Passport To Peril

BLOOD ON THE SNOW

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.”

There was a step on the marble floor, and the flashlight found me.

“What’s back there?” the man’s voice said.

“Nothing,” the Countess Orlovska said. “There’s nobody here. They must have headed for the fence again.”

“All right,” said the man. “Hurry up and get out of here. We haven’t a minute to spare.”

“It’s okay with me,” Orlovska said as the gate clanged shut again. “I don’t like graveyards any more than you do.”

I waited until I could no longer hear the Russian car before I went out on the road. I was lucky in guessing the direction of Asztalos Sandor ut because Walter found me a few minutes after he had climbed the fence on Hiram’s orders.

We made the Buda hills without trouble. The Russians must have been sure we were trapped in the cemetery because there were no roadblocks as there had been the night before. We never even saw a policeman.

We made the plane just as it braked to a stop, and Maria was there with Teensy and Walter’s wife. We abandoned the car in the middle of the pasture.

The plane climbed over the trees and as soon as we had leveled off, the pilot gave us whisky. Hiram had lost a good deal of blood and he would be in the Vienna hospital for a long time, but he was conscious and took Marcel Blaye’s envelope when I handed it to him.

While the others pretended to watch the countryside in the lightening dawn, I took Maria into my arms and kissed her.