Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (6 page)

“What’s your name if I may inquire?” Hiram Carr said.

“Blaye,” I said, “Marcel Blaye.” Maria bit her lip.

“Morris Blaine?” Hiram said. “Why that’s an American name, Blaine. We had a fellow run for president once named Blaine. Didn’t make the grade, though. Isn’t that so, Teensy?”

“Uh-huh,” Teensy said. She seemed a good deal more interested in the scenery.

“I’m Swiss,” I said. Maria dropped her fork. I looked at the Carrs and thought
They’ll arrive at the Budapest station when we do. They’ll see us meet the Countess Orlovska. They’ll be in at the beginning of the end of this nightmare and they’ll still tell the neighbors back in Ohio about the nice, carefree Swiss newlyweds they met in the train, the ones who spoke real good English.

The waiter brought the soup, but Hiram G. Carr went right on talking.

“What’s your line if I may ask, Mr. Blaine?”

I looked at Maria. “Watches and clocks,” I said. “What’s yours, Mr. Carr?”

“That’s a good business,” Hiram said. “I almost forgot all you Swiss are in clocks or cheese.” He enjoyed a small chuckle. “Well now, Mr. Blaine, I’m a diplomat you might say. Oh, I’m not one of those fellows goes to tea parties in striped pants. Fact is, Mr. Blaine, I’m the agricultural man at the American legation in Budapest. Been a practical farmer all my life and my father and grandfather before me. Isn’t that right, Teensy?”

“Uh-huh,” said Teensy, her mouth half full of bread.

“Where you folks putting up in Budapest?” Hiram asked.

“The Bristol,” I said. I knew it was the only hotel on the Corso that hadn’t been destroyed in the siege.

The meat course succeeded the soup, then fruit and cheese and coffee, but Hiram Carr twittered through it all. He talked about the Hungarian wheat crop, told us how apricots are made into barack, discussed the manufacture of paprika, tokay wines, and potato brandy, and the correct way to cook a fogash. At least it kept my mind off the catastrophe impending in Budapest until I looked at my watch and saw we were within half an hour of the city. I called the waiter and had him bring me a newspaper.

“You won’t mind if I attend to a little business?” I said to Hiram. “We’re combining business with pleasure on this trip.”

Although I could see the back of Strakhov’s thin neck from where I sat, I wanted the newspaper handy in case he should come to our table. I figured I could hide the contents of Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope by quickly folding over the paper.

I held the newspaper in front of me with my left hand, broke the seals, and slit open the envelope with the table knife. I lifted out a thick wad of typewritten sheets and placed them on the unfolded newspaper. At that moment, Strakhov left the dining car.

My hands were trembling, and I couldn’t have lifted a glass of water to my lips without spilling it; but Maria was telling the Carrs about life in Geneva, and nobody seemed to notice my nervousness. I knew there had to be some vital information in that envelope, some clue to the mess we were in, something that would give me a defensive weapon in dealing with Countess Orlovska. I don’t know just what I expected to find. But I wasn’t prepared for what was on the typewritten sheets in front of me. Names and addresses in alphabetical order:

Ablon Jeno, Vaci utca
13,
Budapest, watchmaker.

Balogh Henrik, Kossuth Lajos utca, Kecskemet, pharmacist.

Kovacs Pal, Kiraly Karoly utca
388,
Budapest, garage.

And so on through the alphabet. There were more than one hundred names with addresses scattered throughout Hungary. And heading each page was the German word for watchmaker.

I don’t know how long I sat there with my chin in my hands, staring at those lists, trying to make something out of them. I returned to reality when Maria nudged me.

“The waiter says they’re closing the dining car. I think we’d better get back.”

I replaced the lists and wrapped the envelope in the newspaper and followed Maria, Teensy, and Hiram G. Carr down the aisle and through the third-class coaches. There was no sign of Herr Doktor Schmidt.

Hiram Carr turned to me just before we reached our compartment. I was glad he wasn’t going to see the sticker,
Reserved for the Embassy of the USSR,
on our door, although our fate would certainly be known to every Budapest diplomat the next day.

“Now don’t you young folks go and forget us. It’s been a real pleasure. The name is Hiram Carr—Hiram G. Carr to be exact—and you’ll always find me at the American legation. You say you’re stopping at the Bristol? Well, you’ll get a ring from us real soon. We’d like to have you two lovebirds take pot luck with us. Isn’t that right, Teensy?”

“Uh-huh,” said Teensy.

When Maria and I reached our compartment the door was closed. I took her by the arm and walked up the corridor.

“It’s no use,” I said. “There’s nothing in that damned envelope except the addresses of a lot of watchmakers, pharmacists, and garagekeepers. There couldn’t be another envelope? Are you sure you got the right one?”

Maria said, “That’s the right envelope. It’s the only one Monsieur Blaye gave me.”

I bent down and kissed her. “I’ve really gotten you into something this time. When we arrive, just let me handle everything. Don’t say a word. I don’t think they’ll have anything against you.” I thought maybe I ought to tell my troubles to Hiram Carr. He might have helped at the American legation. But, after my story in the dining car, there wasn’t any way for me to prove I was American. And there wasn’t any time. We were already running through the outer suburbs of Budapest.

I slid open the door of our compartment and stood aside to let Maria enter. I thought it curious that the light was off and the shades pulled down but I supposed Strakhov was taking a nap. It was time to wake him.

I put out my hand and switched on the overhead light. Strakhov was in the corner, his hands folded on his lap and his eyes closed. The compartment looked as if a cyclone had hit it. Our baggage had been pulled off the racks and our belongings were scattered all over the seats and the floor. If the major wanted to examine our baggage, he might have done a neater job.

I put my hand on Strakhov’s shoulder to wake him.

Maria would have screamed if I hadn’t clapped my hand over her mouth. Strakhov’s body was still warm, but there wasn’t any doubt he’d never be any deader. There was a knife with a handle a foot long in his back.

I moved faster than I’d ever moved in my life.

“Stuff those things into the bags,” I told Maria. I had to make her act before she became hysterical. “It doesn’t make any difference how. Just clean up the place and hurry.”

I picked Strakhov up under the shoulders and dumped him on the floor, under the window. I tried to pull out the knife, why I’ll never know, but it wouldn’t come. I tried the seat cushions and they lifted and there was space enough to cram the Russian’s body.

By the time I’d replaced the cushions, Maria had finished the baggage. I threw the bags back up on the racks. There was a bright red stain on the cushion where Strakhov had been, but I covered it with pages of the Budapest newspaper. There wasn’t any hope of hiding things indefinitely. I only thought we might gain enough time to leave the train and the station before the train crew caught on.

We heard the conductor in the corridor shouting “Kelenfold, Kelenfold,” and the engineer started braking for that suburban station, the last stop before the train crosses the Danube for the main Keleti station in Pest.

I grabbed a suitcase and handed a smaller one to Maria and followed her up the corridor. Then I remembered the envelope. I went into the last compartment, which was vacant, and stuffed Marcel Blaye’s typewritten lists behind the cushions of the seat, wrapped in the newspaper.

We had no difficulty leaving the train. The guard had left the car platform, and there were a good many people getting off with us.

We walked down the station platform and handed in our ticket stubs from the day before to the stationmaster at the gate. He never noticed the difference. We were the last passengers through, and the station plaza was deserted when we came out.

My nerves were on edge, and the only thing I could think of to say to Maria was, “You know, Strakhov got that story about Grigori all wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Maria said.

“Strakhov had the wrong ending. It isn’t ‘or you will die’ at all. It’s ‘or I will die.’ ”

There was a car parked on the far side of the plaza. I thought it might be a cab. I told Maria to wait while I went over to it.

I had gone about ten feet when a figure came out of the station door behind me. It was Dr. Schmidt and he had a gun in his hand. The gun was pointed at my head.

It had snowed steadily all day and now at dusk it had turned bitter cold again. It was hard moving underfoot, and the few trucks and busses churned and skidded in the unswept streets. The first stars had come out in the sky, and the wind had fallen to a whisper. Thin columns of wood smoke hung suspended like exclamation points atop chimney pots on a thousand glistening roofs. The one redeeming feature of the weather was that the snow served as decent covering to the dreary ruins of Buda, the hilly half of the city on the right bank of the frozen Danube. The flickering shadows from the street lamps gave grotesque substance to the endless miles of blackened walls, and for an evening Budapest was whole again. For a bare half hour, the time required by Herr Doktor Schmidt to conduct us to the center of the city, I saw Budapest almost as I had left it a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, almost as it had been before German and Russian armies hammered it to rubble.

I wasn’t surprised to find Otto and Hermann, the pants presser, waiting for Dr. Schmidt in the late Major Strakhov’s staff car. They had evidently started for Budapest on Schmidt’s orders the minute our train left Hegyshalom; it hadn’t required much effort to beat the local. They were wearing Russian uniforms when the doctor marched us up to the car.

Schmidt had wasted no time getting us into the car.

“I must warn you not to make any trouble,” he said in German. It was the first time I had heard his voice. It was clipped, hard, and precise. “I am an excellent shot. If you will be so kind, please pick up your baggage and proceed to the car.”

Although Maria had told me she understood no German, she picked up the bags and came over to where I was standing. There was no sign of emotion in her dark face, none of the terror she had shown when she told me about Schmidt aboard the Orient Express. She had been close to hysterics just because he was on the same train. Now he was facing her with a gun in his hand, and she appeared calm. The only indication of what she could have been feeling was in the tightened lines around her lovely mouth. I suddenly realized how little I knew about her.

Schmidt put me in the front seat with Otto, who behaved as if he’d never seen me before. The doctor and Hermann, with drawn revolvers, sat in back with Maria between them. We drove straight to the Danube, then followed it north, past the winged victory monument of the Russians on Gellert Hill, over the Erzsebet bridge into Pest, and out the broad Rakoczi ut. We passed a dozen traffic policemen, close enough for me to have touched them, but I knew better than to call for help. Even if they had dared inspect a Red Army car, they wouldn’t have believed any story I could tell them. And if they had intervened, the alternative to Dr. Schmidt was the Countess Orlovska—with the murder of Major Ivan Strakhov to explain in addition to that of Marcel Blaye.

For a time I thought Schmidt was taking us into the country. We continued out Thokoly ut, past the Park Club, and over the railway tracks, but Otto made a skidding left turn into Mexikoi ut which parallels the railroad. The street bounds one of the worst slum districts of Budapest with tenements hard against slaughterhouses, oil refineries, and fertilizer factories, the whole area a rabbit warren for criminals, a sort of unofficial sanctuary for the hunted from Istanbul to Berlin.

Otto turned into an alleyway between two dingy tenements, drove fifty feet or so, and swung the car into a junk-littered yard enclosed in a high board fence. He’d driven from Kelenfold without a word from Schmidt; he had covered the route before. I recalled Major Strakhov’s contemptuous dismissal of Otto and his fellow mercenaries. “Just like children.” The Russian had seen Otto talking to Schmidt on the Hegyshalom platform and he’d put it down to Otto’s desire “to get out of work.” If Strakhov had been a little less superior, he would have suspected that something was up and he might have preserved his own existence.

Hermann jumped out of the car and knocked on the battered wooden door of the tenement.

“Schnell,” said Schmidt when there was no answer. “Hurry up.” Otto hit the car horn. “Stop it, you fool,” said Schmidt. “Do you want to tell the whole neighborhood?”

Hermann beat on the door with the butt of his revolver. A window on the third floor was raised, and the head of an old woman appeared, framed in the flickering light from an oil lamp.

“Wie heissen Sie?” screamed the old woman.

“Mein Gott,” said Dr. Schmidt. “The old fool has lost her mind.”

“You’ve lost your mind, old fool,” Hermann shouted.

“Nein, nein,” screamed Schmidt, leaping out of the car and landing in the snow up to his knees. “Dumkopf.” He shoved Hermann, then cupped his hands and shouted to the woman in the window. “Open this door immediately. It is I who command. Do you hear me?”

There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of the window closing, and the light disappeared. Dr. Schmidt went to the door and when it opened an inch he grabbed it with both hands and swung it back on its hinges so that it smashed against the building. The old woman was standing in the doorway with the oil lamp in her hand.

“You knew I was coming,” Schmidt said, waving his finger under her nose. “Why weren’t you at the door? What do you mean keeping me waiting? What is the matter with you?”