He talked about the Slovaks as a Russian would have talked about Uzbeks or Kazakhs. Socialist solidarity seemed moderately thin on the ground here. Gribkov drained the tumbler. The wine wasn’t vodka, but you could feel it when you drank enough. With a lopsided grin, the pilot said, “Instead, you got me spilling over into your country.”
“I’m just glad the militiamen found you before…anyone else did,” said Geza Latos or Latos Geza.
“So am I,” Boris said. Some of the troubles he’d tried to bomb away in Bratislava plainly had spilled over into northwestern Hungary. The secret policeman’s comment wasn’t what brought them to the Russian’s notice. The way the militiamen kept close together, as if against a hostile world, and pointed their machine pistols every which way spoke volumes about how nervous they were.
“Traitors. Traitors and Fascists. We’re hunting them down. When we catch them, they’re sorry they ever had anything to do with the decadent, reactionary West.” The secret policeman poured Gribkov’s tumbler full again. This time, he poured wine for himself, too. He raised his glass. “To the triumph of the world proletarian revolution!” He drank.
So did Boris. No Soviet fighting man could possibly fail to drink that toast. As he savored the Bull’s Blood, the Russian eyed the secret policeman. The Hungarian seemed more zealous than most Soviet Communists Gribkov knew. Maybe he had to be. Hungary was newly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. If you weren’t a zealot here, people were liable to take you for a backslider.
Gribkov’s head started to buzz. The wine wasn’t so strong as vodka, of course, but drink enough and you’d know it was there, all right. As inconspicuously as he could, he touched the tip of his nose. It was numb. That was a sure sign he was on his way to getting smashed.
He had to work harder to remember German. “How will I go back to the Soviet Union?” he asked, knowing he made a hash of the verb and the syntax. Well, Geza Latos or Latos Geza or whatever the hell his name was didn’t talk exactly like a Fritz, either. He had his own funny accent and turns of phrase.
“We’ve notified the Soviet embassy and the Soviet occupying forces that we recovered you,” the Magyar answered. “They are sending a convoy to bring you to the airport outside of Budapest. As far as I know, nothing has gone wrong with the convoy. It should come here to Magyarovar quite soon.”
“I see.” Boris wondered if he did. Magyarovar lay in the far northwest of Hungary, where a chunk of it stuck up between Austria and Czechoslovakia. “Why do they need a convoy? Wouldn’t a car do? Aren’t the roads safe?”
The secret policeman stared down into his half-empty glass of Bull’s Blood as if the crimson liquid held the secrets of the universe. After a long hesitation, he said, “Not…perfectly. Because of your value, Comrade Pilot, your countrymen don’t wish to take any chances with you. As I say, some trouble has spilled into the Hungarian People’s Republic from Slovakia. They want to be sure they can frighten off or beat back any bandits they may meet.”
“I see,” Gribkov said again. What he saw was anti-Soviet rebellion in Hungary as well as Czechoslovakia. Was there more in Poland? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Poles and Russians had always fought like cats and dogs. The Russian dog was bigger, so it won most of the brawls, but not without picking up scratches on its nose and ears.
“We will triumph in the end. True Communism will arrive. The dialectic shows how inevitable that is,” said Geza Latos or Latos Geza. He was about forty, with narrow green eyes and a cleft chin. Not quite idly, Boris wondered what he’d done and which slogans he’d mouthed during the last war.
It didn’t matter, really. As long as his bosses were happy with the man, Boris couldn’t complain. When you gave a country a whole new government, as the USSR had done all over Eastern and Central Europe, you used the tools that came to hand. You couldn’t do anything else. The ones who hadn’t been true believers before the Red Army thundered in were at least smart enough to see which side of their bread held the butter.
The convoy didn’t come when the secret policeman thought it would. He tried to telephone Budapest, but had trouble getting through. “I’m sorry,” he told Gribkov. “It can’t be helped.”
“Nichevo,” Boris replied, which meant the same thing in Russian.
They gave him a bowl of pork stewed in cream and peppers hot enough to make sweat burst out on his forehead. To cool his scorched mouth, they gave him more Bull’s Blood, enough so he stopped caring about the convoy.
It was dark by the time his escort did reach Magyarovar. Boris blinked when he saw it: it consisted of four tanks shepherding a BTR-152 armored personnel carrier. The tanks were only T-34/85s, but even so….
“Sorry we took so long, sir,” said the first lieutenant in charge of things. “We lost one tank to a mine in the roadway.”
“Bozehmoi!” Gribkov wondered how much lethal hardware left over from the last war was squirreled away here and there in countries like this. He also wondered who was taking it out of the hoards and using it against the USSR now that his country had bigger worries.
They loaded him into the armored personnel carrier and headed east, toward Budapest. Unlike the tanks, the BTR-152 was new. Though the Germans and Americans had, the Red Army hadn’t fielded a vehicle of this class in the last war. They’d made up for it since. The rear compartment could hold seventeen soldiers. Gribkov had it all to himself. He realized that his superiors really must have believed him valuable to the rodina.
An hour and a half out of Magyarovar, several bullets clattered off the BTR-152’s armor. Boris almost jumped out of his skin. He jumped again when the carrier’s machine gun fired back. One of the tanks’ cannons thundered. The convoy didn’t stop, or even slow.
That was the sole trouble they had on the way to Budapest. Gribkov saw only the stretch of ground between the personnel carrier and the Li-2 (a Soviet copy of the DC-3) that waited for him at the airfield. The plane took off, flying east. The little Boris had seen of Hungary was…interesting.
–
The POW camp where they stashed Istvan Szolovits was not far outside of Lyon. It held captured soldiers from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, plus a few Bulgarians and Romanians who had trouble talking with anybody else.
A colonel named Bela Medgyessy was the senior Hungarian officer in the camp. “Ah,” he said when they brought Istvan to him. As such things went, that was polite, but Istvan understood what it meant. Here’s a damned Jew. The colonel didn’t look like an old-fashioned Magyar aristocrat; he looked like a plumber. But he had the same prejudices as the men the new Communist regime had purged.
“Here I am, sir,” Istvan said resignedly. The soldiers who’d captured him had treated him better than his alleged countrymen were in the habit of doing.
“Here you are, yes.” Medgyessy showed a little more distaste than one of those smooth aristos would have, but only a little. “Since you’re here, tell me where you were and what you were doing when they caught you.”
“Yes, sir.” Istvan did, finishing, “They took me for a Russian at first, the stupid clodhoppers.”
No Magyar would have taken kindly to that. Of course, in Bela Medgyessy’s eyes a Hungarian Jew was no Magyar. The colonel looked him over. “You’re good-sized, anyhow. Do you play football?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Istvan answered at once.
“A back, I’d guess,” Medgyessy said, and he was a good guesser. Istvan wasn’t quick or nimble enough for midfield or forward, but he wasn’t afraid to bang in the penalty area, either. The officer went on, “We’ve got a league going with the Czechs and the Fritzes and the Polacks. We’ll see what you can do.”
“That should be, uh, interesting, sir.” Istvan wondered whether he’d got into a fiercer war than the one he’d got out of. Magyars and Czechs got along like water and sodium. Magyars and Poles weren’t a match made in heaven, either.