Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (12 page)

“Don’t let them hear you,” I said. “Don’t you know they invented civilization?”

She pointed to a small glass object pinned to her dress. “See?”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the good eye.” She unpinned it and handed it to me. “It protects us from the evil eye.” It was made of blue glass to represent a human eye.

“You don’t believe that?”

“Of course.” Ilonka was surprised. “Don’t Swiss people believe in the evil eye?”

I’d seen the charms in Turkey. I’d had a chauffeur named Murad who refused to drive my car without one on the radiator cap. I knew that Slovak peasants paint their huts blue to keep evil spirits away, that Polish farmers rub garlic on barn doors to keep vampires from milking their cows at night. But Budapest had been a civilized capital when I left in ’41.

“I must get ready for the show,” Ilonka said. She took my hand. “Promise you’ll wait?”

I said I would. I’d have an excuse to sit alone at the bar until the Countess Orlovska showed up. Though I hadn’t the foggiest notion what to do then.

I watched Colonel Lavrentiev’s image in the back-bar mirror. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, the typical square-faced, square-headed blond Slav. Like the late Major Strakhov, Lavrentiev wore a full-dress uniform complete to epaulets and a large patch of decorations. He was the first Russian I’d seen sporting a monocle, an affectation some Red Army officers had picked up from the Prussians. Lavrentiev was apparently a two-fisted drinker. There were four bottles in front of him.

Then the show started, and I forgot Lavrentiev and Herr Doktor Schmidt, Hiram Carr, and Herr Figl, the grave-robbing Austrian, until I caught sight of one of the chorus girls who looked enough like Maria to make me catch my breath. Then the spotlight reflected a mouthful of gold teeth, but the shock was enough to make me feel guilty and highly uncomfortable, sitting in a nightclub drinking whisky when I should have been searching for Maria.

The show was something to see, just the same, the way I’d remembered it from the days before the proletariat ran the place. The prima donna came out of the wings on the back of a baby elephant, chorus girls floated around the ceiling on hidden wires, the dance floor rose ten feet in the air complete with tap dancers, the band thumped joyously through a dozen ancient American tunes. Colonel Lavrentiev clapped and laughed and beat time on the table with a whisky bottle.

I needn’t have worried about identifying the Countess Orlovska. The chorus was wiggling through the finale when I saw Lavrentiev pull himself to his feet. He swept the empty bottles onto the floor, bellowed at the orchestra leader, and turned to face the entrance. The music ceased abruptly with a wail of the saxophone, the chorus line shuffled to a halt on one foot. Lavrentiev fixed his monocle, lifted his left arm in a sort of Roman-emperor gesture, and Anna, the Countess Orlovska, swept across the floor and into his booth. Neither performers nor patrons seemed surprised; if they were they knew better than to show it in front of the chief of the MVD.

It was easy enough to see Anna Orlovska’s attraction for Marcel Blaye, Colonel Lavrentiev, or any other man. Her ash-blond hair, worn in a short pageboy bob, contrasted strikingly with her dark eyes and full red mouth. An off-the-shoulder white satin evening gown set off her dark skin.

If Anna Orlovska was concerned with the disappearance of Marcel Blaye or the murder of Major Strakhov she didn’t show it. She smiled broadly at Lavrentiev as he bent to kiss her hand. She spoke to a couple in the next box and swallowed in one gulp the glass of champagne the colonel offered her.

The show never did pick up again after the colonel stopped it, and Ilonka was back with me in the bar in a few minutes.

“Does the colonel end the show like that every night?” I said. “It must be tiresome for the customers if the countess always enters in the middle.”

“He does it every time she arrives,” Ilonka said, “which is nearly every flight in the week.”

She didn’t smile, and when the bartender went to the other end she said, “There’s something going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“It looks like there’s going to be trouble.”

“Trouble, how?”

“The place is full of policemen.”

“Cops get into nightclubs free all over the world,” I said.

Ilonka shook her head. “It isn’t that. There’s half a dozen backstage. And the headwaiter says two carloads of gendarmes just drove up outside.”

I figured she wouldn’t be telling me if she’d been the one to suspect me.

“What do you think they want?”

“They must be looking for someone,” Ilonka said.

The music started, and I took Ilonka to the dance floor.

I wondered how the police had learned I was at the Arizona. I was sure Walter and I hadn’t been trailed from Hiram Carr’s. I didn’t think I’d said anything to arouse Ilonka’s suspicions. Swiss travelers were certainly common enough in Budapest. I found myself scanning the faces of the dancers, but there wasn’t one I could recall ever having seen before.

When the orchestra started a waltz, Lavrentiev followed Anna onto the floor. My first impulse was to retreat to the bar as fast as possible. But I realized that haste would make me conspicuous and I was sure that neither the Russian nor his partner had ever set eyes on me. Dancing was better than sitting at the bar wondering how long it would take the cops to close in on me.

I tried to keep to the opposite side of the revolving floor, away from Lavrentiev and Anna. It took a lot of maneuvering what with the constant turning of the waltz and the movement of the turntable under my feet. The colonel was remarkably agile despite his size, and I tried to change my pace as he did, anticipating the changes in the music.

I was so occupied with watching Lavrentiev and Anna that I didn’t spot the sour-faced minister of finance and his fat wife until they had stepped onto the floor directly in our path. Ilonka said, “Look out,” and I saw them and managed to pivot past but the movement threw us off stride, and the revolving floor did the rest.

Before I knew what was happening we had crashed squarely into the chief of the MVD and his partner, the two people in all of Hungary I least wanted to see—together.

We must have made a ridiculous sight, the pompous Lavrentiev in his full-dress uniform, Anna Orlovska in a Paris gown, Ilonka, and me, all four sprawled on the moving dance floor. But if any onlooker dared laugh, I didn’t hear him. I was certain the Russian would order me shot the moment he regained his feet.

Luckily, the bandleader pulled the switch, and the turntable came to a stop. I picked myself up and helped Ilonka to her feet. The kid was frightened speechless, and her make-up stood out like a neon sign against the white of her skin. I turned to the colonel and he was brushing off his medals. He made no move to help Orlovska so I put out my hand to aid her. The music had stopped dead. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the tense faces of the customers and the waiters.

The countess took my hand without glancing at me. She called me a clumsy lout in Polish and a lot of other words I’d heard in the seamier quarters of Warsaw. Her skin-tight satin gown had split in half a dozen places, and her pearl necklace had broken and spilled all over the place.

Lavrentiev, having finished brushing his epaulets, had taken a step off the floor toward his table when Orlovska grabbed his sleeve. He had apparently drunk enough to temporarily forget his precious dignity in favor of the full bottle the waiter had just brought. But Anna Orlovska was having none of it.

“Boris, are you out of your mind?” She screamed like a fishwife and she spoke German for the benefit of the customers.

“What shall I do, Anna?”

“I have been insulted. We have both been insulted. These peasants have insulted the Fatherland.”

I touched Ilonka’s elbow, trying to tell her to get off the floor and let me face Orlovska’s wrath but she was frozen to the spot.

“Boris, do something. Are you man or mouse?”

For all his power as chief of the secret police, Lavrentiev was firmly under Orlovska’s thumb. Like the late Marcel Blaye.

The Russian colonel turned his square face to me and said, “Pig.”

“Do something,” Orlovska screamed. “Have them arrested. Have them punished.”

Lavrentiev wasn’t too drunk to realize he was the center of a spectacle that would provide Budapest with hilarious gossip for days. He’d either have to act to save his face or find some way of coping with Orlovska. He acted. He bellowed at the embarrassed headwaiter to call his orderly.

I thought it high time to open my mouth.

“It is all my fault,” I said in German. I bowed to Orlovska. “I am guilty of the grossest carelessness. Believe me, I apologize from the bottom of my heart.” I turned to Lavrentiev. “And you, sir, kindly accept my most sincere apologies.”

“Look at my dress,” Orlovska screamed at Lavrentiev. “My Paris gown.”

“I shall be only too happy to see that Madame is provided with a new one.”

Orlovska said, “Peasant,” and then for the first time she looked me in the face. She looked at me twice before she did a classic double take. The second time there was recognition written all over her face.

There’s an ancient superstition that a man’s life passes in review when he’s drowning. It could be, because I reviewed my own life at that moment and I couldn’t dredge up any remembrance of ever having set eyes on Anna Orlovska. The Europeski Hotel in Warsaw in 1939? Paris, Berlin, Rome? Budapest in 1941?

Orlovska couldn’t have been on the Orient Express from Vienna. Hadn’t Strakhov said she’d come to Hegyshalom with him from Budapest? She hadn’t seen me on the train to Budapest, unless Strakhov had lied.

Maybe she thought me Marcel Blaye. But that was ridiculous. Maria had known I wasn’t Blaye and if Or-lovska had been his mistress she wouldn’t be fooled.

But there
was
recognition on her face. First disbelief, then open-mouthed amazement. Then she started to say something, swayed a little, and fainted dead away. Maybe she had hurt herself when she’d first hit the floor. Maybe that was it and my imagination was playing tricks on me.

If I hadn’t grabbed for her arm and caught it, she’d have hit the floor again because Lavrentiev, having called his orderly, was no longer interested. He was already back at his table, pouring a drink.

Hiram Carr had sent me to the Arizona to meet Anna Orlovska. I’d accomplished that part with dispatch. There I was, standing in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by gaping customers, waiters, and chorus girls, holding the limp body of the countess in my arms. Ilonka was standing beside me, trembling like a leaf. The befuddled Colonel Lavrentiev was tossing half a glass of whisky down his tree-trunk throat, the only unconcerned person in the joint.

I had to do something so I yelled,
“Föpincér,”
and the headwaiter wiped the glassy look from his bloodshot eyes and came running. My yell galvanized everyone into action. The whole place burst into loud conversation, the bandleader started an encore of “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” the headwaiter and one of his minions relieved me of Orlovska, and Colonel Lavrentiev’s orderly slapped his paw on my shoulder and propelled me toward the exit.

I managed to turn my head before we reached the door and I saw that Ilonka was right behind us. I pulled a wad of bills from my pocket and threw them to her. “Pay the bar bill,” I said, “and keep what’s left for yourself.”

She grabbed my arm, but Lavrentiev’s orderly told her to beat it.

“I’m sorry,” Ilonka said. “I guess you just aren’t a very good dancer.”

It was a hell of a time to tell me that, but she dropped something in my pocket, then turned on her heel and went off to the bar without looking back.

We stopped at the checkroom for my hat and coat. There was a short flight of glass steps leading to the main entrance. There were lights under the glass, and when you walked on the steps a music box was set in action. It had played the first few bars of the “Rakoczi March” when I first visited Budapest; now it sounded suspiciously like the beginning of the “Internationale.”

When we went down the stairs, the orderly still clutching my shoulder, I could see on the sidewalk the gendarmes that Ilonka had mentioned. They were lined up facing the entrance, parallel to the street, as if waiting for inspection. Two big military cars were across the street. I suppose I ought to have been flattered at such an armed turnout in my honor.

I automatically started out the door to be handed over to the gendarmes, but Lavrentiev’s orderly steered me into the doorkeeper’s room, hard by the exit. He sat me down in a chair.

“Let’s see your passport,” he said.

I handed him the Jean Stodder-Geneva document. He read the statistics out loud.

“You’ve got plenty of nerve,” he said, laughing. He threw the passport into my lap.

I could have told him I was frightened stiff. Why didn’t he hand me over to the gendarmes? The Russians must have known who I was the moment I first stepped into the Arizona.

“Do you get drunk in Switzerland and knock down colonels on the dance floor?”

I could have told him I wasn’t drunk, that I hadn’t intended to crash into the colonel and Anna Orlovska. But there wasn’t much use of saying anything. He was having his kind of fun before he sent me off to 60 Stalin ut.

“You’re lucky Colonel Lavrentiev didn’t pull a gun on you,” the orderly said. “He’s got a quick temper. He’s a dignified man.”

I didn’t say anything. I wondered why he hadn’t searched me for the gun. I was sure he could see the bulge in my coat. He must have thought I wouldn’t dare try anything, not with half a hundred gendarmes with carbines a few feet away. Of course, they’d take the gun the minute he handed me over.

I think I could have snapped the gun from the shoulder holster quickly enough to beat him to the draw. But it wouldn’t have done me a bit of good. The minute I fired, those gendarmes would have filled that little room and me full of lead. I think I’ve got as much guts as the next man, but that sort of death has never had any attraction. Anyway, I’m a follower of Grigori and his monkey.