She looked at him in irritation. “Suppose you just talk?”

He blew out a cloud of smoke. “I met the man who calls himself Bartholomew Wakefield thirty years ago, in Budapest, Hungary. Your ‘uncle.’” His eyes were mocking. “As you’ve perhaps deduced, he’s neither English nor Polish and he never had a brother named Richard or a sister-in-law named Mary Winston. He’s Hungarian. Thirty years ago, I knew him only as orült szerzetes. The mad monk.”

Ashley said nothing. Numbly, she got up and went into the kitchen for an ashtray, and handed it to Stevens. He looked up at her with compassion in his face, but he didn’t smile. She sat back down in another chair so that they were in a triangle.

“I was in Budapest on a special mission.” Mac flicked an ash into the bowl. “In the mid-fifties, I traveled between West Germany and Austria, doing legal work—intelligence gathering, I suppose you could say—for the United States. I knew languages, and I knew the situation in Hungary. Our people thought the revolution might succeed without our direct involvement—at best, wishful thinking. We were too intent on seeing even the Communist reformers as the enemy. But that’s neither here nor there. I’ll let history speak for itself on that score.”

He paused, dragging deep on his cigarette, and when neither Ashley nor Jeremy interrupted, went on, his tone unchanged. “I was asked to go to Budapest to help one of our people there get out—someone who was in an untenable situation with both the Soviet Union and the revolutionaries. It was supposed to have been an easy job, but, of course, the revolution turned into a bloodbath—and I was in deep over my head. I had to act—fast, secretly, successfully. I couldn’t screw up. I’d heard about this Hungarian, this mad monk who had been a legend during the Stalinist era. He was said to have been one of the few to escape Recsk prison alive, and for ten years had been a thorn in the side of the Hungarian secret police, sort of a modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel.”

“Was he actually a monk?” Jeremy asked.

“He was—is—a traitor, a murderer, a torturer and a thief.”

Ashley could neither move nor speak.

“Ashley.”

It was Jeremy. His voice seemed to come from a distance. She wouldn’t look at him. Barky was a farmer, she repeated to herself. He didn’t know anything about spies and mad monks. He wouldn’t know how to murder someone.

The image flashed in her mind, treacherously, of Barky’s sharpened butcher knife slicing through the hen’s neck. The scrawny headless body racing madly across the yard. Blood spurting. Barky grabbing the carcass, plunging it into hot water, plucking the feathers.

She grabbed her stomach, suddenly nauseated, sweating, trembling, pale.

“I went to him,” Mac said. “I had no choice. I had to trust him. And he agreed to help. He made all the arrangements for the escape, and then he asked me to follow his instructions—no questions asked. On the night we left, he refused to come along. He couldn’t, he said, but he wouldn’t give any explanation. He’s not the type to bother with such trivia. By then, it was too late to abort. We were desperate.”