Passport To Peril

PERILOUS PLANS

Two men in a car followed us back to Hiram’s house. They stayed only a hundred feet or so behind after picking us up where Hiram had left his sedan, on the far side of the cemetery. The men we’d spotted across the street from the house were still there, only now there were three instead of two.

It wasn’t pleasant to realize they’d known what was happening from the start. They’d deliberately allowed Schmidt and the Americans to carry on a finish fight. It had cost them nothing. They were serving notice on us that the final round had started in the battle for Marcel Blaye’s Manila envelope.

The sudden knowledge of what the Russian game had been explained a good many things. It explained why I hadn’t been picked up in the Arizona, why Hermann and Otto had been permitted to reach Budapest as deserters from the Red Army in a stolen army car. It explained why Hiram’s activities hadn’t been curbed and why Schmidt had been allowed to move around at will. It explained Major Felix Borodin who’d done a very neat job of counterintelligence—until Schmidt had caught him at it.

It also explained the fact that Hiram, Teensy, Walter, Maria, and I were still at liberty. The Russians knew everything but the location of the envelope. We’d remain free until we led them to it or Schmidt did.

But for the moment, the only thing that mattered was to get a doctor for Maria. I tried to get Hiram to stop at a doctor’s office or the hospital, but he said it was too dangerous, that the hospital would hold Maria for several days. They would call the police as soon as we brought her in.

As it was, the Russians saw us carry her to the car and they saw us take her into Hiram’s house. To them it was another detail which concerned only Schmidt and us.

She was hysterical when I found her. I didn’t have to ask a question to know the whole story. Some of Schmidt’s instruments were on the bureau.

Teensy put her to bed in the guest room. Hiram finally managed to get a doctor after calling half a dozen; it was after midnight, and he couldn’t explain on the phone. I was afraid she might be scarred for life, but the doctor said he didn’t think so. He said she should have absolute tranquility, that she ought to go away for a long rest. I thought of what lay ahead of us that night and thanked him.

As soon as Maria was asleep, I joined Hiram in his study. He had spread the map of Budapest on the floor. When I entered the room, he was squatting in front of the fireplace, feeding papers to the flames. It meant that when we left the house that night, it was for good. Hiram was burning his confidential documents and his codes.

“What are you going to do about Maria?” I said. “We can’t move her. She’s in no condition to travel.”

“Teensy and Millie will take her to that inn in the Buda hills. They’ll be among friends.”

I was about to ask how they’d get past the roadblock but I realized then that the Russians had set up roadblocks in order to keep a check on our movements and those of Schmidt, not to stop us. We’d pass roadblocks all right until the MVD had Blaye’s Manila envelope in their hands.

Hiram rubbed his hand across his forehead. I knew how tired he must be. I don’t think he’d had an hour’s sleep in two days.

“Why don’t you go with them?” he said. “Walter and I can take care of the business at Jozsefvaros.”

A few hours earlier I might have agreed. I had told myself I had no interest in Blaye’s envelope. That was before Hiram had revealed its importance, but, nevertheless, I had tried to make a bargain with Schmidt. I had been willing to give him the envelope in return for Maria’s safety and my freedom to carry out the mission that had brought me to Hungary on a murdered man’s passport. But that was before I learned my brother’s fate from the bitch who had betrayed him. It was before Schmidt had “entertained” me at Orlovska’s. It was before I had stood in the doorway of that room in the tenement and seen what Schmidt had done to the woman I loved.

“You go to hell,” I said to Hiram. “I’m in this to stay.”

“You mustn’t worry about Maria,” he said. “Come look at this map, and I’ll tell you why.”

He pointed to the location of the country inn. Then he moved his finger about a mile to the west.

“There’s a dirt road about a hundred yards north of the inn. A little over a mile down that road there’s a long stretch of flat, open field.”

He glanced at his watch.

“Exactly at dawn, in slightly more than five and a half hours, a United States Air Force plane will land in that field. It will take off with Maria, Millie, and Teensy aboard. I hope it will take off with Marcel Blaye’s envelope. I think it possible that either you or Walter or I will be alive at dawn, at seven forty-four.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I might deliver the envelope to the plane but that I wasn’t leaving Hungary until I’d had a final settlement with Schmidt. It occurred to me, though, that I would be insulting him by assuming I’d be the one still alive in five and a half hours.

Hiram called Walter into the room, and we located Jozsefvaros freight station on the map. We couldn’t get away from the cemetery. Where Keleti station, the coffeehouse, and the tenement were on the northern edge of the burying ground, Jozsefvaros bordered it on the south. The layout resembled a huge letter D with Keleti at the top, Jozsefvaros at the bottom, and the curving part the connecting tracks. The cemetery took up most of the inside, and the vertical line represented Fiumei ut, one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

The freight station and the yards paralleled the cemetery’s length of four city blocks. The station took up a quarter of that distance, with six loading platforms on as many tracks.

I noticed something else. Right where the tracks entered the station, there was a large building, the army barracks which houses the Budapest garrison.

Hiram nodded. “And something the map doesn’t show,” he said, “is that the station is surrounded by a high stone wall. The only way to enter uninvited is to walk the tracks from a point well outside the yards.”

I went upstairs to say goodbye to Maria. I knocked but there was no answer. The door was unlocked, and I went in to find her sleeping soundly, the raven-black hair framing her lovely dark face against the white of the pillow.

I bent over and kissed her forehead. I started out the door and then, because the book says you keep a sense of humor in such cases, I took Ilonka’s charm against the evil eye from my pocket and laid it on Maria’s pillow next to her head.