Dark Tunnel (29 page)

It took eight hours to get to North Bay, which was just a little better than halfway to Kirkland Lake. The dusty red plush seats of the old coach were crowded with civilians who looked as sleepy as I felt and soldiers who laughed and sang all night. Nobody got any sleep but I achieved a partial coma that made the trip unreal enough to bear. Farms and forests and dimly shining lakes slipped past the window for hours and merged with the images of my half-conscious dreams. When the mind is held awake on the point of sleep, an imagined face will take a hundred shapes, changing like a movie fadeout and fadein from beauty to ugliness, from gracious intelligence to idiot evil and back again to virtue and beauty. A goddess, a leering devil, a Victory of Samothrace, a sexless imbecile, a sweet young girl, a gross hag. The obscene amorphous masks changed constantly behind my eyes and cold sweat ran down the back of my neck. I sat and watched Ruth’s face change all night.

When daylight came it was better. I could see trees that seemed thicker as we went north, the rock ribs of the country bursting from the earth, still lakes like wide, innocent eyes mocking the bright blue sky. At dawn my brain felt drained and chilly but it gradually drew heat and energy from the sun. Breakfast was better still.

When I got back from the dining-car, a soldier had taken the seat beside me and we talked all morning. He was going home on sick leave after service in the Middle East and Africa, to his parents’ farm in the Clay Belt. I asked him what ailed him and regretted it. He tapped his left leg with his brown walnut knuckles and the leg rang with a metallic sound.

I felt like a child frightened by bad dreams.

At Churchill, a wooden hamlet like an angular fungus on the railway line, I changed to another train. Half an hour later I got off at Kirkland Lake and took a taxi to the hospital.

We went down streets of wooden buildings that looked new and jerry-built. Between and beyond the packing-case buildings I could see the peaked hills of exhausted grey-black earth thrown up by the gold-mines. In atmosphere, Kirkland Lake was like a western boomtown, but there were restaurants and drugstores with shining plastic fronts and electric signs, and faces on the streets from every race in Europe.

The hospital was a brick building standing in its own grounds. When the taxi took me up the drive and let me out at the main entrance, I noticed a man in plain clothes in the vestibule. He gave me a quick, hard look as I mounted the steps, and then turned away.

I passed him without shying, though I was still leery of plain-clothesmen, and walked up to the information desk. The nurse on duty was a middle-aged woman with a brittle grey permanent. Her face was white and starched like her uniform, and her voice when she spoke was very hygienic:

“What can we do for you, sir?”

“My name is Branch, Robert Branch. I—”

“Oh, are you Professor Branch?”

“Right. Has somebody—?”

Her sharp voice amputated my sentence like a sterile knife: “Do you know a man called Gordon?”

“Chester Gordon? Has he been here?”

“No, he has not been here. He called you this morning by long distance.”

“Where is he?”

“The call was from Chicago.”

“What did he want? Did he tell you?”

“No, he told me nothing. When I told him that we had never heard of you, he asked to speak to the policeman on duty here.” She sniffed, as if all policemen were typhoid-carriers.

“Nurse, will you do something for me?”

“What is it? We have rules, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “This is obviously a well-run hospital. Would you be allowed to put in a long-distance call for me, to Chicago?”

“This is not a telephone exchange.”

“No, but the call has to do with one of your patients. And it’s very important.”

“What patient?”

“The unidentified woman with concussion.”

“She has been identified,” the nurse said with the satisfied click of a mousetrap shutting on a mouse.

“She has?”

“Her brother was here this morning. She is a Miss Vlathek.”

I stopped breathing. When I started again I said, “Did you see him? What’s his first name?”

“We did not exchange first names.” But I knew what hers was. Gorgon.

“What does he look like?”

“Black curly hair. Spectacles. Rather pale in the face. A most courteous young man.” Unlike me.

“Where is he now?”

“Nor did we exchange addresses,” she said frigidly. “You can’t really expect me to answer all these questions. Are you a detective?”

“No, not exactly. But I’m assisting the F.B.I.” I hoped I was.

“Then the police will answer your questions.” She began ruffling papers.

I handed her a ten-dollar bill. “Look, put in that call for me, will you? This should cover it.”

“This is American money,” she said.

“I know, but it’s still good. Will you put in the call? It’s a matter of life and death.” I didn’t know then that it was, but I hoped she would recognize the phrase.

“Really?” Interest warmed her eyes almost to freezing-point. “Whom do you wish to speak to in Chicago?”

“The man who called me, person-to-person at the Chicago office of the F.B.I.”

“You
are
a detective,” she said, and even began to flutter a little. I was careful not to deny it.

“Is that the policeman that Gordon talked to this morning?” I pointed towards the vestibule.

“Yes.”

“Before or after Vlathek was here?”

“After, I think. Yes, it was after Mr. Vlathek left. He was here quite early. He said he drove up from Toronto overnight, as soon as he saw the newspaper account of his sister’s accident.”

“How is she?”

“Very weak, but much better. She’s suffering more from shock than concussion. She’s not allowed visitors, of course.”

“How did Vlathek identify her if he didn’t see her?”

“Oh, he saw her. A nurse took him in for a moment when she was sleeping. There was no doubt in his mind that she was his sister.”

“There wouldn’t be,” I said. “May I see her?”

“You’ll have to ask the police. I’m sorry.” Her thin mouth arranged itself in a facsimile of a smile.

“All right. Thanks very much for your trouble. And you
will
put in that call right away?”

“Yes, sir. Chester Gordon, F.B.I., Chicago.”

I did my best to devastate her with a grateful smile and went out to the vestibule. The officer in plain clothes, a brown hulk of a man whose straight back must have worn a uniform most of his forty years, was rolling a cigarette between fingers like Polish sausages.

“My name’s Branch,” I said.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Branch?”

“Perhaps you can give me some information. If you’d be good enough.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m assisting the F.B.I.,” I said, wondering if that was enough to convict me of impersonating an officer.

“Credentials?”

“I have none. I’m a private citizen. But an agent of the F.B.I. has asked me to obtain some information.”

“Sure, but how do I know that?” He raised one thick eyebrow and lowered the other so that he was scowling and looking superior at the same time.

“I’m calling Chester Gordon in Chicago now. The man you talked to this morning. You can ask him about me.”

“That’s all right. He said something about you. I just had to be sure you were the right guy.”

His low eyebrow went up and joined the high one and he drew in and blew out smoke. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you if I can.”

“How long has—Miss Vlathek been in the hospital?”

“Three days. But her name’s not Vlathek.”

“What is it?”

“You tell me.”

“Ruth Esch,” I said.

“That’s what Gordon thinks.”

“What did Gordon tell you?”

“Plenty.” He inhaled deeply and expelled smoke through wide nostrils and wider mouth.

“Did he tell you to arrest Vlathek?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m here for. He said he was coming back. He tried to take the woman out of the hospital this morning but they wouldn’t let him. She was still under guard and the doctor wouldn’t let her be moved, anyway.”

“Will you let me see her?”

“She can’t have visitors. Doctor’s orders.”

“I just want to
see
her. Vlathek saw her this morning. If it’s Ruth Esch I can identify her.”

The big man opened the inner door of the vestibule and spoke to the nurse behind the information desk. “Will you get somebody to show Mr. Branch here where Miss Vlathek’s room is?” She pressed a buzzer beneath the desk.

“Miss Vlathek?” I said in a lowered voice. “Doesn’t she know there isn’t anybody called Vlathek?”

“What people don’t know won’t hurt them,” he said. “We want to get Vlathek.”

“Vlathek-Schneider. Gordon told you about Schneider?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry, Bud, we’re combing the whole region for that guy. All I ask is to get in sight of him.” He clenched a fist like the end of a knotted club and fondled it with his other hand.

I saw a nurse coming down the hall and left him in the vestibule.

“Did you put in that call?” I said to the nurse at the desk.

“Yes. The operator said it would take a few minutes.” She turned to the nurse who had come up behind me silently on rubber soles. “Is Miss Vlathek sleeping?”

“Yes,” the nurse said from behind a white starched bosom like a barricade.

“Take this gentleman to see her, please. He is on no account to speak or disturb her in any way.” She looked at me as if she suspected that I had a noisemaker in my pocket.

“This way, sir.” I followed the nurse along the hall to a rear wing of the hospital. Her starched posterior was immobile as if she moved on wheels. I had to hold myself steady to keep from running ahead of her down the corridor.

We turned into another corridor and she led me to a closed door and stood with a finger on her lips. My heart seemed to reverberate in the quiet wing like a muffled gong. She half-opened the door and I looked over her shoulder into a cool, dim room smelling of the hospital neutrality between life and death. The shade was almost completely drawn but I could see a mass of roses burning darkly on a table by the window and on the pillow a pale sleeping face beneath a helmet of bandages.

The nurse whispered, “She’s sleeping. Don’t make any noise. Can you see her from here?”

“Not very well. May I go in if I’m quiet?”

“Just for a minute.”

I tiptoed into the room and across to the head of the bed. It was Ruth, but not the Ruth I had seen with Peter Schneider. Though the face on the pillow was faintly hollowed by time and pain, it was as fair and smooth as a child’s face. Even in sleep and illness, her lips and chin held the curve of gaiety and courage.

Her lowered lashes shadowed her cheek delicately, and I bent to kiss her closed eyes. Then I remembered that I must not wake her and stood still with my head bowed over her. She must have felt my breath on her face. She raised her eyelids and her clear eyes looked at me.

Something hovered in her eyes, circled wildly and hovered again, like a lost gull over moving grey-green water. The lost thing plunged and her eyes focused and took hold of the meaning of my face.

Her lips fluttered and her voice seemed to come from a distance: “Bob Branch!” Something glittered in her eyes and two tears fell across her temples into the pillow. I touched her face with my hand.

She said in German, “My name is Ruth,
nicht wahr?
I am Ruth Esch.”

“Yes.”

“I remember now—You got my letter?”

“Yes, I came here to find you.”

“My brother,” she said. “Peter Schneider came to me in Toronto and told me my brother was no longer Nazi. He said Carl was sick in the prison camp and calling for me. I came here with Peter and waited to see Carl for three days. Then he took me to a dark field and Carl was there and they struck me—I did not know after so many years my brother could hate me so terribly—”

“Forget your brother. I love you. I came to take you home with me.”

The nurse came across the room and hissed, “You must leave now. You must not disturb her.”

Ruth said, “Don’t go.” Her hands moved under the sheets, beating against them feebly like caught birds.

I said, “I won’t go away, darling. I’m going to stick around. But you’ve got to rest some more.”

She smiled and two more tears fell. I kissed the bright track on her temple and felt the steady, heartbreaking tremor of the pulse that beat there. I went out of the room with sweet salt on my lips.

The nurse shut the door behind me and turned accusingly. “You said you wouldn’t disturb her.”

I felt like laughing in her face and weeping on her shoulder. “What would you do if you loved somebody and lost him for six years and found him again?”

She looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled and patted my arm. “I know. My husband’s been in England since 1940. I’d turn handsprings, I guess.”

She frowned and opened the door quietly and looked in. When she had closed it again I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing. I thought I might have left my bundle in there this morning, but I guess I didn’t. You didn’t see it, did you?”

“What kind of a bundle?”

“A big paper bundle of laundry. You know, caps and uniforms. Maybe I left it in the Residence.”

“No, I didn’t see it.”

Another nurse came tripping silently down the corridor. “Professor Branch?” she said. “Your party is on the line.”

I went back to the front desk and the grey-haired nurse got up from her seat and handed me the phone.

“Hello, Branch speaking,” I said into it.

“Mr. Gordon is on the line,” the operator announced above the electric murmur of the wires.

I said, “Gordon? This is Branch.”

His voice clear and crisp over a thousand miles of wire. “Hello, Branch. Have you seen the woman?”

“I’ve seen her. It’s Ruth Esch, and she’s been here for three days.”

“You’re quite sure? You were wrong once.”

“My glasses were broken and I don’t see so well without them. But there’s no mistake this time. She recognized me even before I spoke.”

“Would you swear to her identity?”