The Enemy Inside

FORTY-THREE

Harry and I hoof it toward the traffic bridge where the lake pours into the river. On the other side of the bridge is the main Lucerne train station, a modern glass and steel structure.

In front of it in the distance I can see the freestanding remnant, the high arching stone façade of the entrance to the nineteenth-century station. That building was lost to a fire in the early 1970s.

In the dead of night there is almost no traffic at all on the bridge. It is nearing two in the morning. Harry and I walk briskly without saying a word, dragging our luggage over the rough cobblestones as we go. The two bags bounce all over the place. Off to the right I see banks of flashing lights just across the river near the entrance to the old wooden footbridge a few hundred yards away, downriver.

“They must be doing some work,” says Harry.

Four minutes later as we approach the other side of the bridge we see that a small crowd has formed near the stone walkway leading along the river. There are a dozen people or more, all looking down the river toward the flashing lights.

By the time we get there, the contagion of curiosity has infected us. We stop for a moment and look down the river along the quay on this side. It is not construction. I can see police vehicles, several of them, and a larger crowd near the end of the wooden bridge. “I wonder what happened,” says Harry.

A fellow standing in front of us hears him. He turns, looks at us, and says, “Someone murdered an old man coming off the bridge.”

As shocking as it is, ordinarily we might not have thought anything more about it, except that Harry and I were instantly troubled by the same question. We look at each other.

“No,” says Harry. “Couldn’t be. He left almost an hour ago. You heard him. He was gonna take a taxi back to his son’s apartment. We gave him the money.” Still, the rash of accidents leaves us both wondering.

We are going to miss the 2 A.M. train. By the time we drag the rolling cases the hundred and eighty yards or so down along the river, Harry and I convince ourselves that it can’t be Korff. It isn’t possible. Some other poor soul.

Harry had given him the money and extracted the promise that he would take a cab home. I was standing right there. I saw the whole thing. This image of the three of us in the hotel lobby makes it even more surreal when I see the back of Korff’s jacket. The collar is still wet with his blood as he lies facedown on the concrete, a few feet beyond the steps leading up to the bridge.

Standing in the crowd holding our suitcases and looking at his dead body on the ground, Harry and I feel as if we’ve been sucker-punched.

Police officers are standing around, a couple of them in plain clothes-detectives, I am assuming. One of them is taking pictures with a large SLR camera, moving in for different angles around the corpse. The flashes of the strobe light up the cold night air each time he snaps the shutter and fires. The uniforms are telling the crowd every few seconds to step back.

“Why didn’t he take the cab?” says Harry. “He said he would.”

“Maybe he needed the money,” I tell him.

“The cost of a taxi wasn’t worth his life.”

“I’m sure he knows that now.” What is troubling to me is not just the violence of the act, but its utter futility. “Why? Why do it at all?”

“What do you mean?” says Harry.

“Why bother to kill him?”

“Obviously because he knew too much,” says Harry.

“Yes. But he’d already told us everything he knew. Whoever killed him had to know that. They were either tailing him or. .”

“Or what?” says Harry.

“Or they were tailing us. Either way they had to know he already met and talked with us. If the purpose was to silence him, why not kill him before he talked instead of after? It’s the pattern. The same thing happened with the girl, remember?”

“I wasn’t there,” says Harry.

“That’s right. It was Herman and me. They waited until after we talked to her in the motel room. And then they killed her. Killed both of them, Ben and her friend. And Graves. I met with him at his office. We talked. Next morning he’s dead in the underground. Each time they waited until after they talked to us, and then they killed them.”

“Kiss-of-death syndrome,” says Harry. “Maybe we need to stop talking.”

“But we’re still alive.”

“We may not be if we stick around here much longer.” Harry checks his watch. “We can still make the three o’clock train if we hurry.”

We make it to the station, Harry checks our tickets, three-day rail passes, good for another two days. He squats down to tie his shoelace. As he does it he sees something on his bag down near one of the rolling wheels.

I turn to check the illuminated sign showing departure times and cities to make sure we get to the correct platform.

When I turn back Harry has his finger to his nose. Seems he’s rolled his bag through something foul.

“What is it, errant dog?” I say.

He ignores me, stands up, grabs the handle of the rolling bag, and walks away.

“Where you going? The platform’s the other way,” I tell him.

Harry doesn’t say anything. He just keeps walking. He pulls his bag over against the far wall inside the station, away from the crowd. I follow him.

“What’s wrong?”

“Do you have anything valuable inside your suitcase?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Some clothes, underwear, extra pair of shoes, my shaving kit. Just the usual.”

“Anything with your name on it?”

I think for a moment. “No. I don’t think so.”

“You want to be sure,” he says. “You can replace everything when we get home. In the meantime, tear the ID label off your bag.” Harry is doing this with his own luggage as he talks.

“What?”

“Just do it,” he says. “And while you’re at it make sure there’s no stick-on barcodes from the airlines on the outside, anything that can identify you.”

“Why?”

“How much time did you have to carefully go through your bag before we left the hotel?”

“What are you talking about? None. Neither did you.”

“Exactly!” says Harry.

He turns his head and looks at me, and suddenly it dawns on me that maybe it’s not what they took out of our bags we should be worried about. Harry knows something he’s not telling me.

“Is there something on board?” I ask.

“You bet.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Could be.”

A cop in a uniform with a dog on a leash forty feet away is sniffing bags. Suddenly this has Harry’s full attention. “Right now I’m wishing it was more crowded. Rush hour or something,” says Harry. “If he starts to come this way”-Harry nods toward the cop-“just walk away and take the bag with you. Don’t run. Go out the way we came in.”

“Listen, why don’t we roll them into the bathroom, use the handicapped stall,” I tell him. “Open ’em up and check them out.”

“Unless I miss my bet we’re not gonna find anything unless you can come up with a sharp knife. I’m thinking they slit the lining and slipped it between the inner lining and the outer case. I’ve seen it done,” says Harry. “Super-glue the cut. .” Harry suddenly looks down at his shoes and smiles. “I don’t want to keep looking at him. If I do, I’m gonna look guilty and he’ll come over here with the dog. In which case we won’t need a knife,” he says.

“What is it, explosives?”

“No. If they wanted to do that they would have left the bags alone and slipped a couple of devices under our beds,” says Harry. “I think you’re right. I don’t think they want to kill us. At least not yet. At the moment I think they have something else in mind.”

“I’m listening.”

“The suitcases in the room. The comb on the bed. Everything tossed and put back so carelessly inside the bags. No one is that stupid. What they wanted was to send us a message,” says Harry. “Let us know they’d been in the rooms.”

“Why?”

“My guess is so we’d panic and run.”

“And here we are,” I tell him.

“Yes, but we’ve had time to think. That and some really fine luck,” says Harry.

“What are you talking about?”

Harry’s eyes keep tracking the cop with the dog as the canine and his master move toward the platforms. “My bag. I’m gonna hate to lose it,” he says. “I’ve had it at least ten years. It’s been everywhere with me. Thing like that grows on you.”

“You make it sound like a family pet.”

“Well, it just did me a favor no dog at the airport is ever going to do.”

“What?”

“It told me what I had in my bag. About a month after I bought this case it got hung up on one of the convey jobs at one of the airports. Brand-new case and suddenly it has a small rip in the outer canvas down near the left wheel. You can imagine how angry I was.”

“Yeah, I can imagine.”

“Well, between the little rip and the bouncing ride over the cobblestones, if that dog over there picks up the powder trail I’m leaving, he’s probably gonna OD,” says Harry. “I’m surprised he hasn’t already found it. If he does, you’ll want to get out of my way, ’cause I’m gonna have to outrun him dragging the suitcase all the way to the river.”

“What? You mean cocaine?”

“No. Hell,” says Harry, “over here that’s a party favor. Get caught and you gotta say ten Hail Marys and write ‘pardon my sinuses’ eight times on the blackboard. No. Don’t look now but I think that snow coming out behind from my wheels is China White.”

Harry is talking heroin. “Why kill us,” he says, “when they can dump us in some European dungeon for a few decades? In the meantime, everybody who’s chatted with us is turning up dead.”

“So what do you want to do? We could just leave the bags here and walk away.”

“We do that, two abandoned bags, they’ll find them before we can get halfway to the platform.” Harry is looking at the cop with the dog again.

“We could take them back to the river and dump them,” I tell him.

“Not a bad idea,” says Harry. “I wish you’d come up with it about five minutes ago. You might want to take a gander at the door.”

When I turn to casually look I see another uniformed cop with a dog on a leash standing there. Two more come through one of the side doors. Beyond the glass doors I see at least three police cars outside with flashing lights.

“One might think there were a lot of druggies that come through here in the middle of the night,” says Harry.

“No. It’s overflow from the crime scene. They’re thinking whoever did it might be trying to take a train out of town.”

“Well, aren’t we lucky,” says Harry. “We’re gonna get busted, but for the wrong reason.”

We watch as the cops all gather by one of the doors. They hold a conference. For the moment, at least, the way to the platform is clear.

“Won’t do us any good.” Harry reads my mind. “They’re sure to search the trains before they leave.”

Six more uniformed cops come through the doors as we’re talking.

“Did you notice on the trains they have no porters? Everybody does their own thing with their bags.”

“What about it?” he says.

“Follow me.” We grab the bags and roll toward the platform halfway across the station. The train leaving for Zurich departs in ten minutes, assuming the authorities don’t delay it.

Along the way there are trains parked at almost every platform. Some of them are dark, the doors locked, waiting for the morning commute.

When we get to Platform 36, there are two trains, both of them hot: the one to Zurich and the one directly across from it headed to Bern. The doors on both are open.

“Follow me.”

“Where you going?” says Harry. “That’s the wrong train.”

“I know.”

A couple of seconds later I step onto the train for Bern and pull my rolling bag on behind me. Harry follows me but with confusion written across his face.

There is already a pile of bags inside the barred-off area for luggage at the bottom of the stairs. We lug the two rollers and toss them on top. Then we climb the stairs to the passenger area on the upper level. I walk down the aisle, Harry following behind me. There’re only four people in the car, lots of open seats. But Harry and I don’t take any of them. By the time we reach the front of the car one of the conductors is climbing the steps coming up the other way toward us. When I see him I smile. “I wonder if you could help us?”

“If I can, monsieur.”

“Is this the train to Zurich?”

“No, no, the train to Zurich is over there.” He points toward the other side of the platform.

“Ah, stupid Americans,” I tell him.

“No, not at all.” He smiles.

He steps to one side and Harry and I quickly brush past him, down the stairs and across the platform.

Six minutes later we watch through the windows from our seats as one of the German shepherds goes apeshit trying to eat our bags over on the other train. The cop trying to hold him on the leash looks like he’s about to go waterskiing behind the beast.

“Catnip for dogs,” says Harry.

I’m praying the animal doesn’t bite through the ballistic fabric on the outer bag. If he does, the blizzard of white powder will have them shutting down the entire station.

Our train suddenly lurches, cars bump together. It starts to move, slowly at first. It rolls along the platform picking up speed, moving past the pillars that support the transparent arches of the roof high overhead. As the train accelerates the pillars begin to look like pickets on a fence until they suddenly disappear.

We roll out of the station and through the rail yard. Harry wipes the sweat from his forehead. “Next stop, Zurich, and the plane ride home. Do me a favor,” says Harry. “The next time I say let’s not go, let’s not go.”