Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (9 page)

I pulled down the window. The wind felt good in my face.

“Get out,” said the voice behind me. “Get out. We haven’t any time.”

I landed in the snow. There was enough light flickering through the falling snow so that I caught the gun that dropped from the window. It was Otto’s Luger.

Sound came on the wind from the station. There were three quick shots, warning shots fired into the air. There were shrill blasts from a whistle.

I turned back to the window to see a body drop out. It landed in the snow alongside me. It was a woman, a six-foot, broad-shouldered woman with bright yellow hair. I helped her to her feet. It was Teensy, the taciturn amazon from the dining car, the wife of Hiram Carr, the American agricultural attaché. She wore ski pants and heavy boots and a short jacket with a fur collar. Her head was bare, and the two bright spots of orange rouge were still on her cheeks. There was also a .45 in her hand.

“Get going,” she said. She emphasized her words with a shove. “Crawl under the cars, get to the fence. Above the billboard. Hiram’s there with a car. Get going.”

I ran toward the head of the train through the drifted snow. I ran toward the lighted part of the yards because the billboard was opposite the second car. I had no choice. Men were coming from the opposite direction, from the station. I could see the dancing beams from their flashlights as they ran.

I ran like a frightened rabbit, but Teensy got to the fence ahead of me. She was in the car, holding open the door, when I scaled the fence. I jumped into the moving car.

Teensy sat in the front seat with Hiram who drove. He was dressed like something out of Fenimore Cooper and Sears Roebuck combined, blue overalls tucked into the kind of boots farmers wear in the cattle barn, a navy pea jacket, and a coonskin cap, complete with tail. Teensy lit me a cigarette.

When we’d driven a good mile, Hiram turned his head and said in his high-pitched voice, “Well, well, Mr. Blaine, such a genuine pleasure to see you again. Isn’t that so, Teensy?”

“Cut the comedy,” Teensy said. “If I have to hear any more of your folksy patter I’ll get out and walk.” She turned to me, “Mr. Stodder, Hiram thinks he has to pretend to be a hick just because he’s supposed to be an agricultural attaché.” I’ve had to listen to the same lowcomedy act all over Central Europe. ‘Don’t you think they speak English real good, Teensy? Been a practical farmer all my life and my father and grandfather before me.’ He’s never been any closer to a farm than Times Square. His father kept a saloon in Brooklyn. I don’t think he knows who his grandfather was.”

Hiram laughed. “It’s surprising how many people take you for just what you pretend to be.” Then he added mischievously, “Isn’t that so, Teensy?”

“You’re an idiot,” Teensy said but she leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

“Look,” I said. “Would you mind letting me out anywhere here? I’ve got to get the girl who was on the train with me.”

“Where did you leave her?” Hiram said.

“In a coffeehouse,” I said. “About two blocks from the station, across from the cemetery. She stayed there with Schmidt while I went into the yards.”

Instead of stopping, Hiram stepped on the accelerator.

“Where are you going?” I said. “It’s in the other direction.” I thought of using the Luger in my pocket.

“Don’t worry,” Hiram said. “We’ll go with you. We won’t leave Mademoiselle Torres. But I’ve got to get rid of this car. We may have been spotted.”

It didn’t seem strange that Carr should have known Maria’s name. Or that Teensy should have addressed me as Stodder. Not after everything else that had happened to me in twenty-four hours.

We drove ten minutes in silence. Then Hiram drove into a gas station, parked the car, and handed the keys to the attendant. We piled into another car which carried diplomatic license plates. Several pairs of skis were strapped to the top.

“We’ve been skiing in the Buda hills,” Hiram said. “Keep your mouth shut if we’re stopped.”

I felt a lot better when I saw Schmidt’s car in front of the coffeehouse. I said I thought Hermann must have joined the doctor and Maria when he left the yards.

“What are we going to do?” I said. “We can’t start a gun battle in there with Schmidt.”

“Never mind about that,” Hiram said. “Schmidt doesn’t want trouble any more than we do.” He stepped out of the car. “You’d better stay out here. It’s close enough to the station so that some of the train crew might be inside. They might recognize you. There might be police.”

Teensy said, “Get behind the wheel and keep the engine running. You’d better be sure that gun is working.”

I lowered the window. I looked at my watch, and it was a few minutes before nine o’clock. Maria had been inside with Schmidt nearly an hour and a half.

Apparently the apricot brandy was flowing freely; when Hiram opened the coffeehouse door the patrons were singing with the gypsy band. Hiram and Teensy couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes but it seemed to me they’d never return. Two or three times I swore with impatience and found myself opening the door to follow them. Teensy had left me a pack of cigarettes; I smoked one after another. If I inspected the safety catch on that Luger once, I looked at it twenty times. A policeman passed, swinging his nightstick. He must have heard the engine because he stopped and stared at the car. I took the gun in my hand when he came close. But he looked at the diplomatic license plates, turned on his heel, and walked away.

Teensy came out of the coffeehouse first. She said, “I’m afraid there’s a hitch.”

“What do you mean?” I said. I didn’t like the look in her face.

“Your girl isn’t there,” Teensy said. “The proprietor said she and Schmidt left an hour ago.”

“You couldn’t have looked for them,” I said. “She wouldn’t have left. Schmidt wouldn’t have left his car here. You didn’t look far enough. The proprietor’s a liar.”

Teensy shook her head. “We looked all right. They’ve been gone nearly an hour, the proprietor says.”

Then Schmidt couldn’t have been alerted by Hermann. The doctor hadn’t waited for Hermann or anybody else. He never had the intention of waiting. He’d ordered Otto to kill me in the train, whether or not we found the envelope.

But how could Schmidt have forced Maria to leave a public place against her will? He couldn’t have used a gun unless the proprietor and all the patrons were in league with him. It didn’t make sense. I remembered my doubts about whether Maria understood German. I recalled contrasting her calm in Schmidt’s hideout with the stark terror she’d shown at the mere sight of him on the Orient Express. Why had she—

Hiram’s high-pitched voice brought me back to earth. “If you’ll slide over, we’ll get moving.”

“Where are we going?” I said. “What about Schmidt and the girl?”

Hiram let in the clutch. “You’re coming to our place. There’s a lot you’re going to tell me. Then we can think about how to find Mademoiselle Torres. And put that gun in the glove compartment. You’d better unload it. You won’t need it now.”

Hiram drove to the Danube, then headed north along the quais.

“Have you ever been to Budapest before?” Teensy asked.

I told her I’d lived there for more than two years, from the beginning of 1939 to just before Pearl Harbor. But I had something else on my mind.

“Will you let me keep the Luger?” I said to Hiram.

“No,” he said. “You still want to leave us?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got to know what’s happened to Maria, to Mademoiselle Torres. If you’ll let me out anywhere along here.”

“Nothing doing,” Hiram said. “We aren’t running a rescue business for free. I want information from you and I want it right away. Besides, how far do you think you’d get without us? You’d be picked up in an hour by the police. Do you understand Hungarian?”

I said I did. Hiram switched on the car radio.

The announcer was saying, “The People’s Democracy has brought peace and prosperity to Hungary.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” I said.

“Wait a minute,” Hiram said. “Just be patient.”

There was a lot more of the usual Communist party-line harangue, then the “Internationale.”

“Attention,” the announcer said. “The Ministry of the Interior has issued the following communiqué:

“A reward of 25,000 forints will be paid for information leading to the arrest of foreign agents, guilty of murdering a Red Army officer on Hungarian soil. The crime was committed this afternoon aboard the Vienna-Budapest local train by a man and woman, traveling on Swiss passports made out in the names of Maria Torres and Marcel Blaye. The Capitalist perpetrators of this unspeakable act are believed to be in the neighborhood of Budapest, having escaped from the train at Kelenfold station before their crime was discovered. All citizens are ordered to telephone police headquarters or notify the nearest policeman the moment this dangerous pair is spotted. Warning: they are believed to be heavily armed.”

Hiram switched off the radio. “They’ve been broadcasting every fifteen minutes. Do you want us to let you off?”

“I’ve got to do something about the girl,” I said. “I won’t leave her.”

“We want to see her just as much as you do,” Teensy said, “but not for the same reasons.”

Hiram seemed to find the remark very humorous.

“And I’d like a long talk with Herr Doktor Schmidt,” Hiram added. “Take my word for it, Mr. Stodder, Schmidt won’t kill her. He won’t do anything until he knows where that Manila envelope has gone.”

I said to Teensy, “Then you found it?”

“No,” she said. “Somebody must have been ahead of us.”

“How did you know about the envelope?” I said.

“It’s a long story,” Hiram said. “I’ll explain when we get to our place. But I saw you were very anxious to examine an envelope in the dining car. Then Teensy saw you duck into the end compartment on your way out of the train. We figured you went in there for a purpose. But we didn’t get a chance to look before the train arrived at Keleti. They sealed the car after they found the Russian’s body.”

We passed the Franz Josef bridge, and the Russians’ winged victory monument was black against a blacker sky over the Gellert Hill. We passed the Elizabeth bridge, and there were the naked walls of the royal palace atop the Buda hills.

The Carrs lived in a big, old-fashioned house at the end of the Stalin ut, near the City Park. The house was less than a mile in a straight line across the park from Schmidt’s hideout on the Mexikoi ut.

The door was opened by a smiling man whom Teensy addressed as Walter. She said Walter and his wife Millie, who did the cooking, had been with the Carrs for many years. Walter was an ex-prizefighter, a heavyweight. I’m over six feet, but Walter towered over me.

Hiram produced a shaker full of cocktails but neither he nor Teensy would discuss Maria or Schmidt or Hungary until we’d finished Millie’s chicken dinner. Hiram said they hadn’t been back to America in more than five years and he quizzed me on everything from major league baseball to the old age pension. After dinner, after he’d poured the Benedictine and thrown a couple of logs on the open fire, we talked about what was on our minds.

I told my story for the third time, just as I’d related it to Maria the night before, the way I’d told it to Schmidt, the story of my brother and how I’d bought Marcel Blaye’s passport for a forgery. Twenty-four hours earlier, even three hours earlier, it had sounded reasonable and logical. With each later telling, it began to assume a quality of fantasy until it sounded only half real to me. I found myself wondering whether I hadn’t suffered some sort of mental aberration and that perhaps neither Maria nor Schmidt nor Strakhov nor any of them had ever existed.

I told the Carrs everything, step by step, until Teensy found me in the dark and silent train in the Keleti yards. She and Hiram listened without moving except to throw logs on the fire from time to time or mix me a highball.

“And that’s all I know,” I said. “How do you two fit into all this?”

Hiram lit a cigar.

“The night before last,” Hiram said, “I was called on the telephone from Vienna. I was told to get over there right away. There wasn’t a train or a plane so Walter drove us over.”

He paused to look at Teensy, but his remarks were still addressed to me. “You mustn’t expect me to tell you everything,” Hiram said. “But since you’ve been frank with me, I’ll tell you all I can about the mess you’re in.

“When we reached Vienna, we were told that a man named Marcel Blaye, in whom a great many governments had expressed interest, had been murdered. Fortunately, if one can use that word in connection with murder, Blaye’s body was found in the American zone. I say it was fortunate because public knowledge of his death would be most inconvenient at this time. Doctor Schmidt knows Blaye has been murdered because he killed him. But the Russians still do not know Blaye’s fate. All they know is that an envelope which he was carrying was brought into Hungary by Mademoiselle Torres, his secretary. They know that Major Strakhov accompanied someone with Blaye’s passport on today’s train. They still think it was Blaye himself. I propose they go on thinking so.”

Hiram’s feet just touched the rug when he sat on the edge of the leather armchair. The cigar was almost as big as the smoker.

“One of our men from Vienna was on the Orient Express. He was following Doctor Schmidt just as Schmidt was trailing Mademoiselle Torres. Unfortunately, our man was not sufficiently imaginative to foresee that you would leave the train. In the first place, he did not know of Blaye’s passport. All he knew was that you had purchased the space which Blaye’s death had made vacant. Unlike Doctor Schmidt, he proceeded to Budapest and wired Vienna in code from the legation. That’s why Teensy and I took this morning’s train.”

“How do you know I’m not mixed up with the Russians?”

Hiram blew an enormous smoke ring. “In that case, you wouldn’t have found it necessary to leave either the Orient or today’s train.”

Teensy said, “We thought at first you might be French or British, until I met you in the yards.”

“I’m eternally grateful for that,” I said. “I thought I was finished. Both of those goons were ready to shoot me.”