I checked an impulse to run. Instead, I turned into a side street, off the avenue that would take me to Hiram and Walter. The footsteps were louder than ever.
The night was bitter cold and clear. The moon had not yet risen, but there was sufficient light from the stars to tell me, when there was no possibility of turning back, that I had entered a dead-end street.
Three chimneys standing against the sky at the end of the street meant three houses wall to wall in front of me. There was no alley, no passage for further retreat.
There was a short stretch of sidewalk cleared by the wind. Before my feet hit the snow again I heard the relentless pounding behind me.
The three houses at the end of the street were dark. They could be apartments with unlocked front doors. They could be private houses, ending my flight on the doorstep.
I passed the first house. If I reached for my gun with my bandaged hands, I’d get a bullet in my back. The footsteps, echoing against the buildings from the hard-packed snow, were scarcely ten feet behind.
I passed the second house, and the door of the third house opened under my hand. I stepped inside and pulled the door behind me. I was in the hallway of a tenement, like the one in which we’d found Maria. There was a dim night light.
I’d taken several steps toward the stairs when I heard the door opening. I turned and flattened myself against the wall, in back of the door.
The door swung open very slowly, so slowly that I managed to get out my gun. I held it by the barrel and when the head appeared I brought down the butt of the gun as hard as I could. He sank to the floor with a crash and lay still.
I pulled him over to the wall, then ran through his pockets. I expected to find a gun, but there wasn’t one. There was only a broken bottle in the back pocket, the apricot brandy soaking his clothing and running in a little trickle across the bare wooden floor.
Then I heard a door open somewhere upstairs and a woman’s voice said, “Jeno, Jeno. Is that you?” When there was no answer, there were footsteps descending the stairs and the woman said, “Drunk again.”
I think I must have run through the snow all the way back to the main avenue, then the three blocks to the meeting place.
We started down the tracks toward Jozsefvaros after Hiram had cut away the bandage from the fingers of my right hand so that I could use my gun.
For most of the distance there was a stone wall to cut off the tracks from the street, but here and there it had crumbled under bombardment or shellfire, and we entered on the right of way through one of those holes. We went single file with Hiram leading, Walter next, and me bringing up the rear, sixty or seventy feet apart.
Hiram’s plan was for Walter and me to wait at the entrance to the station while he located the Austrian coach and discovered how it was guarded. He would rejoin us and sketch out a plan of attack. It would have been a good deal easier if I could have told him at which end of the car I had hidden Blaye’s Manila envelope.
There was just enough light to pick our way slowly along the ties. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d entered Hungary by walking the tracks and now I was finishing the nightmare in the same fashion. Only I no longer had the slightest illusion about the possibility of escape. In the unlikely event that I lived through the next hour, there was still Dr. Schmidt.
We had about a quarter of a mile to walk to the yards, then three city blocks to the station. A hundred yards or so short of the yards there were two big locomotives under a water tower. As far as I could tell, there was no one aboard although they had steam up. I thought they must have been scheduled to pull early-morning trains out of Keleti station, probably including the Vienna local. Fortunately, their headlights were not switched on, or the rest of our walk would have been on a brightly illuminated stage.
I caught up with Walter at the entrance to the yards, in the shadow of the army barracks, which stood a few feet from the tracks on our left. Except for a dim light on each floor of the big building, the red and green signals, and the faint light from the hooded switches, we were shielded by darkness.
We stood without speaking for what seemed an hour although it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes at the most. I wanted a cigarette desperately but I didn’t dare light a match.
Hiram said the Austrian passenger car was on the innermost of the six tracks, to our right as we faced the station. To the left of the car there was a loading platform. To the right was a stone wall, then a narrow street, and the cemetery.
“There are two guards with tommy guns on the platform,” Hiram said. “There’s another on the back platform. There’s a light inside so there may be others.”
“Can we get in back of them?” I said.
“There isn’t a chance,” Hiram said. “There isn’t a three-inch clearance between the car and the wall.”
“What about the other tracks?” I said. “What about the track on the other side of the same platform?”
“Solid with boxcars. All the other tracks are filled.”
“Can’t we go along the top of the freight cars?” I said. “We could get to the back of the platform that way.”
“No,” Hiram said. “The roofs of the loading platform sheds extend over the tracks. There’s no clearance for a man to walk on top of the cars. We couldn’t even crawl.”
“How about going under them?” Walter said.
“Too much snow,” Hiram said.
“What’s left?”
“We’ll have to scale the wall in back of the platforms,” Hiram said.
That meant retracing our steps to the place where we had met and leaving the tracks to walk the streets to Fiumei ut, which paralleled the sidewalk in back of the platforms.
We started back the way we’d come, only I led and Hiram came last.
The whole business made no sense to me. Hiram should have known what we would be up against before we started. There must have been some way to find out.
Hiram had said the stone wall around the Jozsefvaros station was ten or twelve feet high. We couldn’t hope to scale a blank wall without a ladder or some other help. And even if we could find such an aid, a thousand to one shot, how could we hope to use it on the Fiumei ut, one of the main streets of Budapest and pretty well traveled even at three-thirty in the morning? I remembered it as a well-lighted street, but it was sufficiently policed to make suicide any such operation as Hiram contemplated, even if the lights were dim.
Then, too, the map had shown a large open space between the loading platforms and the Fiumei ut wall, including a driveway for trucks to deliver shipments to the platforms. If we succeeded in reaching the top of the wall, we’d have to drop twelve feet into that open space, then cross the driveway to the shelter of the platforms. We might not be watched but we wouldn’t know until we hit the top of the wall and then it might be too late.
There had to be some other way to get into the Austrian car to retrieve Marcel Blaye’s envelope. Hiram’s idea of approaching from the yards was sound. What we needed was a diversion to draw the attention of the guards, something to take them away from the passenger car for just enough time to allow our search.
Perhaps one of us could fire a gun out in the yards? The guards would rush to investigate. But I knew that wasn’t any good because it would then be impossible to leave by the tracks, the only exit Hiram had found because of that stone wall.
I think all three of us must have thought of the locomotive at the same time. At any rate, we all tried to talk at once when I went back to Walter and Hiram caught up with us.
We sneaked up alongside the locomotives, and they were deserted. We checked the switches and they were set straight into one of the middle tracks on which three flimsy wooden boxcars were standing at a loading platform.
I mounted to the cab of the locomotive nearest the yards. I gave Hiram and Walter three minutes by my watch to move as close as possible to the Austrian coach. Then I released the brakes, pulled the throttle wide, and jumped as the big machine began to ro
ll.
I fell into a snowbank alongside the track. I picked myself up and ran after the locomotive as fast as I dared in the semidarkness but I was a good hundred yards from the Austrian coach when the engine plowed into the wooden boxcars.
There was a crash that must have been heard a mile. Then the engine jumped the tracks, sideswiped the loading platform and toppled on its side with a great roar of steam. I reached the passenger car, three tracks away, as the boiler blew up, scattering hunks of those matchbox freight cars like rain.
I was in time to boost Hiram over the coupling onto the back platform of the car. Walter had apparently climbed up before him. There was no sign of Walter nor of any guards. They had rushed over to the track where the locomotive struck.
In the next minute, all of Jozsefvaros went crazy. A siren screamed, whistles blew, a bugle echoed from the roof of the army barracks, the sounds accompanied by the hissing of steam from the wrecked locomotive.
Hiram and Walter returned to the back platform. Walter reached the ground first, and I knew by the way he gripped my shoulder that they had found the Manila envelope.
Walter reached out to help Hiram down.
At that moment, the floodlights went on.
We were shielded by the freight cars on the next track, between us and the station offices and the barracks. But our escape route over the tracks, back to the spot where we had left the street, was blocked. The arcs lit up the station and the yards like a baseball stadium at night.
We climbed onto the car platform and hurried through the corridor to the other end. The large space between the backs of the loading platforms and the high stone wall was in half-darkness, illuminated faintly by the light from the yards.
There was a door in the wall, a high wooden door, in the corner nearest the cemetery. We couldn’t have entered that way because the lock was on the inside, but it offered our only chance to get out.
The door in the wall was about a hundred feet from where we stood on the rear platform of the Austrian coach. For most of the distance there were two or three feet of snow. There was no time to lose. The guards who had hurried to the other platform when the locomotive crashed would be back any second.
We walked off the coach onto the platform, then jumped into the snow and waded as fast as we could through the drifts toward the door in the high stone wall. Walter was ahead of me, Hiram behind.
When I caught up with Walter in front of the door, I saw he was trying to pull back the heavy brass bolt. The door would open in, and snow was drifted against it. Hiram and I worked feverishly to clear it away but it was slow going with only our hands as scoops.
Walter got the bolt back and we had cleared enough snow so that the door would open two or three feet, enough for us to slip through.
None of us realized the significance of the thin iron pipe that ran along the wall just above the door. We never noticed it in the half-light until it was too late. You see, the moment Walter started to swing that heavy door, the electrical connection broke and set off an alarm in the station. We couldn’t hear the alarm, which meant we had no warning. We tugged at that big door until the searchlight went on, and then there was no place to hide.
I suppose the alarm went off when anything happened anywhere along that long stretch of wall. The searchlight stabbed back and forth for a few seconds before it came to rest on us, huddled in front of that door. Walter found it on the station roof but there was a burst of shots from a tommy gun before he fired into the searchlight and put it out of commission. The gunner on the roof must have had buck fever because only one bullet took effect. That one plowed into Hiram, and he crumpled without a sound.
There was no telling how much longer we’d have the darkness. There could be another searchlight. At any rate, they’d come after us quick enough. We might have heard shouts if the siren hadn’t resumed its hysterical wailing.
We left Hiram where he’d fallen and pulled desperately at the door. I found I could slip through, but Walter was a lot bigger, and it took a minute or so to give him enough space to pass, dragging Hiram.
By that time, the siren had trailed off into a low moan, and we could hear the voices of the sentries moving across the loading yard toward the door and us. There was no way to pull the door shut behind us; there was no hardware, no handle on the outer side.
I told Walter to get Hiram to the car. I’d try to hold off the guards until he could get a head start. They’d have a chance on the street that paralleled the cemetery. It wasn’t much used, even in the daytime.
Walter took Hiram in his arms like a baby. It was more than half a mile to the car on the Asztalos Sandor ut.
They were swallowed up in the darkness even before I moved to the right of the door. I flattened myself against the wall with my right arm and my gun straight out from the shoulder. It occurred to me they might come over the wall instead of through the door but in that case they’d need to go back for a ladder and that would give Walter and Hiram precious tune.
But they came straight to the door. I heard the Russian voices. A flashlight probed the opening. When the arm came through, I fired. I hit it, too, because there was a yell of pain and a lot of violent cursing from the arm and his companions. The hit was dumb luck; my finger was so smashed that I had to pull the trigger instead of squeezing it and the gun jumped in my hand.
For a minute or so there was no sound from behind the door. I was counting the seconds to myself, trying to imagine how far Walter had progressed with the unconscious Hiram, how long to wait, if I had the choice, before making a break. Not that I was going to follow them once they reached the car. I might help to get them there—but I was going to the warehouse on Mexikoi ut in search of Herr Doktor Schmidt.
The flashlight stabbed through the doorway once more, and then they pulled the hoary trick of shoving out a uniform cap on the end of a bayonet. But I fired at that, and it quickly withdrew behind the wall, and there was dead silence again.
When I had counted almost to a hundred, I was sure they’d gone for the ladder.
I left the wall, crossed the narrow street to the sidewalk bordering the iron fence, and moved warily in the direction which Walter had taken. I had to cross directly in front of the door. I made it, either because the Russians were keeping well back from the opening or because I was shrouded in the shadows from the tombs on the other side of the fence.
I crossed the street again and followed Walter’s tracks by the reflected light from the arcs in the yards. I managed to keep up a sort of half-running, half-walking pace. I wondered how soon I’d run into a Russian patrol.
Two blocks and there was a low, open shed against the wall of the yards. I wasn’t more than a few feet away when I heard Walter’s voice. I hurried forward because I thought he must be talking to Hiram and the latter had regained consciousness. Walter must have put Hiram down in the shelter of the shed to look after the wound.
I was almost on top of them when I heard another voice, and it wasn’t Hiram’s.
It was the voice of Dr. Schmidt.
Chapter Twenty-Two
BLOOD ON THE SNOW
I stood where I was. When Schmidt came out of the shed and his body and the gun in his hand were outlined against the sky, I had plenty of time to aim. I held the Luger with both hands to steady my aim and I managed to squeeze the trigger as if I were squeezing a lemon. I should have emptied the eight bullets into his ugly body. But nothing happened.
My gun was jammed.
I saw Schmidt back off the sidewalk into the street as if it were all a dream. I watched him until I couldn’t see him any longer in the inky blackness along the cemetery fence on the other side of that narrow street.
I walked up to where Walter was standing. I could make out Hiram’s body stretched on the floor of the shed.
I didn’t have to ask whether Schmidt had Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope. He wouldn’t have left without it. He’d surprised Walter with Hiram in his arms. Walter never had a chance to draw his g
un. I supposed he hadn’t killed them because he didn’t want to advertise his presence to the Russians. He must have known all the time what we were up to in the yards. We’d done his dirty work for him.
I bent over Hiram, and he was still breathing. I took his gun from his pocket and aimed it at the end of the shed, and it fired okay. I left my jammed Luger with him.
I told Walter to keep on going with Hiram, to get him to the car. My watch said it was five minutes after six. Walter was to give Hiram first aid in the car. If I didn’t arrive by seven o’clock, he was to head for the Buda hills without me.
I crossed the street again, this time following Schmidt’s footprints in the snow.
The moon had been up half an hour or so, but there were heavy snow clouds in the sky, and the light from the moon was fitful. I knew that street afforded no exit for another two blocks. There was the high stone wall of the railway yards on one side and the cemetery fence on the other. Schmidt would hurry but he wouldn’t know I was behind him. I had to catch him in those two blocks, before he reached the main avenue where he’d have a car.
Every now and then the clouds would scud from in front of the moon, and I checked his tracks in the snow. The snow was fresh, and the street was infrequently used; those who were forced to travel it at night shunned the sidewalk that touched the cemetery. Schmidt’s were the only marks in the snow. They were easy to follow when there was light. There wasn’t a street lamp in sight or I should have spotted him when he passed them a block or even two ahead.
I was nearly at the end of the street and beginning to think I’d lost Schmidt when there was moonlight and I saw there were no footprints ahead of me. At first I didn’t believe my eyes but I backtracked, thinking he had given me the slip by crossing to the other side.
I found that the doctor’s footprints ended at the cemetery fence.
I knew then that he was heading for the inn on the other side, the place from which he had kidnapped Maria and where I had seen him that evening. The proprietor worked for Schmidt. The doctor would find refuge at the inn. Probably Hermann was waiting. It was a good deal shorter to go through the cemetery and much safer.
Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril Page 17
