Ruby Red Death

Three

Carter caught the early-morning train out of Kitzbühel and arrived in Salzburg before noon. He checked the schedules and found he had forty minutes before the express to Vienna pulled out.

There were two ranks of pay telephones, one at each end of the terminal. He idled by one bank of phones until he had a number, and then walked across the terminal. He dropped the required coins in the slot and waited until a husky female voice answered with the number he had just dialed.

“Tell Gunter that an old friend wants to talk to him,” Carter said. “The number is Salzburg 779–101.”

He hung up and walked leisurely across to the other bank of phones.

No one paid him any attention.

He waited nearly five minutes in the booth before the phone rang. “Yes?”

“All my old friends have died from bad drink and loose women. Who is this?”

“Gunter, you fat old thief. I’m glad to hear they haven’t shot you on the other side for short-changing and overcharging.”

“How could they?” replied the gravelly voice in barely accented English. “I am the answer to their black-market prayers. I haven’t heard from you in an age. You must want something.”

“I have to go over,” Carter said, “and I don’t want to be made.”

“When?” The voice suddenly got serious.

“Tonight, if possible.”

“That might be arranged. You’re in Salzburg?”

“Yes. I’ll arrive in Vienna around seven.”

“Should be enough time. Take a taxi from the station out to my country place. You remember it?”

“I do.”

“I’ll try to have everything ready.”

Carter hung up, bought a paper, and boarded his train.

He had a light lunch in the dining car and slept fitfully all the way to Vienna.

The snow had turned to a light rain, making the streets of the old city glisten. Clutching his light bag, he ignored the taxi queue outside the station and walked several blocks before hailing a passing cab.

“Where?”

“The country. I’ll direct you.”

In no time they had left the city. The windshield wipers flicked steadily. They drove past stolid-looking houses surrounded by stone walls and dripping trees. The streets were as silent as the hills that rolled behind them. Eighteen miles out of the city they exchanged the highway for a mountain road that climbed up through dripping fir trees to a sodden expanse of pastureland. The farmhouses were dark and isolated. Dogs barked as the headlights lit the barns and outbuildings.

They had climbed another three miles, when a building loomed out of the mist, fields stretching behind it into wet darkness.

“Here,” Carter growled.

The driver braked. The headlights shone on a wooden chalet surrounded by an ugly wall built of stone and iron piping. Water ran from the gutters. The shutters were closed. Not a single light showed. Carter gave the driver his shillings and added a large tip.

“Thanks for your trouble.”

The man pocketed his money, glanced across at what looked like a deserted chalet, and drove off.

Carter walked around to the rear and opened a gate in the stone wall. He could see light in the first-floor-rear room, mostly obscured by heavy curtains. He waited a minute or two before crossing a patch of broken concrete and then onto a stretch of lawn.

Interesting, he thought. Gunter Forbin was probably worth millions, yet his “country house” was little more than a dump. But then, when one made one’s millions by not paying duty on Western goods smuggled into Eastern bloc countries, it didn’t pay to advertise one’s wealth.

The ground sloped down and there were steep steps to the basement. The opaque glass door was open as promised. Carter stepped into the passage; there was a wedge of light at the far end. As he moved, the light widened until the whole of the far end was illuminated and Gunter stood silhouetted like a giant against the far wall.

“It’s me,” Carter said.

“I know,” came the reply with a peal of laughter, “I could hear your catlike stealth from the grave. Come in, I have schnapps.”

The room was plain. Carter supposed that the two doors leading off were to a bedroom and kitchen. There was a new armchair, and a table pushed into a corner looked new. There wasn’t much else. Photos of impossibly structured nude women hung from walls badly in need of paint and plaster.

The Killmaster took the offered tumbler of schnapps and set his bag on the table. “You really should spend some of your money, Gunter,” he said with a grin, making a face as he surveyed the room.

“Oh, but I do, I do!” the big man roared. “In Paris, Rome, New York! But not here. Here, I am a poor man. Prosit!” He drank and wiped his mustache with his fingers.

“What have you got for me?” Carter asked, draining his own glass.

“You have my fee, of course?”

“Of course,” Carter replied, withdrawing an envelope from his jacket and dropped it in the big man’s lap. “There’s a little extra in there. I’ll need a few things on the other side.”

“No problem.” As if by magic, a passport and a fist of papers appeared on the table in front of Carter. “For the time you are there, you are Emil Bunder, a relief lorry driver. I used one of your photos from the last time. Here is your union permit, your driver’s license, and your visa for three days of holiday. I assume your business will take no longer than that?”

“Let’s hope not. I’m going over in a lorry?”

Gunter Forbin nodded. “As a relief driver. You’re in luck. I have a shipment going over legally at midnight... seed and packaged manure.”

“In the dead of winter?” Carter said.

The big man shrugged. “My Communist customers like to look ahead.”

“What’s under the seed and shit?”

Forbin grinned. “Perfume, cosmetics, blue jeans, rock and roll tapes... just more shit. Come along, my friend, and we’ll wardrobe you.”

From a closet and drawers in the bedroom, Carter outfitted himself from the skin out in used, locally labeled clothing. The pants and shirt were worn denim, and the old fur-collared leather jacket was cracked with age.

“What will you need over there?” Forbin asked.

“I’m going skiing. Everything should be used. Oh, and a gun... something local to the country.”

Forbin nodded. “Check into the Pension Galpi, on Lenin Korut. It will all be waiting. Will you be shooting anyone?”

“I hope not,” Carter said.

“Then you won’t need extra clips. What about wheels?”

“I’ll rent a car there.”

“Good. Let’s have another schnapps and talk about women.”

An hour later, a knock came on the rear door and Forbin admitted a man nearly his own size, with long, lank black hair and a simian forehead that practically covered his eyes.

His name was Klaus, and he would drive the lorry over.

There was little traffic on the main road east out of Vienna to the frontier, much less than Carter had hoped for. It would be a lot easier to move across a busy frontier than a deserted one. Most of the traffic was trucks. Carter hoped they would blend in and he passed across like so many ants.

About two miles from the border, the trees disappeared and the road narrowed. A little farther on, they slipped into a long line and moved forward in fits and starts.

“How long does this usually take?” he grumbled.

Klaus shrugged. He was a man of no words. He hadn’t said one since they had left Gunter Forbin’s chalet.

Eventually they reached the Austrian barrier. The bills of lading were scarcely glanced at and they were waved through.

The second barrier, into Hungary, was a different story. The two trucks ahead were surrounded by a score of armed border guards. Carter glanced across at Klaus, hoping for some sign of assurance, some indication that that number of guards was not unusual. He was hunched forward, his thick arms crossed on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. His phlegmatic expression said nothing.

The thin arm of a wooden barrier lifted and the first truck moved slowly ahead. Carter would have given a year’s earnings to have been sitting in that truck. Klaus eased forward a length and pulled on the brakes and switched off his engine. The guards in greatcoats and fur hats watched them approach incuriously, their hands dug deep into their pockets, their rifles slung from shoulder straps. When the lorry stopped, they sauntered toward it.

Klaus buttoned up his leather jacket, opened the door, and with a short, curt “Kommen,” stepped out. Carter climbed down his side and the guards moved back to give him room. Klaus strode stolidly toward the large building constructed of rough-cut, unpainted planks. Carter tailed along behind him.

A guard at the door nodded to Klaus and greeted him by name. Inside, there were four civilians standing behind a counter and an officer in a gray-green uniform sitting at a desk behind them, reading a newspaper. Klaus unfolded his manifest and stacked the truck’s papers and his passport on top of it.

One of the civilians turned them around and began to check the documents. Carter took out his phony passport and, matching Klaus’s brusque manner, dropped it onto the counter, then turned and looked the place over with a nonchalance he was far from feeling.

Two men, apparently the crew of the first truck, were slouched over the counter a few feet away, patiently waiting for their clearance. They glanced at Klaus, but they didn’t speak.

The man checked everything including the fine print in Klaus’s papers, then carried them over and laid them on the desk of the officer. He glanced at them casually, hammered the manifest with a rubber stamp, and turned back to his newspaper. Carter’s blood pressure went down another few degrees... despite the tense buildup, this was a routine crossing.

The civilian gave Klaus his documents and picked up Carter’s passport, fingered it open, and glanced at him with flat blue eyes. “Where’s Foss?” he asked.

“What?”

“The regular man, Foss? Where is he?”

The uniformed officer looked up and frowned. Carter did the same toward Klaus.

“Drunk,” Klaus said, and shrugged. “I wasn’t going to take a relief driver, but Bunder here wanted to take his holiday in Budapest.”

By this time, the officer was on his feet examining Carter’s passport. “Three days? Where will you stay in Budapest?”

“Galpi, the Pension Galpi on Lenin Korut.”

“Wait.”

He crossed the room to a telephone. He had to dial three times in order to find the right person. When he did, he talked for a full three minutes, scowling now and then at Carter.

Finally he returned and tossed the passport on the counter. “Ja,” he said, and returned to his paper.

Outside, Carter said in a low voice, “Was that usual?”

“No,” Klaus grunted, and climbed up into the cab.

Great, Carter thought, just great.

A few seconds later the barrier was raised and they were on the road to Budapest.

Well, I’m in. Now the trick will be to get back out when the time comes!

The Pension Galpi was in the old part of Buda, close to the Danube and the downtown section. But it was also remote, in that it seemed a town within a town, bearing little resemblance to the newer part of the city. The streets were narrow, most of them cobblestoned.

“You have a reservation, mein Herr?”

“Ja,” Carter replied, pushing his passport across the desk toward the concierge, a gaunt man with wavy yellow hair.

The man took one look at the name on the passport, and a key appeared from beneath the desk. “Number Seven, second floor, rear.”

He turned away as if he were afraid he would catch something, and Carter headed for the stairs.

The room was small, neat and clean. Piled in the center of it was Carter’s gear, all used with local labels, just as he’d asked for. It took him fifteen minutes, but he finally found the gun, a Frommer 7.65 Stop Model 19. The seven-shot clip in the butt was full. Carter put it back in the heavy lining of the ski parka, undressed, and fell into the bed.

He slept the sleep of the dead until just after ten, and called around for a car until eleven. An hour later, he picked it up and parked in front of the pension. In no time he was packed and on the road north.

It had stopped snowing, but the fresh wind, which was breaking up the clouds, also whipped up the snow, kiting it crazily into drifts. All the way to Hatvan he could see snowplows in action on the main and secondary roads.

Just north of Hatvan the road began to climb into the Bukk Mountains. It was there that Carter spotted the tail. It was a small, two-door Volga sedan, black, with one occupant.

In the village of Nearing, he stopped for lunch. The Volga raced on by before he could get a good look at the driver or get a read on the plate number.

Over pork smothered in onions, Carter tried to reason it out. Lorena’s instructions to him from her brother were clear and precise. He would have to enter Hungary on his own. From Budapest he should drive northeast into the Bukk Mountains. There, he should check into the Cozamor ski resort, where he would be contacted.

By whom?

That would be determined by Vinnick at the last minute. If possible, he would come into Hungary to meet Carter. If not, a way would be found to get Carter over the Romanian frontier.

Just before Eger, Carter saw the Volga fall in behind him again. This time the car was close enough to spot the driver, a very pretty blonde somewhere in her twenties.

Just to make sure, Carter speeded up. The blonde speeded up. When he slowed, she slowed.

Well, Vinnick, it’s your move, Carter thought, and then took a deep breath. At least I hope this move is yours!