The Trinity Six - Charles Cumming [126]
‘Enjoy yourself,’ said the policeman.
Gaddis wasn’t sure that he had heard correctly. Was he imagining it? But the officer had turned his attention to the Hungarian and his girlfriend, both of whom flashed tickets at him with complete indifference to his authority. Perhaps these kind of searches were commonplace. Just then, a radio crackled on the jacket of the second officer. He responded instantly to the message, walking directly out of the carriage and down on to the track.
‘What happened?’ Gaddis asked.
‘They find him,’ said the Hungarian.
Both men stood in their seats and craned to look at the police cars parked at the level crossing. Through the cluster of passengers trying to see the same thing, Gaddis made out a young man who was being bundled into the back seat of the furthest car. A policewoman pushed his head downwards with the flat of her hand, and there were handcuffs on his wrists, secured behind his back.
‘Any idea what that was?’ Gaddis asked.
The Hungarian shook his head. ‘No. I do not,’ he said, and leaned over to kiss his girlfriend.
Chapter 47
An hour later, the train was pulling through the ghost town suburbs of Budapest, past abandoned freight cars on sidings, clusters of wild poppies and weeds. Gaddis saw the entrance to Keleti station opening up ahead in a delta of gleaming tracks. It felt like a cause for celebration. It was now surely just a question of meeting Eva’s contact and of being driven out to the airport.
He stepped down on to the platform and was immediately surrounded by a gaggle of local men and women offering him a room for the night, a taxi into town, a meal at a local restaurant.
‘Car?’ they said as he shook his head. ‘Where you like go, sir?’
He ignored them and stuck to Eva’s instructions, walking towards the great glassed roof of the station in search of Miklós. There was a bench fifty metres along the platform, positioned just a few feet from the ticket inspectors. Sitting on it, exactly as she had described, was a man with a beard wearing a green jacket. Gaddis could see a bottle of Vittel in the man’s left hand. At that moment, Miklós looked up and caught Gaddis’s eye, smiling broadly. Gaddis knew immediately that he would like him: the Hungarian, who was about fifty, had quick, lively eyes, mischief in his face and the aura of a man who was lucky and self-assured.
‘Mr Sam?’ he said, reaching to shake his hand.
Gaddis took it. Miklós was wearing brown leather gloves. The palm was sticky and cold against his own.
‘Will you forgive me if I ask who sent you here?’ Gaddis asked.
‘Of course I will forgive you.’ Miklós was still smiling, still pumping his hand. ‘It is important to be certain about these things, no? My name is Miklós. I was sent to meet you by our mutual friend, Eva, in Vienna, who was in turn acting for the woman you once knew as Josephine Warner.’
Gaddis felt a wave of relief. Miklós took his bag, against Gaddis’s protestations, and walked past the ticket inspectors without a glance. They went outside to a four-door Seat parked just a block from the station.
‘We go to my apartment first,’ Miklós explained. Gaddis thought that there was nothing unusual about this. ‘Your aeroplane, it does not leave for a few hours.’
He had opened the rear door of the car, as if hiring a taxi, but realized his mistake and moved to the passenger seat. Outside, Budapest felt a world away from Vienna, churning and chaotic and still touched by the faded grandeur of Communism. Gaddis was reminded of the grey, dirty light in Moscow; there was that same blanket smell of bitumen and diesel on the air and he felt the kinship of a world with which he was far more familiar. Miklós drove quickly, swerving and leaning on the horn, down film noir boulevards that, to Gaddis’s romantic eye, were full of all the bustle and wonder and threat that had been scoured clean from modern