Claim the Crown
Contents (41)
Claim the Crown
Carla Neggers
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright © 2019 by Carla Neggers
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To my brothers: Jacob, Mark, Jeffrey
To my sisters: Bonnie, Hilda, Gretchen
And to our parents, Leo and Florine,
who chased the bats for us when we were little.
Prologue
Budapest, 1956
The young American covered her mouth as she hurried past another pile of smoldering rubble. Her turquoise eyes, usually so clear and alert, were watery, stinging from the acrid smoke, and her lungs burned. She wanted desperately to run, to be gone. But she restricted her pace to a brisk walk. She couldn’t call attention to herself now. She couldn’t panic.
She focused her thoughts on the people huddled in the shadowed buildings around her. Most of them wouldn’t be leaving, not tonight, not ever, but they had survived centuries of this. She wondered how. Why didn’t they just give up? Only eleven years ago, in the last gasps of World War II, the Germans and the Russians had waged a bloody confrontation with Budapest as the battlefield. Most of the old city on the Danube had been reduced to ruins. The Germans had left; the Russians stayed.
Now once again, here were the tanks, the shelling, the destruction, the death.
And yet as she moved through the gray, shattered streets, she, a stranger, could sense the underlying tenacity of the people. Magyars, the Hungarians call themselves. Over the centuries, they had outlasted the Mongols, the Turks, the Austrians. Now they would outlast the Russians.
Down a quiet, narrow alley, she found the tiny stone church. It was cold inside, and dark. She kept her hood pulled over her auburn curls. Old men and women hunched their shoulders, praying. Wide-eyed, children looked up at the echo of her footsteps.
She remembered the woman she had seen in the park, not a week ago, crying as she rushed her two small children past the bloated corpses hanging from the trees. The men had been lynched, their bodies left to rot, a testament to the depth of anger of the Hungarian people. They had been members of the hated state secret police, the Államvédelmi Hivatal, known simply, always with a shudder, as the ÁVH. Through the ÁVH, the Soviet Union and its hardline Stalinist allies in Hungary had carried out a decade of terror against the very people they claimed to have liberated. They were responsible for thousands of tortures, deportations, forced relocations, imprisonments, executions. During their brief moment of power, when the revolution against the Russians looked as if it might succeed, some had seized the chance to wreak vengeance against the murderers of the ÁVH.