Dine and Die on the Danube Express

by Peter King

She glanced at her watch. “Well, I think I’ll retire. It has a been a long and exhausting evening.”

  “There’s still a lot of it left,” I told her.

  “Maybe, but it will have to get along without me.”

  I couldn’t see any other good-looking women either to interview or to chat with but some minutes later Helmut Lydecker came through the coach, and I invited him to sit in the seat vacated by Elisha Tabor.

  “How is the illusion business?” I asked by way of openers.

  “I’ll know better when we reach Bucharest,” he said.

  “The Romanians are big on illusions, are they?”

  “I’m hoping so.”

  Well, that didn’t advance my knowledge of either his business or him. I tried another approach. “At least you can’t have much competition.”

  “I am well-known now, so I don’t.”

  Perhaps another topic would draw him out. “This Malescu affair is mysterious, isn’t it?”

  “All her affairs are mysterious.”

  “First, she’s dead, then she disappears, now she’s back with us.”

  “What have you heard?” he asked.

  I could hardly give the pompous response of I’m the one asking the questions so I decided to go along. “I understand there have been threats against her life, so she decided to become invisible for a while,” I said.

  “Threats?” he said.

  “Yes, haven’t you heard that? She wants to star in a play called Rakoczi’s Daughter but the IMG doesn’t want her to do so. They have been threatening her.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “You have heard of the play?” At last I had reversed the process. Now our relationship was as it should be, and I was asking the questions.

  “The papers and the TV have been full of stories about that play,” he said. “It would be just like her to build up a big publicity campaign like this. Wonderful advertising.”

  He didn’t sound sympathetic to the star. “You think that’s what it is? Publicity?”

  “She’s done this sort of thing before.”

  “Makes a practice of it, does she?” I asked.

  “When she was a teenager, she faked a disappearance. She’s been doing it ever since. In recent years, it’s become a more elaborate story.”

  “You know a lot about her.”

  “I should,” he said. “I gave her her first job.”

  “Really?” This had to be a breakthrough, I had to keep him talking. “I thought she had always been in the theatre.”

  “She has.”

  “Were you in the theatre at that time?”

  “In a way.”

  “A producer?”

  “No,” he said simply. It didn’t seem to matter to him whether I made sense of his answers or not. I persevered anyway. “You were in publicity yourself—public relations?”

  “No,” he said, and I thought he was going to say no more when he added, “I was then—and still am—a magician.”

  So that was what he meant by saying he was a seller of illusions. “And you hired Malescu?”

  “Yes, as an assistant.”

  “On the stage?”

  “Yes, I was perfecting an illusion at that time.”

  “What was it?”

  “The Vanishing Lady.”

  He didn’t acknowledge the irony of that; perhaps he didn’t realize it.

  “She said she was eighteen, but she was probably sixteen, I learned later,” he said. “She was exceptionally lovely, a little gawky and untutored, but that made her all the more attractive. She didn’t stay with me long, she matured rapidly, got into the chorus of a show, then got a singing part in another. She didn’t have much of a voice, but with her looks and figure, that didn’t matter. She was a fast learner and exceptionally ambitious. She would do anything to progress in the theatre, and at an early age she was clearly a star in the making.”

  He smiled, clearly reminiscing. “I had two assistants at that time, Magda and another girl—I don’t remember her name, I have had so many. An accident during rehearsal almost killed Magda and another, similar, occurred shortly after. Both might have been the fault of the other girl. I dismissed her though she swore she was not responsible.”

  “Did you ever learn if she was?”

  He shook his head slowly. “I was never sure, but I heard later that Magda bragged of getting rid of the other girl. Soon after, Magda left me to further her ambitions.”

  “Did you see her after she left your act?”

  “Oh, yes. Now and then, the shows we were both in would be running in the same city.”

  “Have you talked to her on the Danube Express—this trip, I mean?”

  “No.” He looked out of the window, but only blackness was out there. “The last time we met was a few years ago in Copenhagen. It was—well, acrimonious. We haven’t talked since.”

  I was thinking how quickly Lydecker had gone from a clam to a nightingale. What had caused the change?

  “You can tell all of this to the security chief, Kramer,” he said.

  “Why should I do that?” was the best I could come up with at short notice.

  “You are working as an assistant to him, are you not?”

  Before I could answer, he said, “I saw you go into Malescu’s compartment with Kramer and Brenner.”

  That was ironic. He had reached the right conclusion for the wrong reason. At that time, I had not been asked by Kramer to work with him, but from Lydecker’s point of view, it was a fair assumption.

  “I—er, helped Scotland Yard on one or two occasions, and Kramer has asked me for my opinions,” I conceded.

  He yawned and stood. “You can tell him that I had nothing to do with Malescu disappearing,” he said. “My ‘Vanishing Lady’ illusion is confined to the stage.”

  He wished me a good night and walked off down the coach, leaving me with several points to ponder. First, if I was supposed to be operating undercover, I was doing a terrible job. Damage control? I asked myself. The best answer seemed to be to turn it to my advantage by utilizing the prestige of Scotland Yard and continuing to aid Kramer to investigate. As long as Scotland Yard didn’t hear how I was shamelessly using their name, I was safe.

  Lydecker’s earlier association with Malescu raised a few possibilities, especially as it sounded as if he might have had liaisons with her since then. Had they parted on terms that could lead to murder? If so, could Lydecker have mistaken Talia Svarovina for Malescu and killed her in error? Pretty fanciful, I thought. Hercule Poirot would have sneered at it as a conclusion.

  I followed the example being set and retired for the night.

  When I awoke the next morning, it looked as if we had not made much headway. We were doing little more than thirty miles an hour, and the railroad track zigzagged its way along the Danube River valley in a series of corkscrews, steep climbs, and spiraling descents. Its erratic progress had clearly been determined in an earlier day when railroad engineering was cautious and limited. Old stone bridges carried us from one bank of the Danube to the other, affording fine views of one of the world’s great rivers.

  The scenery was highly rural, with tiny hamlets, inns with porches, and balconies covered with red, white, and yellow flowers, and farms with fat cattle grazing under the windows. This, I thought, was the way to see a country and a vivid contrast to flying over it in a jet plane at near the speed of sound.

  The dining coach was not yet half-full, and I was able to reflect on breakfast habits. There is the fast American breakfast of bagels and coffee or the more extensive one of bacon and eggs with hash browns. In contrast is the Italian breakfast of sweet, cream-filled buns, a small glass of brandy, and hot, thick black coffee. The English are perhaps the only people that eat fish for breakfast, and kippers are an acquired habit. The French stick to their flaky croissants, while Germans and the Dutch like various cheeses with cold salami, ham, and tongue. In Morocco, workers will stop at a hole-in-the-wall street-corner cafe for a dish
of stewed fava beans and a glass of hot mint tea.

  The Danube Express, with supreme nonchalance, offered all of those plus the Austrian variation—small finger sausages. I knew there was a bakery on board, so that all the bread served was literally fresh from the oven. Austrian bread is among the best in the world—it comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors and is made with a wide variety of flours and grains. I chose a flat, saffron-colored bread, moist and succulent and filled with poppy seeds.

  Franz Reingold, one of our most recently arrived passengers, came in and wished me a jovial “Good morning.” I chose a boiled egg and a slice of ham to go with my poppy seed bread. Then came the choice of coffee. With most European countries offering their finest and all being different, this was a problem. I said to the waiter, “I suppose I should ask for Viennese coffee. I know the city’s coffeehouses are famous.”

  “You may know this, Meinherr,” he said, bending forward a little so that his voice should not spread his heresy too far, “but Turkey really established that tradition for the Viennese.”

  “You are not Viennese,” I guessed.

  “I am not, I am from Estonia.”

  “Your Viennese colleagues in the kitchen will disagree with you.”

  He smiled. “They do. But history books say that when the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683, they were losing too many troops and ordered a retreat. They did so, leaving bags of coffee behind, which the Viennese seized and thus became coffee-drinkers.”

  “Addicts, even?” I asked.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “So if I ask you for Viennese coffee now, what will you bring me?”

  “First, I will ask if you would like verkehrt, which is one part coffee to four parts milk—or mocha, that is ebony black in a demitasse—or mit schlagobers—you may know that—”

  “That’s with whipped cream—there’s also doppelschlag, which is double cream.”

  “You are correct. Of course, Turkish coffee is still popular in Vienna, too.”

  “Much less so elsewhere,” I said.

  “That is true. Mainly because the Turkish method of making coffee is to brew it at least three times.”

  I settled for verkehrt.

  Friedlander, the conductor, entered, looking grouchy, and growled something that I took for a greeting. The dining coach did not fill up any further. Presumably many passengers were taking breakfast in their compartments, not a simple matter logistically but accomplished in a polished and unobtrusive manner on the Danube Express.

  I was leaving the dining coach when a steward came alongside me. He didn’t speak out of the side of his mouth, but he was politely discreet as he said, “Herr Kramer would like you to join him in his office.”

  The security chief was studying a document from among a pile on his desk, but he put it aside when I entered.

  “Come in, my friend,” he invited. “I believe we have news for each other.”

  How did he know I had something to tell him?

  “One of the stewards tells me you have been chatting to various people,” he said. “That is good. I have the feeling that answers to many of our questions may exist among the passengers—if we can extract them.”

  So he had the stewards reporting on my movements. Well, he was being thorough, I had to admit that.

  “My talk with Herr Lydecker was illuminating,” I began. “His relationships with Magda Malescu have been both intimate and tempestuous. It is possible that one of them has led to this murder, but it is by no means certain.” I filled him in on the details, and he made notes, nodding as I talked. When I told Kramer that Lydecker had concluded—albeit from the wrong evidence—that I was helping the police, Kramer nodded.

  “He is a shrewd man, that much I have gathered from brief talks with him. Still, it is of little consequence if a few people learn that you are helping the police under these circumstances.”

  I told him, too, of Elisha Tabor’s belief that Mikhel Czerny was not pursuing any personal vendetta against Magda Malescu. “It may be a typical Hungarian viewpoint,” I suggested.

  “Aggressive.” He nodded. “Controversial, argumentative, belligerent even.”

  “You are a student of national behavior,” I told him.

  “Hungarians are the New Yorkers of Europe,” Kramer said. “Very well. Now for my news—information coming in on the Italian wine fellow, Paolo Conti, indicates that he may not be what he purports to be. Some of the answers he gave me are not corroborated. The dossier we have on him is sparse to say the least. All of this makes him suspect, to my way of thinking. Have you talked to him?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Do so at the first opportunity. Let us see if he tells you different stories.”

  “I will.”

  “The excellent Thomas has been diligent—you say that, diligent?”

  “It’s the right word,” I assured him.

  “Good. Thomas learned that a radio-telephone message went out from a device on this train almost exactly fifteen minutes before the limousines left for the Hotel Imperial.”

  “Do you know what it said?”

  “No. Unfortunately, the law does not allow the recording of personal calls by passengers. But Thomas did succeed in determining who received that call.”

  He sat back, spine rigid as always. His blond hair almost gleamed with triumph. His light blue eyes certainly did.

  “I can’t wait,” I told him.

  “That call went to the offices of the Budapest Times on-line news service.” He continued.

  “One other point—as I told you, Herr Brenner has some powerful connections throughout Europe. At my request, he called a friend of his who is on the board of directors of the Budapest Times. He asked this friend what he knew of this Mikhel Czerny. Herr Brenner learned that although Czerny uses many people as sources of information, the paper only prints what Czerny personally tells the news editor.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “That suggests that it was not a contact of Czerny who called in with this story—it says that Czerny himself phoned it in to the editor.”

  “That is so.”

  “That in turn means that Czerny is on this train.”

  Kramer banged a fist on the table. “That is the conclusion we must reach. Herr Brenner’s friend at the Budapest Times was reluctant to say much about Czerny. Of course, with more evidence, we could get a court order and force him to tell us more. Meanwhile, though, Herr Brenner says that his friend tells him that Czerny is fond of adopting various roles in order to get his information. Informants do not always know who they are talking to—and he pays out generous bribes where necessary.”

  “This is really reaching,” I said, “but have you considered the possibility that Czerny himself could have killed Malescu?”

  “Surely Malescu had more reason to kill Czerny than the other way around—but what you say needs to be included in our thinking. Then, that consideration assumes that Czerny wanted to kill Malescu—but perhaps he didn’t? Perhaps he knew that Talia Svarovina was not Malescu—perhaps he knew whom he was killing?”

  “Possible,” I conceded. “About Czerny—you say he adopts various roles. Does that mean disguises?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “So he could be any man on the train?”

  “That must be so,” Kramer said. “Not I, of course.”

  “Nor I,” I added quickly.

  “Certainly not,” he agreed.

  He did so promptly. I hoped it wasn’t too promptly.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  IN THE LOUNGE COACH, Professor Sundvall was talking to an attentive group on the subject of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Someone had apparently asked him a question concerning the musical genius, prompted, no doubt by the presence on board of the “lost” folio.

  “Mozart was born in Salzburg,” the professor was saying. “His father had wanted to be a lawyer but gave up the idea and joined an orchestra there. He started to teach his son to play the clavier when
Wolfgang was only three, and the boy made such extraordinary progress that within a year he was composing music for it.”

  Sighs of awe arose at that statement.

  “From then on, Wolfgang was oblivious to everything else in life. Music completely absorbed him—so much that even when obliged to play children’s games with his older sister, he would only do so to the accompaniment of music.

  “His father took Wolfgang and Wolfgang’s sister, Nannerl, to the Imperial Palace in Vienna to play as a trio at a concert. The seven-year-old Wolfgang climbed on to the Empress’s lap to kiss her then ran over to a royal guest from France who was present—Marie Antoinette—and proposed to her.”

  Chuckles of amusement at such precocity greeted that comment. “Wolfgang’s prodigious talent continued to expand. Before he was eight, he could play any piece of music set in front of him—and play it equally well on the harpsichord, the organ, or the violin. Proud of his own ability—which amazingly enough, he recognized in himself—he would throw a cloak over the clavier keyboard and prove that he could play just as easily when he could not see the keys.”

  “A true genius,” commented someone.

  “Unquestionably. By the time he was ten years old, he had composed masses, arias, symphonies, sonatas, serenades, and even two operas. One of the operas was in typical Italian style and the other in the German style.

  “When Wolfgang’s father took him to Rome, they went to a recital of Allegri’s famous Miserere in the Sistine Chapel. After they had sat through the performance, which was in eight parts, Wolfgang wanted his father to get him the music so that he could play it. His father told him that written music was forbidden by the Pope so Wolfgang went back to their rooms and wrote the piece out in its entirety from memory. To satisfy himself that it was accurate, he went back to the Sistine and listened to it again, comparing it note by note to his own version. There was not one significant variation.”

  “Did he become a recluse as he grew older?” a voice asked.

  “Not at all. One of his closest friends was the son of Johann Sebastian Bach and later, he became a good friend of Haydn. Wolfgang had a friendly nature and made friends easily—”