Cause for Alarm v-2

by Eric Ambler

  The summons from Rome I received late on the Tuesday afternoon. There had been a fire at the works of one of our customers just outside the city. The fire had spread from the stores to a machine shop containing a battery of S2 machines. The fire had been put out, but five of the machines had been damaged. The machines had been busy on a Government contract with a penalty clause not covered by insurance. I was wanted immediately to advise as to the speed with which the necessary spare parts could be obtained from England and the possibility of increasing the output of the undamaged machines and to place a valuation on the damage done.

  Bellinetti was, as usual, out of the office. I told Umberto where I was going, and went back to the Parigi. There, I packed a suitcase with the things I might require for a night in a hotel, snatched an early dinner and caught a night train to Rome.

  I spent the following day amidst the ruins of the burnt-out shop. The damage was more extensive than I had anticipated, and the unhappy signatories of the contract with the penalty clause had lost their heads. Eventually, I sent a long telegram to Fitch, and was able to get one back from him with reassuring news concerning the delivery of the spare parts. The works manager kissed me on both cheeks. It was, however, very late when eventually I got away, and I was dog-tired. I decided to spend the night in Rome and travel back to Milan the following day.

  It was towards half-past six the following evening when my train drew into the Centrale at Milan. It had been full for most of the way. Now it began to empty. The corridor was jammed with luggage and people. I was standing outside my compartment waiting impatiently for the way to clear when I saw Zaleshoff.

  The platform was crowded with people meeting the train. He was standing on the outskirts of the crowd, scanning the alighting passengers anxiously. I leaned out of the window and waved. Then he saw me.

  He made no effort to wave back. I saw him glance quickly up and down the platform and then edge his way through the crowd towards the window through which I was leaning. A second or two later he was standing below me. I was about to ask him who he had been waiting to meet when he looked up. Something in his face alarmed me.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Get back into your compartment and stay there.”

  There was extraordinary urgency in his voice. His eyes had dropped. He was looking down the platform.

  “What the…?”

  “Do as I tell you.”

  “But this train goes on to Venice.”

  “That doesn’t matter a damn. Get back inside and keep out of sight. Open your suitcase and be looking inside it. I’m coming aboard in a minute. I’ll join you when we’ve left the station.”

  He had not raised his voice, but his tone was so vehement that I obeyed him. Utterly bewildered, I returned to the compartment and opened my suitcase. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him, a moment or two later, plant his back against the glass door of the compartment. He remained there motionless until the train began to move. Then he took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He did not turn round until the train had left the station. Then he slid the door open, stepped inside the compartment, shut the door behind him and pulled the blinds down.

  Then he turned to me. He grinned.

  “I’ve met every train from Rome to-day,” he said. “I think they were beginning to take an interest in me.”

  “What on earth is this all about?” I demanded.

  “Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  He took out his cigarettes and sat down facing me.

  “The fat’s in the fire,” he announced calmly.

  “What does that mean?” I was worried and beginning to get irritated.

  “Yesterday afternoon, Vagas skipped it by air to Belgrade. He could only have got away by the skin of his teeth because your friend Commendatore Bernabo was arrested at seven o’clock. They were waiting for him when he got home. And there’s a warrant out for your arrest. About eight o’clock last night they raided your offices. It was the Ovra all right, not the regular police. They went through the place with a fine comb. They’ve been at it all day to-day. Bellinetti’s been enjoying himself no end, I guess. The only trouble was that they didn’t know where you were. But they’re watching all three stations. You wouldn’t have got out of the Centrale without being arrested.”

  “But what’s it all about?”

  “The actual charge is one of bribing Government officials. That means Bernabo, of course. But the real trouble is that they’ve found out about your reports to Vagas.”

  I swallowed hard. I felt suddenly very, very frightened. “But who

  …?” I began.

  He laughed shortly and not pleasantly.

  “That’s easy. The one person we didn’t reckon on taking a hand-your girl friend, Madame Vagas.”

  13

  “YOU HAVE NO CHOICE”

  The train gathered speed. Zaleshoff went on talking. I listened to him in stunned silence.

  “This is the way I see it,” he said: “Madame Vagas had it in for her ever-loving husband. That note she slipped you the night you went to the Opera proves that. You remember what she said? ‘He killed Ferning.’ It was obvious that she knew a lot. I’ve an idea she knew more than Vagas knew. And there’s only one way she could have found out about Ferning’s being bumped off. My guess is that the Ovra, knowing that she fancied Vagas about as much as a dose of poison, got at her and persuaded her to keep tabs on him. She agreed, with reservations. She didn’t tell them, then, that he was actually a German agent. She must be a bit crazy. You could see the way her mind worked in that note. She knew that Vagas hadn’t actually killed Ferning with his own hands. But she saw that he was, in a sort of way, morally responsible. Her hatred twisted that moral responsibility into a direct one. She must,” he added reflectively, “have hated him plenty.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw the baroque hangings of that house in the Corso di Porta Nuova, the obscene wall paintings, Ricciardo, pale and dainty in his blood-red satin knee breeches, gliding across the hall. There had been a smell of incense in the air. I remembered that sudden deadly passage of hatred between the husband and the wife. “Any talk of death depresses her.” For a moment I thought that I understood Madame Vagas, saw through and round her mind, and found her horribly sane; then the moment passed. I looked up at Zaleshoff.

  “Vagas got away, you said?”

  “Yes, he got away. I don’t even know if they’ve issued a warrant for him. Maybe not. What happened probably was that his wife, having spilled all the beans to the Ovra, couldn’t resist telling him that she had done so. When he knew that they knew he was a German agent, he knew that it was time he went. His pensioners have saved his bacon before, but he couldn’t rely on their being able to repeat the process. You can’t buy your way through all the time. Sooner or later you come up against folks who haven’t had their cut. Then you’re done. Vagas took it on the lam like any other sensible guy in his position would have done. He was darn lucky to have the chance, and he knew it.”

  “What did you mean by saying that they’d found out about my reports? Madame Vagas may have known nothing about them.”

  “Ah, I was coming to that. Tamara and I were in our office last night when they raided your place. Bellinetti was with them, sort of official guide, but your lad had gone home. I knew you were away, as I’d called you up at the Parigi about some dinner the evening before, and they’d told me. Well, I, as a respectable citizen wondering what the devil all the fuss was about, marched up and threatened them with the law. They were a dirty lot of thugs. They shot me out straightaway, of course; but I discovered two things. One was that Bellinetti didn’t know where you were, which was odd. The other thing was that they had found out about the poste restante business. As I barged in I heard one of them telling the others to look for any correspondence from a man named Venezetti. That clinched it. Nobody but Vagas’ wife could have known about that.”

  I remembered
something. “Vagas told her that he was meeting me that night on the autostrada. She sent her kind regards.”

  “Oh, did she! Well, now you’ve got them. Vagas must have been crazy to trust her. But his own self-esteem would place her above suspicion.”

  “Why should she start off by warning me and then do this?”

  “She probably thought that having ignored her warning you had only yourself to blame. And then Vagas must have done something that sent her completely nuts.”

  “You may be right. But what I can’t understand is why Bellinetti didn’t know where I was. I told Umberto. Incidentally, how did you know I’d gone to Rome. I tried to telephone you before I went, but there was no reply.”

  He grinned. “Ah, that’s the rest of the story. I told you that they began again on your office this morning. Well, Tamara and I were downstairs pretty early. We hadn’t a ghost of a notion what had happened to you. I don’t mind telling you we were damnably worried. You might have gone straight back to the Parigi and been arrested. I went along to try and find out, but the place was alive with Ovra agents, and if I’d started asking after you there might have been some trouble. We decided that the best thing was to stay at the end of the telephone in case you’d found out what had happened and called us up. Then, towards ten o’clock there was a scratch at the door, and your lad-Umberto, is it? — slipped in with his knees knocking together and frightened out of his wits, wanting to know if I was a friend of yours. I told him yes. He said that he’d been questioned upstairs, and then told to go home until he was sent for again. He’d come to me because he was worried about you. He seems to like you, that kid. They’d asked him where you were, and they hadn’t asked any too gently, because he had a cut lip and a hand-mark on his cheek that looked pretty nasty. But he hadn’t told them. He’d said he didn’t know. It appears that he knew who and what they were, and was afraid for you.”

  “His father was murdered by them,” I said shortly.

  “Ah! Well, it was a bit of luck for you that you told Umberto. He’d forgotten to tell Bellinetti, who’d been out most of the previous day. But he told me, and so I left Tamara at the telephone and camped out at the station.”

  I was silent for a moment. My thoughts were far from pleasant.

  “Well,” I said at last, “what do we do now?”

  Zaleshoff was looking out of the window. “The first thing we do,” he said slowly, “is to get out of this train. I don’t think it stops before Brescia, but there’ll be a ticket collector along before then and neither of us has a ticket. Besides…” he broke off and added: “How much money have you got?”

  I examined my wallet.

  “About four hundred odd lire, nearly five hundred.”

  “Is that all? What about Vagas’ three thousand?”

  “I paid most of it into the bank.”

  “What have you got in that suitcase?”

  “Pyjamas, a change of underclothing, a dirty shirt, toothbrush and shaving things.”

  “Put the toothbrush and shaving things in your pocket, your underclothing too if you want it, then give me the suitcase.”

  “But look here, Zaleshoff…”

  “We’ll talk later,” he said impatiently; “we’ll be slowing down soon for Treviglio.”

  I did as I was told. He took the suitcase and examined it carefully.

  “No initials, no name and address anywhere on it?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  He led the way into the corridor.

  “Now,” he said, “I’m going to walk along the corridors to the last coach before the van. You follow me, but not too closely. Someone may wonder what the hell I’m doing carrying a suitcase about when we’re nowhere near a stop and you don’t want to get involved in any arguments.”

  He disappeared towards the rear of the train. I began to follow slowly. Suddenly he reappeared, walking quickly towards me. He was frowning.

  “Go back and get into the lavatory at the other end of the coach. There’s a ticket collector coming along. Don’t lock yourself in or he’ll wait for you to come out. Give him ten minutes to pass, then join me at the back of the train.”

  He turned and disappeared with the suitcase into a lavatory. I followed suit at the other end of the corridor. I waited there nervously for five minutes. Then I heard the ticket collector slide open the door of the compartment next to the lavatory and ask to see the occupants’ tickets. There was a long pause, then the door slid to again. The man paused as he drew level with the lavatory door, evidently to glance at the indicator on the lock, then passed on. A few minutes later I joined Zaleshoff at the end of the train. I was feeling guilty.

  “I don’t see why,” I said bitterly, “we couldn’t have bought tickets from him.”

  “You’ll see why, to-morrow,” he said cryptically.

  Then I noticed that he no longer had the suitcase.

  “Threw it out of the window when we were going through that tunnel,” he explained.

  “I don’t see where this is getting us, Zaleshoff,” I said. “Frankly, I’m worried, damned worried. I think the best thing I can do is to get off at Brescia and telephone the Consulate in Milan. If there is, as you say, a warrant out for my arrest, I’m not going to gain anything by playing the fool like this. The sooner I get in touch with the Consulate, the better.”

  “Do you want to go to jail?”

  “Of course not. But there’s surely no question of jail. There may be a fine, possibly a heavy one, and I shall probably be given twenty-four hours in which to leave the country. All very unpleasant, no doubt, but that’s the worst of it. Good gracious, man, I’m a British subject, known to the Consulate, and fairly respectable, I…”

  “The British authorities,” he interrupted, “would, in the ordinary way, see you through anything from petty larceny to murder. But a charge of espionage puts the thing in a different category. They’ll drop you like a hot cake as soon as they know about it.”

  “But you yourself said that the charge was bribery.”

  “Until they catch you. Then you’ll get the whole packet.”

  “Well,” I said disgustedly, “even if you are right, I still don’t see any alternative for me.”

  “The only place you’ll be safe is out of the country, and that’s where we’re going.”

  “You seem to forget,” I said witheringly, “that I have no passport.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “Well then!”

  “I said we’d talk later…”

  “And in the meantime, I suppose…”

  “In the meantime,” he interjected, “you get wise to yourself and do as I tell you.”

  I shrugged. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t make much difference.”

  “It makes a lot of difference. Have a cigarette. It’ll steady your nerves.”

  “My nerves,” I snapped, “are perfectly all right.”

  He nodded calmly. “That’s good. You’re going to need them in a minute. We’re going to drop off this train when it slows down for the curve at Treviglio.”

  I did not answer. Things were moving too quickly for me. Twenty minutes before, I had been a comparatively composed Englishman returning from doing what I was conscious of being a sound piece of work. I had been looking forward to a quiet dinner, a couple of hours in a cinema and an early bed with a new book to read. Now I was a fugitive from the Italian secret police, hiding in lavatories, cheating ticket collectors and contemplating leaving a train in an unconventional and illegal manner. It had all happened far too suddenly. I couldn’t adjust my mind to these new and fantastic circumstances. I found myself wondering seriously whether perhaps by pinching myself I might wake up to find that I was, after all, still in bed in Rome. But no: there was Zaleshoff smoking and gazing intently out of the window and in my pocket there was a safety-razor, a leaking tube of shaving cream and a pair of American underpants. I looked down on to the track by the side of the train. It looked
a long way away and dangerous. The train was going too fast for me to see whether the track was of small or large stones. It was a long, even grey-brown smear. It seemed to me that the train had begun to make a curious thumping noise. I tried to separate the noise, identify it, and realised that it was the sound of the blood pumping in my head. I knew suddenly that I was scared, scared stiff.

  Zaleshoff touched me on the arm.

  “We’re beginning to slow down. We’ll give it another minute, then we’ll get outside on the steps, ready. Don’t forget to let yourself go limply if you can’t keep your feet when you land.”

  I nodded, speechless, and looked down again.

  To me it seemed as if the train were going as fast as ever. It was running along the top of a steep embankment between ploughed fields. I looked again at the ground streaming past. Then I saw Zaleshoff put his hand on the latch of the door. It was madness, I told myself, madness! We should both break our legs or our arms or we should get flung under the wheels of the luggage van behind us and mangled to death. Suddenly there was a grating noise below us.

  “They’re braking,” said Zaleshoff, “come on. You’d better go first.”

  He opened the door and the roar of the steel coach seemed suddenly to be lost in the blustering wind.

  “Down with you,” said Zaleshoff. “Make it snappy, now.”

  I looked down. There were four steps down, then the track. I clutched the rail and went down three steps. The wind tore at my hat. With my free hand I jammed it down over my ears. Then I swung myself round facing the direction we were going. I could see the engine now as it began to round the curve. The smoke was flying in a long cone from the funnel. Below me the ground seemed to be going at a sickening speed. I felt suddenly giddy and retreated a step. I looked up. I had to shout against the wind.