Dark Tunnel

by Ross Macdonald

  “Look,” Gordon said, stealing my thunder. “When the window closed under Judd’s weight, the receiver would be knocked off.”

  He closed the pane to an angle of thirty degrees with the vertical, and the receiver was knocked off by the bottom sash of the upper pane. He caught it as it fell. “The sound of the jar and the fall would be enough for her. If Judd had somehow got back into the room, he’d have tried to phone the police and she’d have heard him.”

  When Gordon closed the window, the chain attached to the upper corner jerked the wall-lamp on and broke loose from the adhesive tape.

  “That explains the light going on,” I said. “They couldn’t leave the light on when they left him on the window for fear he’d be seen from outside. They unscrewed the bulb on the corner for the same reason. They arranged for the light to go on when he fell, because a fall from a lighted room would look more like suicide.”

  “A suicide in the dark is a rare thing,” Gordon said. “That Nazi pair is well informed—not that I ever thought the democracies had a corner on intelligence. The light was one of the things that puzzled me, and the window was another. I didn’t think he could have been lying on the window, I didn’t think it would bear a man’s weight.”

  “These windows are heavy glass,” I said, “and the sashes are steel. The Buildings men sit on them when they clean the upper panes. I just tried lying on one of them at the hospital about an hour ago.” I didn’t go into the details. “It worked all right.”

  Gordon surprised me by holding out his hand. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “Frankly, I thought you were a bit of a damn nuisance this morning. I don’t think so now.”

  “I have my uses,” I said. “I made a good guinea pig for Schneider to experiment with and give himself away. But he still has to be caught.”

  “He still has to be caught,” Gordon agreed. “The woman has disappeared completely, but Peter has been traced as far as the Bomber Plant. I’m on my way there now.”

  “Take me along.”

  The sullen shadow passed over Gordon’s face and drew down the corners of his mouth. For five seconds he said nothing.

  Then he said, “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  I PICKED UP A trench coat I had hanging in my office and we went down to the President’s office on the first floor. Gordon went in to report to Galloway and I remembered that I had no money in my pockets and went down the hall to the Business Office to cash a check.

  On the way out I met Helen Madden in the hall. She was walking slowly and meticulously like a woman learning to walk again after a long illness. She was very well groomed, as if she had had nothing else to do all night. She came up to me and put a kid-gloved hand on my arm and said:

  “I’m sorry, Bob. I thought I was doing the right thing but I made a mistake.”

  “I make hundreds. I made a dozen last night—”

  “I thought you’d gone off the deep end. I was the one that had.”

  I said: “We’re all in this together. Death is the least rational thing there is, and it affects everybody whether they know it or not. When a man is murdered, everyone gets a little irrational.”

  “Was he murdered, Bob? I was sure he killed himself, but I didn’t know why he should.”

  “He was murdered.” I told her because any spoken word is better than newsprint. “Peter Schneider and his woman drugged him and left him on the window to fall out when he came to. He came to and fell when you were at the door.”

  “Why did they kill him? They didn’t even know him.”

  “To cover up for Dr. Schneider. Three hours later they killed Dr. Schneider to cover up for themselves. It’s the Nazi principle that killing people is less complicated than living with them. If they were allowed to carry it to its logical conclusion, the world would be populated by the 6,600,000 members of the Nazi party and their women and children and some slaves.”

  My little lecture sounded gauche in my own ears but I thought it might help Helen to see Alec’s death in perspective. Then I realized that it would take her years. Perhaps it would take me as long.

  She said, “Have they been caught?”

  “No, but they will be. The F.B.I. is after them and they can’t get away. I’m going to Detroit now with the F.B.I. man, Gordon.”

  She said, “Kill them,” through jaws so tense that her teeth chattered.

  After a pause I said, “I’d like to talk to you to-morrow or so. You’ll be around?”

  “No,” she said. “I hate this city. I’m going away as soon as we bury Alec. I applied at the Red Cross this morning. It’s funny how a city can change overnight. I loved it yesterday and today there’s dust over everything.”

  I had nothing to say. I couldn’t even say, “You’ll get over it in time,” because I didn’t think she would.

  I said, “I hope I see you before you leave.”

  She gave me her hand and said, “I hope so, too.” My eyes followed her down the hall. Something in the way she moved made me think of a naked woman in a cold place.

  I went back to the President’s office and sat down in the anteroom to wait for Gordon. Through the closed door to the inner office, I could hear him telephoning.

  Galloway’s secretary, a faded blonde who had every department of the university filed and classified in her mind and was always looking for new items to file, stopped typing when I sat down, and started to pump me.

  While she was still priming me with rumors, Gordon came out of the inner office and overheard the conversation. He closed the door behind him and said:

  “We’re keeping this thing out of the news for the present. It will help us to catch them if they don’t know we’re looking for them, or how hard. So the less talk about it the better.”

  The faded secretary faded some more and went back to her typing, jabbing at the keys as if they were hostile eyes.

  Gordon said, “Ready, Branch?” and I followed him out to the black sedan. We got in and headed for Detroit.

  On the outskirts we passed a police patrol and I said, “There’s been no sign of Ruth Esch?”

  “No. Nor Schneider. I’ve just been talking to the Detroit office. They’ve telegraphed their description to police all over the Middle West.”

  “What about Kirkland Lake?”

  “And Kirkland Lake. All the leading cities in Ontario, in fact. We’re going to send out circulars if they’re not in our hands by to-morrow.”

  “Has the Detroit office gotten hold of Rudolf Fisher?”

  “Not yet. We’ve got a man watching his house. When he comes home he’ll be picked up. I want to question him myself.”

  “And that’s where we’re going now, is it?”

  “Eventually. I’m going to stop at the Bomber Plant on the way. The green coupe answering to the description of Schneider’s car was last identified turning in at the Bomber Plant. I’ve got an idea about that.”

  I had asked too many questions and I said nothing, but my silence hung question-marks in the air. Gordon went on talking with his eyes on the road ahead:

  “Schneider’s car hasn’t been seen on the other side of the Bomber Plant. It may have been missed, but it’s more likely that he turned into the plant to throw off pursuit. The entrance guards insist that he couldn’t get in without an employee’s badge. But his name’s not on the list of employees. For that matter, he hasn’t a car license under his own name either.”

  “Is it your idea that he may have been working at the Bomber Plant under another name?”

  “Yes. If I’m right I don’t think I have to look any further for the saboteur we’ve been hunting.”

  “Galloway said something about your being at the Bomber Plant last night.”

  “I’ve been there every day for a month,” Gordon said, “pretending to be a maintenance man. Half the time on the night shift. We’ve had a man in every department—I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself, Branch. We didn’t catch anybody, but there’s been
no sabotage for a couple of weeks.”

  “Peter Schneider went to Canada a week or two ago,” I said. “Maybe the coincidence isn’t fortuitous. And when he was in Kirkland Lake according to Ruth’s letter, there was a mass escape of German prisoners from a prison camp near there. It could be that he’s a very active and versatile young man. He’s a bungler, though. He sets his hand to too many things. He bungled my execution, and all the prisoners have been caught or killed.”

  “Not all,” Gordon said. ‘They killed or recaptured all the Bonamy prisoners but one. A certain Captain von Esch is still at large.”

  “Captain von Esch! What’s his first name?”

  “I don’t know. We’re looking out for him, of course, but he hasn’t been seen in the United States. I could find out, if you think you know him. Do you know the whole German nation, Branch?”

  “I know Captain von Esch if he’s Ruth Esch’s brother. I met him once. Her name was originally von Esch before she dropped the von. Her brother’s name is Carl.”

  “I’ll check on it,” Gordon said. “This thing may have greater ramifications than we realized.”

  Ruth Esch had greater ramifications than I realized, I said to myself. She must have gone to Kirkland Lake to help her brother to escape. A woman doesn’t travel five hundred miles north to a country of forests and bare rock on a pleasure jaunt. Yet even when I condemned her to myself, there was a residue of my old feeling for her in my mind, an irrational hope that she would escape or die or dissolve into thin air before she was caught. Peter Schneider was the one I wanted to see again. He had taken me in three rounds and I was waiting for the fourth. It was getting to be a long time between rounds.

  The highway curved up over a rise and the Bomber Plant came in sight ahead and to the right. It lay low on the horizon in the afternoon sun like a walled city in a wasteland. For a mile or more the road followed the high net fence, supported by steel posts and crowned by barbed wire, that surrounded the plant. Then we came to the wide entrance gates and turned in.

  A fat uniformed guard, with Auxiliary Military Police on his left shoulder, stepped into the path of the car and stopped us. Gordon took out his wallet and showed the guard his credentials: “Is your group leader around? I’d like to speak to him.”

  “Yeah, he’s over at the Exit gate. I’ll go and get him. You better swing your car in over there.” He pointed to the back of the new red-brick building marked Employment Office, and waddled away with his holster swinging against his hip.

  When we turned the corner of the building, I saw the green coupe parked at the curb.

  I whispered to keep from shouting, “That’s Peter Schneider’s car.”

  “It looks like it,” Gordon said.

  He parked and we got out and looked at the coupe. It was a 1938 Ford V-8, an ordinary enough car but I didn’t like it. It had chased me down a dirt road at dawn. Now it sat at the curb, quiet and dead, like an empty green beetle shell.

  Gordon searched the back of the seat and the dashboard cupboard. The ignition key was in place but there was nothing in the car. He got behind the wheel and started the engine. It started smoothly enough but I noticed that the needle of the tank gauge pointed to Empty. Gordon saw it, too:

  “He may have seen that he was running out of gas and left his car here so he wouldn’t have to abandon it on the road.”

  “Maybe he ran out of coupons,” I said.

  Gordon said unsmilingly: “He must have got here this morning about when the shift changes. That would give him a good chance to take a bus to Detroit without being observed.”

  The engine coughed and Gordon switched it off. A weather-beaten man in a blue uniform with wide shoulders and a narrow waist hugged by a black Sam Browne belt came round the corner.

  “My name’s Killoran,” he said. “You’re Mr. Gordon, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. Where did you pick up this car?”

  “We went over the parking-lots when you phoned us and found this over behind the Bomber School, and we brought it here. I don’t know if it’s the one you want but it answers the description.”

  “You keep a file of the employees’ license-numbers, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, only this crate is listed under a guy called Ludwig Vlathek”

  “It is, eh?” Gordon looked at me and I looked at him. “I want your complete file on Ludwig Vlathek.”

  Killoran turned to the fat guard, who had trailed him around the corner at a distance. “Raym, get the file on Ludwig Vlathek. V-L-A-T-H-E-K. If there’s more than one Vlathek, it’s the one with the California birth-certificate I want.”

  Raym heaved himself out of sight. I wondered about the birth-certificate, but remembered that they can be forged.

  “What’s this guy wanted for?” Killoran asked.

  “Read it in the papers,” Gordon said, “if it’s the right man. Was there anything in the car?”

  “Not a thing. Just a jack and crank under the seat. Oh, yeah, and an old newspaper. I swiped it to take home. I don’t often get to see a Canadian newspaper.”

  “Give it to me,” Gordon said. “And in future leave things as you find them.”

  Killoran produced a wooden, “Yessir,” and brought the paper out of his inside breast pocket.

  Gordon unfolded it and I looked at it over, his shoulder. It was the Toronto Globe and Mail of the day before. He riffled through it hurriedly, scanning it page by page. Near the top of page eight, directly below a picture of Wendell Willkie, there was a piece torn out.

  “It would be interesting,” Gordon said, “to know what our friend tore out of a Canadian newspaper.”

  “Our good friend. Bonamy,” I said cryptically because Killoran was standing beside us with his ears perked up. “I can find out, the university Library takes it. Let’s see, third column on page eight.”

  “I’ll have a man check it in the Detroit Library,” Gordon said.

  Raym appeared with a heavy paper folder under his arm. He handed it to Killoran and Killoran handed it to Gordon.

  “It’s all here, is it, captain?” Gordon said. “Thanks for your co-operation. Hold the car until you hear from us, will you?”

  “Yeah. Good luck.” He went away with Raym at his heels.

  Gordon and I climbed into the black sedan and he opened the folder. Attached to one of the sheets there was a small photograph, hardly bigger than passport size, of a man’s head and collar.

  “Do you recognize Ludwig Vlathek?” Gordon said and handed me the picture.

  Vlathek’s hair was dark and curly but his skin looked very fair. The eyebrows on the prominent eye-ridges were long and thin and curved, like a woman’s eyebrows which have been plucked and lengthened with a pencil. The eyes were pale behind rimless spectacles and the general impression of the face was one of almost grotesque earnestness, emphasized by the sharp triangular chin and thick straight nose.

  I knew the eyes under their bulbous ridges, but the last time I had seen them they were set under eyebrows so faint they were almost invisible.

  “This is Peter Schneider, with a dark wig and eyebrows and glasses.”

  “I never got a good look at Schneider,” Gordon said, “but I’d have my doubts of Vlathek if he looked like a typical Rabbi. Now we’ve got two versions of Schneider to look for.”

  “I don’t like either of them. I’d like Peter best as a bare skull that had been dead a long time. Alas, poor Vlathek.”

  Gordon started the car and we circled the Employment Office and went out through the Exit gates. Killoran saluted as we passed.

  We turned into the expressway and headed for Detroit at a speed that wasted rubber.

  “What was Vlathek’s job?” Gordon said. “Can you find it in the folder?”

  I picked it up from the seat between us and went through it. Born in California—the certificate must have been forged. Experience at the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia. That was possible, but the Nazis had controlled the Skoda records for years. I found w
hat I wanted:

  “He’s an inspector in the machine tool division.”

  “No wonder they’ve been having production trouble. Where does he live?”

  I found the address and told him, “215 Pequegnat Street, Detroit.”

  Gordon said nothing, but the speedometer climbed so that the wind blasted the windshield.

  “Does that mean anything to you?” I said.

  “Uh-huh. Something,” he said with painful smugness. “215 Pequegnat Street, eh? A small world.”

  “Well?” I said not with a bang but a whimper. Gordon smiled secretly. The car was whistling down the expressway like a long, black bullet. I looked at the speedometer again. The airblast on the windshield was a ninety-mile-an-hour hurricane now. When we hit the top of a rise the wheels soared off the road for a fraction of a second.

  Gordon flicked an eye at the speedometer and said, “We’ll hold her there—no use taking risks.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “That would be foolhardy, indeed. Why the warm, mysterious glow about Vlathek’s address?”

  “Rudolf Fisher lives at 215 Pequegnat Street.”

  Pequegnat Street was in a lower middle-class residential section near Gratiot and Seven Mile Road, the kind of section where people are neither high-class nor the low-class enough to know their neighbors. The houses were all the same, middle-sized frame buildings too old to be smart and too new to be interesting, each with a patch of lawn big enough to turn a somersault on.

  There was nobody turning somersaults on Pequegnat Street when we got there after breaking all the speed-laws of the County of Wayne and the City of Detroit. Except for a few parked cars, the street was empty as far as I could see. The houses had a blank, closed-up look like the secretive look of a woman who has no secrets. The house with 215 painted on its glass number-plate had Venetian blinds which gave it a more secret look than the other houses, but it had the same number of windows of the same size and shape in the same positions.

  Gordon drove past the house without slackening speed and I said, “Hey! We passed 215.”