“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?”