulation about drink apart, he considered that, as an ex officer, it was his duty to set an example to the mostly younger men in whose company he marched, slept, fed and listened to lectures; so, in spite of his natural inclination to laziness, he performed his drill and kept his notes conscientiously.

After hours of marching up and down, and listening to talks, many of which he could have given better himself, he was by turns stiff, bored, relaxed, amused and resigned. The fact that his habitual stoop disappeared overnight meant nothing, as his life had more than once depended on its doing so when he had disguised himself in a black Gestapo uniform or that of a German Army Officer. All the same, he had to admit that he felt considerably fitter when at the end of the fortnight he left Uxbridge for a little world as remote from it as Mars.

There, his companions had on average been ten years younger than himself and a good cross-section of the middle classes; some, coming from quite poor homes, had done well in their trades, others came from the rank and file of the professions. After the first night or two they had mentally shed their years; so that the atmosphere had become the friendly, somewhat boisterous, one of boys doing a last term at school.

Now, overnight, he exchanged four hours a day of vigorous exercise for a chair in a large basement room shored up with great beams, between which the walls were covered with maps made brilliant by neon lighting; for, although he had not realized it, the War Room in the Cabinet Offices was actually its Map Room. Here, there was no ragging or inconsequent chatter of girls, movies and binges, but quiet war talk occasionally spiced with sophisticated wit, and plans for fishing or shooting when a next leave came along.

The dozen or so men who ran it were Lt. Colonels or of equivalent rank in the other two services, and most of them were considerably older than Gregory. The majority had reached their present rank in the First World War and, anxious to serve again, had been put in to carry on this most secret work on the recommendation of some old friend now high up in their own service.

They were much too discreet to question the sudden addition to their number of a Pilot Officer and, having accepted Gregory in a most friendly way, soon initiated him into his duties. These consisted of receiving reports from all the Intelligence centres, either in locked boxes or over an array of scrambler telephones ranged on a long table in the middle of the room, and making the adjustments necessary to the maps, or recording the information for inclusion in the daily 'Most Secret' War report which went to the King, the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Organization.

As Gregory soon learned, the latter consisted in the main of some twenty officers who formed the Joint Planning Staff. The majority of them were also of Lt. Colonel's rank, but they were a generation younger than those in the War Room and, with one curious exception, had all been handpicked from among the most promising graduates of the three Staff Colleges. The exception, as it so happened, had been a Cadet in H.M.S. Worcester with Gregory when they were in their teens and, from time to time since, they had seen one another. He had been brought in some months earlier, like Gregory, by way of Uxbridge, but to do some special planning with a one-legged Colonel who had previously been Chief Instructor at the Intelligence College at Matlock.

Although the Planners and the War Room Staff worked in the same basement and shared a small mess, the former never discussed future operations in the presence of the latter; as it was an accepted rule that no one should ever be given information which his work did not make it necessary for him to have. But, all the same, Gregory and his colleagues usually had a pretty shrewd idea what was in the wind from the movements of forces and other indications that inevitably came their Way.

The basement was a honeycomb of corridors and rooms of varying sizes. In addition to the ones where the routine work was carried on there were those in which the War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff Committee held their meetings on nights when air raids were taking place, others allocated to individual Ministers who at times slept there, and others again which were slept in regularly by the senior War Cabinet personnel and members of the Prime Minister's Staff. There was, too, a complete suite for him in case an emergency should necessitate a retreat below stairs from the flat immediately above, known as 10 Downing Street annexe, which was his permanent wartime quarters.

Although Gregory had not at first realized it, the place was in fact an underground fortress. The Brigade of Guards supplied a guard for its entrances, which were further protected by armed Home Guards and Special Police; and inside it a body of Royal Marines could be turned swiftly from officers' servants into a garrison. It was bombproof, gas proof and stocked with enough food and medical supplies to stand a prolonged siege. In it was situated the terminal of the Atlantic telephone and an exchange with direct underground lines to every principal city in Britain. So, had a German Airborne Division descended on Whitehall, the Prime Minister and all his advisers could have shut themselves in there and, from it, continued the High Direction of the war without interruption.

Successive teams of duty officers kept the War Room operating night and day, but their hours were staggered so that each had different days and nights off duty every week; and they were at liberty to swap watches when that suited their individual plans. Finding that between dinner and midnight was the most popular time for Ministers and other V.I.P.s to look into the War Room for the latest news and a chat, Gregory was always willing to take over from any of his colleagues who wished to dine out, as he found the speculations of such bigwigs on the future course of the war intensely interesting and, now that Erika had returned to the north, nights out in wartime London had little appeal for him.

On his return from Uxbridge he had again settled into his old quarters in Gloucester Road. Soon after the First World War he had gone to live there because his Cockney batman, Rudd, had inherited a long lease of No. 272, which consisted of a grocer's shop with three floors above it of rooms to let. Gregory had had the rooms at the back of the first floor converted into a small flat and, although he could long since have afforded to move to a better address, he had always retained them because he was very fond of Rudd, and nowhere could he have found a more cheerful, willing and devoted servant. But he found evenings spent alone there hang heavily on his hands and most of his best friends had war jobs which had taken them out of London.

It was, no doubt, lack of occupation in his off duty hours which, after a few weeks, first began to ferment in him a sense of restlessness. Once, too, he had fallen into the routine of the War Room, there ceased to be anything stimulating about it. The job carried little responsibility other than its extreme secrecy, and called for no initiative. Day after day he pinned little cards, giving the operative strengths of various types of aircraft at each airfield, on to a great map of Britain, while his naval and military colleagues moved pins denoting warships, or divisions and brigades, across oceans and deserts. Lunch or dinner at his club, or at another as the guest of one of them, provided the only break in the monotony and, when experience gradually showed him that few of the V.I.P.s were any better at predicting the next moves of the enemy than he was himself, he began to lose much of his interest in his chats with them.

Had the war been going well he might have been more contented but, as spring advanced into summer, one catastrophe after another befell the Allies.

While he was at Uxbridge the Japanese had driven the Americans from the Bataan peninsula, bombed Ceylon and sunk Hermes one of our precious aircraft carriers and the cruisers Dorchester and Cornwall, in the Indian Ocean. During the latter part of April he watched the Japs climbing up the map of Burma, until they had driven the Chinese out of Lashio the southern terminal of China's life line, the Burma Road and pushed General Alexander back across the Chindwin river. By mid May the Americans had lost Corregidor Island their last foothold in the Philippines Mandalay had fallen, and the British were being hard-pressed on the frontier of India.

Our relationships with the French had further deteriorated as Marshal Petain, although remaining nominally head of the Vichy Government, had now given Laval a free hand and full collaboration with the Germans was the new order of the day.

The U boats continued to take a toll of Allied shipping that far outran new construction. The cost in sinkings of sending convoys to the Arctic with arms for Russia, and through the Mediterranean with help for Malta, was appalling; and it looked as if the garrison of the little island would soon be bombed out of existence.

Towards the end of May, Rommel attacked in Libya. For about a fortnight there was most desperate fighting but the reports put out by General Auchinleck's spokesmen in Cairo were full of optimism. Then, from the second week in June, things suddenly went wrong. After several days of heroic resistance at Bir Hakeim the Free French were withdrawn. Next day the Knightsbridge Box, which had been equally stubbornly defended by the British, was overrun. El Adam, Belhamed and Acroma were swiftly captured and our 4th Armoured Brigade was heavily defeated at Sidi Rezegh.

Tobrak was now cut off but no one imagined for one moment that it would fall. In the previous year, gamely defended by the Australians, it had successfully withstood a siege, and this time its prospects of doing so should have been much better. Its garrison commander, the South African General Klopper, had under him 25,000 fighting troops and a further 10,000 administrative details all capable of using a rifle at a. pinch, while the fortress contained ammunition and supplies sufficient for ninety days. Yet, after only one day of heavy bombardment and a single determined assault by the enemy, the General ordered his troops to lay down their arms.

This terrible disgrace to British Arms was lightened only by one episode enshrined in words which equal the most glorious in our history. On receiving the order to surrender, Captain Sainthill, Coldstream Guards, sent back the reply, 'Surrender is a manoeuvre that the Guards have never practised in peace so they do not know how to carry it out in war.' He then led his company to the attack and, together with 188 South Africans who were equally determined to save the honour of their country, succeeded in fighting his way through to the main body of the Eighth Army.

The conduct of Klopper, coupled with General Ritchie's apparent loss of control over the general situation, soon placed Egypt itself in jeopardy. Day after day Gregory glumly watched his military colleagues move the red topped pins in the map of North Africa as they plotted another British Army in retreat. The Libyan frontier was abandoned; so, too, were the strong positions at Mersa Matruh. On the Prime Minister's insistence General Auchinleck all too belatedly relieved Ritchie and took over the battle himself; but by the end of the month the Army was back at El Daba, only ninety miles from Alexandria.

Churchill had received the shattering blow of Tobruk's surrender while in Washington. On his return it was known in the War Room that the Americans had shown the most generous sympathy and promised all possible aid to the Eighth Army; but it must take weeks before tank replacements could reach it from the United States… In the meantime no one could say where the retreat would end, and at the Auk's headquarters in Cairo the secret papers were being burnt as a precaution against Rommel’s' making a lightning thrust which would carry his armour to the capital.

July opened with a motion in the House of Commons declaring lack of confidence in the Prime Minister's direction of the war. The vast majority of the people rejoiced when it was defeated by 475 votes to 25; but the fate of the Nile Valley and our whole position in the Middle East still hung in the balance.

In July, too, the situation on the Russian front began to give cause for grave anxiety. During the winter months, owing to lack of suitable clothes and equipment, the German armies had suffered appallingly. But once the thaw was sufficiently advanced to permit rapid movement they had renewed their efforts to achieve a decisive victory. Colossal battles had raged for weeks in the Kharkov and Kursk sectors, in which Marshal Timoshenko had managed to hold his own; but the Germans had launched another all-out offensive farther south. Regardless of losses, they had stormed the Kerch peninsula and battered their way into Sevastopol. By mid July they had broken through on a six hundred mile wide front, reached Rostov, crossed the Lower Don and now threatened both Stalingrad and the Caucasus.

Such was the situation on the night of Sunday, July 26th; and as was the case on most Sundays, after a cold supper together, Gregory and Sir Pellinore were up in the big library giving free rein to their hopes and fears. For an hour or more their talk roved over the battle fronts, then Gregory summed up.

'So there we are; Alexander hanging on by the skin of his teeth along the Indian frontier, the Auk hanging on by the skin of his outside Cairo, and the Ruskies being chivvied a hundred miles a day towards their oil wells without which they would have to chuck their hand in. It may be silly, but for the first time since the war started I'm beginning to lie awake at nights and wonder if we may not lose it.'

'What's that!' boomed Sir Pellinore, suddenly sitting bolt upright. 'Don't talk nonsense, boy! This is not like you. I can tell what's wrong though. It's having your nose so close to a lot of small maps all the time that's got you down. As Wellington said, "Always use the big ones".'

'There is no comfort to be got from doing that in this case. If the armies of Alex and the Auk both crack, within three months the Germans and the Japs will join up in Persia. Then we would about have had it.'

'I'd give long odds against the Axis pulling off a double. Besides, we wouldn't be sitting on our bottoms while the Nazis overran the whole Middle East.'

'It doesn't seem to me that there's much we could do to stop them.'

'We could launch a new campaign nearer home. That would force 'em to commit all the troops they had to spare.'

The decision taken only the night before, to do Operation Torch and occupy French North Africa, was still known only to a very limited number of people, and not even a rumour of it had yet reached the War Room; so Gregory shook his head and replied pessimistically:

'Everyone agrees that it is out of the question for us to open up a Second Front in 1942.'

'We might, and probably should, if driven to it by such an emergency. You are ignoring the brighter side, too, my boy. Think of the hell we have been knockin' out of Germany.'

'Oh, the R.A.F. is magnificent, I know. That 1,000 bomber raid on Cologne at the end of May, and the others since Lubeck, Hamburg, Essen, Bremen. Not to mention the Desert Air Force. If it hadn't been for those lads Rommel would already be in Cairo.'

'United States Air Force is showin' well too now. Fine feat their bombing of Tokyo; and every week more of their heavies are being flown here to increase the weight of bombs we can put down on the wursteaters.'

'That's all very well; but as we've seen both in Burma and the Desert, a determined air force can delay, but cannot halt, a victorious army. Even if it is possible to bomb Germany into submission that would take years; and, in the meantime, the German and Jap armies may have conquered half the world.'

Sir Pellinore made a gesture of protest. 'It's true that we've struck a bad patch; but whatever may happen in the next few months, 1943 will see us on top again. Once the great new American armies are fully equipped and begin to roll forward the housepainter will find that he's bitten off more than he can chew.'

'Not necessarily. Not if the Russians are forced to give in before an Allied army is able to come to their rescue.'

'Why should they? You went to Russia yourself. Like the wizard you are, you got the low-down from Marshal Voroshilov. He told you that their plan was to use their masses to make the Germans exhaust themselves, and that they were holding their best troops until the time came for them to go over to the offensive or in the last event if Stalingrad was threatened.'

That was ten months ago and their losses since have been immense. Stalingrad is only vital to them because, if they lost it, they could no longer get the oil from the Caucasus up the Volga to their central and northern fronts. But now the Caucasus itself is threatened; so they may already have had to throw in the crack Reserve Army that the Marshal told me about.'

'I see. Yes. You fear that there may be no stopping this great break through in the south. Of course, you're right about the oil wells. If they lose those their goose will be cooked.'

'And so will ours. Hitler now wields a whip over a dozen nations. He has coerced millions of men into both working and fighting for him. If the Soviets collapse he will be able to bring 180 divisions back into Western Europe. All hope of opening a Second Front would be gone for good then. For the Allies to attempt a landing on the Continent in the face of even half that number, in addition to the forces he has there already, would be plain suicide. We could only sit and watch him just as we are doing now while he sent forty or fifty divisions crashing down through Turkey and Persia into India.'

'Damn it, Gregory! You're giving even me the willies. Mind, I don't believe it will happen. But one must admit that it's just possible.'

'It could easily happen if we do nothing but twiddle our thumbs for the rest of the year. Just now you told me to use large maps, and I am using them. The armies of Alex, the Auk, and the Soviet army defending the Caucasus may be thousands of miles apart, but strategically all three are fighting back to back. The collapse of either of the first two would be a major calamity and prolong the war for years; if the Russians collapse, then I see no end to it.'

Sir Pellinore held out his glass. 'For God's sake give me a drink. Some of the high-ups who bring me their troubles have been pretty pessimistic lately; but none of them has painted as black a picture as this.'

Gregory poured them both another ration of old brandy, and remarked:

'That's probably because they are all worried stiff with their personal responsibilities; whereas I'm only a looker-on. And lookers-on get the best view of the game.'

'Well, what would you have us do?'

'Don't ask me; I'm not a planner. I only stick pins in maps.'

'Exactly. And it's that which has given you the time to do a bit of thinkin'. Come on now. What's the remedy?'

'There is only the obvious one. It is to stop burying our heads in the sand. You could at least try prodding your high-up friends into facing the situation and deciding on some definite action.'

'What sort of action?'

'Anything which would take a bit of weight off the Russians. Keeping them in the war is the thing that matters above all else; and, apart from sending them arms, we are doing nothing. Absolutely nothing! We are just calmly waiting for 1943. By then it may be too late, whereas some audacious move now could be the premium which would insure us against an eventual stalemate, or something far worse.'

'Nothing short of a full-scale landing in France or Norway would force the Germans to withdraw troops from the Russian front; and I'm certain that a major operation of that kind is not possible.'

Gregory shrugged. 'To reject it is being penny wise and pound foolish. The withdrawal of ten or twelve divisions from the Russian front this summer might change the whole course of history. I don't think you would say that I'm normally a pessimist. But, if the Russians pack up before we can get into Europe, I don't believe we'll ever defeat Hitler.'

For a moment Sir Pellinore remained silent. Then he said, 'If ten or twelve divisions would do the trick, there is one possibility by which it might be brought about.'

'How?' Gregory asked, suddenly sitting forward.

'The Nazis are stretched to the limit already; so they'd have to recall that number if one of the countries they are holding down blew up behind them.'

'Surely there is very little chance of that. After being crushed between the German and Russian millstones, the poor old Poles can't have much kick left in them. And, since the Czechs assassinated Heydrich in May, I gather they are liable to be shot if they so much as lift a finger.'

'I wasn't thinking of the occupied countries. Germany's official allies were the birds I had in mind. Italy and Finland are no good both too deeply involved. But there are Hungary and Rumania. They were dragged in against their wills, and such contributions as they have made to Hitler's war have been prised out of 'em by blackmail. Hungary is the best bet. I know a lot of Hungarians. They all loathe the Germans' guts. I'd bet a monkey to a rotten apple that they have some sort of league pledged to break away from Hitler as soon as they see a chance.'

'Even if you are right, I can't imagine that while things are going so well for Germany they would risk his wrath by ratting on him.'

'I don't know so much,' Sir Pellinore replied thoughtfully. 'After the last war the Allies treated Hungary pretty savagely. Under the Treaty of Trianon they gave more than half her territories away. Since then she's got most of them back. In March '39, when Hitler cut Czechoslovakia into three bits, he annexed Bohemia, made Slovakia a vassal state and let the Hungarians reoccupy Ruthenia. Then, in the summer of '40, the Axis made the Rumanians return Transylvania. But the Hungarians must fear that if the Allies win they'll be made to give these territories up again. For a promise that they should retain them and, perhaps, get back some of the other lands of which they were robbed in 1920,1 believe they might consider ratting on the Nazis now.'

For a long moment Gregory did not reply. Then he said: 'On every front, except in the air over Europe, the Germans and the Japs are getting the best of us. In battle after battle the Allies are being driven back. To my mind it is imperative that somehow, somewhere, we should launch a new thrust at the enemy within the next few months. If we don't, it may be too late, and we'll lose the war altogether. So, if you think there is even a sporting chance that we could persuade the Hungarians to stick a knife in Hitler's back, you had better arrange for me to go to Budapest.'

Seconded for Special Service

Chapter 4

It was not often that Sir Pellinore started anything unintentionally; but he knew he had started something now, and he was far from happy about it. His only son had been killed in the First World War and it was Gregory who, as a very young subaltern had carried him back out of the hell of Thiepval Wood after he had been mortally wounded. Since then Gregory had gradually taken the place of that son in the old man's affections.

Although it would have been against his principles to persuade anyone of whom he was fond against risking their life for their country in time of war, he had been extremely glad when the threat of the call-up had enabled him to plant Gregory in a safe job; and he had hoped that he would come to feel that honour had been satisfied by his previous exploits. As this was no question of an urgent mission, and the whole idea was drawing a bow at a venture, Sir Pellinore decided that he was justified in trying to retrieve the situation; so he said with apparent casualness:

'Not much good you goin' to Budapest. You don't speak Hungarian.'

'What has that to do with it?' Gregory brushed the objection aside. 'I have worked in Norway, Finland, Russia, Holland without a word of the language of those countries. Anyhow, everyone in Budapest speaks German, and that's my second tongue.'

'The Hungarians wouldn't budge without a pretty strong inducement. It would mean getting the War Cabinet and Roosevelt too, to agree that they should keep Transylvania and Ruthenia after the war, and probably be given a port on the Adriatic into the bargain. Our top chaps might not be willing to promise that.'

'I can't believe it! Statesmen don't usually boggle at giving away territory which isn't theirs to give. And if there is a chance that, given this promise, the Hungarians will do all that a Second Front would do for us, Britain and America would be mad not to make it.'

'True enough. But there's no call for you to get out your automatics and buy a Tyrolean hat. This is a job for the F.O. I'll put the idea up to someone there tomorrow morning.'

Gregory shook his head. 'Judging by the Foreign Office form in this war so far, that wouldn't get us anywhere. They would take a year to think it over; then go cap in hand to the wrong chap in Budapest. What's needed is someone to go there and find out what is cooking and who is the cook.'

I hardly like to ask for you to be released from your job to go off on what may prove a wild goose chase.'

'Nonsense! The whole idea of putting me into the War Room was that my leaving it at short notice would not affect its efficient running for even a day. It would be another matter if I were a Planner, or doing an "I" job in some headquarters. General Ismay told me himself that he had suggested it as the most convenient way of keeping me on ice for you, and the time has come when I want you to take me off it.'

'All right, then,' Sir Pellinore conceded reluctantly. 'Have it your own way.'

'Fine!' Gregory grinned. In the last few minutes he seemed to have become a different man. His fretful despondency had completely disappeared and he voiced his racing thoughts. 'Those damn maps have been getting me down. A chance to use my wits again without taking on a suicide gamble was the very thing I needed. Budapest is a lovely city, the Hungarians are charming people, and there will be none of those blond beasts in black uniforms who might claim me at the end of a pistol as an old acquaintance. This, as the R.A.F. say, is a piece of cake. When can I start?'

'Bad policy to rush your fences. You'll do better if I first collect all the information I can for you to work on. That will take a little time. Then there are the arrangements for your journey. Say in about ten days.'

'Couldn't suit me better. I'm due for some leave and I can fix up to take it at forty-eight hours' notice. That will give me a clear week with Erika. Naturally I shan't tell the chaps in the War Room that I may not be coming back for a month or two. I'll leave you to arrange that with Colonel Jacob.'

Sir Pellinore nodded. 'I'll suggest that, when he puts in a replacement, he should say that you've been injured in a car smash, or something. Anyhow, that's his affair. Will you go down to Gwaine Meads or have Erika up to London?'

'I'll speak to her on the telephone now, if I may, and see which she'd prefer.'

It was the sort of call that Erika had been dreading for some time past, as she knew her Gregory far too well to have any hope of his remaining in a safe job for the rest of the war.

After he had told her in guarded terms that he was going abroad again, she decided that she could better support the strain of his coming departure in the country than in the restaurants and nightclubs of war worn London, which now offered so little and had become so tatty; so he told her to expect him on the coming Wednesday.

Gregory had started a spell of duty at six o'clock that evening and, in order that he might dine with Sir Pellinore, a colleague who owed him a turn had taken over from him at half past seven; but he had promised to be back by eleven. As it was now close on that hour, he took leave of his host and, with a much more jaunty step than he had come, made his way through the blackout along the edge of the park, till he found the gap in the barbed wire leading to the tall bronze doors in the basement beyond which lay his office.

The following morning he arranged about his leave and at ten o'clock went off duty. As he was leaving the building he found himself alongside the old friend who had once been a Cadet with him in H.M.S. Worcester. Together they turned left and, as they passed the bottom of Clive Steps, Gregory asked:

'What brings you out at this hour of the morning?'

'My daily jaunt to the War Office,' replied the other. 'It's part of my job to attend the meetings of the I.S.S.B.'

'And what may that be? Or shouldn't one ask?'

'Oh, there's no secret about what the initials stand for. It's the Inter Services Security Board. They are the boys who check up on any leakages of information, and devise all the regulations for preventing news of what we're up to from reaching the enemy.'

A hundred yards further on they parted. The other airman crossed the Horse Guards Parade, went through the arch, over to the War Office and up to a room on the third floor, in which half a dozen officers were already seated round a table.

It was one of the Board's principal functions to scrutinize all troop movements and see to it that the public knew as little as possible about them; so, soon after any new operation had been definitely decided upon, the Board was automatically informed. That morning, Operation Torch was one of the items on the agenda, and was to remain so for many weeks to come; for the problems entailed in covering the movement of ships, men and aircraft, in preparation for the great expedition, were innumerable.

As yet they had only the outline plan, since 'Eps' as the Executive Planning Staffs in the three Service Ministries were called were still working on the nuts and bolts which would turn the plan from a broad strategic conception into a practical operation of war with the forces and supplies needed to carry it out nominated down to the last detail.

A middle aged Major of the Royal Scots who had among his ribbons an M.C. with bar, and who was Secretary to the Board, read out particulars in clear incisive tones; the 'Cardinal' Colonel, who was Chairman, made some comments, then the Admiralty representative looked across at the airman from the War Cabinet Offices and said in a high-pitched, rather nasal, voice:

'Now we shall see if amateurs like you and your new Colonel can really produce the goods.'

The airman was junior to the sailor so he replied with chill politeness, 'Given a continuance of the help always so generously afforded us by I.S.S.B., sir, I think we may manage.'

The sailor was far from popular; so a large man in civilian clothes, who was Chief of counterespionage in Britain and affectionately known to the rest of the party as 'Himmler,' tittered.

The Major with the double M.C. gave the airman a friendly smile. 'Unlike our naval member, this old horse feels no pain and grief that such headaches are no longer ours. But this little affair is going to be quite something; and naturally the Board will be right behind you.'

A youngish, good-looking Captain who was on the secretariat looked up from the notes he had been making with his left hand, and added, 'It's going to be murder if things go wrong. The Jerries can hardly fail to spot a convoy of this size and what might happen if the U-boat packs got into it does not bear thinking about.'

'That's not our worst worry,' replied the airman. 'There would be losses, of course, but not serious enough to cripple the operation if the naval escorts do their stuff. Besides, there is at least some hope that we'll be able to get them down to Gib. undetected. The real trouble will start as soon as they turn in to go through the Straits. Then any cover we have managed to give their initial sailing must be blown. Once in the Med. the whole of the Axis air force will be alerted; and, if the object of the operation leaks out, the Vichy French may prove hostile into the bargain. If the landings are seriously opposed it could be a massacre. I only hope to God we'll be able to think up some way of foxing the enemy about our 'ultimate objectives.'

The Major nodded. 'I'd say that your new master will produce a better rabbit than we would have got from old one leg Dumbo; but the two of you have certainly been given one hell of an assignment. This could be worse than Tobruk. The Order of Battle will include the best of everything the Army's got, and they'll be two thousand miles from home. There will be no getting the remnants off in small boats as we did at Dunkirk. Well, let us know how we can help, and keep your chin up.'

Had Gregory been at this meeting he would have been equally worried about the outcome of the expedition to North Africa, but at least he would have been disabused of his idea that the British and Americans intended to do nothing in 1942 which might force the enemy to withdraw a certain number of divisions from Russia. Such knowledge, had he had it the evening before, would certainly have caused his conversation with Sir Pellinore to take an entirely different turn; so it is most unlikely that the project of his going to Budapest would ever have arisen.

As it was, while the I.S.S.B. was discussing the first tentative arrangements for the security of Operation Torch, he was lying in his bath thinking of that lovely city, so justly termed 'The Queen of the Danube,' Or, to be more accurate, he was thinking of a wonderful three weeks that he had spent there three years before the war in the company of a very lovely young woman,

In the summer of 1936, on behalf of Sir Pellinore, he had been engaged in investigating international smuggling operations which had assumed large and dangerous proportions; for, in addition to big consignments of contraband goods, a number of Communist agitators were being flown in by night to secret landing grounds in lonely parts of Kent. His painstaking enquiries on the French coast had got him nowhere until one midnight in the Casino at Deauville his curiosity had been aroused by the sight of a beautiful dark-haired girl and, quite incidentally, the fact that she was in the company of an elderly man whom he knew to be a crooked financier.

She had proved to be a Hungarian named Sabine Szenty,' and it was through having got to know her later that night in unusually dramatic circumstances that he secured his first clue to the problem which had so far defeated him. Unwillingly to begin with, then in rebellion against her crooked chief, she had eventually helped him to unmask the smugglers' organization. It had very nearly cost both of them their lives and, even when the job was done, her own participation in their criminal activities left her liable to prosecution and a prison sentence. To save her from that he had performed a highly illegal act himself; but he had had no cause to regret it, for after their arrival in Budapest she had rewarded him in an entirely suitable manner.

He wondered now what had happened to her, and if she was still living in the Hungarian capital. It was probable that by this time she had married; but she had never sought to conceal the fact that she was by nature an adventuress, and believed in taking all the good things of life that offered with both hands; so he thought it unlikely that she would as yet have settled down to respectable domesticity. She could still be only about twenty-eight and with beauty such as hers she would be able for years yet, should she wish, to change one rich husband for another.

Sabine, he decided, compared favourably with any of the numerous women whom for a season he had loved and who had returned his love. Erika was, of course, the great exception, and he was not being consciously unfaithful to her when he thought of those laughing carefree sunny days and hectic nights that he had spent with Sabine beside the Danube, and wished that he had some magic formula for setting time back so that he might enjoy them all over again.

Later in the day, he told Rudd that on Wednesday morning he would be going north on a week's leave and that shortly after his return he expected to be away from London for quite a time.

Rudd pushed the greasy cap he always wore, both indoors and out, on to the back of his head, scratched in his yellowish hair above the right ear and said in a wheedling tone:

'See 'ere Mr. Gregory, sir; that's Dutch for you goin' abroad again, an' you don't 'ave to tell me no different. Can't yer take me wiv yer, sime as you done now an' again in the old days? I'd pull me weight. You know that. An' the 'ome' Guard's become a farce now, wiv not a 'ope o' any of us old sweats wot's in it gettin' a crack at the Jerries.'

'Sorry, old friend,' Gregory replied with real sympathy. 'I wish I could; but this time it's right out of the question. I won't forget you, though, when another chance does occur to use the sort of help you have always given me so willingly.'

'Thanks, sir,' Rudd grinned, showing teeth that badly needed the attention of a dentist. 'Well, good luck then; an' should you be seein' little ole 'itler, give 'im an extra one from me right on the kisser.'

Up in Wales, Gregory was favoured with July sunshine, but even in the private wing of the big house there was little real privacy, and it was difficult for Erika to free herself from the work of administration as long as she remained under the same roof as the hospital. Earlier in the year while he had been a permanent resident, he had not minded that, but now it irked him; so they decided to spend the weekend at Llandudno.

The trip was not a success. Owing to petrol rationing they had to go by train and were then tied to the town. At the hotel in which they stayed the wartime food was abominable and even indifferent drink obtainable only at extortionate prices. To add insult to injury a bottle of champagne that Gregory bought from a wine merchant on the Saturday morning, for them to drink up in their bedroom that night, proved when opened as happens occasionally for no known reason with the best of brands to be badly corked.

They were both glad to get back to Gwaine Meads; but there their only out-of-doors escape from patients and nurses was to take picnics in the woods, and the weather suddenly went bad on them. As Gregory was now looking forward with cheerful anticipation to his mission, all this increased his impatience to be on his way to Budapest. About that he endeavoured to conceal his feelings from Erika; but she knew him so well that she sensed and resented it, with the result that they had few really happy hours during their last days together.

On Tuesday, August 4th, he took the last train back to London. First thing the following morning he rang up Sir Pellinore, who told him to pack a bag and come to Carlton House Terrace. On his arrival in the library there shortly after eleven o'clock, the elderly Baronet told him to open a quart' of champagne that was standing ready in an ice bucket. As soon as they had taken their first swig out of the silver tankards, Sir Pellinore said:

'Your terms of reference are simply to spy out the land find out if the anti German feeling in Hungary is strong enough for us to make practical use of it. There would be no point in your trying to act as a go-between with any anti Nazi elements you may come across until the F.O. and the State Department have fully considered the whole question. But if the report you bring back is favourable, you may be sent out again to open secret negotiations.' Having taken another good swig at his champagne, Sir Pellinore went on: 'You'll be leavin' on Friday by the weekly diplomatic plane that serves our Embassy in Berne; so I thought you might as well spend your last two nights here. From Switzerland you'll proceed under your own steam by whatever route you think best. I've got devilish little information for you to go on, though. The fellers I've talked to all say their Hungarian files are hopelessly out of date.'

'Our spies can't be up to much then,' Gregory remarked, lighting a Sullivan.

'That's not the trouble. We haven't got any there.'

'Why on earth not?'

'One of the results of the MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain Governments, all cheeseparing so idiotically on the Secret Service funds in the years before the war. What little money there was all had to go on the highest priorities Germany and Russia. Funds were so short that, as we had an alliance with the French, we left it to them to keep tabs on Nazi activities in North Africa; so when the French ratted on us we hadn't even got a skeleton setup there.'

'Chamberlain's shortcomings are ancient history now, though; and the M.I. shows have been on a war footing for close on three years.'

'Oh, they haven't lacked money since September '39. I was only explaining why we had no organ grinders in Budapest. And we haven't been at war with Hungary that long, you know. We didn't declare war on Hungary, Finland and Romania until last December.'

'Even so, I should have thought seven months was time enough to get something going.'

Sir Pellinore shrugged his great shoulders. 'I doubt if we' should ever have declared war against these Nazi satellites at all unless Joe Stalin had pressed us to and trained spies can't be got just by putting an advertisement in The Times. We've still probably only about one to every dozen employed by Himmler. With so much ground to cover, it would be a waste to send good men to places where the odds are all against our ever undertaking military operations. Anyway, I've drawn a blank about what's going on there apart from a digest of the stuff that has appeared in the newspapers.'

'How about an identity and a passport?'

'That's all fixed up. I didn't do it through the old firm, though. I'm told that they perform miracles to keep us in the know about the enemy's Order of Battle, but in other ways it's far from being the show it was when the little Admiral ran it. There's a new firm that specializes in sabotage, but its people bring home a lot of stuff, and its Chief is much more of a live wire. Been parachuted into Hitler's Europe himself at least half a dozen times. You're to report to him at ten thirty tomorrow morning.'

'Good. I must say I would have liked to have someone reliable whom I could contact, just to get the lie of the land; but if Hungary is now like darkest Africa to the professionals, I must go native and hope for the best.'

'Oh, I can give you a few names to start the ball rollin'. Old friends of mine. Now that our countries are at war they may not be willing to give you their active help. But they'll still observe the decencies. If you say you're a friend of mine they wouldn't dream of turning you over to the police. There's Istvan Lujza. He was a Cabinet Minister in the last years of the old Emperor. And Prince Gyorgy Hunyadi. He owns the finest partridge shoot in Hungary; probably in the world. Then there's Mihaly Zapolya. Never forget one night when we got tight together and shot out half the lights on the Franz Joseph Embankment. What a lark! That's years ago, of course; but wars don't make any difference to friendship between people with whom you've done that sort of thing.'

Next morning Gregory took a taxi to a big block of offices a quarter of a mile north of Oxford Street. It was a hive of activity and, judging from its entrance, passageways and lift, it appeared to be staffed almost entirely with pretty girls. Most of them were in the uniform of the F.A.N.Y. but quite a number wore smart civilian clothes. When they addressed each' other they spoke with the accent of Mayfair but, as they passed Gregory in short stages from the door up to the General's office, they were none the less brisk and efficient for that.

The General proved to be a small, dark, wiry man. Instead of the slacks usually worn by officers in London, or the ugly battledress which had been brought in only with the object of making officers less conspicuous in the field, he was turned out with the impeccable correctness of a staff officer in the First World War. The sight of his beautifully cut riding breeches and highly polished field boots in combination with the parachute badge on his arm made Gregory's heart warm towards him, and within a few minutes they were talking together like old friends.

When they got down to business, the General said: 'Sir Pellinore tells me that you speak both German and French well enough to pass as a native of either country. As you must know, owing to centuries of Austrian domination the Magyars have an hereditary hatred for everything German; so I think you would stand a much better chance of winning their confidence if you clocked in as a Frenchman. Diplomatic relations between France and Hungary have never been severed. With a Vichy passport you should be able to go in and out freely whenever you wish.'

'Excellent,' Gregory nodded. 'I like that idea. There must be plenty of Frenchmen carrying Vichy passports who are de Gaullists at heart; so nobody will think it particularly odd if, when sounding them out, I express views uncomplimentary to the Nazis.'

'That is just what I thought; and we have an identity for you which should fill the bill. It is that of a Free French Officer who was an Interpreter with the Commandos and was killed in the St. Nazaire raid. Your story will be that you were fed up with serving under General de Gaulle, so during the confusion of the fighting you took the opportunity to desert; and that, as you had no time for Petain either, instead of remaining in France you went to Switzerland. Why, after a few months, you should have decided to go to Hungary, I leave to you.'

'It depends rather on this chap's circumstances, doesn't it?'

'To some extent; but I don't think they will help you very much. His name was Etienne Tavenier. He retired from the Army with the rank of Major a few years before the war. Presumably he did so because at about that time he inherited from his father a pleasant property in Perigord. That suggests that he was fairly well off, so could have afforded to travel, and might some time have been to Budapest on a holiday. But they will give you such particulars as we have of him downstairs. Your passport is ready for you there too, and various other papers. Among them is a draft on a Swiss bank in Berne for £500. They will give you the lot in cash or open a credit for you as Commandant Tavenier in Budapest, just as you wish.'

Gregory smiled. 'That seems quite a generous allowance, as I am going there only to try to find out the form; and that should not take me more than a couple of weeks.'

'The amount is in accordance with Sir Pellinore's request,' the General smiled back. 'This being a private enterprise, he is footing the bill. If your report proves hopeful, no doubt you will be going out again to stir up some trouble. If not, and you have left some of the money in a Budapest bank, we can arrange for our Swiss friends to reclaim it. And now, I'm due at a conference; so I'll wish you luck and pass you on to the section that has been arranging about your papers.'

The General's beautiful secretary took Gregory to a room on a lower floor, and said to a girl seated behind a desk there, 'Oh, Diana, here is your customer for Budapest.' Then with a ravishing smile she left them.

Diana was another lovely small, thin faced, with the sort of golden hair that cannot be got out of a bottle, and a slightly arched nose. She looked only about twenty-two, so Gregory expected her to show him through to someone more senior; but she casually waved him to a chair, offered him a Lucky Strike, then took one herself and, after surveying him for a moment from beneath her long lashes, said with a smile:

'It's a good thing you are only taking Tavenier's name and not attempting to pass as him. He was quite a lot older and going bald.'

'Did you know him, then?' Gregory enquired.

'No. But I got a description of him from C.C.O., H.Q., so that if you do run into trouble you could anyhow say that they are confusing you with a cousin of the same name, and be able to describe him correctly.'

'That was thoughtful of you.'

'Oh, it's just part of the Austin Reed Service.' Producing a folder from a drawer she tipped its contents out on to the desk and passed them to him one by one, methodically checking them off on a list as she did so.

In addition to the Vichy passport which contained an up-to-date photograph of himself that he had had taken at Sir Pellinore's suggestion before going up to Wales and the draft on the Swiss bank, there were a partly used Vichy ration card, two faked bills and several letters to support his false identity. When she had done, she said:

'As Tavenier lived over here from the time of his evacuation with other French troops from Dunkirk until the St. Nazaire raid last March, it would be quite in order for him to be wearing British underclothes; but you should remove any initials you may have on yours and, I suggest, buy yourself a French style suit and shoes when you get to Berne.'

Such advice to Gregory was very much 'teaching one's grandmother to suck eggs;' but he thanked her gravely, and she went on:

'Now this is off the record. I have one contact for you. But you must memorize his name and address; not write it down. It is Leon Levianski, wholesale furrier, 158 Kertesz Utcza, Pest.'

'Thanks.' He repeated what she had said three times, then asked, 'How does this chap come into our picture?'

'He doesn't. She lit another cigarette and looked down at her desk, her long lashes veiling her eyes. 'I happen to have an American boyfriend who is in O.S.S. Naturally we are terribly cagey with one another, but I told him the other night that we badly wanted a contact in Budapest and asked if he could help. He got me the name of this Jewish merchant. You see, it is still possible for the Hungarians to write to the U.S. via Scandinavia or Turkey, and ever since America came into the war this man has been writing a monthly letter to a cousin of his in New York. Instead of his letters just being waffles, they are factual reports of what goes on inside Hitler's Europe at least the old Austro-Hungarian part of it as far as this man can assess it on all he hears by way of the Jewish grapevine. After a while the cousin in New York thought they might interest the State Department; so now he sends them on regularly to Washington. Their writer might be able to help a bit. Anyhow, I think you would be quite safe in approaching him.'

Gregory repeated the name and address again, and nodded. 'I'm very grateful to you.' Then he read through the particulars of Etienne Tavenier. They were distinctly scanty. The Frenchman had entered the 14th Regiment of Tirailleurs in 1912, and served as a subaltern in the First World War. Afterwards he had spent several years in North Africa, then in 1926 married Mademoiselle Phoebe Constant (father's occupation unknown), and transferred to the 110th Infantry. It was believed that there were no children of the marriage, and that the wife's death (about the time of Munich) had been due to ptomaine poisoning. A year or so earlier Tavenier had come into his inheritance, a small chateau at Razac, not far from Perigueux. In 1939 he had been recalled to the colours, and in May, 1940, his battalion had been a part of General Blanchard's army, which had made a gallant stand beside the British. After being taken off from Dunkirk he had opted to remain in Britain as a member of the Free French Forces.

Having digested this, Gregory looked up and remarked, 'Not exactly a world-shaking career; but that is all to the good for my purpose. It is going to take quite a lot of thinking, though, to provide a plausible reason for a chap like that taking a holiday in Budapest in the middle of a war. If he was a sufferer from arthritis he might seek relief in a course of the famous mud baths; but it wouldn't be easy to bluff the doctors that I was afflicted in that way. Of course, the Hungarians are a romantic lot, so I might put it across discreetly that I had formed an attachment there before the war and had come back in the hope of being able to find the girl again.'

The goddess behind the desk shook her head. 'I don't like it. Middleclass Frenchmen are the most unromantic people in the world. But I have been thinking quite a lot about a story for you to tell. How about using foie gras?'

'Foie gras?' Gregory echoed in a puzzled voice.

'Yes; it's a national industry in Hungary. My mother and stepfather were there in 1938 and they brought back tins and tins of it.'

He nodded. 'You're quite right. One can't look out of the train anywhere in Hungary without seeing a flock of geese. But what is your idea?'

'Well, this foie gras was awfully good. The biggest tins had whole livers in them and they were that lovely shade of rich pink. There was only one thing lacking; there were no truffles to bring out the flavour.'

Gregory sat forward and thumped the desk. 'By jove! And I am supposed to own a place in Perigord, where the truffles come from. Of course, my object in going to Budapest is to get in touch with the foie gras makers and see if I can't fix up to supply them with truffles after the war.'

With the unselfconsciousness which is so often a by-product of beauty, the girl scratched her head with the blunt end of her pencil as she said, 'That's it. And my parents tell me that Budapest is an enchanting city. I do hope you'll have a pleasant stay there and a safe return.'

Ten minutes later Gregory left her office. He had never subscribed to the theory that blondes were necessarily dumb, and he knew from experience that beauty or the lack of it had no relation whatever to women's brains; but he did marvel somewhat that beings so young and glamorous as those in that secret headquarters should now be conducting affairs as efficiently as well travelled men. He decided that he would bring Diana back the biggest foie gras he could find in Hungary as a reward for her excellent idea.

He could not know that before the month ended he would be counting himself lucky if he could get out of Budapest without bag or baggage, but alive to tell the tale.

The Scene is Set

Chapter 5

Gregory arrived in Budapest on Thursday, August 13th. On the previous Friday, after flying at a great height over France, the weekly diplomatic plane had landed him safely at Berne. Next morning he had presented his special letter of introduction at the bank and been shown into a private, office. There he had made his arrangements about money and handed over both his British and French passports the former for safe keeping until he reclaimed it, the latter so that the bank could get him a visa for Hungary, which they promised to have done for him by Monday, or Tuesday morning at the latest. He had then bought his tickets for the journey, a second-hand suitcase with several French labels on it, and some clothes of decidedly French cut.

On the Tuesday he had left Berne as Mr. Sallust and arrived in Lausanne as Commandant Tavenier. From there he had caught the Simplon-Orient Express down to Zagreb, where he changed trains and did the last lap north to the Hungarian capital.

He could have gone by air, but dismissed the idea because he knew that passengers who arrived in planes from foreign countries during wartime were much more closely scrutinized than the far greater numbers who crossed frontiers in trains and he naturally wished to keep himself as inconspicuous as possible. Again he could have taken the quicker, direct route via Innsbruck and Vienna, but those cities now lay within Hitler's Greater Germany. The odds against his coming face to face during the short space of half a day's train journey with a Gestapo man who might recognize him were extremely long, but they were infinitely longer against his doing so on the stretch of railway which ran through Italy and Yugoslavia; and it was because he never took the smallest unnecessary risk that he had survived so many dangerous missions.

The same caution had decided his choice of an hotel. The Donau Palota was the most frequented by rich and influential Hungarians; so to stay at it would have given him his best chance of scraping acquaintance with the sort of people whose views on the future of Hungary he wished to find out. But it was there that in 1936 he had occupied a suite while having his affaire with the beautiful Sabine, and hotel servants have long memories. In consequence, on his arrival in Berne he had sent a telegram to the Vadaszkürt, hoping that with five days' notice they would have a room for him. In that he was lucky, as when he was booking in the clerk told him that, like those in most other capitals during wartime, the hotels in Budapest were now packed to capacity in season and out.

Having surrendered his passport for registration by the police he was shown up to a room on the third floor. Instead of opening into a passageway it was entered from a broad balcony that overlooked a huge oblong courtyard formed by the interior walls of the four sides of the hotel. Large trees were growing in the courtyard and beneath their leafy branches were several score of tables, as during the summer months it was used as the hotel's restaurant.

That night Gregory dined down there, and one glance at the menu showed him that Budapest was very far from being reduced to the scant choice of indifferent food which was all that could be offered by restaurants in London. Hungary, as he knew, had few industries, and from her vast farmlands had for centuries fed a great part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; but he had expected to find at least fairly strict rationing owing to the voracious demands of a Germany that had now been at war for nearly three years. This first evidence that the Hungarians were by no means altogether under the thumb of their mighty ally was encouraging. He cheerfully ordered trout with melted butter, roast goose and green peas; then lingered over a fresh peach and a bottle of Tokay while listening to one of those gypsy orchestras for which Hungary is famous.

Next morning he did not go at once to seek out Leon Levianski or any of Sir Pellinore's old friends. He wanted first to get the feel of the capital; so he set off on what, for him, was a long walk.

Budapest is only one eighth the size of London and its centre is proportionately smaller; so during a stroll of two hours or so a sightseer may pass along most of its principal streets. It is, however, divided into two sharply contrasting parts. Buda, which is the older of the twin cities, is almost entirely residential, and consists of tier upon tier of ancient buildings, churches and palaces rising steeply to crown a ridge of hills on the west bank of the Danube. Pest, much larger and the centre of all commercial activities, is entirely flat. From just east of the river, where the smart shopping district is situated, it stretches away divided by the magnificent two-mile long Andrassy Avenue, until its new factories and suburbs merge into the distant plain.

The Vadaszkürt and other principal hotels are all in Pest, and only a stone's throw from the Vorasmarty Ter, out of which runs Vaczi Utcza, the equivalent of Bond Street; so Gregory turned in that direction. When he reached the square he saw that the windows of Gerbaud's, the famous patisserie, were, as of old, filled with rich cream cakes, crystallized fruits and sweets; and, on entering the Utcza, found that most of the other shops showed equally little sign of depleted stocks.

Strolling southwards he reached the great Market and spent a quarter of an hour there. Its stalls held an abundance of meat, game, fish and groceries, and the people in it were mainly well clad. He found that less surprising when he suddenly recalled that Hungary had not become seriously involved in the war until Hitler had attacked Russia in the preceding summer; so, apart from a shortage of some manufactured goods, she would hardly have yet been reduced to such stringencies as clothes rationing.

There were quite a few soldiers about in drab wartime uniform, and a number of much smarter girls dressed as nurses and army drivers. In half an hour he had seen only two German officers, and confirmed his earlier impression that after those of Vienna, the girls of Budapest were the prettiest of any city he had ever visited.

On emerging from the Market he had his first view of the Danube. It was a broad, turgid, fast flowing stream, and far from blue; but it sparkled prettily in the August sunshine. To his right lay a broad mile long embankment which was termed the "Corso" for, in front of its many cafes, lay Budapest's most fashionable promenade. Turning along it he now had a fine view of Buda. Across the river it rose upon its hills, a miracle of beauty, its turrets and spires seeming to pierce the almost cloudless blue sky.

By Erzsebet Bridge he crossed the river. Slowly he made his way up past the Royal Palace, which was now the residence of the Regent, Admiral Horthy, and so into Buda's twisting cobbled streets where for a thousand years there had lived men and women who had played a part in Europe's history. Six years before, from a first floor window in one of the ancient houses there, he had witnessed the annual celebration which embodied Hungary's great traditions and it was a sight that he had never forgotten.

At some time in the Dark Ages the tomb of Stephen, the first King of Hungary who had accepted Christianity, had been opened, and it had been found that, although his body had fallen into dust, his right hand lay there unwithered. It had henceforth become the custom for this miraculous hand to be exposed to the veneration of the multitude by being carried through the streets of the city on the fifteenth of each September.

Gregory had seen many processions, but nothing to equal this in medieval pageantry. There had been the Palace Guards wearing silver pointed Saxon helmets, eighteen inches high, and carrying flashing halberds serrated like the prow of a Venetian gondola. The gold and crystal casket containing the sacred relic was surrounded by chanting priests. Behind it walked the Prince Archbishop, the Metropolitan of the Greek Church and the Papal Legate, resplendent in robes of purple, white and crimson, their trains held up by small boys in lace bordered surplices. Then had come the Corps Diplomatique, brave in its orders and gold embroidered uniforms. The black clad Deputies of the Hungarian Parliament had next struck an incongruous note, but after them had come the handsome

Regent Horthy in Admiral's uniform and, following him, the body of men who made the ceremony unique.

They were some three score of the Magnates of Hungary; all nobles who could trace their ancestry back to the times when their forebears had held Hungary as the bastion of Christian Europe against the Infidel. Their costumes were those worn in Napoleonic times, or earlier, and marvellously varied; gold tasselled Hessian boots, silver braided doublets of green, blue, black and cerise, half cloaks trimmed with sable, astrakhan, ermine or sea otter, flat busbies surmounted by plumes and aigrets, dolmans, sabretaches, and great jewel hilted scimitars all jostled together forming a sea of colour, so that the eye was quite incapable of taking in the details of so splendid a spectacle.

As Gregory thought of it again, he thought too of Sabine, who had stood beside him in the window that they had hired, holding his hand and telling him with low voiced but passionate enthusiasm, as the procession moved below them, of the past glories of her country.

From the small square dominated by the Coronation Church, in which reposed the Sacred Hand of St. Stephen, he walked through to the open space behind the church where a great equestrian statue of the Royal Saint looked out over the river and the city.

This lofty emplacement was called the Fisher bastion and from it there was a truly marvellous view. To either side the red roofed houses of Buda seemed to be tumbling away down the steep slope on which the ramparts stood as though at any moment they might fall into the Danube. Seen from here the river looked even broader, and much more tranquil, as it wound its way between the twin cities. To the north it divided into two arms which embraced the mile long Margareten Insel.

This lovely wooded island had been made into a private park by the Archduke Joseph; now it had on it Budapest's latest luxury hotel the Palatinosan enormous open air bathing pool, and several cafe restaurants which after dark become nightclubs offering glamorous floor shows. In the opposite direction the river disappeared behind the lofty Citadel on its way towards distant Belgrade and Rumania. Far below, the famous Suspension Bridge linked Buda's hill with central Pest, along the shore of which stood the Parliament House with its many graceful spires, the Donau Palota and numerous other fine modern buildings. Beyond them rose the three hundred feet high dome of the Leopold Church from a sea of office and apartment blocks stretching away into the blue distance.

As Gregory sat there for a while he recalled that it was on one of these slopes that St. Gellert had met his fate. He was the Bishop who had converted King Stephen to Christianity; but certain full-blooded types had not approved the change, so they had put Gellert in a barrel and sent him rolling down the hill. As the barrel had spikes in it the unfortunate missionary could have been little more than a lacerated corpse by the time it bounced into the Danube.

Not a very pleasant death, Gregory reflected; but, after all, perhaps not so bad, as it must have been quite quick, and easily a hundred times less prolonged and painful than that which he might himself expect should he ever have the ill luck to fall alive into the hands of Herr Gruppenführer Grauber.

Descending through the steep narrow streets, he recrossed the river, walked along to the Corso and, sitting down at a table outside one of the cafés ordered himself a baratsch. This golden liquor is distilled from apricots and is the Hungarian national drink. It is made in every farmhouse in the country, and varies with quality and age from a fiery breathtaking spirit to a smooth and delectable liqueur. As it is unsweetened it is equally suitable for an aperitif or a digestive, and is drunk by all classes at all hours. While renewing his acquaintance with this invigorating tipple, Gregory considered the results of his morning's ramble.

Except perhaps for coffee, and other such items which came from distant lands, Hungarian larders were clearly not yet subject to the stress of war and, although prices had evidently risen considerably, there seemed no reason to suppose that for meat, bread, butter and other basic foods they were beyond the means of the workers.

Petrol was evidently short, as there were many fewer cars on the streets than he had seen there in peace time. On the other hand, there were many more horse drawn vehicles, including quite a number of private carriages which must have been dug out by rich people from old coach houses. Hungary had been slower to adopt the motor than most nations as her roads were bad and horses cheap and plentiful. Horse breeding was one of her national industries and the great herds reared on the plain of the Hortobagy made it certain that however long the war lasted the supply would never fail; so the Hungarians had no need to worry about local transport. In the matter of fuel, too, they could have no great anxieties, as most of the houses and offices were still heated in winter by old-fashioned wood burning stoves which could be kept going from their own forests.

By the time Gregory finished his drink he had reached the conclusion that the chances of his mission being successful were far from good. Had he found a state of shortages and aggravating restrictions approaching those in Britain and Germany, there would have been reason to assume that a good part of the Hungarian people were war weary and, not being so deeply committed as those of the two great powers to fight on to the end, might give ready backing to a movement for a separate peace. But that was not the case. So far, too, Budapest had not suffered a single air raid'; so, apart from the comparatively few walking wounded to be seen in the streets, there had been little really to bring the war home to the people of the capital. In short, the horrors and privations of Hitler's war were still unknown to it, and in its continued plenty and gaiety, its state was very similar to that which had prevailed in London for the greater part of the First World War.

Having lunched off a gulyds of venison, washed down with a carafe of the rich Hungarian red wine known as Bullsblood of Badascony, he took an aged open carriage along to the nearest end of Kertesz Utcza, where he paid it off, then strolled along to No. 158.

It proved to be a double fronted shop in a rather dreary block, and the furs in the windows looked distinctly shoddy. Pushing open the door Gregory walked in. The shop ran back some way and was a much larger place than might have been supposed from the street; but it was three parts empty. Less than a quarter of the rows of hangers held coats, there were a few bundles of skins thrown carelessly on the floor, and the only person in it was a stout redheaded Jewess who was checking over raw pelts behind a long narrow counter.

Going up to the counter Gregory told her in French that he wished to buy a fur that could be made up as a collar for his winter travelling coat.

She replied first in Magyar, then in bad German, that she did not understand French.

Ignoring the fact that she did understand German, he repeated his statement in deliberately poor English.

As he had hoped, she again shook her head but, making a sign that he should wait, went to the back of the shop and through a glass door. A moment later she emerged again with a man of about forty. He was short, had a round face, curly black hair and a bluish chin, but he did not look particularly like a Jew.

Gregory was wondering if this was Mr. Leon Levianski. However, he had no intention of asking, as the approach had to be made with, the greatest circumspection. It was a possibility that one of Levianski's more recent letters to his cousin in New York had fallen into wrong hands. If so, it was quite on the cards that he would have been arrested for conveying useful information to the enemy. Any stranger enquiring for him thereafter would at once be suspect; and the last thing Gregory wanted was to have a description of himself in such a connexion turned in to the police.

The dark man came forward and said in passably good English: 'If you please, sir, I have no French. Speak with me please in English and tell me what you wish.'

In broken English Gregory once more enquired for fur which would make a warm collar to a travelling coat.

The furrier shrugged his broad shoulders and spread wide his hands, T regret. I have little to offer, sir. This time last year, yes. I could have given you choice of a dozen Sea Otter. Smartest and best wearing fur for gentleman's coat. But now, some odd pieces of Persian Lamb which we could make up; otherwise nothing.'

'Why have you become so short of stock?' Gregory enquired.

'Russia,' came the prompt reply. 'Our Hungarian troops, they go properly clothed for the war we fight. But the Germans, no. Hitler is everyone say a very clever man. Perhaps, but his judgment is not good when he expects to conquer Russia in one summer campaign. Winter comes and many thousand Germans they shiver, get frostbite, die. Their Fraus and Fräuleins make sacrifice of vanity and send them fur coats. But it is not enough. Our Government orders that we hold nothing back from the German Mission that comes to purchase.' After an almost imperceptible pause he added, 'And as they are our Allies it is right that we should give best help. But it has left us deplete, very deplete.'

'I quite understand,' Gregory replied, 'It was a Sea Otter that I wanted though; so I think I had better try elsewhere. Still, I'm sorry, as furs are tricky things; and I was assured by a Mr. Levianski of New York that your firm was a reliable one.'

'You know my cousin, then!' exclaimed the furrier. 'But this is different. For you I will enquire of my friends in the trade, and somehow a Sea Otter find for you.'

'Would you, perhaps, be Mr. Leon Levianski?' Gregory now felt it safe to ask.

'Why, yes. And that you should know my cousin is of much interest. Has it been long, please, since you see him in New York?'

Gregory held the dark eyes only a few feet from his own with a steady glance, and said in a low voice. 'I have never met your cousin; but I know about the letters that you write to him.'

Levianski's face blanched slightly, then he essayed a not very convincing laugh. 'My letters! I am surprise that he should think it worth while to show to anyone. They are gossips only of things here which I think might interest him.'

'Your gossip has been found interesting by good friends of his who wish well to Hungary,' Gregory swiftly sought to reassure him. 'And I would greatly like to talk to you about this. Could you meet me for a drink somewhere this evening?'

'Yes, I could do that,' Levianski agreed after a moment's hesitation. 'Where have you to suggest?'

Gregory smiled. 'It is always safer to discuss this sort of business in a crowd. Would six o'clock at the Cafe Mignon on the Corso suit you?'

'Thank you. Yes, please. I am happy to make acquaintance.' Returning his smile, the furrier bowed him out of the door.

As it was a heavenly afternoon, Gregory decided to have a bathe. The Hungarians have a passion for bathing and, it is said, there are no less than one hundred and sixty public baths in Budapest to choose from. But he had no hesitation in having himself driven in another old fiacre across the bridge to the Margareten lnsel.

The oblong pool there was as large as a small lake. Its sides for twenty feet out, sloped very gradually so that hundreds of children could splash about along them without danger; yet there was still ample room in the middle of the pool and at its deep end for an equal number of good swimmers to enjoy themselves without undue crowding.

Gregory dived and swam for about half an hour, then came out and lay sunning himself on the sand which had been brought from the shores of Lake Balaton as a surround for the pool. It was delightful there in the warm windless air, with the faint hum of conversation and occasional laughter coming from the groups nearby. The fact that millions of men, from the arctic to the deserts of Egypt and the remotest islands of the Pacific, were at that moment desperately endeavouring to kill each other, when they might be enjoying something similar to this, struck him as both tragic and crazy.

Yet his bliss was not entirely unalloyed, for he was subconsciously a little lonely. He would have given a lot to have had Erika there or Sabine. A mental picture of the latter, as she had once sat beside him not many yards from where he was lying now, flashed into his mind. Only the more intimate parts of her slender golden brown body had been encased in a white satin swimsuit, and she had been sitting with her hands clasped round her bent knees, from time to time shaking the dark hair which fell to her shoulders, because its ends had got a little wet under the bathing cap she had just taken off.

As he thought idly of the fun they had had together he wondered where she was now, and if he would run into her. Then, with a little shock, he realized that such a meeting could prove highly dangerous. She knew him to be an Englishman, and her country was at war with Britain. She knew, too, that he had acted as Sir Pellinore's secret agent in getting to the bottom of at least one conspiracy to sabotage British interests; so she would immediately jump to the conclusion that he had come to Budapest as a spy. Women who have parted with their lovers as good friends are, he knew, more prone to be ruled by pleasant memories than patriotic considerations; so he thought the odds were that she would not turn him over to the police, but one could never tell. There was, too, the nasty possibility that should they suddenly come face to face in the presence of other people she might, from astonishment at seeing him, give him away inadvertently.

Much as he would have liked to spend a few hours with her again and hear from her what she had made of her life, he decided that he must keep a sharp lookout for her and, should he see her, beat a quick retreat before she had a chance to recognize him.

While in the pool he had seen that there were many more women than men bathing and among them quite a number of pretty girls, some of whom had looked at him more than once with the sort of glance which invites conversation. But he had no intention of becoming involved in anything of that kind, even temporarily. It was just such dalliance with young women about whom one knew nothing which could have the most unexpected repercussions and, at times, lead men employed on his sort of work to an extremely sticky end.

In due course he dressed, drank a baratsch at the pool bar, then had himself driven to the Corso. Sitting down at one of the tables in front of the Cafe Mignon, he ordered himself a stein of dark lager, and soon afterwards saw Levianski coming towards him.

With a wave of his hand and a smile he called out as if to an old acquaintance, 'Wei geht es Ihnen Was wollen Sie irinken?'

The broad shouldered little Jew returned his greeting, said that he too would like a dark lager, then, sitting down, added in a lower voice, 'So you do speak German?'

Gregory answered in an equally low tone, 'My pretending not to was only a ruse aimed at getting your assistant to fetch, someone who spoke French or English. I hoped it might be you; and I was lucky. But we will speak German together from now on, so as not to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves.'

Nodding agreement, Levianski said, 'Now tell me, please, how you came to see my letters, and what you want with me.'

That he could not be expected to talk freely, unless he was trusted to some extent, was obvious. But Gregory did not mean to reveal his true identity. With disarming candour he replied:

'My name is Etienne Tavenier, and I am a retired Major of the French Army. For some time I have been living in Switzerland. I am not a de Gaullist but my sympathies are with the Allies. Naturally they have an information centre there. I have an English friend who works in it, and he asked me if I would make this visit to Budapest. I agreed, but I do not come as a spy, to pry into military matters. I assure you of that. Although I have been a soldier I am at heart a man of peace; and my one wish is to help in any way I can to stop this terrible war before it destroys all Europe.'

Having paused to light a cigarette, he went on, 'Evidently the letters you wrote to your cousin were passed on by him, as I feel sure you must have intended them to be. Anyhow, copies of them were sent to the Middle Europe Section of the Allies' information centre in Switzerland. That is how your name came to be given to me as a man I could trust, and one who might be able to help me with the answers to certain questions that I have come here to investigate.'

Levianski's dark eyes were quite expressionless as he asked, 'What are those questions?'

'They can really all be embodied in one. What is the attitude of the Hungarian people towards the war?'

'That is not simple to answer. The fact that I am a Jew does not make me any the less a Hungarian; but my attitude is very different from that of the average Catholic priest, big landowner or peasant.'

'Naturally. But what I mean is, do you believe that the bulk of the people are convinced of the Tightness of the cause for which they are fighting?'

'I can only repeat that the views of the main elements which make up our population vary greatly. You see, Hungary is quite different from most other nations. Her classes are not integrated in the same way. By that I do not mean that we are torn by class warfare. In fact, in peace time, we suffer very little from labour troubles, and in all classes there is a high degree of patriotism. But, where international relations are concerned, there is no unity of opinion to bind us together; as, for example, the mutual hatred of the French and the Germans which is common to all classes in both countries.'

'Please go on, and tell me about these conflicting interests.'

'Well, to start with, Hungary has not yet really emerged from feudalism. The greater part of the land is still divided into vast estates which are owned by a hundred or so families. They lost them after the First World War, but the Bolshevik revolution led here by Beia Khun lasted only six months. That was not long enough to destroy the attitude of mind of the peasants, which had been engrained into them through many centuries. When the magnates returned from temporary exile their peasants received them joyfully, restored their lands and went back to work for them.

'By the Treaty of Trianon the size of Hungary was reduced by half. In that way many of these great magnates lost some of their estates; but most of them retained enough land and wealth for their way of life to remain almost unaltered. In their great country houses they keep staffs of up to fifty servants, and as many more outside to run their stables and their shooting parties. Up there, opposite to us, on the hill of Buda the great stone buildings that you can see are their town palaces. All of them hold priceless art treasures and fine libraries, for the Hungarian aristocracy is a highly cultured one; but it has the faults as well as the virtues of all feudal aristocracies.

'The Magyar nobility is brave, open handed and casually kind to those who are dependent upon it, but it is also proud, cynical and immoral. They despised the Austrian aristocracy because in most cases Austrian family trees do not go back, by several hundred years, as far as theirs. They regard Hitler and his Nazi Gauleiters as the scum of the gutters. Yet, for their own ends, they received the Austrians as equals and treat these jumped-up Germans with most considerate politeness. As for their morals, those of cats are better. The tittle-tattle of their servants on that aspect of their lives is so consistent that it cannot be doubted. Within their own small circle husbands, wives and even unmarried girls take and exchange paramours with a freedom which would be considered utterly shameful did they occupy a less exalted station.

'You will appreciate, therefore, that they are concerned only to maintain their privileged position. But naturally they also have a heavy bias towards any policy which, while protecting their present sources of wealth, might lead to their getting back the estates which they lost in 1920 by the creation of Poland, Czechoslovakia and a greatly enlarged Rumania.'

Levianski took a long pull at his lager, then went on. 'You will now expect me to speak of the middle classes. Well, there are none. At least not as there are in other countries. The noble Magyars would not soil their hands with commerce, or allow even their remotest relatives to do so. That is, until 1920, After the revolution some of the younger ones who had become impoverished through it became motor salesmen, travel agents and so on; also the general spread of education qualified a few thousand of the younger peasants to move into the towns and replace the Austrians who had previously acted as our petty officials, but neither group is sufficiently numerous to form a class. It was the void between lord and peasant which attracted my people to Hungary. That was many centuries ago, of course, but the Jews gradually established themselves here and by their industry made themselves indispensable.

'Today in Pest there are three hundred thousand of us nearly a third of the population of the capital. Many of our families have grown rich on the proceeds of doing the things that the aristocracy was too proud or too lazy to do; but we have served Hungary well. We are the doctors, the lawyers, the industrialists, the importers of the things that Hungary must have and the exporters of the things she has to sell. Without us the country would fall into a state of chaos overnight. The Magyar lords have always recognized that; therefore they have not only given us their protection through the centuries, but treated us generously. Whether they would be strong enough to continue to do so with Europe at peace and Hitler its overlord is a very different question.

'We watch with awful fear what is happening in the lands where Hitler has only to give an order for it to be obeyed. Himmler is, if possible, even more demented in his racial theories than his master. From the Germanic part of Poland he deported a million Jews, and to fill the void he has been dragging from all parts of Europe people, many of whom cannot even speak German, just because they are of German blood. For them it means loss of homes, properties, friends and occupation; but these Nazis are too fanatical to care even for the welfare of their own race.

'For my people, of course, matters are infinitely worse. They are despoiled of everything except the clothes in which they stand up. Last winter thousands of the women, children and old folk who were despatched to East Prussia, packed into cattle trucks, did not survive the journey. They were frozen stiff hours before they reached their destination.

'In Austria things are no better. Within a week of the Anschluss, at the order of Heydrich, Karl Adolf Eichmann set up in Vienna his "Office for Jewish Emigration". A very few, like Mr. Louis de Rothschild who ransomed himself by signing away his steel rolling mills, were allowed to emigrate; 180,000 others were not so fortunate. Most of them are dead; the rest tortured skeletons in huge concentration camps, like Dachau and Mauthausen.

'Eichmann's "Office" already has a branch in Budapest. It has been spending enormous sums in stirring up anti Jewish feeling here. As the Government would find it almost impossible to carry on its war industries without us, we are still protected. But if Hitler and Himmler were freed from their war commitments…'

'You would not have a hope,' Gregory cut in. 'They would send in their Germans to take over your businesses; and it could only be a matter of time before you suffered the same terrible fate as the Jews in Germany, Poland and Austria. Now, what about the peasants?'

'The Germans and the Russians are both hereditary enemies of the Hungarian people,' Levianski replied, 'but they dislike the Germans more because for so long they were bullied by the German speaking Austrian petty officials and tax gatherers. In their case, though, there is a more important factor than race prejudice; it is religion. Roman Catholicism still has a firm hold on Hungarians both rich and poor. The country people are devout and their village priests are looked up to by them. They are told from the pulpits that Stalin is anti Christ and that they must think of the war against the godless hordes of Russia as a crusade. Therefore, much as they dislike the Germans, they are fighting beside them, for the most part, willingly.'

'To sum up, then,' said Gregory, 'the nobility will continue to support Germany because they fear that a Russian victory would lead to their losing everything, and the peasants will fight on in defence of their religious beliefs; but your people would rather see the Russians win, as the lesser evil.'

Levianski pulled a face. 'It would be only a lesser evil. Things were bad enough during the Bela Khun revolution. The Sovietization of Hungary would mean the loss of our businesses and private fortunes. But at least our lives would be spared; and that is more than we could hope for under a Nazi controlled government.'

'I think you are right that the Russians would plunder Jewish and Christian capitalists alike, if Hungary fought on to the end and Germany is defeated. But it would be a very different state of affairs if she decided to make a separate peace now. I feel sure that, pressed as they are at the moment, the Russians would be only too glad to guarantee Hungary's independence, and that the other allies would underwrite that guarantee.'

'Ah, yes,' Levianski sighed. 'If only that could be brought about how happy we should all be. But I see no prospect of it. Besides, if Hungary deserted her allies, it is quite on the cards that the Nazis would march in, and we would then be at the mercy of their Gestapo murder squads.'

'I don't think that would happen. Hitler has his hands full in Russia. He couldn't spare the divisions to open up another front; and that is what he would have to do if he were opposed by the Hungarian army.'

'Perhaps you are right.'

'I'm sure I am; and think what such a move could lead to. If Hungary made a separate peace and withdrew her troops from the Russian front, that might be the beginning of the end. Hitler is in a relatively strong position now, but he must know that he will have to face up to America next year. He might very well decide that he could get a better peace by opening negotiations in 1942 than if he continues the struggle in '43 or '44. As I have told you, my one desire is to see peace restored before Europe becomes a shambles. But I am convinced that neither Britain nor Germany will make a first move; so the only hope is that one of the smaller countries will do so and set the ball rolling. It was for that I came to Hungary; to find out if there was any chance of her Government entering into a secret understanding should it be approached by the British.'

'I am in no position to say,' Levianski spread out his hands, 'but I should think it most unlikely.'

'For the Jews of Hungary it could mean not only life, but future security and prosperity,' said Gregory earnestly. 'The fact that they control Hungary's industry and commerce must give them considerable power. Surely there are ways in which they could exert their influence on the government to consider a separate peace?'

Levianski shook his head. 'You do not understand. The Jews have been well treated here because for hundreds of years they have performed many useful services. But never, never, have they sought to interfere in politics. To have done so would have been to invite an end to the tolerance with which they are regarded. It is true that we have come to think of ourselves as Hungarians, and that financially we run the country. But the fact remains that the Hungarians still look on us only as guests here. And the guest in a man's house does not presume to tell him how to run it.'

They talked on for another half-hour; but it was already clear to Gregory that the Jews of Pest were unlikely to contribute anything worth while towards the downfall of Hitler. Despite their numbers and immense financial resources, the fatalism which was tied like a millstone round the neck of their race weighed them down so heavily that they were incapable of standing up in defence of their rights as human beings; or even of using such power as they had in an organized attempt to protect themselves from future massacre. The best that could be hoped from them was that in devious ways they would hamper the Hungarian war effort and, should a movement for an independent peace arise, give it their backing.

Nevertheless, Leon Levianski showed himself personally to be a courageous man; for he said to Gregory before they parted: 'These endeavours of yours to find a way to bring about peace are most praiseworthy; the more so as making them may easily bring you. into danger. I am sure you would not willingly involve me in trouble with the police. But, if, they get after you and you can evade them for a few hours, come to my apartment over the shop. I could hide you there for a time, until you could make a plan for getting safely out of the country.'

Gregory thanked him for his generous offer. They then shook hands firmly and went their separate ways through the August dusk. As Gregory walked back to the Vadaszkürt he decided rather glumly that there now seemed little hope of his being able to take a favourable report back to London. His talk with Levianski had reinforced his own opinion formed that morning, that the Hungarian people were as yet by no means war weary, and also revealed the fact that even if they had been it would not have made much difference, as the issue of Hungary's continuing in the war lay entirely with the aristocracy. Naturally, he intended to see and sound Sir Pellinore's friends, but since the governing class were not subject to pressure from the masses it seemed unlikely that they would be willing to abandon the pro Nazi policy which they had evidently decided offered the best prospect of preserving their wealth and estates. And during the past fortnight the Russian situation, worry over which had been the origin of his mission, had been going from bad to worse.

He could only console himself a little with the thought that, anyhow, a fortnight's holiday in Budapest with good food and good cheer to be had for the asking would be a most pleasant change after the dreariness of London. As he entered the hall of the hotel, he was thinking that for dinner he would order that famous Hungarian dish, chicken stewed with rice and red peppers. He was not expecting any letters so would have walked straight through had not one of the porters called to him from behind the desk, 'Excuse me, sir!'

When he crossed to the desk the man handed him back his passport and with it a cheap looking envelope addressed to M. le Commandant Tavenier. Tearing the envelope open, he gave a swift glance at the single sheet of paper that it contained. It was a typed note from the French Consul General to the effect that information having been received from the police of M. le Commandant Tavenier's arrival in Budapest, it was requested that within twenty-four hours he would attend at 17. Fo-utca in order that his stay in the Hungarian capital might be regularized.

This was something for which Gregory had not bargained. No doubt it was only a routine matter; but all the same he had an uneasy feeling that having to make his number with the Vichy authorities might, sooner or later, land him in just the sort of tricky situation he was very anxious to avoid.

A Sinister Figure

Chapter 6

On the following morning Gregory took a cab across the river to 17. Fo-utca and handed the porter at the door the summons he had received. The porter was a Hungarian and after a glance at the letter announced its bearer in bad French over a house telephone to some invisible person. He then showed Gregory into a small sunless room. It was furnished with the sparse economy typical of French officialdom, and occupied only by a dark-haired middle-aged woman. With a cigarette dangling from her lower lip she was thumbing through some dog-eared papers on the narrow desk before her. As he came into the room she gestured towards a wooden bench against one wall, then took no further notice of him.

After sitting there for ten minutes his patience began to wear thin, and he was just about to demand that she did something about him, when a door behind her opened and over her head a tall man gave him a swift scrutiny.

Returning the glance, Gregory was far from favourably impressed by the man's appearance. He was wearing a dark blue suit with a stiff white collar, out of which arose a scrawny neck, surmounted by a hollow cheeked face, a long narrow nose, eyes with liverish pouches beneath them and an almost bald head, that together gave him some resemblance to a vulture. With a slight inclination of his bony skull, this sinister looking individual said:

'Monsieur le Commandant, my name is Cochefert. I regret to have had to trouble you to come here, but there are just a few formalities… Please to come in.'

Gregory followed him into a somewhat larger but equally bleak room. Monsieur Cochefert gave him a hard chair and sat down in another behind a bare table piled high with bundles of documents. Drawing a printed form towards him and picking up an old fashioned steel nibbed pen, he asked:

'May I have the object of your visit to Budapest?'

Had Gregory been less experienced in such matters he would have been tempted to reply, 'We are not on French soil, so you have no authority here. My business has nothing to do with you, and you can go to the devil.' But he was much too old a hand needlessly to antagonize any official; so, with pleasant memories of the charming and helpful Diana, he said quite amiably:

'I own a truffle farm in Perigord and I have come here to investigate the possibility of supplying Hungarian" foie-gras makers with truffles after the war.'

'Indeed!' Cochefert raised eyebrows having so few hairs in them that they were only just perceptible. 'That sounds a idea. The pate made here is excellent, but could be much improved by the introduction of truffles.' As he made a note on the form, Gregory saw that it already had on it Tavenier's home address and other particulars; so the Hungarian police must have given the French Consulate a sight of his passport. To give substance to his cover story, he said:

'As a matter of fact, even if I had not had the note asking me to call here I should have done so to ask if I could be supplied with a list of the names and addresses of the principal foie-gras manufacturers.'

'Strictly speaking, that is a matter for our Commercial Attaché at the Embassy, the Frenchman replied, 'but I will telephone him and ask for a list to be sent to you.'

Gregory made a little bow. 'Monsieur is most kind.'

'It is a pleasure. May I ask how long you intend to stay in Budapest?'

'For about a fortnight.'

'Good. I see that you obtained your visa for Hungary in Switzerland; so I take it you broke your journey there?'

T have been living there for the past three months. Fortunately I am fairly well off and investments that I have there enable me to do so in reasonable comfort. I find it much more congenial than France, now that our poor country has fallen into such a sad state.'

'That is very understandable. I, too, am glad to escape the annoyances and privations suffered by everyone in France these days, and I hope to retain my post here until the end of the war. Talking of the war Monsieur le Commandant, at your age you must have been with your regiment in 1939. I would be interested to hear how you fared?'

'My battalion formed part of General Blanchard's Army of the North,' replied Gregory promptly. 'As you will know, it was trapped with the British in Belgium and the greater part of it was killed or captured. But several thousand troops of General de la Laurencie's IIIrd Corps were taken off from Dunkirk, and I was lucky enough to be among them.'

T see, and you opted to return to France?'

Gregory shook his head. 'No; I was one of those who favoured fighting on. Later, like many others, I realized the futility of doing so. Most of them are still stuck in England, but I had the good fortune to get away. I was posted as an Interpreter to one of the Commando units that took part in the St. Nazaire raid last March. Soon after I got ashore I took advantage of the smoke and confusion to slip away and look for a good hiding place. I went to earth in a grain warehouse on the docks and I had brought sufficient iron rations in my haversack to last me several days. When the excitement had died down I took a chance with a dock foreman. He brought me a suit of civilian clothes and I had enough francs for my railway fare; so four days after the raid I was back at Razac the village in Perigord where I own the chateau.'

Cochefert nodded his vulture like head, and sighed. 'Ah, Monsieur le Commandant, this war is not like other wars. It has set brother against brother; and often left gallant officers such as yourself no alternative but to adopt such means as you describe to save their honour and the honour of France.'

'Yes; the honour of France,' Gregory repeated piously.

It was the sanctimonious phrase which sprang to the lips of many Frenchmen in those days; in most cases to disguise from themselves the fact that they had been led by their military idol, old Marshal Petain, into deserting their ally and entering into a pact with Hitler.

On this they both stood up, remained silent for a moment as though paying tribute to the memory of some highly respected friend who had recently died, then shook hands. It seemed then that Monsieur Cochefert had no further questions to ask for, after exchanging punctilious salutations with his visitor, he showed him out to the front door.

Back in the sunlit street, Gregory felt that he had dealt with a possibly dangerous business very successfully. The line that he had at first thrown in his lot with the Free French but later 'seen the light' was, he thought, a nice artistic touch; and the foie-gras story could not have gone down better. Cochefert might lack most of those physical attributes which would have made him the answer to a maiden's prayer, but he had fulfilled his tiresome function in a friendly spirit and appeared to be entirely satisfied.

The next item on Gregory's agenda was to get in touch with Sir Pellinore's old friends. Just in case he ran into any trouble, he thought it wiser not to do so from his own hotel; so he walked along to the Bristol. Going up to the hall porter’s desk he asked the man to get him Count Istvan Lujza's telephone number.

The porter looked at him in surprise and said the ex Minister, sir, he has been dead for two years or more.'

Murmuring that he had not been in Budapest since before the war, Gregory asked him to try Count Mihaly Zapolya. This time the porter held a short telephone conversation in Hungarian, then reported:

'I have spoken with the doorman at the palace in the Illona Utcza, and he says that as usual in the summer months His Excellency the Count is living on his estate at Nagykata.'

Hoping that he would prove luckier with the third string to his bow, Gregory asked for Prince Gyorgy Hunyadi. The porter gave a dubious shake of his head and replied:

'I feel almost certain that His Highness is still abroad, sir; but I will ring up the Foreign Office.' Another telephone conversation followed, and it emerged that the Prince was in Buenos Aires as Hungarian Ambassador to the Argentine.

That left only Count Zapolya as a possible contact; so Gregory enquired where Nagykata was. He learned to his relief that it was only about thirty miles from Budapest; but the station which served it was no more than a village halt, and there were only two trains that stopped there each day. As it was not yet half past ten, by hiring a two horse carriage and promising its driver a liberal tip, he just managed to catch the morning one, which got him there by half past eleven.

When he jumped down from the train he could see no sign of a village or a large country house, and there was no conveyance of any kind available. But he had taken the precaution of writing the Count's name in block letters on an envelope and, on showing this to the solitary porter, the man grinned and pointed up the road towards a slight eminence, crowned by trees, that stood out from the flat plain.

After a half mile walk he found that beyond the trees lay the village, and that it was a replica of a dozen others that he had seen from the train. To one side of a broad uneven open space stood a small onion spired church; the rest of the buildings varied little except in size. They were thatched and squat, the eaves of their roofs coming very low down; nearly all of them were whitewashed and had semicircular arches leading to inner yards. There were no motor vehicles in the street, but a number of huge haywains each drawn by a team of four slow moving white oxen, and flocks of cackling geese straggled in all directions. Not one of the villagers was in any kind of uniform; there were no notices with arrows pointing to air raid shelters or Red Cross huts and, in fact, it made the war seem so immeasurably remote that the bombings, the sinkings and the barrages that were killing thousands every day might have been taking place on another planet.

At the village inn he found a man who could speak German and, while he drank his first baratsch of the day, a horse was harnessed for him in leisurely fashion to an ancient carriage. There followed a two-mile drive between the endless fields of rich black earth, which had no boundary banks or hedges and were broken only by an occasional low farmhouse with a few barns clustering about it. More trees at length indicated an entrance to a private park. In it, grassy meadows with fine herds of cattle grazing in them sloped down to a long lake, partly covered by bulrushes and with a few swans gracefully sailing about its open spaces.

The house was hideous. Except for one much older wing, the main building was a product of Victorian times and even the green painted wooden colonial style shutters that flanked its many windows could not redeem it architecturally. Yet in eighty years its lemon yellow brick had mellowed sufficiently to give it a not unfriendly appearance, and fine magnolia trees, the flowers of which gave out a heavenly scent, broke up the flatness of its barrack like walls.

When the carriage pulled up in front of the porch, Gregory got out, signed to the coachman to wait for him, then took an envelope from his pocket. It contained a note that he had thought out during his journey and written in the village inn while the carriage was being got ready for him. It was in French, addressed to Count Zapolya, and read:

/ have recently arrived in Hungary, and Sir Pellinore Gwaine-Cust particularly asked me while here to seek an opportunity of conveying his kindest remembrances to Your Excellency. Owing to the unhappy events which have disturbed so many social relationships in Europe during the past three years, it is possible that Your Excellency may prefer not to receive me; but I trust this will not be the case, as I have proposals to make which might prove to Hungary's advantage.

He had written it in French only because that was the lingua franca of Sir Pellinore's generation; he had all but said that he was in Hungary on a secret mission as the agent of enemy power, and he had signed the note with his own name. His reason for this unusual rashness was his instinct that, should he introduce himself to the Count as a Frenchman, then later have to admit that he was an Englishman, it might so offend the susceptibilities of an old school Central European nobleman at not having been trusted in the first place that he would refuse to play any further part in the matter.

A servant in livery had hurried out of the house as the carriage drove up. He ushered Gregory into a hall panelled in pine and hung with ibex antlers and other trophies of the chase, bowed him to one of half a dozen big ebony elbow chairs, then put the note on a silver salver and hurried away with it.

Five minutes later he returned to lead Gregory through an even larger hall in which there were some fine suits of armour and several very beautiful Ming vases on tall carved stands, then down a long dim corridor to a pleasant sunny room at the southwest corner of the house. As Gregory was shown in an elderly man stood up, moved out from behind a desk, bowed slightly and said:

'Zapolya.'

Returning the Continental greeting by saying his own name, Gregory took swift stock of Sir Pellinore's old friend. The Count's hair was still thick and dark, except for white feathers just above his ears, but his lined face gave the impression that he must be seventy or more. He still held himself very upright and, from his prominent nose, chin and dark velvety eyes, it was apparent that as a young man he must have been very good-looking. Another legacy of his youth that he retained was the fashion of wearing short side-whiskers and an upturned waxed moustache. He smelt faintly of eau de Cologne and fine Havana cigars, and was wearing country tweeds that had the cut of Savile Row. Having offered Gregory a chair, he sat back in his own and said in French:

'It is now quite a few years since I have seen Sir Pellinore, but I am always delighted to have news of him. I trust that he is well, and that even the war has not robbed him of his remarkable capacity for enjoying life?'

'When I left London ten days ago he was in excellent health and spirits,' Gregory smiled. 'And over our last dinner together he told me with tremendous zest of some of the marvellous times he had with you here in Hungary.'

'Ah, we were both younger then,' the Count smiled back, 'but such memories keep the heart young even in old age. So you have come from London, eh? May I ask your nationality?'

'I am an Englishman; but I came here from Switzerland on a French passport.'

'You are, then, a member of the British Secret Service?'

'No. If I were caught I should expect to be treated as a spy, and shot. But I give you my word that I have not come here to ferret out Hungary's military secrets. I am the personal emissary of Sir Pellinore, and my object is to find out if there is any chance of detaching Hungary from her alliance with Nazi Germany.'

Gregory expected the Count to shrug and shake his head; but instead, changing to English which he spoke as fluently as he did French, he said, 'This is most interesting. Nothing would please myself and most people of my class than to break with that horrible man Hitler, if it could be done with reliable safeguards for Hungary's future. Please tell me your proposals.'

For a moment Gregory remained silent. It would not do to show his surprise, or the sudden excitement which rose in him at the thought that, after all, he might succeed in sticking a knife in Hitler's back and reducing the pressure on the Russian front by a dozen divisions. Leaning a little forward he said earnestly:

'Your Excellency will appreciate that I am not authorised to enter into negotiations. I am here only on behalf of Sir Pellinore to explore possibilities. But, as you may know, Sir Pellinore is very close to His Majesty's Government; so you may take it that his ideas, as brought to you by me, would certainly receive very serious consideration and, probably, official endorsement. His suggestion is that Hungary should enter into a separate peace with the Allies and withdraw her Army from Russia. In return Russia, Britain and the United States would jointly guarantee Hungary's frontiers after the collapse of Hitler and thus she would save herself from occupation and imposition of a heavy war indemnity.'

'You speak with great confidence of the collapse of Hitler; but in all three years the war has lasted, he has never been in a stronger position, and the territory he controls is still increasing every day.'

'His new gains might well be compared to a swollen stomach,' Gregory smiled. 'It is my belief that the chunks of Russia that he is swallowing will give him a frightful bellyache before he is through.'

'Perhaps; but if he succeeds in biting the heart out of Russia it is she who must collapse.'

'That would not save him. He would have to leave half his army to occupy the vast areas of enemy territory, and he would still have Britain and America building up to leap upon his back. The Allied Air Forces are already pounding hell out of the German cities; and airpower is the dominant factor in modern war. As the months go by we shall be putting two, three, five, seven, ten aircraft into the air for every one of his. When the time is ripe the Allied armies will land in Europe and, with German industry in ruins, the Nazis will no longer be able to maintain their army in the field. That is why Hitler must ultimately be beaten.'

Zapolya nodded thoughtfully. 'Personally, I believe that with regard to the final outcome you are right; but Hitler is a very long way from being beaten yet. Germany might exact an extremely heavy penalty from Hungary should she attempt to insure her future with the Allies in the way you suggest.'

'That is a risk which must be run if Hungary is to sit among the victor nations at the Peace Table. She would find no seat there if she waited to act until Germany was on her last legs. Now is the time when Hungary's help would be of real value to the Allied cause, and so worth their agreeing to pay for in solemn undertakings which would ensure her future wellbeing.'

'You implied only that she would not be treated as a defeated enemy. That is not enough. You may recall what happened in the First World War, when Rumania decided to throw in her lot with the Allies. General Von Mackensen and his Germans overran her in a few weeks. The same thing might happen here.'

Gregory countered that suggestion with the arguments he had used to Levianski, but the Count waved a slender hand in a gesture of rebuttal. It is true that the Germans are heavily engaged in Russia, but they still have several armoured divisions in the West. I can hardly imagine that sufficient trained American troops have yet arrived in Britain for the Allies to be contemplating an assault on the Continent; so those armoured divisions could be used to subdue Hungary. Our people are brave and most of them hate the Germans, but nearly the whole of our army has been sent to the Russian front. It could not get back in time to defend our cities, and their garrisons of reservists would be practically helpless in the face of several hundred German tanks.'

After a moment's thought, Gregory said, 'Even if the Allies are not yet ready to attempt the liberation of the Continent, I think they are quite capable of making a landing in force strong enough to pin down the German armour in the West., Again, I speak only as a private individual; but Mr. Churchill has always used large maps. I think it quite possible that he would press the Americans to agree to such an Allied landing, if Hungary definitely undertook to break with Hitler, as Italy might then follow suit, and that would bring a complete Allied victory within measurable distance.'

'It would.' Zapolya drew slowly on his fine Havana. 'And if such a landing succeeded Hungary would have little to fear. But what if it failed? What if the Germans drove the Allies back into the sea? Their Panzers would then face about and come dashing across Europe to destroy us.'

'I have already agreed that some risk must be taken if Hungary is not to suffer the fate of a vanquished nation when the Allies finally defeat Hitler.'

'And I have already said that merely to be guaranteed her present frontiers is not enough. If she is to risk being overrun and forcibly held down, perhaps for several years, while many of her leading citizens are murdered by the Gestapo or thrown into concentration camps, her people must have something more than that to look forward to.'

'You mean a revision of the Treaty of Trianon?'

'Yes. By that iniquitous settlement forced on us after the last war, Hungary was robbed of over half her population and nearly two thirds of her ancient territories. The Allies would have to give a solemn undertaking to repair permanently this monstrous injustice.'

Gregory had known that if he could get any Hungarian to enter on a serious discussion of his mission that demand would be made, but he had deliberately refrained from leading off with any proposal smacking of bribery. Now he smiled, and said:

'Sir Pellinore raised that matter with me. Few English people realized the way in which Hungary was torn to pieces by the Allied statesmen who dictated the Peace Treaty; and those of us who have since considered the facts feel that she was greatly wronged. Proposals for revision would, Sir Pellinore assured me, be most sympathetically considered by His Majesty's Government if informal talks such as we are having now develop into actual negotiations. I think, too, we can look even further than that. Quite apart from the question of old wrongs being righted, there is another side to it. A few minutes ago you referred to Rumania's having been overrun in the First World War because she sided with the Allies. It was largely to compensate her for her sufferings in the Allied cause that she was given Transylvania at Hungary's expense. In this case the position would be reversed. General Antonescu brought Rumania in on the side of the Germans, so the Allies owe her nothing; whereas, if Hungary now exposes herself to the possibility of repression by the Nazis, she would be able to put forward claims at the Peace Conference which could not decently be rejected.'

'You are right! Yes; you are right,' Count Zapolya nodded, vigorously. 'But we should need an undertaking signed by Churchill, the President and Stalin, so that we could proclaim it to the people. Given that I believe that the Hungarian nation to a man would favour defying the Nazis.'

This enthusiastic declaration swept away the last traces of the pessimism that had weighed on Gregory's spirits since his talk with Levianski. In fact, to arouse a united Hungary against Germany was far more than he had hoped to do when leaving London. Striving to suppress the excitement that had risen in him at the entirely unexpected change in his prospects of succeeding in his mission, he asked as calmly as he could:

'What does Your Excellency suggest should be my next step?'

'We must consult with certain of my friends. Like yourself, I am only a private individual and have no power to enter into actual negotiations. It would, in fact, be futile for anyone here to do so without having the approval of the Regent. But Admiral Horthy could not fail to be swayed by the opinion of a powerful group of his brother magnates. From frequent conversations I know the views of most of them are similar to my own; but we must get them together so that a committee of them can set about exploring the conditions on which Hungary might enter into a separate peace with the Allies.

The first, of course, would be that the Allies should make a landing and do their utmost to contain the German armoured divisions in France and the Low Countries. Everything else hangs upon your being able to obtain for us a firm understanding from the Allied Governments that they will do that.'

'In that case,' Gregory suggested, 'I think it would be best if I returned and reported to Sir Pellinore right away.'

'No, no; I wish you first to discuss the whole matter with some of my friends.'

'Surely that could come later? An Allied landing on the Continent in sufficient strength to be effective would, I imagine, necessitate drastic changes in Allied strategy. Given that Mr. Churchill and President Roosevelt both favoured it, they would still ask the advice of their Chiefs of Staff, and they in turn would not give an opinion until the question of forces available, and all sorts of other matters, had been thoroughly gone into. The decision is such a momentous one that they could not be expected to take it without prolonged discussion. Therefore, the sooner I set the ball rolling the better, and in the meantime you could be preparing the ground among your friends; so that there would be less delay on this side in the event of my coming back with a favourable answer.'

The Count shook his head. T appreciate your arguments ', but, all the same, I am opposed to your leaving Hungary for another week or so. I consider it important that you should first meet a few of the leading personalities in our Upper House, and talk to them as you have to me.'

Feeling that it would be tactless to oppose the Count's wishes, Gregory agreed. But all his instincts warned him against discussing these highly dangerous matters with a number of people; and, before he was very much older, he had cause to regret bitterly that he had allowed himself to be persuaded.

The Magnates of Hungary

Chapter 7

Barely a moment after it had been settled that Gregory should not yet return with his now promising report to London, the door was opened by a footman. Bowing to Count Zapolya, he uttered a short phrase in Magyar.

Standing up, the Count smiled at Gregory. 'Luncheon is about to be served. My wife and relatives will be most interested to hear news of London, and a firsthand account of the air raids which the Nazis claim caused such devastation.

As Gregory's freedom, and possibly his life, depended upon particulars about himself being kept secret, his host's casualness filled him with alarm. But he took some comfort from the thought that Etienne Tavenier had been in England between his evacuation from Dunkirk and the St. Nazaire raid as he said quickly:

'I will tell them about London with pleasure. However, Your Excellency will recall my mentioning that I entered Hungary on a French passport. I am sure all the members of your family are entirely trustworthy, but I feel that it might spare them grave embarrassment, should they meet me again later outside your family circle, if you introduce me to them now as Commandant Tavenier.'

'Tavenier, eh! Yes, that would be wise,' the Count agreed. Then he led Gregory down a wide corridor, the walls of which were hung with great dark oil paintings of male and female Zapolyas through the centuries, to a large bay windowed room the dominant motif of which was rich yellow brocade. There were nine or ten people in it and Gregory soon found that the pale amber liquid in the glasses most of them were holding was not baratsch, but Dry Martini.

He found, too, that, except for a Bishop and one walrus moustached old gentleman who was a Baron in his own right, they were all either Counts or Countesses, as the Magyars followed a widespread Continental custom that all children took the title of their parents, distinguishing themselves by the use of their Christian names. All of them spoke German, French, English and Italian with almost equal fluency and apparently, as the spirit moved them at the moment; so the conversation was a veritable Babel.

Zapolya's wife, the Countess Dorottya, was plump and grey-haired, but appeared to be still on the right side of fifty, so a good twenty years younger than himself. As she extended a beautifully kept hand to Gregory he remembered just in time not to kiss it, as a chance remark he had heard in the bar of the Zur Krone two nights before had informed him that the Hungarian aristocracy now regarded the custom as bourgeois. That she was the Count's second wife emerged a few minutes later when a tall man with Tartar features, also about fifty, was introduced to him as the Count's eldest son, Count Rudolph.

There was a beautiful black-haired Italian, the Countess Marcella, who was the wife of a much younger son, not present, and a bronze haired Countess Erzsebet, who was a daughter of the house; a handsome young man named Count Istvan, and a hunchback with a clever, amusing face named Count Laszlo. But before Gregory could gather more than a vague idea of their relationships they all went in to lunch.

They were using, as Gregory learned later, the smaller dining room; but it could easily have seated twenty. Standing in it near the far end of the table were a sandy haired young man with thickened glasses, whom Gregory thought looked suspiciously like a German, a mousey looking woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a boy of about nine and a pretty little dark girl of about eleven. The children, Count Sityi and Countess Teresa, belonged to the Countess Marcella, and the grownups were their Austrian tutor and French governess.

Throughout the meal a major-domo stood behind Count Zapolya's chair while elderly footmen handed dishes that had nothing Hungarian about their cooking, but were obviously the productions of an excellent French chef. Nevertheless, it proved a jolly, informal, family party with everyone laughing and talking at once. But for the medley of tongues it might have been a luncheon in one of the stately homes of England for, like the English, and unlike the Germans, Austrians and French, these Magyar aristocrats regarded the fact that they had been born noble as so natural that they made no effort whatever to impress, or to protect their dignity behind a cold, formal manner.

In the role of the French major who had got away from

Dunkirk, Gregory gave an account of wartime life in England, and described the blitz. Most of them knew London well, and while the burning of a large part of the City meant little to them, they pressed him for further details when he spoke of the great raid on the West End.

On that Saturday night he had been dining with friends at Hatchett's when a stick of bombs crashed along Piccadilly and scores more fell in the neighbourhood. An hour or so later, when they left the restaurant, fires along the wide thoroughfare had made it as bright as day from the Circus to the Ritz, and from pavement to roof every window in 'Burtons the Tailors' building was belching great tongues of flame.

Most of the men among Gregory's listeners had pleasant memories of being entertained at the famous clubs in Pall Mall and St. James's Street, so were distressed to hear that many of them had been severely damaged; yet, having no experience of air raids, it was the after effects which struck them most forcibly. No doubt they would have faced the dangers of the blitz with commendable bravery, but they were quite shocked when Gregory told them that, after he had made a tour of the area the following morning to see the worst for himself, owing to the electric and gas mains having been wrecked the Berkeley could provide him only with a cold lunch.

With fruit and dessert wines the luncheon continued in leisurely fashion till past three o'clock, then the Count told Gregory that it was the custom of the house party to go for a drive in the afternoon. Thereupon Gregory remarked that his poor driver must be wondering how much longer he meant to stay, and that in any case it was time for him to be starting back for Budapest; but Zapolya would not hear of his doing so.

'Nonsense, my dear fellow,' he declared. 'My people will have seen to it that the man was given a meal then paid off. If you must return to Budapest tonight, I'll have you driven to the station at any hour, and the Station Master will flag the first train that comes along to stop and pick you up. But unless you have engagements that you cannot possibly cancel by telephone, I suggest that you should spend the next few days here. We shall then have an opportunity to discuss matters in more detail.'

Gregory said that he would have been, delighted to accept but had not with him even a toothbrush, let alone a change of clothes. The Count waved the objection aside. He would send his valet in on the next train to collect Gregory's things from the Vadaszkürt, and the man would be back by nightfall. He would also arrange with the management that Gregory's room at the hotel should be reserved so that he could return to it whenever he wished.

In consequence, Gregory drove out with the family, and on his return was equipped for dinner, by the charming Countess Elizabeth, with an Hungarian costume, selected from the great store of finery kept in the house for amateur theatricals and dressing up. To put him at his ease several of the other men also wore the national dress that night and the women all congratulated him on the fine figure he cut. When, at two o'clock in the morning, he eventually went up to bed he found that all his own things had been arranged in his room as though he had already occupied it for a week.

On waking the following morning between the fine lawn sheets he found it difficult to believe that he was not still dreaming. Twenty-four hours earlier he had been convinced that he had come to Hungary on a wild goose chase; now there seemed a definite possibility that he might succeed in engineering a break between the Hungarians and the Nazis. The half waking thought was made all the more unreal by kaleidoscopic memories of having the previous day walked into a world of luxurious, cultured leisure that he had believed to have become extinct for two years or more all over war torn Europe. Yet his transitory doubts were dissipated by the arrival of a French speaking manservant who brought him a breakfast which could not have been surpassed in pre-war days, and asked him at what temperature he liked his bath.

For the next three days he remained at Nagykata, enjoying to the full a gracious hospitality, and much laughter; but the secret reason for his presence there was kept well in mind by his elderly host. Unostentatiously the Count called several conferences in his own room. Before the first he explained to Gregory that his eldest son, Count Rudolph, was interested only in agricultural problems, so would be of little use in their deliberations; but the Baron Alacy who was also a retired General the Bishop, and the merry eyed hunchback, Count Laszlo, were called in. All three agreed that, short of some unforeseeable circumstance, the combination of the United States, the British Empire and Soviet Russia must in the end defeat Germany and Japan; so that Hungary's best hope

for the future lay in going over to the Allies. But there was a considerable divergence of opinion on the question of the conditions to be stipulated in any secret pact and the timing of this exceedingly dangerous volte-face.

In the meantime, Zapolya had written guardedly to a number of his other relations and most intimate friends, and convened a meeting at the Nobles Club in Budapest for Thursday the 20th.

From the time of Gregory's arrival in Budapest up to the morning of that day, the news had been far from favourable to his mission. Lieutenant General Gott, who he had heard was the most promising of our younger Generals in the Middle East, was reported killed while over Libya in an aircraft. The British had arrested the leaders of Congress on evidence that they were preparing to sell out India to the Japs, which had led to serious rioting in Bombay. Another attempt to relieve besieged Malta had been carried out at heavy cost, the cruiser Manchester and the aircraft carrier Eagle both being sunk as well as many other ships. And, worst of all for the Allied cause as a whole, the German offensive in Russia was meeting with spectacular success. Von Bock was still being held outside Stalingrad, but further south the Germans had penetrated the foothills of the Caucasian mountains and were threatening Krasnodar. The hope that these claims might be exaggerated had been nullified by an admission from the Soviet High Command that they had evacuated Maikop, the oil centre north of the Caucasus, and were destroying many oil wells in the threatened area.

Then, on the morning of the 20th, came the first news of the British and Canadian landings at Dieppe. The German communique stated that, although many thousands of men and considerable numbers of tanks had got ashore on six beaches the preceding day, after nine hours of severe fighting, the invaders had been driven back into the sea with great loss in killed and prisoners.

Having no source but the German to go on, Gregory could only hope that the action had not proved as costly as reported. But he was certain in his own mind that it could have been only a reconnaissance in force, with no intention of trying for a permanent foothold. In any case, despite the victory claimed by the Germans, it strengthened his hand enormously, as it showed that the British had both the will and the ability to make such descents on the Continent; and, that being so, the Germans would not now dare risk withdrawing any considerable part of their forces which were holding the European coastline from Northern Norway to the Pyrenees.

In consequence, he was in excellent heart when, after breakfast, with the Count and the others who were in the plot, he left for the capital, the intention being that all of them should lunch at the Zapolya Palace on the Illona Utcza before the meeting.

Although termed a "Palace", it was actually one of a hundred or more similar mansions that crowned the slopes of Buda and was no larger, than the fine London houses of the British aristocracy; but, unlike them, it was built round a courtyard entered through a big semicircular arch and, from the terrace on its northeast side, had a magnificent view over the river. The Count pressed Gregory to stay there but he was anxious not to compromise Sir Pellinore's old friend more than was absolutely necessary, just in case one of the numerous people who were soon to be told about his mission gave him away; so he tactfully declined the offer and had his bags sent on to the Vadaszkürt.

After lunch they drove to the Nobles Club, or the Casino as it was often termed owing to the heavy gambling to which many of its members were addicted. As they went up the broad staircase Gregory was surprised to see in the place of honour at its top a large portrait in oils of King Edward VII.

Catching his glance Zapolya smiled at him and said:

"When Edward VII was Prince of Wales he came many times to Budapest and, as an honorary member of the Club, he made himself so popular that the Committee decided to have his portrait painted. During the First World War several German nobles who were sent here as liaison officers were also made honorary members, and they objected most strongly to our continuing to display the portrait of the late King of a country with which we were at war. But we told them that wars should not be allowed to interfere with private relationships, that it was our Club, and that if they did not like our way of conducting its affairs they need not come to it. That is still the case, and nothing would induce us to take it down.5

'How I admire that spirit,' Gregory replied. 'It is the greatest tragedy of modern times that wars are no longer fought with chivalry, and that whole populations are made to hate one another. The killing which cannot be avoided entails misery enough without the destruction of personal bonds built up over long years of friendship and respect.'

The Count nodded. That at least is one way in which we Hungarians need feel no shame at the accusation that our country is behind the times. We still do all we can to ameliorate the hardships that war brings to enemy civilians. The professional at our golf club is a case in point… He is, like nearly all of them, a Scotsman; so, when Britain declared war on us, he was arrested and interned. But we decided that to keep him behind barbed wire for months, or perhaps years, through no fault of his own was both harsh on him and stupid as far as we were concerned. So within a week we had him released on parole and back at the Club.'

In a large room on the first floor some twenty men were assembled. Gregory was introduced to each of them in turn as Commandant Tavenier; then they all sat down round a big baize covered gaming table and the meeting began. The Count informed them of his reason for calling them together; Gregory followed with a statement in general terms of the object of his mission, and when he had done a long discussion took place.

It was clear from the beginning that no one present had any love for the Nazis, or for the Germans as a people; but they regarded them as a lesser evil than the Russians, and feared that an Allied victory might lead to Communism's spreading southward into Hungary.

Gregory contended that, if Hungary came over to the Allies, when the war ended she would be preserved from an occupation by Russian forces and her Government be in a strong position to take adequate measures against the spread of Communism. Whereas, should she stand by Germany to the end, her defeat would lead to bankruptcy and social upheavals which must make the triumph of Communism inevitable.

As the latter alternative was exactly what had occurred in 1919, his contention met with general agreement but, as several people were quick to point out, it would not apply if Hitler won, as he would crush Communism once and for all.

The question of which side would win was then argued and opinion upon it was sharply divided. Most of the older men believed that time was on the side of the Allies and that their almost limitless resources would enable them to overcome

Hitler in the long run; but many of the younger ones were convinced that if he could once put Russia out of the war Britain and America would never be able to break him.

The view of these younger men being that which was held in secret by Gregory himself and, in fact, the very fear which had led to his coming to Budapest, he had all his work cut out to argue convincingly against it; so, as soon as he could, he sidetracked the discussion to what was likely to happen in Hungary should the war end in a German victory.

For him this was a much better wicket, because National Socialism was no friend to any aristocracy. The Hungarian Nazis, who sported the Arrow Cross as their symbol, were mostly disgruntled intellectuals, minor officials of Austrian descent and hot-headed students, and so far the magnates had managed to keep them very much in their place. Whereas in Germany no noble could now hope to hold a position of influence unless he accepted such people as equals by becoming a member of the Parti, the great landowners were ordered about by the Parti Gauleiters and the rich were both heavily taxed and blackmailed into making big special contributions to the Parti funds. With Hitler as undisputed Lord of Europe it could not be long before these Hungarian magnates found themselves either dancing to the tune of the Arrow Cross boys or having to put only one foot wrong to find themselves in a concentration camp.

These purely class interests were reinforced by the intense concern, common to all Hungarians, that Hungary should retain such provinces as she had succeeded in getting back since the Treaty of Trianon, and have the others she had lost restored to her. These 'Lost Provinces' had, under the Treaty, gone to Italy, Rumania, Austria and the newly created sovereign states of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Hitler, having occupied the last two against opposition, had penalized them by making them disgorge to Hungary much of the territory she had been forced to cede to them in 1920; but the question was, would the United States and Britain allow them to keep these lands that for twenty years had been a part of the newly created countries which had recently become the victims of Hitler. Above all they were concerned to retain their beloved Transylvania and get back Croatia with the old Hungarian port of Fiume on the Adriatic. They had little hope that Hitler would ever coerce Mussolini into giving up the latter, whereas, although the Allies might insist that the two new States should retain their pre-war frontiers, Rumania and Italy had played the part of enemies who could be despoiled in favour of a Hungary which had taken a hand in Hitler's defeat.

Eventually it was agreed that as a long-term policy it would be in Hungary's best interests to go over to the Allies; but soon several voices were raised with fearsome warnings of the brutal treatment that the country might receive at Hitler's hands before help from the Allies could reach her. Gregory spoke of the landings at Dieppe on the previous day and asserted with confidence that others in greater strength would hold the German armour; but again controversy raged on whether such measures would prove successful.

He was bombarded with scores of questions on these various aspects of the problem and could only say that he was in no position to answer for the British Government, but that if the meeting could give him an idea of the terms likely to be acceptable he would return to London and come back in a few weeks' time better qualified to enter into negotiations.

The upshot was the appointment of a Committee to discuss' matters further with him and determine the Heads of Agreement under which a secret pact might be formulated. Count Zapolya was asked to serve but declined on the grounds that he had done his part by bring them together, and that he now wished younger men to formulate the policy upon which the future of their country might depend. However, as the retired General Baron Alacy the Bishop and the hunchback Count Laszlo Zapolya had all participated in the early conversations with Gregory at Nagykata, they were elected. To them were added a youngish Colonel named Janos Orczy, who had lost his left arm early in the war and was now serving in the War Office, and a Count Zsigmond Szegenyhaz who held a post in the Foreign Office.

It was six o'clock before the meeting broke up, and after several drinks in the big salle downstairs Gregory took leave of Count Zapolya and his other new friends with very mixed feelings.

On the one hand he was extraordinarily elated by the thought that, whereas only five days earlier he had been prepared to write off his mission as a total failure, there was now a body of the most influential men in Hungary actually preparing to negotiate on his proposals.

On the other he was horrified and alarmed by their complete disregard for security. It had been bad enough at Nagykata, as he had found that within twenty-four hours the whole house party had become aware of the reason for his presence there; but at least they were an isolated group with only the Austrian tutor whom he hoped was still in the dark as a possible immediate danger. Here, in Budapest, matters were infinitely worse.

When opening the meeting, Count Zapolya had not asked his friends for any pledge of secrecy, or even warned them to refrain from mentioning the matter under discussion to anyone who had not been invited. Then, after the meeting broke up, several groups had dispersed about the Club still debating the subject in tones loud enough for members who had not been present to hear what they were talking about. No doubt the Count took it for granted that the high sense of honour traditional among the Hungarian nobility was guarantee enough of secrecy. But Gregory was well aware that many men, however discreet in other respects, confided everything to their wives, and that quite a number of women had the deplorable habit of treating their hairdressers as father confessors; so, one way or another, there seemed a quite frightening possibility that, before many days had passed, the news that a conspiracy to break with Hitler was brewing would reach the ears of some fanatical pro Nazi.

At the Vadaszkürt a clerk behind the reception desk told him that his old room had been kept for him and that his luggage had been sent up. As he took the key he got the idea the man had given him a rather queer look; but he thought no more of it until he stepped out of the lift on the third floor. The chambermaid who had done his room during his first visit was there sorting out some dirty linen. Stopping her work she bobbed him the usual curtsy and murmured, 'Kuss die hand'; but no smile accompanied the greeting and she stared at him with an unhappy expression in her round blue eyes.

Gregory was liked by servants because he not only always had a pleasant word for them and never showed ill temper, but was tidy by nature and took some pains to save them as much work as possible. Now, it did not occur to him that this plain strong limbed peasant girl might be concerned on his account, but thinking something had upset her he smiled and asked:

'What's the trouble, Tina?'

In her halting German she stuttered out, 'Perhaps, sir, I should not tell. But there are men in your room. The Manager, he bring them up an hour ago. They wait for you. I think they are the police.'

The smile froze on Gregory's lips. His spine stiffened slightly and he had the sensation that his feet had suddenly turned to lead. But his brain raced from thought to thought with the swiftness of a prairie fire.

Could someone who had been at the meeting have inadvertently betrayed him already? No; that was hardly possible quite impossible, in fact, if the police had been waiting in his room for him for the past hour. Could one of the women at Nagykata have blabbed about his talks with Zapolya and the others? That was unlikely as they were still all in the country and would hardly have been so wantonly indiscreet as to give particulars about him and his mission to anyone in a letter or during a telephone conversation. But what of the Austrian tutor? Surely no one in the house party would have been so imbecile as to confide in him? He might have overheard something to rouse his suspicions, though, then deliberately played the part of a snooper and sent the results of his spying to the police.

As Gregory released the breath he had unconsciously been holding, the thought flashed across his mind that the police might wish to see him only on a routine matter. But he instantly dismissed it. If they were concerned with some regulation to do with foreign visitors, which he had failed to observe, they would simply have left a message for him to call at the police station, or sent a man round to catch him in the entrance of the hotel as he came in. There would not be two of them and Tina had made it quite clear that there was more than one. And they would not be waiting to confront him without warning in the privacy of his room.

The question now was what course to take. Should he face the music or cut and run for it?

It was certain that the police would be armed and, although he was carrying a small automatic that he had smuggled through the customs, a shooting match at close quarters was not a thing to enter upon lightly. Anyhow, they would be two to one and, even if he succeeded in rendering them both hors de combat, once the sound of shooting had raised a general alarm he would not be able to get out of the hotel without encountering further trouble. Yet if they did know about his secret mission and he entered his room but did not shoot it out with them, in another few minutes he would be walking back along the corridor with his wrists locked into a pair of handcuffs.

Fate, in the form of Tina's warning, had given him an alternative. He need not go on. Instead, he could step back into the lift and make a bolt for it. But what then? How much grace could he expect? The men in his room might wait there for another hour or more without suspecting that he had slipped out of their clutches. But no! The desk clerk would probably have telephoned up to let them know that he had just come in. Anyway, the clerk would telephone when he saw the man they were after going out again. Possibly, even, the clerk would call on the porters to hold him till the police could be fetched down. That would mean a fight in the hall. He could put a couple of shots over their heads to scare them into letting him pass; but they would all shout 'Stop thief!' and start a hue and cry in the street. Even if he got clear away, within a few hours he would have the whole police force of Budapest on the lookout for him. Fortunately in another hour or so it would be dark. But he would have to leave the city that night, or go into hiding with Levianski. The risk of recognition and capture would be much too great for him to go about openly any more. Such a handicap could make it almost impossible to continue with his mission. The Hungarian nobility were not the sort of people who would take kindly to furtive meetings in obscure cafés and for him to be able to make contact with them again at all depended on whether he could keep his freedom for the next half-hour.