“What kind of a bundle?”
“A big paper bundle of laundry. You know, caps and uniforms. Maybe I left it in the Residence.”
“No, I didn’t see it.”
Another nurse came tripping silently down the corridor. “Professor Branch?” she said. “Your party is on the line.”
I went back to the front desk and the grey-haired nurse got up from her seat and handed me the phone.
“Hello, Branch speaking,” I said into it.
“Mr. Gordon is on the line,” the operator announced above the electric murmur of the wires.
I said, “Gordon? This is Branch.”
His voice clear and crisp over a thousand miles of wire. “Hello, Branch. Have you seen the woman?”
“I’ve seen her. It’s Ruth Esch, and she’s been here for three days.”
“You’re quite sure? You were wrong once.”
“My glasses were broken and I don’t see so well without them. But there’s no mistake this time. She recognized me even before I spoke.”
“Would you swear to her identity?”
“I’m going to marry her. Does that convince you?”
“I have to be sure,” Gordon said. “But I figured she must be there.”
“What do you mean, you figured? You thought it was a bum steer.”
“I was wrong. I mean that’s what I figured this morning after we captured Carl von Esch.”
“So you got him.”
“We had to shoot him a little, but he’ll live to stand trial. Did you ever see him, Branch?”
“Once.”
“He resembles his sister, doesn’t he?”
“No. Yes. I don’t remember very well. I didn’t see much resemblance at the time, but he’s not a big man, is he?” A door in my mind opened on whirling vistas of possibility and another door clanged shut for good on a dark, ugly place. “Listen, Gordon, he knocked out his sister and left her for dead in an old mine-shaft here. Was he disguised as a woman?”
“When we caught him,” Gordon said, “he tried to ditch a bundle he was carrying. I’ve got the bundle here. It contains a set of women’s clothes, a woman’s red wig, and a pair of rubber breasts. He had Ruth Esch’s passport and visa on his person, and her Department of Justice permit to enter the United States. Incidentally, he entered this country from Windsor the night of September 21—the day before this whole thing started. Peter Schneider must have driven him down from Kirkland Lake this morning. He had on a man’s suit, but he was wearing women’s underwear under it. I got the suit identified over long-distance by the man that had his car stolen, you know, the little man in the blanket. All in all, I think we’ve got enough to convict von Esch of murder.”
“Is he homosexual?”
“He has some of the mannerisms. Good female impersonators usually are pansies; they like pretending to be women. Why?”
“I saw Peter Schneider kiss him. That’s what buffaloed me from the first, more than my bad eyes, I think. I’ve seen men in women’s clothes in Paris, in the hole-in-the-wall dancehalls around the Place de la Bastille. But I forgot there were such things.”
“You’ll never forget again. They haven’t got Schneider yet, have they?”
“No. At least I don’t know. There’s still a policeman here.”
“Sergeant Cummings? Let me speak to him, will you?” I was laying down the receiver when Gordon said, “Just a minute. How badly hurt is she?”
“Pretty badly. Concussion and shock. She seems to be recovering—her memory has come back—but she’ll be in bed for quite a while.”
“If I can get permission, I’m going to come and talk to her when she’s able. Are you staying?”
“I’m going to stay here until I can take her back with me. There’s nothing on the books against her?”
“Not on our books. It’s pretty clear that her brother and Schneider sapped her and stole her clothes and papers and identity so that Carl could get away to this country. It not only got him across the border but it provided him with respectable shoes to step into, with very little danger of our investigating him. You were the nigger in the woodpile, Branch. You know now why they tried to kill you.”
“I know now all right. The irony is that when I did see Carl I was taken in. Herman Schneider wasn’t taken in, though. I doubt if they tried to fool him. He saw the whole thing and couldn’t stand it, even if he was working for the Nazis. They probably told him he had to co-operate or else. He co-operated to save himself, but he was cracking. They must have seen that he was both useless and dangerous to them, and had no qualms about killing him. They could get around whatever political morality he had, but his sexual morality was too strong to curb, stronger even than his vanity. Besides, he was a friend of Ruth’s and so far as he knew they had killed her.”
“They may try to yet.”
“What?”
“Look, Branch, she’s got to be guarded. I’ll talk to the police but you see that they’re not niggardly with protection. Her life is in danger.”
“From Schneider?”
“Why else would he go back to Kirkland Lake? Fenton checked that item in the Globe and Mail. He must have been in a hurry, to leave the paper in his car. The item he tore out—”
“I know. I saw it in Toronto.”
Gordon spoke with a harsh sincerity that made the telephone vibrate: “She’s got to be guarded twenty-four hours a day as long as Schneider is at large. They must have thought they killed her and that she wouldn’t be found. Now that he knows she’s alive, he’ll try to finish the job. So far as he knows she’s the only one that can put the finger on him.”
“Do you want to talk to the mountie?”
“Right. I appreciate your calling back right away. I’ll have the charges reversed.”
I called the man in the vestibule to the phone and listened to him asking and answering questions. Then he asked a nurse to get the resident physician, and she fetched a stout man in a white coat.
I heard him tell Gordon that Ruth should be able to talk to him in a week, perhaps sooner if necessary. He hung up.
The plain-clothesman called headquarters and asked for another man to help guard the hospital. When he finished phoning I said:
“Are you going to put a man in her room?”
“What do you think, Dr. Sandiman?” he said to the stout doctor. “The F.B.I. thinks there’s going to be another attempt on her life.”
“They do?” Dr. Sandiman’s chins shook. “We must do everything possible to protect her, Sergeant. Of course. But he’ll have to be very quiet, as inconspicuous as possible. A sudden shock to the patient could have very serious repercussions.”
“Could it?” I said.
“Very serious, indeed.”
“And Schneider was in her room?”
“Yeah,” Cummings said. “I only wish I’d known it sooner.”
“Did he leave those roses by the window?”
“Yeah. But I examined them. They’re O.K.”
“The point is that they’re there, visible from outside. He could have put them there to mark her room.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
I turned to Sandiman. “I have a suggestion, doctor. Miss Esch should be protected against the danger of shock as well as other dangers. Could you move her to another room without disturbing her?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I think that would be very sensible.”
“Then why not do it now?”
He gave orders to the nurse. As she started down the hall I said to her, “Leave the roses where they are.”
Sergeant Cummings went back to the vestibule. I said to Sandiman:
“Will you let me have the room that Miss Esch is vacating?”
“What on earth for? Are you ill?”
“Not especially, though you might have a look at my eyes. It’s just that if a certain visitor comes to that room I wouldn’t want him to be disappointed.”
“You’d do better to leave it to the poli
ce.” There was officious disapproval in his bulging blue eyes.
“The visitor I expect murdered my best friend. Yesterday he tried to hang me.” I showed him the marks on my neck.
He clucked like a sympathetic hen, but he said, “All the more reason for leaving it to the police.”
“Look, doctor,” I said, “I am leaving it to the police. He’ll never reach that room. But if he does I don’t want him to be disappointed.”
“Have you a gun?”
“No.”
“You’ll need a gun. Come along.”
He took me down the hall to his office. On the white wall above his desk there was a photograph of a young man in army uniform who looked like Sandiman’s son. But it was a uniform of the First World War. I looked at his face and saw the unchanging bones under the fat He was the young man in the photograph.
He opened a drawer and laid a Colt .45 on the desk. “Keep this under your pillow. It’s loaded.”
“Thanks. Now how about bandaging my head. My concussion is paining me something terrible.”
He glanced at me sharply and gradually smiled. “Good idea. What reason shall I give for admitting you? It’s imperative to have a reason.”
“My eyes. Make it my diabolical eyes.”
“By the way, what happened? Haemorrhage?”
“Yes, the hangman’s noose—”
“I see. We’ll put some drops in them while we’re about it.”
I took off my glasses and he put drops in my eyes and covered my hair with bandages. He handed me the Colt and led me down the hall to the room that Ruth had left. “We put her at the other end of the wing,” he said.
“Good.”
“Well, I’ve got work to do. Good luck.” He waved a pudgy hand and closed the door.
I got into bed with my clothes on and pulled the sheet up to my eyes. I held the revolver in my right hand under the cover and watched the window. The scent of the roses reminded me of funerals and weddings, but I felt more like a bridegroom than a corpse.
I lay all afternoon and watched the bright spot the sun made creep down the blind. My mind was keyed up tight. My nerves were taut and brittle, ready to snap. To relieve the tension that made me shiver slightly under the sheet, I thought of great things beyond my reach, the stars and planets, a million luminous balls kept in the air by a juggler nobody had ever seen. To make the sun move down my blind a foot in an hour, the earth’s periphery whirled a thousand miles through space.
I thought of the inevitable past, Alec Judd crushed out with ten million others by the immense millstones of war, the millstones that were already powdering the bones of the men who had set them in motion. I thought of Herman Schneider, morally broken on a neat, cruel wheel devised by the son who had once been seed in his loins. I remembered the hunched despair of his well-fed shoulders when he walked away from the strange lovers in the fencing room, the lost and gone look in his eyes above the Lüger when he was going to shoot me, and the jagged hole that let the desperate conflict out of his head. I felt for him the kind of remote pity I felt for Agamemnon, a weak, well-meaning man betrayed and murdered in a forgotten language on a stage that time had crumbled into dust.
In the nightmare sequence of events that had seemed to grow out of each other, meaninglessly and malignantly, like cancer cells, I saw the push of giant uncontrollable forces on weak men, the waste of breakable wills and stout fragile bodies fractured in the clash of continents. But underneath the tired, cold impersonality of my vision I mourned for Alec Judd. I yearned steadily to plant the Schneider seed six feet deep.
When the sun’s rays came straight through the opening at the bottom of the blind and lay horizontally across the room, a nurse brought me dinner. It was a good dinner, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes and gravy and a quarter of a lemon pie. I ate it with my left hand, watching the window. My right hand held the gun under the sheet.
The sun faded out of the room and darkness seeped in slowly. I was glad that night was falling. I was more likely to have a visitor at night and I was lonely for someone to shoot.
The nurse came in and took away my tray. It was so dark I could barely see her face. The door opened and I could see a man’s head and shoulders black against the light from the hall.
“Don’t shoot,” Sandiman said. “How’s it going?”
“Fine. The dinner was excellent.”
“I’ll tell the dietitian. Well, see you later.”
“No sign of Schneider?”
“No.” He closed the door.
Now I could see only the dim outlines of the room, the walls which seemed more distant than before, the pale ridge my legs made under the sheet, the dark roses beside the window. I lay and watched the black mass of the roses, red in the sun and black at night like blood, rich and delicate to the touch like a loved woman, drowsy and dark like sleep and death. The rich, dark cloud of roses expanded and engulfed the room and the whole night.
I opened my eyes with a start and saw her standing in the room, a blurred figure glimmering faintly in the darkness by the window. No, it was a nurse. I could see her white uniform and cap. I must have been asleep. Thank God, he hadn’t come when I was asleep.
I realized that he could have. The nurse was there by the window and I hadn’t heard her enter. She seemed to be raising the shade.
“Leave it down,” I said.
I could feel her start, but she said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “All right,” and drew the shade.
Her low voice echoed in my mind. I closed my hand on the revolver under the sheet but there was no feeling in my fingers. I had been half-lying on my arm and it was asleep.
As I reached for the gun with my left hand, the white blur slipped towards me and I saw the gleam of a face and the white shadow of an arm stretched out. In the split-second it took me to throw off the sheet I thought of several things: the evil whiteness of Melville’s whale, the whiteness of sunless plants, the white bandaged head that had been on my pillow, the white look of death, and the bundle of caps and uniforms which the nurse had left in the room where Vlathek had been.
I caught the hand as it descended and tore the sandbag out of it. It wrenched free and took my throat. I drew my right knee to my chin and kicked out against the silent thing above me. It staggered back across the room, jumped up before I could free my other leg from the sheet, and crashed through the blind out the window.
The gun was lost on the floor but I felt life in my right hand again. I dived out the open window through the wreckage of the blind and landed on all fours on the ground. There were shouts from somewhere and I saw the white shape streaking across the lawn towards the trees at the edge. I went after it.
Before he reached the trees, Nurse Schneider fell over his skirts and I jumped him with my knees in the small of his back. He twisted over and I caught a glimpse of his pale contorted face before his heel came into my stomach and sprawled me backwards on the grass.
I got up fighting for air and saw him crouched with his right hand under his starched skirt tugging at something. The hand came out with a black gun he had given birth to.
I heard men’s voices and the sound of running feet somewhere behind me. He started to back away into the shadow of the trees and I walked towards him against my will faster than he retreated. The gun flashed and coughed.
I felt a freezing blow in the right thigh where the bullet struck but I got him by the wrist with my left hand and forced down the gun. His other hand tore my face but I kept hold of the twisting wrist. I circled his arm with my right arm and grasped my left wrist with my right hand and lifted.
The tendons in his shoulder tore softly like damp cardboard, and the gun dropped to the ground and lay impotent. He screamed on a high monotone and bit my arm. I let go of him with my right hand and hit him on the temple with all the will left in my body. He fell forward into the grass with his face turned sideways.
The ground shook under heavy feet and Sergeant Cummings came up b
eside me with a late gun in his hand. He turned a flashlight on the quiet face and said:
“It’s him.”
I said, “Yes,” between gulps of air.
Above the dark-headed trees the stars began to waver and flare like torches at a celebration a long way off and I sat down in the grass because my right leg was made of rubber. My mind flew out like smoke in empty space and I rode a vertical wind through moving stars like fields of arcing fireflies. The earth was a small, forgotten thing, a withered apple for which black ants and red ants fought together. The diastole of exhaustion ended and the systole of unconsciousness closed on my head, narrowing the universe to a warm, dry tunnel where I ran lightly and easily in the friendly darkness. The terrible things had died in the dark behind. At the end of the tunnel Ruth was waiting with hair bright as sunlight and no sword in her hand.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1949 by Kenneth Millar
Renewed 1971 by Kenneth Millar
Introduction copyright © 1980 by Bill Pronzini
cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4532-9052-1
This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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Dark Tunnel Page 24
