"Watch the headlines in the Washington Post," Eugene suggested.

Philip Swett had a hard time rounding up the usual movers and shakers for his regular Sat.u.r.day night Georgetown bash. Sundry stars of the Washington press corps, senior White House aides, Cabinet members. Supreme Court justices, members of the Joint Chiefs, State Department topsiders and Pickle Factory mavens had asked for rain checks; they were all too busy following the breaking news to socialize. Joe Alsop, who had popularized the domino theory in one of his columns, dropped by but fled in mid-c.o.c.ktail when he received an urgent phone call from his office (it seemed that Moscow had just threatened to use rockets if the Israelis didn't agree to a Middle East ceasefire and the British and French continued to menace Egypt). Which left Swett presiding over a motley crew of under-secretaries and legislative a.s.sistants and the stray guest, his daughter Adelle and his son-in-law Leo Kritzky among them. Putting the best face on the situation, he waved everyone into the dining room. "Looks like Stevenson is going down in flames next Tuesday," he announced, motioning for the waiters to uncork the Champagne and fill the gla.s.ses. "Latest polls give Ike fifty-seven percent of the popular vote. Electoral college won't even be close."

"Adlai never had a chance," a State Department desk officer observed. "No way a cerebral governor from Illinois is going to whip General Eisenhower, what with a full-fledged revolution raging in Hungary and the Middle East in flames."

"People are terrified we'll drift into world war," remarked a Republican speech writer. "They want someone at the helm who's been tested under fire. "

"It's one thing to be terrified of war," maintained a Navy captain attached to the Joint Chiefs. "It's another to sit on the sidelines when our allies-the British and French and Israelis-attack Egypt to get back the Suez Ca.n.a.l. If we don't help out our friends, chances are they won't be there for us when we need them."

"Ike is just being prudent," explained the State Department desk officer. "The Russians are already jittery over the Hungarian uprising. The Israeli invasion of Sinai, the British and French raids on Egyptian airfields, could lead Moscow to miscalculate."

"In the atomic age it would only take one teeny miscalculation to destroy the world," declared Adelle. "Speaking as the mother of two small ones, I don't fault an American president for being cautious."

Leo said, "Still and all, there's such a thing as being too cautious."

"Explain yourself," Swett challenged from the head of the table.

Leo glanced at Adelle, who raised her eyebrows as if to say: For goodness sake, don't let him browbeat you. Smiling self-consciously, Leo turned back to his father-in-law. "The data I've seen suggests that Khrushchev and the others on the Politburo have lost their taste for confrontation." he said. "It's true they rattle their sabers from time to time, like this threat to intervene in the Suez matter. But we need to look at their actions, as opposed to their words-for starters, they pulled two divisions out of Budapest when the Hungarians took to the streets. If we play our cards right, Hungary could be pried out of the Soviet sphere and wind up in the Western camp."

"Russians believe in the domino theory as much as we do," said a much-published think tank professor who made a small fortune consulting for the State Department. "If they let one satellite break away others are bound to follow. They can't afford to run that risk."

"Is that what you're telling the State Department-that you think the Red Army will invade Hungary?" Swett asked.

"Count on it, the Red Army will be back, and in force," the professor predicted.

"If the Russians do invade Hungary," Leo said, "America and NATO will be hard put to sit on their hands. After all these years of talking about rolling back Communism, we'll have to put up or shut up if we want to remain credible."

Adelle, who worked as a legislative a.s.sistant for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, looked surprised. "Are you saying we ought to go to war to keep our credibility?" she asked.

Before Leo could answer, the State Department desk officer said, "Mark my words, n.o.body's going to war over Hungary. Knowing Ike, knowing John Foster Dulles, if push comes to shove my guess is we'll back down."

"I hope you're wrong," Leo persisted earnestly. "I hope, at the very least, they have the nerve to bluff the Russians. Look, if the Russians can't be sure how America will react, then the doves on the Politburo, Khrushchev among them, might be able to keep the hawks in line."

The grandfather clock was closing in on midnight by the time the last of the guests had departed. With only family remaining-since the birth of his twin granddaughters, two years before, Philip Swett grudgingly included Leo under 'family'-the host broke out a bottle of very aged and very expensive Napoleon cognac and filled three snifters. "To us," he said, raising a gla.s.s. A grunt of pure pleasure escaped his lips after he swallowed the first sip of cognac. Turning the snifter in his fingers, he gazed sideways at his son-in-law. "Knew you were an ardent anti-Communist, Leo-suppose you wouldn't be in the Company if you weren't-but never thought you were madcap about it. This Hungary business brings out the gung-ho in you."

"There is something exhilarating about a slave nation breaking free, " Leo admitted.

"I've got nothing against a slave nation breaking free long as it doesn't bring the world down around our ears."

"Each of us has his own idea of where American national interest lies-" Leo started to say.

"By golly, it's not in America's national interest to bring on a nuclear war which could reduce America to volcanic ashes!" Swett squinted at Leo. "You appear to be pretty d.a.m.n sure of yourself when you say Khrushchev and Company went and lost their taste for confrontation. What do you know that's not in the newspapers? Has that Pickle Factory of yours got a spy in the Politburo?"

Leo smiled uncomfortably. "It's just an educated guess."

Swett snorted. "Ask me, sounds more like an uneducated guess."

"I don't agree with what he's saying any more than you do, Daddy," Adelle said, "but Leo's ent.i.tled to his opinion."

"Not saying he isn't. Just saying he's full of c.r.a.p."

Swett was grinning as he spoke, which made it impossible for Leo to take offense. "On that note," he said, setting the snifter on a table, pushing himself to his feet, "we ought to be heading home to relieve the baby-sitter. He nodded at his father-in-law. "Phil."

Swett nodded back. "Leo."

Adelle sighed. "Well, at least the two of you know each other's name.

Leaning over the small table in the inner sanctum off the library of the Abak.u.mov mansion outside of Moscow, matching the numbers on the message to the letters on the grid of the one-time pad, Starik meticulously deciphered the bulletin from his agent in Rome; he didn't want messages dealing with KHOLSTOMER pa.s.sing through the hands of code clerks. The several sums of US dollars, transferred over the past six months to a Swiss bank from SovGaz and the Soviet Import-Export Cooperative, then speedily paid out to various sh.e.l.l companies in Luxembourg that channeled the money on to the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank, and finally to the Vatican Bank itself, were accounted for.

Starik burned the enciphered message and the one-time pad in a coal stove, then inserted the deciphered message in the old-fashioned file box with an iron hasp. The words Soversheno Sekretno ("Top Secret") and KHOLSTOMER were written in beautiful Cyrillic script across the oak cover. He placed the box on the shelf of the large safe that was cemented into the wall behind the portrait of Lenin, enabled the destruction mechanism, closed the heavy door and carefully double-locked it at the top and at the bottom with the only existing key, which he kept attached to the wrought silver chain hanging around his neck.

Then he turned his attention to the next message, which the code clerks working in the top floor room-within-a-room had just broken out of its cipher. It had come in marked "Urgent Immediate" fourteen minutes earlier. The clerk who had delivered the deciphered version to Starik mentioned that the Washington rezidentura, using emergency contact procedures, had come on the air outside its regularly scheduled transmissions, which underscored the importance of the matter.

As Starik read through SASHA's brief message-"I wish to G.o.d I could help them, but I can't." -his eyes brightened. He reached for the phone and dialed the gatehouse. "Bring my car around to the front door immediately," he ordered.

Starik extracted the last of the hollow-tipped Bulgarian cigarettes from the packet and thrust it between his lips. He crumpled the empty packet and tossed it into the corrugated burn bin on his next turn around the anteroom. One of the half-dozen KGB heavies sitting around on wooden benches reading photo magazines noticed Starik patting his pockets and offered a light. Bending over the flame, Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov sucked the cigarette into life.

'How long have they been at it?" he called across the room to the secretary, a dreary-faced young man wearing goggle-like eyegla.s.ses, who was sitting behind the desk next to the door.

"Since nine this morning," he answered.

'Seven hours," one of the bodyguards grunted.

From behind the shut door of the Politburo conference room came the m.u.f.fled sound of riotous argument. Every now and then someone would raise his voice and a phrase would be audible: "Simply not possible to give you a written guarantee." "No choice but to support us." "Matter of days at the most." "Weigh the consequences." "If you refuse the responsibility it will be on your head."

Starik stopped in front of the male secretary. "Are you certain he know I am here?"

"I placed your note in front of him. What more can I do?"

"It is vital that I speak to him before a decision is taken," Starik said "Ring through to him on the phone."

"I am under strict instructions not to interrupt-"

"And I am instructing you to interrupt. It will go badly for you if you refuse."

The young man was caught in an agony of indecision. "If you give me another written message, Comrade Colonel General, I can attempt to deliver it in such a way as to ensure that he has read it."

Starik scribbled a second note on a pad and ripped it off. The secretary filled his lungs with air and plunged into the room, leaving the door partly open behind him. "Run unacceptable risks if we do not intervene." "Still recovering from the last war." "Only thing counterrevolutionists understand is force."

The door opened wider and the secretary returned. The round figure of Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev materialized behind him. The six heavies lounging around the room sprang to their feet. Starik dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out with the toe of one of his soft boots.

Khrushchev was in a foul mood. "What the devil is so important that it cannot wait until-"

Starik produced a plain brown envelope from the inside pocket of his long peasant's jacket, pulled several sheets of paper from it and held them out to Khrushchev. "These speak for themselves."

The First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party fitted on a pair of steel-rimmed reading gla.s.ses and started to skim the doc.u.ments. As he finished the first sheet, his thick lips parted. From time to time he would glance up and pose a question.

"How sure are you of the source of these reports?"

"I would stake my life on him."

"These appear to be minutes of a meeting-"

"There was a three-way conversation on a secure telephone line between CIA Director Dulles; his brother, John Foster Dulles, who is recuperating in a Washington hospital; and Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. A stenographer in the office of CIA Director Dulles recorded the conversation."

Khrushchev chuckled. "I will not ask you how these records came into your possession."

Starik did not smile. "I would not tell you if you did."

Khrushchev bristled. "If I instruct you to tell me, you will tell me."

Starik stood his ground. "I would quit first."

Nikolai Bulganin, the one-time mayor of Moscow who, on Khrushchev's insistence, had been named premier the previous year, appeared at the door behind the First Secretary.

"Nikita Sergeyevich, Marshal Zhukov is pressing for an answer-"

Khrushchev pa.s.sed the pages he'd already read to Bulganin. "Look through these, Nikolai Aleksandrovich," he ordered crisply. He read through the remaining pages, reread two of them, then looked up. His small eyes danced excitedly in his round face. "The parenthetical observation at the top," he said, lowering his voice, "suggests that these words were spoken in the White House."

Starik permitted himself a faint smile.

Khrushchev showed the last doc.u.ment to Bulganin, then returned the papers to Starik. "My thanks to you, Pasha Semyonovich. Of course, this permits us to a.s.sess the situation in a different light." With that, both the First Secretary and the Soviet premier returned to the conference room, closing the door behind them.

The KGB heavies settled back onto the benches. The young secretary breathed a sigh of relief. Behind the thick wooden door the storm seemed to have abated, replaced by the droning of unruffled men moving briskly in the direction of a rational decision.

9.

BUDAPEST, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1956.

ON THE STAGE OF THE CORVIN CINEMA, AMID A CLUTTER Of orange peels and empty sardine tins and broken ammunition crates and discarded clothing and heaps of mimeographed tracts and a.s.sorted weaponry, the players in the drama waited for the curtain to rise on the third act. Half a dozen teenage girls fitted machine gun bullets, smuggled in from a Hungarian Army base the previous night, into cartridge belts as they giggled over boys who had caught their eye. Several older women, sitting in a semicircle under the stage, filled empty beer bottles with petrol and then stuffed cloth wicks into them. In a corner, Zoltan, Ebby's gypsy radioman, sharpened the long curved blade of his father's father's knife on a snakestone, testing it every now and then against the ball of his thumb. A young squad leader, just back from patrolling the Pest bank of the Danube, stripped off his bandolier, leather jacket and knitted sweater and crawled onto a pallet alongside his sleeping girlfriend, a freckle-faced teenager with blonde pigtails; she stirred and turned and buried her head in the boy's neck, and the two whispered for several minutes before falling asleep in each other s arms. In the back of the auditorium Ebby dozed on one of the folding wooden seats, his head propped against a window curtain rolled into a makeshift pillow. Elizabet lay stretched across three seats in the row behind him, a Hungarian Army greatcoat covering her body, a sailor s watch cap pulled over her eyes and ears shutting out the light and sound, but not the tension. Shortly before four in the morning Arpad lumbered through the double door of the theater and looked around. He spotted Ebby and strode across the auditorium to sink wearily onto the seat next to him.

Ebby came awake instantly. "Are the rumors true?" he demanded.

Arpad, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, nodded gloomily. "You must get the news to your American friends in Vienna. Pal Maleter and the other members of the delegation were invited to continue the negotiations at the Russian command post on the island of Tokol in the Danube. Sometime after eleven last night, Maleter phoned to say everything was in order. An hour later his driver turned up at the Parliament and reported that Maleter and the others had been arrested. The KGB burst into the conference room during a coffee break. Maleter's driver was napping in the cloakroom. In the confusion he was overlooked. Later he managed to slip out a back door. He said the Russian general negotiating with Meleter was furious with the KGB. He'd given him his word as a soldier that the Hungarian delegation would be safe. The leader of the KGB squad took the general aside and whispered something in his ear. The general waved his hand in disgust and stalked out of the room. The KGB threw burlap sacks over the heads of our negotiators and led them away."

"This can only mean one thing," Ebby whispered.

Arpad nodded grimly. "We are betrayed by everyone," he said dully. "There is nothing left for us except to die fighting."

From beyond the thick walls of the Corvin Cinema came the dry thud of cannon fire; it sounded like someone discreetly knocking on a distant door. Somewhere in Pest several artillery sh.e.l.ls exploded. Around the auditorium students were climbing to their feet in alarm. A sh.e.l.l burst on Ulloi Avenue, shaking the building. Everyone started talking at once until an Army officer clambered onto a stepladder and shouted for silence. He began issuing orders. Grabbing their weapons, filling their overcoat pockets with Molotov c.o.c.ktails, the students headed for the exits.

Elizabet was on her feet in the row behind Ebby and Arpad, shivering under the greatcoat pulled over her shoulders like a cape. Clutching her mutilated breast, she listened for a moment to the distant thunder and the explosions. The blood drained from her already pale lips. "What is happening?" she whispered.

Arpad stood up. "The Russians have come back, my dear Elizabet. They have declared war on our revolution." He started to say something else but his voice was lost in the burst of a sh.e.l.l between the Corvin Cinema and the Kilian Barracks across the street. The explosion cut off the electricity. The lights in the cinema blinked out as a fine powdery dust rained down from the ceiling.

Around the auditorium flashlights flickered on. Ebby b.u.t.tonholed Zoltan and the two of them made their way by flashlight to the makeshift pa.s.sageway that had been cut in the walls between the Cinema and the adjoining apartment building, and climbed up to the top floor room that had been turned into a radio shack. With the stub of a pencil Ebby started printing out a CRITIC to Vienna Station. "Don't bother enciphering this," he told Zoltan. "The most important thing now is-"

The whine of Russian MiGs screaming low over the rooftops drowned out Ebby. As the planes curled away, he heard the dry staccato bark of their wing cannons. Racing to a window, he saw flames leaping from the roof of the building next to the Kilian Barracks across the intersection. Zoltan, his face creased into a preoccupied frown, wired the transceiver to an automobile battery and fiddled with the tuning k.n.o.b until the needle indicated he was smack on the carrier signal. Then he plugged in the Morse key. Ebby finished the message and pa.s.sed it to Zoltan, and then held the flashlight while the gypsy radioman tapped out his words: soviet artillery on Buda hills began sh.e.l.ling Pest 4 this morning explosions heard throughout city one sh.e.l.l landed street outside corvin soviet jets strafing rebel strongpoints according unconfirmed report kgb arrested nagy defense minister pal meleter and other members hungarian negotiating team last night hungarians at corvin preparing for house to house resistance but unlikely prevail this time Bending low over the Morse key, working it with two fingers of his right hand, Zoltan signed off using Ebby's code name. Ebby caught the sound of tank engines coughing their way down Ulloi. He threw open the window and leaned out. Far down the wide avenue, a long line of dull headlights could be seen weaving toward the Cinema. Every minute or so the tanks pivoted spastically on their treads and sh.e.l.led a building at point blank range. As Zoltan had predicted when they installed the radio shack on the top floor, the Russian tanks were unable to elevate their cannons in the limited s.p.a.ce of the streets. So they were simply shooting the ground floors out from under the buildings, and letting the upper floors collapse into the bas.e.m.e.nts. "I think we'd better get the h.e.l.l out of here," Ebby decided. Zoltan didn't need to be told twice. While Ebby retrieved the antenna attached to the stovepipe on the roof, he stuffed the battery and the transceiver into his knapsack. The gypsy led the way back through the deserted corridors to the apartment that connected to the Corvin Cinema. Then the Russian tanks started blasting away at the ground floor of their building.

They ducked through the double hole in the bricks and made their way down a narrow staircase to the alleyway behind the cinema. The clouds overhead turned rose-red from the fires raging around the city. Groups of Corvin commandos, boys and girls wearing short leather jackets and black berets, white-and-green armbands, crouched along the alleyway, waiting heir turn to dash out into the street to hurl Molotov c.o.c.ktails at the tanks that were blasting away at the thick concrete walls of the Cinema and the fortress-like facade of the ma.s.sive barrack building across the avenue. Someone switched on a battery-powered radio and, turning up the volume, set it atop a battered taxi sitting on four flat tires. For a moment the sound of static filled the alleyway. Then came the hollow, emotional voice of the premier, Imre Nagy.

Gesturing with both hands as if he himself were giving the speech, Zoltan attempted a running translation. "He says us that Soviet forces attack our capital to overthrow the legal democratic Hungarian government, okay. He says us that our freedom fighters are battling the enemy. He says us that he alerts the people of Hungary and the entire world to these G.o.dd.a.m.n facts. He says us that today it is Hungary, tomorrow it will be the turn of-"

There were whistles of derision from the crouching students waiting their turn to fling themselves against the Russian tanks; this was not a crowd sympathetic to the plight of a bookish Communist reformer caught between the Soviet Politburo and the anti-Communist demands of the great majority of his own people. One of the young section-leaders raised a rifle to his shoulder and shot the radio off the roof of the taxi. The others around him applauded.

There were sporadic bursts of machine gun fire from the avenue. Moments later a squad of freedom fighters darted back into the alleyway, dragging several wounded with them. Using wooden doors as stretchers, medical students wearing white armbands carried them back into the Corvin Cinema.

The students nearest the mouth of the alleyway struck matches and lit the wicks on their Molotov c.o.c.ktails. The freckled girl with pigtails, who looked all of sixteen, burst into tears that racked her thin body. Her boyfriend tried to pry the Molotov c.o.c.ktail out of her fist but she clutched it tightly. When her turn came she rose shakily to her feet and staggered from the alleyway. One by one the others got up and dashed into the street. The metallic clack of Russian machine guns drummed in the dusty morning air. Bullets chipped away at the brick wall across the alleyway and fell to the ground.

Zoltan picked up a bullet and turned it in his fingers; it was still warm to the touch. He leaned close to Ebby's ear. "You want an opinion, okay, need to get our a.s.ses over to the American emba.s.sy."

Ebby shook his head. "We'd never make it through the streets alive."

In the stairwell inside the doorway to the cinema Arpad and Elizabet were arguing furiously in Hungarian. Several times Arpad started to leave but Elizabet clung to the lapel of his leather jacket and continued talking. They stepped back to let two medical students haul a dead girl-the freckled sixteen-year-old who had broken into tears before she ran into the street-down the stairs to the bas.e.m.e.nt morgue. Arpad waved an arm in dismay as they carried the body past, then shrugged in bitter resignation. Elizabet came over to kneel behind Ebby. "Remember the tunnel that runs under the street to the Kilian Barracks? I talked Arpad into going with us-there are hundreds of armed freedom fighters still in the barracks, plenty of ammunition. The walls are three meters thick in places. We can hold out there for days. Even if the rest of the city falls we can keep the ember of resistance alive. Perhaps the West will come to its senses. Perhaps the Western intellectuals will oblige their governments to confront the Russians." She nodded toward the knapsack on Zoltan's back. "You absolutely must come with us to send reports of the resistance to Vienna. They will believe messages from you."

Zoltan saw the advantages immediately. "If things turn bad at Kilian," he told Ebby, "there are tunnels through which you can escape into the city."

"The reports I send back won't affect the outcome," Ebby said. "At some point someone with an ounce of sanity in his brain has to negotiate a truce and stop the ma.s.sacre."

"You must send back reports as long as the fighting continues," Elizabet insisted.

Ebby nodded without enthusiasm. "I'll tell them how the Hungarians are dying, not that it will change anything."

The four of them descended the steel spiral stairs to the boiler room and then made their way single file along a narrow corridor into a bas.e.m.e.nt that had been used to store coal before the cinema switched to oil, and had been transformed into a morgue. Behind them the medical orderlies were carrying down still more bodies and setting them out in rows, as if the neatness of the rows could somehow impose a shred of order on the chaos of violent and obscenely premature death. Some of the dead were badly disfigured from bullet wounds; others had no apparent wounds at all and it wasn't obvious what they had died of. The smell in the unventilated bas.e.m.e.nt room was turning rancid and Elizabet, tears streaming from her eyes, pulled the roll collar of her turtleneck up over her nose.

Threading their way through the bodies, the group reached the steel door that led to the narrow tunnel filled with thick electric cables. On one stone someone had carefully chiseled "1923" and, under it, the names of the workers on the construction site. About forty meters into the tunel-which put them roughly under Ulloi Avenue-they could hear the treads of the tanks overhead fidgeting nervously from side to side as they hunted for targets. Arpad, in the lead, pounded on the metal door blocking the end of the tunnel with the b.u.t.t of his pistol. Twice, then a pause, then twice more. They could hear the clang of heavy bolts being thrown on the inside, then the squeal of hinges as the door opened. A wild-eyed priest with a straggly gray beard plunging down his filthy ca.s.sock peered out at them. Several baby-faced soldiers wearing washed-out khaki and carrying enormous World War I Italian bolt-action naval rifles trained flashlights on their faces. When the priest recognized Arpad, he gave a lopsided smile. "Welcome to Gehenna," he cried hysterically, and with a flamboyant gesture he licked his thumb and traced an elaborate crucifix on the forehead of each of them as they pa.s.sed through the door.