Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  “That’s right.”

  He turned the next corner, parked fifty feet from the intersection, turned off the motor, and waited. In a minute a blue Ford roadster which I had noticed when we passed it on Pequegnat Street came round the corner and parked behind us. A burly young man who looked like an insurance agent got out of the roadster and came up to our car on Gordon’s side.

  “Mr. Fenton,” Gordon said, “I’d like you to meet Professor Branch. Professor Branch is a public-spirited citizen who has been very helpful in the Schneider case.”

  Fenton smiled a quick, public-spirited smile and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Branch.”

  Before I could answer him he was talking to Gordon: “Fisher came home about half-an-hour ago. He’s there now.”

  “Anybody with him?”

  “No. He came by himself on foot. Do I go and get him?”

  “We’ll both go.”

  Gordon started to get out on his side of the car and I started to get out on mine. He said:

  “You’d better stay here, Branch, if you don’t mind. This Fisher may be dangerous.”

  “Not this boy.” Fenton smiled a contemptuous smile that turned down the corners of his wide mouth. “Unless you’re afraid that Professor Branch will be seduced.”

  “Eh?”

  “I interviewed Rudy a couple of weeks ago. His element is the boudoir. He wants to grow up and be beautiful like Hedy Lamarr. He intimated to me in his subtle feminine way that he could really go for me because I’m such a masculine type, if only I weren’t so coldly professional in my attitude.” Fenton twisted his mouth sideways, rubbed his blue-black chin with a thick rectangular hand, and spat in the road.

  “I see.” Gordon got out of the car and I followed him. On the way back to Fisher’s house, Gordon told Fenton about Ludwig Vlathek in a hundred words.

  “I underestimated Rudy,” Fenton said. “I thought he was baring his soul to me but the little bastard had this up his sleeve. I guess I don’t understand women.”

  When we turned up the narrow concrete walk, I saw a movement behind the Venetian blinds.

  “Stay out here, Branch,” Gordon said. “If nothing happens I suppose you can come in.”

  Fenton had climbed the porch steps and was knocking on the door. Gordon mounted behind him and stood at his shoulder. The door opened immediately. I couldn’t see who had opened it but I heard a soft contralto voice with a German accent say:

  “Hello, Mr. Fenton. This is an unexpected pleasure. Won’t you come in. And your friends, too, of course.”

  Gordon looked at me and I followed them in. Rudolf Fisher held the door for me and I got a good look at him.

  His makeup was tastefully applied but it couldn’t stand white daylight. His lips were rich and red like fresh liver. The rouge on his cheek-bones was carefully tapered-off but it was too gaudy against the chalky whiteness of his powdered face. The shadowing around his gentian-blue eyes made them seem ridiculously large and insanely sombre. But the hand-set wave in his light brown hair was a masterpiece, as shiny and as precisely corrugated as a glass washboard.

  He said: “Won’t you come into the den, gentlemen? It’s cozier in there.”

  He drew his Tyrian-blue dressing-gown closer about his willowy form and tripped ahead of us into the den. He turned on a table-lamp with a scarlet silk shade and a porcelain base decorated with droop-eared Chinamen. I could see the room now: the ivory baby grand with the black fringed drape, the two Persian rugs piled one on the other in front of the ivory mantel, the dead black linoleum on the floor, the ivory-framed Van Gogh reproductions on the ivory walls like windows into a new intense world, the white satin divan with its black and gold and crimson cushions.

  Fisher fluttered a white hand towards the divan, said, “Won’t you sit down, gentlemen?” and sat down on a red leather hassock with his black silk ankles crossed in front of him. In the red light, his face looked quite healthy, like any other young chatelaine’s.

  Fenton said: “We’ll stand, Rudy. We won’t be long. Where’s Vlathek?”

  Fisher’s shoulders came closer together under the purple gown, as if a wind had risen in the room. “He left me. I told you two weeks ago my friend left me. He was an awfully fine person but he just couldn’t stand it when you suspected me of those things. He was terribly disgusted with me.” His lower lip trembled and he touched it with the long pink fingernails of his right hand.

  “Peter will be terribly, terribly disgusted now,” Fenton said.

  The ivory fingers clenched in the purple lap. “Why do you call him Peter? My friend’s name is Ludwig.” The contralto voice had a soprano range.

  Gordon said: “Peter killed his father last night. And he killed another man who told us about you before he died. Talk about Peter.”

  The red mouth opened as if gun-barrels had glinted, but the scream that tortured the white face was silent. The red mouth closed and opened again and closed again. Then it said in a babble of words:

  “I hate him, too, I don’t like him a bit, he treated me horribly. Peter took my car this morning and all the gasoline coupons that I’ve been saving up to go to Chicago to see the Post-Impressionist exhibition and when I tried to stop him he slapped my face. I used to think he was an awfully nice person but now I don’t like him at all any more, he’s not a fine person at all.”

  “You’ll talk then,” Gordon said.

  Fisher got to his feet and shook his clasped hands in front of him. “I most certainly will, I’ll tell you all about Peter. Why, I was tremendously fond of Dr. Schneider, he was really a dear man. And I just hate Peter.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me a thing. I haven’t had anything to do with him for weeks and weeks. He was never a true friend of mine. But I’ll tell you everything that I know about him—”

  “Not here,” Gordon said. “You can come down to the Federal Building with us and give a full statement.”

  “Get your wraps, Rudy,” Fenton said. “It won’t take long.”

  It took long enough. An hour later I was still sitting in the black sedan on Lafayette, waiting for Gordon to come out. He had refused to let me enter the field office on the grounds that the agent in charge chewed small change, distrusted superfluous laymen, and spat nickel-plated bullets.

  For the first half-hour I went from newsstand to newsstand trying to buy the Toronto Globe and Mail of the day before, but there was none to be had. Then I went back to the car for fear of missing Gordon, and sat and thought with a brain whose contents were as strange and kaleidoscopic as Rudolf Fisher’s den.

  Obvious, Rudolf’s attitude to Peter was that of a deserted wife. Did Ruth Esch know her lover was such a versatile amorist. Or didn’t she care? Maybe women in the Third Reich were trained to like that sort of thing. I thought of Roehm, the homosexual chief of the SA whom Hitler murdered with his own talented hands in the blood-bath of 1934. I thought of the elegant Nazi boys I had seen in the Munich nightclubs, with their lipstick and their eye-shadow and their feminine swagger, and the black male guns in their holsters. I thought of the epicene white worms which change their sex and burrow in the bodies of dead men underground.

  Something wriggled away from my mental censor and hopped into my consciousness: the name that the hotel detective in the shabby brown suit had called Ruth Esch. White fluorescent light flooded a deep pit in my mind where the albino serpent and the red-headed toad grappled with each other in a nest of worms. The whole thing seemed tragically clear. Nothing real, nothing outside of imagination is ever as real or as painful as that image was. I closed my mind against it for a strange reason: I felt such pity for Ruth.

  “Still waiting?” Gordon said. I hadn’t seen him come up but he was standing at the curb beside the car. “We just got a telegram from the Kirkland Lake police. There’s a woman answering to Ruth Esch’s description in the hospital there. She’s badly injured and can’t be moved so they put a guard on her. It must be a
bum steer, though.”

  It took me a moment to grasp what he said. Then I said, “Why? She probably went back there because she thought it was the last place you’d look for her.”

  “Figure it out,” Gordon said. “It’s about four now. She’s had nine hours at most to get there from here, and it’s over six hundred miles.”

  “An airplane could do it.”

  “It’s remotely possible that she went there by plane. But we checked the airports, and we’ve been watching all private planes closely since the war broke. Also, she’d have had to fly over a guarded border. I think it’s a bum steer.”

  “It’s a hell of a coincidence then. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

  “No time to argue,” Gordon said. “I’ve got to catch the Chicago plane. There’s a lead there that isn’t bum. Captain von Esch was recognized in Chicago this afternoon. Pardon me, I’ve got to go and get Fenton to bring my car back from the airport.”

  He crossed the sidewalk and re-entered the Federal Building. By the time he disappeared I had decided to go to Kirkland Lake. I followed him into the building and found a pay-phone. The airport told me that I could get a plane to Toronto within an hour—somebody had cancelled his reservation. The New York Central station told me I’d reach Toronto in plenty of time to catch the northbound train. I had a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket and that was enough to go on with.

  I went out and climbed into the back of the car and a minute later Gordon and Fenton climbed into the front.

  “Where can I drop you, Branch?” Gordon said with a shade of impatience in his voice.

  “I’ll go along to the airport, thanks. I’m taking the Toronto plane.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I’m going to Kirkland Lake. I want to see if the woman in the hospital is Ruth Esch.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Gordon said, but he started the car and headed out Jefferson. “Even if it is the right woman, she’s injured and under guard. She can’t get away.”

  “I like travelling,” I said. “I’ve heard that Kirkland Lake is quite a charming town in its crude way.”

  Gordon shrugged his shoulders without looking around. “It’s your time and your money. There’s a faint chance that she went by plane. But we can leave her to the Canadian authorities for the present. Her brother is our responsibility.”

  “Captain von Esch is her brother then?”

  “His name’s Carl, and he even seems to bear her a family resemblance. Same features, same coloring. We got a complete description of him from the Canadian War Department. How he got from Northern Ontario to Chicago I don’t know. But I do know that he’s not going to get out of Chicago.”

  “Did Fisher tell you anything about the Bonamy prison-break?”

  “No, he didn’t know anything about that phase of Schneider’s activities,” Fenton said. He half-turned in the seat and hooked a grey herringbone arm over the back. “He claimed he never heard of either of the Esches. He may have been holding out, but I don’t think so. He was scared green.”

  “Verbal diarrhoea,” Gordon said. “He dictated over three thousand words in a little over an hour. I could hardly get a question in edgeways.”

  “Three thousand words about what?” I said.

  “It’s a long story the way he told it,” Fenton said. He turned to Gordon: “Is it all right to tell him, Chet?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just a public-spirited citizen. Read me some selections from Proust instead.”

  “Tell him,” Gordon said. “Branch literally risked his neck on this case. God knows he must have learned to keep mum by this time.”

  “Well, keep it to yourself until it breaks in the papers,” Fenton said. “If it ever does. According to Fisher, Herman Schneider was a spy in spite of himself. He left Germany in the middle thirties for honest liberal reasons. The Nazis couldn’t risk concentrating him then because too many people in Germany and outside of Germany knew his name. So they let him go, but they kept Peter. Peter was only a kid then, but he was in the Hitler Youth and he didn’t want to leave. He stayed and grew up into a hundred percent Aryan superman with bells on.

  “By the time Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, Peter was an officer of Engineers in the regular army. He showed such aptitude for sabotage and psychological warfare that they shifted him to Intelligence and trained him to work here in the United States. They knew they’d be fighting us soon and they were ready for it, they thought. They looked a long way ahead but they didn’t see the right things. For one thing they over-estimated the strength of native fascism in this country. Anyway, Peter was slated for the job of engineering adviser to the Gauleiter of Michigan. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds now, before Russia held the Germans and Pearl Harbor gave us the shock treatment.

  “After a year of working with English phonograph records and studying at the Skoda Works and the Ford plant in Belgium and a few other places, Peter was ready to graduate to America in the summer of 1941. We weren’t at war with them yet and it was easy enough for them to get him into this country, but they made it hard for the sake of an added advantage. The Nazis are experts in making everything pay off double—”

  “Including trouble,” I said. “Double, double, toil and trouble.”

  “That’s true, too,” Fenton said. “Peter contacted his father through a Gestapo stooge in the Free German underground. He said he had had a change of heart and all that crap and he was just dying to get out of Germany but the nasty Nazis wouldn’t let him go. Old man Schneider fell for it and went to the German Consulate in New York. They agreed to let Peter out of Germany and save him from Stalin and the steppes, for a price. If the Herr Doktor would provide them with a certain piece of information—The Herr Doktor had a moral conniption fit and gave them what they wanted. They released Peter, and old man Schneider went to the State Department and got the prodigal son into the country before you could say Heliogabolus Schwartzentruber.

  “Ever since then the prodigal has been blackmailing Dr. Schneider for more information, and getting it. But that was just a sideline for Peter. In two years he’s worked in at least six of the important war plants in the Detroit area, under different names with stolen birth certificates. He’s had a hand in psychological sabotage, too. He’s been helping to direct the activities of the native fascists in Detroit, the fanatical anti-Jew anti-Negro anti-labor boys. Fisher didn’t say, but I suspect Peter Schneider played a part in inciting the race riots.”

  “Where does Fisher fit into all this?” I said.

  “He’s Peter’s friend,” Fenton said with heavy irony, curling his lip as if friend was a four-letter word. “They met at a pansy drag soon after Peter came to this country, isn’t that romantic? Rudy’s a weak willie—at least he’s trying like hell to act like one—and Peter used him for little errands like contacting old man Schneider. That’s Rudy’s story: if it’s not true we’ll break it down. But it’s pretty clear that when we cracked the Buchanan-Dineen circle, Peter dropped his Vlathek alias and cleared out for Canada, leaving Rudy holding the bag with his lily-white hands. I only hope he didn’t leave our Rudolf with child.”

  “Have you ever thought of helping to solve the sewage problem by converting your imagination into a septic tank?” Gordon said.

  Fenton grinned and said to me, “Chet’s the last Puritan, Mr. Branch. Santayana’s boy was only the second-last. I trust I haven’t offended your delicate shell-like ears with my coarse talking.”

  I said, “I teach a course in Swift and Fielding. Compared with them you’re mealy-mouthed.”

  “My God, Gordon,” Fenton roared, “did you hear that? I’m mealy-mouthed.”

  The mid-afternoon traffic was light and we were already in the suburbs. When we reached the airport, the Chicago plane was landing. Gordon had just time to give Fenton a few instructions and to say to me:

  “If you find out anything let us know. Call the Detroit or Ch
icago field office and reverse the charges.”

  He shook my hand and walked up the ramp and ducked into the plane. A ground attendant lifted the ramp and shut the aluminum door behind him. I stood with Fenton and watched the great plane change from an incongruous winged turtle on the ground to a bird in the sky.

  Fenton shook hands and said, “See you again, Branch.” He went back to Gordon’s car and drove away.

  I picked up the ticket I had reserved and went into the waiting-room to wait for the Toronto plane.

  CHAPTER XIV

  EARLY TWILIGHT HUNG OVER the city like a thin, grey haze and made the lake a sheet of striated lead, stretching to a leaden horizon, when I landed at the Toronto Airport. I took a taxi to the Union Station. Down the long, drab streets the neons trembled in the gathering air, glowing blue and red and green with a quiet, inhuman lustre.

  At the station a ticket-clerk told me I had nearly five hours to wait. The next train that would make the Kirkland Lake connection at Churchill left Toronto at 11:30 that night. I wouldn’t get to Kirkland Lake until two o’clock the next day.

  I found a phone-booth and called the airport, but there was no seat available on any plane going anywhere. I went back to the ticket-clerk and bought a coach ticket, which was the only kind I could buy. That meant I had to sit up all night.

  I went through the tunnel from the station to the Royal York, ate a quick dinner in the grill, and hired a room to sleep in until my train left. I was hatless and suitcaseless and wild-eyed, and the desk-clerk looked at me suspiciously. I mollified him by paying in advance.

  “I’d like to be called at 11:10,” I said. “I have to catch the North Bay train.”

  “Yessir, you shall be called,” he said, and signaled to a bellboy.

  I followed the bellboy across the huge lobby to the elevators, but before I got to them something took hold of my attention and stopped me in my tracks. It was a newspaper folded inside out and left by someone on the seat of a leather armchair. At the top of the page that was showing there was a picture of Wendell Willkie.