Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (17 page)

I don’t know how long we drove. I managed to doze off despite my nerves. When I woke, the sun was in the sky. The car had stopped in the cobblestoned courtyard of what I took to be a country inn. A smiling Hungarian couple, whom I immediately supposed to be the proprietor and his wife, such being the inevitable pattern of life in a country inn, greeted Hiram and Teensy and showed me to a room.

I was put to bed, and they brought me breakfast, but I had little appetite. Hiram produced a doctor who dressed my wounds and filled me with sedatives. He said Walter had been shot in the leg but luckily it was only a flesh wound.

I slept the day through and awoke without that sense of depression which had taken hold when Maria disappeared. The prospect of doing something about finding her made me eager to start, although I couldn’t do much walking or hold a gun in my hands. Speaking of guns, I remarked for the first time that Schmidt hadn’t searched me at Orlovska’s, and the gun Carr gave me had remained inside my jacket all the time.

Someone had removed my dinner jacket and substituted the clothes I had left at Carr’s. The contents of my pockets had been emptied on the bureau. I remembered Ilonka dropping something in my pocket just as I was booted out of the Arizona by Lavrentiev’s orderly. It stared back at me in the dim light of the room—Ilonka’s blue glass eye, the good eye that fights the evil eye. It amused me, but I slipped it in my pocket when I had finished dressing.

I made my way down the stairs, a step at a time, to find Walter in the huge living room, seated in front of the open fire. Hiram and Teensy joined us in a few minutes. After a quick dinner, we shook hands with the proprietor and his wife and drove off in Hiram’s car.

“What’s the setup?” I said. “They’ve got a lot of guts to take us in. What happens if the Russians catch them?”

Hiram took one hand off the wheel and drew it across his neck.

“But there are thousands like them in the countries behind the Iron Curtain,” Hiram said, “decent people who figure they haven’t anything to lose. These Communist regimes, these so-called People’s Democracies, are run by the gutter element in all these Eastern European countries. People like the couple you just saw fought the Germans when they overran these countries. They don’t see much difference between being managed from Berlin or Moscow.”

“But I don’t see why they should take their lives in their hands,” I said. “Suppose a Russian patrol had walked into the place while we were there?”

“They’d have had a tough time finding us,” Hiram said. “Those old buildings have a dozen hiding places. The proprietor’s neighbors would have warned him the moment Russian or Hungarian police approached within a mile of the place.”

“When’d they set that up?” I asked.

“It’s been going on for hundreds of years. People in these countries have been hiding from one invader or another since the beginning of history. Take the Hungarians. They’ve been occupied by Romans, Huns, Slavs, Tartars, Turks, Rumanians, Austrians, and half a dozen others. They’ve fought them all and they’ve seen them all depart. Why should they accept the Russians any more than the others?”

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Matyasfold,” Hiram said. “We’ll start there, anyway.”

When Schmidt had taken Maria and me to the tenement on Mexikoi ut he’d told Hermann to drive the Russian staff car “to Felix in Matyasfold.” Felix would give the redheaded German civilian clothes and phony papers for himself and Otto as well as a car. I’d mentioned the fact to Hiram when I’d first gone to his home, and he had put two of his men on the job of watching Matyasfold, a town some ten miles from the Budapest city limits.

I was surprised that Hiram had put searching for Maria ahead of any attempt to get Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope from the railway car at Jozsefvaros. Not that he hadn’t made me a promise. I guessed he figured the Russians had grabbed Schmidt when they’d arrived at Orlovska’s and there was no hurry about the envelope. I’d told Hiram I was sure the countess, providing Schmidt hadn’t killed her after my escape, couldn’t reveal the secret because she hadn’t realized what she had told me.

Carr must have read my mind because he said, “If you’re right about that damned envelope, we’ve got a lousy job ahead of us. They’ll have a dozen armed men around that car. They’ll keep it there and they won’t move it until they’ve hanged somebody for murdering Strakhov.”

Teensy put it frankly. “If Hiram wasn’t stumped we wouldn’t be going to Matyasfold instead. But he’ll think of something. He always has.”

I wondered how much longer Hiram Carr could keep himself out of 60 Stalin ut, diplomatic passport or not. The MVD certainly knew why he was in Budapest. They watch all foreigners, and diplomats twice as much. They’d long since learned Hiram wasn’t an agricultural expert, that his legation job was a blind. Colonel Lavrentiev might get plastered nights at the Arizona but he was plenty smart, and so was his staff. It didn’t occur to me at the moment that the Russians might be biding their time, waiting until they could grab all of us in one haul.

There wasn’t any doubt of Carr’s purpose in heading for Matyasfold. The rescue of a Spanish girl named Maria Torres had no meaning for him. She was strictly incidental. He wanted all the information he could gather on Schmidt and his gang, everything he could dig up on the underground German scientists. He thought he could learn from whoever was holding her prisoner for Schmidt. It didn’t occur to either of us at that moment that Maria might not be alive.

We took long enough to return to Budapest, hitting the Danube far to the south of the city, then doubling back along the river. Hiram didn’t dare try to pass the roadblocks in the Buda hills. When we had crossed the Danube, Hiram made a wide detour around the city to reach Matyasfold to the east. We never once saw a policeman, except for those on traffic duty. It was almost as if they’d been moved out of our path by design and it was unnatural enough to give me a sense of foreboding. We’d had too easy a time since Walter carried me from Orlovska’s house. It was too good to last.

Matyasfold is one of those undistinguished towns, half city, half country, that you find near big cities all over the world. On the high-speed trolley line from Budapest, it’s an ideal community for white-collar workers who can’t afford city rents. At the beginning of the war, the Hungarians built an airport for the defense of Budapest. Then German fighter squadrons moved in. After the war, the Russian air force took over.

When we were a couple of miles from Matyasfold, Hiram changed places with Teensy. While she drove, he talked.

“After you told me how Schmidt had instructed Hermann to go to Matyasfold,” Hiram said to me, “I put two of my men on the job.

“Felix isn’t too common a name in Hungary. But my men could have spent a month finding the right Felix if that was all I gave them to go on. Do you remember what Schmidt told Hermann?”

“Of course,” I said. “I remember the conversation almost exactly. After all, it was only yesterday.” I could hardly believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since Maria and I had left the train at Kelenfold only to fall into the hands of the Nazi doctor. “Schmidt said, ‘I want that car moved from here immediately. It is much too dangerous. You will drive it to Felix in Matyasfold.’ ”

“Do you remember what else Schmidt told Hermann?”

“He said, ‘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.’ Then he said, ‘If you are stopped by police, you will tell them you are Frau Hoffmeyer’s nephew.’ ”

Hiram said, “What does that conversation tell you about Felix?”

“Well,” I said. “It means that Felix is one of Schmidt’s agents.”

“That’s hardly a discovery,” Hiram said. I didn’t see why it amused him.

“It meant that Felix, whoever he is, was in a position to supply civilian clothes to Hermann. It meant he had facilities for forging documents.”

“Or stealing them,” Hiram said. “But don’t you see the most important clue to the identity of Felix?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The car,” he said, “the Russian army car.”

“Schmidt told Hermann to hand it over to Felix.”

“That’s correct,” Hiram said. “If it were only a question of faked documents or civilian clothes, Felix could be almost anybody. A shopkeeper, for instance, the postman, or the tax collector. But it isn’t normal for such persons to have army staff cars and it isn’t easy to hide one. Garage people can’t disguise an army car with a coat of paint the way they do stolen stock cars. Anybody can dispose of a uniform like Hermann’s but not automobiles with army insignia.

“The more I thought about that angle, the more I figured Felix had to be someone whose possession of a Red Army car wouldn’t excite suspicion and someone who had access to official documents at the same time. It seemed to me we were looking for a Red Army officer and a fairly high one at that.

“I think we’ll find that Doctor Schmidt’s agent, the Felix who is stooge for the Nazi Bruderschaft, is pretty close to the commander of the Russian air base right here in Matyasfold.”

“How do you know Schmidt brought Maria out here?” I said.

“I don’t,” Hiram said, “but we’ve got to start looking somewhere, don’t we?”

I had visions of Hiram, Teensy, Walter, and me driving up to the main gate of the air base to attack the garrison. The six-foot Teensy with her bleached-blond hair, little Hiram in his coonskin cap, Walter, the perpetually smiling ex-prizefighter with a bum leg, and John Stodder alias Marcel Blaye alias Jean Stodder, the involuntary watch and clock salesman whose bandaged hands couldn’t hold a gun. Coxey’s Army would have looked like a West Point color guard alongside us. It was the strangest American expeditionary force on record.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Hiram.

“Call on a friend of mine for a cup of coffee.”

Hiram told Teensy to turn off the main highway into the Kossuth Lajos utca, about half a mile short of the air base. The car skidded and spun wildly in the narrow, rutted road, but we had less than half a block to go. The street was lined on both sides with identical cracker-box bungalows, the Hungarian equivalent of a hundred communities along the Long Island Rail Road.

“It’s all right,” Hiram said. “Let’s go in.”

I couldn’t figure how he knew until I noticed the shade was half raised in one of the windows of the bungalow we were entering.

“You’re a new member of the agricultural attaché’s staff,” Hiram said.

“I don’t know the difference between timothy and trailing arbutus,” I said.

“Never mind,” said Hiram. “Neither do I. Your hands and feet were frostbitten when you went skiing. That’s how Walter hurt his leg.”

“That gives American skiers a fine reputation,” I said. “Incidentally, what’s my name?”

“John Stodder,” he said. “I’ve got papers to prove it.”

I couldn’t understand why the briefing, if we were visiting one of Hiram’s agents, until we went inside the house. We were introduced in turn to Bela Szabo, his wife and seven children, the wife’s mother, somebody’s brother-in-law, and the serving girl who insisted on kissing everybody’s hand.

It seemed that Mrs. Szabo sewed for Teensy, and there were a couple of dresses ready to try on. The two women vanished into a back room, Hiram and Papa Szabo, a gaunt, bearded, melancholy man, repaired to the small porch to smoke a cigar, and Walter and I were left with the seven children, Mrs. Szabo’s mother, and the unidentified brother-in-law who volunteered to play the accordion. The serving girl, who answered to the name of Lilli, passed the apricot brandy.

I tried to answer Mrs. Szabo’s mother’s questions about America, but my mind was on Maria. Now that there was a possibility I might see her again, perhaps within a few hours, my feelings were uncertain. I’d thought of little else since I left her outside the coffeehouse with Schmidt. With reunion perhaps close at hand, I was filled with misgivings.

After all, what did I know about Maria Torres except what she herself had told me? How did I know she hadn’t voluntarily left the coffeehouse with the German doctor without waiting for me? What proof did I have, aside from the background she had given me, for believing she was a prisoner of Schmidt and not an accomplice?

I remembered how surprised I’d been when she’d responded to Schmidt’s command in German at Kelenfold to “Pick up your baggage,” although she’d told me she understood no German. There was no sign of emotion in her lovely face at that moment, none of the terror she’d displayed when she’d first sighted Schmidt aboard the Orient Express. I remembered how calm she’d been in the warehouse on Mexikoi ut and how I’d mistrusted her show of nerves when we’d met on the Orient. I’d started to put her down as a girl with too much imagination and too little control of herself. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe it had been clever acting.

But that didn’t make sense, either. She’d followed me off the Orient, with all the danger that involved. She’d played my game with Major Strakhov. She’d stuck by me when I decided to leave the train at Kelenfold. And hadn’t she thrown her arms around my neck and kissed me when I left her to enter the Keleti yards? Hadn’t she tried to go with me?

“I don’t get it.” I said it out loud in English because Mrs. Szabo’s mother said in Hungarian, “I beg your pardon?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. You were asking me about the Brooklyn Bridge?” The unidentified brother-in-law promptly pumped out an off-key rendition of “The Sidewalks of New York,” and Papa Szabo stuck his head in the door to tell him to be careful because the People’s Democracy does not favor fraternization with foreigners. Then Walter, who didn’t speak a word of Hungarian, told the fascinated children, who didn’t understand a word of English, the story of Br’er Rabbit.

I stood by during endless handshaking and the patting of small heads, toasts in apricot brandy, and more hand kissing by the serving girl who got the customary quarter from each of us in tips. Then we left.