The Last Frontier

‘He would probably have refused me – he had a notice forbidding unauthorized passengers.’ Far back in Reynolds’ mind a tiny little warning bell was ringing. ‘My appointment is urgent.’

‘But why –’

‘The truck?’ Reynolds smiled ruefully. ‘Your roads are treacherous. A skid on ice, a deep ditch and there you were – my Borgward with a broken front axle.’

‘You came by car? But for businessmen in a hurry –’

‘I know, I know!’ Reynolds let a little testiness, a little impatience, creep into his voice. ‘They come by plane. But I had 250 kilos of machine samples in the boot and back of my car: you can’t lug a damned great weight like that aboard a plane.’ Angrily, now, he stubbed out his cigarette. ‘This questioning is ridiculous. I’ve established my bona-fides and I’m in a great hurry. What about that transport?’

‘Two more little questions, and then you shall go,’ the officer promised. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair now, fingers steepled across his chest, and Reynolds felt his uneasiness deepen. ‘You came direct from Vienna? The main road?’

‘Of course! How else would I come?’

‘This morning?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Vienna was less than 120 miles from where they were. ‘This afternoon.’

‘Four o’clock? Five o’clock?’

‘Later. Ten past six exactly. I remember looking at my watch as I passed through your customs post.’

‘You could swear to that?’

‘If necessary, yes.’

The police officer’s nod, the quick shifting of his eyes, took Reynolds by surprise, and, before he could move, three pairs of hands had pinioned his from behind, dragged him to his feet, twisted his arms in front of him and snapped on a pair of shiny steel handcuffs.

‘What the devil does this mean?’ In spite of the shock, the cold fury in Reynolds’ tone could hardly have been bettered.

‘It just means that a successful liar can never afford to be unsure of his facts.’ The policeman tried to speak equably, but the triumph in his voice and eyes were unmistakable. ‘I have news for you, Buhl – if that is your name, which I don’t for a moment believe. The Austrian frontier has been closed to all traffic for twenty-four hours – a normal security check, I believe – as from three o’clock this afternoon. Ten past six by your watch indeed!’ Grinning openly, now, he stretched out a hand for the telephone. ‘You’ll get your transport to Budapest, all right, you insolent imposter – in the back of a guarded police car. We haven’t had a Western spy on our hands for a long time now: I’m sure they’ll be delighted to send transport for you, just especially for you, all the way from Budapest.’

He broke off suddenly, frowned, jiggled the receiver up and down, listened again, muttered something under his breath and replaced the receiver with an angry gesture.

‘Out of order again! That damned thing is always out of order.’ He was unable to conceal his disappointment, to have made the important announcement personally would have been one of the highlights of his life. He beckoned the nearest of the men.

‘Where is the nearest telephone?’

‘In the village. Three kilometres.’

‘Go there as fast as you can.’ He scribbled furiously on a sheet of paper. ‘Here is the number and the message. Don’t forget to say it comes from me. Hurry, now.’

The man folded the message, stuffed it into his pocket, buttoned his coat to the neck and left. Through the momentarily opened door, Reynolds could see that, even in the short time that had elapsed since his capture, clouds had moved across the stars and slow, heavy snowflakes were beginning to swirl across the silhouetted oblong of darkening sky. He shivered involuntarily, then looked back at the police officer.

‘I’m afraid that you’ll pay heavily for this,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re making a very grave mistake.’

‘Persistence is an admirable thing in itself, but the wise man knows when to stop trying.’ The little fat man was enjoying himself. ‘The only mistake I made was ever to believe a word you said.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘An hour and a half, perhaps two, on these snowy roads, before your – ah – transport arrives. We can fill in that time very profitably. Information, if you please. We’ll start off with your name – your real one this time, if you don’t mind.’

‘You’ve already had it. You’ve seen my papers.’ Unasked, Reynolds resumed his seat, unobtrusively testing his handcuffs: strong, close-fitting over the wrist and no hope there. Even so, even with bound hands, he could have disposed of the little man – the spring-knife was still under his trilby – but it was hopeless to think of it, not with three armed policemen behind him. ‘That information, those papers, are accurate and true. I can tell lies to oblige you.’

‘No one is asking you to tell lies, just to, shall we say, refresh your memory? Alas, it probably needs some jogging.’ He pushed back from the desk, levered himself heavily to his feet – he was even shorter and fatter standing upright than he had seemed sitting down – and walked round his desk. ‘Your name, if you please?’

‘I told you –’ Reynolds broke off with a grunt of pain as a heavily ringed hand caught him twice across the face, back-handed and forehanded. He shook his head to clear it, lifted his bound arms and wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His face was expressionless.

‘Second thoughts are always wiser thoughts,’ the little man beamed. ‘I think I detect the beginning of wisdom. Come now, let us have no more of this disagreeable foolishness.’

Reynolds called him an unprintable name. The heavily-jowled face darkened with blood almost as if at the touch of a switch, he stepped forward, ringed hand clubbing down viciously, then collapsed backwards across his desk, gasping and retching with agony, propelled by the scythe-like sweep of Reynolds’ upward swinging leg. For seconds the police officer remained where he had fallen, moaning and fighting for breath, half-lying, half-kneeling across his own desk, while his own men still stood motionless, the suddenness, the unbelievable shock of it holding them in thrall. It was just at this moment that the door crashed open and a gust of icy air swept into the hut.

Reynolds twisted round in his chair. The man who had flung open the door stood framed in the opening, his intensely cold blue eyes – a very pale blue indeed – taking in every detail of the scene. A lean, broad-shouldered man so tall that the uncovered thick brown hair almost touched the lintel of the doorway, he was dressed in a military, high-collared trench-coat, belted and epauleted, vaguely greenish under a dusting of snow, so long-skirted that it hid the top of his high, gleaming jackboots. The face matched the eyes: the bushy eyebrows, the flaring nostrils above the clipped moustache, the thin chiselled mouth all lent to the hard, handsome face that indefinable air of cold authority of one long accustomed to immediate and unquestioning obedience.

Two seconds were enough to complete his survey – two seconds would always be enough for this man, Reynolds guessed: no astonished looks, no ‘What’s going on here?’ or ‘What the devil does all this mean?’ He strode into the room, unhooked one of his thumbs from the leather belt that secured his revolver, butt forward, to his left waist, bent down and hauled the police officer to his feet, indifferent to his white face, his whooping gasps of pain as he fought for breath.

‘Idiot!’ The voice was in keeping with the appearance, cold, dispassionate, all but devoid of inflection. ‘Next time you – ah – interrogate a man, stand clear of his feet.’ He nodded curtly in Reynolds’ direction. ‘Who is this man, what were you asking him and why?’

The police officer glared malevolently at Reynolds, sucked some air down into his tortured lungs and whimpered huskily through a strangled throat.

‘His name is Johann Buhl, a Viennese businessman – but I don’t believe it. He’s a spy, a filthy Fascist spy,’ he spat out viciously. ‘A filthy Fascist spy!’

‘Naturally.’ The tall man smiled coldly. ‘All spies are filthy Fascists. But I don’t want your opinions, I want facts. First, how did you find out his name?’

‘He said so, and he had papers. Forgeries, of course.’

‘Give them to me.’

The police officer gestured towards the table. He could stand almost upright now. ‘There they are.’

‘Give them to me.’ The request, in tone, inflection, in every way, was a carbon copy of the first. The policeman reached out hastily, wincing with the pain of the sudden movement and handed him the paper.

‘Excellent. Yes, excellent.’ The newcomer rifled expertly through the pages. ‘Might even be genuine – but they’re not. He’s our man all right.’

Reynolds had to make a conscious effort to relax his clenching fists. This man was infinitely dangerous, more dangerous than a division of stupid bunglers like the little policeman. Even trying to fool this man would be a waste of time.

‘Your man? Your man?’ The policeman was groping, completely out of his depth. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I ask the questions, little man. You say he is a spy. Why?’

‘He says he crossed the frontier this evening.’ The little man was learning lessons in brevity. ‘The frontier was closed.’

‘It was indeed.’ The stranger leaned against the wall, selected a Russian cigarette from a thin gold case – no brass or chromium for the top boys, Reynolds thought bleakly – lit a cigarette and looked thoughtfully at Reynolds. It was the policeman who finally broke the silence. Twenty or thirty seconds had given him time to recover his thoughts and a shred of his courage.

‘Why should I take orders from you?’ he blustered. ‘I’ve never seen you in my life before. I am in charge here. Who the devil are you?’

Perhaps ten seconds, ten seconds spent minutely examining Reynolds’ clothes and face, elapsed before the newcomer turned lazily away and looked down at the little policeman. The eyes were glacial, dispassionate, but the expression on the face showed no change: the policeman seemed to shrink curiously inside his clothes and he pressed back hard against the edge of the desk.

‘I have my rare moments of generosity. We will forget, for the present, what you said and how you said it.’ He nodded towards Reynolds, and his tone hardened almost imperceptibly. ‘This man is bleeding from the mouth. He tried, perhaps, to resist arrest?’

‘He wouldn’t answer my questions and …’

‘Who gave you authority either to question or injure prisoners?’ The tone of the voice cut like a whip. ‘You stupid bungling idiot, you might have done irreparable harm! Overstep your authority once again and I personally will see to it that you have a rest from your exacting duties. The seaside, perhaps – Constanta, for a start?’

The policeman tried to lick his dry lips and his eyes were sick with fear. Constanta, the area of the Danube-Black Sea Canal slave labour camps, was notorious throughout Central Europe: many had gone there but no one ever returned.

‘I – I only thought –’

‘Leave thinking to those capable of such difficult feats.’ He jerked a thumb at Reynolds. ‘Have this man taken out to my car. He has been searched, of course?’

‘But of course!’ The policeman was almost trembling in his eagerness. ‘Thoroughly, I assure you.’

‘That statement coming from such as you makes a further search imperative,’ the tall man said dryly. He looked at Reynolds, one heavy eyebrow lifting slightly. ‘Must we be reduced to this mutual indignity – my having to search you personally, I mean.’

‘There’s a knife under my hat.’

‘Thank you.’ The tall man lifted the hat, removed the knife, courteously replaced the hat, pressed the release catch, thoughtfully inspected the blade, closed the knife, slid it into his coat pocket and looked at the white-faced policeman.

‘There is no conceivable reason why you should not rise to the topmost heights of your profession.’ He glanced at his watch – as unmistakably gold as the cigarette case. ‘Come, I must be on my way. I see you have the telephone here. Get me the Andrassy Ut, and be quick about it!’

The Andrassy Ut! Even though he had been becoming surer of the identity of the man with the passing of every moment, confirmation of his suspicions still came to Reynolds with a sense of shock and he could feel his face tightening in spite of himself under the speculative gaze of the tall stranger. Headquarters of the dreaded AVO, the Hungarian Secret Police currently reckoned the most ruthless and implacably efficient behind the iron curtain, the Andressy Ut was the one place on earth he wanted at all costs to avoid.

‘Ah! I see the name is not new to you.’ The stranger smiled. ‘That bodes no good for you, Mr Buhl, or for your bona-fides: the Andrassy Ut is hardly a name on every western businessman’s lips.’ He turned to the policeman. ‘Well, what are you stuttering about now?’

‘The – the telephone.’ The voice was high and squeaking again and faltering badly: he was afraid now to the point of terror. ‘It’s out of action.’

‘Inevitably. Matchless efficiency on every hand. May the gods help our unfortunate country.’ He produced a wallet from his pocket, opened it briefly for inspection. ‘Sufficiently good authority for the removal of your prisoner?’

‘Of course, Colonel, of course.’ The words tripped over one another. ‘Whatever you say, Colonel.’

‘Good.’ The wallet snapped shut, and the stranger turned to Reynolds and bowed with ironic courtesy.

‘Colonel Szendrô, Headquarters, Hungarian Political Police. I am at your service, Mr Buhl, and my car at your disposal. We leave for Budapest, immediately. My colleagues and I have been expecting you for some weeks now, and are most anxious to discuss certain matters with you.’

TWO

It was pitch dark outside now, but light streaming from the open door and uncovered window of the hut gave them enough visibility to see by. Colonel Szendrô’s car was parked on the other side of the road – a black, left-hand drive Mercedes saloon already covered with a deep layer of snow, all except the front part of the bonnet where the engine heat melted the snow as it fell. There was a minute’s delay while the colonel told them to release the truck driver and search the inside of the truck for any personal luggage Buhl might have been forced to abandon there – they found his overnight bag almost immediately and stuffed his gun into it – then Szendrô opened the front right-hand door of the car and gestured Reynolds to his seat.

Reynolds would have sworn that no one man driving a car could have held him captive for fifty miles, only to find out how wrong he was even before the car started. While a soldier with a rifle covered Reynolds from the left-hand side, Szendrô stooped inside the other door, opened the glove compartment in front of Reynolds, fetched out two lengths of thin chain and left the glove box open.

‘A somewhat unusual car, my dear Buhl,’ the colonel said apologetically. ‘But you understand. From time to time I feel that I must give certain of my passengers a feeling of – ah – security.’ Rapidly he unlocked one of the handcuffs, passed the end link of one of the chains through it, locked it, passed the chain through a ring or eye bolt in the back of the glove box and secured it to the other handcuff. Then he looped the second chain round Reynolds’ legs, just above the knees and, closing the door and leaning in through the opened window, secured it with a small padlock to the arm-rest. He stood back to survey his work.

‘Satisfactory, I think. You should be perfectly comfortable and have ample freedom of movement – but not enough, I assure you, to reach me. At the same time you will find it difficult to throw yourself out of the door, which you would find far from easy to push open anyway: you will observe that the pull-out handle is missing from your door.’ The tone was light, even bantering, but Reynolds knew better than to be deceived. ‘Also, kindly refrain from damaging yourself by surreptitiously testing the strength of the chains and their anchors: the chains have a breaking load of just over a ton, the arm-rest is specially reinforced and that ring in the glove box bolted through on to the chassis … Well, what on earth do you want now?’

‘I forgot to tell you, Colonel.’ The policeman’s voice was quick, nervous. ‘I sent a message to our Budapest Office asking to send a car for this man.’

‘You did?’ Szendrô’s voice was sharp. ‘When?’

‘Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Fool! You should have told me immediately. However, it’s too late now. No harm done, possibly some good. If they are as thick in the head as you are, a circumstance of which it is admittedly difficult to conceive, a long drive in the cold night air should clear their minds admirably.’

Colonel Szendrô banged the door shut, switched on the roof light above the windscreen so that he should have no difficulty in seeing his prisoner, and drove off for Budapest. The Mercedes was equipped with snow tyres on all four wheels, and, in spite of the hard-packed snow on the road, Szendrô made good time. He drove with the casual, easy precision of an expert, his cold blue eyes for ever shifting to his right, very frequently and at varying intervals.

Reynolds sat very still, staring right ahead. He had already, in spite of the colonel’s admonitions, tested the chains; the colonel hadn’t exaggerated. Now he was forcing his mind to think coldly, clearly and as constructively as possible. His position was almost hopeless – it would be completely so when they reached Budapest. Miracles happened, but only a certain kind of miracle: no one had ever escaped from the AVO Headquarters, from the torture chambers in Stalin Street. Once there he was lost: if he was ever to escape it would have to be from this car, inside the next hour.

There was no window winding handle on the door – the colonel had thoughtfully removed all such temptations: even if the window had been open he couldn’t have reached the handle on the outside. His hands couldn’t reach the wheel; he had already measured the arc of radius of the chain and his straining fingers would have been at least two inches away. He could move his legs to a certain extent, but couldn’t raise them high enough to kick in the windscreen, shatter the toughened glass throughout its length and perhaps cause a crash at fairly high speed. He could have placed his feet against the dashboard, and he knew of some cars where he could have heaved the front seat backwards off the rails. But everything in this car spelt solidity, and if he tried and failed, as he almost certainly would, all he’d probably get for his pains would be a tap on the head that would keep him quiet till they got to the Andrassy Ut. All the time he deliberately compelled himself to keep his mind off what was going to happen to him when he got there: that way lay only weakness and ultimate destruction.

His pockets – had he anything in his pockets he could use? Anything solid enough to throw at Szendrô’s head, shock him for a length of time necessary to lose control and crash the car: Reynolds was aware that he himself might be hurt as seriously as the colonel, even though he had the advantage of preparation: but a fifty-fifty chance was better than the one in a million he had without it. He knew exactly where Szendrô had put the key to the handcuffs.

But a rapid mental inventory dismissed that hope: he had nothing heavier in his pocket than a handful of forints. His shoes, then – could he remove a shoe and get Szendrô in the face with it before the colonel knew what he was doing? But that thought came only a second ahead of the realization of its futility; with his wrists handcuffed, the only way he could reach his shoes in any way unobtrusively was between his legs – and his knees were lashed tightly together … Another idea, desperate but with a chance of success, had just occurred to him when the colonel spoke for the first time in the fifteen minutes since they had left the police block.

‘You are a dangerous man, Mr Buhl,’ he remarked conversationally. ‘You think too much – Cassius – you know your Shakespeare, of course.’

Reynolds said nothing. Every word this man said was a potential trap.

‘The most dangerous man I’ve ever had in this car, I should say, and a few desperate characters have sat from time to time where you’re sitting now,’ Szendrô went on ruminatively. ‘You know where you’re going, and you don’t appear to care. But you must, of course.’

Again Reynolds kept silent. The plan might work – the chance of success was enough to justify the risk.

‘The silence is uncompanionable, to say the least,’ Colonel Szendrô observed. He lit a cigarette, sent the match spinning through the ventilation window. Reynolds stiffened slightly – the very opening he wanted. Szendrô went on: ‘You are quite comfortable, I trust?’

‘Quite.’ Reynolds’ conversational tone matched Szendrô’s own. ‘But I’d appreciate a cigarette too, if you don’t mind.’

‘By all means.’ Szendrô was hospitality itself. ‘One must cater for one’s guests – you’ll find half a dozen lying loose inside the glove compartment. A cheap and undistinguished brand, I fear, but I’ve always found that people in your – ah – position do not tend to be over-critical about these things. A cigarette – any cigarette – is a great help in times of stress.’

‘Thank you.’ Reynolds nodded at the projection on top of the dashboard at his own side. ‘Cigar lighter, is it not?’

‘It is. Use it by all means.’

Reynolds stretched forward with his handcuffed wrists, pressed it down for a few seconds then lifted it out, its spiral tip glowing red in the faint light from above. Then, just as it cleared the fascia, his hands fumbled and he dropped it on the floor. He reached down to get it, but the chain brought his hands up with a sharp jerk inches from the floor. He swore softly to himself.

Szendrô laughed, and Reynolds, straightening, looked at him. There was no malice in the colonel’s face, just a mixture of amusement and admiration, the admiration predominating.

‘Very, very clever, Mr Buhl. I said you were a dangerous man, and now I’m surer than ever.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘We are now presented with a choice of three possible lines of action, are we not? None of them, I may say, has any marked appeal for me.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Magnificent again!’ Szendrô was smiling broadly. ‘The puzzlement in your voice couldn’t be improved upon. Three courses are open, I say. First, I could courteously bend over and down to retrieve it, whereupon you would do your best to crush in the back of my head with your handcuffs. You would certainly knock me senseless – and you observed very keenly, without in any way appearing to do so, exactly where I put the key to these handcuffs.’ Reynolds looked at him uncomprehendingly, but already he could taste defeat in his mouth.

‘Secondly I could toss you a box of matches. You would strike one, ignite the heads of all the other matches in the box, throw it in my face, crash the car and who knows what might happen then? Or you could just hope that I’d give you a light, either from the lighter or cigarette; then the finger judo lock, a couple of broken fingers, a transfer to a wrist lock and then the key at your leisure. Mr Buhl, you will bear watching.’

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ Reynolds said roughly.

‘Perhaps, perhaps. I have a suspicious mind, but I survive.’ He tossed something on to the lap of Reynolds’ coat. ‘Herewith one single match. You can light it on the metal hinge of the glove box.’

Reynolds sat and smoked in silence. He couldn’t give up, he wouldn’t give up, although he knew in his heart that the man at the wheel knew all the answers – and the answers to many questions which he, Reynolds, probably didn’t know ever existed. Half a dozen separate plans occurred to him, each one more fantastic and with less chance of success than the previous one, and he was just coming to the end of his second cigarette – he had lit it off the butt end of the first – when the colonel changed down into third gear, peered at the near side of the road, braked suddenly and swung off into a small lane. Half a minute later, on a stretch of the lane parallel to and barely twenty yards from the highway, but almost entirely screened from it by thick, snow-covered bushes, Szendrô stopped the car and switched off the ignition. Then he turned off his head and side lights, wound his window right down in spite of the bitter cold and turned to face Reynolds. The roof light above the windscreen still burned in the darkness.