Thursday July 11, 1944
Tibor Meghy looked at his watch on the sideboard. It was five-to-four. He still couldn't sleep. The previous evening's events were replaying themselves over and over in his mind.
As he had stood in the kitchen the man had spoken in German with a slight accent, perhaps a southern German. "Who are you?" Tibor had demanded, "And how did you get in here?" The scruffy man licked his top lip, "I could give you a name I suppose, but would it be much good?" Tibor's heart had gone into overdrive and he gripped the chair in front of him to steady himself. "What do you want?" The stranger remained silent for a moment, then raised an eyebrow, "We need to talk Tibor." Tibor's mind raced as to who this man was. Was he an English agent sent by Katalin or was he from the counter-intelligence service? Tibor was hungry and demanded to eat first before they spoke. The stranger agreed, he fancied a snack too but he warned Tibor not be stupid and try anything foolish with the cutlery. The man made sure he saw the outline of his concealed pistol.
So they sat at the small kitchen table, the tap dripping steadily and loud noises from the children next door were convenient so that they would not be overheard. They sat down to cold tinned ham sandwiches with beetroot and a bottle of Pilsner each.
"Not bad Tibor." Ricky was stuffing his face with sandwich and crumbs fell onto his shirt. "How to you know my name?" "Either you are Tibor or Im in the wrong flat. It's happened before you know." Ricky smiled. Tibor wasn't in the mood for jokes and gnawed at his sandwich. "A mutual friend of ours, lets call her Gabbie shall we? Just a name. Well she did what you asked and told us about your job. Your job with military intelligence. Your job in England. Apparently you have something to tell." Tibor felt happier, he knew his dear Katalin had not betrayed him despite her note and sudden departure to Cairo. He had tried to stop her at the station but had just missed the train.
"You know a Colonel Homlok. Rather powerful friends Mr Meghy. Youre a man to mark. Big friend, big job. Between the shafts and still functioning eh? I need you to testify to me. That means you tell me everything, tell it straight and dont fuck me around because youll end up hung by your own side and you'll never see Gabbie again. OK?" Ricky had revealed an unsettled nature that Tibor could not decipher between acting and a real psychotic nature, so he simply nodded in agreement. He mopped his brow, he was sweating. Ricky pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and lit one for him. A few puffs did the trick.
"Ok Sir. When I left school I was briefly employed at the pensions office as a boy runner. I was fired for loafing around and a comrade of my father, Major Homlok told me he could get me a job. I was trying to save for Christmas and thought what the hell. It was a good job, I had to collate reports, type letters and eventually he got me onto a radio operators course. He was my superior and we spent most of 1936 in Sofia. My Morse wasn't the best, and I was retrained as a driver. I'm a good driver. Never owned a car though." Both men smiled at this. "I was posted to the British Embassy in Budapest as a cleaner, then the German embassy as a maintenance man. I did five months at the Hungarian embassy in Warsaw in 1940. I never seemed to settle. By then the Major was a Colonel and was Head of Intelligence. My friends joked he could now pull real strings for me. And he did. After a long time buming around Budapest trailing foreign diplomats and photographing Czech fortifications I received a posting as a driver at the Hungarian embassy in London in March 1943. I was in fact the assistant of Major Lorand Utassy de Uljak, the military attaché. I collected my own small scraps of information during my duties but that was not much. I typed his reports and coded them and wrote his secret ink letters. Life was dull, driving the ambassadors fat wife around the West End, ferrying snot-nosed junior career diplomats to and from Croydon and at night serving drinks at diplomatic parties. The Major was bored too. He needed women, he said to me once 'Are you any good at chatting up pretty girls?' I lied and said I was. So that was added to my duties too, luring well-heeled women into his flat." "What a dirty old man. Don't suppose you have any blackmail shots do you?" "No, I was no good. One frumpish lady with buck teeth. That's what he said. Anyhow he found his own lady. He met her at some high-class club playing bridge. Ah, always bridge."
Ricky's ears pricked up, "When was this?" "Oh, around July I guess. It wasn't until November that he said she was working at the War Office. He had been giving me copies of papers she stole, I began making miniatures and hiding them in the usual capsules. Later it was film from a camera we supplied her with. We were big then! Big slaps on the back from Homlok. Until then we had fed back chickenshit, gossip and what we could get from magazines. Now she was giving him a report a week, sometimes twice a week. We were big men in Budapest. Promised medals and such." "What kind of papers did this woman provide?" "Oh, well, Army reports mainly, tank production figures, indoctrination leaflets, assessments of military events, like the Monaco situation, technical stuff." "Whose tank production. England's? Germany?" "A mix, mostly German, French, Italian with the odd Iberian item. The Major was only interested in German information, but the Colonel and so on would take the rest. Everything had value to someone and could be traded."
After a few silent gulps of beer Ricky decided to get to the heart of the reason for his visit. "So what was this womans name and what did she do?" "Her name I wasn't sure at first, the Major was secretive, he told me nothing. I had driven her a few times and found out her name was Nadya. Then one evening I picked her up at her house in Hendon. I happened to see her name on some mail by the door. It was Nadya Gardner." "Was this a cover name?" "No. I dont think so." "And her job?" "I dont know. He never said. I assumed she was a secretary, she looked that sort." Ricky wasn't entirely happy, there must have been a motive. "So did she provide the Major with all this stuff for favours in bed or money?" "I never made payments to her. The Major might have but they saw a lot of each other. You might call it love. Perhaps she felt she was doing the right thing. He is a persuasive man, charming and handsome. Not a ladys man but sophisticated, calm."
Ricky nodded, he knew the sort of thing. He'd done it himself in other times and places and his father was an expert on that technique. "Could you describe this woman?" "Yes, about five foot five, slim, dark hair, dark eyes, a very ordinary sort of woman really, she was about twenty-five I guess." Ricky wanted to wrap things up since it was getting late. "So what about your homecoming? Lots of medals in the filing clerks room these days?" Tibor lowered his head. "Well I had done my year, I came home and found some of my black market activities while I had been in Poland had caught up with me. I could have been fired, or worse. But Homlok, ever a dear friend to me, defended me and saw to it the charges were largely dropped, but I had to pay a fine and was demoted."
Ricky got tough. "So now you know where all those juicy files from London are kept don't you? And you know what happened to them. Whether all those non-German related War Office reports were of any use to another country and who they might have been sold to." Tibor knew if he said anymore it was treason but he had already said enough to stretch his neck. "Listen stranger. I love Katalin, I'm no spy. It's a job to me but I want to be free. She wants that too. We are on different sides and we can't love each other across this divide. I told her this story because I thought that is what was good for us both. I felt she was working for your side and that if she told her bosses it would be of such value that it would be worth a lot of money and perhaps offer us a new start. I like England. I would gladly go back with her and settle there. I won't tell you more unless you promise to get me to England."
Ricky was a tough man, he was in two minds whether to use some causal slapping to jolt him into talking or whether to believe this love-stuff. After all, his own wife was stuck in Turkey with his little girl, a similar situation. But what could he do, the man was a bundle of nerves, any slip up and Tibor would incriminate himself and wind up dead. He couldn't promise him five grand and little detached house in Metroland with an Austin Ten and membership to the Harrow Conservative Association. It was hard to promise a man a life he didnt know himself. He only knew Tibor was a failure, a no good dropout only held together by his big friend and he knew from what little he was told that GABBIE was a scantily clad, scheming dancer who collected pillowtalk. More likely they would end up in a little two-room flat in Liverpool with mildew up the walls, no job, suspicious foreigner-hating neighbours and money worries resulting in them hating each other's guts after three years.
Finally though, Tibor told Ricky what he wanted to know. He remembered giving a bundle of reports to a courier called Lazlo Farkas who, he had heard from someone else, was the official link with the Abwehr in Budapest. He did not tell him that Homlok had told him about the deal he had struck with the Abwehr for one hundred thousand Reichsmarks a month. He had to leave something juicy for London when he got there.