Dark Tunnel (28 page)

“It’s a hell of a coincidence then. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

“No time to argue,” Gordon said. “I’ve got to catch the Chicago plane. There’s a lead there that isn’t bum. Captain von Esch was recognized in Chicago this afternoon. Pardon me, I’ve got to go and get Fenton to bring my car back from the airport.”

He crossed the sidewalk and re-entered the Federal Building. By the time he disappeared I had decided to go to Kirkland Lake. I followed him into the building and found a pay-phone. The airport told me that I could get a plane to Toronto within an hour—somebody had cancelled his reservation. The New York Central station told me I’d reach Toronto in plenty of time to catch the northbound train. I had a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket and that was enough to go on with.

I went out and climbed into the back of the car and a minute later Gordon and Fenton climbed into the front.

“Where can I drop you, Branch?” Gordon said with a shade of impatience in his voice.

“I’ll go along to the airport, thanks. I’m taking the Toronto plane.”

“What the hell for?”

“I’m going to Kirkland Lake. I want to see if the woman in the hospital is Ruth Esch.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Gordon said, but he started the car and headed out Jefferson. “Even if it is the right woman, she’s injured and under guard. She can’t get away.”

“I like travelling,” I said. “I’ve heard that Kirkland Lake is quite a charming town in its crude way.”

Gordon shrugged his shoulders without looking around. “It’s your time and your money. There’s a faint chance that she went by plane. But we can leave her to the Canadian authorities for the present. Her brother is our responsibility.”

“Captain von Esch
is
her brother then?”

“His name’s Carl, and he even seems to bear her a family resemblance. Same features, same coloring. We got a complete description of him from the Canadian War Department. How he got from Northern Ontario to Chicago I don’t know. But I do know that he’s not going to get out of Chicago.”

“Did Fisher tell you anything about the Bonamy prison-break?”

“No, he didn’t know anything about that phase of Schneider’s activities,” Fenton said. He half-turned in the seat and hooked a grey herringbone arm over the back. “He claimed he never heard of either of the Esches. He may have been holding out, but I don’t think so. He was scared green.”

“Verbal diarrhoea,” Gordon said. “He dictated over three thousand words in a little over an hour. I could hardly get a question in edgeways.”

“Three thousand words about what?” I said.

“It’s a long story the way he told it,” Fenton said. He turned to Gordon: “Is it all right to tell him, Chet?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just a public-spirited citizen. Read me some selections from Proust instead.”

“Tell him,” Gordon said. “Branch literally risked his neck on this case. God knows he must have learned to keep mum by this time.”

“Well, keep it to yourself until it breaks in the papers,” Fenton said. “If it ever does. According to Fisher, Herman Schneider was a spy in spite of himself. He left Germany in the middle thirties for honest liberal reasons. The Nazis couldn’t risk concentrating him then because too many people in Germany and outside of Germany knew his name. So they let him go, but they kept Peter. Peter was only a kid then, but he was in the Hitler Youth and he didn’t want to leave. He stayed and grew up into a hundred percent Aryan superman with bells on.

“By the time Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, Peter was an officer of Engineers in the regular army. He showed such aptitude for sabotage and psychological warfare that they shifted him to Intelligence and trained him to work here in the United States. They knew they’d be fighting us soon and they were ready for it, they thought. They looked a long way ahead but they didn’t see the right things. For one thing they over-estimated the strength of native fascism in this country. Anyway, Peter was slated for the job of engineering adviser to the Gauleiter of Michigan. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds now, before Russia held the Germans and Pearl Harbor gave us the shock treatment.

“After a year of working with English phonograph records and studying at the Skoda Works and the Ford plant in Belgium and a few other places, Peter was ready to graduate to America in the summer of 1941. We weren’t at war with them yet and it was easy enough for them to get him into this country, but they made it hard for the sake of an added advantage. The Nazis are experts in making everything pay off double—”

“Including trouble,” I said. “Double, double, toil and trouble.”

“That’s true, too,” Fenton said. “Peter contacted his father through a Gestapo stooge in the Free German underground. He said he had had a change of heart and all that crap and he was just dying to get out of Germany but the nasty Nazis wouldn’t let him go. Old man Schneider fell for it and went to the German Consulate in New York. They agreed to let Peter out of Germany and save him from Stalin and the steppes, for a price. If the Herr Doktor would provide them with a certain piece of information—The Herr Doktor had a moral conniption fit and gave them what they wanted. They released Peter, and old man Schneider went to the State Department and got the prodigal son into the country before you could say Heliogabolus Schwartzentruber.

“Ever since then the prodigal has been blackmailing Dr. Schneider for more information, and getting it. But that was just a sideline for Peter. In two years he’s worked in at least six of the important war plants in the Detroit area, under different names with stolen birth certificates. He’s had a hand in psychological sabotage, too. He’s been helping to direct the activities of the native fascists in Detroit, the fanatical anti-Jew anti-Negro anti-labor boys. Fisher didn’t say, but I suspect Peter Schneider played a part in inciting the race riots.”

“Where does Fisher fit into all this?” I said.

“He’s Peter’s friend,” Fenton said with heavy irony, curling his lip as if friend was a four-letter word. “They met at a pansy drag soon after Peter came to this country, isn’t that romantic? Rudy’s a weak willie—at least he’s trying like hell to act like one—and Peter used him for little errands like contacting old man Schneider. That’s Rudy’s story: if it’s not true we’ll break it down. But it’s pretty clear that when we cracked the Buchanan-Dineen circle, Peter dropped his Vlathek alias and cleared out for Canada, leaving Rudy holding the bag with his lily-white hands. I only hope he didn’t leave our Rudolf with child.”

“Have you ever thought of helping to solve the sewage problem by converting your imagination into a septic tank?” Gordon said.

Fenton grinned and said to me, “Chet’s the last Puritan, Mr. Branch. Santayana’s boy was only the second-last. I trust I haven’t offended your delicate shell-like ears with my coarse talking.”

I said, “I teach a course in Swift and Fielding. Compared with them you’re mealy-mouthed.”

“My God, Gordon,” Fenton roared, “did you hear that? I’m mealy-mouthed.”

The mid-afternoon traffic was light and we were already in the suburbs. When we reached the airport, the Chicago plane was landing. Gordon had just time to give Fenton a few instructions and to say to me:

“If you find out anything let us know. Call the Detroit or Chicago field office and reverse the charges.”

He shook my hand and walked up the ramp and ducked into the plane. A ground attendant lifted the ramp and shut the aluminum door behind him. I stood with Fenton and watched the great plane change from an incongruous winged turtle on the ground to a bird in the sky.

Fenton shook hands and said, “See you again, Branch.” He went back to Gordon’s car and drove away.

I picked up the ticket I had reserved and went into the waiting-room to wait for the Toronto plane.

E
ARLY TWILIGHT HUNG OVER
the city like a thin, grey haze and made the lake a sheet of striated lead, stretching to a leaden horizon, when I landed at the Toronto Airport. I took a taxi to the Union Station. Down the long, drab streets the neons trembled in the gathering air, glowing blue and red and green with a quiet, inhuman lustre.

At the station a ticket-clerk told me I had nearly five hours to wait. The next train that would make the Kirkland Lake connection at Churchill left Toronto at 11:30 that night. I wouldn’t get to Kirkland Lake until two o’clock the next day.

I found a phone-booth and called the airport, but there was no seat available on any plane going anywhere. I went back to the ticket-clerk and bought a coach ticket, which was the only kind I could buy. That meant I had to sit up all night.

I went through the tunnel from the station to the Royal York, ate a quick dinner in the grill, and hired a room to sleep in until my train left. I was hatless and suitcaseless and wild-eyed, and the desk-clerk looked at me suspiciously. I mollified him by paying in advance.

“I’d like to be called at 11:10,” I said. “I have to catch the North Bay train.”

“Yessir, you shall be called,” he said, and signaled to a bellboy.

I followed the bellboy across the huge lobby to the elevators, but before I got to them something took hold of my attention and stopped me in my tracks. It was a newspaper folded inside out and left by someone on the seat of a leather armchair. At the top of the page that was showing there was a picture of Wendell Willkie.

I picked up the paper and saw that it was yesterday’s
Globe and Mail,
opened at page eight. I scanned the columns. It was the third column from which Peter Schneider had torn the clipping. Where the empty space had been in Peter’s copy there was nothing but a patent medicine advertisement offering solace to those undergoing change of life.

The bellboy was waiting by the elevators with a blank, intolerant expression on his sharp jockey’s face. I was just about to throw the paper down and follow him, when I thought of something that made me realize what a hell of an amateur detective I was. It was the simple staggering fact that newspapers are printed on two sides.

I turned the page and the heading I was looking for blazed black in my eyes. The bellboy kept on waiting while I read:

Unidentified Woman Regains Consciousness

Injured Woman in Kirkland Lake Hospital

Unable to Remember Name.

Kirkland Lake, Sept. 22 (C.P.):—The unidentified woman who two days ago was found, suffering from exposure and concussion, on the outskirts of this Northern Ontario mining town has regained consciousness. Although hospital authorities state that she has every chance of complete recovery, she is suffering from temporary amnesia as a result of her injury, and is unable to identify herself.

The injured woman, an attractive red-head in her late twenties, was undoubtedly a victim of foul play according to police. She was found unconscious in an old mine shaft south of the city on the night of September 20, by a group of boys who were playing there. She had not been assaulted, but her appearance suggested that she had been struck on the head with a blunt instrument and flung into the shallow shaft. She was dressed in men’s clothes of good quality but there were no personal effects or money on her person when she was found.

Police assign robbery as the motive, but have been unable to apprehend the author of the brutal attack. Sergeant Norris E. Collins, of the R.C.M.P., has advanced the theory that one of the prisoners who escaped from the Bonamy prison camp on September 20 may have been responsible for the vicious attack on the unknown woman. The Bonamy camp is only a few miles from the scene of the crime. (See p. 3 for an account of the capture of the German escapees, only one of whom is still at large.)

According to Dr. R. A. Sandiman, resident physician at Kirkland Lake Hospital, the injured woman speaks English with a slight German accent and frequently lapses into German as if it were her native tongue. Anyone who can supply information which may help to identify her is asked to communicate with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Kirkland Lake.

I stood and looked at the date on which she had been found. September 20. It twisted in my mind like a key, but no door opened. This must be the woman that the Kirkland Lake police had put under guard. My first thought was that Gordon was right and it couldn’t be Ruth after all. After the night and day I had gone through, insane coincidence seemed more probable than any kind of luck.

I noticed that the bellboy was still waiting and told him to leave my room-key at the desk.

He saw the look on my face and said, “Is anything wrong, sir?”

“Plenty. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He started away and I said, “Yes, there is. Where’s the tavern?”

“Right this way, sir,” and he led me to the copper-gleaming tavern on the basement floor.

I sat down at a corner table and ordered a quart of Molson’s Ale. Despair was dragging me down by the heels but the hot fingers of hope had me by the nape of the neck. The ale ballasted me but the wild pulling in two directions went on. A graph of my feelings for the next few hours would have looked like the Manhattan skyline.

One question I could not get around. If the woman wasn’t Ruth, why had Peter Schneider torn out the clipping about her? If the woman who had been in the Kirkland Lake Hospital for three days was Ruth Esch, it was not Ruth I had seen trading blows and kisses with Peter Schneider. Somebody else had helped him to murder Alec Judd and Herman Schneider.

After a while the ale slowed down the alternating swing of my feelings and I went up to my room to try to sleep. The two-hour sleep I got was as restful as a surfboard ride. Finally, the beetle-green motorboat that was dragging me over the dream-waves of hope and despair stopped with a grinding of gears and I answered the telephone.

The switchboard girl said it was 11:10 and I had twenty minutes to catch my train.

I put on the rest of my clothes over the underwear I had slept in, went down to the desk and checked out, and walked quickly through the brightly lighted tunnel to the station. I had time for a cup of coffee at the lunchbar before the train left for North Bay.