Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril

by Parker, Robert B.

  You see, Marcel Blaye was the name on the Swiss passport which I had bought for $500 that morning in Vienna. I had thought I was getting a clever forgery, even to the Hungarian visa which the Russians had consistently refused me as John Stodder, American. I had taken for granted that Marcel Blaye of Geneva was a figment of the forger’s imagination. I had complimented Herr Figl on the quick job he’d done, even to the ugly red stain on the cover which made the passport look used.

  The girl had said, “You even look a great deal like him,” when she’d first entered the compartment. That explained the similarity in statistics—the same height, six feet, the same weight, 178 pounds, the same black hair and brown eyes, even a similar scar on the upper right cheek. The age on the passport was thirty-five, two years older than I. Figl had said it was a meaningless error in transcribing from the notes I’d given him the night before. In reality, all the filthy Austrian had done was to change the photograph. He’d stolen the passport from Marcel Blaye’s corpse.

  I don’t know how long we sat in silence before I glanced at my watch. Fifteen—no, fourteen minutes to Hegyshalom, the Hungarian border station. There would be a general alarm at all frontiers for the murderer of Marcel Blaye, for the man who had killed him in Vienna and robbed him of his passport.

  I stood up and faced the girl. “Listen,” I said. “I believe you. Don’t ask me why but I know you’re telling the truth. I’m going to help you. You’ve got to trust me. We’ve got to leave this train.”

  There wasn’t any time to tell her my story. She wouldn’t have believed it anyway. She’d have thought I was in league with the man in the corridor. How else could I have received Marcel Blaye’s passport—and his seat on the Orient Express?

  I opened the door an inch, ready to slam and bolt it again, but the corridor was deserted. I turned to tell the girl to follow me and saw her standing on the seat, reaching into the baggage rack. I started to say we couldn’t take any baggage until I saw she had fished a fat Manila envelope from a suitcase. She could stick that in her pocket; we’d have to abandon everything else.

  She followed me through the darkened corridors. When we neared the end of the last car, I whispered to her to wait until I called.

  I walked to the end of the corridor. There was a Russian guard on the back platform, a carbine slung over his shoulder, his face nearly hidden by the collar of his greatcoat.

  I went into the toilet, locked the door, and took the roll of paper from the hook. I unrolled the paper until it made a heap in the corner. Then I touched my lighter to the pile. I unlocked the door and went to the platform.

  “Fire,” I said to the guard in Russian. “There’s fire in the toilet. The train is on fire.”

  He slowly took the carbine from his shoulder, leaned it against the vestibule wall and then walked deliberately past me into the corridor, without a word. I watched him go into the toilet. When he’d shut the door, I waved to the girl to come to the platform. We could hear him splashing water from the basin onto the blazing paper.

  The train was moving slowly, climbing steadily. The smoke from the laboring engine swirled onto the platform.

  “Jump,” I told the girl. She landed in the drifted snow piled high alongside the track.

  I tossed the guard’s carbine. Then I jumped.

  For a moment after I landed in the snow I thought I might have set too big a blaze. Suppose the whole wooden coach caught fire? The guard was patently stupid but not too stupid to pull the alarm signal. The Orient would grind to a stop. It wouldn’t take long to start a dozen armed guards looking for us.

  I called to the girl who was twenty feet or so away from me. I told her to lie quiet. In a minute, I lifted myself to one knee. The train was no longer in sight. When I heard the faint, faraway moan of the locomotive, I got to my feet and went to help the girl. I found the carbine and brushed off the wet snow.

  The tracks were hedged in on both sides by towering pines. The storm had lifted, and far up the tracks we could see the first stars.

  I made sure the carbine was loaded and the trigger set. I told the girl to follow and started up the tracks in the direction the train had gone.

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do next. I was only glad that I wasn’t going to be on the Orient when the Hungarian police came aboard and that neither the girl nor I would have to face the squat little murderer with the bullet head.

  Chapter Two

  DESPERATE FLIGHT

  We walked the ties for more than a mile before we came to a break in the pines—and then we found ourselves on a Russian military road. It didn’t take long for us to wish we’d taken our chances on the train.

  We had spoken only once during the uphill walk, when the girl caught her breath long enough to ask me if Vienna wasn’t in the other direction. I said we were following the train only because the sky was clearer in that direction. “We aren’t walking to Vienna.” I put out my hand. “I think it’s high time we were introduced. My name is John Stodder.”

  “And mine is Maria Torres,” the girl said. There was enough light from the stars for me to see she was smiling. There was no sign of the panic she’d shown on the train. It was hard going for her along the ties; she was wearing high heels and she’d tripped once but she didn’t complain.

  We turned into the plowed side road but we hadn’t gone far when I heard a car approaching from the direction of the railroad. I pulled Maria off the road into the shadow of the pines. We watched a big Russian military car lumber through the deep ruts, heard it skid to a stop a few hundred feet beyond us, then grind off again in low gear a minute later.

  When we could no longer hear the car’s engine, we walked slowly alone the side of the road until we came in sight of a gate in a high wire fence which crossed the road. I whispered to Maria to wait while I moved up to the fence. The gate was chained and locked. There was no way to scale the fence, which was topped with barbed wire. There was a sentry box on the other side, off the road, but it was empty, and there were tracks in the snow where the sentry had gone into the woods. Apparently he had just started his tour, after opening and closing the gate for the car.

  I was sure he’d be gone ten or fifteen minutes and there was nothing to do until he returned. Perhaps I could think of a way to trick him into unlocking the gate. I took Maria’s arm, and we moved back to a rock in the shadow of the trees, just short of the fence. Maria sat beside me. She was shivering with cold, and I made her take my overcoat. I cupped a match in my hands to light cigarettes.

  Maria said, “How long before they start looking for us?”

  I couldn’t see her face, but her voice was steady.

  “Daylight,” I said. I tried to sound offhand. “There isn’t much they can do tonight.” I was sure the military car had been searching for us but I didn’t want to alarm her. The car could have been alerted by shortwave radio from the train.

  “You’re sure they’ll look for us?”

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t fool her to that extent. “In the morning. By that time we’ll be back in Vienna. It can’t be more than seventy kilometers.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “First we’re going to get through this gate. Then we’re going to find a farmer with a car or a truck to take us to Vienna. I’ve plenty of dollars. There’s always someone in these countries who’ll do anything for dollars.” I wished I had been as confident as I hoped I sounded. I thought of my green American passport, locked in the safe at the Hotel Bristol in Vienna.

  Maria’s low voice cut into my thoughts. “They’ll know who we are from our baggage, won’t they?” That was just the trouble. I’d very carefully changed the labels on my bags and in my clothing that morning in Vienna. I’d marked everything with the name Marcel Blaye and the address Geneva. Proof to any policeman that I’d robbed Blaye after killing him.

  The girl’s cigarette glowed in the dark. She said, “I’ve led you into a lot of trouble. I don’t know why I let you do this
for me.”

  I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not before we were safely back in Vienna. So I told her half the truth. “I happen to like you. And I’ve been in trouble myself.” Then I said, “Who was Marcel Blaye?” The past tense no longer seemed out of place.

  Maria said, “I’m not very sure that I know.” She paused, and I waited for her to go on. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted, and from time to time the limb of a tree would crack like a rifle bullet under the weight of the newly fallen snow.

  “Monsieur Blaye described himself as an exporter of watches and clocks. He had an office in Geneva, off the Rue du Mont Blanc near the post office. He came to Geneva just before the end of the war—early in 1945, I think. You see, I don’t know very much about him because I only worked for him six weeks.”

  “You mean you didn’t know very much about him, yet you were willing to travel with him to Budapest?”

  Maria was silent for a moment. “I don’t think you can understand unless I explain the background. It’s just that I have three younger sisters to support.” She stubbed her cigarette in the snow and pulled my coat closer about her shoulders. “When we were children, we lived in Madrid, where we were born. My father was a lawyer but he was also a republican and when the monarchy was overthrown, he became Spanish consul to Geneva. When Franco made his revolt, my father insisted on returning to Spain to fight. He was killed at Guadalajara.”

  I listened, but there was no sound of the sentry returning.

  “The Republic took care of Mother and us until it ceased to exist. Mother worked at the League of Nations for a while but she died of pneumonia when I was seventeen. I’ve been working ever since. I went to work for Monsieur Blaye just because he offered a lot more money than I was making at the time.”

  I found myself wondering what interest Blaye had taken in Maria Torres.

  “He wasn’t interested in me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. “I never knew him before I answered his ad in the Journal de Geneve. He seemed to be very much in love with a Polish girl, a Countess Orlovska, who used to come to the office.”

  “Why were you going to Budapest?”

  “Monsieur Blaye said he’d arranged a big deal with the Hungarian government. He said it was so important and so secret that I mustn’t say a word to anyone. He even made me tell my sisters that we were only going to Zurich.”

  “What about the man on the train? Who is he?”

  “He told me his name was Doctor Schmidt,” Maria said, “but I don’t know much about him. I saw him for the first time a week ago when he came to the Geneva office. He and Monsieur Blaye had a terrible row in Monsieur’s private room. The next time I saw him was on the train from Geneva.”

  “What did Blaye tell you about him?”

  “Monsieur Blaye caught sight of Doctor Schmidt in the dining car. I thought Monsieur would die of fright. He left his dinner half eaten and insisted on locking himself in his compartment. That’s when he told me Schmidt was planning to kill him.”

  I lit cigarettes for both of us and passed one to Maria.

  “Monsieur Blaye insisted on leaving the train at Zurich and taking the next one. But it didn’t do any good because Doctor Schmidt did the same thing. When we arrived in Vienna, Monsieur took me to the Metropole in a taxi. He gave me an envelope to carry and told me he’d meet me on the Orient this afternoon. That was the last I saw of him.”

  I figured Blaye must have been murdered shortly after leaving Maria. Herr Figl would have needed at least twelve hours to substitute my photograph for Blaye’s and to forge a new Swiss foreign-office seal for the picture, apparently the only change he had needed to make.

  “You aren’t Swiss, are you?” Maria said.

  Something told me to be cautious. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because,” Maria said, “when you mentioned the distance to Vienna, you said ‘soixante-dix’ the way a Frenchman does. If you were Swiss you would have said ‘septente.’ ”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m American,” I said. The only thing that mattered any longer was Blaye’s passport. There was no reason not to tell her the truth about everything else.

  “You speak French without an accent,” the girl said. “You must have lived in France.”

  “I was born in Paris,” I told her. “My father was in the American consular service for many years. We lived all over the world. I never learned very much in school but I did pick up languages.”

  “Are you a diplomat?”

  I laughed. “No,” I said, “I’m a newspaperman. After college in America, I seemed to drift naturally into foreign correspondence, largely because of my languages I guess.”

  “Then you’re going to Budapest on assignment?” Maria asked.

  I hadn’t talked to anybody about my reasons for going to Budapest. My father and mother thought I was still in Paris. The whole project was something I’d kept locked inside me. It was a mission that had to be accomplished if I were to go on living with myself.

  “I’m going to Hungary to look for a man,” I said.

  Maria was so close I could hear her breathing.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, “and one I’m not very proud of. I don’t think it would interest you.” I found myself wanting desperately to tell her, this girl I’d known less than two hours and whom I’d probably never see again after we returned to Vienna. Because, as soon as I recovered my American passport, I’d have to find another way to enter Hungary.

  I felt Maria’s hand on my arm. “Please tell me,” she said. “I want to hear it.”

  “I told you my father was in the consular service,” I said. “There were five of us in the family—Father and Mother, of course, my sister Daphne, my brother Bob, and me. We were always very close as a family, perhaps because we shared the same experiences and because we lived so much in foreign surroundings.

  “Bob and I were always together although he was”—there was that damned past tense again—“although he was two years younger than I. When we were children Mother taught us together so that when we entered boarding-school in America we were in the same class. We went to college together and shared the same room for four years.”

  There was the sound of an airplane overhead, and we could see the running lights blinking against the stars. The Russian plane which wasn’t carrying Marcel Blaye.

  “After we graduated, I came to Europe for a news agency, and Bob went on to law school. But I went home just before Pearl Harbor, and my brother and I enlisted in the Air Corps after America went into the war. We took our basic training together and went to Officer Candidate School. Then, because I had been a newspaperman, I was sent to Intelligence School while Bob became a navigator.”

  Now that the words were coming out, it was almost as if someone else were talking.

  “Strangely enough, we wound up in the same heavy-bomber outfit. I say strange because the Air Corps usually went to lengths to separate brothers. Anyway, we went through the campaign in Italy and when that was cleaned up we were assigned to help the Russians. One of our first missions was to attack the Manfried Weiss steel works—they’re on an island in the Danube at Budapest. They were producing for the Germans who had taken over Hungary.”

  I paused to relight my cigarette.

  “Six planes went on the mission, and none of them came back. Oh, they accomplished their mission all right. They blasted hell out of the steel works, which stopped working for the Germans or anybody else. But the planes never got back to base. One crashed and the entire crew was killed. The other five either crash-landed or the crews bailed out. Most of them were captured and put in prison camps. A few escaped into Yugoslavia and joined the Partisans.”

  “What was wrong with the planes?” Maria asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, “except they ran out of gas. The operations office made a stupid, inexcusable miscalculation, and the airplanes arrived over the target more than an hour before daylight. The hour they had to circle above the
clouds before attacking made the difference between having enough gas and what happened.”

  “What about your brother?” the girl said.

  “He bailed out safely,” I said. “The whole crew got out all right. They started walking to Yugoslavia and they made it—all except Bob. Somewhere along the line he disappeared. Neither the Air Corps nor the State Department has ever been able to find a trace of him. He just vanished into thin air.”

  Maria said, “I know how your family must feel. It must be terrible for all of you, the dreadful uncertainty, not knowing anything for sure. For a while we didn’t know for sure about my father.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and there’s something even my family doesn’t know. I was the officer who made the fatal mistake.”

  We heard the sentry returning through the woods, whistling. I told Maria to crouch behind the rock so that she wouldn’t be seen from the road if the sentry should use a flashlight.

  I ran down the road until I was out of sight of the gate. I raised the railway guard’s carbine and squeezed three shots in quick succession. Then I ducked into the woods and doubled back to the fence as fast as I could move through the deep snow. I reached the fence in time to see the sentry open the padlock in the glare of his flashlight, slide through the gate, and run toward the spot from where I had fired. It didn’t take me long to grab Maria’s arm, hustle her through the gate, and snap the lock again.

  We ran through the snow at the side of the road until we were out of breath; I was sure the shots would bring a Russian patrol. We’d leave tracks in the snow but we’d have made more noise in the hard-packed center of the road. The end of the snowstorm had brought that still, bitter cold when a running step echoes like hammer on anvil.

  I suppose we’d put a hundred yards or so between us and the fence when we heard the guard’s carbine blast the padlock off the gate. We started to run again, and the siren went off; there must have been a switch in the sentry box. We ran until Maria tripped, let go my hand, and fell heavily. I picked her up and we heard the sound of a car coming toward us and saw the long beams of the headlights slashing into the shadows of the trees at the bend in the road ahead. The rising scream of the siren and the moving light and the throb of the car’s engine seemed to freeze us where we stood, locked in each other’s arms.