We ran through the snow at the side of the road until we were out of breath; I was sure the shots would bring a Russian patrol. We’d leave tracks in the snow but we’d have made more noise in the hard-packed center of the road. The end of the snowstorm had brought that still, bitter cold when a running step echoes like hammer on anvil.
We heard the guard’s carbine blast the padlock off the gate. We started to run again, and the siren went off; there must have been a switch in the sentry box. We heard the sound of a car coming toward us and saw the long beams of the headlights slashing into the shadows of the trees at the bend in the road ahead. The rising scream of the siren and the moving light and the throb of the car’s engine seemed to freeze us where we stood...
SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:
DEAD STREET by Mickey Spillane
DEADLY BELOVED by Max Allan Collins
A DIET OF TREACLE by Lawrence Block
MONEY SHOT by Christa Faust
ZERO COOL by John Lange
SHOOTING STAR/SPIDERWEB by Robert Bloch
THE MURDERER VINE by Shepard Rifkin
SOMEBODY OWES ME MONEY by Donald E. Westlake
NO HOUSE LIMIT by Steve Fisher
BABY MOLL by John Farris
THE MAX by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
THE FIRST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins
GUN WORK by David J. Schow
FIFTY-TO-ONE by Charles Ardai
KILLING CASTRO by Lawrence Block
THE DEAD MAN’S BROTHER by Roger Zelazny
THE CUTIE by Donald E. Westlake
HOUSE DICK by E. Howard Hunt
CASINO MOON by Peter Blauner
FAKE I.D. by Jason Starr
PASSPORT to PERIL
by Robert B. Parker
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK (HCC-057)
First Hard Case Crime edition: July 2009
Published by
Titan Books
For my children
Chapter One
FRIGHTENED GIRL
It wasn’t until the Orient Express was nearing the Hungarian frontier, about two hours out of Vienna, that I found I was traveling on the passport of a murdered man.
I’d been alone in my compartment for most of the time, reading the Budapest papers and planning my mission to Hungary, my first visit since the end of the war. It was good to be in the luxurious international train. Snow had fallen heavily since we’d pulled out of the Westbahnhof in Vienna, and there was a biting north wind.
The girl entered the compartment just after the Orient had flashed through the bombed-out ruins of Bruck-an-der-Leithe. I had wiped the mist off the window and was watching the station lights flicker through the falling snow. At first I thought the door had been opened by the Wagons-Lits porter or the dining-car steward to tell me dinner was ready. Then I heard a woman’s voice say in French, “Thank god you’re here. I thought you’d been—”
I’ll always remember that warm, low voice. It stopped abruptly when I turned to show my face. The girl was tall and slender, somewhere in her middle twenties.
“I’m terribly sorry. I’ve made a mistake.” She turned her head to check the number on the compartment door. “No, this is number seven, isn’t it?” She glanced at the baggage rack above my head. When she looked at me there was complete disbelief in the dark face. “I thought you were someone else.” She paused. “You even look a great deal like him.”
“Perhaps you’re in the wrong car,” I said. “Are you sure you want car twenty-two?”
“Yes, car twenty-two.” She pointed to the rack. “That’s my baggage. I put it there before we left the station.” She took her ticket from her pocket and studied it. “Compartment seven, car twenty-two. There’s no mistake.”
I checked my ticket again, and it was correct. There are two seats in a second-class compartment when the sleeping-car is used for daytime travel.
There was bewilderment in the girl’s wide-set black eyes. I found her extremely attractive. Her raven-black hair was parted and drawn behind her ears, and her cheeks were a little hollowed so that her cheekbones and the firm line of her jaw showed clearly. She was wearing a gray tweed suit with a frilly blouse and she carried a blue velvet beret in her hand.
She hesitated, and for a moment I thought she would leave the compartment, but she finally sat beside me, and I offered her the Hungarian newspapers. “No, thank you. I’m afraid I don’t read Hungarian.” The puzzled light was still in her eyes. She turned to me. “Would you mind telling me how you got this seat?”
“Not at all. It’s very simple. The Wagons-Lits office in Vienna swore the Orient was sold out. But I’ve usually found that at least one person fails to show up at the station. I took a chance and got aboard. This was the only vacant seat, and I bought it from the porter after the train started.”
The girl was quiet a moment, as if she were trying to imagine what had caused the other man to miss the train, the man whose seat I’d taken. “Is there another train tonight from Vienna to Budapest?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s a local tomorrow morning. But there’s the Russian plane tonight. It gets to Budapest before we do.” I didn’t want to frighten her but I couldn’t help adding, “It isn’t very safe. I wouldn’t want to take it in this weather. The pilot hedgehops all the way to follow the tracks.” I was about to tell her of the trip I’d made in a Russian plane from Budapest to Bucharest with the pilot using an oil company’s road map to guide him, but something in her expression told me she wasn’t in the mood for levity.
The girl said, “Have you ever been to Budapest?” even though she’d seen me reading the Hungarian newspapers. Maybe she thought I’d picked up the language at Berlitz.
“Yes,” I said, “I was living in Budapest when the war started. I know it very well. It’s the most beautiful city in the world—or it was before the Germans and the Russians blew it apart.”
She accepted a cigarette from my case, and I lit it. I asked her if she knew Budapest. She shook her head, and I noticed the blue highlights in the midnight-black of her hair. “Not at all,” she said. “I’ve never been in this part of Europe before.” I wondered about her nationality. Her French was grammatically perfect, but the accent was off somewhere.
“Could I get back to Vienna tonight? Could I get a train from the border?”
Maybe she was on her honeymoon. That would account for her distress. But there weren’t any rings on her long, slender fingers.
I knew there weren’t any trains from the frontier that night—I’d learned the timetable by heart—but I felt sorry for her. I said, “Let’s look it up. There must be a railway guide in the porter’s compartment. I’ll get it.”
I opened the door and bumped into a man in the corridor. I excused myself and he grunted, but he didn’t move and I had to wedge past him. He was leaning on the rail, apparently engrossed in watching the melting snowflakes slide down the heated glass. I didn’t pay much attention to him except to notice he was short and squat, with a bullet head that could have made him almost any nationality in Central Europe.