Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (21 page)

He glanced at his watch.

“Exactly at dawn, in slightly more than five and a half hours, a United States Air Force plane will land in that field. It will take off with Maria, Millie, and Teensy aboard. I hope it will take off with Marcel Blaye’s envelope. I think it possible that either you or Walter or I will be alive at dawn, at seven forty-four.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I might deliver the envelope to the plane but that I wasn’t leaving Hungary until I’d had a final settlement with Schmidt. It occurred to me, though, that I would be insulting him by assuming I’d be the one still alive in five and a half hours.

Hiram called Walter into the room, and we located Jozsefvaros freight station on the map. We couldn’t get away from the cemetery. Where Keleti station, the coffeehouse, and the tenement were on the northern edge of the burying ground, Jozsefvaros bordered it on the south. The layout resembled a huge letter D with Keleti at the top, Jozsefvaros at the bottom, and the curving part the connecting tracks. The cemetery took up most of the inside, and the vertical line represented Fiumei ut, one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

The freight station and the yards paralleled the cemetery’s length of four city blocks. The station took up a quarter of that distance, with six loading platforms on as many tracks.

I noticed something else. Right where the tracks entered the station, there was a large building, the army barracks which houses the Budapest garrison.

Hiram nodded. “And something the map doesn’t show,” he said, “is that the station is surrounded by a high stone wall. The only way to enter uninvited is to walk the tracks from a point well outside the yards.”

I went upstairs to say goodbye to Maria. I knocked but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, and I went in to find her sleeping soundly, the raven-black hair framing her lovely dark face against the white of the pillow.

I bent over and kissed her forehead. I started out the door and then, because the book says you keep a sense of humor in such cases, I took Ilonka’s charm against the evil eye from my pocket and laid it on Maria’s pillow next to her head.

The car that followed us to Hiram’s trailed us again when we left the house for the last time.

We had decided to separate in order to shake them. After dropping me near the Danube Corso, Hiram would drive Walter to Buda, then return to Pest to abandon the car. We agreed to meet at three o’clock near the railway tracks, a quarter mile from the Jozsefvaros yards.

Hiram had said the chances were that one of us would come out of the yards. There would be a car in an alley at 188 Asztalos Sandor ut which borders the tracks from Keleti to Jozsefvaros and was close by our three-o’clock meeting-place. Hiram estimated forty minutes to reach the makeshift flying-field, which meant that whichever of us got to the car would have to get there by seven o’clock.

I found before leaving the house that I could handle a gun, although with some difficulty and at the risk of opening the wounds on my hands. Each of us carried two ammunition clips for our Lugers. With one cartridge already in each chamber, that gave us seventeen shots apiece, which Hiram suggested should be enough to take over the city.

When I left the car it was the first time I’d been alone and on foot in the center of Budapest in more than nine years. I found myself in front of the old redoubt. Across the square and facing the Danube had been the Hangli Gardens, traditional afternoon drinking spot for American and British newspapermen. Now the Hangli was gone. In its place was a tall stone shaft with a tiny stone airplane on top, Russia’s memorial to her pilots who died in the city’s capture from the Nazis. The square had been renamed in honor of Molotov.

I walked through the Vaci utca, a glittering shopping center before the war. The old familiar names were on the stores but nearly every one bore the sign
Nationalized,
and the show windows were bare.

There were pictures of Generalissimo Stalin everywhere. It gave me the chills to see the mustachioed dictator’s face side by side with the yellow posters inviting my capture.

I walked past the Belvarosi coffeehouse, and the gypsy band was playing the melody that reminded me of Maria just when I wanted to forget how much she had come to mean to me. I knew what lay ahead and how little chance there was that I should ever see her again.

Then, my love, let us try while the moonlight is clear, Amid the dark forest that fiddle to hear.

I won’t pretend my nerves were calm. I fancied I saw an MVD agent in every man and woman I passed. It was the same on the bus; each new passenger seemed vaguely familiar. I’d seen their faces before. I sat in the back of the bus; I expected at any moment to feel a gun in my ribs.

There was one heavyset man I was sure had been on the train to Budapest. He left the bus behind me; for two blocks the crunching of heavy footsteps in the snow told me I was being followed.

I checked an impulse to run. Instead, I turned into a side street, off the avenue that would take me to Hiram and Walter. The footsteps were louder than ever.

The night was bitter cold and clear. The moon had not yet risen, but there was sufficient light from the stars to tell me, when there was no possibility of turning back, that I had entered a dead-end street.

Three chimneys standing against the sky at the end of the street meant three houses wall to wall in front of me. There was no alley, no passage for further retreat.

There was a short stretch of sidewalk cleared by the wind. Before my feet hit the snow again I heard the relentless pounding behind me.

The three houses at the end of the street were dark. They could be apartments with unlocked front doors. They could be private houses, ending my flight on the doorstep.

I passed the first house. If I reached for my gun with my bandaged hands, I’d get a bullet in my back. The footsteps, echoing against the buildings from the hard-packed snow, were scarcely ten feet behind.

I passed the second house, and the door of the third house opened under my hand. I stepped inside and pulled the door behind me. I was in the hallway of a tenement, like the one in which we’d found Maria. There was a dim night light.

I’d taken several steps toward the stairs when I heard the door opening. I turned and flattened myself against the wall, in back of the door.

The door swung open very slowly, so slowly that I managed to get out my gun. I held it by the barrel and when the head appeared I brought down the butt of the gun as hard as I could. He sank to the floor with a crash and lay still.

I pulled him over to the wall, then ran through his pockets. I expected to find a gun, but there wasn’t one. There was only a broken bottle in the back pocket, the apricot brandy soaking his clothing and running in a little trickle across the bare wooden floor.

Then I heard a door open somewhere upstairs and a woman’s voice said, “Jeno, Jeno. Is that you?” When there was no answer, there were footsteps descending the stairs and the woman said, “Drunk again.”

I think I must have run through the snow all the way back to the main avenue, then the three blocks to the meeting place.

We started down the tracks toward Jozsefvaros after Hiram had cut away the bandage from the fingers of my right hand so that I could use my gun.

For most of the distance there was a stone wall to cut off the tracks from the street, but here and there it had crumbled under bombardment or shellfire, and we entered on the right of way through one of those holes. We went single file with Hiram leading, Walter next, and me bringing up the rear, sixty or seventy feet apart.

Hiram’s plan was for Walter and me to wait at the entrance to the station while he located the Austrian coach and discovered how it was guarded. He would rejoin us and sketch out a plan of attack. It would have been a good deal easier if I could have told him at which end of the car I had hidden Blaye’s Manila envelope.

There was just enough light to pick our way slowly along the ties. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d entered Hungary by walking the tracks and now I was finishing the nightmare in the same fashion. Only I no longer had the slightest illusion about the possibility of escape. In the unlikely event that I lived through the next hour, there was still Dr. Schmidt.

We had about a quarter of a mile to walk to the yards, then three city blocks to the station. A hundred yards or so short of the yards there were two big locomotives under a water tower. As far as I could tell, there was no one aboard although they had steam up. I thought they must have been scheduled to pull early-morning trains out of Keleti station, probably including the Vienna local. Fortunately, their headlights were not switched on, or the rest of our walk would have been on a brightly illuminated stage.

I caught up with Walter at the entrance to the yards, in the shadow of the army barracks, which stood a few feet from the tracks on our left. Except for a dim light on each floor of the big building, the red and green signals, and the faint light from the hooded switches, we were shielded by darkness.

We stood without speaking for what seemed an hour although it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes at the most. I wanted a cigarette desperately but I didn’t dare light a match.

Hiram said the Austrian passenger car was on the innermost of the six tracks, to our right as we faced the station. To the left of the car there was a loading platform. To the right was a stone wall, then a narrow street, and the cemetery.

“There are two guards with tommy guns on the platform,” Hiram said. “There’s another on the back platform. There’s a light inside so there may be others.”

“Can we get in back of them?” I said.

“There isn’t a chance,” Hiram said. “There isn’t a three-inch clearance between the car and the wall.”

“What about the other tracks?” I said. “What about the track on the other side of the same platform?”

“Solid with boxcars. All the other tracks are filled.”

“Can’t we go along the top of the freight cars?” I said. “We could get to the back of the platform that way.”

“No,” Hiram said. “The roofs of the loading platform sheds extend over the tracks. There’s no clearance for a man to walk on top of the cars. We couldn’t even crawl.”

“How about going under them?” Walter said.

“Too much snow,” Hiram said.

“What’s left?”

“We’ll have to scale the wall in back of the platforms,” Hiram said.

That meant retracing our steps to the place where we had met and leaving the tracks to walk the streets to Fiumei ut, which paralleled the sidewalk in back of the platforms.

We started back the way we’d come, only I led and Hiram came last.

The whole business made no sense to me. Hiram should have known what we would be up against before we started. There must have been some way to find out.

Hiram had said the stone wall around the Jozsefvaros station was ten or twelve feet high. We couldn’t hope to scale a blank wall without a ladder or some other help. And even if we could find such an aid, a thousand to one shot, how could we hope to use it on the Fiumei ut, one of the main streets of Budapest and pretty well traveled even at three-thirty in the morning? I remembered it as a well-lighted street, but it was sufficiently policed to make suicide any such operation as Hiram contemplated, even if the lights were dim.

Then, too, the map had shown a large open space between the loading platforms and the Fiumei ut wall, including a driveway for trucks to deliver shipments to the platforms. If we succeeded in reaching the top of the wall, we’d have to drop twelve feet into that open space, then cross the driveway to the shelter of the platforms. We might not be watched but we wouldn’t know until we hit the top of the wall and then it might be too late.

There had to be some other way to get into the Austrian car to retrieve Marcel Blaye’s envelope. Hiram’s idea of approaching from the yards was sound. What we needed was a diversion to draw the attention of the guards, something to take them away from the passenger car for just enough time to allow our search.

Perhaps one of us could fire a gun out in the yards? The guards would rush to investigate. But I knew that wasn’t any good because it would then be impossible to leave by the tracks, the only exit Hiram had found because of that stone wall.

I think all three of us must have thought of the locomotive at the same time. At any rate, we all tried to talk at once when I went back to Walter and Hiram caught up with us.

We sneaked up alongside the locomotives, and they were deserted. We checked the switches and they were set straight into one of the middle tracks on which three flimsy wooden boxcars were standing at a loading platform.

I mounted to the cab of the locomotive nearest the yards. I gave Hiram and Walter three minutes by my watch to move as close as possible to the Austrian coach. Then I released the brakes, pulled the throttle wide, and jumped as the big machine began to roll.

I fell into a snowbank alongside the track. I picked myself up and ran after the locomotive as fast as I dared in the semidarkness but I was a good hundred yards from the Austrian coach when the engine plowed into the wooden boxcars.

There was a crash that must have been heard a mile. Then the engine jumped the tracks, sideswiped the loading platform and toppled on its side with a great roar of steam. I reached the passenger car, three tracks away, as the boiler blew up, scattering hunks of those matchbox freight cars like rain.

I was in time to boost Hiram over the coupling onto the back platform of the car. Walter had apparently climbed up before him. There was no sign of Walter nor of any guards. They had rushed over to the track where the locomotive struck.

In the next minute, all of Jozsefvaros went crazy. A siren screamed, whistles blew, a bugle echoed from the roof of the army barracks, the sounds accompanied by the hissing of steam from the wrecked locomotive.

Hiram and Walter returned to the back platform. Walter reached the ground first, and I knew by the way he gripped my shoulder that they had found the Manila envelope.