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And how did he know the crew had parachuted to safety?

But Jamison hadn’t wanted to talk to them, and there was no one else they could think of who would have the answers, and the brass seemed hysterical about secrecy, so they kept their mouths shut.

Chapter TWO

Batthyany Palace

Holy Trinity Square

Budapest, Hungary

1115 Hours 29 January 1943

Beatrice, Countess Batthyany and Baroness von Steighofen, was wearing a sable coat that reached nearly to her ankles when she walked across the parquet floor to take the telephone call.

Under the coat, she wore a tweed skirt and two sweaters. Her feet were in a pair of sheepskin-lined over-the-ankle boots that had once belonged to her late husband, and her legs were encased in knitted woolen stockings reaching over her knees. Her red hair was somewhat sloppily done up in a loose bun, into which she had just stuck the side pieces of a rather ugly pair of tortoiseshell spectacles.

The Countess had been reading when informed of the telephone call, and Batthyany Palace was as cold as a witch’s teat. The palace, directly across Holy Trinity Square from St. Matthias’ Church, had been built at approximately the same time (1775-77) as the royal castle (1715-70) atop Castle Hill, and it had always been difficult to heat. Without adequate supplies of coal, it was now damned near impossible.

The irony was, she had coal, lots of it. There were half a dozen coal mines running around the clock on Batthyany property. The problem was in getting the coal from the mines to Batthyany Palace. That required trucks. She had been allocated one truckload per month, and she didn’t always get that. Even when she did, one truckload was nowhere near enough to heat the palace.

She didn’t bother trying to heat the lower floor, nor the upper two floors. They had been shut off with ugly, and really not very effective, wooden barriers over the stairwells. Only the first floor was occupied.

The Countess was living in a five-room apartment overlooking Holy Trinity Square, but she often thought she might as well be living in the basement for all she saw of the square. Most of the floor-to-ceiling windows had been timbered over to hold in the heat from the tall, porcelain-covered stoves in the corners of the rooms. The two windows leading to the balconies over the square, and, in the rear, the garden that were not timbered over were covered with seldom-opened drapes.

The telephone beside the Countess’s bed had stopped working two months before. When she had—personally, after her butler had gotten nowhere with them—called the Post Office people to complain, she had been rudely informed that there was a war on, and that they couldn’t tell her when there would be someone available to come fix it.

“I regret, my dear Countess,” the man had said, “that you will be forced to use one of the other eleven telephones my records show you have available to you in the palace.”

He was unmoved when she told him that eight of the twelve telephones in the palace were in the shut-off portions.

The nearest working telephone to the Countess’s bedroom was in the corridor leading to her apartment from the first-floor sitting room. It was— like the porcelain stoves—American. The Countess was convinced that it was faults in the Hungarian Post Office wiring rather than in the American telephone that forced her into the corridor.

She picked up the telephone, and as she did, she glanced at herself in the gilt-framed mirror on the wall. She shook her head at the way she looked.

“My dear von Heurten-Mitnitz,” the Countess said. “How nice to hear from you! Are you in Budapest?”

“I have been appointed First Secretary of the Embassy,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

“May I offer my congratulations?” the Countess said.

“That’s very kind of you, Countess,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said.

“How long have you been here?” she asked.

“I arrived last night,” he said.

“Beastly train ride, isn’t it?” she said. “You must be exhausted.”

“Actually, I drove,” von Heurten-Mitnitz said. “Standartenführer Müller has also been assigned here, and I brought his car down for him.”

“That’s your friend? That plump little Hessian, the one who looks like a pickle barrel? ” the Countess asked.

Helmut von Heurten-Mitnitz laughed.

“Indeed,” he said.

“The situation—I won’t say ‘politics’—” the Countess said, “makes for strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?”