Dine and Die on the Danube Express

by Peter King

  “To be honest, yes.”

  “I suppose it would to you. After all, you’re a man.”

  She said that with a finality that was inarguable. She smiled and resumed her departure. I sat alone thinking.

  If she was right, I was inclined to think that any man who had been having an affair on the train with Elisha Tabor was a hot suspect. I debated how much to tell Kramer. It was not that I wanted to withhold any useful information from him, but his reaction when I told him that my “information” came from intuition was predictable. He would scoff. I decided to hold Irena’s suspicions for a while and see if I could make anything of them.

  The Danube Express was still following a serpentine route as it wove its way along the track high above the river. Rocks gleamed dully in the desultory sunshine, though they had been cleared from the river’s main course, and their appearances were confined to the shallower edges.

  Farms and villages dotted the scene as far as the eye could see, and, in the distance, another of the tall graceful church spires pierced the air.

  As I entered the next coach, Kramer and Dr. Stolz were coming toward me. We paused in the corridor. No one was near.

  “The doctor finds the cause of death to be undoubtedly the same as before,” Kramer told me, and the doctor nodded agreement. “The symptoms are identical.”

  He looked from one to the other of us. “I must leave you. There is a sore throat in Coach 6 that requires attention.”

  He left, and Kramer said, “I have some answers from Thomas. First, he has learned that our Swiss friend, Franz Reingold, is a major stockholder in Ostdeutscher Eisenbahn Gesellschaft—a very prominent railroad company in Germany. They would like to have the contract to run a luxury train similar to this one. If we were severely behind schedule or if we suffered an accident or if various other things happened—we might lose our contract, and the OEG might be able to pick it up.”

  “Might be a motive,” I conceded, “but I don’t see Herr Reingold as a serious suspect.”

  “Nor do I,” said Kramer, “but I cannot afford to overlook anything. Further, this morning’s edition of the Budapest Times gives its daily report of the progress of the Donau Schnellzug. No revelations, but there is a strong recommendation that readers who are following the daily reports should be sure to read tomorrow’s paper for another sensational story.”

  “Another? Does that mean even more sensational than the murder of Malescu and her miraculous reappearance?”

  “One would presume so.”

  “So Czerny—or someone very close to him—is on the train?”

  “It looks that way,” Kramer said harshly.

  “I have a suggestion …”

  “Yes?” Kramer looked at me hopefully

  “Let me talk to Malescu alone.”

  He frowned. “I had intended that we should interrogate her together. Surely it would be—”

  “We can still do that—but let me talk to her first. I have some half-formed theories, and if I can talk to her on a sort of personal basis, I believe I might learn something helpful. I am sure she feels intimidated by you, but she might open up to me.”

  Kramer looked doubtful.

  “We don’t have much time left,” I urged. “We need to try anything.”

  “I am not sure,” he said reluctantly. “When do you propose to do this?”

  “Now,” I told him, and the immediacy in the one word was enough to convince him.

  “Very well,” he said officiously. “Proceed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  SHE OPENED HER COMPARTMENT door in response to my knock and gave me an inquiring smile. I came right to the point.

  “Herr Kramer and I were going to interrogate you further,” I said, making it sound as heavy as I could. “I asked him to let me talk to you first.” That removed the smile.

  “What is this about?” she asked, not being too confrontational but not hinting at a lot of cooperation.

  “It’s about Acid Essence of Almonds.”

  The great actress came on display at once, but it was a fifth of a second late. A momentary flash of alarm had shown for that length of time, and I had been watching carefully for it.

  “When do you wish to do this talk?” she asked, her composure returning rapidly.

  “Right now would be convenient.”

  She paused, then pulled the door open, and I entered.

  The compartment was much more untidy than when I had seen it before. Clothes of every description were everywhere. She wore a beige pantsuit and she had fluffy slippers on her feet. Her face showed only a little makeup although she looked surprisingly good that way. “I was getting dressed to leave the compartment,” she explained, and I made no comment. She cleared a small armchair by sweeping an armful of clothes on to the chest.

  I sat and she took a similar chair opposite. She had now donned a conciliatory facial expression, which I guessed meant she intended to find out what I knew.

  “The circumstances surrounding the episode of your murder as reported in the Budapest Times have clouded this investigation,” I said in my most official voice. “It is time to clarify it.”

  “I have told all I know,” she said before I could continue.

  I shook my head. “Not all, not all by any means. You have not, for instance, told us of your visit to Herr Hofstatter’s storage room next to the kitchen coach. Nor have you told us that you sent your understudy, Talia Svarovina, there after your visit.”

  She looked away. She might be a great actress, and she might be a woman who could control her emotions in personal situations, but I had given her to believe that I knew a lot that she thought she had concealed.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?” I invited. I was about to smile to set her at ease, but I had the feeling that it might be a sharklike smile and set the wrong tone.

  “It—it was supposed to be a publicity stunt,” she said. Her voice faltered just enough. “We have tabloid newspapers in Hungary just as melodramatic as you have in England or the United States. They supply wonderful stories that get a lot of attention, and it doesn’t matter if they are proved to be false days later. I arranged with one of them to run a story that I had been poisoned, then to run a retraction later. They felt that having it all take place on the Danube Express would make it an even bigger story.”

  “Where does your understudy fit into this?”

  “I discussed it with her, of course. We were very close.”

  “So,” I said, “you went to the storage area on the train and saw the Acid Essence of Almonds. You sent Talia Svarovina to steal a jar of it. You know the odor of bitter almonds is characteristic of cyanide, a lethal poison—and that the two are very similar except for one being deadly and one being harmless. You thought that an aroma of cyanide would add to the appearance of death. But tell me, you must have planned this before leaving Munich—but you didn’t steal the Acid Essence until you were on the train.”

  She was gaining confidence now. “I had planned on leaving an empty bottle of aspirin on the bed to make it look as if I had taken all of them. The tour of the kitchens was something I often do—but seeing the Acid Essence of Almonds, I decided to make the apparent death so much more dramatic.”

  That, at least, was probably true. A chance to add more drama would be irresistible to her.

  “As it happened, though,” I said, “the first appearance of the story in print did not appear in a tabloid, did it? The Budapest Times carried it.”

  “I had not reckoned on the resourcefulness of Mikhel Czerny” she said, a touch of anger in her voice. “I don’t know how he got the story so quickly.”

  “Could it be because Czerny or one of his informers is on the train?”

  I tried to discern if that surprised her or not. I was alert for any clue, but I wasn’t certain of her reaction.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly.

  I switched tracks, hoping to catch her off guard. “You said you and your under
study were very close. Did you often have her impersonate you?”

  “Of course. Many stars do that.”

  “For what reason?”

  “To avoid crowds, to replace them at boring events, when they don’t feel well—many reasons.”

  “To take risks for you when you think you might be in danger?”

  She hesitated. “Some stars do that. I don’t; I would not risk Talia’s life.”

  “But surely you have done so when you have been in danger from the IMG? Didn’t they threaten your life if you played Rakoczi’s daughter?”

  “I have never endangered Talia—not knowingly.”

  “Didn’t you endanger her when you had her replace you in this enactment of a phony murder?”

  “Not at all,” she said promptly

  “Yet she was murdered.”

  “There was no connection,” she said forcefully.

  “You say that you and Talia were very close, but surely you had your disagreements, arguments?”

  “Of course. Such a relationship is not always smooth—especially between two women.”

  “Arguments about men?”

  That took her unawares. “Men? No, not about men.”

  “Surely not about theatre?”

  “She was my understudy—there was nothing to argue about there. No, if we had arguments, they were about clothes, makeup, style—”

  She stopped. My skepticism must have been transparent.

  “All right! Trivial matters to you,” she snapped.

  “Far from a motive for murder.”

  “I didn’t murder her!” she shouted.

  “Do you know who did?” I asked sharply.

  “No, I have not the slightest idea.”

  She sat back and stared out of the window. Her profile was perfect. Outside, there was a striking view, although I knew that was not why she had adopted that position. The Danube Express was snaking around a bend, and, ahead of us, a high suspension bridge soared loftily over the river, which was still brown. Neither of us had a camera though, or, at that moment, the photographic urge.

  I had a sudden outrageous notion. I decided to give it a try. “I don’t believe your story about a tabloid. Furthermore, I think you set up this whole scenario with Mikhel Czerny.”

  It didn’t matter if it was true or not, I was thinking while I said it, the sheer provocation of the statement ought to be enough to pull something out of her.

  Her attention jerked back toward me. “That’s the most preposterous thing I ever heard,” she said. But somehow, I felt I was onto something. I wasn’t sure if it was in her words or her attitude or her face, but it was worth following up.

  “Maybe this antagonism between you and Czerny isn’t real,” I said, trying to use a silky tone. “Maybe it’s just another good publicity gimmick.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Her response was fiery enough to make me wonder if I was wrong, but I plunged ahead, making it up as I went along.

  “Taking it a step further, if you and he are not in conflict, then perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps he’s your lover.”

  Her reaction surprised me. She burst into laughter. “That’s absurd—” Another thought struck her, and her laughter subsided to a giggle. “Not impossible, I suppose but still—” She quickly became serious. “If only you knew how—but never mind, I understand that you are only doing your job and trying to find out who killed Talia and Tabor.”

  “We will be in Bucharest tomorrow, and the journey will be over,” I told her. “The only chance of finding the killer of those two women is to do it before we arrive. Don’t you want to help to do that?”

  “I can’t help you,” she said simply.

  “I think you can. Do you mean you don’t want to?”

  She gazed out of the window again. Clearly there was some dilemma she was trying to resolve. Maybe I could spur her on … add some pressure.

  “Naturally, there is some suspicion that you may have killed Talia,” I said. “She was your understudy, and it would be understandable if she was jealous of you. So if she might have a motive to kill you, might you not have one to kill her?”

  “I suppose you could think that,” she murmured, still looking out the window at an expanse of green grass dotted with stands of birches, “but I would have no motive to kill Tabor.”

  “Maybe you did have a motive,” I said sharply.

  “Even if I did, I certainly did not kill her.”

  “You realize that you are under suspicion, and if you have a motive, we will find it.”

  Was she debating what to tell me? If so, she had something to hide. What could it be?

  “Did you know Tabor before this trip?”

  She paused a long time. I knew I must be onto something else. I put on more pressure. “Better tell me. We’ll learn about it anyway.”

  She paused again then made up her mind. “Yes, Tabor almost killed me twice.”

  It was the “twice” that rang a bell in my memory. Who was it who had almost killed somebody twice …?

  “When you were with Lydecker,” I said slowly, “your early days in the theatre—his other assistant made mistakes during your rehearsals, she caused two accidents—you say they almost killed you … Lydecker let that other assistant go—that was Elisha Tabor, wasn’t it?”

  She didn’t answer at once, then she decided.

  “Yes,” she breathed. “She was jealous of me. I was better-looking than she, I was better in the act.”

  “She denied all that, though, didn’t she? She said you set up those accidents to get rid of her.”

  She flashed me an angry look. “Lydecker told you that? It’s not true!”

  I had my own ideas about who was telling the truth, but I didn’t express them. Instead, I said, “So you and Tabor have had this feud all these years? I find that hard to believe. Have you both been arranging accidents for the other all this time?”

  “She has been harassing me.”

  “In what way?”

  She hesitated, but knew that she had gone too far now to stop. “In print,” she said.

  “In print? You mean she was passing information to Czerny?”

  “No, she didn’t need to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  She paused, no doubt a natural actor’s pause for dramatic effect.

  “She WAS Czerny.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  SEVERAL COMPONENTS SLOTTED INTO place after I had absorbed that startling revelation.

  “You faked your own death. You have had lots of practice at dying—on the stage. You sprinkled Acid Essence of Almonds around your compartment and summoned Czerny” A thought struck me. “How did you summon Czerny, by the way?”

  She raised her chin defiantly. I was thinking quickly and discarding possibilities just as quickly. “My guess would be by a phone call, probably saying something like, ‘Someone has killed Malescu—go to her compartment at once—you can get the story of a lifetime. If you hurry, you can get there before anyone finds her.’”

  I looked for some reaction but could see none. “If you want to help yourself avoid being suspected of the murders of Svarovina and Tabor, you’d better cooperate,” I said harshly.

  She swallowed and looked away. “All right. Yes, it was something like that. I used a deep voice, sounding like a man.”

  “When Czerny arrived, you put on the typical death rictus associated with cyanide.” I had in fact, on one occasion found the body of a man poisoned that way and had never forgotten the snarling, tortured features. “You looked so frightening that Czerny would have bolted out of the door at once.”

  “I am quite sure I looked frightening,” Malescu murmured. “Still, the desire to splash the news across the front page would have been overwhelming. She couldn’t wait to send in the story.”

  “And then you did your disappearing act.”

  “No one was harmed by it.” She shrugged.

  “I appreciate your frankness,” I said. “At this point,
I regret that the interview has to become official. I must bring in the Head of Security, Herr Kramer, and have him hear this.”

  She shrugged, and I picked up the phone and called Kramer. He came at once, and I recounted the disclosures of the past minutes. He listened without interruption until I finished.

  The faint whoosh of air past the windows of the Danube Express was the only sound in the compartment. The scenery was a meaningless blur. Magda Malescu must have been aware of the effect of her bombshell, but to her credit, she didn’t exploit it. She sat, impassive but imposing.

  “So that is why Czerny’s columns criticized you so severely and so frequently,” Kramer said.

  “They did more than that. They reviled me, they did their best to ruin my professional reputation.” Malescu’s words were calm, matter-of-fact, but underneath was a simmering anger.

  “I understand now why you did not want to tell us this,” I said, and she nodded.

  “Yes, it is a perfect motive for wanting to kill her, isn’t it? I realize that. But I did not. I did not kill her—or Talia.”

  I could imagine the curtain falling to loud applause as she delivered those lines on the stage. It would be a memorable moment in the performance. She made no effort to dramatize it, but I had to remind myself, as I had so many times before, that she was an accomplished actress. Just as she could act, she could act as if she were not acting.

  Kramer looked impatient, anxious to press on with the investigation.

  “So Fraulein Svarovina took your place in this charade?”

  “No. I must explain. I didn’t know Czerny—Elisha Tabor—was going to be on this train. It was on the platform at Munich Haupt-bahnhof, that I saw her about to board.”

  That clicked in my mind. “So it was not the letter that the steward, Hirsch, handed you on the platform that startled you so. You looked past him and saw Elisha Tabor.”

  “You led us to think that it was a death threat from the IMG,” snapped Kramer. “You said they were determined to prevent you from playing Rakoczi’s daughter.”

  She raised her chin defiantly. “I have been receiving threats from the IMG. That is true.”