The Dark Tunnel

CHAPTER IV

I STOOD ON THE station platform, feeling frustrated and empty, until the late commuters scattered to their families and the train pulled out. When the lights and noises faded down the track into darkness and silence, I had a momentary childish wish to be on the train, headed for Chicago and points west. Then anger came back and took hold of me again, and I started towards McKinley Hall to meet Alec Judd.

He knew more about the Schneiders than I did. Perhaps he would know why they had lied to me about Ruth and tried to kill me. Even if they knew that Alec was suspicious of them, they had no way of knowing that he had told me about it unless they could read minds. So far as they knew, and so far as I knew myself, I was perfectly harmless. But I began to feel less harmless as the night wore on.

Walking through the dark streets to the university, I thought of a way of checking on Dr. Schneider’s story about Ruth. The clock on the university tower rang the quarter-hour as I crossed the campus. If I was lucky I could find out right away.

I let myself into McKinley Hall with my faculty pass-key. The basement corridor was as quiet and black as the inside of a sealed pyramid. I climbed the stairs to the second floor in the dark and went down the corridor to the office of the German Department. There was no light behind the pebbled glass door and the door was locked.

I took the automatic elevator to the fourth floor. Bailey, head of the English department and air-raid warden of the building, kept a flashlight in a desk in the English office. I found it in an unlocked drawer and flashed it around the room. There were several letters in my mailbox. I had no time to look at them now, and stuffed them in the breast pocket of my coat. When I got back to the second floor, the corridor was as quiet and dark as before.

I switched on the flashlight and looked at the lock, which seemed to be the same as the one on the English office, a spring lock of the Yale type. I took out my jackknife and set the lighted flash on the floor and went to work on the lock. After a few minutes of grunting and swearing, I managed to get the door-jamb thoroughly scratched and the door open. I picked up the flashlight and stepped into the office and closed the door behind me.

Most of the departments in the College of Arts did their business in the same way and kept similar files. The filing cabinets along the wall behind the secretary’s desk were tall and dark green like the ones in the English office, and I was pretty sure they would contain the same kind of material: old examinations which could be shuffled and used over again, mimeographed material for courses, reports on graduate students and former students, information on teaching appointments in the department.

The cabinet drawers were unlocked and I soon found the appointment records. I riffled through the folders with one hand, holding the flashlight in the other. Damman, Eisberg, Erskine, Esch. Ruth’s name was here then.

I jerked the folder from the drawer and sat down at the desk to examine it. The first sheet in it was a copy of a university contract on thin blue paper:

This was followed by the usual printed conditions. The contract was dated September 15, 1943, one week ago.

The rest of the contents of the folder removed any doubts I had had that Ruth had been appointed to teach at the university. There was a copy of the personal record which is kept for every member of the faculty. The place-names and dates were pleasant to look at, because Ruth had lived in those places and done things at those times. Born in Cologne, Germany, August 8, 1915. Ph.D. candidate at the University of Munich, 1933-1936. Assistant Lector for English at Weltwirtschaftliches Institut, Kiel, Germany, 1936. Member of company of Munich Repertory Theatre, 1937. There was nothing below that but white paper. Six blank years.

I sat with my eyes on the dimly lit paper and tried to imagine the blank years. Things I had read and heard about German concentration camps and North African prisons crawled across my bright, sweet memory of Ruth Esch. My imagination was like a wavering flashlight beam in a terrible shifting darkness that covered half the earth. Terror and hunger and long silence broken by the sound of whips. Where had Ruth been and what had they done to her and where was she now?

The floor of the corridor creaked outside the office and I doused my light and stood up facing the door. I heard it open slowly and a hand fumbled for the light switch along the wall. Dr. Schneider? The step in the corridor must have been heavy to make the floor creak. I turned on the flashlight and threw its beam on the door. Alec stood there blinking like a groundhog in winter.

I could see his face but he couldn’t see mine. He said, “Who is that?” He found the switch and turned on the lights. “Bob!”

“Turn off the lights. This is extra-curricular.”

He turned them off and I replaced Ruth Esch’s folder in the files by the light of the flash, and closed the drawer.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Alec said.

“Let’s get out of here first and then I’ll tell you. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I was on the way up to my office and I saw a light. How did you get in?”

I showed him the scratches on the door-jamb. “My pig-sticker.”

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Alec said as we stepped into the hall. “Those scratches are sure to be noticed.”

“So what? There was something I wanted to find out and I found it out. Nobody’s going to suspect me of being a Raffles, unless you turn stool-pigeon and sing to the cops.”

“You’re getting your jargon mixed,” Alec said, and I could tell from his voice that he was smiling in the dark. “That’s not the point. You can fry for all I care. The point is that Schneider is going to find out about those scratches and he’s going to be very careful.”

“It’s about time he turned over a new leaf. He’s been getting frightfully careless lately. In fact, his little attempt to kill me to-night was grotesquely inefficient.”

“His what?”

“I thought that would hold you,” I said. “Let’s go up to your office. This is no place to talk.”

We went up to Alec’s office on the fifth floor. I shared my office with two other teachers, but Alec was a full professor and had a room to himself. On two sides, books hid the wall from floor to ceiling. He had been a great scholar before war had made him an administrator. At forty, he was co-editor of the Middle English Dictionary which the university had been working on for years.

His desk stood in a corner against the wall between one set of bookshelves and the tall window which faced the door, so that the light came from the left when he worked there in the daytime. He hadn’t used this office to work in for months, but the desk was still the desk of a scholar, littered with books and papers and philological journals. A cradle phone stood clear of the debris on a shelf which projected from the wall beside the window. A lamp with a green glass shade for night work hung on the wall above the telephone.

Alec pulled the chain which turned on the wall lamp and switched off the ceiling light.

“Sit down,” he said and I took the old leather armchair at the end of the desk. He sat down in the swivel-chair facing me across the corner of the desk, and opened a drawer. “Would you like a drink?”

“I think I would.”

He produced a pint of Bourbon and uncorked it and handed it to me. I took a stiff drink and wiped the neck of the bottle and set it on the desk.

“What would the Dean say?” I wondered.

“He’d say give me some.” Alec recorked the bottle and put it back in the drawer without drinking any.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Have you gone into training for the Navy?”

“No, but I’ve got a job to do. I’m going to search Schneider’s office to-night. If there’s anything there, I’ve got to find it before he sees those scratches on the door to-morrow. I wish you’d told me you wanted to get into that office.”

“Why? Because you can walk through locked doors?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m a superior burglar. I borrowed Bailey’s master-key. They gave it to him so he could turn out the lights anywhere in the building for a blackout.”

“I’m sorry if I interfered with your plans. But I’ve started to have plans of my own. Can I help with the search?”

“If you want to. It may be a big job. And it may lead to nothing. Now what’s this about Schneider’s attempting to kill you?”

“It’s a fairly long story.” I told it to him from the beginning, without adjectives but leaving nothing out. Not even the lipstick on Peter’s face and the shadow of a woman I thought I had seen in Schneider’s hallway. I told him what I had found in the German office.

When I finished, he said, “Is it possible that they used Ruth Esch’s name to get you out there so they could kill you?”

I thought a minute. “I don’t think so. Hunter told me about her first, and I went to Schneider and brought up the subject myself. Anyway, he couldn’t very well fake the records in the German office.”

“He could if he wanted to. But you say you don’t know any reason why they should try to kill you.”

“No doubt I’m an irritating type. I was indiscreet enough to blaspheme the organic totalitarian state at dinner. Then I beat Peter at foils. It’s barely possible that he was just trying to frighten me with the sabre to get back at me for that. It’s barely possible, too, that the automobile accident was an automobile accident.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“Are you going to lay charges?”

“I’ve been thinking about it. But there’s not much evidence beyond my personal impressions and a pair of broken glasses. Before I do anything I want to know where Ruth comes into this. And we’ll see what we can find in Schneider’s office. When I get the Schneiders, I want to get them for keeps.”

“So do I,” Alec said, and his mouth shut on the stem of his pipe like a mantrap on a leg.

“Do you know anything against Schneider that you haven’t told me?”

“Very little, unfortunately, and what evidence I have is what you’d call circumstantial, I suppose.”

“What is it? You can hang a man on the right kind of circumstantial evidence.”

“There are two things, really. One of them points in the general direction of Schneider, and the other points straight at him but doesn’t really prove anything. The first thing is this. When the Buchanan-Dineen bunch was rounded up in Detroit, a good deal of information was found in the hands of Nazi agents, information that was known only to certain men in the armed services and to members of our War Board.”

“What kind of information?”

“Largely material on Army and Navy training programs at the university, enrollment figures, length of courses, curriculum of the various programs. They had a detailed analysis of all the courses, A S T P, V-12, and the rest – meteorology, aeronautics, naval architecture, Asiatic and European languages, army engineering – the whole business.”

“It sounds like a leak,” I said, “but not such a bad one.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” The intensity of his seriousness seemed to draw his eyes back into his head. “Information like that can tell a highly trained spy more about the long-range plans of the United Nations than a whole mail-car full of short-term official orders. The Nazis have men who can put two and two together and get twenty-two, men who do research in the history of the future. And stuff like that is perfect raw material for them.

“I’ll give you an obvious example. Last spring the Army speeded up the A S T P course in Italian local government, and a couple of months later all the advanced students in that course were ordered away. Any spy who knew that and who knew his business could figure out where they were going, and why, and approximately when. The idea that enemy spies are interested chiefly in airplane plans and secret formulae is hardly more than a literary convention.”

“I know. It’s just that it’s sometimes hard to recognize something important when it turns up in your own back yard.”

“It’s important all right. A smart German who knew all about our A S T P courses and could correlate the knowledge with information from other sources could figure out a hell of a lot. He could predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy a lot of the things that we’ll be doing five years from now in Europe.”

“In 1948? The war will be over long before then.”

“No doubt it will, but the Nazis won’t be finished if they can help it. Himmler’s boys are laying plans now for carrying on underground even after Germany loses the war. But they’re not going to get any more information from us.”

“You said there was something else, something that pointed directly at Schneider.”

“Right. There’s a young man named Rudolf Fisher who lives in Detroit, a naturalized American of German birth. When the F.B.I. arrested Buchanan-Dineen and her little helpers, they picked up Rudolf for questioning. Evidently they had something which connected him with the Nazis, but they didn’t have enough to make it stick. Anyway, they released him after a day or two.”

“What’s the connection with Schneider?”

“Well, it may be a connection or it may not. I think it is. For the last two winters Schneider’s been giving an Extension Course in German language in Detroit, and Rudolf Fisher’s been enrolled in the course both times and had perfect attendance.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been doing a research job on Schneider. But it’s in the files in the Extension office for anybody that wants to look for it. Now if Schneider’s a spy and Fisher was his go-between, Fisher’s enrollment in Schneider’s course would have given them a very neat and respectable excuse for meeting once a week.”

“That’s supposing quite a lot. Fisher may simply have aspirations to culture.”

“Then he chose a curious way to satisfy them. He was born in Germany and lived there until he was fifteen. What would a German want with a course in German conversation?”

There was no answer to that. Alec went on: “So far this sounds pretty flimsy, too flimsy to turn over to the F.B.I. That’s why I want to search Schneider’s office. We may turn up something concrete.”

“The F.B.I. could do a better job of searching.”

“But I can’t set them on Schneider until I’m sure. You know what could happen to him if I raised a hue and cry, whether he’s guilty or innocent. Public opinion would force him out of his job. There’s been criticism of the university already for retaining a German on the staff. As I see it, there’s perhaps one chance in ten that he’s an innocent man, and I will not take the responsibility for wrecking a man’s life until I’m sure of my grounds.”

“I see that,” I said. “But make it one chance in twenty that he’s innocent. And one chance in a thousand that he’d leave incriminating evidence in his office.”

“I’m not sure that it’s so unlikely. So far as he knows, he’s above suspicion. And he’s going to hold his first Extension class in Detroit to-morrow night.”

“Is Rudolf Fisher enrolled?”

“I don’t know. Registration isn’t complete. But I gave Schneider the plans for the new A S T Program the day before yesterday, marked private and confidential, not to be copied and not to go out of his hands. He sent them back yesterday. If he copied them, the chances are the copy is in his office now, and if we can find it we’ll have the evidence we need.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Wait a minute. There’s something else we’ve got to find out, and we can attend to that first.” He looked at his watch. “It’s ten-twenty. We can’t enter Schneider’s office yet.”

“One must observe the formalities, no doubt.”

“There may be janitors in the building. In any case, we’d better wait.”

“And while we’re waiting, we can try and find out if Ruth Esch has arrived.”

“We’ve been thinking about the same thing,” Alec said.

“What else should I be thinking about? I’ve been thinking about her ever since I met the train and nobody got off.”

He turned in his chair and lifted the cradle phone from the shelf behind his head. He dialed a number and waited while the phone rang twice.

Peter’s voice answered: “Professor Schneider’s residence.”

“May I speak to Miss Ruth Esch?” Alec asked.

“Miss Ruth Esch?”

The line was silent for five seconds. Then Alec repeated, “Miss Ruth Esch.”

“One moment, please,” Peter said.

Alec put down the receiver and replaced the phone on the shelf. “Come on. My car’s out front.”

In six or seven minutes we reached the base of the road that climbed Bingham Heights. Alec drove up a side road a few yards and parked the car in a shallow ditch.

“We’ll sneak up on the bastards,” he said as we got out, “and see what we can see.”

He went up the road to the heights like a locomotive on a grade, steady but puffing. I had less weight to carry but I felt the pace he set, and my heart had two reasons for pounding.

He stopped at the cliffhead to look at the smashed fence. The cables were still down and two of the white posts were jagged like broken teeth. The front windows were lighted in the house across the road, but there was nobody in sight.

“It looks as if he wanted to get through that fence quite badly,” Alec said.

“He did get through.”

“I suppose he figured he could jump out into the bushes and let you go over with the car. You said the door on your side wouldn’t open?”

“It wouldn’t open. I think he jammed it when he shut it for me.”

“We should have a look at that car to-morrow. I want to look at the door. And I want to look at the steering-gear, just to make sure that it wasn’t an accident.”

“We’ll have to wade a creek to look at it, unless the wreckers can get it out.”

“I can wade a creek. That sabre business sounds fantastic, and this accident on top of it sounds more fantastic.”

“The Schneiders have fantastic personalities,” I said. “Shall we join them?”

We walked beside the road under elms and maples. The drying grass rustled faintly under our feet, and the wind whispered in the trees with the autumnal voice of an old woman.

“What in hell made you want to fence with young Schneider?” Alec said. “You’re not Sir Lancelot.”

“Wait till you meet Peter. He makes your adrenal glands play like fountains. Incidentally, you’re not Edgar B. Hoover but I understand you’re hot on the spoor of some spies.”

“Shut up,” Alec retorted pleasantly.

We turned into the Schneider driveway, walking on the grass in the shadow of the arching trees. We avoided the open triangle of concrete in front of the house and walked quietly under the trees to the side. We stayed out of the fluorescent light that fell from the uncurtained windows and glared on the grass-blades of the lawn like white alkali dust.

There was a light on the screened porch at the back and I crept forward a few feet and craned my neck to look into the porch. Dr. Schneider was sitting there in a deck-chair reading a newspaper.

I moved back into the deep shadow where Alec was standing. Suddenly he put his hand on my arm and said, “What’s that?” in a hissing whisper.

From the house came a ringing clash, repeated once and twice and three times in regular time, like the sound of harsh cymbals. I knew the sound – foils have a duller ring – and ran across the lawn on tiptoe towards the lighted window of the salle d’armes. Before I reached it, the clashing sabres ceased.

I put my hands on the sill and stood on tiptoe to look into the room. The window was open but there was no sound.

Then the harsh cymbals rang again, once and twice and three times and four in steady beat. I could see the sabres moving above the sill, so quickly that their flashing seemed to hang in the air like solid wheels of thin silver.

I chinned myself on the sill to see the swordsmen and felt Alec’s heavy shoulder moved against the back of my thighs to take part of my weight. One of the swordsmen was Peter Schneider. His back was to me but I saw his blonde hair and the way he stood.

The other swordsman was bareheaded, too, and faced me full in the light, a woman with green eyes and red hair that moved lightly on her head when she moved to parry and strike. Her breasts were sharp and steady beneath her raised arm and a blue flared skirt whirled round her knees in time with the whirling sabres. The woman looked dear to me and yet remote in the white air, like a lost thing found under water.

The sabres must have clashed thirty times in unbroken sequence but the play went on. They stood bareheaded under the flashing blows as if they trusted each other utterly. The woman’s face looked dazzled and serene and Peter’s body moved like a dancer’s in love.

The woman stepped back and lowered her sabre and Peter laid his weapon on the floor and stepped towards her. She came into his arms and I saw his face go down to hers. She dropped her sabre and her hand came round to the nape of his neck. Her knee pressed forward between his legs and they stood there swaying in passion.

Alec took away his shoulder and my heels came down hard on the ground. I felt disemboweled and stuffed with kapok. A goblin monotone in the howling wilderness of my brain began to recite brisk little rhymes about what a four-letter day it was for me, and repeated them like a cracked record. Phut shut blut slut rut gut mut.

Alec had pulled himself up to the window and I chinned myself beside him on the wide sill. The kiss was still going on, far beyond the Hays office maximum. A charming scene. A charming couple, Peter Schneider and Ruth Esch. I couldn’t see too much of them.

Dr. Schneider made a sudden appearance in the doorway at the far end of the room. He seemed interested in the scene, too. He stood glaring.

Then his mouth opened so that his false teeth glittered in his beard. He said in German in a loud voice: “Stop that!”

The young lovers sprang apart like the two halves of an apple separated by a knife. I couldn’t see Peter’s face, but Ruth’s face looked pale and angry as she turned to face him.

Dr. Schneider walked towards them ponderously and quickly, his black beard shaking on his chest. With a grunt he stooped and picked up the woman’s sabre and brought the flat of it down across her shoulders. I heard it swish in the air and he raised it for a second blow.

Peter, in a voice like the yap of a dog, said a German word which implied that his father’s sexual practices improved on nature’s simple plan. Without waiting for a further development of the theory, I dropped to the grass and sprinted around the back of the house and onto the porch. I heard Alec pound up the steps behind me as I ran in the open back door.

When I reached the door of the fencing room, Dr. Schneider was lying on the floor on his back. Peter was kneeling on his father’s outstretched arms and briskly slapping his face. Just a family party.

“This will teach you to mind your business,” Peter said in German. The old man’s curses were muffled and he gasped for breath.

The woman was standing above the two men, looking down at them. She glanced up and saw us and I stepped into the room with Alec at my shoulder. She fell back a pace and her hand flew to her mouth, but she said quite calmly then:

“Peter, you have guests.”

Peter came to his feet facing us in a single fluid motion. His face was scarlet with fury and for a moment he crouched slightly with his shoulder muscles bunched under his sweater as if he would leap at us. I wish he had.

The woman touched his arm and said, “Please.”

Peter drew a hand across his rage-puffed lips. Then he said, “Dr. Branch.”

I heard the woman take a short, hard breath. She looked at me with wide green eyes in which bewilderment moved like water under wind. Had I changed so much?

Before I could speak, Peter said, “Forgive me for being found in such an undignified position. My father is in his manic phase again. Happily it never lasts long, but I sometimes have to act decisively in order to avoid a Dostoevsky climax. Prince Myshkin, you know.”

Dr. Schneider was getting to his feet, his face contorted with effort and indignation. “It is you who are insane!” he exploded in German. “You are insane and corrupt.”

“Hold thy noise, pig-dog,” Peter said in German. “Or thou wilt be made to regret it.’

“I regret begetting you. You are twisted and insane. And as for this thing–” The old man pointed at the woman with a stubby finger that vibrated in the air “–you will take this thing out of my house.”

“Your house?”

“Out of my house. To-night. I cannot stand it.”

Dr. Schneider stamped to the door with his shoulders hunched as if in despair. I wondered what he despaired of. The woman stood straight and watched him go past us out of the room. Her eyes flared with hate like the green flame of copper foil.

Peter turned to me and said, “My father is temporarily insane, as I said. But pardon me, I believe you know my fiancée, Dr. Branch? Miss Ruth Esch.”

She said, “Do you remember me, Bob? I’ve changed, I know. Though I said I would remain myself.” Her voice was harsher than it had been.

“You haven’t changed at all,” I said. “I knew you right away.”

But she had changed. Anyone changes in six years, and she had been in prison. Her hair was as bright as ever but her green eyes were not so clear. The bones of her face were more prominent and there were faint hollows in her cheeks and along the line of her jaw. Her skin was ravaged by time and the hardships she had undergone, and she looked older than she was.

Yet the strong and delicate shape of her head was the same and her body was as I remembered it. Slim and straight as a boy’s, with small, high breasts and narrow hips and firm legs like a dancer’s. I stood and looked at her and wondered if I had dreamed I saw her kiss Peter Schneider. But he said she was his fiancée and she had not denied it. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Alec had not spoken till now. He said, “I’m afraid I don’t know Miss Esch, and Mr. Schneider.”

“Mr. Judd,” I said to them.

Ruth bowed stiffly and Peter clicked his heels. Alec’s frown deepened at that.

My story was ready. “I came to inquire if Miss Esch had arrived safely. Mr. Judd was good enough to drive me out. We were just going to knock on the front door when we heard the sound of fighting. We came in without knocking.”

Peter coolly looked me up and down. “Unwisely, perhaps? Do you frequently intervene in family crises with which you have nothing to do?”

“I dislike patricide,” I said. “I dislike homicide of any kind.”

Peter turned red again. He was turning red as regularly as a traffic light. But he spoke very calmly and precisely. “Good evening, Dr. Branch. And Mr. Judd. You have seen that Miss Esch has arrived safely and now, I believe, there is nothing to detain you.”

I looked at Ruth and she turned away. There was a red weal across the back of her neck where the sabre had struck her. I said, “Ruth,” but she didn’t look at me.

Suddenly, I felt like a romantic boy. Six years is a long time. The six years from 1937 to 1943 were a very long time in Europe. Much water had flowed under the bridge, and much blood, and then the bridge was blown up. I had known her for one month and she had made no promises.

I turned and walked out of the room and Alec followed me to the front door. It was locked but I turned the key in the lock and we stepped out onto the driveway. We had nothing to say to each other as we went down the road to the car. At least I had nothing to say, and Alec held his peace.

We found the car and drove back into Arbana. My head was buzzing, not with ideas. Ruth Esch had changed all right. She had changed from my girl into Peter Schneider’s.

Yet she had probably saved my life. It was pretty clear that she had been in Schneider’s house all evening: I remembered Dr. Schneider’s phone-call when I first mentioned Ruth to him in the German office, the lipstick on Peter’s face, the woman in the doorway who had shaken her head at Beau Sabreur. A queer thought dragged through my head and left a narrow slime of doubt: had she objected to my decapitation because an automobile accident is a less dangerous way to commit murder?

“Drop me at my apartment, will you, Alec? I’m going to have a drink and go to bed.”

“No more housebreaking to-night?”

“Not for me. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Right.” He stopped the car at my corner and I got out.

Before I slammed the door, I said, “Good luck.”

He needed it.