Butcher of Belgrade

Thirteen

There was little choice left. The train would be nearing Dimitrovgrad and entering Bulgaria soon, and then my job would get much tougher. I could not just sit back and wait for Richter to show himself. I had to make a methodical search of the sleeping compartments, knocking on each and every door. The tactic might get me in trouble with the porter, but I had to chance that.

I decided to go to the far end of the first sleeping car, the one toward the front of the train. I would start my search at its far end and work my way back through both cars. But that plan became suddenly and dramatically unnecessary. As I reached a point about halfway through the first sleeping car, a compartment door opened, and there was Hans Richter in the corridor just a few feet from me, staring at me as if I were an apparition.

“You!” he hissed.

I noticed that he was carrying the radio.

“Call it quits, Richter,” I warned. “You’re not making it to Sofia now.”

But Richter had other ideas. He uttered something under his breath in German, then he whirled and started running down the corridor away from me.

He was heading toward the sleeping car I had just left, toward the end of the train. The train was too crowded to attempt a shot. Instead I gave chase.

A couple of moments later Richter was on the rear platform of the train. He had gone as far as he could go in that direction. When I got to the door, Wilhelmina out, he was waiting for me. The door slammed back against me as I tried to move through its opening on the platform. I almost lost my footing as the door struck my chest and arm. Richter had given it a hard shove. I stepped warily through the doorway and just got a glimpse of Richter disappearing up a ladder that led to the top of the car.

“Give up, Richter!” I shouted above the noise of the train. But he had disappeared from view.

There seemed little to do but follow him.

I leaned out over the tracks, looking up the ladder, and just in time I saw Richter aiming at my head with a small Belgian revolver. The gun barked out, I ducked back, and the slug spent itself on the speeding ground under the wheels. Then Richter was moving along the top of the car toward the front of the train.

I swung quickly onto the ladder and climbed it to the top of the car. Richter was already at the far end, leaping from the dining car to the last sleeper. He lost his balance momentarily, as he landed on the top of the next car, but he kept his footing.

I ran along the top of the dining car after him. When I reached the end of it, I leaped the distance between it and the sleeper without pausing and kept running.

Richter turned and fired two more shots at me. I saw him aim and ducked low. Both shots went wild, although the second one chewed at the car roof under my feet. I returned fire with Wilhelmina, but with the train moving under us, my aim was bad, too, and the slug sang harmlessly past Richter’s head. Then he was running again.

Richter jumped another space between cars. He was getting better at it. I followed; we ran and leaped the length of several more cars. Richter was now getting close to the front of the train.

As Richter made another jump between cars, the train swerved, and he fell to one knee. When he turned and saw me closing on him, he aimed the small revolver again and fired two more shots. I flattened myself on the top of the next car, and the slugs chewed up wood on the superstructure beside my head and arm. Richter pulled the trigger of the revolver a third time, but nothing happened. Then he angrily hurled the gun at me. It bounced off the car top and disappeared over the edge.

Richter was turning and running again. I rose, holstered the Luger, and followed. Then I saw a mountainside loom ahead and a black opening yawning in it — tunnel The train rocketed into the tunnel, and Richter flattened himself just in time as his car disappeared into the blackness. I threw myself face down, too, and then I was immersed in darkness. In a moment I saw the disc of light growing at the other end, and emerged from the black tube into daylight again.

Richter was already moving toward the engine. I got to my feet and ran after him. I wanted to prevent him from getting back down to the interior of the train. He jumped onto the first day coach behind the engine and kept going. When I made the jump, the train lurched around a sharp bend in the tracks. I fell to my right and almost slipped off the top of the car.

I waited until the tracks straightened again. Then I moved on toward Richter. The train swayed again over some uneven track as Richter neared the front of the car. He fell and dropped the radio. It slid to the edge of the car roof, but Richter grabbed it before it went over.

Richter was at the front end of the car now. He was looking at the engine as I moved to close the small distance between us. He decided against jumping to the engine and moved instead to the ladder leading over the side of the car. I reached him just as he got one foot on it.

I grabbed him with all my strength and pulled him up to the car roof. He glared at me as he struggled to break free.

“Let me go!” he yelled. “Do you think I have created all this for nothing?”

His words were almost whisked away by the wind before I could grasp what he was saying. But his eyes told me everything. I was succeeding where everybody else had failed, and Hans Richter was finally trapped. In a few short days, I had become his nemesis.

I slammed a fist into his square face and broke his nose.

Richter fell to the roof of the moving car. The countryside slipped past below us at a dizzying pace. I grabbed at him again, but he kicked out and knocked my legs from under me, and I fell beside him and rolled to the very edge of the roof.

I glanced at the rush of ground below me as I grabbed at the edge of the roof with my hands and legs. While I inched away from the edge, Richter regained his feet Then, as I turned to rise, he kicked out at my head.

I evaded the kick, and Richter lost his balance again, and slipped to his knees. We both struggled to our feet together, but I had the edge this time. I slammed a fist into his midsection, and he doubled under the impact. Then I swung hard at the side of his head and connected. He staggered backward and almost fell down again.

I was now between Richter and the front edge of the car’s roof. With a last desperate effort, he swung the radio at my head. This time I saw it coming and side-stepped as Richter came at me. The momentum of his charge carried him past me to the end of the car and over it. As he flew by, I grabbed at the radio and snatched it from his grasp. Richter plummeted into the open space between the car and the engine.

I had no chance to save him. I almost went over myself as I grabbed at the radio. In another instant, Richter was falling between the car and the engine, and then he had hit the tracks below. In a split-second, the car rolled over his crumpled form.

It was not a pretty sight. Richter did not even have time to scream. The body disappeared under the moving car. Then as I glanced over the side, I saw a torn leg and another part of the body that was not identifiable tumble away from the track bed. The Butcher of Belgrade had been chopped up.

The train was slowing. We were obviously nearing Dimitrovgrad, and I could not be on that train when it got there. I climbed down the ladder that Richter had tried to use earlier, and as the train slowed even more, I jumped to the rushing ground.

I tried to keep my legs under me, but I could not. I turned head over heels twice, scraping flesh and tearing cloth as I rolled. Then, miraculously, I ended on my back at the bottom of a small embankment, and I saw the observation platform of the train recede down the track.

I felt for broken bones, but I found none. I had lost the radio, but that was lying within fifteen feet of me. I moved over to it, and in the light of a late afternoon sun, opened it at the back and looked inside. There it was as I had concluded, set into the works of the radio so that it looked like part of the circuitry — the satellite monitoring device.

I closed the radio as I shook my head. My left hand and cheek burned where they had been rubbed raw by gravel along the track bed. I wiped at my face with a handkerchief and looked down the track toward the place where Richter had fallen off the train. It was a good mile or so back there, and I could see nothing.

A parallel set of tracks ran about thirty yards away, and a slow train was approaching on them. It was going in the direction that I had just come from, heading toward the Dragoman Pass. Somewhere up ahead this train would switch over to the main track.

It was a big break for me, for it would get me out of this neighborhood in a hurry and in a way that I could avoid the authorities. I quickly crossed over to the other tracks. In a moment the train was moving past me, increasing its slow speed gradually. I waited until the last car, one of several second class coaches, was approaching, and then I started running as fast as I could. I grabbed at the rail of the steps on the rear platform and held on, and the train jerked my legs out from under me. A moment later I was standing on the platform with Hans Richter’s radio still in my hand, watching the landscape around Dimitrovgrad slip into the distance.

In less than five minutes the train passed the spot where the Butcher had met an appropriate death. I saw what looked like a heap of old clothing lying between the tracks, but the debris was not identifiable as a person. The rest of Richter was lying somewhere along the far side of the tracks. I stared pensively at the heap for a long moment, and then it disappeared from sight.

Ursula would be unhappy that Richter had not been brought back to Bonn for trial. But there had been a kind of justice in the end of his ugly career — a kind of violent retribution.

Ursula and I would spend tonight in some small room at Crveni Krst. I would touch her body, and we would think only of those warm moments together.

We had earned the right.