The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (16 page)

'Apply the beard, Hiram
...
that damnable, outrageous beard that nearly landed you in a Czech jail
...
the
...'

And then the truth burst upon him, came, as it were, in a sudden picture that formed itself in his mind, a vision of enchanting sweetness and loveliness, and he was out of his room hatless, coatless, and running down the stairs as though possessed, and out through the lobby. He heard someone cry:
'V
erdammter besoffener Amerikaner!
and then he was out the door and into a cab. Of the ride to the Podebradova he remembered nothing except that he continued to urge the driver to greater speed. And then he was pounding on Heidi's door out of breath, wild-eyed, dishevelled, and when it opened, he found himself in the room with Heidi and the dapper, pale little Count d'Aquila. The two stared at him.

'Heidi! D'Aquila!' Hiram cried,
'I
know....
I know....'

They ran to him. 'Hiram Oh, tell me! What ? What ?'

'Where the boy is! Or where he
was!
If it isn't too late.

Where they took him ' Behind
the steel spectacles, his eyes
were wild and his knees were shaking.

It was the little Count d'Aquila who went to him and placed hard and friendly hands on his shoulders. 'My friend,' he said, 'is this true ?
...
Heidi has told me what you did for her in London. I am here to help
you....
Be steady....'

Hiram recovered under the soothing grip. 'Yes
...
yes....
But come at once, for God's sake, at once. It mustn't be too late. Both of you come....'

They were out of the door after him, bewildered, but infected by his rush. He ran down the outer hall and up the service staircase, three at a time to the door of the apartment of Madame von Ovenecka. The other two arrived there panting.

'Knock!' whispered Hiram to Heidi.

'Are you sure ? You are mad. You are out of your mind, my friend,' said Count Mario d'Aquila.

'No
...
no, no,' said Hiram.
'I
cannot be. I was mad, out of my head before, but I see clearly now. He must
be....
He must be.'

Heidi knocked.

'Wer
ist
da?'

'Answer, Heidi,' said Hiram.

'Die Heidi, die Heidi, die Heidi ist da,'
sang Heidi, as she had done on that other night.

'Bedaure, Madame darfnicht gestort werden.'

'She says Madame Ovenecka cannot be disturbed,' translated Heidi.

Hiram made a curt motion towards the door with his head, and said sharply: 'We go through,' and it was the little Count who hit it first. For all of his slight size he must have been as hard as iron, for the door trembled under his charge, and the shock of Hiram's following impact completed the job and they burst through.

The tall, dour companion and Madame von Ovenecka were both standing at the fire-place, their faces black with anger. Hiram did not even stop to look at them. 'Come on,'he shouted, and ran through to the series of bedrooms down the corridor. In the second they found the boy Peter on the bed, obviously in a drugged sleep, thin, pale, but otherwise unharmed....

It was Hiram who picked him up in his arms, and said: 'O.K., skipper. And I guess that's that.'

But when they returned to the drawing-room, Hiram still carrying the unconscious child, they found that the broken-in doorway had filled up. It was blocked with the enormous, overwhelming girth of Dr Anton Virslany, who stood there puffing and wheezing and grunting, his little eyes gleaming merrily, and inside the room
stood the magnificent figure of
Captain Petrus Ovenecka, and in his hand there was a small, graceful gun.

'So,' said the Captain. 'This is indeed most unfortunate. But first perhaps I suggest that you give me the child.'

Heidi's cry in German rang out to wake the dead. Once, twice, three times
:'
Help! Help! Police
!'

Without the slightest compunction or change in the bland and almost noble expression of his handsome face, the Captain turned slightly and shot at her - and missed. And then the slim and dapper little Count was at his throat like a raging animal.

· Hiram was burdened with the boy, and hesitated. He had an impression of the little man with the trick moustache and the slicked back hair fighting like one possessed, and apparently gaining, and the angular companion picking up a heavy vase from the mantel, when Heidi hurled herself upon her, a small, desperate ball of fury, and they went to the floor together.

The odds were even now, except for old Madame Ovenecka, who could be discounted. Hiram swung around, set the child down on a couch and started for Dr Virslany. Here was battle at last. But the tremendous Nazi agent in the doorway never moved. He stood, huge, obese and motionless, still wheezing and puffing, the merry look in his eyes, his flabby chins climbing out of his collar. He did not stir or raise a finger. Hiram heard the Captain's gun explode twice more at intervals. And then he was conscious of a swift, hard rustling behind him. There was no time to turn his head more than to catch out of the corner of his eye, an impression rather than an actual sight of the sweet and benign old lady standing over him with her arm raised. He did try to duck as the lavender silk of her arm flashed towards him, but it was too late. Something seemed to tear loose the lining of his skull, after which there came nothing but a great and enfolding darkness.

He awoke to noise and confusion, and the presence of many people, and too, the sound of weeping. He was on a couch with a stranger bending over him, apparently a doctor. With his head splitting, and the room still rocking, he struggled to a sitting position. The place was full of people, police, men in plain clothes and some soldiers. Two of them held the raging
¹
figure of the angular companion-nurse between them. A form was stretched out upon the floor, half-covered. It was the handsome and heroic-looking Captain Ovenecka. He was dead. Close by, propped up in a chair with Heidi kneeling beside him, sat the Count Mario d'Aquila, deathly pale. The left side of his coat and clothes had been cut away, and arm and shoulders were wrapped in fresh bandages that showed a faint seepage of blood from his wound. The weeping was coming from Heidi. As Hiram sat up, she heard him and turned her head. She arose and came over to his side and took his head in her arms, and held him there, and he felt her tears dripping on to his cheeks. An agonizing fear took hold of
Hiram....

'Heidi
...
Heidi
...'
he said. 'Where
...
where is Peter?'

Because of the way he had said it, she hardly dared tell him. She said first:
'Danke den Lieben Gott
you are alive, Hiram. You and Mario. Peter
...
Peter is gone. The police came too late. The woman was choking me. When
...
when the police came, Virslany was gone and Peter, too.'

Hiram sickened so that he thought he would lose his senses again, because now he knew another truth. But he managed to ask: 'And Madame von Ovenecka
...
Where
...
where is she
...
?'

'She was gone, too Both were gone with Peter. But

Hiram.... It did not seem to
be....
It was not Madame von Ovenecka.... It was a much younger woman who was like her, but
...'

A terrible cry of agony and remorse burst from Hiram, and he shook himself loose from Heidi, and again struck his now aching skull with the heel of his hand as though by increasing the pain he could make restitution. 'Oh, dear God! Yes, yes! I
knew....
I knew, and again I didn't think far enough. It's my curse. I'm cursed with it. And the child is gone, and a fine, brave man nearly lost his life. False was true, and true was false. I merely assigned to Madame von Ovenecka an evil role.

That was right. But it wasn't enough. And it was all there for me to see. There never was an
old
Madame Ovenecka. The crayon with which she was drawing when we came in upon her that night of your party before the usual time when you were expected, it was an actor's lining pencil. You will find it with the rest of her make-up. Great God, she said it herself. "The arts by which an old w
oman makes herself look younger
have nothing to do with the devil
”

"No, but she and her
supposed son
were
devils. The same arts will make a
young woman look old!
And she hid her hands from me, because young hands are hard to disguise. It was all there to see if I had not been blinded by my own vanity. Heidi
...
Heidi....
I cannot look at you, or at d'Aquila I wish to God that she
had killed
me....'

Heidi held his head until the sobs that gripped and tore him had abated, and somehow Mario managed to leave his chair and come to his side and place an arm around his shoulder.

And when the strange, stoutish man, with the plain, round, bespectacled face now pain-racked, blood-flecked, dishevelled, and looking older and sterner, finally raised his head, there were the two, one on either side, and on their faces were love and sympathy and understanding. Hiram managed to speak then, softly at first, almost as though he were talking to himself. He said:

'I
will get him back. I
will
get him back. I will get Peter back for you, Heidi, somehow, some time. I promise you, and I promise you, too, Mario. I promise you both that I will bring him back. I can. I will. I
will
do it. You must both trust me and be patient, but I will do it. When you know what a fool I have been, you will see that I must bring him back, and you will believe me.'

The amazingly strong fingers of the little man with the small, white teeth and shining, slicked back hair and absurd little moustache, took his hand in the grip of comradeship of men who are not afraid to adventure, and held it, and for the second time in his life Hiram Holliday felt upon his cheek

the gentle kiss of Her Highne
ss the Princess Adelheit von Fü
rstenhof of Styria, von und zu Schoenau und Blankenburg Hohenlohe Altmark. And to him there returned for the first time since he had come to Prague, a small measure of peace.

DEATH NOTICE IN BERLIN

How Hiram Holliday Was, but Was Not in Berlin

Late
in November the city of Berlin, capital of the expanding German Reich, harboured a mystery, still unsolved, and the Gestapo, as the
Geheime Stoats Polizei
is known, is not fond of mysteries that occur under its nose, especially when one involves the death of so exalted and prominent a personage as Dr Heinrich Grunze, the little hunchback who was
Minister der Auslands Propaganda,
or Minister of foreign propaganda and the Number 4 Nazi, though some claimed he stood even closer to the top than that.

The mystery then involved the passing of Dr Grunze - it was officially announced that he had died in bed
at
home of heart failure, but this was not true - the disappearance of one of the most famous beauties in Berlin, and the execution in the courtyard of the grim and famous old Moabit prison of one Hermann Weide, a traitor and Communist, for
Landesverat,
which is the equivalent of high treason. Dr Grunze remained dead, and the beauty continued to be missing, but Communist Weide, although his bandaged head rolled on to the cobbled ground at the flash of the axe in the hands of the white-gloved, top-hatted executioner and thereafter, by special order, was immediately cremated, apparently never existed, even though he was officially listed as dead in the German archives.

It was many months before those working on the case began to have even an inkling of what might have been the truth, and by that time those who could have shed the final light on the affair were either dead or safely out of the country.

It was the morning of November 21, a Monday, in Berlin, that the famous People's Court was in session in the grim grey building that housed it. The three elderly judges sat at a table at the far end of the large, bare, whitewashed room with barred windows. At another table covered with brief-cases and papers were the prosecutors. At a smaller table, alone, was the advocate assigned by the court to defend the prisoner, who sat on a bare bench to one side, manacled, and between two black uniformed, black-steel-helmeted S.S. men. Near the door, and ranged at intervals around the wall were more S.S. men, armed with rifles. The prisoner himself was unrecognizable, because his head was wrapped in bandages that left free only his eyes, but a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles were on the place where his nose would have been, the two shafts worked into the crisscross of the bandaging so as to hold them in place. He sat erect and silent between his two guards.