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have some Villdnyi Furmint left?'

'I'll go and see.' She turned to leave, but Jansci called-her. 'One moment, my dear. Mr. Reynolds, when did you eat last?'

'Ten o'clock this morning.'

'So. You must be starving. Julia?'

'I'll see what I can get, Jansci.'

'Thank you -- 'but first the wine. Imre' -- -he addressed the youngster who was pacing restlessly up and down -- 'the roof. A walk around. See if everything is clear. Sandor, the car number plates. Burn them, and fix new ones.'

'Burn them?' Reynolds asked as the man left the room. 'How is that possible?'

'We have a large supply of number plates.' Jansci smiled. 'All of three-ply wood. They burn magnificently.... Ah, you found some Villdnyi'

'The last bottle.' Her hair was combed now, and she was smiling, appraisal and frank curiosity in her blue eyes as she looked at Reynolds. 'You can wait twenty minutes, Mr. Reynolds?'

'If I have to.' He smiled. 'It will be difficult.'

'I'll be as quick as I can,' she promised.

As the door closed behind her Jansci broke open the seal of the bottle and poured the cool white wine into a couple of glasses.

'Your health, Mr. Reynolds. And to success.'

'Thank you.' Reynolds drank slowly, deeply, gratefully of the wine -- he could not recall when his throat and mouth had been so parched before -- and nodded at the one ornament in that rather bleak and forbidding room, a silver-framed photograph on Jansci's desk. 'An extraordinarily fine likeness of your daughter. You have skilled photographers in Hungary.'

'I took it myself,' Jansci smiled. 'It does her justice, you think? Come, your honest opinion: I am always interested in the extent and depth of a man's percipience.'

Reynolds glanced at him in faint surprise then sipped his wine and studied the picture in silence, studied the fair, waving hair, the broad smooth brow above the long-lashed eyes, the rather high Slavonic cheekbones curving down to a wide, laughing mouth, the rounded chin above the slender column of the throat. A remarkable face, he thought, a face full of character, of eagerness and gaiety and a splendid zest for living. A face to remember....

'Well, Mr. Reynolds?' Jansci prompted him gently.

'It does her justice,' Reynolds admitted. He hesitated, fearing presumption, looked at Jansci, knew instinctively how hopeless it would be to try to deceive the wisdom in these tired eyes, then went on: 'You might almost say it does her more than justice.'

'Yes?'

'Yes, the bone structure, the shape of all the features, even the smile is exactly the same. But this picture has something more -- something more of wisdom, of maturity. In two years perhaps, in three then it will be your daughter, really your daughter: here, somehow you have caught a foreshadowing of these things. I don't know how it is done.'

'It's quite simple. That photograph is not of Julia but of my wife.'

'Your wife! Good lord, what a quite extraordinary resemblance.' Reynolds broke off, hurriedly searched his past sentences for any unfortunate gaffes, decided he had made none. 'She is here just now?'

'No, not here.' Jansci put his glass down and turned it round and round between his fingers. 'I'm afraid we do not know where she is.'

'I'm sorry.' It was all Reynolds could think of to say.

'Do not misunderstand me,' Jansci said gently. 'We know what happened to her, I'm afraid. The brown lorries -- you know what I mean?'

"The Secret Police.'

'Yes.' Jansci nodded heavily. "The same lorries that took away a million in Poland, the same in Romania and half a million in Bulgaria, all to slavery and death. The same lorries that wiped out the middle classes of the Baltic States, that have taken a hundred thousand Hungarians, they came also for Catherine. What is one person among so many million Who have suffered and died?'

'That was in the summer of '51?' It was all Reynolds could think to say: it was then, he knew, that the mass deportations from Budapest had taken place.

'We were not living here then, it