Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (3 page)

“You’re sure they’ll look for us?”

“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t fool her to that extent. “In the morning. By that time we’ll be back in Vienna. It can’t be more than seventy kilometers.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“First we’re going to get through this gate. Then we’re going to find a farmer with a car or a truck to take us to Vienna. I’ve plenty of dollars. There’s always someone in these countries who’ll do anything for dollars.” I wished I had been as confident as I hoped I sounded. I thought of my green American passport, locked in the safe at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna.

Maria’s low voice cut into my thoughts. “They’ll know who we are from our baggage, won’t they?” That was just the trouble. I’d very carefully changed the labels on my bags and in my clothing that morning in Vienna. I’d marked everything with the name Marcel Blaye and the address Geneva. Proof to any policeman that I’d robbed Blaye after killing him.

The girl’s cigarette glowed in the dark. She said, “I’ve led you into a lot of trouble. I don’t know why I let you do this for me.”

I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not before we were safely back in Vienna. So I told her half the truth. “I happen to like you. And I’ve been in trouble myself.” Then I said, “Who was Marcel Blaye?” The past tense no longer seemed out of place.

Maria said, “I’m not very sure that I know.” She paused, and I waited for her to go on. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted, and from time to time the limb of a tree would crack like a rifle bullet under the weight of the newly fallen snow.

“Monsieur Blaye described himself as an exporter of watches and clocks. He had an office in Geneva, off the Rue du Mont Blanc near the post office. He came to Geneva just before the end of the war—early in 1945, I think. You see, I don’t know very much about him because I only worked for him six weeks.”

“You mean you didn’t know very much about him, yet you were willing to travel with him to Budapest?”

Maria was silent for a moment. “I don’t think you can understand unless I explain the background. It’s just that I have three younger sisters to support.” She stubbed her cigarette in the snow and pulled my coat closer about her shoulders. “When we were children, we lived in Madrid, where we were born. My father was a lawyer but he was also a republican and when the monarchy was overthrown, he became Spanish consul to Geneva. When Franco made his revolt, my father insisted on returning to Spain to fight. He was killed at Guadalajara.”

I listened, but there was no sound of the sentry returning.

“The Republic took care of Mother and us until it ceased to exist. Mother worked at the League of Nations for a while but she died of pneumonia when I was seventeen. I’ve been working ever since. I went to work for Monsieur Blaye just because he offered a lot more money than I was making at the time.”

I found myself wondering what interest Blaye had taken in Maria Torres.

“He wasn’t interested in me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. “I never knew him before I answered his ad in the
Journal de Geneve.
He seemed to be very much in love with a Polish girl, a Countess Orlovska, who used to come to the office.”

“Why were you going to Budapest?”

“Monsieur Blaye said he’d arranged a big deal with the Hungarian government. He said it was so important and so secret that I mustn’t say a word to anyone. He even made me tell my sisters that we were only going to Zurich.”

“What about the man on the train? Who is he?”

“He told me his name was Doctor Schmidt,” Maria said, “but I don’t know much about him. I saw him for the first time a week ago when he came to the Geneva office. He and Monsieur Blaye had a terrible row in Monsieur’s private room. The next time I saw him was on the train from Geneva.”

“What did Blaye tell you about him?”

“Monsieur Blaye caught sight of Doctor Schmidt in the dining car. I thought Monsieur would die of fright. He left his dinner half eaten and insisted on locking himself in his compartment. That’s when he told me Schmidt was planning to kill him.”

I lit cigarettes for both of us and passed one to Maria.

“Monsieur Blaye insisted on leaving the train at Zurich and taking the next one. But it didn’t do any good because Doctor Schmidt did the same thing. When we arrived in Vienna, Monsieur took me to the Metropole in a taxi. He gave me an envelope to carry and told me he’d meet me on the Orient this afternoon. That was the last I saw of him.”

I figured Blaye must have been murdered shortly after leaving Maria. Herr Figl would have needed at least twelve hours to substitute my photograph for Blaye’s and to forge a new Swiss foreign-office seal for the picture, apparently the only change he had needed to make.

“You aren’t Swiss, are you?” Maria said.

Something told me to be cautious. “Why do you say that?”

“Because,” Maria said, “when you mentioned the distance to Vienna, you said ‘soixante-dix’ the way a Frenchman does. If you were Swiss you would have said ‘septente.’ ”

“As a matter of fact, I’m American,” I said. The only thing that mattered any longer was Blaye’s passport. There was no reason not to tell her the truth about everything else.

“You speak French without an accent,” the girl said. “You must have lived in France.”

“I was born in Paris,” I told her. “My father was in the American consular service for many years. We lived all over the world. I never learned very much in school but I did pick up languages.”

“Are you a diplomat?”

I laughed. “No,” I said, “I’m a newspaperman. After college in America, I seemed to drift naturally into foreign correspondence, largely because of my languages I guess.”

“Then you’re going to Budapest on assignment?” Maria asked.

I hadn’t talked to anybody about my reasons for going to Budapest. My father and mother thought I was still in Paris. The whole project was something I’d kept locked inside me. It was a mission that had to be accomplished if I were to go on living with myself.

“I’m going to Hungary to look for a man,” I said.

Maria was so close I could hear her breathing.

“It’s a long story,” I said, “and one I’m not very proud of. I don’t think it would interest you.” I found myself wanting desperately to tell her, this girl I’d known less than two hours and whom I’d probably never see again after we returned to Vienna. Because, as soon as I recovered my American passport, I’d have to find another way to enter Hungary.

I felt Maria’s hand on my arm. “Please tell me,” she said. “I want to hear it.”

“I told you my father was in the consular service,” I said. “There were five of us in the family—Father and Mother, of course, my sister Daphne, my brother Bob, and me. We were always very close as a family, perhaps because we shared the same experiences and because we lived so much in foreign surroundings.

“Bob and I were always together although he was”—there was that damned past tense again—“although he was two years younger than I. When we were children Mother taught us together so that when we entered boarding-school in America we were in the same class. We went to college together and shared the same room for four years.”

There was the sound of an airplane overhead, and we could see the running lights blinking against the stars. The Russian plane which wasn’t carrying Marcel Blaye.

“After we graduated, I came to Europe for a news agency, and Bob went on to law school. But I went home just before Pearl Harbor, and my brother and I enlisted in the Air Corps after America went into the war. We took our basic training together and went to Officer Candidate School. Then, because I had been a newspaperman, I was sent to Intelligence School while Bob became a navigator.”

Now that the words were coming out, it was almost as if someone else were talking.

“Strangely enough, we wound up in the same heavy-bomber outfit. I say strange because the Air Corps usually went to lengths to separate brothers. Anyway, we went through the campaign in Italy and when that was cleaned up we were assigned to help the Russians. One of our first missions was to attack the Manfried Weiss steel works—they’re on an island in the Danube at Budapest. They were producing for the Germans who had taken over Hungary.”

I paused to relight my cigarette.

“Six planes went on the mission, and none of them came back. Oh, they accomplished their mission all right. They blasted hell out of the steel works, which stopped working for the Germans or anybody else. But the planes never got back to base. One crashed and the entire crew was killed. The other five either crash-landed or the crews bailed out. Most of them were captured and put in prison camps. A few escaped into Yugoslavia and joined the Partisans.”

“What was wrong with the planes?” Maria asked.

“Nothing,” I said, “except they ran out of gas. The operations office made a stupid, inexcusable miscalculation, and the airplanes arrived over the target more than an hour before daylight. The hour they had to circle above the clouds before attacking made the difference between having enough gas and what happened.”

“What about your brother?” the girl said.

“He bailed out safely,” I said. “The whole crew got out all right. They started walking to Yugoslavia and they made it—all except Bob. Somewhere along the line he disappeared. Neither the Air Corps nor the State Department has ever been able to find a trace of him. He just vanished into thin air.”

Maria said, “I know how your family must feel. It must be terrible for all of you, the dreadful uncertainty, not knowing anything for sure. For a while we didn’t know for sure about my father.”

“Yes,” I said, “and there’s something even my family doesn’t know. I was the officer who made the fatal mistake.”

We heard the sentry returning through the woods, whistling. I told Maria to crouch behind the rock so that she wouldn’t be seen from the road if the sentry should use a flashlight.

I ran down the road until I was out of sight of the gate. I raised the railway guard’s carbine and squeezed three shots in quick succession. Then I ducked into the woods and doubled back to the fence as fast as I could move through the deep snow. I reached the fence in time to see the sentry open the padlock in the glare of his flashlight, slide through the gate, and run toward the spot from where I had fired. It didn’t take me long to grab Maria’s arm, hustle her through the gate, and snap the lock again.

We ran through the snow at the side of the road until we were out of breath; I was sure the shots would bring a Russian patrol. We’d leave tracks in the snow but we’d have made more noise in the hard-packed center of the road. The end of the snowstorm had brought that still, bitter cold when a running step echoes like hammer on anvil.

I suppose we’d put a hundred yards or so between us and the fence when we heard the guard’s carbine blast the padlock off the gate. We started to run again, and the siren went off; there must have been a switch in the sentry box. We ran until Maria tripped, let go my hand, and fell heavily. I picked her up and we heard the sound of a car coming toward us and saw the long beams of the headlights slashing into the shadows of the trees at the bend in the road ahead. The rising scream of the siren and the moving light and the throb of the car’s engine seemed to freeze us where we stood, locked in each other’s arms.

Then I knew another sound. Somewhere close behind us there was a running brook. Our only chance to get a head start on the Russian patrol was to follow that brook into the woods. If we left the road through the snow they’d follow our tracks in a minute.

Luckily the icy water wasn’t much above our ankles, and we were already numbed with the cold. We made good progress into the woods, following the center of the stream by the sound of the water alone. I looked back once, and the road was bright with the light of the oncoming car. The siren had died away. The roar of the car’s engine and the rushing of the water beneath us were the only sounds.

When we were well into the woods, the going became harder without even the little light from the stars. I stumbled and fell half a dozen times before I sensed that Maria was no longer close behind me. I didn’t dare call her. I turned back, putting my arms out straight in front of me the way a blind man does but I didn’t find her. I tried using my lighter, but it was dripping wet.

I lost my head. I found myself trying to run through the stream, stumbling and crashing on my face when the stones on the bottom rolled under my feet, calling Maria’s name at the top of my lungs.

Somehow I found her, down on her knees in the water. I picked her up in my arms and I knew she had fainted from exhaustion and the cold. I turned and went blindly forward again but slower so that I wouldn’t fall with her.

I’ll never know how far I walked before I knew there was a light ahead. My eyes must have seen it long before my brain accepted it.

Of course, when the Russians hadn’t found us on the road, they’d doubled to the other side of the woods.

I put Maria down in the snow at the side of the brook, unslung the carbine from my shoulder, and started to knock off the safety. But I had no choice. I threw the gun upstream as far as my strength would let me. I picked up the girl again and started for the light. No matter what happened to me I had to get help for her.

When the light grew brighter and brighter, I tried to run through the snow. Then I heard a shout. I heard the crack of a rifle bullet. I felt my knees give way under me. And then nothing more.

When I opened my eyes someone was bending over me. My first thought was to ask the Russians to take care of Maria, to tell them she was innocent and that I had forced her to leave the train with me.

I tried to lift myself on one elbow, fighting to clear my brain enough to recall the Russian words. But a hand pushed me back on the snow, and a voice said, “Warten Sie einen Augenblick, mein Herr—wait a minute.”

For a moment I thought I must be delirious. I had expected to hear Russian. I wasn’t prepared for German.

If these men proved to be Austrian police, we might have an easier time with them. There wasn’t any love lost between the Austrians and the Red Army. Perhaps they weren’t policemen at all. They might be farmers or hunters who could be persuaded to let us go in return for the dollars in my pocket.