“I’ve got a match,” I said in Russian. It’s one of the first phrases in the book. “In my left pocket.” I couldn’t have held even a matchbox. Schmidt had ripped my hands.
I felt a hand in my pocket. Then I heard a match strike. It burst into flame. It lit my cigarette. I took a couple of deep puffs.
The hand drew back the lighted match. I saw the face of my rescuer, and the cigarette dropped from my lips into the snow.
I had expected to see a Russian soldier or a Hungarian gendarme. But the man standing next to me was neither. He was a tall, rawboned man with a wide smile.
It was Hiram Carr’s butler, Walter.
“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
