Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

The Munich Courier by Robert Edward Eckels{© 1971 by Robert Edward Eckels.}

A new approach to the spy story — counterespionage by means of “pure deduction”… Now see if you can spot the crucial clue…

The rain started in earnest just as I left the train station and to cap it off there wasn’t an Army car waiting for me. I hadn’t really expected one although Giddings had assured me that of course there would be one. But then Giddings worked out of a nice warm office in Berlin and it tended to give him an overly optimistic viewpoint.

“It’s really the Army’s job more than ours,” he had said, his ever-present pencil clasped between his two hands as he swiveled back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling. Giddings had opted for the C.I.A. when he was graduated from an Ivy League college, but he affected the same rising-young-executive mannerisms as his classmates who’d chosen Madison Avenue or Wall Street. “An Army courier traveling north from Munich was murdered on a train and some passports he was carrying were stolen,” he went on. “But the Army’s criminal investigation people haven’t been able to come up with anything solid so far. Since we have at least a peripheral interest because some of those missing passports are going to turn up in the hands of agents trying to infiltrate the U.S., I volunteered your services.”

He brought his eyes down to mine and smiled ingenuously. “After all, you did prove yourself a pretty good detective in that Murphy affair behind the Iron Curtain. And when I mentioned you to General Cole he was most enthusiastic about giving you a crack at it.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said drily. Despite General Cole’s enthusiasm I had no illusions about the kind of reception I’d get from the men in the field. It’s only in television, movies and books that investigative agencies welcome outsiders coming in to tell them their business. Nevertheless, Giddings was my boss, and where he said go I went.

Now, with fine rain soaking into my topcoat and no Army car to meet me, I found nothing to convince me I was wrong. Still, a job was a job. I shrugged, turned up the collar of my coat, and ducked out to compete with the rest of the passengers for a cab.

The lieutenant who came in answer to my call from, the guard post at the main gate to the U.S. Army post just outside town was properly apologetic. He was also very young and very sincere. So he just might have really believed that the whole thing had resulted from a mixup in dates. I didn’t contradict him and he took me straight to the post adjutant.

Who was something else again. He was a short barrel-shaped man named Donovan — a captain and well aware of the fact that he was growing old in grade. His graying hair was cropped Prussian short, and his eyes were small and bitter. He glared at me sourly from behind his desk. “So you’re the man from Berlin,” he said. There was no welcome in his voice.

I nodded. Besides Donovan and myself there were two others in the room: a tall sleepy-eyed man in civilian clothes named Hurley who was a sergeant in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and a uniformed corporal named Lassiter.

“Well,” Donovan went on, “I don’t know what you expect to accomplish.” He shot an angry glance at Hurley. “The C.I.D. has been raking the thing over for the past three weeks. With no luck.”

Lassiter smiled nervously, but Hurley’s face didn’t change.

Donovan waited another moment, then turned back to me. “Are you acquainted with the facts in the case?” he said.

“Only in general,” I said. “They told me in Berlin that you’d fill me in on the details here.”

Donovan nodded curtly. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the passport situation or not,” he said. “Military personnel don’t travel on passports, of course. But their dependents do, and so do U.S. civilian employees of the Army.

“Now, German law requires that all aliens residing more or less permanently in Germany have their passports stamped each month at a police station. To spare our civilians this inconvenience the Status of Forces agreement exempts anyone with a properly validated passport that identifies him as an Army dependent or employee. Unfortunately, the validation is good for only eighteen months. Don’t ask me why, because the normal overseas tour for a career soldier or civilian employee is three years.”

“So,” I said, “the passports have to be revalidated at least once during each tour of duty.”

“Right,” Donovan said. “And the only place it can be done is at Army Headquarters at Heidelberg.” He smiled wryly. “Originally each post would send its own courier to Heidelberg whenever it had a batch of passports needing revalidation. But then we got organization.

“A system was set up whereby the courier from Munich would take the train up once a month. And at each stop he would meet a local courier who’d turn over his passports to be taken on to Heidelberg for revalidation. On the return trip the process would be reversed.”

Donovan paused and made a slight negative gesture with his hand. “Like so many things that don’t work out, it seemed a good idea in theory. It saved the expense involved in each post sending a man all the way to Heidelberg, and Headquarters didn’t get its work piecemeal.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “the Munich courier would be carrying a pretty large number of passports by the time he got to Heidelberg.”

Hurley decided it was time to put his two cents’ worth in. “I’ll say,” he said. “The courier who was killed was only halfway through his run and he already had one hundred and fifty passports with him. Each of them is worth five hundred dollars on the black market — more probably when you’re dealing with so many.”

I whistled. “Which gave him a load worth at least seventy-five thousand dollars!”

“Right,” Donovan said impatiently. He held up a hand palm forward as if to forestall me. “But we recognized the temptations involved and set up strict controls.

“In the first place, every passport is accounted for at every step of the way, and there’s no ducking responsibility. For example, the individual turning one in to me for revalidation gets a signed receipt from me, and the passport itself is locked in my safe until it’s time for the run. Then at the time the passports are batched up for shipment to Heidelberg, a blanket receipt listing every name and passport number is prepared. The local courier signs one copy when he picks up the passports and takes another copy with him for the Munich courier to sign as his receipt.”

“And you better believe we’re careful,” Lassiter put in. I turned to face him. He was a lanky individual with a pleasantly bony face, sandy hair, and a ready grin. “I ought to know,” he said. “I’m the local courier and I walk on eggs every time I have a batch of passports in my hands.”

“He’s right,” Donovan said. “Everyone who handles passports knows he doesn’t stand a chance of going uncaught if he tries to steal one.

“The other possibility, of course, was that somebody would try to hijack the Munich courier. To guard against that we varied the day he’d make his run and the train on which he’d travel, keeping it a secret even from the local couriers until just before they had to make their own runs down to the station. The Munich courier would be in civilian clothes to keep himself inconspicuous. On top of that he was armed with a .45 and he traveled in a private compartment which he kept locked and was under orders to open to nobody.”

“How would he get the passports from the local courier then?” I said.

“At each stop,” Donovan said, “he’d leave the compartment, locking it behind him, and meet the local courier on the platform outside. Together they’d check the local man’s passports against the list-receipt. If everything checked out, the Munich courier would sign the receipt and thereafter assume responsibility for the passports. If anything did not check out, he’d refuse to sign and the local man would have to explain it to his Commanding Officer. Of course,” Donovan added gruffly, “everything always checked out, so there was never any question of that.”

“I see,” I said. “This would be the time when he was most vulnerable, though — when he was going back and forth between the compartment and the platform.”

Donovan gave me another sour look. “Yes,” he said, “but it was also the time when he was most on guard. And with the number of people always around on the platform the possibility of pulling off a hijack undetected was nil.” He shrugged and gave his head a slight toss. “It was a good system,” he said, “and it worked.”

“Until three weeks ago,” I said.

Donovan looked at me for a long moment, then nodded grimly. He turned to Lassiter. “You want to tell him about it, Corporal?” he said. “It was your run.”

“Why not?” Lassiter said cheerfully. “It’ll only be for the thousandth time.” He grinned. “There’s not much to tell, though, really. Three weeks ago I made my regular passport run down to the Bahnhof. As usual I was ten or fifteen minutes early. So I waited around on the platform for the train to come in. Only this time when it did, the Munich courier didn’t get off.”

“What did you do?” I said.

Lassiter shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “The train stops a little longer than usual here because this is where the crew changes. So I thought maybe he was just waiting until most of the crowd got down before he got off.”

“You didn’t get on the train and go looking for him?” I said.

Lassiter shook his head. “No, sir,” he said emphatically. “I didn’t know which car his compartment was in and I was afraid I might miss him if he did get off.”

“But he never did?”

“No,” Lassiter said. “The train pulled out leaving me there on the platform. It was the first time anything like that had ever happened and the only thing I could think of was that somehow there’d been a mixup on the trains. There was another one due from Munich in another hour. So I waited around for it. When there wasn’t a courier on that one either, I came back to the post and returned the passports to Captain Donovan.”

The captain cleared his throat. “The first thing I did, of course, was to phone Munich. They said the courier had left as scheduled.”

“That’s where our people came into it,” Hurley said. There was a decisiveness in his voice that belied his sleepy eyes. “A couple of MP’s met the train at Heidelberg and went through it with the German authorities. They found the Munich courier all right — dead in his compartment. He’d been knifed in the throat and all the passports were gone. Apparently he’d been taken by surprise because his gun was still in its holster and it didn’t look as if there’d been a fight.”

“Was he the regular Munich courier?” I said.

Hurley nodded. “One of the regulars,” he said. “A Master Sergeant named Bruton. He and three other NCO’s rotated the duty.” He smiled tightly, without humor. “And that’s about all we know. We checked back on his run and he made every stop between Munich and here and none after. Which pinpoints it as happening somewhere between the last stop — Rundesheim — and here. We questioned the train crew but none of them saw anything out of the ordinary on that particular stretch of track — or for that matter anywhere, from Munich up to here.”

“How about the other passengers?” I said.

“You tell me who they were,” Hurley said heatedly. “Nobody makes lists of train passengers. By the time we found the body the train was almost empty and nobody’s come forward to volunteer anything.” He subsided into his chair. “We had the crime lab boys go over that compartment with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. They found nothing. Oh, plenty of fingerprints, of course. But they were all Bruton’s or the crew that cleaned the compartment before the train left Munich. And the crew all had ironclad alibis.”

I turned to Donovan. “What did you do with the passports Lassiter brought back?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me. “Left them right in his brief case and locked them back up in my safe until we can work out a new way of shipping them to Heidelberg,” he said.

“May I see them?” I said.

Donovan hesitated, then shrugged and went to the safe. He opened it with his back to me and pulled out a thick plastic brief case. He came back to his desk, sat down, and pushed the brief case across to me. All without a word.

I smiled briefly, unzipped the case, and emptied it of all its contents — 25 green-and-gold U.S. passports. Worth, if Hurley was correct, over $12,000 on the black market. I arranged them into neat piles, aware that everyone was watching me.

“How many stops did the train make between here and Heidelberg?” I said to Hurley.

“Three,” he said. “Four if you count the suburban station at the north edge of town here. But only three where passport pickups were scheduled.”

I nodded slowly. It all fit together now. I said, again to Hurley, “Did anybody check with the crew taking the train north from here to see if they noticed anything out of the ordinary?”

“No,” Hurley said coldly. “There was no point to it, because whatever happened had to happen before the train reached here.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I’m not a policeman and I don’t know police routine. But I do know clandestine operations, and I’ve been sitting here thinking just how I would pull this kind of operation off. And there’s only one way it could have been done.”

I smiled at Hurley whose eyes were no longer sleepy. “The obvious first move would be to corrupt one of the local couriers.”

“Impossible,” Donovan said. “Nobody’s going to put himself in a position where he’s sure to be caught and punished.”

“He will if the price is right,” I said drily. “But when you come right down to it, the only one who couldn’t duck responsibility was the Munich courier. All one of the local men would have to do is turn his passports over to Bruton in the usual way, get his signed receipt, then follow him on to the train to find out where his compartment was located. It would be simple enough for the local courier to get the man from Munich to open up. After all, he would know the local man and if the local man called out something like ‘I’ve got a passport you signed for—’ ”

I paused and smiled grimly. “And unless I miss my guess that’s just what happened. Only Bruton got a knife in the throat instead of a passport.”

“My God!” Hurley said. “The Rundesheim courier.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It was Lassiter here.”

“No, you don’t,” Lassiter exploded. Blood had suffused his face, turning it ugly. “You’re not going to hang me with a lot of blue-sky speculation. You get yourself some proof before you start throwing accusations around.”

Donovan nodded in agreement, and Hurley turned his eyes on me.

“It had to be Lassiter,” I said. “Only a fool would admit to being the last to see Bruton — which eliminates the Rundesheim courier. The smart man would turn his own passports back in and claim never to have met Bruton. Which is exactly what Lassiter did. The timing works out, too. Instead of waiting for the next train, as he claimed to, he rode up to the suburban stop and got off there. That’s where he must have called from.”

“You’re still guessing,” Lassiter said.

“True,” I said. “But if you want concrete proof — where’s the Munich courier’s receipt?”

Hurley frowned. “I don’t follow that,” he said. “He wouldn’t have a receipt if he didn’t meet Bruton.”

“Precisely,” I said. “But he would have brought back the unsigned copy and it should have been in the brief case with the passports. But it wasn’t, because Bruton had signed it and Lassiter didn’t dare let that be found.” I turned and smiled at Lassiter. “And that missing receipt is what’s going to hang you,” I said.