The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER XIII

I PICKED UP A trench coat I had hanging in my office and we went down to the President’s office on the first floor. Gordon went in to report to Galloway and I remembered that I had no money in my pockets and went down the hall to the Business Office to cash a check.

On the way out I met Helen Madden in the hall. She was walking slowly and meticulously like a woman learning to walk again after a long illness. She was very well groomed, as if she had had nothing else to do all night. She came up to me and put a kid-gloved hand on my arm and said:

“I’m sorry, Bob. I thought I was doing the right thing but I made a mistake.”

“I make hundreds. I made a dozen last night–”

“I thought you’d gone off the deep end. I was the one that had.”

I said: “We’re all in this together. Death is the least rational thing there is, and it affects everybody whether they know it or not. When a man is murdered, everyone gets a little irrational.”

“Was he murdered, Bob? I was sure he killed himself, but I didn’t know why he should.”

“He was murdered.” I told her because any spoken word is better than newsprint. “Peter Schneider and his woman drugged him and left him on the window to fall out when he came to. He came to and fell when you were at the door.”

“Why did they kill him? They didn’t even know him.”

“To cover up for Dr. Schneider. Three hours later they killed Dr. Schneider to cover up for themselves. It’s the Nazi principle that killing people is less complicated than living with them. If they were allowed to carry it to its logical conclusion, the world would be populated by the 6,600,000 members of the Nazi party and their women and children and some slaves.”

My little lecture sounded gauche in my own ears but I thought it might help Helen to see Alec’s death in perspective. Then I realized that it would take her years. Perhaps it would take me as long.

She said, “Have they been caught?”

“No, but they will be. The F.B.I. is after them and they can’t get away. I’m going to Detroit now with the F.B.I. man, Gordon.”

She said, “Kill them,” through jaws so tense that her teeth chattered.

After a pause I said, “I’d like to talk to you to-morrow or so. You’ll be around?”

“No,” she said. “I hate this city. I’m going away as soon as we bury Alec. I applied at the Red Cross this morning. It’s funny how a city can change overnight. I loved it yesterday and today there’s dust over everything.”

I had nothing to say. I couldn’t even say, “You’ll get over it in time,” because I didn’t think she would.

I said, “I hope I see you before you leave.”

She gave me her hand and said, “I hope so, too.” My eyes followed her down the hall. Something in the way she moved made me think of a naked woman in a cold place.

I went back to the President’s office and sat down in the anteroom to wait for Gordon. Through the closed door to the inner office, I could hear him telephoning.

Galloway’s secretary, a faded blonde who had every department of the university filed and classified in her mind and was always looking for new items to file, stopped typing when I sat down, and started to pump me.

While she was still priming me with rumors, Gordon came out of the inner office and overheard the conversation. He closed the door behind him and said:

“We’re keeping this thing out of the news for the present. It will help us to catch them if they don’t know we’re looking for them, or how hard. So the less talk about it the better.”

The faded secretary faded some more and went back to her typing, jabbing at the keys as if they were hostile eyes.

Gordon said, “Ready, Branch?” and I followed him out to the black sedan. We got in and headed for Detroit.

On the outskirts we passed a police patrol and I said, “There’s been no sign of Ruth Esch?”

“No. Nor Schneider. I’ve just been talking to the Detroit office. They’ve telegraphed their description to police all over the Middle West.”

“What about Kirkland Lake?”

“And Kirkland Lake. All the leading cities in Ontario, in fact. We’re going to send out circulars if they’re not in our hands by to-morrow.”

“Has the Detroit office gotten hold of Rudolf Fisher?”

“Not yet. We’ve got a man watching his house. When he comes home he’ll be picked up. I want to question him myself.”

“And that’s where we’re going now, is it?”

“Eventually. I’m going to stop at the Bomber Plant on the way. The green coupe answering to the description of Schneider’s car was last identified turning in at the Bomber Plant. I’ve got an idea about that.”

I had asked too many questions and I said nothing, but my silence hung question-marks in the air. Gordon went on talking with his eyes on the road ahead:

“Schneider’s car hasn’t been seen on the other side of the Bomber Plant. It may have been missed, but it’s more likely that he turned into the plant to throw off pursuit. The entrance guards insist that he couldn’t get in without an employee’s badge. But his name’s not on the list of employees. For that matter, he hasn’t a car license under his own name either.”

“Is it your idea that he may have been working at the Bomber Plant under another name?”

“Yes. If I’m right I don’t think I have to look any further for the saboteur we’ve been hunting.”

“Galloway said something about your being at the Bomber Plant last night.”

“I’ve been there every day for a month,” Gordon said, “pretending to be a maintenance man. Half the time on the night shift. We’ve had a man in every department – I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself, Branch. We didn’t catch anybody, but there’s been no sabotage for a couple of weeks.”

“Peter Schneider went to Canada a week or two ago,” I said. “Maybe the coincidence isn’t fortuitous. And when he was in Kirkland Lake according to Ruth’s letter, there was a mass escape of German prisoners from a prison camp near there. It could be that he’s a very active and versatile young man. He’s a bungler, though. He sets his hand to too many things. He bungled my execution, and all the prisoners have been caught or killed.”

“Not all,” Gordon said. ‘They killed or recaptured all the Bonamy prisoners but one. A certain Captain von Esch is still at large.”

“Captain von Esch! What’s his first name?”

“I don’t know. We’re looking out for him, of course, but he hasn’t been seen in the United States. I could find out, if you think you know him. Do you know the whole German nation, Branch?”

“I know Captain von Esch if he’s Ruth Esch’s brother. I met him once. Her name was originally von Esch before she dropped the von. Her brother’s name is Carl.”

“I’ll check on it,” Gordon said. “This thing may have greater ramifications than we realized.”

Ruth Esch had greater ramifications than I realized, I said to myself. She must have gone to Kirkland Lake to help her brother to escape. A woman doesn’t travel five hundred miles north to a country of forests and bare rock on a pleasure jaunt. Yet even when I condemned her to myself, there was a residue of my old feeling for her in my mind, an irrational hope that she would escape or die or dissolve into thin air before she was caught. Peter Schneider was the one I wanted to see again. He had taken me in three rounds and I was waiting for the fourth. It was getting to be a long time between rounds.

The highway curved up over a rise and the Bomber Plant came in sight ahead and to the right. It lay low on the horizon in the afternoon sun like a walled city in a wasteland. For a mile or more the road followed the high net fence, supported by steel posts and crowned by barbed wire, that surrounded the plant. Then we came to the wide entrance gates and turned in.

A fat uniformed guard, with Auxiliary Military Police on his left shoulder, stepped into the path of the car and stopped us. Gordon took out his wallet and showed the guard his credentials: “Is your group leader around? I’d like to speak to him.”

“Yeah, he’s over at the Exit gate. I’ll go and get him. You better swing your car in over there.” He pointed to the back of the new red-brick building marked Employment Office, and waddled away with his holster swinging against his hip.

When we turned the corner of the building, I saw the green coupe parked at the curb.

I whispered to keep from shouting, “That’s Peter Schneider’s car.”

“It looks like it,” Gordon said.

He parked and we got out and looked at the coupe. It was a 1938 Ford V-8, an ordinary enough car but I didn’t like it. It had chased me down a dirt road at dawn. Now it sat at the curb, quiet and dead, like an empty green beetle shell.

Gordon searched the back of the seat and the dashboard cupboard. The ignition key was in place but there was nothing in the car. He got behind the wheel and started the engine. It started smoothly enough but I noticed that the needle of the tank gauge pointed to Empty. Gordon saw it, too:

“He may have seen that he was running out of gas and left his car here so he wouldn’t have to abandon it on the road.”

“Maybe he ran out of coupons,” I said.

Gordon said unsmilingly: “He must have got here this morning about when the shift changes. That would give him a good chance to take a bus to Detroit without being observed.”

The engine coughed and Gordon switched it off. A weather-beaten man in a blue uniform with wide shoulders and a narrow waist hugged by a black Sam Browne belt came round the corner.

“My name’s Killoran,” he said. “You’re Mr. Gordon, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. Where did you pick up this car?”

“We went over the parking-lots when you phoned us and found this over behind the Bomber School, and we brought it here. I don’t know if it’s the one you want but it answers the description.”

“You keep a file of the employees’ license-numbers, don’t you?”

“Yeah, only this crate is listed under a guy called Ludwig Vlathek”

“It is, eh?” Gordon looked at me and I looked at him. “I want your complete file on Ludwig Vlathek.”

Killoran turned to the fat guard, who had trailed him around the corner at a distance. “Raym, get the file on Ludwig Vlathek. V-L-A-T-H-E-K. If there’s more than one Vlathek, it’s the one with the California birth-certificate I want.”

Raym heaved himself out of sight. I wondered about the birth-certificate, but remembered that they can be forged.

“What’s this guy wanted for?” Killoran asked.

“Read it in the papers,” Gordon said, “if it’s the right man. Was there anything in the car?”

“Not a thing. Just a jack and crank under the seat. Oh, yeah, and an old newspaper. I swiped it to take home. I don’t often get to see a Canadian newspaper.”

“Give it to me,” Gordon said. “And in future leave things as you find them.”

Killoran produced a wooden, “Yessir,” and brought the paper out of his inside breast pocket.

Gordon unfolded it and I looked at it over, his shoulder. It was the Toronto Globe and Mail of the day before. He riffled through it hurriedly, scanning it page by page. Near the top of page eight, directly below a picture of Wendell Willkie, there was a piece torn out.

“It would be interesting,” Gordon said, “to know what our friend tore out of a Canadian newspaper.”

“Our good friend. Bonamy,” I said cryptically because Killoran was standing beside us with his ears perked up. “I can find out, the university Library takes it. Let’s see, third column on page eight.”

“I’ll have a man check it in the Detroit Library,” Gordon said.

Raym appeared with a heavy paper folder under his arm. He handed it to Killoran and Killoran handed it to Gordon.

“It’s all here, is it, captain?” Gordon said. “Thanks for your co-operation. Hold the car until you hear from us, will you?”

“Yeah. Good luck.” He went away with Raym at his heels.

Gordon and I climbed into the black sedan and he opened the folder. Attached to one of the sheets there was a small photograph, hardly bigger than passport size, of a man’s head and collar.

“Do you recognize Ludwig Vlathek?” Gordon said and handed me the picture.

Vlathek’s hair was dark and curly but his skin looked very fair. The eyebrows on the prominent eye-ridges were long and thin and curved, like a woman’s eyebrows which have been plucked and lengthened with a pencil. The eyes were pale behind rimless spectacles and the general impression of the face was one of almost grotesque earnestness, emphasized by the sharp triangular chin and thick straight nose.

I knew the eyes under their bulbous ridges, but the last time I had seen them they were set under eyebrows so faint they were almost invisible.

“This is Peter Schneider, with a dark wig and eyebrows and glasses.”

“I never got a good look at Schneider,” Gordon said, “but I’d have my doubts of Vlathek if he looked like a typical Rabbi. Now we’ve got two versions of Schneider to look for.”

“I don’t like either of them. I’d like Peter best as a bare skull that had been dead a long time. Alas, poor Vlathek.”

Gordon started the car and we circled the Employment Office and went out through the Exit gates. Killoran saluted as we passed.

We turned into the expressway and headed for Detroit at a speed that wasted rubber.

“What was Vlathek’s job?” Gordon said. “Can you find it in the folder?”

I picked it up from the seat between us and went through it. Born in California – the certificate must have been forged. Experience at the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia. That was possible, but the Nazis had controlled the Skoda records for years. I found what I wanted:

“He’s an inspector in the machine tool division.”

“No wonder they’ve been having production trouble. Where does he live?”

I found the address and told him, “215 Pequegnat Street, Detroit.”

Gordon said nothing, but the speedometer climbed so that the wind blasted the windshield.

“Does that mean anything to you?” I said.

“Uh-huh. Something,” he said with painful smugness. “215 Pequegnat Street, eh? A small world.”

“Well?” I said not with a bang but a whimper. Gordon smiled secretly. The car was whistling down the expressway like a long, black bullet. I looked at the speedometer again. The airblast on the windshield was a ninety-mile-an-hour hurricane now. When we hit the top of a rise the wheels soared off the road for a fraction of a second.

Gordon flicked an eye at the speedometer and said, “We’ll hold her there – no use taking risks.”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would be foolhardy, indeed. Why the warm, mysterious glow about Vlathek’s address?”

“Rudolf Fisher lives at 215 Pequegnat Street.”

Pequegnat Street was in a lower middle-class residential section near Gratiot and Seven Mile Road, the kind of section where people are neither high-class nor the low-class enough to know their neighbors. The houses were all the same, middle-sized frame buildings too old to be smart and too new to be interesting, each with a patch of lawn big enough to turn a somersault on.

There was nobody turning somersaults on Pequegnat Street when we got there after breaking all the speed-laws of the County of Wayne and the City of Detroit. Except for a few parked cars, the street was empty as far as I could see. The houses had a blank, closed-up look like the secretive look of a woman who has no secrets. The house with 215 painted on its glass number-plate had Venetian blinds which gave it a more secret look than the other houses, but it had the same number of windows of the same size and shape in the same positions.

Gordon drove past the house without slackening speed and I said, “Hey! We passed 215.”

“That’s right.”

He turned the next corner, parked fifty feet from the intersection, turned off the motor, and waited. In a minute a blue Ford roadster which I had noticed when we passed it on Pequegnat Street came round the corner and parked behind us. A burly young man who looked like an insurance agent got out of the roadster and came up to our car on Gordon’s side.

“Mr. Fenton,” Gordon said, “I’d like you to meet Professor Branch. Professor Branch is a public-spirited citizen who has been very helpful in the Schneider case.”

Fenton smiled a quick, public-spirited smile and said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Branch.”

Before I could answer him he was talking to Gordon: “Fisher came home about half-an-hour ago. He’s there now.”

“Anybody with him?”

“No. He came by himself on foot. Do I go and get him?”

“We’ll both go.”

Gordon started to get out on his side of the car and I started to get out on mine. He said:

“You’d better stay here, Branch, if you don’t mind. This Fisher may be dangerous.”

“Not this boy.” Fenton smiled a contemptuous smile that turned down the corners of his wide mouth. “Unless you’re afraid that Professor Branch will be seduced.”

“Eh?”

“I interviewed Rudy a couple of weeks ago. His element is the boudoir. He wants to grow up and be beautiful like Hedy Lamarr. He intimated to me in his subtle feminine way that he could really go for me because I’m such a masculine type, if only I weren’t so coldly professional in my attitude.” Fenton twisted his mouth sideways, rubbed his blue-black chin with a thick rectangular hand, and spat in the road.

“I see.” Gordon got out of the car and I followed him. On the way back to Fisher’s house, Gordon told Fenton about Ludwig Vlathek in a hundred words.

“I underestimated Rudy,” Fenton said. “I thought he was baring his soul to me but the little bastard had this up his sleeve. I guess I don’t understand women.”

When we turned up the narrow concrete walk, I saw a movement behind the Venetian blinds.

“Stay out here, Branch,” Gordon said. “If nothing happens I suppose you can come in.”

Fenton had climbed the porch steps and was knocking on the door. Gordon mounted behind him and stood at his shoulder. The door opened immediately. I couldn’t see who had opened it but I heard a soft contralto voice with a German accent say:

“Hello, Mr. Fenton. This is an unexpected pleasure. Won’t you come in. And your friends, too, of course.”

Gordon looked at me and I followed them in. Rudolf Fisher held the door for me and I got a good look at him.

His makeup was tastefully applied but it couldn’t stand white daylight. His lips were rich and red like fresh liver. The rouge on his cheek-bones was carefully tapered-off but it was too gaudy against the chalky whiteness of his powdered face. The shadowing around his gentian-blue eyes made them seem ridiculously large and insanely sombre. But the hand-set wave in his light brown hair was a masterpiece, as shiny and as precisely corrugated as a glass washboard.

He said: “Won’t you come into the den, gentlemen? It’s cozier in there.”

He drew his Tyrian-blue dressing-gown closer about his willowy form and tripped ahead of us into the den. He turned on a table-lamp with a scarlet silk shade and a porcelain base decorated with droop-eared Chinamen. I could see the room now: the ivory baby grand with the black fringed drape, the two Persian rugs piled one on the other in front of the ivory mantel, the dead black linoleum on the floor, the ivory-framed Van Gogh reproductions on the ivory walls like windows into a new intense world, the white satin divan with its black and gold and crimson cushions.

Fisher fluttered a white hand towards the divan, said, “Won’t you sit down, gentlemen?” and sat down on a red leather hassock with his black silk ankles crossed in front of him. In the red light, his face looked quite healthy, like any other young chatelaine’s.

Fenton said: “We’ll stand, Rudy. We won’t be long. Where’s Vlathek?”

Fisher’s shoulders came closer together under the purple gown, as if a wind had risen in the room. “He left me. I told you two weeks ago my friend left me. He was an awfully fine person but he just couldn’t stand it when you suspected me of those things. He was terribly disgusted with me.” His lower lip trembled and he touched it with the long pink fingernails of his right hand.

“Peter will be terribly, terribly disgusted now,” Fenton said.

The ivory fingers clenched in the purple lap. “Why do you call him Peter? My friend’s name is Ludwig.” The contralto voice had a soprano range.

Gordon said: “Peter killed his father last night. And he killed another man who told us about you before he died. Talk about Peter.”

The red mouth opened as if gun-barrels had glinted, but the scream that tortured the white face was silent. The red mouth closed and opened again and closed again. Then it said in a babble of words:

“I hate him, too, I don’t like him a bit, he treated me horribly. Peter took my car this morning and all the gasoline coupons that I’ve been saving up to go to Chicago to see the Post-Impressionist exhibition and when I tried to stop him he slapped my face. I used to think he was an awfully nice person but now I don’t like him at all any more, he’s not a fine person at all.”

“You’ll talk then,” Gordon said.

Fisher got to his feet and shook his clasped hands in front of him. “I most certainly will, I’ll tell you all about Peter. Why, I was tremendously fond of Dr. Schneider, he was really a dear man. And I just hate Peter.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me a thing. I haven’t had anything to do with him for weeks and weeks. He was never a true friend of mine. But I’ll tell you everything that I know about him–”

“Not here,” Gordon said. “You can come down to the Federal Building with us and give a full statement.”

“Get your wraps, Rudy,” Fenton said. “It won’t take long.”

It took long enough. An hour later I was still sitting in the black sedan on Lafayette, waiting for Gordon to come out. He had refused to let me enter the field office on the grounds that the agent in charge chewed small change, distrusted superfluous laymen, and spat nickel-plated bullets.

For the first half-hour I went from newsstand to newsstand trying to buy the Toronto Globe and Mail of the day before, but there was none to be had. Then I went back to the car for fear of missing Gordon, and sat and thought with a brain whose contents were as strange and kaleidoscopic as Rudolf Fisher’s den.

Obvious, Rudolf’s attitude to Peter was that of a deserted wife. Did Ruth Esch know her lover was such a versatile amorist? Or didn’t she care? Maybe women in the Third Reich were trained to like that sort of thing. I thought of Roehm, the homosexual chief of the SA whom Hitler murdered with his own talented hands in the blood-bath of 1934. I thought of the elegant Nazi boys I had seen in the Munich nightclubs, with their lipstick and their eye-shadow and their feminine swagger, and the black male guns in their holsters. I thought of the epicene white worms which change their sex and burrow in the bodies of dead men underground.

Something wriggled away from my mental censor and hopped into my consciousness: the name that the hotel detective in the shabby brown suit had called Ruth Esch. White fluorescent light flooded a deep pit in my mind where the albino serpent and the red-headed toad grappled with each other in a nest of worms. The whole thing seemed tragically clear. Nothing real, nothing outside of imagination is ever as real or as painful as that image was. I closed my mind against it for a strange reason: I felt such pity for Ruth.

“Still waiting?” Gordon said. I hadn’t seen him come up but he was standing at the curb beside the car. “We just got a telegram from the Kirkland Lake police. There’s a woman answering to Ruth Esch’s description in the hospital there. She’s badly injured and can’t be moved so they put a guard on her. It must be a bum steer, though.”

It took me a moment to grasp what he said. Then I said, “Why? She probably went back there because she thought it was the last place you’d look for her.”

“Figure it out,” Gordon said. “It’s about four now. She’s had nine hours at most to get there from here, and it’s over six hundred miles.”

“An airplane could do it.”

“It’s remotely possible that she went there by plane. But we checked the airports, and we’ve been watching all private planes closely since the war broke. Also, she’d have had to fly over a guarded border. I think it’s a bum steer.”

“It’s a hell of a coincidence then. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

“No time to argue,” Gordon said. “I’ve got to catch the Chicago plane. There’s a lead there that isn’t bum. Captain von Esch was recognized in Chicago this afternoon. Pardon me, I’ve got to go and get Fenton to bring my car back from the airport.”

He crossed the sidewalk and re-entered the Federal Building. By the time he disappeared I had decided to go to Kirkland Lake. I followed him into the building and found a pay-phone. The airport told me that I could get a plane to Toronto within an hour – somebody had cancelled his reservation. The New York Central station told me I’d reach Toronto in plenty of time to catch the northbound train. I had a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket and that was enough to go on with.

I went out and climbed into the back of the car and a minute later Gordon and Fenton climbed into the front.

“Where can I drop you, Branch?” Gordon said with a shade of impatience in his voice.

“I’ll go along to the airport, thanks. I’m taking the Toronto plane.”

“What the hell for?”

“I’m going to Kirkland Lake. I want to see if the woman in the hospital is Ruth Esch.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Gordon said, but he started the car and headed out Jefferson. “Even if it is the right woman, she’s injured and under guard. She can’t get away.”

“I like travelling,” I said. “I’ve heard that Kirkland Lake is quite a charming town in its crude way.”

Gordon shrugged his shoulders without looking around. “It’s your time and your money. There’s a faint chance that she went by plane. But we can leave her to the Canadian authorities for the present. Her brother is our responsibility.”

“Captain von Esch is her brother then?”

“His name’s Carl, and he even seems to bear her a family resemblance. Same features, same coloring. We got a complete description of him from the Canadian War Department. How he got from Northern Ontario to Chicago I don’t know. But I do know that he’s not going to get out of Chicago.”

“Did Fisher tell you anything about the Bonamy prison-break?”

“No, he didn’t know anything about that phase of Schneider’s activities,” Fenton said. He half-turned in the seat and hooked a grey herringbone arm over the back. “He claimed he never heard of either of the Esches. He may have been holding out, but I don’t think so. He was scared green.”

“Verbal diarrhoea,” Gordon said. “He dictated over three thousand words in a little over an hour. I could hardly get a question in edgeways.”

“Three thousand words about what?” I said.

“It’s a long story the way he told it,” Fenton said. He turned to Gordon: “Is it all right to tell him, Chet?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just a public-spirited citizen. Read me some selections from Proust instead.”

“Tell him,” Gordon said. “Branch literally risked his neck on this case. God knows he must have learned to keep mum by this time.”

“Well, keep it to yourself until it breaks in the papers,” Fenton said. “If it ever does. According to Fisher, Herman Schneider was a spy in spite of himself. He left Germany in the middle thirties for honest liberal reasons. The Nazis couldn’t risk concentrating him then because too many people in Germany and outside of Germany knew his name. So they let him go, but they kept Peter. Peter was only a kid then, but he was in the Hitler Youth and he didn’t want to leave. He stayed and grew up into a hundred percent Aryan superman with bells on.

“By the time Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, Peter was an officer of Engineers in the regular army. He showed such aptitude for sabotage and psychological warfare that they shifted him to Intelligence and trained him to work here in the United States. They knew they’d be fighting us soon and they were ready for it, they thought. They looked a long way ahead but they didn’t see the right things. For one thing they over-estimated the strength of native fascism in this country. Anyway, Peter was slated for the job of engineering adviser to the Gauleiter of Michigan. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds now, before Russia held the Germans and Pearl Harbor gave us the shock treatment.

“After a year of working with English phonograph records and studying at the Skoda Works and the Ford plant in Belgium and a few other places, Peter was ready to graduate to America in the summer of 1941. We weren’t at war with them yet and it was easy enough for them to get him into this country, but they made it hard for the sake of an added advantage. The Nazis are experts in making everything pay off double–”

“Including trouble,” I said. “Double, double, toil and trouble.”

“That’s true, too,” Fenton said. “Peter contacted his father through a Gestapo stooge in the Free German underground. He said he had had a change of heart and all that crap and he was just dying to get out of Germany but the nasty Nazis wouldn’t let him go. Old man Schneider fell for it and went to the German Consulate in New York. They agreed to let Peter out of Germany and save him from Stalin and the steppes, for a price. If the Herr Doktor would provide them with a certain piece of information – The Herr Doktor had a moral conniption fit and gave them what they wanted. They released Peter, and old man Schneider went to the State Department and got the prodigal son into the country before you could say Heliogabolus Schwartzentruber.

“Ever since then the prodigal has been blackmailing Dr. Schneider for more information, and getting it. But that was just a sideline for Peter. In two years he’s worked in at least six of the important war plants in the Detroit area, under different names with stolen birth certificates. He’s had a hand in psychological sabotage, too. He’s been helping to direct the activities of the native fascists in Detroit, the fanatical anti-Jew anti-Negro anti-labor boys. Fisher didn’t say, but I suspect Peter Schneider played a part in inciting the race riots.”

“Where does Fisher fit into all this?” I said.

“He’s Peter’s friend,” Fenton said with heavy irony, curling his lip as if friend was a four-letter word. “They met at a pansy drag soon after Peter came to this country, isn’t that romantic? Rudy’s a weak willie – at least he’s trying like hell to act like one – and Peter used him for little errands like contacting old man Schneider. That’s Rudy’s story: if it’s not true we’ll break it down. But it’s pretty clear that when we cracked the Buchanan-Dineen circle, Peter dropped his Vlathek alias and cleared out for Canada, leaving Rudy holding the bag with his lily-white hands. I only hope he didn’t leave our Rudolf with child.”

“Have you ever thought of helping to solve the sewage problem by converting your imagination into a septic tank?” Gordon said.

Fenton grinned and said to me, “Chet’s the last Puritan, Mr. Branch. Santayana’s boy was only the second-last. I trust I haven’t offended your delicate shell-like ears with my coarse talking.”

I said, “I teach a course in Swift and Fielding. Compared with them you’re mealy-mouthed.”

“My God, Gordon,” Fenton roared, “did you hear that? I’m mealy-mouthed.”

The mid-afternoon traffic was light and we were already in the suburbs. When we reached the airport, the Chicago plane was landing. Gordon had just time to give Fenton a few instructions and to say to me:

“If you find out anything let us know. Call the Detroit or Chicago field office and reverse the charges.”

He shook my hand and walked up the ramp and ducked into the plane. A ground attendant lifted the ramp and shut the aluminum door behind him. I stood with Fenton and watched the great plane change from an incongruous winged turtle on the ground to a bird in the sky.

Fenton shook hands and said, “See you again, Branch.” He went back to Gordon’s car and drove away.

I picked up the ticket I had reserved and went into the waiting-room to wait for the Toronto plane.