The Fighting Agents Part 21

"I don't think I want to hear it," she said.

"I used to ask myself, Cynthia," Whittaker said, looking at her, "sometimes at very very inappropriate moments, 'Why are you doing this? If you love Cynthia, why the h.e.l.l are you s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g somebody else?' " inappropriate moments, 'Why are you doing this? If you love Cynthia, why the h.e.l.l are you s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g somebody else?' "

He looked at her as if he expected a response.

"No answer came, Cynthia," he said. "The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is that I am an unprincipled sonofab.i.t.c.h. "

"Another possibility is that you don't really love me," she said. "Not that way. For G.o.d's sake, Jimmy, we have known each other since we were kids. I used to take care of you when you were a little boy."

"I have loved you since you were about fourteen," he said, matter-of-factly. "You were climbing out of Chesty's pool in Palm Beach, and I got a look down your bathing suit. My heart stopped, and then jumped. My heart still stops and then jumps sometimes when I look at you. What this equation means, I'm afraid, is that I do in fact love you. That way. That way."

"What about Garvey?" she said.

Whittaker nodded his head as if he expected not only her change of subject but even that particular question.

"She said," he said, "changing the subject."

He drained his drink, then stretched across the couch to put the empty gla.s.s on a table.

"I'm not going to let you off the hook there, Cynthia," he said, and started to cross the room to the bar.

"What the h.e.l.l is that supposed to mean?"

"There's more to playing Mata Hari, my dear Cynthia, than running around the woods in Virginia with a rifle, or flas.h.i.+ng your OSS credentials to impress people."

"Now, that's a cheap shot!"

"It involves things like making decisions," he said. "For example, 'Do I send a nice little boy in a sailor suit off someplace where he is liable to drown, or have his head sliced off with a sword?' "

My G.o.d, he's seen those pictures! He knows what he's getting himself into. He's frightened!

He looked at her out of Chesty's eyes.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n you!" she said.

He didn't reply. He walked back to the couch and sat down.

She felt a sudden infuriating urge to cry. She fought it down, then went to the bar and poured an inch of brandy into a snifter.

She wondered why Whittaker was being such a sonofab.i.t.c.h about Garvey. Why he didn't just say, "We'll take him," or "We better not take him." He d.a.m.ned well was equipped to decide whether the contribution Garvey could make to the mission overrode his youth, and inexperience, and lack of training, and, for that matter, physical stamina.

That's what had to be judged. Whether Garvey was drowned or beheaded was important only insofar as it would affect the mission.

Clearly, Garvey should go. Why had Jimmy been unwilling to come out and say that?

Because, she suddenly understood, he was being a sonofab.i.t.c.h again-a male male sonofab.i.t.c.h. He was simply unable to understand that she thought as he did. He still thought she was playing at being a spy; the b.a.s.t.a.r.d had even called her "Mata Hari" and accused her of flas.h.i.+ng her OSS credentials to impress people. sonofab.i.t.c.h. He was simply unable to understand that she thought as he did. He still thought she was playing at being a spy; the b.a.s.t.a.r.d had even called her "Mata Hari" and accused her of flas.h.i.+ng her OSS credentials to impress people.

G.o.dd.a.m.n him!

"Garvey will go," she announced.

He nodded.

Their eyes met.

"If I asked you a straight question, could I have a straight answer?" Cynthia heard herself ask.

"That would depend on the question," he said.

The telephone rang. It was Ellis.

"Sorry I didn't call earlier, Ellis," he said. "I just forgot."

He reported that the material was on hand, that the weather was good, and unless Ellis heard to the contrary, they would depart Mare Island for Hawaii on schedule.

"And we're taking Garvey," he concluded. "Get him transferred officially as soon as you can. Get him overseas pay, and hazardous-duty pay . . . whatever you can."

Ellis said something else, to which Whittaker replied: "Thanks, Chief, I'll d.a.m.ned well try."

Cynthia knew that Ellis had told him to take care of himself.

Whittaker hung the phone up again.

"You were asking?" he said, meeting her eyes.

"Are you afraid?"

"I'll tell you what I'm afraid of," he said seriously, after a pause. "I'm afraid I'll answer that dumb question the wrong way, and that'll give you your excuse to throw me out of here."

"Are you afraid, Jimmy?" Cynthia asked.

"This is probably the wrong answer, but f.u.c.k it. Truth time. No, I'm not. I'm good at this sort of thing. There's a thrill, Cynthia. It's even better than flying."

She looked at him first in disbelief, then in astonishment when she realized he was telling the truth.

"The wrong answer, I gather?" he asked dryly.

"It wasn't the answer I expected," she said.

"Do I get to stay?"

She felt her face flush. She felt faint. There was a contraction at the base of her stomach.

She forced herself to look at him.

"If you like," she said very softly.

And then, more quickly than she would have thought possible, he erupted from the couch and came to her.

Embarra.s.sed, she averted her face.

His hand came up, and the b.a.l.l.s of his fingers touched her cheek and gently turned her face to his. She met his eyes.

His fingers moved down her cheek, and down her neck, and onto her shoulders. He buried his face in her hair. She felt his arms around her, pressing her to him, and then felt his body shudder.

And then he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom.

3.

ST. GERTRUD'S MUNIc.i.p.aL PRISON PeCS, HUNGARY 12 FEBRUARY 1943 There was just barely room enough for the Tatra diesel dump truck to pa.s.s through the tunnel to the courtyard of St. Gertrud's. Sc.r.a.pe marks on the granite walls of the tunnel and on the fenders of the truck testified that the drivers didn't always make it through on the first try.

The Tatra pulled into the courtyard and, with a great clas.h.i.+ng of gears and bursts of sooty diesel exhaust, backed up to within ten feet of an interior door.

The heavy wooden door opened inward and three guards came out. They were middle-aged men in gray uniforms and black boots. Carrying billy clubs and small .32-caliber automatic pistols in closed-top holsters, two of them took up positions facing each other between the truck and the door. The third, holding a clipboard in gray woolen gloved hands, stood to one side by the door. As the prisoners came out of the door and started to climb onto the truck, he checked their names off on a roster.

The prisoners, of various ages and sizes, wore loose-fitting black duck jackets and trousers over whatever clothing they had been wearing when they were arrested. On their heads were black cotton caps with brims, universally too large. These covered their ears as well as the tops of their heads. There were more than thirty of them, more than the Tatra's dump body could comfortably accommodate sitting down. It was necessary for them to line the three walls of the truck bed (the rear wall of the dump truck was slanted) standing up and hanging on to the wall and each other.

It was just after six in the morning, and they had just been fed. Breakfast had been a hunk of dark bread and a veal, potato, and cabbage soup. It was hearty fare and tasty. The intention of the prison authorities was obviously to provide adequate nutrition for the prisoners. There would be a second meal, bread and lard, and a third at night, always a gulyas (stew). This sometimes had paprika, making the traditional Hungarian stew, and sometimes just chunks of meat floating in a rich broth with potatoes and cabbage.

When all the prisoners had climbed onto the Tatra truck, the guard with the clipboard went back inside the prison. The other two guards went to a small BMW motorcycle, kicked it into life, and waited for the truck to leave the courtyard. Then they followed it, ten or fifteen yards behind, making a series of slow turns on the cobblestones so they would not catch up with it and have to stop.

St. Gertrud's prison was on the edge of Pecs. Three minutes after leaving the prison, the truck was groaning in low gear as it climbed a narrow and winding cobblestone street. The motorcycle had to come to a stop three times to wait for the truck to get ahead.

The truck climbed to the top of a hill, then started down the other side, equally steep and winding. The truck moved very slowly, in low gear, for it had snowed the night before, and there was a layer of slush over the cobblestones. When the road was clear, the truck went down the hill at a terrifying rate.

When it had almost reached the bottom of the hill, the truck turned off onto a road that appeared to be paved with coal. There was a dirt road under the coal, but coal falling from trucks had then been crushed under other trucks, so that there was in fact a three-inch-deep layer of coal paving the road.

When the truck reached the mine head and stopped, the prisoners, without being told what to do, got off the truck and walked to the shaft head. There, suspended from an enormous wheel, like a monstrous water bucket over a well, was a steel-framed elevator. The prisoners filed onto it until they closely packed it.

Then the basket descended into the mine.

Fifty feet from the surface, it began to get dark. At one hundred feet, they could see nothing at all; it was like being blind. By three hundred feet, however, their pupils had reacted to the absence of light and dilated to the point where some sight returned.

At five hundred feet, when the basket stopped with a groan and then bounced up and down until the elasticity of the cables had expended itself, there were faintly glowing electric lights.

The prisoners were issued carbide headlamps by a foreman. They gathered around a table to clean them. Then they filled the bra.s.s fuel tanks with fingernail-size pellets of carbide, added water, and quickly screwed the covers in place. The headlamps began to hiss as the water reacted chemically on the carbide and produced gas. The prisoners ignited the escaping gas from a lamp burning on the table, then adjusted the lamps to their heads.

The foreman looked over the prisoners and gestured at two of them. They went to him as the others walked into a tunnel.

I have been selected to shovel donkey s.h.i.+t, First Lieutenant Eric Fulmar, Infantry, Army of the United States, thought. First Lieutenant Eric Fulmar, Infantry, Army of the United States, thought. I wonder why. That job usually goes to the old men; shoveling donkey s.h.i.+t and spreading straw doesn't require as much strength as wielding picks or sledgehammers or coal shovels. I wonder why. That job usually goes to the old men; shoveling donkey s.h.i.+t and spreading straw doesn't require as much strength as wielding picks or sledgehammers or coal shovels.

The basic motive power in the mines was donkeys. They were hitched to a coal car and dragged the full car to the elevator. They were then unhitched, the coal car manhandled onto the basket, and the basket hauled to the surface.

The donkeys were then hitched to an empty coal car, which they dragged back along the rails to be filled again with coal.

Eric at first had been horrified at what appeared to be cruel and inhumane treatment of the animals, even though he was aware that, in the circ.u.mstances, there was little room for him to pity anything, human or animal. He had then expected any minute that the Gestapo or the SS-or the Hungarian version thereof, the Black Guard-would show up and introduce themselves by knocking him down and kicking his teeth out to put him in the right frame of mind for the interrogation to follow.

But that had not happened. Except for one man, the last Black Guards he had seen were the ones who had carried him and Professor Dyer to St. Gertrud's prison. That man had been a corporal or a sergeant (Fulmar was not sure about their rank insignia) he had seen the next morning. That morning, the one Black Guard had been sitting backward on a chair watching, as prison guards went through the paperwork.

A prison guard had dumped on the table the contents of a gray paper envelope containing all the personal property taken from him when they had arrested him on the barge. Except for his wrist.w.a.tch and his money. The prison guard, in soft German, had told him to identify the property taken from him, and to sign a form he handed him. It had not seemed to be a propitious time to bring up the missing money or the wrist.w.a.tch.

"Your property will be returned to you at the completion of your sentence," the guard had said.

Fulmar had said nothing, praying that his relief would not be evident on his face. He had quickly come up with a scenario that seemed to make sense, but was frightening because it seemed to be too good to be true: He and Dyer had been arrested not because the Gestapo and the SS-SD were looking for them all over German-occupied Europe, but because they seemed to be black marketeers who had come to Hungary with a good deal of money in search of foodstuffs.

Painfully aware that it was wishful thinking, he began to realize that the Black Guards who had stopped and searched the barge and found them had been looking for black marketeers-not to bring them before the bar of justice, but to find them with large amounts of cash that could "disappear" between the time they were arrested and the time they got to the police station.

If the Black Guards charged them with black marketing, which was a serious crime, requiring a formal trial, the state would take the money Fulmar had with him. If, on the other hand, they were charged with "unauthorized travel," the euphemism for Austrians and Germans who came privately to Hungary to buy sausage and smoked ham and salami for their own use, there was no need for the subject of the money to come up at all.

"May I ask, Sir, what my sentence is?" Eric had asked very carefully.

"You have been sentenced by the Munic.i.p.al Magistrate to three months' confinement at hard labor for unauthorized travel to Pecs," the prison guard had said.

"Yes, Sir," Fulmar said. "Thank you, Sir."

"Three months in the mines," the Black Guard had said, in barely understandable German, "will be good for you. And maybe it will even teach you that you can't slip things past the river patrol."

There was a suggestion there that if he had offered the Black Guard on the boat a little money, he would not have been arrested at all.

There was a terrible temptation to press his luck, to offer them more money to let them go. But he realized in time that he was so overexcited by fear that he couldn't trust his own judgment. He was deeply aware that a vein on his temple was pulsing in time with his heart. And his ears rang.

"I will remember that, Sir," Fulmar said, managing a weak smile.

Smiling, the prison guard waved him out of the little office.

As quickly as the first scenario had come to him, others followed, and they were not nearly as pleasant. A hundred things could go wrong: Professor Dyer might panic. He might decide to try to save his own skin by turning on Fulmar. And Gisella had not been arrested. So he might decide that turning himself and/or Fulmar in would somehow help her.

But above all, there was the alarm sounded for all of them by the Gestapo and the SS-SD. It was wishful thinking gone mad to hope that no connection would be made between the two men the entire German security services were looking for and the two "persons traveling to Pecs without authorization."

But there had been nothing to do about that possibility but pray.

On his second day in the mines, Professor Dyer had crushed his fingers under the wheels of one of the coal cars. He had been taken from the mine, howling in pain. It had been easy then to imagine that the accident would attract the authorities to him, but that hadn't happened, either.

Dyer's hand had been treated and bandaged. And he now spent his days one-handedly sweeping out the cells in St. Gertrud's and replacing the straw in the mattresses.

Every night, when he got back, Fulmar had to display a confidence that he did not feel at all. He had to rea.s.sure Dyer they had nothing to worry about, that all they had to do was avoid attracting attention to themselves, and they would be turned free.

And every morning, he gave the professor what he hoped was an encouraging wink as he filed out of the cell block to get on the truck.

The donkeys in their stalls stood waiting stoically to be led out and hitched to the coal cars. They didn't seem to mind, obviously, doing what was expected of them. Being in the mines, for them, was the way things were.

The mine corridor where the donkeys had their stalls was several hundred feet long; the donkey stalls occupied the center portion. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of donkey manure. There was a sharp odor on top of that, ammonia-like, from donkey urine.