During the Second World War Hamburg harbor had been the site of a huge submarine pen that refueled and repaired the Nazi U-boats before they ventured down the Elbe and past Cuxhaven out into the North Sea. Made of poured concrete, the pen had walls a dozen feet thick. Our air raids had damaged but not destroyed it. It had been planted in the harbor bed so solidly that, after the war, demolition experts decided it would be next to impossible to blow it out of the water. Result: just inside the roadstead of Hamburg harbor remained a monument to the Nazi U-boat fleet. It would probably remain there as long as Hamburg was a city.
We were looking at it.
The runabout veered toward it suddenly.
We were only thirty yards behind them. The third figure had reappeared in the cockpit. At this distance I could see her long hair blowing loose in the wind—Hilda. This time she was struggling with the figure at the wheel. Kenny Farmer came up behind her and got a mugging grip on her. Kyle shouted hoarsely, wordlessly. He was so close, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
Farmer tore Hilda away from the man at the wheel, who must have been Andros.
“They’re heading right for it!” Wolf shouted.
The runabout plowed on at full throttle toward the wall of the U-boat pen. We were so close I could see a large fissure in the wall. At the last instant the runabout swerved.
It struck the base of the wall broadsided, scraped along it for two seconds and keeled over. Two figures hit the water.
“Hilda!” Kyle shouted. He left the tiller without another word and dove overboard.
The third figure clung to the keel of the upturned runabout, then straddled it, then took dead aim and fired at us. He must have reloaded and it must have been a revolver. There were six shots.
Wolf was on his back between the two side benches of the launch. I went to him. In the moonlight I could see black blood on his shirt. He’d been hit twice.
“Tell Hilda …” he said.
He’d been hit in the lung. Blood gushed from his mouth and nose. He choked on it.
“Tell Hilda I … tell her …”
He made bubbling sounds. His eyes were already glazing.
“Tell Hilda … I came after … her.…”
Then he said something in Czechoslovak, and then he shuddered and was dead.
I made my way back to the tiller. We had run straight by the keeled-over boat. I swung the tiller hard left and started circling back. Two figures were swimming toward the fissure in the wall of the U-boat pen. They clambered out of the water. The wall swallowed them.
A dozen feet from the runabout two other forms were thrashing together in the water, struggling. One of them raised his arm and brought it down. Raised it and brought it down again. I was close enough to see the revolver in his hand. He was using it as a club.
The figures drifted apart. Head down in the water, one floated toward the launch. He went under and came up. The other swam for the wall.
I put the motor on idle and leaned over the side for the floater. He was Kyle. I dragged him over the gunwale and aboard. He coughed and choked on the water he had swallowed. The pain in my head really socked me then. I’d been dangling head first over the side of the boat too long.
“Kyle,” I said. I slapped his face. He had to come around. I couldn’t go after Hilda unless he guided the launch toward the fissure in the wall.
I slapped his face again, again without result. I tugged at his earlobes. “Kyle,” I said. “Damn it, Kyle. Come on, boy. Come on.”
His eyelids fluttered. He tried to sit up but fell back to one elbow. On the second try he made it.
“Got to go after them,” he said.
“You’ve got to take the boat in close for me.”
“Wolf can. I’m going—”
“He’s dead.”
I half dragged, half carried Kyle back to the tiller. He was barely conscious. I pointed. “Over there? Can you pull her over there?”
The idling motor rasped as he swung it to slow-forward. I went across Wolf’s body to the prow, the Magnum in my hand. The pain kept hitting me in waves. I couldn’t see straight. The wall of the U-boat pen got bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller.
“That’s it. Now hold it!”
I jumped. My left leg dragged in water, my right knee struck concrete. Then I was in the fissure and through it.
At first it was very dark. I had to feel my way along. But ahead I could see the silver-white of moonlight. The huge walls of the pen were still intact, but most of its ceiling was gone.
I followed the fissure through the wall to a ramp on its inner side. I could hear water sloshing close by. To my left the ramp started at water level. To my right it climbed the wall. I couldn’t estimate size or distance in the moonlight, but the far side of the pen was lost in darkness. It probably had been built to service a dozen or more U-boats at a time. An abandoned boat crane lay on its side in the water beyond the ramp, stark in the moonlight, like the bones of a prehistoric monster trapped in a tar pit.
I started up the ramp. There was no other way they could have gone.
Ten steps. The ramp rose steeply. Another ten steps and I was puffing and blowing. I couldn’t help that. It was all I could do to keep one leg going after the other. They’d hear me coming a mile away.
Kenny Farmer wasn’t a mile away. He was waiting for me farther up the ramp, where the Flying Fortresses or Liberators had cracked the wall during the war, where the moonlight didn’t penetrate the darkness of another fissure.
He came out of the darkness just as I climbed abreast of it. The only sound was my labored breathing. He was my size or bigger, and tough; as tough as an expatriate American tomcatting through the back alleys of Europe would have to be. At the moment I wasn’t any kind of tough at all. He brought the revolver, that he held reversed in his hand, down once toward my head. I had enough left in me to bob away from it. He struck my left shoulder.
I shot him twice in the face.
The muzzle velocity of a .44 Magnum can send a slug through six inches of oak. There is no hand gun with more power.
It jerked Kenny Farmer off his feet. It slammed him back against the wall as if a punch press had hit him. He hung there an instant, the left leg twitching, the right buckling. He was already dead. Then he settled into a sitting position against the base of the wall.
“Kyle!” a voice cried out above me. “Oh God, Kyle!”
It was Hilda.
I went in a shuffling, staggering run up the ramp. Above me at the top of the wall I could see the crenelations of bomb damage. And two dark silhouettes struggling.
“Look out, Kyle! He has a gun!”
Hilda again. They fought for the gun, Hilda and the man that was her father.
Hilda was getting the better of it. She had forced him back against the wall, her left hand pinning his right wrist with the gun. I felt reckless enough and exhausted enough to walk right up to them and shove the muzzle of the Magnum against the Greek’s neck.
“Drop it, Andros. Drop it or I’ll shoot you where you’re standing.” I meant it.
“You’re not Kyle,” Hilda said. She let go of Andros.
I still had the Magnum against his neck. He dropped the gun, and then we just looked at each other.
We had only met face to face, really met, once before. That was in the Venetian Archipelago, where I had tracked down and captured the Greek for Talese’s Guardia. The result for Andros had been a life sentence on a penal island.
He was a master criminal, the only master criminal other than political criminals Europe had produced in years. The last time I hadn’t been able to learn what made him tick, and I wasn’t going to find out this time either. He was a small man, and trim. He wore a neat white linen suit, sodden now with water. His white hair was uncombed and wet. The faintest suggestion of a smile tugged at his lips. His eyes were deepset, dark hollows in the moonlight. I couldn’t see them, but I had seen them once before. They were pale and depthless, as unfathomable as t
he space between the stars. They say you can tell what a man is like from his eyes, but Andros’ eyes would teach you nothing.
He said: “I knew somehow we would meet again, Mr. Drum. I had hoped it would be under different circumstances.” There was nothing special about his voice. It was just a voice.
I didn’t say anything.
“You won’t take me back to prison again. I had one taste of that. It was enough.”
“That’s where you’re going,” I said.
He smiled. He took a step away from me.
“Hold it,” I warned him.
“Do you really think you have to shoot me?”
Another step, a third—and then he was over the side of the ramp. He didn’t jump. He just took one step too many and then there was nothing but air under him, and then he fell.
It was at least sixty feet down to the water inside the U-boat pen. The splash was a long time in coming.
“Kyle!” Hilda screamed at me. “I thought you were Kyle! I never would have fought with him if I knew …”
I turned toward her. I shook her shoulders. “I don’t give a hoot in hell who you thought I was,” I said. “I don’t give a good goddam what you would have done, sister. Kyle’s in love with you and Lois Hackett says you’re a little naive but otherwise warm and with a heart a mile wide. I hope to hell you’re what she says. I hope you make Kyle as happy as he thinks you’re going to make him. Now let’s get out of here.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Hilda said. “I stopped them in the boat. They were shooting at you. I made them overturn.”
“Sure. You also called Lois from Quimper, pleading with her to give you a hand with your little old problem. The fact that the problem happened to involve an international crook who’d order a man killed as easily as most people order wine with their dinner didn’t seem to bother you. The fact that—”
“What are you saying? My father was reasonable at first in Quimper. He didn’t—”
“Okay, okay. Forget it. Let’s get going. Kyle’s waiting at the boat.”
“How dare you talk like that? I never would have done what he wanted. Why do you think he took me here instead of to Switzerland?”
“Because he hoped he could convince you here. Either he thought you were stupid enough or selfish enough to have your arm twisted. We’ll never know which, will we?”
“He was my father,” Hilda said.
Maybe she was right, and maybe I was wrong. I felt as drained and empty as a sieve. I just wanted to get it all over with.
“Even my brother,” Hilda said, “even he understood. He wouldn’t let you talk to me like that. He’s … changed.”
I breathed the moist night air in through my mouth and said: “Wolf came after you In the boat. Farmer shot him. He’s dead, Hilda.”
Then she cried. And then we went down the ramp together.
Kyle was waiting just off the fissure in the launch.
Halfway back to the Alster, a police cruiser picked us up. Koenig and Talese were aboard. I told them what had happened. Talese said I ought to spend the night, and probably a few days, in the hospital. Instead I went with them to the Jung Mühle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HILDA WAS A LONG TIME, alone, with Maria Mydlar.
Koenig spent most of that time on the telephone, and he had reason to.
“Another one of the Greek’s options,” Talese told me. “There was the possibility Maria Mydlar might cross him. She knew he was a fugitive, signore.”
“So he left Farmer at Fat Steak Willi’s.”
“Exactly. While he waited on the Alster with his daughter. In a boat. Captain Koenig, of course, wanted to know why. He could have chosen a seaplane again; he had one in Bremerhaven. So why a boat? A seaplane is quicker.”
Koenig learned why: Andros back-stopping himself again. If Maria Mydlar talked Hilda into helping him, they’d have gone overland to Switzerland. If she hadn’t, we never learned what Andros would have done.
But there was a third alternative. Andros never got the chance to bring Hilda and the Mydlar woman together because the police showed up at Fat Steak Willi’s. And Andros’ third alternative was his last desperate bid for freedom.
Koenig’s phone calls did the rest. Why a boat? Andros couldn’t have gone very far in a runabout, and his failure to go anywhere at all got the German customs agents a haul. Andros had intended rendezvousing with a freighter anchored outside the Hamburg harbor roadstead. It flew the Panamanian flag.
It was loaded to the hatch covers with stolen cars for delivery to the black market in South America. If the worst happened, Andros intended starting a new life there. Some phone calls from Koenig, a thorough search of the port by the customs agents, and they found their pigeon.
It was almost dawn when we saw Hilda again. Kyle got up. He went to her stiffly.
She said: “My mother … I didn’t know … I always thought …” She was crying. She couldn’t talk for a while.
But Maria Mydlar had done a good job of brain washing. “Pana Mydlar told me,” Hilda said finally. “There was no proof at all that Andros was my … father. Oh, I know, there is a document, a birth certificate the Nazis wrote out for him. But the Czechs hated Andros and already he was a fugitive in his own country, so the Nazis did it as a favor to him. If he had a Czech daughter, it was his thought then that he could live in peace in Prague. But it didn’t work out that way. He betrayed even the Nazis.” She was crying softly by then against Kyle’s chest. He stroked her hair.
“I’m glad it didn’t … work out. Pana Mydlar told me. He made my mother’s life miserable. In the end she hated him. She never talked to me about it. I never … I was always so—so far away, she said. She did all her talking to Wolf. She confided in Wolf. And my brother … the thought of the money at first … but he died trying to get me away from Andros. Isn’t that proof enough?”
It was proof enough for Hilda. I looked at her in Kyle’s arms and hoped Lois was right about her.
We flew to Rome on Sunday.
Saturday was spent writing and signing statements for the Hamburg police. Fat Steak Willi had Andros’ papers, including the birth certificate issued in Prague. She was only too glad to surrender them. She denied all knowledge of the Greek’s plans. She even denied knowing he was a fugitive. The police would let it go at that, Koenig told me. Fat Steak Willi, like all the other madams on Bordelstrasse, must have had her official contacts.
The harbor police never found Andros’ body in the water of the U-boat pen. “It is nothing,” Koenig assured me. “There were places for the U-boats to slip in underwater. He could have slipped out the same way, with the tide. He fell almost seventy feet. Believe me, he is dead.”
But was he? I began to understand how Sherlock Holmes must have felt about Dr. Moriarity.
They made a feature article for Sports Illustrated out of what happened to Kyle and Hilda in Rome.
It had everything from a Czech security officer in trouble to a pair of Olympic medals. Ironically, it was the Prague birth certificate which got Hodza off the hook. Mead Lederer paid a visit to the Greek Olympic coach and a man from the Greek Embassy in Rome, and they put in a claim for Hilda as a Greek national. They didn’t intend pushing the claim, Lederer told me, but their claim made the headlines, because all Rome was Olympic-conscious. And by then the Czechs and their Russian big brothers realized they couldn’t keep Kyle and Hilda apart without giving themselves a big black eye as far as public opinion was concerned. Everybody loves a lover.
Hilda agreed to compete as a Czech, and that settled it. Afterward she would be Mrs. Kyle Ryder of Texas.
As expected, she tossed the discus one hundred sixty-two feet and copped a gold medal. Kyle’s javelin heave was even better—over two hundred forty-four feet for a new world record.
Junius Ryder took a long look at Hilda at a party after the Games and surprised his son by saying: “That little lady’s gonna do right fine in Texas, boy.”
He gave Hilda a big wet fatherly kiss. He yipped like a maverick-chasing cowpuncher to prove how he felt. He was a little drunk.
I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked for American Export Lines, and after the Games Lois and I got a couple of cabins aboard the S.S. Independence sailing for New York. It was Lois’ idea. She said I needed the rest.
How I got my rest and what we did aboard the Independence is our business.
THE END
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