The Iron Angel

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Someone might have followed us,” Slava argued, “and wants to disrupt our mission.”

  “They’ve certainly done that,” Aman said. “There’s no way we can continue without Vincenti.”

  “Why do you say that?” Grazu bristled as if his personal honor was at stake. “I will lead the mission if no one else does. We have come too far to turn back now.”

  “Let’s deal with his death first,” Slava insisted. “The conductor must be notified.”

  “The police will delay us for questioning,” Michael pointed out.

  She gave him an exasperated look. “He’ll be found when we cross the Swiss border anyway. I’m going to find the conductor right now.”

  She was gone before anyone could object.

  “Perhaps he was robbed,” Aman suggested.

  Michael moved closer to the body. “I’ll see if his money’s been taken. You both can witness that I removed nothing from him.”

  “I don’t know,” Grazu said with a twisted smile, “Gypsies are fast with their fingers.”

  Michael ignored the remark and surveyed the area around Vincenti’s body. The desktop was clear of everything except the three sheets of paper on which the dead man had been writing. There was nothing on the floor and nothing on the seat next to the body. Michael felt in the crevice between the seat and its back, but not even a coin or a gum-wrapper was hidden there. Next he checked the dead man’s pockets. His wallet, containing the currency they’d been issued for the journey seemed to be intact. Otherwise, his pockets contained only the usual objects – a handkerchief, keys, a case for his eyeglasses, a few Romanian coins, a pen, and a notebook that had a section for addresses.

  Michael turned his attention to the topcoat that hung near the compartment door. In one pocket he found gloves, in another a slender vial of blood pressure pills.

  “Where’s his passport?” Grazu asked.

  That had been bothering Michael too. He wondered if the old man might have been killed for it. Then he spotted the overnight bag on the rack above the seat. He lifted it down carefully and opened the unlocked snaps on either end. The passport was lying on top of a clean shirt and pajamas. “Here it is. Nothing seems to be missing.”

  “Unless the killer took something we didn’t know about.”

  “That’s always a possibility!” Michael went quickly through the bag, turning once toward the two men. “One of you stand outside in case Slava comes back with the conductor. I don’t want him walking in on me like this.” But the overnight bag contained nothing except a few articles of clothing, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb and brush, and a small scissors perhaps for trimming his beard.

  Aman had stepped outside and Grazu remained. “Didn’t he have any back-ground information on the meeting?” he asked Michael.

  Michael got down on his hands and knees to make certain no sheet of paper had fallen beneath the seat or into the heating unit. “There’s nothing here. Perhaps Slava has the material in her briefcase.”

  Slava entered then, pushing past Aman with the train conductor in tow. The conductor stared at the body as if he’d never seen a dead man before. “This is terrible! We’ll radio ahead to Milan and request instructions.” As he was retreating out the door he seemed to remember his duties. “You three clear out and I’ll lock the compartment.”

  They went down the corridor to Slava’s compartment. “What will we do now?” Aman said.

  “I told you!” the younger Grazu sputtered. “I will lead the mission if no one else does! King Michael has been told of our arrival and we must appear as scheduled!”

  Aman was doubtful. “I don’t know. If one of us killed Dr. Vincenti perhaps there is a plot on King Michael’s life.”

  “Rubbish!” Grazu turned to Slava. “Do you have the background information on the meeting? We found nothing in Vincenti’s compartment.”

  She nodded, brushing the hair back from her eyes. “I have it in my briefcase.” She produced a sheaf of papers from the fine leather case Michael had noticed earlier. “Here’s everything we need if you wish to continue.”

  “I think we should vote on it,” Aman said. “I vote we abort the mission and return home. We can leave the train at Milan and catch the next one back to Romania.”

  “I vote we continue on,” Grazu urged. He and Aman looked to Slava and Michael for their decisions.

  “Continue”, Slava said.

  “Continue,” Michael agreed.

  “Three to one on my side,” Grazu crowed. “Will you leave or continue with us, Aman?”

  The museum director started at him with ill-concealed distaste. “I will continue, if only to keep you under some sort of control, little man. It is not yet the Germans’ time to rule.

  Grazu was on his feet bristling. “I am Romanian, not German! Are you questioning my loyalty?”

  At that moment there was a knock on the compartment door. Michael opened it and the conductor stepped partway in. “The authorities in Milan have been alerted. They will meet the train and remove the body there. Everyone will be questioned before we are allowed to proceed. It may take longer than our scheduled one-hour stop.”

  When he’d left them alone again, Slava said, “They’ll want to know where each of us was. We’d better get our stories straight.”

  “Michael and I were together in the dining car,” Aman pointed out. “Neither of us had an opportunity to stab him.”

  Grazu missed no opportunity to continue his feud with the older man. “That’s only if we believe Vincenti was alive when you left his compartment. We heard you speak to him, but we heard no answer and none of us saw him. You told us he didn’t want to be disturbed, but that might have been because he was already dead.”

  “He was alive when I left him,” Aman stated firmly. “But either you or Miss Botosana might have entered the compartment and killed him while Michael and I were in the dining car.”

  Slava smiled at Michael. “It seems that you are the only one with an alibi.”

  “Not so fast,” Grazu said. “Perhaps Vincenti was still alive when the Gypsy went to check on him. A dagger is a Gypsy weapon, remember. He might have stabbed him and then come running to report his murder.”

  Slava sighed and nodded. “It appears that any one of us might have done it.”

  The railroad station at Milan was modeled like a cathedral, with high vaulted ceilings and balconies that seemed to serve no purpose. Michael remembered it from his previous visit to the city, but this time the experience was different. He was led through the station to a private office the police had commandeered for questioning. The others had gone first, but he’d been kept separate from them until he was questioned.

  Lieutenant Rizzoli was a beefy man who smoked a cigar. That he disliked Gypsies was obvious to Michael with the first words out of his mouth.

  “Is this one of your Gypsy shivs?” he asked gesturing toward the dagger in a plastic evidence bag that rested on the table between them. He said “shiv” in English though he spoke in Italian. Michael wondered if he knew that the slang word came originally from the Romany word for blade. He didn’t really need to know because to him Gypsies and knives were practically the same.

  “I never saw that dagger before,” Michael answered truthfully. “It’s not a Gypsy weapon”

  Rizzoli chewed on his cigar. “Tell us in your own words exactly what you know of this. I believe you were the one who found the body.”

  “I found it,” Michael admitted and launched into a brief account of their journey. He didn’t know how much the others had told, but he managed to remain vague about the nature of their journey to Switzerland.

  When he’d finished, the police stenographer typed up the statement while he waited on the bench outside the office to sign it. As he sat there, Grazu the labor leader, was brought out of an adjoining office and seated next to him.

  Seeing Michael, Grazu seemed to have forgotten his suspicions concerning the dagger. “This is all a matter of routine,”
he offered smiling nervously. “The detective assured me we’re not under suspicion. They’re questioning the other passengers about a possible thief, someone Vincenti might have surprised in his compartment.”

  “He surprise no one,” Michael reminded him. “He was drafting his remarks to the king when he was stabbed. If a thief had entered thinking the compartment was empty, he would simply have excused himself and left.”

  Lieutenant Rizzoli reappeared with two typed statements. Grazu read his, then took out a fountain pen and signed it. He passed the pen to Michael for signing his statement. “Fine,” the lieutenant told them. “You are free to re-board the train. It should be getting under way shortly.”

  Vincenti’s body had been removed in their absence, as had his overnight bag and topcoat. The compartment was empty. Michael lingered near the door at the front of the passenger car, watching for Slava and Aman to return from questioning.

  That was how he happened to see Captain Segar suddenly dart across the high-ceilinged station and grab an innocent-looking man in a bear hug. The man carried a package about the size of a cigar box.

  Michael thought for a moment that his eyes were deceiving him. Segar in Milan? It was impossible – Segar was back in Romania!

  But when he hurried over to the struggling pair to confirm the identity, Segar spoke to him. “Michael take that package out of his hand – very carefully or you might blow us all up.”

  “Segar, what –”

  “Take that package!”

  The man in Segar’s grasp, with a black mustache and glowering eyes, struggled to break free, then dropped the package. Michael made a grab for it, but wasn’t quite fast enough.

  The package hit the floor but nothing happened.

  By that time, Lieutenant Rizzoli and two uniformed officers had come running.

  “What’s going on here?” Rizzoli demanded.

  “Hold this man!” Segar commanded in the most authoritative voice Michael had ever heard him use. “Here are my credentials. I represent the new Romanian government. This man was attempting to board the train with an explosive device.”

  “Vincenti has been killed,” Michael managed to tell Segar.

  “His death must be linked to this bomb plot in some way,” Segar speculated. “I followed this man here from Romania.”

  Rizzoli chewed on his cigar and carefully picked up the fallen package. In a gesture either brave or foolhardy he carefully tore open a part of the wrapping. “It’s a book.” He announced. “Twentieth Century Romania.”

  “A gift fit for a king,” Segar said. “Let us go somewhere private where innocent travelers will not be injured if it goes off.”

  The Italian lieutenant led them back to an office used for questioning. The prisoner had been handcuffed and seated himself silently in one of the chairs. Michael tried to remember if he’d ever seen him before, but decided it was only the expression that was familiar – the arrogant sneer he’d seen on officials of the old government when he drove to the city. He’d thought these men, and that expression, were gone from Romania for good. But the time had been too short. The new freedom could not come overnight.

  Segar removed the jacket from the book and took a penknife from his pocket. He slit the binding, front and back and peeled away the cloth covering. Something white and doughy came into view. “Plastic explosive,” he told them. “There’s a timer and detonator hidden in the binding, but I won’t fool with those.” He placed the book on the desk. “I’m sure it’s safe until the timer is set. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been carrying it around like this.”

  Lieutenant Rizzoli stared at the prisoner. “Who is he?”

  “A member of the secret police under the former government. His name is Meershan, though he goes by others. He took a plane from Bucharest this morning. We had a tip about the bomb, so I went along to see what he was doing with it. It was packed in his luggage and plastic explosives are difficult to detect with airport X-rays. When he left the plane at Milan, I decided he would make contact with this train.”

  “To kill the members of the government mission?” Michael asked.

  “No, to deliver this infernal device to the hands of the final assassin, who would present it to King Michael. My plan was to follow him until he made contact with one of our party, but in the station he spotted me – he must have remembered seeing me on the plane. He started running with his package. I couldn’t risk his getting away with the bomb – I had to arrest him.”

  “You have no jurisdiction here,” Rizzoli muttered.

  “It was a citizen’s arrest until you arrived to make it official,” Segar explained. He turned to Michael. “Tell me about Vincenti’s murder.”

  Running through the events quickly Michael concluded, “It seems likely that Vincenti somehow discovered the identity of the would-be assassin. He had to be killed before the assassin was to accept delivery of the bomb from this man Meershan.”

  Rizzoli lit a fresh cigar and walked over to grasp their prisoner by the coat lapels. “Who were you meeting on the train?” he asked.

  “No one.”

  The detective leaned closer until the glowing tip of his cigar was almost brushing Meershan’s cheek. “I’ll ask you again. To whom were you supposed to deliver the package?”

  Meershan’s glowering eyes went to each of their faces in turn, finally stopping at Michael. “Him!” he spat out. “The Gypsy.”

  Before Rizzoli could say anything, Captain Segar spoke up in Michael’s defense. “That’s not true. I recommended Michael for this mission personally. King Michael would be the last person he’d attempt to kill.”

  Rizzoli relaxed a bit. “Why should anyone want to kill a deposed king who’s been living in exile for more than forty years? Surely your country would never take him back.”

  “It has to do with symbols,” Michael told him. “The king is a symbol of the old Romania, before Communism. We may not want him back, but we want that sort of life back – a freedom even I was too young to have ever known. Though our former President and his wife went before a firing squad, there are still plenty of people opposed to freedom of that sort.”

  The lieutenant turned back to the prisoner. “Do you have a better answer for me, scum? Who were you planning to meet?”

  Meershan’s eyes grew even harder. “Go to hell.”

  Rizzoli raised his arm to strike the man, but Michael intervened. “Wait a minute! Give me time to think.”

  “You are going to produce the murderer from a hat, perhaps?”

  “I know I’m not guilty, despite what this man says. And we can rule out robbery as a motive. Since the bomb had to have been intended for use by one of those three – Slava, Grazu or Aman – we can safely assume one of them killed Dr. Vincenti. Otherwise we have a would-be bomber assassin plus a totally independent murderer without a logical motive.”

  “You said Vincenti was preparing a draft of his greeting to the king,” Segar reminded him. “Could he have left a hidden message in it identifying the killer?”

  Michael shook his head. “Not unless it was so obscure as to be useless. It was his handwriting but there were only general remarks about the greatness of Romania’s past.”

  “Perhaps all three are in on it,” Rizzoli suggested. “I read a mystery once where all the passengers on the train conspired to kill –”

  Then it came to Michael. He remembered something, and it all came to him. “Not all three,” he said. “Just one of them. And now I know which one ”

  The other three were brought from the train and the passengers told there would be another brief delay before the journey to Lausanne and Paris continued. Segar suggested that Michael explain his reasoning to him and Lieutenant Rizzoli stood by. The prisoner Meershan was being held in an adjoining room.

  “You’ll remember,” Michael began, facing Slava Botosanna and the two men, “that I searched the compartment very carefully after I discovered Dr. Vincenti’s body. Something was missing and I couldn’t under
stand what – not at first. Then we got on to looking for his passport and other things, and I forgot about it.”

  “What was missing?” Grazu asked.

  “Dr. Vincenti had written a pencil draft of the remarks he would make in greeting King Michael, yet there was no pencil in the room. It wasn’t on the desktop with the sheets of paper or on the floor, or down the seat cushions. All I found in his pockets was a pen. You’ll remember I even searched his overnight bag on the rack. There was no pencil anywhere.”

  “No pencil,” Rizzoli repeated. “Are you saying the man was killed over a pencil?”

  “Not at all. I’m just saying it wasn’t there. Why not? There is only one possible explanation. The murderer removed it from the compartment after stabbing Vincenti.”

  “I repeat, are you saying the man was killed over a pencil?”

  “No. If he was killed over a pencil why would the killer remove it? A pencil is a pencil. What harm could there be in leaving it? The pencil had to belong to the killer. In other words the pencil – if left at the crime scene – would have revealed the killers identity.”

  “It had the name of a restaurant on it?” Aman suggested. “Or a business establishment?”

  Michael shook his head. “An ordinary wooden pencil, even with advertising on it, would not immediately identify the killer. I believe it was something more – the gold mechanical pencil I noticed Slava using back in Bucharest.” He turned toward her. “Perhaps it even has your initials engraved on it, Slava.”

  She was on her feet, face flushed struggling for breath. “I’m not the only one who owns a pencil! What about these two?”

  Michael shook his head. “Aman uses a felt tip pen, and I just borrowed Gruzu’s fountain pen a short while ago. You’re the only one with a recognizable pencil, Slava. You went in to discuss the greeting to King Michael and loaned Vincenti your pencil while he wrote a rough draft. Then what happened? Somehow he must have suspected you, and you stabbed him. You had to remove the pencil or it would have placed you in the room. He wouldn’t have just borrowed it from you because he had his own pen.”