There was a line of naked trees against the sky, and I found they bordered a road. The ground is too hard to open graves in the winter months, but the cemetery roads are plowed so that the dead can be trucked to receiving vaults until spring.
I followed the road away from the fence, through a line of squat black tombs, wall to wall like the homes of the living that faced the cemetery gates.
I walked five minutes or so, and the road swung sharply to the left. When I had made the turn, the moon came from behind the clouds, and I saw Schmidt. I think he must have heard my step on the snow, which was packed hard as ice at that point. I don’t think he knew until that moment that I was following. He wasn’t more than fifty feet from me.
We were in the dark again, almost immediately, before either could use his gun. We were like two blind men, in the middle of that city of the dead, hunting each other, each waiting for the light of the moon yet fearing the other might use it first.
Schmidt fired the first shot without waiting for the moon. I never believed he had nerves but I think that’s what happened. He must have aimed for the spot where he’d seen me standing. It was an error in judgment surprising in the Nazi doctor because I had been careful to put the wall of a tomb between myself and him.
I didn’t fire back. I knew where he was and he hadn’t located me.
The tombs paralleled the road. There was space behind them, between them and another marble row. The rest of the year it was a gravel path. I waded slowly through snow almost to my waist. I wanted to get in back of him. I didn’t stop to think he might be vanishing along that road while I was playing cowboy and Indian. His job was to get away with the envelope and mine to catch him if I could.
But he didn’t go. I can only guess why not. Perhaps he thought Walter was with me and that he was surrounded; a cemetery just before dawn can play queer tricks on a man’s nerves. Maybe he thought his shot was already bringing a Russian patrol inside the gates.
At any rate, Schmidt was still standing in the middle of the road when I came out from behind the tombs. As soon as there was a little light, I dropped him with one bullet. He screamed like a child and the sound cascaded.
He wasn’t dead when I reached him. I lifted his gun. I went through his pockets and found the Manila envelope.
Then the Russians drove through the gate, the one close by the spot where Schmidt and I had scaled the fence. They entered the cemetery as if they were children whistling and singing to keep the ghosts away. Even without the siren, we’d have known they were coming, even if they hadn’t raced the engine like a hotrod driver.
I jammed Schmidt’s Homburg on his bullet head. I picked his broken gold-rimmed spectacles from the snow and started to push them on his face and then realized what I was doing and threw them away.
I grabbed the German by the scruff of his fat neck and dragged him off the road. I dragged him through the snow to the gate of a tomb. The gate opened, and I hauled him inside. I closed the gate and fumbled with the latch, unthinking, until I realized there is no lock on the inside of a tomb.
I sat in that tomb surrounded by the dead, my teeth chattering, and listened to the babble of a dying man.
Herr Doktor Wolfgang Schmidt, propped up against a coffin, laughed and pleaded and scolded out of his memory. The man who had never swerved an inch from his grotesque ideal during his lifetime, who never used sentiment or humanity or tenderness, called for his mother. Two or three times I found my bloody hands, the ones he’d smashed, closing round his stumpy throat to quiet him forever but I couldn’t do it.
I heard the Russian car coming all the way from the gate, the tires whirring as they skidded on the icy places, the whining of the engine. The spotlight took short cuts and once it lighted the inside of my prison, flooding through the grillwork in the gate like daylight. I drew back automatically although of course they couldn’t see me. I lost my balance and fell on the marble floor and when I turned to pick myself up there was a grinning skull within reach of my hand.
They saw the marks in the snow as soon as they rounded the bend, the path I’d made in dragging Schmidt’s body. They stopped almost in front of us and they saw the doctor’s blood where he’d fallen.
I backed into the far corner and went down on all fours, behind an enormous copper casket, as the gate swung open.
“Here’s one of them,” a voice said in Russian. “He’s still alive. Get him out of here.”
“It’s Schmidt,” Anna Orlovska’s voice said. “It’s the German Schmidt.”
“He must have crawled in here,” the man’s voice said. “The others must be close by.”
There was a step on the marble floor, and the flashlight found me.
“What’s back there?” the man’s voice said.
“Nothing,” the Countess Orlovska said. “There’s nobody here. They must have headed for the fence again.”
“All right,” said the man. “Hurry up and get out of here. We haven’t a minute to spare.”
“It’s okay with me,” Orlovska said as the gate clanged shut again. “I don’t like graveyards any more than you do.”
I waited until I could no longer hear the Russian car before I went out on the road. I was lucky in guessing the direction of Asztalos Sandor ut because Walter found me a few minutes after he had climbed the fence on Hiram’s orders.
We made the Buda hills without trouble. The Russians must have been sure we were trapped in the cemetery because there were no roadblocks as there had been the night before. We never even saw a policeman.
We made the plane just as it braked to a stop, and Maria was there with Teensy and Walter’s wife. We abandoned the car in the middle of the pasture.
The plane climbed over the trees and as soon as we had leveled off, the pilot gave us whisky. Hiram had lost a good deal of blood and he would be in the Vienna hospital for a long time, but he was conscious and took Marcel Blaye’s envelope when I handed it to him.
While the others pretended to watch the countryside in the lightening dawn, I took Maria into my arms and kissed her.
Afterword
My father, who I called Bobby, but whose full name was Robert Bogardus Parker Jr., was first and foremost a newspaper man. He loved being where the action (what he called “the story”) was, where the news was “being made.” Most of my memories of him include an open newspaper or a typewriter. Even my baby photographs—1939 Budapest—age 14 months—show me on my father’s lap looking at the camera while his eyes are downcast, reading a folded newspaper balanced on his knees.
The typewriter image is of an old, black, boxy Remington typewriter—a shiny black machine, the keys solid, round, and high. It sat in the base of its own case, the top having been lifted off and put aside. Bobby sat at a table, using the first fingers of both squarish hands to tap out “the story.” Bobby, coffee cup on table, often cigarette in mouth, ripping a sheet of yellow paper out of the roller, wadding it up and throwing the ball of paper on the floor. (“Rurrripp, scrunch, fittttt!” Just like in the movies! Honest!) Within a few hours, the floor was littered with yellow paper balls.
The memories, however, are few. Most of these are of summer visits to Morland, my paternal grandparents’ farm in South Woodstock, Vermont. My father was mainly an absent “presence” in the lives of my brother Roby (Robert B. Parker III) and me and later, after my parents divorced in 1947, a brief presence in the life of my half-sister Lucci.
My father’s first book was Headquarters Budapest, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944. The jacket copy gives his biography:
Although still in his thirties, Robert Parker is one of the few veteran correspondents who have seen the war from the totalitarian side. He was with the German Army on its march into Poland in 1939; he rode with an armored division of Hungarians into Sub-Carpathic Russia and saw Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria taken over by the Nazis. He also covered the Russian conquest of Bessarabia and, prior to the current war, the revolution in Spain. He has traveled widely in Germa
ny and been in and out of France and other Nazi-occupied countries many times.
From 1939–41, he made his headquarters in Budapest, Hungary, one of the best listening posts in Europe. From the spring of 1942 up to a few months ago, Mr. Parker was OWI [Office of War Information] Chief in Turkey.
Robert Parker was born in Newark, N.J., and educated at the Pingry School, Elizabeth, N.J., and Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. He worked for a time on the staff of the Newark Evening Call and the Schenectady Gazette. Upon his graduation from college, he worked for the New York Journal, from which in 1933 he transferred to The Associated Press. He was sent to Paris—and there began his eventful career as a foreign correspondent.
Since it was still wartime, the jacket failed to mention that he, like many journalists, was also a member of the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), an organization my mother referred to as “Oh, So Secret.” My brother says that Bobby was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, and I remember stories of his propaganda activities, such as putting Allied messages in prayer books in churches all over Europe, including Germany, and also tales of “Wild Bill” Donovan. During the war years, my father was involved in getting European Jews, including his assistant, Paul Vajda, out of prisons (and out of the country to safety, if possible). After my mother died, I found letters from people he had helped among her papers.
In 1946, we moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where my father worked for Radio Station WLW. His daily 30-minute radio news program, “World News Analysis,” aired at 11:00 P.M. (Not surprisingly, we children only heard it a few times, once when my mother was his guest.) On Sundays he and three other commentators, Jack Beall, Arthur Reilly, and Maj. General James E. Edmonds, all friends since their European days, shared a WLW news discussion panel called “The World Front.”
In Ohio my parents divorced, and my mother, brother and I moved to Washington, D.C. Over the next nine years, my father owned an upstate New York weekly newspaper that folded and a herd of cattle that contracted hoof-and-mouth disease, and worked for the New York Daily News and the United Nations news bureau.
He wrote two more books: Ticket to Oblivion in 1950, and Passport to Peril in 1951. Published by Rinehart & Co., they were also brought out in paperback editions by Dell. Reviewed as suspense novels about European espionage, these books were praised by reviewers as “suave, exciting, unusual, and thrilling.”
I think those are the adjectives I would have used as a teenaged daughter about my imagined father. I feel it was a deep loss not to have known him better, and longer.
I, for one, would have loved to know what he would have thought or written about the fall of the Berlin Wall; or the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB spy, now MI6 agent, poisoned by radioactive polonium; or about Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader-turned-fugitive, wanted for international war crimes, who, until he was finally arrested, lived right in Belgrade for a decade disguised as an eccentric monk-like practitioner of alternative medicine.
My father died of a heart attack in 1955, just short of his fiftieth birthday. His was a short life of accomplishment at an early age, a hard-hitting, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, stress-filled existence. It was a life of constant deadlines of all sorts. In many ways he lived the life of his fictional protagonists, and like theirs, his wasn’t always a happy one.
During the war years, though, Bobby was just where he wanted to be—where the story was, in a period of great historical upheaval in the world.
Daphne Wolcott Parker Hawkes
Princeton, NJ
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Passport to Peril (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback)) Page 18
