Passport To Peril

THE BODY IN THE CELLAR

The two men were still across the street when Hiram, Teensy, Walter, and I drove off. They made no move to follow.

“They won’t arrest me yet,” Hiram said. “They’d rather wait to catch me red-handed. Then they’ll stage the biggest trial you ever saw.” He spoke without emotion, as if he were discussing a bridge tournament or a birthday party. He had no nerves.

I felt an urge to keep the conversation going.

“Why do you suppose Borodin, a major in the Russian Army, got mixed up with Schmidt?”

“Why do any of them sell out?” Hiram said. “Usually it’s money or women or both. Sometimes it’s ambition, sometimes wounded vanity.

“Marcel Blaye fell for Orlovska. He wanted to go back to Germany, and the Russians promised him a high post in their East German government.

“Look at Orlovska. She wants money and luxury. She’ll sell out to anybody to get an easy life. But in this racket, the Blayes, the Orlovskas, and the Borodins don’t last too long. Traitors and double-dealers usually hang themselves. Men like Schmidt are the tough ones. They’re dedicated fanatics, men with one idea that dominates their lives. You can’t buy them or convert them or curb them. In a normal world, Blaye, Orlovska, and Borodin would probably be in jail but Schmidt would be confined to an insane asylum.”

We drove past the coffeehouse. There were two stories above the café. The roof was flat. There was an alley on one side, separating the coffeehouse from the shop of a stonecutter whose sign announced he made tombstones for the Kerepesitemetö, the huge municipal cemetery across the street. There was a four-story tenement against the other wall of the coffeehouse.

We swung round the block, and the illuminated clock in the Keleti station tower said the time was ten thirty-five. It was more than an hour since we’d dropped Major Felix Borodin. Considering the time required to shake Hiram’s operative, Borodin had met Schmidt in the coffeehouse a good half hour earlier.

We couldn’t see the rear of the coffeehouse because of the surrounding buildings. Hiram said it was probable there was an open space behind, to which the alley led.

When we had made almost a full circle, Walter and I dropped off. We would go inside the café. Teensy and Hiram would be outside, to cover our exit in case of trouble. The proprietor had never seen either Walter or me but he would remember the Carrs as having inquired about Maria and Schmidt. The car would be parked on the far side of the cemetery, an area of warehouses deserted at night.

Teensy had changed the bandages on my hands for skimpier dressings, and I was sure I could handle a gun, although with a good deal of pain. At any rate, I carried the Luger in the shoulder holster.

We stood just inside the door for a moment. I took a quick look but I saw neither Schmidt nor Borodin. There weren’t more than twenty-five or thirty patrons, seated at small tables. The headwaiter beckoned to us to take a table near the gypsy band which was on a platform, but I shook my head, and we sat near the door. As soon as we had ordered, I took a couple of newspapers from the rack so that we could hide our faces if we had to. We drank our coffee and pretended to read. It didn’t help any that I’d picked papers in Turkish and Greek, of which neither Walter nor I understood a word.

After a couple of coffees, I called the waiter and asked him in German for the men’s room. He sent me through a doorway in the corner back of the gypsies’ platform. The men’s room was at the end of a thirty-foot corridor. The stairway to the second floor was off the corridor, about halfway down.

There was a dim gaslight at the head of the stairs, but there was enough light for me to see two doors which were numbered. At first I thought it might be smart to engage a room. But we had no baggage. It was the kind of place where a couple could get a room without baggage but a man alone would be looked upon with suspicion.

I went back to the table, and Walter went through the same routine.

Most of the men in the coffeehouse were from the railroad yards. There were two or three Wagons-Lits porters in their brown uniforms, trainmen in the habitual dark blue, and enginemen whose calling was apparent, even in civilian clothes, from the coal-dust tinge of their skins. The few women seemed to be there for the ancient purpose.

There was a short, barrel-chested man who moved through the room conversing with the customers. I took him to be the proprietor. I’d forgotten to ask Hiram to describe him. The finger-marked menu on the table said the owner’s name was Georgy Kis, but his Prussian mustache and bristly haircut made me think he’d been born Georg Klein and later Magyarized his name.

By the time Walter returned, I had decided I was going to climb the stairs. After another coffee, I’d tell Walter within the waiter’s hearing that I felt ill. I’d make sure I looked ill, too, on my way to the corridor. I didn’t think it would take me long to case the upstairs floors, but if Walter found the need to warn me, he was to give the gypsies five dollars to play “Lilli Marlene,” a tune every band in Central Europe knows by heart.

The corridor was empty, and I made the second floor without being seen. I thought the stairs creaked unduly under the tattered red carpet, but the gypsy band was attacking “Black Eyes” with gusto sufficient to cover anything.

There were half a dozen rooms on the second floor. The doors were closed, and there was no way to tell which were occupied without hearing voices. I stood at the end of the narrow hallway, as far from the flickering gaslight as possible, until the music stopped. Someone was talking in the third room. I put my ear to the door but a man was speaking Hungarian without an accent, an ability which neither Schmidt nor Borodin possessed.

I tried the top floor. I heard a woman scream and I raced down the corridor, but when I reached the door she was shouting in Hungarian. I went downstairs as fast as I could.

The proprietor was talking with Walter in German when I returned to the table. He turned to bow to me. I tried to read his face, but it was totally without expression.

“May I suggest a Fernet Branca?” he said. “I find an upset stomach nearly always comes from one’s nerves.” He glanced at my bandaged hands.

“Something I ate,” I said. “My nerves are fine.”

When the music started again and the proprietor had moved away, I buried my nose in the Athens paper and tried to figure the next move.

I couldn’t shuttle between the café and the upper floors indefinitely. I’d been lucky to get away with one visit without being caught. There was no way to determine behind which of the twelve doors Schmidt and Borodin might be conferring, if they were in the place at all. I couldn’t try all the doors or break down the locked ones to see if Maria were a prisoner in one of them.

The only course was to drink coffee and pretend to read and hope that Schmidt or Borodin would appear. I put down the paper and started to explain to Walter, but it wasn’t necessary because Schmidt came in the front door at that moment. Borodin was not with him.

I kicked Walter under the table. I held the newspaper in front of my face, but I was placed so that I could watch Schmidt out of the corner of my eye. I expected him to head for the corridor which led to the stairway but he stood just inside the door. He stuck his head forward like a vulture, peering through those gold-rimmed spectacles until he spotted the proprietor and went to him at the far end of the room. They talked for some time, their bullet heads close together. I got the impression that Schmidt was excited; he used his hands steadily in emphasis.

I called our waiter and paid the bill. I wanted to be ready to leave the moment Schmidt did. He wore no hat or coat, and I guessed he couldn’t have come far, that he’d left his things in some nearby building.

The proprietor accompanied Schmidt to the door, and they shook hands.

I didn’t want to risk bumping into Schmidt in front of the place so I counted to sixty before Walter and I got up from the table and followed. We reached the sidewalk just in time to see him enter the tenement next door.

“We’ve got to tell the Carrs,” I said to Walter. “You watch to see Schmidt doesn’t come out again. I’ll try to find Hiram in the alley.”

“Whistle ‘Dixie,’ Mr. Stodder,” Walter said. “That’s our signal. Seems only Americans know that tune.”

I waded through the snow to the back of the alley, praying that Hiram wouldn’t put a bullet through my head before I could come near enough to risk whistling.

I took cover behind a large block of granite, on the edge of the stonecutter’s property. I stuck my head out and whistled the first few bars of “Dixie.” I listened but nobody came and there was no response. I waited a minute or so and then whistled louder, but still nothing happened. I moved across the alley, into the yard back of the coffeehouse. I whistled again and still there was no answer.

I went back to the sidewalk, to Walter.

“They don’t answer,” I said. I thought I might have misunderstood Hiram’s plan, but Walter confirmed it. Teensy and Hiram would be outside to cover our exit in case of trouble.

“Maybe they’re across the street,” Walter said. But we both knew that was impossible. There was only a thin strip of sidewalk in front of the high iron fence which keeps the living out of the cemetery. There wasn’t any place, other than the alley and the back yard, from which Hiram and Teensy could have watched the coffeehouse.

We couldn’t stand on the sidewalk indefinitely.

“I guess we’d better follow Schmidt,” Walter said. “Maybe Mr. and Mrs. Carr went around the corner for a cup of coffee. It’s cold standing in the snow.”

That was no moment to start thinking of what might have happened.

We went into the four-story tenement. There weren’t any letterboxes with names on them. It didn’t matter, though, because the cellar door was ajar, and we heard voices and we knew what had happened to Hiram and Teensy.

We found them at the foot of the cellar stairs. The body of Major Felix Borodin was lying twenty feet away, half concealed by the furnace. The door at the far end of the cellar was opened, the wooden door banging back and forth in the wind.

“Schmidt killed him,” Hiram said.

I went to the back door and there was enough light to see tracks in the fresh snow.

“When Schmidt left here to go to the coffeehouse,” Teensy said, “we spotted him. We knew he was coming back because he’d left his hat and coat. We figured we could look over the place while he was next door.

“We heard him come back, but he didn’t come upstairs as we’d counted. By the time Hiram got down here, Schmidt had fired two shots. Then he must have heard Hiram’s step on the stairs because he went through the door over there.”

First Marcel Blaye, then Ivan Strakhov, now Felix Borodin.

“You’d better go upstairs,” Hiram said quietly. “Up on the top floor.”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant.

“Schmidt was on his way up there,” Hiram said. “That was next.”

“There’s nobody else in the building,” Teensy said. “You can go right up.”

I had to call Walter to help me break down the door because Schmidt had locked it from the outside. I heard muffled sounds through the door, the same sounds that must have told Hiram and Teensy who was locked up inside.

I stood on the threshold. I was afraid to walk in. I was afraid of what I might see. I called her name, and she staggered toward me. I caught her in my arms.

I knew then that I would kill Dr. Schmidt if it took me the rest of my life to find him.