“Yes,” McDonald admitted, “I suppose it does.”
“All right, then obviously somebody in that organization is a rat, and that’s the rat we’ve got to find. Maybe it’s Hansen’s nonexistent widow. Maybe it’s someone I haven’t heard of and you would least suspect….”
It was amazing the possibilities that could occur to a man just from listening to his own words. The one that occurred to Larry now made him feel a little sick.
“Who’s looking after the general?” he asked.
McDonald stared at him. He was beginning to look a little sick himself, but in a rather different way. Then he looked at Maren, who was following the discussion with very large eyes, and sighed.
“All right, I give up,” he said. “I was afraid I’d never get away with this hero act, but you can’t blame a guy for trying when his girl is watching…. You ask me who’s looking after the general, Mr. Willis. I thought I’d made that clear. Why do you think I’ve been playing cat and mouse in my own apartment instead of getting lost in a healthier climate? How far do you think I could travel with a companion who speaks no Danish, no English, and his fat face plastered all over the front pages? And there’s no organization, friend. No organization at all!”
McDonald wasn’t casual any more. He was wilted—but emphatic.
“There, behind yon bedroom door,” he cried, sweeping one arm toward the hall behind them, “sleeps the most troublesome, the most dangerous, and the most sought-after house guest in Europe—General Gregor Vassilievich Yukov!
“… and the last man on earth I expected to bring home from a boat ride!”
15.
MCDONALD’S ARM DROPPED TO HIS SIDE, AND HE SIGHED ONCE more. There was a brief commemorative silence in honor of a dead hero; but the loss didn’t leave him either desolate or speechless for long. Two gaping mouths were enough for one gathering.
He turned about and studied them: Maren edged forward on her chair like a commuter waiting for her stop to be called, and Larry with a big idea like bubble gum all over his face.
“Well, why don’t you ask me another question?” McDonald asked.
“I’m trying to think of one,” Larry mumbled.
A crooked smile and Ira McDonald was back to normal again. “I’ll save you the trouble,” he said, coming back to the sofa arm, “and there’s no use trying to pretty it up. The fact is, I sold old man Carlsberg a bill of goods. But that’s my business, showing the visitors a good time. Some like castles and cathedrals; some like dancing girls; Carlsberg likes rescuing refugees from behind the iron curtain, and I figured that he could afford it. Who am I to say what a man should do with his money?”
There was a slight pause for audience reaction; but it was too early for boos and hisses.
“It started right after the old man came over here,” McDonald continued. “I guess the Independence Day observance in the old home town steamed him up, or maybe he’s just naturally steamed, but all he’d talk about was the Great Red Menace and what should be done about it. Garth told me he’d sunk thousands in various funds to finance would-be refugees, and so what was another thousand, more or less?”
“Or even ten,” Larry suggested.
“Less expenses,” McDonald said, “and there weren’t too many of them. I have friends scattered all over Europe. It was just a matter of contacting the right ones and arranging for a Russian-speaking refugee who could pass for a headline-making general.”
“Ira McDonald!” Maren cried. “Are you trying to tell us that you never intended to rescue General Yukov?”
If she hadn’t been a girl whose large eyes were still feasting on this man in the dressing gown, she would have reached that conclusion at least five minutes earlier. But now that audience reaction was developing, McDonald was forced to go on the defensive.
“Maren, honey,” he pleaded, “do you think I’m crazy enough to attempt a job like that on my own? As your friend Willis has just pointed out, that’s a big-league operation. Sure, I dropped the name in my talks with Carlsberg and told him that I thought I could swing it; but I made no promises. What does it matter anyway? The old gent would have gotten a thrill for his money, and some poor devil would have gotten a free ride to the States. As for my out, well, anybody can mistake a face.”
“But ten thousand dollars!”
“Yes, ten thousand dollars. Small change to a man like Otto Carlsberg, but a passport to paradise to a guy trying to scrape up a nest egg so he can marry a wonderful girl and give her just a few of the things she deserves.”
It was a nice speech. Maren quieted down, and even Larry might have appreciated it if the knowledge of the general’s proximity hadn’t made him callous to such things. But patching up a difference with his girl wasn’t the only trouble on Ira McDonald’s mind. Intentional or not, he still had a guest in the bedroom whose presence was not only dangerous but incredible.
“Oh, I was wrong,” he added sadly. “I’ll stand on a street corner and shout it if I ever get out of this mess. What I can’t understand is how I got in it…. The plan was simple. Tuesday night I went out with Hansen in his boat. We headed for the waters off the East German coast and waited for the small boat carrying the man Brad had found for me. I’d set it up this way because the old man was supposed to go along. At the last minute he backed out. Afraid something would go wrong and he’d be captured and held for ransom.”
McDonald tried to smile again, but the joke was too grim. A couple of men were dead because of it. He seemed to remember that.
“Well, we got our man off the small boat all right, and I didn’t suspect anything until we were well on the way back to Copenhagen. I went into the cabin to brief him on how to act when he met Carlsberg and found myself talking to a man who not only spoke Russian, but couldn’t speak anything else. I still didn’t dream that I had the real Yukov, although I wondered how Brad made a deal with him when he can’t speak Russian any more than I can; but on the trip back I began to notice things. His clothing, for instance.”
“I saw his boots in the boat cabin,” Larry commented.
McDonald nodded. “Conspicuous, weren’t they? That’s why I made him take them off. But it wasn’t just his clothing; it was his whole manner. It finally dawned on me that this boy behaved like brass. As a test, I called him by name. The response put gray hairs in my head.”
It had put a few gray hairs in Larry’s head, too, he suspected. He saw McDonald glance at the bedroom door again and joined him in a shudder.
“That’s when I decided to come back here instead of going on to the yacht as we’d planned,” McDonald continued. “I wanted to investigate this puzzle. I put in a call to Brad in Berlin but couldn’t reach him. By the time his wire arrived, the news of Yukov’s escape was out, and Hansen was having hysterics on the telephone…. I guess you two know more about the rest of the story than I do.”
The story was told, and the silence was for thinking. For three people thinking their own thoughts and fearing their own fears, but all of them focused on one grim reality. Nothing was solved. Valdemar’s appraisal of Ira McDonald was justified and Sheldon Garth’s suspicion confirmed, but nothing was solved. The dead were still dead, and the living were still fleeing shadows.
But the man who slept behind that bedroom door was no shadow. A frightening frustration took hold of Larry. This nightmare had to end. He couldn’t go on finding answers that led only to more bewildering questions; he couldn’t go on paying for other people’s mistakes.
And so the silence ended with a challenge.
“Why didn’t you go to the police when you knew you had the real general?” he hurled at McDonald. “Why did you have to hole in here and let two men die?”
Out of whatever distance his mind had taken him, the man on the sofa answered in a hollow voice, “I suppose that’s what I should have done.”
“You suppose? Wouldn’t it have been the natural thing to do?”
“Yes, it would—” McDonald’s face came up slo
wly, and his eyes had a personal message in them that Larry took C.O.D. “If a man had no fear for his own life…. I don’t think you understand the situation, Willis. It’s not just a matter of hitting the jackpot on my refugee fishing trip; it’s the grim but obvious fact that Yukov’s means of transportation to Copenhagen is known, and by people who take a dim view of liberators. Sure, I could deposit the general with the proper authorities, and in my book that’s the American Embassy, but how much longer would I be breathing? Before I let this Pandora out of the box, I want safe-conduct to parts unknown!”
“The embassy could arrange that,” Larry countered.
With a snort of derision, Ira McDonald was on his feet. “Of course they could,” he retorted, “after investigating my story, after interrogating the general for days, maybe weeks, to make sure he’s authentic! In the meantime, I’d be with Hansen and Valdemar in whatever Valhalla the gods reserve for fallen idiots!”
A man could say what he pleased about himself, but the terminology was a little harsh on Valdemar. McDonald seemed to realize that as soon as the words were out. He was at Maren’s side in an instant, one arm thrown protectively about her shoulders and a sudden softness in his voice.
“I’m sorry, darling,” he murmured. “I feel terrible about Valdemar. It’s almost as if I’d killed him myself.”
And Maren’s voice was softer, too.
“Mac, please, you mustn’t say that.”
“But Mr. Willis is right. I should have gone to the authorities. No man has the right to think of himself alone….”
Larry’s feeling of helpless frustration was coming back. He saw the way McDonald took Maren’s hand, and the way her fingers tightened in response. The handwriting on the wall was as large as a kindergarten scrawl, and there wasn’t a thing he could do but stand there and wait for the inevitable.
“… Poor old Valdemar,” McDonald murmured. “No, this thing can’t go on! Whatever happens to me, I’ve got to go to the police now!”
But “police” was a bad word to toss around in the presence of a man who was careless with his penknife.
“Wait a minute,” Larry protested, “what about me?”
“What about you?” McDonald seemed to have trouble remembering what it was that had brought this lanky intruder into his living room. “Oh, the knife!” he said. He came to his feet, almost smiling. “I don’t think the police will be very much concerned with a visiting American salesman when they have a a repentant Commie general on their hands. When I tell my story, you’ll be in the clear, Willis. You won’t have to worry.”
“But what about you?” Maren protested. “You just said—”
“Forget what I said!”
McDonald approached the desk, his eyes on the telephone. “The picture may not be so black as it was painted,” he added. “I may be able to make a getaway. We may be able to meet somewhere unless—”
The pause was like a postscript to that handwriting on the wall. McDonald’s eyes met Larry’s, and what wasn’t said was even more impressive than what was.
“If I do, keep an eye on her, Willis,” he said. “Those Red devils aren’t beyond making reprisals.”
It was only a matter of hours since Larry’s mind had run along the same dead-end street and forced him to reach for a telephone he hadn’t used. Reprisal and hostage were two different words, but the terrible implication was the same. And no man had the right to think of himself alone. McDonald had said it, but that didn’t make the words any less true.
A key scratching in the lock had stopped Larry’s call to the police. It was his own hand on the telephone that stopped McDonald’s.
“What was that idea you had a while ago?” he demanded. “Something about two Ira McDonalds?”
McDonald shook his head. “No, I can’t ask you to take any more risks, Willis. From what I’ve just heard, you’ve been through enough hell on my account.”
But it wasn’t on McDonald’s account, and he might as well have saved his breath. Being a reasonably intelligent man, he could see that. Maren could see it too, and the hope in her eyes gave everybody courage.
“I didn’t have a plan, really,” he admitted. “It was just a thought…. You see, if this thing could be timed right it might be possible to hop a plane immediately after delivering the general to the embassy.”
“I can get you a ticket,” Larry volunteered. “Where do you want to go?”
McDonald opened a drawer of the desk and poked around in the contents until he found an airline schedule. “I’ve been promising Maren a honeymoon in Rome,” he murmured. “It seems to me that we’re entitled to that ten thousand now even if I didn’t come by it honestly…. And it’ll have to be two tickets, Willis. I’m sure you realize that.”
There was a flight at eleven o’clock in the morning. He circled the timetable with a pen he’d picked up from the desk.
“But how do we get to the airport?” Maren asked. “Won’t we be followed?”
“Mr. Willis will be followed,” McDonald said. “Now here’s my idea. Tomorrow morning Mr. Willis will buy two tickets on the Sunday-morning flight to Rome—”
“Sunday!” Maren protested.
“Yes, Sunday. You’ll see why in a moment…. He’ll be watched, no doubt, but by this time the fat man knows he’s not the real McDonald. There’s nothing to fear on that score.”
“But what about the police?” Larry said.
McDonald frowned. “That’s a problem. Of course, with luck they may not connect you with that knife for some time. If they do, tell them the truth. They may not believe it, but you’re an American citizen and American citizens aren’t thrown into jail in this country without pretty convincing proof of guilt.”
McDonald may have been whistling in the dark, but the tune sounded good to Larry’s sensitive ears. And it was good to be planning some action for a change instead of stumbling around in the dark waiting for the sky to fall.
But McDonald must have been making plans all this time … all the time they had explained about the fat man and that wild-goose chase to the farm.
“How did you get out to Tante Gerda’s?” he asked.
“Larry rented a car,” Maren said.
“Do you still have it, Willis?”
Willis didn’t have it, but the porter at the hotel couldn’t very well return the car until the rental garage opened in the morning. “Good!” McDonald said, when he heard the news. “Then you won’t have to go through that rental red tape again…. All right, then, here’s the way we’ll work it. Sunday morning you’ll take a bag and go to the airport. You’ll be followed, naturally, because somebody’s bound to be curious about the extra seat. Hang around the desk as if you were checking in for the flight, but at boarding time grab a cab back to your hotel. The bloodhounds will follow, and the plane will leave with two empty seats.”
McDonald glanced at the airline schedule. “The first stop is at Hamburg at a little past noon,” he said. “That’s where we take those empty seats, Maren, because tomorrow night, after you finish your usual stint at the dining room, we’ll be hitting the road in Willis’s rented car. That’ll give me plenty of time to get rid of the general….” He paused to run the idea over in his mind. It seemed to satisfy him even if it didn’t make Larry happy. “Yes, that’s the best way,” he murmured. “Do your job as if nothing was in the air. Go home afterward and pretend to go to bed. Meanwhile, Willis can be standing by with the car. Get back here at—” McDonald frowned at the modernistic wall clock behind the desk—“make it twelve, sharp. I’ll be expecting you then. And don’t worry about the rental fee, Willis. I’ll leave the car at a pickup agency in Hamburg and take care of everything.”
It wasn’t the rental fee that worried Larry; it was the everything Ira McDonald was going to take care of. Translated into Danish, everything was a girl with copper-colored hair, wide gray eyes, and a nose that wrinkled when she laughed. But she wasn’t laughing now; she was waiting for a decision. Larry knew there were
more questions to be asked and more gaps to be filled in, but he also knew that the decision she was waiting for had been made nearly an hour ago when a voice had spoken from the doorway and Maren Lund fell into another man’s arms.
… And so it was almost midnight before Larry got back to his hotel. The pocket-sized lobby was deserted, except for a nearsighted clerk at the reception desk, and the fiddling had stopped in that quaint little terrace bar just off the dining room. Everything was quiet and deserted just the way he wanted it to be. No one to stare at him. No one to notice and remember how frightened the American looked when he came in. Above all, no stout Nemesis with a roll-brimmed hat on his head and a fat cigar in his hand to step up behind him and say, “I’m sorry, Herre Willis, but I must ask you to accompany me to police headquarters.” He’d be nice about it, of course. Always polite, these Danes….
16.
THE CHIMES IN THE BELL TOWER DIDN’T AWAKEN LARRY IN the morning; he hadn’t slept. Sleep was for the peaceful and the dead. Sleep was for people who didn’t dread every footfall in the hall and sweat out the night waiting for a knock at the door that never came…. Dawn and still nothing. Still the empty streets with the yellow spots of the street lights fading into the morning gray, but nothing else. No police cars, no sirens, no sound. And no answer. He’d told himself a story over and over again, but there was no answer at all…. Six o’clock and a quarter of that twenty-four hours gone, but no alternative to McDonald’s plan. So it was good-by, Maren Lund, it’s been nice knowing you. It’s been nice wanting you and dreaming about you, but now it’s good-by…. Eight o’clock and breakfast served on a tray in his room, and with it a morning paper he couldn’t read. That was too bad. There might be something in that paper about a man found dead in Tivoli Gardens and a knife with a peculiar inscription on the handle. Maybe it was just as well he couldn’t read the paper, because now it was time to stop unpacking his mind and get on with a few chores that would take all the nerve he could muster. He wondered if it would be inappropriate to buy a present for the bride….
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