Passport To Peril

SEARCH FOR A GIRL

“Please be quiet, Mr. Stodder,” Walter said softly. “They may try to follow our tracks in the snow.” He put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it.

“But you’re hurt,” I said. “They must have hit you. You’ve got to have help.”

“I’m all right,” Walter said. “We’ll move in a few minutes. Those krauts must have given you a bad time, Mr. Stodder.” My boiled shirt was spattered with blood.

There were a dozen questions I wanted to ask. Where was Hiram Carr? How had Walter known the Russians would attack the house? How had he and Carr known where I was?

We stood in silence under the tree in the darkness for ten minutes or so. There was no sound from the direction of the house. Maybe Schmidt and Hermann had surrendered, but I thought it unlikely. Either the Russians had killed both the Germans or they had ceased fire to plan a new attack.

There was a road somewhere close behind us. We heard a car approach. I thought it was going to stop, that perhaps the Russians were bringing up more men. They could be looking for me. But the car passed without slowing, and then we heard its horn off in the distance.

“We’ll go now,” Walter said. “It isn’t far.”

He started to pick me up, but I told him I could walk. He hadn’t noticed my feet were bare and still bleeding. We had only about fifty feet to go to the road but it took us a long time to find our way around the trees in the inky darkness. I fell half a dozen times.

“You wait here, Mr. Stodder,” Walter said. “Everything’s all right. I’ll be back for you directly.” The first streaks of dawn were lightening the sky.

Someone whistled down the road, in the direction Walter had taken, the first few bars of “Dixie,” and in a few minutes a car appeared out of the morning mist.

When the car came abreast of where I was sitting, Walter hopped off the running board to help me in. Hiram, still in his pea jacket and coonskin cap, was behind the wheel. Teensy was beside him, still in her ski costume, the two bright spots of orange rouge gray in the morning light.

Teensy winced when she saw my hands and feet, but neither she nor her husband commented. There wasn’t any small talk. Hiram got right to the point.

“Where is the envelope? Did you find out from Orlovska?”

I noticed we were driving farther away from Budapest, toward the west. The wild idea entered my head that we were heading for Vienna, that this was the first step in leaving Hungary.

“Where are you going?” I said. “We’ve got to get back to Budapest. You promised me you’d help me find Maria. I’ve done what you asked. You can’t let me down.”

Hiram said quietly, “Nobody’s letting you down. We wouldn’t have been here if we were going to let you down. But the roadblock is still in back of us. We’d never get through it now. We’ll have to take another road back to Budapest. First we’ve got to get you and Walter to a doctor.”

“All right,” I said. “Yes, I know where the envelope is. It’s where I left it.”

I saw Hiram glance at Teensy as if he thought my mind was wandering as a result of Schmidt’s treatment. Walter must have told him what he’d seen through the window.

“That’s where it is,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m not crazy. The Russians moved the car. They took it off the train and moved it to Jozsefvaros. They took it away after you two left the train at Keleti. We looked in the wrong cars, that’s all.”

“Did Orlovska tell you that?” Hiram asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then the envelope isn’t there any more. If she knew it, Lavrentiev did, too.”

“No,” I said. “She knew the car was moved because she and Lavrentiev went through it at Jozsefvaros. But they didn’t know about the envelope. She told Schmidt about the car being moved, though, and he knew the envelope was there.”

I filled them in on what had happened after Walter left me near the Arizona.

“How did you know the Russians were going to attack the house?” I said.

“We didn’t,” Teensy said. Hiram laughed.

“How did you get there at the same time?”

“A little invention of this corny husband of mine,” Teensy said. She pinched his cheek, and he gurgled like a happy child.

“What invention?” I said. “What did an invention have to do with it?” I was beaten up and worn out and hardly in the mood for conundrums. “Walter got me out the back window because Schmidt and Hermann were busy with the Russians in front.”

Hiram giggled. I could have murdered him with pleasure at that point.

“That’s correct,” Teensy said, “only there weren’t any Russians.”

“I’m not crazy,” I said. “I heard them in front of the house.”

“Phonograph record,” Teensy said.

“What?”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Hiram said gleefully. “It fooled you and the Germans, didn’t it?”

“Phonograph record,” Teensy said. “Schmidt will be quite annoyed when he finds it.

“You see, Mr. Stodder, I told you Hiram is an incurable gadgeteer. He figured this out a long time ago. These new long playing machines in small sizes are just what he needed.”

“Tell him about the voices he heard,” Hiram said.

“Oh, those were Russians cheering Stalin at a May Day parade,” Teensy said. “Hiram recorded them from a Moscow radio program.”

“I’ve seen everything,” I said. “But what about the shots that came in the front windows?”

“That was me,” Teensy said, “while Walter worked around to the back porch. I might say it took some shooting, too, so I wouldn’t hit you. Had to lie flat on my stomach in the snow so the bullets would hit the ceiling.”

“So there weren’t any Russians there at all?” I said. “That means Schmidt will get away.”

“Maybe,” Hiram said, “but he’ll have a hell of a time. We put his car where he won’t find it in a hurry and we shot all four tires to shreds. I think perhaps the Russians will get him before he finds the car.”

“I thought you said they weren’t around?”

“They weren’t,” Teensy said, “but they will be soon. You see, Hiram called them while Walter was bringing you out to the road.”

“What do we do about Maria?” I said.

“We can’t do anything until tonight,” Hiram said. “We’ll have to lay low today. Even if we dared, I don’t think any doctor will let you move without a long sleep.”

I don’t know how long we drove. I managed to doze off despite my nerves. When I woke, the sun was in the sky. The car had stopped in the cobblestoned courtyard of what I took to be a country inn. A smiling Hungarian couple, whom I immediately supposed to be the proprietor and his wife, such being the inevitable pattern of life in a country inn, greeted Hiram and Teensy and showed me to a room.

I was put to bed, and they brought me breakfast, but I had little appetite. Hiram produced a doctor who dressed my wounds and filled me with sedatives. He said Walter had been shot in the leg but luckily it was only a flesh wound.

I slept the day through and awoke without that sense of depression which had taken hold when Maria disappeared. The prospect of doing something about finding her made me eager to start, although I couldn’t do much walking or hold a gun in my hands. Speaking of guns, I remarked for the first time that Schmidt hadn’t searched me at Orlovska’s, and the gun Carr gave me had remained inside my jacket all the time.

Someone had removed my dinner jacket and substituted the clothes I had left at Carr’s. The contents of my pockets had been emptied on the bureau. I remembered Ilonka dropping something in my pocket just as I was booted out of the Arizona by Lavrentiev’s orderly. It stared back at me in the dim light of the room—Ilonka’s blue glass eye, the good eye that fights the evil eye. It amused me, but I slipped it in my pocket when I had finished dressing.

I made my way down the stairs, a step at a time, to find Walter in the huge living room, seated in front of the open fire. Hiram and Teensy joined us in a few minutes. After a quick dinner, we shook hands with the proprietor and his wife and drove off in Hiram’s car.

“What’s the setup?” I said. “They’ve got a lot of guts to take us in. What happens if the Russians catch them?”

Hiram took one hand off the wheel and drew it across his neck.

“But there are thousands like them in the countries behind the Iron Curtain,” Hiram said, “decent people who figure they haven’t anything to lose. These Communist regimes, these so-called People’s Democracies, are run by the gutter element in all these Eastern European countries. People like the couple you just saw fought the Germans when they overran these countries. They don’t see much difference between being managed from Berlin or Moscow.”

“But I don’t see why they should take their lives in their hands,” I said. “Suppose a Russian patrol had walked into the place while we were there?”

“They’d have had a tough time finding us,” Hiram said. “Those old buildings have a dozen hiding places. The proprietor’s neighbors would have warned him the moment Russian or Hungarian police approached within a mile of the place.”

“When’d they set that up?” I asked.

“It’s been going on for hundreds of years. People in these countries have been hiding from one invader or another since the beginning of history. Take the Hungarians. They’ve been occupied by Romans, Huns, Slavs, Tartars, Turks, Rumanians, Austrians, and half a dozen others. They’ve fought them all and they’ve seen them all depart. Why should they accept the Russians any more than the others?”

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Matyasfold,” Hiram said. “We’ll start there, anyway.”

When Schmidt had taken Maria and me to the tenement on Mexikoi ut he’d told Hermann to drive the Russian staff car “to Felix in Matyasfold.” Felix would give the redheaded German civilian clothes and phony papers for himself and Otto as well as a car. I’d mentioned the fact to Hiram when I’d first gone to his home, and he had put two of his men on the job of watching Matyasfold, a town some ten miles from the Budapest city limits.

I was surprised that Hiram had put searching for Maria ahead of any attempt to get Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope from the railway car at Jozsefvaros. Not that he hadn’t made me a promise. I guessed he figured the Russians had grabbed Schmidt when they’d arrived at Orlovska’s and there was no hurry about the envelope. I’d told Hiram I was sure the countess, providing Schmidt hadn’t killed her after my escape, couldn’t reveal the secret because she hadn’t realized what she had told me.

Carr must have read my mind because he said, “If you’re right about that damned envelope, we’ve got a lousy job ahead of us. They’ll have a dozen armed men around that car. They’ll keep it there and they won’t move it until they’ve hanged somebody for murdering Strakhov.”

Teensy put it frankly. “If Hiram wasn’t stumped we wouldn’t be going to Matyasfold instead. But he’ll think of something. He always has.”

I wondered how much longer Hiram Carr could keep himself out of 60 Stalin ut, diplomatic passport or not. The MVD certainly knew why he was in Budapest. They watch all foreigners, and diplomats twice as much. They’d long since learned Hiram wasn’t an agricultural expert, that his legation job was a blind. Colonel Lavrentiev might get plastered nights at the Arizona but he was plenty smart, and so was his staff. It didn’t occur to me at the moment that the Russians might be biding their time, waiting until they could grab all of us in one haul.

There wasn’t any doubt of Carr’s purpose in heading for Matyasfold. The rescue of a Spanish girl named Maria Torres had no meaning for him. She was strictly incidental. He wanted all the information he could gather on Schmidt and his gang, everything he could dig up on the underground German scientists. He thought he could learn from whoever was holding her prisoner for Schmidt. It didn’t occur to either of us at that moment that Maria might not be alive.

We took long enough to return to Budapest, hitting the Danube far to the south of the city, then doubling back along the river. Hiram didn’t dare try to pass the roadblocks in the Buda hills. When we had crossed the Danube, Hiram made a wide detour around the city to reach Matyasfold to the east. We never once saw a policeman, except for those on traffic duty. It was almost as if they’d been moved out of our path by design and it was unnatural enough to give me a sense of foreboding. We’d had too easy a time since Walter carried me from Orlovska’s house. It was too good to last.

Matyasfold is one of those undistinguished towns, half city, half country, that you find near big cities all over the world. On the high-speed trolley line from Budapest, it’s an ideal community for white-collar workers who can’t afford city rents. At the beginning of the war, the Hungarians built an airport for the defense of Budapest. Then German fighter squadrons moved in. After the war, the Russian air force took over.

When we were a couple of miles from Matyasfold, Hiram changed places with Teensy. While she drove, he talked.

“After you told me how Schmidt had instructed Hermann to go to Matyasfold,” Hiram said to me, “I put two of my men on the job.

“Felix isn’t too common a name in Hungary. But my men could have spent a month finding the right Felix if that was all I gave them to go on. Do you remember what Schmidt told Hermann?”

“Of course,” I said. “I remember the conversation almost exactly. After all, it was only yesterday.” I could hardly believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since Maria and I had left the train at Kelenfold only to fall into the hands of the Nazi doctor. “Schmidt said, ‘I want that car moved from here immediately. It is much too dangerous. You will drive it to Felix in Matyasfold.’ ”

“Do you remember what else Schmidt told Hermann?”

“He said, ‘You will give your uniform to Felix. He will return your civilian clothes and the necessary documents. He will also give you clothes and documents for Otto.’ Then he said, ‘If you are stopped by police, you will tell them you are Frau Hoffmeyer’s nephew.’ ”

Hiram said, “What does that conversation tell you about Felix?”

“Well,” I said. “It means that Felix is one of Schmidt’s agents.”

“That’s hardly a discovery,” Hiram said. I didn’t see why it amused him.

“It meant that Felix, whoever he is, was in a position to supply civilian clothes to Hermann. It meant he had facilities for forging documents.”

“Or stealing them,” Hiram said. “But don’t you see the most important clue to the identity of Felix?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The car,” he said, “the Russian army car.”

“Schmidt told Hermann to hand it over to Felix.”

“That’s correct,” Hiram said. “If it were only a question of faked documents or civilian clothes, Felix could be almost anybody. A shopkeeper, for instance, the postman, or the tax collector. But it isn’t normal for such persons to have army staff cars and it isn’t easy to hide one. Garage people can’t disguise an army car with a coat of paint the way they do stolen stock cars. Anybody can dispose of a uniform like Hermann’s but not automobiles with army insignia.

“The more I thought about that angle, the more I figured Felix had to be someone whose possession of a Red Army car wouldn’t excite suspicion and someone who had access to official documents at the same time. It seemed to me we were looking for a Red Army officer and a fairly high one at that.

“I think we’ll find that Doctor Schmidt’s agent, the Felix who is stooge for the Nazi Bruderschaft, is pretty close to the commander of the Russian air base right here in Matyasfold.”

“How do you know Schmidt brought Maria out here?” I said.

“I don’t,” Hiram said, “but we’ve got to start looking somewhere, don’t we?”