Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril

by Parker, Robert B.

  After a couple of coffees, I called the waiter and asked him in German for the men’s room. He sent me through a doorway in the corner back of the gypsies’ platform. The men’s room was at the end of a thirty-foot corridor. The stairway to the second floor was off the corridor, about halfway down.

  There was a dim gaslight at the head of the stairs, but there was enough light for me to see two doors which were numbered. At first I thought it might be smart to engage a room. But we had no baggage. It was the kind of place where a couple could get a room without baggage but a man alone would be looked upon with suspicion.

  I went back to the table, and Walter went through the same routine.

  Most of the men in the coffeehouse were from the railroad yards. There were two or three Wagons-Lits porters in their brown uniforms, trainmen in the habitual dark blue, and enginemen whose calling was apparent, even in civilian clothes, from the coal-dust tinge of their skins. The few women seemed to be there for the ancient purpose.

  There was a short, barrel-chested man who moved through the room conversing with the customers. I took him to be the proprietor. I’d forgotten to ask Hiram to describe him. The finger-marked menu on the table said the owner’s name was Georgy Kis, but his Prussian mustache and bristly haircut made me think he’d been born Georg Klein and later Magyarized his name.

  By the time Walter returned, I had decided I was going to climb the stairs. After another coffee, I’d tell Walter within the waiter’s hearing that I felt ill. I’d make sure I looked ill, too, on my way to the corridor. I didn’t think it would take me long to case the upstairs floors, but if Walter found the need to warn me, he was to give the gypsies five dollars to play “Lilli Marlene,” a tune every band in Central Europe knows by heart.

  The corridor was empty, and I made the second floor without being seen. I thought the stairs creaked unduly under the tattered red carpet, but the gypsy band was attacking “Black Eyes” with gusto sufficient to cover anything.

  There were half a dozen rooms on the second floor. The doors were closed, and there was no way to tell which were occupied without hearing voices. I stood at the end of the narrow hallway, as far from the flickering gaslight as possible, until the music stopped. Someone was talking in the third room. I put my ear to the door but a man was speaking Hungarian without an accent, an ability which neither Schmidt nor Borodin possessed.

  I tried the top floor. I heard a woman scream and I raced down the corridor, but when I reached the door she was shouting in Hungarian. I went downstairs as fast as I could.

  The proprietor was talking with Walter in German when I returned to the table. He turned to bow to me. I tried to read his face, but it was totally without expression.

  “May I suggest a Fernet Branca?” he said. “I find an upset stomach nearly always comes from one’s nerves.” He glanced at my bandaged hands.

  “Something I ate,” I said. “My nerves are fine.”

  When the music started again and the proprietor had moved away, I buried my nose in the Athens paper and tried to figure the next move.

  I couldn’t shuttle between the café and the upper floors indefinitely. I’d been lucky to get away with one visit without being caught. There was no way to determine behind which of the twelve doors Schmidt and Borodin might be conferring, if they were in the place at all. I couldn’t try all the doors or break down the locked ones to see if Maria were a prisoner in one of them.

  The only course was to drink coffee and pretend to read and hope that Schmidt or Borodin would appear. I put down the paper and started to explain to Walter, but it wasn’t necessary because Schmidt came in the front door at that moment. Borodin was not with him.

  I kicked Walter under the table. I held the newspaper in front of my face, but I was placed so that I could watch Schmidt out of the corner of my eye. I expected him to head for the corridor which led to the stairway but he stood just inside the door. He stuck his head forward like a vulture, peering through those gold-rimmed spectacles until he spotted the proprietor and went to him at the far end of the room. They talked for some time, their bullet heads close together. I got the impression that Schmidt was excited; he used his hands steadily in emphasis.

  I called our waiter and paid the bill. I wanted to be ready to leave the moment Schmidt did. He wore no hat or coat, and I guessed he couldn’t have come far, that he’d left his things in some nearby building.

  The proprietor accompanied Schmidt to the door, and they shook hands.

  I didn’t want to risk bumping into Schmidt in front of the place so I counted to sixty before Walter and I got up from the table and followed. We reached the sidewalk just in time to see him enter the tenement next door.

  “We’ve got to tell the Carrs,” I said to Walter. “You watch to see Schmidt doesn’t come out again. I’ll try to find Hiram in the alley.”

  “Whistle ‘Dixie,’ Mr. Stodder,” Walter said. “That’s our signal. Seems only Americans know that tune.”

  I waded through the snow to the back of the alley, praying that Hiram wouldn’t put a bullet through my head before I could come near enough to risk whistling.

  I took cover behind a large block of granite, on the edge of the stonecutter’s property. I stuck my head out and whistled the first few bars of “Dixie.” I listened but nobody came and there was no response. I waited a minute or so and then whistled louder, but still nothing happened. I moved across the alley, into the yard back of the coffeehouse. I whistled again and still there was no answer.

  I went back to the sidewalk, to Walter.

  “They don’t answer,” I said. I thought I might have misunderstood Hiram’s plan, but Walter confirmed it. Teensy and Hiram would be outside to cover our exit in case of trouble.

  “Maybe they’re across the street,” Walter said. But we both knew that was impossible. There was only a thin strip of sidewalk in front of the high iron fence which keeps the living out of the cemetery. There wasn’t any place, other than the alley and the back yard, from which Hiram and Teensy could have watched the coffeehouse.

  We couldn’t stand on the sidewalk indefinitely.

  “I guess we’d better follow Schmidt,” Walter said. “Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Carr went around the corner for a cup of coffee. It’s cold standing in the snow.”

  That was no moment to start thinking of what might have happened.

  We went into the four-story tenement. There weren’t any letterboxes with names on them. It didn’t matter, though, because the cellar door was ajar, and we heard voices and we knew what had happened to Hiram and Teensy.

  We found them at the foot of the cellar stairs. The body of Major Felix Borodin was lying twenty feet away, half concealed by the furnace. The door at the far end of the cellar was opened, the wooden door banging back and forth in the wind.

  “Schmidt killed him,” Hiram said.

  I went to the back door and there was enough light to see tracks in the fresh snow.

  “When Schmidt left here to go to the coffeehouse,” Teensy said, “we spotted him. We knew he was coming back because he’d left his hat and coat. We figured we could look over the place while he was next door.

  “We heard him come back, but he didn’t come upstairs as we’d counted. By the time Hiram got down here, Schmidt had fired two shots. Then he must have heard Hiram’s step on the stairs because he went through the door over there.”

  First Marcel Blaye, then Ivan Strakhov, now Felix Borodin.

  “You’d better go upstairs,” Hiram said quietly. “Up on the top floor.”

  I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

  “Schmidt was on his way up there,” Hiram said. “That was next.”

  “There’s nobody else in the building,” Teensy said. “You can go right up.”

  I had to call Walter to help me break down the door because Schmidt had locked it from the outside. I heard muffled sounds through the door, the same sounds that must have told Hiram and Teensy who was locked up inside.

&
nbsp; I stood on the threshold. I was afraid to walk in. I was afraid of what I might see. I called her name, and she staggered toward me. I caught her in my arms.

  I knew then that I would kill Dr. Schmidt if it took me the rest of my life to find him.

  Chapter Twenty

  PERILOUS PLANS

  Two men in a car followed us back to Hiram’s house. They stayed only a hundred feet or so behind after picking us up where Hiram had left his sedan, on the far side of the cemetery. The men we’d spotted across the street from the house were still there, only now there were three instead of two.

  It wasn’t pleasant to realize they’d known what was happening from the start. They’d deliberately allowed Schmidt and the Americans to carry on a finish fight. It had cost them nothing. They were serving notice on us that the final round had started in the battle for Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope.

  The sudden knowledge of what the Russian game had been explained a good many things. It explained why I hadn’t been picked up in the Arizona, why Hermann and Otto had been permitted to reach Budapest as deserters from the Red Army in a stolen army car. It explained why Hiram’s activities hadn’t been curbed and why Schmidt had been allowed to move around at will. It explained Major Felix Borodin who’d done a very neat job of counterintelligence—until Schmidt had caught him at it.

  It also explained the fact that Hiram, Teensy, Walter, Maria, and I were still at liberty. The Russians knew everything but the location of the envelope. We’d remain free until we led them to it or Schmidt did.

  But for the moment, the only thing that mattered was to get a doctor for Maria. I tried to get Hiram to stop at a doctor’s office or the hospital, but he said it was too dangerous, that the hospital would hold Maria for several days. They would call the police as soon as we brought her in.

  As it was, the Russians saw us carry her to the car and they saw us take her into Hiram’s house. To them it was another detail which concerned only Schmidt and us.

  She was hysterical when I found her. I didn’t have to ask a question to know the whole story. Some of Schmidt’s instruments were on the bureau.

  Teensy put her to bed in the guest room. Hiram finally managed to get a doctor after calling half a dozen; it was after midnight, and he couldn’t explain on the phone. I was afraid she might be scarred for life, but the doctor said he didn’t think so. He said she should have absolute tranquility, that she ought to go away for a long rest. I thought of what lay ahead of us that night and thanked him.

  As soon as Maria was asleep, I joined Hiram in his study. He had spread the map of Budapest on the floor. When I entered the room, he was squatting in front of the fireplace, feeding papers to the flames. It meant that when we left the house that night, it was for good. Hiram was burning his confidential documents and his codes.

  “What are you going to do about Maria?” I said. “We can’t move her. She’s in no condition to travel.”

  “Teensy and Millie will take her to that inn in the Buda hills. They’ll be among friends.”

  I was about to ask how they’d get past the roadblock but I realized then that the Russians had set up roadblocks in order to keep a check on our movements and those of Schmidt, not to stop us. We’d pass roadblocks all right until the MVD had Blaye’s Manila envelope in their hands.

  Hiram rubbed his hand across his forehead. I knew how tired he must be. I don’t think he’d had an hour’s sleep in two days.

  “Why don’t you go with them?” he said. “Walter and I can take care of the business at Jozsefvaros.”

  A few hours earlier I might have agreed. I had told myself I had no interest in Blaye’s envelope. That was before Hiram had revealed its importance, but, nevertheless, I had tried to make a bargain with Schmidt. I had been willing to give him the envelope in return for Maria’s safety and my freedom to carry out the mission that had brought me to Hungary on a murdered man’s passport. But that was before I learned my brother’s fate from the bitch who had betrayed him. It was before Schmidt had “entertained” me at Orlovska’s. It was before I had stood in the doorway of that room in the tenement and seen what Schmidt had done to the woman I loved.

  “You go to hell,” I said to Hiram. “I’m in this to stay.”

  “You mustn’t worry about Maria,” he said. “Come look at this map, and I’ll tell you why.”

  He pointed to the location of the country inn. Then he moved his finger about a mile to the west.

  “There’s a dirt road about a hundred yards north of the inn. A little over a mile down that road there’s a long stretch of flat, open field.”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Exactly at dawn, in slightly more than five and a half hours, a United States Air Force plane will land in that field. It will take off with Maria, Millie, and Teensy aboard. I hope it will take off with Marcel Blaye’s envelope. I think it possible that either you or Walter or I will be alive at dawn, at seven forty-four.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I might deliver the envelope to the plane but that I wasn’t leaving Hungary until I’d had a final settlement with Schmidt. It occurred to me, though, that I would be insulting him by assuming I’d be the one still alive in five and a half hours.

  Hiram called Walter into the room, and we located Jozsefvaros freight station on the map. We couldn’t get away from the cemetery. Where Keleti station, the coffeehouse, and the tenement were on the northern edge of the burying ground, Jozsefvaros bordered it on the south. The layout resembled a huge letter D with Keleti at the top, Jozsefvaros at the bottom, and the curving part the connecting tracks. The cemetery took up most of the inside, and the vertical line represented Fiumei ut, one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

  The freight station and the yards paralleled the cemetery’s length of four city blocks. The station took up a quarter of that distance, with six loading platforms on as many tracks.

  I noticed something else. Right where the tracks entered the station, there was a large building, the army barracks which houses the Budapest garrison.

  Hiram nodded. “And something the map doesn’t show,” he said, “is that the station is surrounded by a high stone wall. The only way to enter uninvited is to walk the tracks from a point well outside the yards.”

  I went upstairs to say goodbye to Maria. I knocked but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, and I went in to find her sleeping soundly, the raven-black hair framing her lovely dark face against the white of the pillow.

  I bent over and kissed her forehead. I started out the door and then, because the book says you keep a sense of humor in such cases, I took Ilonka’s charm against the evil eye from my pocket and laid it on Maria’s pillow next to her head.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  RUNAWAY LOCOMOTIVE

  The car that followed us to Hiram’s trailed us again when we left the house for the last time.

  We had decided to separate in order to shake them. After dropping me near the Danube Corso, Hiram would drive Walter to Buda, then return to Pest to abandon the car. We agreed to meet at three o’clock near the railway tracks, a quarter mile from the Jozsefvaros yards.

  Hiram had said the chances were that one of us would come out of the yards. There would be a car in an alley at 188 Asztalos Sandor ut which borders the tracks from Keleti to Jozsefvaros and was close by our three-o’clock meeting-place. Hiram estimated forty minutes to reach the makeshift flying-field, which meant that whichever of us got to the car would have to get there by seven o’clock.

  I found before leaving the house that I could handle a gun, although with some difficulty and at the risk of opening the wounds on my hands. Each of us carried two ammunition clips for our Lugers. With one cartridge already in each chamber, that gave us seventeen shots apiece, which Hiram suggested should be enough to take over the city.

  When I left the car it was the first time I’d been alone and on foot in the center of Budapest in more than nine years. I found myself in front of the o
ld redoubt. Across the square and facing the Danube had been the Hangli Gardens, traditional afternoon drinking spot for American and British newspapermen. Now the Hangli was gone. In its place was a tall stone shaft with a tiny stone airplane on top, Russia’s memorial to her pilots who died in the city’s capture from the Nazis. The square had been renamed in honor of Molotov.

  I walked through the Vaci utca, a glittering shopping center before the war. The old familiar names were on the stores but nearly every one bore the sign Nationalized, and the show windows were bare.

  There were pictures of Generalissimo Stalin everywhere. It gave me the chills to see the mustachioed dictator’s face side by side with the yellow posters inviting my capture.

  I walked past the Belvarosi coffeehouse, and the gypsy band was playing the melody that reminded me of Maria just when I wanted to forget how much she had come to mean to me. I knew what lay ahead and how little chance there was that I should ever see her again.

  Then, my love, let us try while the moonlight is clear, Amid the dark forest that fiddle to hear.

  I won’t pretend my nerves were calm. I fancied I saw an MVD agent in every man and woman I passed. It was the same on the bus; each new passenger seemed vaguely familiar. I’d seen their faces before. I sat in the back of the bus; I expected at any moment to feel a gun in my ribs.

  There was one heavyset man I was sure had been on the train to Budapest. He left the bus behind me; for two blocks the crunching of heavy footsteps in the snow told me I was being followed.