Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril (22 page)

Walter reached out to help Hiram down.

At that moment, the floodlights went on.

We were shielded by the freight cars on the next track, between us and the station offices and the barracks. But our escape route over the tracks, back to the spot where we had left the street, was blocked. The arcs lit up the station and the yards like a baseball stadium at night.

We climbed onto the car platform and hurried through the corridor to the other end. The large space between the backs of the loading platforms and the high stone wall was in half-darkness, illuminated faintly by the light from the yards.

There was a door in the wall, a high wooden door, in the corner nearest the cemetery. We couldn’t have entered that way because the lock was on the inside, but it offered our only chance to get out.

The door in the wall was about a hundred feet from where we stood on the rear platform of the Austrian coach. For most of the distance there were two or three feet of snow. There was no time to lose. The guards who had hurried to the other platform when the locomotive crashed would be back any second.

We walked off the coach onto the platform, then jumped into the snow and waded as fast as we could through the drifts toward the door in the high stone wall. Walter was ahead of me, Hiram behind.

When I caught up with Walter in front of the door, I saw he was trying to pull back the heavy brass bolt. The door would open in, and snow was drifted against it. Hiram and I worked feverishly to clear it away but it was slow going with only our hands as scoops.

Walter got the bolt back and we had cleared enough snow so that the door would open two or three feet, enough for us to slip through.

None of us realized the significance of the thin iron pipe that ran along the wall just above the door. We never noticed it in the half-light until it was too late. You see, the moment Walter started to swing that heavy door, the electrical connection broke and set off an alarm in the station. We couldn’t hear the alarm, which meant we had no warning. We tugged at that big door until the searchlight went on, and then there was no place to hide.

I suppose the alarm went off when anything happened anywhere along that long stretch of wall. The searchlight stabbed back and forth for a few seconds before it came to rest on us, huddled in front of that door. Walter found it on the station roof but there was a burst of shots from a tommy gun before he fired into the searchlight and put it out of commission. The gunner on the roof must have had buck fever because only one bullet took effect. That one plowed into Hiram, and he crumpled without a sound.

There was no telling how much longer we’d have the darkness. There could be another searchlight. At any rate, they’d come after us quick enough. We might have heard shouts if the siren hadn’t resumed its hysterical wailing.

We left Hiram where he’d fallen and pulled desperately at the door. I found I could slip through, but Walter was a lot bigger, and it took a minute or so to give him enough space to pass, dragging Hiram.

By that time, the siren had trailed off into a low moan, and we could hear the voices of the sentries moving across the loading yard toward the door and us. There was no way to pull the door shut behind us; there was no hardware, no handle on the outer side.

I told Walter to get Hiram to the car. I’d try to hold off the guards until he could get a head start. They’d have a chance on the street that paralleled the cemetery. It wasn’t much used, even in the daytime.

Walter took Hiram in his arms like a baby. It was more than half a mile to the car on the Asztalos Sandor ut.

They were swallowed up in the darkness even before I moved to the right of the door. I flattened myself against the wall with my right arm and my gun straight out from the shoulder. It occurred to me they might come over the wall instead of through the door but in that case they’d need to go back for a ladder and that would give Walter and Hiram precious tune.

But they came straight to the door. I heard the Russian voices. A flashlight probed the opening. When the arm came through, I fired. I hit it, too, because there was a yell of pain and a lot of violent cursing from the arm and his companions. The hit was dumb luck; my finger was so smashed that I had to pull the trigger instead of squeezing it and the gun jumped in my hand.

For a minute or so there was no sound from behind the door. I was counting the seconds to myself, trying to imagine how far Walter had progressed with the unconscious Hiram, how long to wait, if I had the choice, before making a break. Not that I was going to follow them once they reached the car. I might help to get them there—but I was going to the warehouse on Mexikoi ut in search of Herr Doktor Schmidt.

The flashlight stabbed through the doorway once more, and then they pulled the hoary trick of shoving out a uniform cap on the end of a bayonet. But I fired at that, and it quickly withdrew behind the wall, and there was dead silence again.

When I had counted almost to a hundred, I was sure they’d gone for the ladder.

I left the wall, crossed the narrow street to the sidewalk bordering the iron fence, and moved warily in the direction which Walter had taken. I had to cross directly in front of the door. I made it, either because the Russians were keeping well back from the opening or because I was shrouded in the shadows from the tombs on the other side of the fence.

I crossed the street again and followed Walter’s tracks by the reflected light from the arcs in the yards. I managed to keep up a sort of half-running, half-walking pace. I wondered how soon I’d run into a Russian patrol.

Two blocks and there was a low, open shed against the wall of the yards. I wasn’t more than a few feet away when I heard Walter’s voice. I hurried forward because I thought he must be talking to Hiram and the latter had regained consciousness. Walter must have put Hiram down in the shelter of the shed to look after the wound.

I was almost on top of them when I heard another voice, and it wasn’t Hiram’s.

It was the voice of Dr. Schmidt.

I stood where I was. When Schmidt came out of the shed and his body and the gun in his hand were outlined against the sky, I had plenty of time to aim. I held the Luger with both hands to steady my aim and I managed to squeeze the trigger as if I were squeezing a lemon. I should have emptied the eight bullets into his ugly body. But nothing happened.

My gun was jammed.

I saw Schmidt back off the sidewalk into the street as if it were all a dream. I watched him until I couldn’t see him any longer in the inky blackness along the cemetery fence on the other side of that narrow street.

I walked up to where Walter was standing. I could make out Hiram’s body stretched on the floor of the shed.

I didn’t have to ask whether Schmidt had Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope. He wouldn’t have left without it. He’d surprised Walter with Hiram in his arms. Walter never had a chance to draw his gun. I supposed he hadn’t killed them because he didn’t want to advertise his presence to the Russians. He must have known all the time what we were up to in the yards. We’d done his dirty work for him.

I bent over Hiram, and he was still breathing. I took his gun from his pocket and aimed it at the end of the shed, and it fired okay. I left my jammed Luger with him.

I told Walter to keep on going with Hiram, to get him to the car. My watch said it was five minutes after six. Walter was to give Hiram first aid in the car. If I didn’t arrive by seven o’clock, he was to head for the Buda hills without me.

I crossed the street again, this time following Schmidt’s footprints in the snow.

The moon had been up half an hour or so, but there were heavy snow clouds in the sky, and the light from the moon was fitful. I knew that street afforded no exit for another two blocks. There was the high stone wall of the railway yards on one side and the cemetery fence on the other. Schmidt would hurry but he wouldn’t know I was behind him. I had to catch him in those two blocks, before he reached the main avenue where he’d have a car.

Every now and then the clouds would scud from in front of the moon, and I checked his tracks in the snow. The snow was fresh, and the street was infrequently used; those who were forced to travel it at night shunned the sidewalk that touched the cemetery. Schmidt’s were the only marks in the snow. They were easy to follow when there was light. There wasn’t a street lamp in sight or I should have spotted him when he passed them a block or even two ahead.

I was nearly at the end of the street and beginning to think I’d lost Schmidt when there was moonlight and I saw there were no footprints ahead of me. At first I didn’t believe my eyes but I backtracked, thinking he had given me the slip by crossing to the other side.

I found that the doctor’s footprints ended at the cemetery fence.

I knew then that he was heading for the inn on the other side, the place from which he had kidnapped Maria and where I had seen him that evening. The proprietor worked for Schmidt. The doctor would find refuge at the inn. Probably Hermann was waiting. It was a good deal shorter to go through the cemetery and much safer.

I managed to pull myself to the top of the iron fence although I opened up the wounds in my hands and they bled profusely. I went over and let myself down again by dropping my feet until they touched a headstone, jumping the rest of the way into the drifted snow.

There was a line of naked trees against the sky, and I found they bordered a road. The ground is too hard to open graves in the winter months, but the cemetery roads are plowed so that the dead can be trucked to receiving vaults until spring.

I followed the road away from the fence, through a line of squat black tombs, wall to wall like the homes of the living that faced the cemetery gates.

I walked five minutes or so, and the road swung sharply to the left. When I had made the turn, the moon came from behind the clouds, and I saw Schmidt. I think he must have heard my step on the snow, which was packed hard as ice at that point. I don’t think he knew until that moment that I was following. He wasn’t more than fifty feet from me.

We were in the dark again, almost immediately, before either could use his gun. We were like two blind men, in the middle of that city of the dead, hunting each other, each waiting for the light of the moon yet fearing the other might use it first.

Schmidt fired the first shot without waiting for the moon. I never believed he had nerves but I think that’s what happened. He must have aimed for the spot where he’d seen me standing. It was an error in judgment surprising in the Nazi doctor because I had been careful to put the wall of a tomb between myself and him.

I didn’t fire back. I knew where he was and he hadn’t located me.

The tombs paralleled the road. There was space behind them, between them and another marble row. The rest of the year it was a gravel path. I waded slowly through snow almost to my waist. I wanted to get in back of him. I didn’t stop to think he might be vanishing along that road while I was playing cowboy and Indian. His job was to get away with the envelope and mine to catch him if I could.

But he didn’t go. I can only guess why not. Perhaps he thought Walter was with me and that he was surrounded; a cemetery just before dawn can play queer tricks on a man’s nerves. Maybe he thought his shot was already bringing a Russian patrol inside the gates.

At any rate, Schmidt was still standing in the middle of the road when I came out from behind the tombs. As soon as there was a little light, I dropped him with one bullet. He screamed like a child and the sound cascaded.

He wasn’t dead when I reached him. I lifted his gun. I went through his pockets and found the Manila envelope.

Then the Russians drove through the gate, the one close by the spot where Schmidt and I had scaled the fence. They entered the cemetery as if they were children whistling and singing to keep the ghosts away. Even without the siren, we’d have known they were coming, even if they hadn’t raced the engine like a hotrod driver.

I jammed Schmidt’s Homburg on his bullet head. I picked his broken gold-rimmed spectacles from the snow and started to push them on his face and then realized what I was doing and threw them away.

I grabbed the German by the scruff of his fat neck and dragged him off the road. I dragged him through the snow to the gate of a tomb. The gate opened, and I hauled him inside. I closed the gate and fumbled with the latch, unthinking, until I realized there is no lock on the inside of a tomb.

I sat in that tomb surrounded by the dead, my teeth chattering, and listened to the babble of a dying man.

Herr Doktor Wolfgang Schmidt, propped up against a coffin, laughed and pleaded and scolded out of his memory. The man who had never swerved an inch from his grotesque ideal during his lifetime, who never used sentiment or humanity or tenderness, called for his mother. Two or three times I found my bloody hands, the ones he’d smashed, closing round his stumpy throat to quiet him forever but I couldn’t do it.

I heard the Russian car coming all the way from the gate, the tires whirring as they skidded on the icy places, the whining of the engine. The spotlight took short cuts and once it lighted the inside of my prison, flooding through the grillwork in the gate like daylight. I drew back automatically although of course they couldn’t see me. I lost my balance and fell on the marble floor and when I turned to pick myself up there was a grinning skull within reach of my hand.

They saw the marks in the snow as soon as they rounded the bend, the path I’d made in dragging Schmidt’s body. They stopped almost in front of us and they saw the doctor’s blood where he’d fallen.

I backed into the far corner and went down on all fours, behind an enormous copper casket, as the gate swung open.

“Here’s one of them,” a voice said in Russian. “He’s still alive. Get him out of here.”

“It’s Schmidt,” Anna Orlovska’s voice said. “It’s the German Schmidt.”

“He must have crawled in here,” the man’s voice said. “The others must be close by.”