The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,183

freezing, in the icy waters. They say you could hear the ice cracking all the way up the vineyards. I was in the castle at the time, and it was being shelled. I thought the walls would collapse in on us. Much of it was destroyed. But in the cellars, we were safe. A day later, the army had moved on, and I wandered back to the village of my birth, the only home I had ever known, and - nothing."

Her voice faded to an inexorable whisper. "Nothing but pillage and destruction. Charred ruins, black embers. The occasional farmhouse on the mountain had escaped destruction. But the village of Molnar, which had survived the Romanian pillage, the Tartars and the Turks, was no more. No more. And in the river, so many bodies were floating, like an ice floe. And among them, naked, bloated, bluish, were the bodies of my very own parents." She raised a hand to her forehead. "When you see what human beings can do to each other, it makes you ... ashamed to be alive."

The two Americans were silent for a moment.

"How did you find yourself in the castle?" Janson asked after a while.

The old woman smiled, remembering. "Janos Ferenczi-Novak - a wonderful man, and so was his Illana. To serve them was a privilege, I never forgot that. You see, my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents worked the land. They were peasants, but over time, the nobleman deeded them small parcels of land. They grew potatoes, and grapes, and berries of all sorts. They had hopes for me, I think. I was a pretty little girl. It's true. They thought if I worked as a servant at the castle, I would learn a thing or two. Perhaps the count would take me with him to Budapest, where I might meet a special man. My mother nurtured these sorts of dreams. She knew one of the women who helped run Ferenczi-Novak's household, and had her meet her little girl. And one thing led to another, and I met the great man himself, Count Ferenczi-Novak, and his beautiful blue-eyed wife, Illana. The count was spending more and more time in Budapest, in the circles of the government of the Regent Horthy. He was close to Miklos Kallay, who would become prime minister. I think he was some sort of high minister in Kallay's government. The count was an educated man. The government needed such men as he, and he had a strong sense of public service. But even then, he would spend several weeks at a time in his country estates, in Molnar. A tiny village. A tavern owner. The grocer, a Jew from Hodmezovasarhely. But mostly farmers and woodcutters. Humble folk, eking out a living along the Tisza River. Then came the day my mother took me to the castle on the hill - the castle we had somehow imagined, growing up, to be part of the mountain itself."

"It must be hard to remember something that happened so long ago," Jessie ventured.

The old woman shook her head. "Yesterday is sunk into the mists of the past. What happened six decades ago, I can see as if it is happening now. The long, long path, past his stables. The stone gateposts with their worn carvings. And then, inside - the curving staircase, the worn steps. It took my breath away. Drunken guests, people said, would slip on those worn steps. Later, when I joined the household staff, I would overhear Countess Illana talking about such things - she was so funny, and so dismissive about it all. She never liked the staghorns mounted on the walls - did any castle not have them? she protested. The paintings, Teniers, Teniers the Younger. 'Like every castle in Central Europe,' I once heard the countess say to someone. The furniture, 'Very late Franz Josef,' she would say. And how dark it was in the main hall. You didn't want to put a hole through the frescoes, you see, to put in electric lighting. So everything

glowed with candlelight. In that hall, I remember, there was a grand piano, of rosewood. With the most delicate lace cloth on top, and a silver candelabra that had to be carefully polished every Saturday. And outside it was as beautiful. I was dizzy with excitement the first time I walked through the English-style garden in the back. There were overgrown catalpa trees, with their misshapen limbs, littering pods everywhere, and pollarded acacias and