Borrower of the Night: The First Vicky Bliss Mystery (17 page)

I had no intention of vaulting over Tony’s prostrate body to continue the chase. No, indeed. But I wouldn’t have been able to in any case. Tony fell on me. It was becoming a habit.

Tony was out cold, but he was breathing okay. I untangled myself and lifted his head onto my lap. He sat up with a start.

“Damn it,” he shouted, “why aren’t you chasing that guy?”

There was a brief silence, fraught with emotion.

“I ought to let your head bounce off the floor,” I said, finally.

“Damn, damn damn. To fall for a hoary old trick like that…. Damn.”

“If you’re restraining your language on my account, don’t,” I said, helping him up. “Can you make it back to the
Schloss
? No point hanging around here.”

“Oh, sure. The principal damage is to my inflated ego.”

That was an exaggeration. He was feeling poorly, and our progress was slow. With Tony leaning heavily on me, I began to feel my own age, and I was looking forward to going to bed. But when we reached the
Schloss
it was evident that I was still some distance from that indulgence. Our corridor was wide awake. The first person we saw was George, and the sight of his flushed, grim face told us something serious had happened.

“What’s up?” Tony asked.

“Schmidt. He’s dead.”

“Dead!” Tony tried to enter Schmidt’s room, but George’s arm barred the door.

“Don’t go in yet.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve seen a lot of dead men,” said George, “but I never saw one who looked like that.”

“Stop talking like The Monk,” I said sharply. “What happened?”

George fumbled in his pocket and located a cigarette and matches. He looked at them blankly, as if he had forgotten what to do with them.

“I heard him scream,” he said. “What a sound…The
Gräfin
heard it too. She was in the hall when I came out of my room. I went through Schmidt’s door like a bulldozer. It wasn’t locked. Schmidt was sitting up in bed facing the window. The lamp by the bed was lit. He didn’t look at us, not even when the door crashed open. He was looking at the window. He never looked at us at all. He just kept staring…at the window. Then he keeled over.”

George was perspiring. His shirt clung to his broad chest.

All eyes turned toward the windows, which were open to admit the night air.

I pushed George aside. Without looking at the motionless form on the bed, I crossed the room, and leaned out the window. The distance between it and the window of Tony’s room was a good twenty feet. To the left, at an even greater distance, were the windows of the neighboring guest chamber. There were no windowsills. The outer panes were flush with the stones of the wall. Below was a stretch of blank wall reaching down to the foundations.

I craned my neck and looked up toward the sloping eaves of the roof. A very tall man, standing on the window ledge, might have been able to touch the edge of the roof with his fingertips. I might have done it myself. I’d have hated to try.

“Unless somebody has suckers on his hands and feet, like the Human Fly, there’s no way out here,” I reported, withdrawing my head.

“But that’s impossible. I tell you I was in the corridor within seconds of the time I heard him scream. Nobody could have come out that door without my seeing him.”

“And I,” said a cool voice, “was in the corridor when Herr Schmidt cried out. No one left his room.”

The speaker was the
Gräfin
. Blankenhagen was with her. He was fully dressed, of course; I wondered what kind of emergency it would take to get Blankenhagen out of his room without his pants. He bent over Schmidt. Then he flew into violent action, stripping the clothes from the little man’s chest and fumbling in his bag for a hypodermic.

“The man is not dead. Telephone to the hospital. We must have an ambulance as quickly as possible. Run!”

The
Gräfin
obeyed. She didn’t run, but she moved fast. The rest of us stared blankly at one another.

“You said he was dead.” I looked accusingly at George.

“I thought he was.” George was badly shaken. “He sure looked dead. I couldn’t help—”

“Nobody’s blaming you,” I said, more mildly. “Doctor, can we do anything?”

“You can go,” said Blankenhagen, without looking up. “All of you. Out of here.”

So we left. But I sat in my room with the door open till the ambulance arrived and took Schmidt away. The doctor went with him. Then I closed and locked my door and, remembering the interchangeable keys of the
Schloss
, I wedged a chair under the handle.

I was glad Schmidt wasn’t dead. I rather liked the old guy, despite the fact that I would not have been willing to stake my life on his honesty. In fact, I had been willing to consider him a prime suspect. His earlier attack hadn’t put me off the scent; the suggestion of invalidism was a good alibi in a case where the villain displayed such startling agility. But this attack couldn’t have been faked. Unless…

I had already considered the idea that there were two villains. Tony’s encounter with the armor was particularly significant. Blankenhagen had suggested that Tony had hit his head when he fell, but I had seen that neat round lump behind his ear, and the word that came to my mind was “blackjack.” If someone had been waiting for Tony in the darkness under the stairs, and had knocked him out, it would explain a lot of things.

It began to look more and more like Blankenhagen. If Schmidt’s heart attack tonight was a fake, only the doctor could back him up in his pretense. Yet in that case would Blankenhagen risk taking Schmidt to a hospital, with a whole staff of doctors and interns?

It looked less like Blankenhagen.

I took a sheet of paper and a pencil, thinking maybe things would be clearer if I wrote them down, the way the detective always does in a mystery story. I wrote down Schmidt’s name, and that of the doctor. I couldn’t think of anything else to write.

Even if Schmidt’s heart attack was genuine, he could be one of the conspirators. However, he had not been the black figure we had pursued that night; he was far too short. The Black Man had had ample time to reach the
Schloss
while we were limping along the streets.

So then what? George’s crazy story implied that Schmidt had faced someone, or something, that had scared him almost to death. How had the intruder reached Schmidt and escaped without being seen? And what had the hypothetical villain done to frighten the old man so badly?

Suppose someone had dangled an object from the roof in front of Schmidt’s window—an object so horrifying that the mere sight of it swimming in space had been enough to paralyze Schmidt’s weak heart.

I scowled and drew doodles over the rest of the paper. I couldn’t think of anything that scary. A grinning skull? A phosphorescent phantom? Schmidt was a grown man. He might be startled, but no homemade phantom could frighten a man to that extent.

How about a Black Man crawling up the wall like a bat?

I threw my pencil on the table so hard the point broke, and stood up. Just for that, I told my undisciplined imagination, you and I are going exploring.

The heavy cupboard that served as my closet was pushed into the corner I wanted to examine. It was ten feet high and four feet wide and seemed to be built of concrete. My first shove didn’t even rock it. After I had greased a track under the feet with a candle, and strained every muscle in my back, it began to yield. There are some advantages to being big, I guess.

Finally I had the cupboard moved out at an angle. I squeezed in behind.

The whole room had once been wood-paneled, but now only a few rotting fragments remained, in areas like this, which were normally concealed by furniture. I lifted my lamp in one hand and ran my fingers over the stones. They felt like stones. I rapped tentatively on one of them, and scraped my knuckles. I put the lamp on the floor, sat down beside it, and made a profane remark.

And there it was. As simple as that. I had been looking at the stones which were on my eye level, and that would have been over the head of a stocky medieval male. The doorway was so low that even Burckhardt would have had to bend over in order to pass through. I could see the outlines clearly, where the mortar was missing. In earlier times, of course, tapestries and/or paneling had covered the door.

It yielded a trifle when I pushed against it, but it refused to open. I looked in vain for a bar or catch. Then the answer came to me. I was in the countess’s room. The active party in the nocturnal get-togethers would be coming into the room, not leaving it. In those days a lady was supposed to act like a lady.

A wooden coat hanger proved strong enough to act as a lever. The door opened with a protesting squeal of rusted hinges. I told myself that next day I would squander a few marks on a can of oil. The creaking doors of Schloss Drachenstein were beginning to get on my nerves.

I lifted up the lamp and held it through the opening. I couldn’t see much—only the top of a flight of stairs going down.

There were only four stairs. Then the passage leveled out. I had wondered how a passage could run between the rooms of the count and countess without blocking the windows of Tony’s room. Now I understood. It was below the window level.

When I reached the end of the passage I found a variation where I had expected a repetition of the arrangement outside my own room—that is to say, steps leading up to the count’s chamber. The steps were there, but at the foot of them was a narrow opening just wide enough to admit a human body, through which the stairs went on down.

I stood on one side of the hole and meditated. I was awfully tired, and the stale air was giving me a headache. I didn’t expect to find a hiding place in these walls; they were too accessible, if not to servants, then to the innocent inhabitant of the countess’s room. Burckhardt wouldn’t hide the shrine in any place where Konstanze might have found it. So what was I after?

It was no use. Even fatigue doesn’t deaden my insatiable curiosity. With a sigh I stepped over the gap in the floor and mounted the stairs that led up.

They ended in the outlines of a door, which yielded, as mine had done, to the leverage of my handy coat hanger. It only opened an inch or so, though, and then it stuck. I put my flashlight and one eye up against the opening and saw a blank wooden surface beyond. I poked at it with my coat hanger. Nothing happened.

I knew where I was: outside Schmidt’s room. The paneling was blocking the door. There must be a way of opening the panel, but it was no use trying from this side. So I descended the stairs and instead of stepping into the passage. I squeezed through the hole and followed the steps on down.

They went down for quite a distance. The walls closed in on me like the shaft of a mine. I kept feeling a weight hanging over my head—several tons of assorted walls, roofs, and floors. The air was stifling.

At the bottom of the stairs was another passage. I followed it doggedly, my flashlight trained on the floor ahead, my head pulled in like a turtle’s, to avoid the low ceiling. I went slowly because I didn’t want to fall into a hole like the one up above.

The obstruction I encountered was not a hole. At first sight it was an amorphous shape that filled the entire width of the corridor. In the dust-haunted beam of the flashlight it seemed to move. But when I advanced resolutely upon it, I realized that the illusion of movement had been caused by reflected light dancing off a metal surface. I had found Count Burckhardt’s missing armor.

Nine

THERE WAS NO ONE IN THE ARMOR NOW. IT was dismembered, helmet and greaves lying across the hollow breastplate. Behind it, the corridor ended in a wall of wood. In its surface was an ordinary door handle, made of iron, and a closed bolt. I pushed the bolt back. It moved sweetly, without the usual screech of rusted metal. When I looked at my fingertips I saw why. They were covered with a thin coating of oil.

I turned the door handle and stepped out into the Great Hall.

The western windows were dull gray squares, but the rosy light of dawn was beginning to show in the east. The room didn’t look haunted or eerie now; it was only melancholy in its faded grandeur. Pale light lay like dust on the scarred paneling; silence filled the space which had once rung with the songs of the minnesingers and the Latin of a vanished nobility.

As I had anticipated, the door was located in the area under the stairs, where Tony had been attacked. I didn’t let the door close; I had locked my own door from the inside, so I would have to return by the secret passage.

I examined the outside of the door. There was no latch or hinge visible. The panel fitted so closely against the others that only someone who knew it was there could have found it. Finally I found a carved flower that yielded to pressure and then turned on a pivot. As it moved, so did the inner handle. I played with the flower till I was sure I knew how to operate it, and then turned reluctantly back into the hot, airless passageway.

My tablemates were all in their places when I went down for breakfast next morning. Blankenhagen looked as if he hadn’t slept.

“How is Herr Schmidt?” I asked.

“Still critical.” The doctor looked from me to George to Tony, and it was obvious he wouldn’t have given ten
Pfennige
for the lot of us. “There will be no visitors. None.”

“Then you ought to take yourself off the case,” said George, answering the implication rather than the words.

Blankenhagen thought it over.

“You are right. It is correct. I will give orders that I may not be admitted.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“Cut it out,” I said. “I’m sure Schmidt is safe from you.”

Blankenhagen eyed me with moderate approval. Apparently he took my comment as a personal compliment, which was not how I meant it. I meant he was too smart to harm Schmidt under such carefully guarded conditions when he was already under suspicion. However, seeing the doctor’s rare and attractive smile, I decided not to explain myself.

“He hasn’t said anything?” George asked carelessly.

“He cannot be questioned. The criminal—if there is a criminal—is safe for the time being.”