working.”
I lowered the window. I looked at my watch, and it was a few minutes before nine o’clock. Maria had been inside with Schmidt nearly an hour and a half.
Apparently the apricot brandy was flowing freely; when Hiram opened the coffeehouse door the patrons were singing with the gypsy band. Hiram and Teensy couldn’t have been gone more than five minutes but it seemed to me they’d never return. Two or three times I swore with impatience and found myself opening the door to follow them. Teensy had left me a pack of cigarettes; I smoked one after another. If I inspected the safety catch on that Luger once, I looked at it twenty times. A policeman passed, swinging his nightstick. He must have heard the engine because he stopped and stared at the car. I took the gun in my hand when he came close. But he looked at the diplomatic license plates, turned on his heel, and walked away.
Teensy came out of the coffeehouse first. She said, “I’m afraid there’s a hitch.”
“What do you mean?” I said. I didn’t like the look in her face.
“Your girl isn’t there,” Teensy said. “The proprietor said she and Schmidt left an hour ago.”
“You couldn’t have looked for them,” I said. “She wouldn’t have left. Schmidt wouldn’t have left his car here. You didn’t look far enough. The proprietor’s a liar.”
Teensy shook her head. “We looked all right. They’ve been gone nearly an hour, the proprietor says.”
Then Schmidt couldn’t have been alerted by Hermann. The doctor hadn’t waited for Hermann or anybody else. He never had the intention of waiting. He’d ordered Otto to kill me in the train, whether or not we found the envelope.
But how could Schmidt have forced Maria to leave a public place against her will? He couldn’t have used a gun unless the proprietor and all the patrons were in league with him. It didn’t make sense. I remembered my doubts about whether Maria understood German. I recalled contrasting her calm in Schmidt’s hideout with the stark terror she’d shown at the mere sight of him on the Orient Express. Why had she—
Hiram’s high-pitched voice brought me back to earth. “If you’ll slide over, we’ll get moving.”
“Where are we going?” I said. “What about Schmidt and the girl?”
Hiram let in the clutch. “You’re coming to our place. There’s a lot you’re going to tell me. Then we can think about how to find Mademoiselle Torres. And put that gun in the glove compartment. You’d better unload it. You won’t need it now.”
Hiram drove to the Danube, then headed north along the quais.
“Have you ever been to Budapest before?” Teensy asked.
I told her I’d lived there for more than two years, from the beginning of 1939 to just before Pearl Harbor. But I had something else on my mind.
“Will you let me keep the Luger?” I said to Hiram.
“No,” he said. “You still want to leave us?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got to know what’s happened to Maria, to Mademoiselle Torres. If you’ll let me out anywhere along here.”
“Nothing doing,” Hiram said. “We aren’t running a rescue business for free. I want information from you and I want it right away. Besides, how far do you think you’d get without us? You’d be picked up in an hour by the police. Do you understand Hungarian?”
I said I did. Hiram switched on the car radio.
The announcer was saying, “The People’s Democracy has brought peace and prosperity to Hungary.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I said.
“Wait a minute,” Hiram said. “Just be patient.”
There was a lot more of the usual Communist party-line harangue, then the “Internationale.”
“Attention,” the announcer said. “The Ministry of the Interior has issued the following communique:
“A reward of 25,000 forints will be paid for information leading to the arrest of foreign agents, guilty of murdering a Red Army officer on Hungarian soil. The crime was committed this afternoon aboard the Vienna- Budapest local train by a man and woman, traveling on Swiss passports made out in the names of Maria Torres and Marcel Blaye. The Capitalist perpetrators of this unspeakable act are believed to be in the neighborhood of Budapest, having escaped from the train at Kelenfold station before their crime was discovered. All citizens are ordered to telephone police headquarters or notify the nearest policeman the moment this dangerous pair is spotted. Warning: they are believed to be heavily armed.”
Hiram switched off the radio. “They’ve been broadcasting every fifteen minutes. Do you want us to let you off?”
“I’ve got to do something about the girl,” I said. “I won’t leave her.”
“We want to see her just as much as you do,” Teensy said, “but not for the same reasons.”
Hiram seemed to find the remark very humorous.
“And I’d like a long talk with Herr Doktor Schmidt,” Hiram added. “Take my word for it, Mr. Stodder, Schmidt won’t kill her. He won’t do anything until he knows where that Manila envelope has gone.”
I said to Teensy, “Then you found it?”
“No,” she said. “Somebody must have been ahead of us.”
“How did you know about the envelope?” I said.
“It’s a long story,” Hiram said. “I’ll explain when we get to our place. But I saw you were very anxious to examine an envelope in the dining car. Then Teensy saw you duck into the end compartment on your way out of the train. We figured you went in there for a purpose. But we didn’t get a chance to look before the train arrived at Keleti. They sealed the car after they found the Russian’s body.”
We passed the Franz Josef bridge, and the Russians’ winged victory monument was black against a blacker sky over the Gellert Hill. We passed the Elizabeth bridge, and there were the naked walls of the royal palace atop the Buda hills.
The Carrs lived in a big, old-fashioned house at the end of the Stalin ut, near the City Park. The house was less than a mile in a straight line across the park from Schmidt’s hideout on the Mexikoi ut.
The door was opened by a smiling man whom Teensy addressed as Walter. She said Walter and his wife Millie, who did the cooking, had been with the Carrs for many years. Walter was an ex-prizefighter, a heavyweight. I’m over six feet, but Walter towered over me.
Hiram produced a shaker full of cocktails but neither he nor Teensy would discuss Maria or Schmidt or Hungary until we’d finished Millie’s chicken dinner. Hiram said they hadn’t been back to America in more than five years and he quizzed me on everything from major league baseball to the old age pension. After dinner, after he’d poured the Benedictine and thrown a couple of logs on the open fire, we talked about what was on our minds.
I told my story for the third time, just as I’d related it to Maria the night before, the way I’d told it to Schmidt, the story of my brother and how I’d bought Marcel Blaye’s passport for a forgery. Twenty-four hours earlier, even three hours earlier, it had sounded reasonable and logical. With each later telling, it began to assume a quality of fantasy until it sounded only half real to me. I found myself wondering whether I hadn’t suffered some sort of mental aberration and that perhaps neither Maria nor Schmidt nor Strakhov nor any of them had ever existed.
I told the Carrs everything, step by step, until Teensy found me in the dark and silent train in the Keleti yards. She and Hiram listened without moving except to throw logs on the fire from time to time or mix me a highball.
“And that’s all I know,” I said. “How do you two fit into all this?”
Hiram lit a cigar.
“The night before last,” Hiram said, “I was called on the telephone from Vienna. I was told to get over there right away. There wasn’t a train or a plane so Walter drove us over.”
He paused to look at Teensy, but his remarks were still addressed to me. “You mustn’t expect me to tell you everything,” Hiram said. “But since you’ve been frank with me, I’ll tell you all I can about the mess you’re in.
“When we reached Vienna, we were told that a man named Marcel Blaye, in whom a great many governments had expressed interest, had been murdered. Fortunately, if one can use that word in connection with murder, Blaye’s body was found in the American zone. I say it was fortunate because public knowledge of his death would be most inconvenient at this time. Doctor Schmidt knows Blaye has been murdered because he killed him. But the Russians still do not know Blaye’s fate. All they know is that an envelope which he was carrying was brought into Hungary by Mademoiselle Torres, his secretary. They know that Major Strakhov accompanied someone with Blaye’s passport on today’s train. They still think it was Blaye himself. I propose they go on thinking so.”
