Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril

by Parker, Robert B.

  Hiram shook his head. “I told you we weren’t running a rescue business for free and I meant it. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to see this thing through with us.”

  “And supposing I refuse?”

  “You won’t,” Hiram said. There was a hard quality to his voice I hadn’t heard before. “You’re an American and you’ll stick with us. But, even if you hadn’t made such a decision on your own, I think we’ve ways to influence you. We could turn you over to the Russians or Doctor Schmidt. Or we could send you to Vienna to be executed by a firing squad for the murder of Blaye.

  “You see, Mr. Stodder, you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in a very serious business. This is a matter of life and death for nations as well as individuals. You’ve taken a hand in a game that could influence the issue of war or peace in Europe and the world.”

  Chapter Eight

  UNWILLING ACCOMPLICE

  At that moment, Hiram’s pronouncement didn’t impress me in the slightest.

  “But that doesn’t help me find Maria,” I said. “I’m not going to leave her in Schmidt’s hands, no matter what your problem is.”

  Hiram was very patient. “Nobody said you had to. I told you I want to talk to her and I’ve got some questions for Schmidt, too. You’d better make up your mind right now that there’s nothing you can do to rescue Mademoiselle Torres without our help. All I’m asking is that you realize finding her is also part of my problem.”

  “What’s this problem?” I asked. “What’s this threat to the peace of Europe and the world? And what do you mean by ‘peace’ anyway? Who said there was any peace in the world? I’m one of the thirteen million Americans who fought for peace. I haven’t seen anything that looks like peace.”

  “All right, then,” Hiram said. “There isn’t any peace. But there still isn’t a shooting war. At least, we aren’t in one. Perhaps I ought to say that the outcome of this little problem might mean the difference between America’s winning or losing a shooting war.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  Hiram asked Teensy to fill our glasses.

  “The whole thing goes back to the Fall of 1944,” Hiram said. “At least, this phase of it does. In one way or another it’s been going on for a century.”

  I suppose I was fed up because I had to sit there and listen to Carr talk in what I considered silly generalities instead of going to Mexikoi ut to get Maria.

  “Please skip the preliminaries,” I said. Both Hiram and Teensy looked at me. “I’m sorry. I guess my nerves aren’t what they ought to be.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Hiram said. “I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

  “Let’s start in 1944, in the fall. By October it was evident to everyone, except probably Adolf Hitler, that Nazi Germany was finished, that it was impossible to continue resistance against Britain and the United States in the west and Russia in the east.

  “A little over a month later, French troops would be fighting the Germans in the streets of Strasbourg for possession of the city itself. But already the Nazis knew what it meant to have the blitzkrieg, their own invention, turned against them. The Allies were fighting on the sacred soil of the Reich itself, something Hitler had boasted could never happen. The Siegfried Line had been cracked in the west, and in the east the Russians were attacking Hungary, the last ally left to Germany in Europe.

  “On the tenth of October, 1944, there was a meeting at the Rotes Haus, the famous old hotel in Strasbourg which was still in German hands. That meeting was attended by the nine leaders of the nine basic industries of Germany.

  “We had a man working at the Rotes Haus as a relief waiter. He’d been in Strasbourg before the war and had been parachuted back. He managed to send us a good many details by radio before the Nazis caught him. As a waiter, he served the nine Germans and learned a good deal of what was going on.”

  “Who were they?” I said.

  “The names aren’t of any interest now,” Hiram said, “even if I could remember them. They were, of course, outwardly Nazi like everybody else of importance under Hitler. But they were really the representatives of the Junkers and the Ruhr industrialists, the men who, generation after generation, are behind the governments of Germany, whether those governments are headed by Hitlers or Kaiser Wilhelms or Konrad Adenauers. You follow me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re the men who look upon 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 as just a couple of battles in a long war. I remember talking with a German diplomat who thought that way, even in the summer of 1939.”

  Hiram and Teensy waited for me to continue. I guess Hiram figured I’d be easier to handle if I became enthusiastic.

  “It was right here in Budapest,” I said. “It was the German minister. He was a member of the Prussian aristocracy who had served in the German diplomatic service for twenty years before Hitler took over. He told everybody he abhorred the Nazi regime but he served it faithfully.”

  “What were you doing here, Mr. Stodder?” Teensy asked.

  “I was a newspaper correspondent,” I said. “The Hungarian press chief invited me and two Hungarian editors to dine with the minister. I didn’t like the Nazis, but my business was to get news and I went.

  “Anyway, it was the evening that Berlin and Moscow announced the famous ten-year treaty between Germany and Russia. I asked the German minister what he thought would follow. He said he thought war was inevitable. Then I asked him what he thought would be the outcome of such a war. He said he felt Germany would lose.”

  “He must have been drinking,” Hiram said. “Most of them weren’t that frank.”

  “Oh, he’d been drinking, but the payoff was his next statement. He said that he thought Germany would lose but she would win the next one, the Third World War.”

  “What was his reasoning?” Teensy asked.

  “He said Germany would lose but it would only be a token defeat. Just as in 1918, he said, Britain and France would be terribly weakened. He said Germany, no matter what happened, possessed greater powers of recovery. He felt Britain and France would be dying nations even in apparent victory.”

  “What did he say about Russia?” Hiram asked.

  “He said that, pact or no pact, Germany and Russia would fight each other. But I remember what he said after that just as clearly as if it were yesterday.

  “The German minister said something like this: ‘Russia may fight alongside Britain and France. She might help swing the coming war against Germany. But Russia is Asiatic. Russians are ruthless. You would soon find Russia would try to rule Europe. England would eventually fight Russia as England has fought every nation that has tried to dominate Europe. Then our chance would come. Germany would pick up the pieces.’ ”

  “That fits in with my story,” Hiram said. “It all fits perfectly.

  “Those nine men who met at Strasbourg also looked at the Second World War as a battle in what they regard as another Hundred Years’ War, one they fanatically believe will end in German victory in spite of two lost battles. Because they regarded the second battle as lost, they met to send German industry underground. They couldn’t send all of their industry, of course, but they could send the key scientists, the men responsible for so many of Germany’s military weapons. They would continue to work in secret on their inventions against the day when a new German army would be ready.”

  I drained my glass. “A lot of people in America are talking about rearming Germany today,” I said. “You hear arguments that Western Germany ought to be allowed a certain number of infantry divisions. You hear a lot of talk like that in Washington. They think they can use the Germans against the Russians.”

  Hiram nodded. “Your German minister was certainly right. The Russians have already armed the ‘people’s police’ in Eastern Germany. But nobody will benefit except the Junkers and the Ruhr industrialists.

  “Early in 1945, the plan to send the German war scientists underground was put into effect. Some of them were instructed
to surrender to the British and the Americans as refugees. Others went into the Russian lines. A good many technicians went to Scandinavia and Switzerland, others to Spain and Portugal. You see, it didn’t make any difference in the long run where they continued their work as long as they were ready to return to Germany when the time came. They were to continue their scientific research anywhere they could, even to pretending to work for the Russians, the Americans, or the British. They would have facilities at their disposal and they would also form a sort of scientific intelligence corps, learning other countries’ secrets at the same time.”

  It was a further development of the old scheme for keeping their soldiers in training, even to noncoms like Otto and Hermann who had joined the Red Army as frontier guards. A new version of the Trojan Horse.

  “Do you think Germany was about to produce new weapons when the war ended?” I asked. “If you remember, Hitler kept promising the Nazis marvelous new weapons if they would hang on a few months longer. Everybody was talking about the neue Waffen. Do you believe it was only propaganda?”

  Hiram lit another cigar. “No, I know it wasn’t all bluff on Hitler’s part. There’s a lot of evidence to show they’d made tremendous new advances in rockets, for instance. But they never got into production.”

  “Haven’t all those things been outdated by the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb?” I asked.

  “Certainly not,” Hiram said. “Suppose the Germans invented a controlled rocket which would travel 10,000 miles, one that could carry an A-bomb or an H-bomb? There’s good reason to believe they did.”

  I said, “I don’t quite see what this has to do with Marcel Blaye and why he was killed by Doctor Schmidt.”

  “I’m coming to that. There was a gap of many months between the time we were tipped off by the relief waiter in Strasbourg and the occupation of all of Germany. Even then the Russians had gotten into Berlin before the British and Americans and the Reds had first crack at what was left of Nazi records. It took months and years of patient intelligence operations to pick up any trail. The nine German industrialists and their Junker associates had planned very thoroughly.” We could hear the screaming siren of a police car moving down Stalin ut. It reminded me that we were only two blocks from number 60, the headquarters of the MVD.

  Hiram said, “Almost every line we followed ended at a blank wall. Then, a couple of months ago, we turned up Marcel Blaye in Geneva. As Mademoiselle Torres told you, Blaye had arrived in Geneva early in 1945. He had set himself up in business as a watch and clock exporter which gave him all the excuse in the world to travel and to carry on an extensive correspondence abroad. Blaye was a German. His real name was Count Manfred Blomberg. His grandfather had been Swiss and so he was able to get a Swiss passport. Blaye, or Blomberg, was a contact man between some of the exiled underground scientists and his principals who remained in Germany.”

  “Who is Schmidt?” I asked.

  “As far as we know,” Hiram said, “a former colonel in the Wehrmacht. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of a group of ex-generals and staff officers in Germany who call themselves Die Bruderschaft, the brotherhood? That’s the outfit that is plugging for the rearmament of Western Germany. They’re behind the campaign to sell the United States and Britain on allowing Western Germany a few infantry divisions.

  “Of course, the brotherhood is tied up with the industrialists and the Junkers.”

  I recalled Maria’s story of the angry scene between Blaye and Schmidt in the former’s Geneva office. “What did Schmidt have against Blaye? Why did he want to kill him if they were members of the same gang?”

  Hiram poured us another drink, then stirred the fire. Teensy was sound asleep on the sofa.

  “I told you we found Blaye in Geneva a couple of months ago. The Russians had beaten us to it. By the time we became interested in Blaye, they’d sent the Countess Orlovska, one of their best agents, to work on him. And she succeeded, too.”

  I still had the pink perfumed note in my pocket. I handed it to Hiram.

  “Then the countess talked Blaye into making a deal with the Russians?” I said. “She mentions Blaye’s solemn word in regard to a bargain.”

  “That must have been it all right,” Hiram said. “The countess is an extremely attractive woman. She knew how to handle Blaye. I suppose she made her favors contingent on his selling out his friends. Maybe she promised him a high place in the new East German government.”

  “The Manila envelope contained dozens of addresses,” I said. “Addresses of watchmakers and pharmacists and machine shops. I wish I knew who has it.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Hiram said. “That’s to go to the Countess Orlovska. We haven’t got it. We know Schmidt didn’t find it, unless his game is a lot more subtle than it seems. If the Russians have it, Orlovska may know where it is.”

  He left the armchair and stood with his back to the dying fire. He looked more than ever like a grotesque doll, with his head barely reaching the level of the mantelpiece.

  “Do you recall anything about the lists?” he asked. “Can you remember any of the addresses?”

  “I didn’t try to memorize them,” I said. “You’ll recall I had no idea what they meant. Even if I’d known, I wouldn’t have tried to memorize them at that point. My only thought was to get away from this business.”

  “Do you recall any detail at all?”

  “Only the first name on the list. I remember because the name was Ablon, the name of an old Hungarian friend. I think the notation said this Ablon was a watchmaker on the Vaci utca. Does that help?”

  “Maybe,” Hiram said. “It might help if nothing else works. But we’ve got to work on the Countess Orlovska. We’ve got to get that list fast before the Russians start working on it.”

  “How do you propose doing that?”

  Hiram flicked his ashes into the fire.

  “That’s a job for you,” he said.

  “Me?” I said. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Lots,” Hiram said. “I think you’re ideal for that job. Orlovska likes handsome young men. She’s never seen or heard of you before. Your French and German are good enough so you can be French or Belgian or Austrian. Or you can just go on being Swiss.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “The only man who might be in a position to identify you in the circles in which Orlovska moves is Major Strakhov and he’s dead.”

  I got up and went over to the window. “Nothing doing,” I said. “I told you, Mr. Carr, that all I want is to get out of this mess. I want to send Mademoiselle Torres back to Geneva, then I want to trace my brother. I haven’t the slightest further interest in the whole affair. I’m certainly not interested in Countess Orlovska.”

  Hiram replied as if he were talking to a recalcitrant child.

  “Mr. Stodder, I think you’ll do it. Do I have to repeat ad nauseam what I told you about the pressure I can apply? No, I think not. Even if you can’t see your duty as an American—”

  “I know all about my duty. I didn’t spend four years in the Army Air Force for the cultural advantages.”

  “I think you can understand what refusal might mean to you, Mr. Stodder.” Hiram was very patient. “Need I remind you again that you are dependent on me? Without my help, you cannot save Mademoiselle Torres. You cannot even save your own life.”

  “What are you planning?” I said. I didn’t feel very friendly.

  “I propose that you get some sleep. I’ll have Walter wake you at midnight,”

  “Midnight? Why midnight?”

  “Because,” Hiram said. “You’re going to visit a few nightclubs. I think you’ll run into the countess.”

  “How about Maria? What are you going to do about Schmidt?”

  Hiram rang the bell for Walter.

  “We shall visit Doctor Schmidt. But, Mr. Stodder, you don’t think for one moment that he has taken Mademoiselle Torres back to the Mexikoi ut? We shall have to locate him. I already
have two men on the job. You spoke of Hermann leaving the Russian staff car in Matyasfold, with a man named Felix. We shall watch Matyasfold, too.”

  “Why can’t we go to the warehouse now?”

  Hiram looked at me incredulously. “Mr. Stodder, we are enemies in an armed camp. Would you behave like the American police raiding a gambling den? We must move slowly and cautiously. We must operate here behind the Iron Curtain with our wits.

  “Let me reassure you again, Mr. Stodder. Doctor Schmidt won’t let any harm come to Mademoiselle Torres until he knows what has happened to the precious envelope. That’s up to you to discover. Go to bed now and get some sleep.”

  Chapter Nine

  IN THE DRAGNET

  I was dog-tired, but it was a long time before sleep came.

  I was Hiram Carr’s prisoner, whatever he chose to call it. I might possibly escape him. There were no bars on the window, and it would have been an easy jump from the second floor into the drifted snow. But the alternatives to following Carr’s orders were even less attractive.

  First there was the overwhelming possibility that I’d be picked up by the Hungarians or the Russians before I’d moved very far from the house. Without a passport I was lost. If I eluded the police, I’d still have to find food and shelter. The reward offered for my capture would make denunciation certain the minute I appeared in public.

  Suppose I left Carr’s house after stealing a gun, then made my way safely across City Park to Schmidt’s place on the Mexikoi ut? How could I get past the old woman in the tenement without alerting the doctor?

  I thought of trying to flee Hungary, of making my way to Yugoslavia or Rumania on foot; I knew it was insanity to think of crossing the fortified frontier into Austria. But I had no money other than the traveler’s checks which I had stupidly signed with the name of Marcel Blaye. I knew there was an anti-Russian underground in Hungary but why should I expect any help there, even if I could make contact?

  Over and above such considerations, however, I wasn’t ready to abandon the mission for which I’d come to Hungary. I had found it increasingly difficult to live with my feeling of guilt in regard to my brother Bob; to leave Hungary after having started my search would make life impossible. And now there was the added fact of Maria. The thought of leaving her in the custody of Schmidt after all we’d been through together didn’t make sense. If she later proved to be something other than what she had pretended that would be different. For the moment, I had no choice but to stick with Hiram Carr.