Dark Tunnel (9 page)

“Of course,” I said, and laid the sabre on the table. The last fifteen minutes seemed unreal to me already. I was not sure what was real and what was imaginary. The only thing I knew for certain was that I had felt panic and had made a fool of myself.

I said, “Let’s go.”

There was nobody in the hall and I said, “Where’s Peter?”

“He asked me to excuse him to you. He suffers from migraine and the unaccustomed exercise brought on an attack. He has gone to his room.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. Will you give him a message?”

“Of course,” he said as he let us out the front door. “What message do you wish me to give him?”

“Tell him that the épée is an instrument of war as well as the sabre, and that I know the use of the épée. Tell him that I’d be very glad to instruct him in its use.”

“You are very kind, Dr. Branch. I’ll be sure to tell Peter.” He smiled with the deep irony I had seen in his smile before and left me at the door to get his car out of the built-in garage at the side of the house.

It was dark night now, and the stars were brilliant among the tall trees. The black Packard rolled up to the door like a gliding house, and Dr. Schneider got out and opened the right-hand door for me. I got in and he shut it behind me. He moved around the front of the car like a clumsy black bear in the headlights, and slid behind the wheel.

He shifted gears and we moved down the driveway in a cavern of elms.

I hadn’t heard the door on his side close, and I said, “your door’s open.”

He said, “Oh, thank you,” and banged the door, but when the car turned right into the road his door swung open a little and I saw that he was holding it with his hand. The beginning of a new, bewildered panic squirmed in my chest but I said nothing for fear of making a fool of myself again.

The car picked up speed as we approached the curve where the road dipped down the side of the escarpment. I saw the headlights glare on the white posts of the guard fence and the scrubby bushes on the other side. The headlights swept dark space beyond the head of the cliff, as black and empty as the space between burnt-out stars.

My hand found the inside handle of the door on my side and I tried to pull it up. Then I put my weight on it to push it down. It wouldn’t move. I looked at Schneider and he was staring straight ahead. The car was doing about forty and was heading for the guard fence.

His hand on the wheel jerked down and the car swerved to the right. I yelled, “Brakes!” but it was too late. The car crashed through the fence and plunged into the bushes towards the edge of the cliff.

Schneider cried, “Jump!” and tumbled sideways off the seat. His door swung open under his weight but I hadn’t time to reach it. The big car was tearing through the bushes like a half-track.

I knew I couldn’t find the brake with my feet in time to stop it, so I wrestled the wheel with my left hand and reached for the brake with my right. The car veered and bucked and came to a halt at an angle.

I got out on the driver’s side and looked at it. One wheel was over the edge and the car seemed to tremble there like a balance on a knife-blade. Its headlights stared blindly out into the empty darkness like a stupid animal. I was angry and elated at the same time, and I put my shoulder against the front fender and heaved.

The Packard rolled over the edge of the cliff and I listened to hear it strike. For three seconds it was as if the two tons of metal had dissolved in air, and then I heard the rending crash of its fall into the shallow creek at the foot of the cliff. For two more seconds I listened to the water it had splashed up falling like heavy rain into the stream.

I felt better now. Schneider had tried to kill me and though I probably couldn’t prove it, I had given him an accident that he’d have to report to the police. And they weren’t making Packards for civilians any more. After five years of sedentary life broken only by hunting and hand-ball and an unsatisfactory duel with sabres, it felt good to push a valuable automobile over a cliff with a clear conscience.

I heard scramblings in the low bushes behind me and I turned quickly with my fists clenched. I could see Dr. Schneider’s shadowy bulk coming towards me in the darkness.

“I’m sorry that I was unable to save your car, Dr. Schneider—”

“But thank God you are safe, my dear boy—”

“And don’t come any nearer,” I said, “or I’ll be tempted to throw you down after it.”

“What is that? What do you mean?” But he stood still.

A light went on in the front windows of the house across the road and a moment later the porch-light went on. A man came out the front door in a dressing-gown and trotted across the lawn towards us.

I said to Schneider, “Figure it out for yourself,” and walked around him to the road.

The man in the dressing-gown came running up to me and said, “What happened?”

I said, “We’ve had an accident. That gentleman’s car went off the road and over the cliff.”

“Good Lord! Did anybody go over in it?”

“No,” I said. “May I use your phone?”

“Of course, certainly. In the front hall. The door’s open.”

He turned to question Schneider, who had limped diffidently up to the road, and I ran across the lawn to the house and called a taxi.

I went down the road and met the taxi at the foot of the hill. When I got into the front seat beside the driver, the clock on the dash said five to nine. The train from Detroit was just pulling in when we reached the station. Ruth Esch did not come on that train and nobody I knew was at the station to meet her.

I
STOOD ON THE
station platform, feeling frustrated and empty, until the late commuters scattered to their families and the train pulled out. When the lights and noises faded down the track into darkness and silence, I had a momentary childish wish to be on the train, headed for Chicago and points west. Then anger came back and took hold of me again, and I started towards McKinley Hall to meet Alec Judd.

He knew more about the Schneiders than I did. Perhaps he would know why they had lied to me about Ruth and tried to kill me. Even if they knew that Alec was suspicious of them, they had no way of knowing that he had told me about it unless they could read minds. So far as they knew, and so far as I knew myself, I was perfectly harmless. But I began to feel less harmless as the night wore on.

Walking through the dark streets to the university, I thought of a way of checking on Dr. Schneider’s story about Ruth. The clock on the university tower rang the quarter-hour as I crossed the campus. If I was lucky I could find out right away.

I let myself into McKinley Hall with my faculty pass-key. The basement corridor was as quiet and black as the inside of a sealed pyramid. I climbed the stairs to the second floor in the dark and went down the corridor to the office of the German Department. There was no light behind the pebbled glass door and the door was locked.

I took the automatic elevator to the fourth floor. Bailey, head of the English department and air-raid warden of the building, kept a flashlight in a desk in the English office. I found it in an unlocked drawer and flashed it around the room. There were several letters in my mailbox. I had no time to look at them now, and stuffed them in the breast pocket of my coat. When I got back to the second floor, the corridor was as quiet and dark as before.

I switched on the flashlight and looked at the lock, which seemed to be the same as the one on the English office, a spring lock of the Yale type. I took out my jackknife and set the lighted flash on the floor and went to work on the lock. After a few minutes of grunting and swearing, I managed to get the door-jamb thoroughly scratched and the door open. I picked up the flashlight and stepped into the office and closed the door behind me.

Most of the departments in the College of Arts did their business in the same way and kept similar files. The filing cabinets along the wall behind the secretary’s desk were tall and dark green like the ones in the English office, and I was pretty sure they would contain the same kind of material: old examinations which could be shuffled and used over again, mimeographed material for courses, reports on graduate students and former students, information on teaching appointments in the department.

The cabinet drawers were unlocked and I soon found the appointment records. I riffled through the folders with one hand, holding the flashlight in the other. Damman, Eisberg, Erskine, Esch. Ruth’s name was here then.

I jerked the folder from the drawer and sat down at the desk to examine it. The first sheet in it was a copy of a university contract on thin blue paper:

To Miss Ruth Gerda Esch,

Care of Professor Herman Schneider,

15 Bingham Heights Road,

Arbana, Michigan.

You are hereby notified of your appointment as instructor in the Department of German Language and Literature, College of Literature and the Arts, for the University year 1943-1944, with compensation at the rate of $2400 for the year.

This was followed by the usual printed conditions. The contract was dated September 15, 1943, one week ago.

The rest of the contents of the folder removed any doubts I had had that Ruth had been appointed to teach at the university. There was a copy of the personal record which is kept for every member of the faculty. The place-names and dates were pleasant to look at, because Ruth had lived in those places and done things at those times. Born in Cologne, Germany, August 8, 1915. Ph.D. candidate at the University of Munich, 1933-1936. Assistant Lector for English at Weltwirtschaftliches Institut, Kiel, Germany, 1936. Member of company of Munich Repertory Theatre, 1937. There was nothing below that but white paper. Six blank years.

I sat with my eyes on the dimly lit paper and tried to imagine the blank years. Things I had read and heard about German concentration camps and North African prisons crawled across my bright, sweet memory of Ruth Esch. My imagination was like a wavering flashlight beam in a terrible shifting darkness that covered half the earth. Terror and hunger and long silence broken by the sound of whips. Where had Ruth been and what had they done to her and where was she now?

The floor of the corridor creaked outside the office and I doused my light and stood up facing the door. I heard it open slowly and a hand fumbled for the light switch along the wall. Dr. Schneider? The step in the corridor must have been heavy to make the floor creak. I turned on the flashlight and threw its beam on the door. Alec stood there blinking like a groundhog in winter.

I could see his face but he couldn’t see mine. He said, “Who is that?” He found the switch and turned on the lights. “Bob!”

“Turn off the lights. This is extra-curricular.”

He turned them off and I replaced Ruth Esch’s folder in the files by the light of the flash, and closed the drawer.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Alec said.

“Let’s get out of here first and then I’ll tell you. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was on the way up to my office and I saw a light. How did you get in?”

I showed him the scratches on the door-jamb. “My pig-sticker.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Alec said as we stepped into the hall. “Those scratches are sure to be noticed.”

“So what? There was something I wanted to find out and I found it out. Nobody’s going to suspect me of being a Raffles, unless you turn stool-pigeon and sing to the cops.”

“You’re getting your jargon mixed,” Alec said, and I could tell from his voice that he was smiling in the dark. “That’s not the point. You can fry for all I care. The point is that Schneider is going to find out about those scratches and he’s going to be very careful.”

“It’s about time he turned over a new leaf. He’s been getting frightfully careless lately. In fact, his little attempt to kill me to-night was grotesquely inefficient.”

“His what?”

“I thought that would hold you,” I said. “Let’s go up to your office. This is no place to talk.”

We went up to Alec’s office on the fifth floor. I shared my office with two other teachers, but Alec was a full professor and had a room to himself. On two sides, books hid the wall from floor to ceiling. He had been a great scholar before war had made him an administrator. At forty, he was co-editor of the
Middle English Dictionary
which the university had been working on for years.

His desk stood in a corner against the wall between one set of bookshelves and the tall window which faced the door, so that the light came from the left when he worked there in the daytime. He hadn’t used this office to work in for months, but the desk was still the desk of a scholar, littered with books and papers and philological journals. A cradle phone stood clear of the debris on a shelf which projected from the wall beside the window. A lamp with a green glass shade for night work hung on the wall above the telephone.

Alec pulled the chain which turned on the wall lamp and switched off the ceiling light.

“Sit down,” he said and I took the old leather armchair at the end of the desk. He sat down in the swivel-chair facing me across the corner of the desk, and opened a drawer. “Would you like a drink?”

“I think I would.”

He produced a pint of Bourbon and uncorked it and handed it to me. I took a stiff drink and wiped the neck of the bottle and set it on the desk.

“What would the Dean say?” I wondered.

“He’d say give me some.” Alec recorked the bottle and put it back in the drawer without drinking any.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Have you gone into training for the Navy?”

“No, but I’ve got a job to do. I’m going to search Schneider’s office to-night. If there’s anything there, I’ve got to find it before he sees those scratches on the door to-morrow. I wish you’d told me you wanted to get into that office.”

“Why? Because you can walk through locked doors?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m a superior burglar. I borrowed Bailey’s master-key. They gave it to him so he could turn out the lights anywhere in the building for a blackout.”

“I’m sorry if I interfered with your plans. But I’ve started to have plans of my own. Can I help with the search?”