ON JANUARY 1, 1956, a little after quarter past five in the afternoon, a Piper Cub air taxi touched down on a small airfield at Dieppe (Seine-Inférieure). Wearing fleece-lined Royal Air Force boots, a wolf-fur coat, dark glasses and a black felt Stetson, Ivy alighted from the single-engine craft once it had parked. She shook the pilot’s hand, shook her head in reply to something he said, and made for the field’s exit lugging a heavy gray canvas traveling bag with ease. There she met a waiting Land Rover. A young man was at the wheel, fair-haired, twenty or so, lumber jacket, sweater, brown corduroy pants and pataugas.
“You are Mademoiselle Ivy? I am Lajos. Let me help you with that.” (But she had already stowed her bag in the back of the Land Rover and was clambering into the front seat.) “You should have let me help you,” said Lajos as he started the engine.
“Hello Lajos,” said Ivy, extending her hand for him to shake, but instead he took it, and leant low to kiss it.
“My deepest respects,” he declared.
His accent was formidable. The Land Rover sprang into motion and headed at first towards the sea, entering Dieppe via the long, straight downslope of Rue Gambetta. Electoral billboards fled past in the winter dusk. National Assembly candidates were vowing to finish the Algerian rebels. Other posters pitched films currently showing at the town’s movie theaters: School for Love, Kiss Me Deadly, East of Eden. Meanwhile, considering Lajos’s accent and his manners, Ivy was asking him if he had been in France long.
“A year, or not quite,” he said. “I left Hungary in ’52 but after that I was in Austria. Then I came to Paris, where I soon met Samuel.” He cast an anxious glance at Ivy. “I don’t know why he didn’t come to greet you in person. I fancy he wants you to form an opinion of me.”
Ivy made no reply. At the bottom of Rue Gambetta the Land Rover turned right into a hairpin bend. The vehicle crossed Dieppe skirting the train station, taking side streets so as to avoid traffic jams or being held up by a closed railway crossing. They soon reached the heights above Le Pollet, which they climbed rapidly, overtaking family sedans: Peugeot 203s and 403s, Renault Frégates, Citroën DS19s, etc. Reaching the top, at the traffic circle, instead of taking the road to Eu and Le Tréport they bore right and headed east on National 320. Lajos had put his sidelights on when they left the airfield. Now he lit his beams, for night had fallen. Ivy took off her dark glasses. Beneath her black felt hat she had a long face and a broad brow, prominent cheekbones, an elegant nose and large dark flinty eyes. Her straight brown hair was medium-length, brushing her shoulders, and she had short bangs and smelt slightly of expensive perfume and a little of kerosene. She lit a Gitane with a Zippo lighter.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked belatedly.
“No,” said Lajos. “I may be queer, but I’m not a sissy.
” He looked at her sideways. He seemed to be expecting a reaction or something of the sort.
“If you don’t ask me any questions,” he went on, “how can you form an opinion of me? I am sure that Sam sent me to meet you for you to form an opinion of me.”
“Samuel Farakhan hates driving. He hates being a passenger in a car even more. He is horrified by the fact that we drive on the right in France. That’s why he sent you. Aside from that you are cute, you drive very well, and you are overanxious and useless. And as for me I am worn out because I was up until seven this morning tying one on at the house of a bunch of idiots. And worn out because the last year has worn me out. So fuck off and leave me be.”
“Oh my goodness!” said Lajos with affected consternation. He seemed about to apologize or something, but thought better of it and kept silent for a moment as the Land Rover reached Envermeu, made its way through the little town and carried on down N320, a two-lane blacktop running along a hillside amid damp meadows yellowing in the obscurity and muddy fields sprinkled with thatched cottages and clumps of leafless trees.
“You did some research for me this year,” said Lajos in a timid and courteous way. “Thank you for that.”
“Research? Oh yes. It was nothing. I’m a reporter—I have my sources. When Sam wrote me, or rather when I got his letter in Paris two months later, I asked friends of mine and we looked in the newspaper morgues. Two childhood buddies of yours, huh?” (Without being aware of it, she had begun to address Lajos in the familiar form, from distraction perhaps, or from fatigue or because of remembering her journalist pals.) “Strange friends, I must say. Anyway, it was no trouble. I can’t even recall their names now.”
“Balazs, like the China specialist, and Branko. Zoltàn Balazs and Rustem Branko. They weren’t really friends of mine. They were five or six years older. At that age, it makes a difference. I suppose they helped me survive.”
“The hard way?”
“Tough, yes. I don’t know whether I wanted to find them to say hello or to beat them up when I left Hungary too.” Lajos was speaking slowly now, and driving fast. “They were shits. They boasted about having been informers, at thirteen or fourteen, for the Germans and for Horthy’s police, and then about going over to the Communists. In 1948 they joined the AVO, the secret police. They could have made a career of that. They were earning three thousand forints a month, and there were perks. I think they left Hungary because they were afraid their past would come out, but perhaps they were just looking for adventure.”
“They found it.”
“They weren’t really smart,” said Lajos. “Just cunning and suspicious. But avaricious.”
“Well,” said Ivy, exhaling cigarette smoke, “they had Cadillacs and women for a while. Then they were dead.”
“But are you quite sure about that, when it comes to Branko? Sam showed me your letter: you wrote that the body was almost entirely destroyed.”
“But identifiable. A few fingers, all the same. And teeth. He had had dental work. In Miami, I think. In any case, it was certain.”
In the night the lights of Londinières were getting closer. Lajos shifted down.
“But you did say that someone got out.”
“Lajos,” said Ivy rather tiredly, “All I did was consult some press files and talk to some friends and checked a few things. I work as a photographer on major features. I’m not a detective. The files say that Alba Black, niece of the international arms trafficker Aaron Black, disappeared as well as a German or Dutch seaman whose name I forget. The others are dead: your two guys and two Americans at the scene, and a third American with an Italian name died en route to the hospital.”
“They killed one another, did they?”
“Seemingly.”
“Over the split of the spoils,” said Lajos, talking like a book.
In the darkness of the Rover’s interior the wide and beautiful mouth of the young woman gave a cold smile that quickly vanished.
“You can’t split up a ransom that hasn’t been paid,” she said.
“And you can’t split up a little girl,” said Lajos, smiling almost merrily, and adding: “unless you are cannibals.”
“Or bastards,” said Ivy in a steely tone.