Free The Europe That Was by Geoffrey Household

from Romania, who told him that the beloved restaurant was reserved for workers’ recreation.
    Devenor, still living with his memories, was almost turned into a communist on the spot. To open that supreme flower of luxury to any of the masses who could appreciate it—that, if you like, was a justification of revolution. He said so, and his generous dream was instantly shattered.
    â€˜A tenpenny lunch, old boy. Soup and one greasy course.’
    Devenor used to swear that inspiration, there and then, had come to him. Very possibly it had. Shock is a stimulant. He retired behind his newspaper to think it out. What had happened to the Gradina’s cooks—any of them who hadn’t been commandeered for official banquets? Surely a Gradina cook must have the artist’s horror of communism? Surely he would be glad to leave? Rescue was a duty.
    From that moment in the club, Devenor, converted to the possibility of heaven, went at his task like any fanatical missionary. He saw the parallel. ‘My intention,’ he said, ‘was to save two human souls from destruction. And I don’t see that it matters a damn if one of them was my own.’
    He had friends enough alive in Bucharest, and even a worthless and affectionate godson. Cautiously he wrote to them all, but received only a few picture postcards of greeting in reply. He tried for his Gradina cook through consuls and labour exchanges and refugee organizations and old pals in the Board of Trade. He told the truth and waslaughed at. He told ingenious lies and was obstructed. At last he lost his temper with all this paper and politeness. It was plain that there was nothing for it but to have a look at the frontiers, and possibly do the job himself. It would be an occupation, a joyous return to his early days of adventure. He loved and understood Romanians, but all his life he had refused to take them seriously when they told him what he had decided was impossible.
    He made no plans at all for his penetration of the Iron Curtain. It was impossible to make any. Romania might be visited by students or delegates who were prepared to wait six months for a visa, but Devenor, a former oil magnate, would have to wait for a revolution. As for illegal entry, that no doubt was possible to some lean and hardened desperado. Devenor, however, was neither hard nor lean; he was only desperate. He hadn’t had a decent meal in his own house for five years, and worse outside it.
    For a start he flew to Istanbul. He did not confide his business to anyone, least of all to Romanian refugees. He listened; he enjoyed his holiday; and never for more than ten waking minutes did he forget his objective. But he could take no action beyond the patient acquisition of large sums in Romanian and Turkish bank notes. He considered himself, he said, entirely justified in breaking the currency laws of his own and any other country for so worthy a cause. After all, had he intended to rescue a scientist or politician, his illegalities would have had general approval. It was not his fault that government officials could not see the superior importance of a cook.
    He tried out, in imagination, many a plan. Most of them involved crawling through barbed wire, for which he was quite unfitted, or jumping overboard in darkness, which, though of buoyant belly, he intensely disliked. He was perfectly well aware that he might have to risk his liberty, but he wished to do so without avoidable discomfort. Finesse was his game, not youthful exercise. It was just a matter of waiting for an opportunity which would allow him to use his perfect knowledge of the Romanian language and character.
    He had to wait a month. Not idly, he insisted, not at all idly. Hotel bars, obscure cafés, frontier villages, the docks—he frequented them all as assiduously as any spy. Then, in the course of one of his morning patrols, he found on an unguarded quay, awaiting shipment to Constantsa, the topmost section