I replaced the lists and wrapped the envelope in the newspaper and followed Maria, Teensy, and Hiram G. Carr down the aisle and through the third-class coaches. There was no sign of Herr Doktor Schmidt.
Hiram Carr turned to me just before we reached our compartment. I was glad he wasn’t going to see the sticker, Reserved for the Embassy of the USSR, on our door, although our fate would certainly be known to every Budapest diplomat the next day.
“Now don’t you young folks go and forget us. It’s been a real pleasure. The name is Hiram Carr—Hiram G. Carr to be exact—and you’ll always find me at the American legation. You say you’re stopping at the Bristol? Well, you’ll get a ring from us real soon. We’d like to have you two lovebirds take pot luck with us. Isn’t that right, Teensy?”
“Uh-huh,” said Teensy.
When Maria and I reached our compartment the door was closed. I took her by the arm and walked up the corridor.
“It’s no use,” I said. “There’s nothing in that damned envelope except the addresses of a lot of watchmakers, pharmacists, and garagekeepers. There couldn’t be another envelope? Are you sure you got the right one?”
Maria said, “That’s the right envelope. It’s the only one Monsieur Blaye gave me.”
I bent down and kissed her. “I’ve really gotten you into something this time. When we arrive, just let me handle everything. Don’t say a word. I don’t think they’ll have anything against you.” I thought maybe I ought to tell my troubles to Hiram Carr. He might have helped at the American legation. But, after my story in the dining car, there wasn’t any way for me to prove I was American. And there wasn’t any time. We were already running through the outer suburbs of Budapest.
I slid open the door of our compartment and stood aside to let Maria enter. I thought it curious that the light was off and the shades pulled down but I supposed Strakhov was taking a nap. It was time to wake him.
I put out my hand and switched on the overhead light. Strakhov was in the corner, his hands folded on his lap and his eyes closed. The compartment looked as if a cyclone had hit it. Our baggage had been pulled off the racks and our belongings were scattered all over the seats and the floor. If the major wanted to examine our baggage, he might have done a neater job.
I put my hand on Strakhov’s shoulder to wake him.
Maria would have screamed if I hadn’t clapped my hand over her mouth. Strakhov’s body was still warm, but there wasn’t any doubt he’d never be any deader. There was a knife with a handle a foot long in his back.
I moved faster than I’d ever moved in my life.
“Stuff those things into the bags,” I told Maria. I had to make her act before she became hysterical. “It doesn’t make any difference how. Just clean up the place and hurry.”
I picked Strakhov up under the shoulders and dumped him on the floor, under the window. I tried to pull out the knife, why I’ll never know, but it wouldn’t come. I tried the seat cushions and they lifted and there was space enough to cram the Russian’s body.
By the time I’d replaced the cushions, Maria had finished the baggage. I threw the bags back up on the racks. There was a bright red stain on the cushion where Strakhov had been, but I covered it with pages of the Budapest newspaper. There wasn’t any hope of hiding things indefinitely. I only thought we might gain enough time to leave the train and the station before the train crew caught on.
We heard the conductor in the corridor shouting “Kelenfold, Kelenfold,” and the engineer started braking for that suburban station, the last stop before the train crosses the Danube for the main Keleti station in Pest.
I grabbed a suitcase and handed a smaller one to Maria and followed her up the corridor. Then I remembered the envelope. I went into the last compartment, which was vacant, and stuffed Marcel Blaye’s typewritten lists behind the cushions of the seat, wrapped in the newspaper.
We had no difficulty leaving the train. The guard had left the car platform, and there were a good many people getting off with us.
We walked down the station platform and handed in our ticket stubs from the day before to the stationmaster at the gate. He never noticed the difference. We were the last passengers through, and the station plaza was deserted when we came out.
My nerves were on edge, and the only thing I could think of to say to Maria was, “You know, Strakhov got that story about Grigori all wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Maria said.
“Strakhov had the wrong ending. It isn’t ‘or you will die’ at all. It’s ‘or I will die.’ ”
There was a car parked on the far side of the plaza. I thought it might be a cab. I told Maria to wait while I went over to it.
I had gone about ten feet when a figure came out of the station door behind me. It was Dr. Schmidt and he had a gun in his hand. The gun was pointed at my head.
Chapter Five
CAPTURE
It had snowed steadily all day and now at dusk it had turned bitter cold again. It was hard moving underfoot, and the few trucks and busses churned and skidded in the unswept streets. The first stars had come out in the sky, and the wind had fallen to a whisper. Thin columns of wood smoke hung suspended like exclamation points atop chimney pots on a thousand glistening roofs. The one redeeming feature of the weather was that the snow served as decent covering to the dreary ruins of Buda, the hilly half of the city on the right bank of the frozen Danube. The flickering shadows from the street lamps gave grotesque substance to the endless miles of blackened walls, and for an evening Budapest was whole again. For a bare half hour, the time required by Herr Doktor Schmidt to conduct us to the center of the city, I saw Budapest almost as I had left it a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, almost as it had been before German and Russian armies hammered it to rubble.
I wasn’t surprised to find Otto and Hermann, the pants presser, waiting for Dr. Schmidt in the late Major Strakhov’s staff car. They had evidently started for Budapest on Schmidt’s orders the minute our train left Hegyshalom; it hadn’t required much effort to beat the local. They were wearing Russian uniforms when the doctor marched us up to the car.
Schmidt had wasted no time getting us into the car.
“I must warn you not to make any trouble,” he said in German. It was the first time I had heard his voice. It was clipped, hard, and precise. “I am an excellent shot. If you will be so kind, please pick up your baggage and proceed to the car.”
Although Maria had told me she understood no German, she picked up the bags and came over to where I was standing. There was no sign of emotion in her dark face, none of the terror she had shown when she told me about Schmidt aboard the Orient Express. She had been close to hysterics just because he was on the same train. Now he was facing her with a gun in his hand, and she appeared calm. The only indication of what she could have been feeling was in the tightened lines around her lovely mouth. I suddenly realized how little I knew about her.
Schmidt put me in the front seat with Otto, who behaved as if he’d never seen me before. The doctor and Hermann, with drawn revolvers, sat in back with Maria between them. We drove straight to the Danube, then followed it north, past the winged victory monument of the Russians on Gellert Hill, over the Erzsebet bridge into Pest, and out the broad Rakoczi ut. We passed a dozen traffic policemen, close enough for me to have touched them, but I knew better than to call for help. Even if they had dared inspect a Red Army car, they wouldn’t have believed any story I could tell them. And if they had intervened, the alternative to Dr. Schmidt was the Countess Orlovska—with the murder of Major Ivan Strakhov to explain in addition to that of Marcel Blaye.
For a time I thought Schmidt was taking us into the country. We continued out Thokoly ut, past the Park Club, and over the railway tracks, but Otto made a skidding left turn into Mexikoi ut which parallels the railroad. The street bounds one of the worst slum districts of Budapest with tenements hard against slaughterhouses, oil refineries, and fertilizer factories, the whole area a rabbit warren for
criminals, a sort of unofficial sanctuary for the hunted from Istanbul to Berlin.
Otto turned into an alleyway between two dingy tenements, drove fifty feet or so, and swung the car into a junk-littered yard enclosed in a high board fence. He’d driven from Kelenfold without a word from Schmidt; he had covered the route before. I recalled Major Strakhov’s contemptuous dismissal of Otto and his fellow mercenaries. “Just like children.” The Russian had seen Otto talking to Schmidt on the Hegyshalom platform and he’d put it down to Otto’s desire “to get out of work.” If Strakhov had been a little less superior, he would have suspected that something was up and he might have preserved his own existence.
Hermann jumped out of the car and knocked on the battered wooden door of the tenement.
“Schnell,” said Schmidt when there was no answer. “Hurry up.” Otto hit the car horn. “Stop it, you fool,” said Schmidt. “Do you want to tell the whole neighborhood?”
Hermann beat on the door with the butt of his revolver. A window on the third floor was raised, and the head of an old woman appeared, framed in the flickering light from an oil lamp.
“Wie heissen Sie?” screamed the old woman.
“Mein Gott,” said Dr. Schmidt. “The old fool has lost her mind.”
“You’ve lost your mind, old fool,” Hermann shouted.
“Nein, nein,” screamed Schmidt, leaping out of the car and landing in the snow up to his knees. “Dumkopf.” He shoved Hermann, then cupped his hands and shouted to the woman in the window. “Open this door immediately. It is I who command. Do you hear me?”
There was a moment’s silence, then the sound of the window closing, and the light disappeared. Dr. Schmidt went to the door and when it opened an inch he grabbed it with both hands and swung it back on its hinges so that it smashed against the building. The old woman was standing in the doorway with the oil lamp in her hand.
“You knew I was coming,” Schmidt said, waving his finger under her nose. “Why weren’t you at the door? What do you mean keeping me waiting? What is the matter with you?”
“Bitte, Verzeihung, Excellenz,” the old woman said. “Please forgive me. One does not know these days. There have been police raids in the neighborhood. I thought, Excellency, I—”
“Shut up,” Schmidt said. “You are not here to think.” He called to Otto. “Get those two in here immediately.”
I managed to beat Otto out of the car to help Maria down. Her hand brushed my face as I swung her into the snow, and I thought she held my arm longer than necessary, but it might have been to steady herself. There was just enough light for me to see her dark face. The wide-set black eyes were calm, the firm line of her jaw was clearer than ever.
The old woman stood inside the door as Maria and I entered. I took her for well over eighty. She was thin as a skeleton, her eyes sunken and dull, her pinched face streaked with dirt. Her bony arm trembled with the weight of the oil lamp which threw long dancing shadows into the barren hallway.
Schmidt ordered the woman to lead the way, and we followed her in single file up three flights of narrow, rickety stairs at her wheezing pace, a step at a time and with only the lamp in her shaking hand for illumination. The building must have been abandoned for years. The rooms and the hallways were piled high with junk, most of the windows were broken, the walls were running damp.
When we reached the top floor, the old woman led the strange parade to the front of the house, into a room crammed with boxes and barrels and old newspapers. The slanting roof cut the height of the room so that I had to lower my head to enter. There were two dormer windows, and through the broken, grimy panes we could see the lights of the Danube Corso and the long beams of the Russian antiaircraft searchlights in the Varosliget, the city park a few blocks away.
There was a broken-down armoire, covered with dust, against the wall, on the side of the building away from the alley. The door, its glass front shattered, hung drunkenly from one rusted hinge. When the old woman had recovered her breath from the climb, she kicked the door open and stuck her head inside. When she stepped back, we could see that the back panel of the armoire had slid aside; there was an entrance to the warehouse next door.
Schmidt elbowed the old woman aside and squeezed his squat body through the armoire. A few moments later the narrow opening was flooded with light, then Schmidt reappeared.
“Hermann.”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.” The pants presser clicked his heels.
“I shall need Otto here with me to help entertain our friends. But I want that car moved from here immediately. It is much too dangerous. You will drive it to Felix in Matyasfold, Verstehen Sie?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
“You will give your uniform to Felix. He will return your civilian clothes and the necessary documents. He will also give you clothes and documents for Otto. You will return here promptly in one hour. If you are stopped by police, you will tell them you are Frau Hoffmeyer’s nephew.”
“God forbid,” said the old woman.
“Shut up,” said Schmidt. “You will say you are to visit Frau Hoffmeyer. Your papers will bear you out. Do you understand, Hermann?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
“As soon as we are inside, you will help Frau Hoffmeyer replace the dust on this armoire and you will pile some junk in front of the door. Verstehen Sie, Hermann?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
“Gut,” said Schmidt. “Gehen Sie schnell.” He raised his hand with the palm outstretched. “Heil Hitler.” Hermann clicked his heels for the tenth time. “Heil Hitler.”
The old woman cackled. “In my day we said, ‘Hoch der Kaiser.’ ”
“Shut up, old fool,” Schmidt said. “Who cares about your day? Your day is gone forever.”
Otto herded Maria and me into the warehouse room, and the armoire panel closed behind us.
The room into which we moved I took to be the repair shop for the warehouse. There were wooden benches against the three outer walls of yellow brick and without windows. The benches were cluttered with tools of every description from screwdrivers to power lathes. The fourth wall, opposite the entrance, was of rough, unpainted wood and also windowless. At one time there must have been a stairway from the floor of the warehouse, some forty feet below, but there existed no sign of it. The only ventilation came from a big skylight under which was stretched a blackout curtain on wires. The room was lighted by electricity, and in one corner there was a tank with water taps.
There was a desk against the wooden wall, opposite the entrance, and half a dozen chairs in front of it, but the main exhibit was a life-size oil painting on the wall behind the desk. The picture was lighted the way people light pictures of their more prosperous ancestors. The subject was Adolf Hitler.
“Sit down, please,” Dr. Schmidt said. He placed his hat and coat and cane on the workbench, then seated himself at the desk. He might have been preparing to instruct a class in manual training except for the revolver he placed within reach. Otto stood behind Maria and me.
The doctor cleared his throat.
“I am quite sure there is no need for me to introduce myself.” His tiny pig eyes gleamed behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. “Fraulein Torres I have had the pleasure of meeting in Geneva. You, mein Herr, I do not know—yet. But I shall know you very well. Is it not so, Otto?”
“Ja wohl, Excellenz.”
I found myself saying to Maria, “I thought you told me you didn’t understand German?”
“I don’t,” Maria said. Her composure made my own nerves twice as jumpy.
“I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle,” Schmidt said. “I had forgotten. We shall speak French. Or rather, should I say, I shall speak French.” He had the habit of cocking his head and pulling on his ear as if to emphasize his point. “I promise you shall have your chance to talk later.”
Otto giggled.
Schmidt picked up the revolver and sighted it over our heads at an imaginary target. He put down the revolver, remove
d his spectacles, and wiped them with a handkerchief.
“First of all, you will please put Monsieur Blaye’s Manila envelope on the desk.”
When neither Maria nor I moved, the doctor said, “Come, come,” and pulled at his ear. When nothing happened then, he said, “I’m afraid I shall have to ask Otto to find which of you is carrying it.”
With Schmidt pointing the gun at me, I had to let Otto search me. I didn’t like his running his hands over Maria and I must have shown it in my face because the doctor said, “Please remain calm, Monsieur.”
Otto put Blaye’s passport and the traveler’s checks and Maria’s passport on the desk. He stepped back, and we sat down.
“You examined the suitcases they took off the train, Otto?”
“Yes, Excellency.”
“And what did you find?”
“A toothbrush, three odd stockings, a suit of lady’s underwear, one shoe—”
“That will do, Otto. You did not find a large Manila envelope, the one you took from Mademoiselle Torres in the snow last night, the one you gave Strakhov like the fool you are?”
“There was no envelope at all, Excellency.”
Schmidt picked up the revolver and ran his hand along the barrel. Through the skylight came the sound of a locomotive whistling for the grade crossing in front of the warehouse.
By this time my nerves were ragged. The whole performance had turned into a never-ending nightmare. I had come to Hungary on what I thought was a forged passport, on a personal mission, an attempt to trace my brother. I had good reason to fear the Russians and the Hungarians, the masters in this country. There was no reason whatever to get mixed up with Herr Doktor Wolfgang Schmidt, a German who sat under a portrait of Adolf Hitler in a Budapest warehouse. Whatever his racket, he was just as much afoul of the authorities as I was. A good deal more, because he’d murdered a Russian officer. The killer could only have been Schmidt looking for that damned envelope.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t know what this is all about and I’m not interested. If you’re worried about that list of watchmakers, I hid it on the train.”
Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril Page 5
