When we were a couple of miles from Matyasfold, Hiram changed places with Teensy. While she drove, he talked.
“After you told me how Schmidt had instructed Hermann to go to Matyasfold,” Hiram said to me, “I put two of my men on the job.
“Felix isn’t too common a name in Hungary. But my men could have spent a month finding the right Felix if that was all I gave them to go on. Do you remember what Schmidt told Hermann?”
“Of course,” I said. “I remember the conversation almost exactly. After all, it was only yesterday.” I could hardly believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since Maria and I had left the train at Kelenfold only to fall into the hands of the Nazi doctor. “Schmidt said, ‘I want that car moved from here immediately. It is much too dangerous. You will drive it to Felix in Matyasfold.’ ”
“Do you remember what else Schmidt told Hermann?”
“He said, ‘You will give your uniform to Felix. He will return your civilian clothes and the necessary documents. He will also give you clothes and documents for Otto.’ Then he said, ‘If you are stopped by police, you will tell them you are Frau Hoffmeyer’s nephew.’ ”
Hiram said, “What does that conversation tell you about Felix?”
“Well,” I said. “It means that Felix is one of Schmidt’s agents.”
“That’s hardly a discovery,” Hiram said. I didn’t see why it amused him.
“It meant that Felix, whoever he is, was in a position to supply civilian clothes to Hermann. It meant he had facilities for forging documents.”
“Or stealing them,” Hiram said. “But don’t you see the most important clue to the identity of Felix?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The car,” he said, “the Russian army car.”
“Schmidt told Hermann to hand it over to Felix.”
“That’s correct,” Hiram said. “If it were only a question of faked documents or civilian clothes, Felix could be almost anybody. A shopkeeper, for instance, the postman, or the tax collector. But it isn’t normal for such persons to have army staff cars and it isn’t easy to hide one. Garage people can’t disguise an army car with a coat of paint the way they do stolen stock cars. Anybody can dispose of a uniform like Hermann’s but not automobiles with army insignia.
“The more I thought about that angle, the more I figured Felix had to be someone whose possession of a Red Army car wouldn’t excite suspicion and someone who had access to official documents at the same time. It seemed to me we were looking for a Red Army officer and a fairly high one at that.
“I think we’ll find that Doctor Schmidt’s agent, the Felix who is stooge for the Nazi Bruderschaft, is pretty close to the commander of the Russian air base right here in Matyasfold.”
“How do you know Schmidt brought Maria out here?” I said.
“I don’t,” Hiram said, “but we’ve got to start looking somewhere, don’t we?”
Chapter Sixteen
ON GUARD
I had visions of Hiram, Teensy, Walter, and me driving up to the main gate of the air base to attack the garrison. The six-foot Teensy with her bleached-blond hair, little Hiram in his coonskin cap, Walter, the perpetually smiling ex-prizefighter with a bum leg, and John Stodder alias Marcel Blaye alias Jean Stodder, the involuntary watch and clock salesman whose bandaged hands couldn’t hold a gun. Coxey’s Army would have looked like a West Point color guard alongside us. It was the strangest American expeditionary force on record.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Hiram.
“Call on a friend of mine for a cup of coffee.”
Hiram told Teensy to turn off the main highway into the Kossuth Lajos utca, about half a mile short of the air base. The car skidded and spun wildly in the narrow, rutted road, but we had less than half a block to go. The street was lined on both sides with identical cracker-box bungalows, the Hungarian equivalent of a hundred communities along the Long Island Rail Road.
“It’s all right,” Hiram said. “Let’s go in.”
I couldn’t figure how he knew until I noticed the shade was half raised in one of the windows of the bungalow we were entering.
“You’re a new member of the agricultural attaché’s staff,” Hiram said.
“I don’t know the difference between timothy and trailing arbutus,” I said.
“Never mind,” said Hiram. “Neither do I. Your hands and feet were frostbitten when you went skiing. That’s how Walter hurt his leg.”
“That gives American skiers a fine reputation,” I said. “Incidentally, what’s my name?”
“John Stodder,” he said. “I’ve got papers to prove it.”
I couldn’t understand why the briefing, if we were visiting one of Hiram’s agents, until we went inside the house. We were introduced in turn to Bela Szabo, his wife and seven children, the wife’s mother, somebody’s brother-in-law, and the serving girl who insisted on kissing everybody’s hand.
It seemed that Mrs. Szabo sewed for Teensy, and there were a couple of dresses ready to try on. The two women vanished into a back room, Hiram and Papa Szabo, a gaunt, bearded, melancholy man, repaired to the small porch to smoke a cigar, and Walter and I were left with the seven children, Mrs. Szabo’s mother, and the unidentified brother-in-law who volunteered to play the accordion. The serving girl, who answered to the name of Lilli, passed the apricot brandy.
I tried to answer Mrs. Szabo’s mother’s questions about America, but my mind was on Maria. Now that there was a possibility I might see her again, perhaps within a few hours, my feelings were uncertain. I’d thought of little else since I left her outside the coffeehouse with Schmidt. With reunion perhaps close at hand, I was filled with misgivings.
After all, what did I know about Maria Torres except what she herself had told me? How did I know she hadn’t voluntarily left the coffeehouse with the German doctor without waiting for me? What proof did I have, aside from the background she had given me, for believing she was a prisoner of Schmidt and not an accomplice?
I remembered how surprised I’d been when she’d responded to Schmidt’s command in German at Kelenfold to “Pick up your baggage,” although she’d told me she understood no German. There was no sign of emotion in her lovely face at that moment, none of the terror she’d displayed when she’d first sighted Schmidt aboard the Orient Express. I remembered how calm she’d been in the warehouse on Mexikoi ut and how I’d mistrusted her show of nerves when we’d met on the Orient. I’d started to put her down as a girl with too much imagination and too little control of herself. Maybe I’d been right. Maybe it had been clever acting.
But that didn’t make sense, either. She’d followed me off the Orient, with all the danger that involved. She’d played my game with Major Strakhov. She’d stuck by me when I decided to leave the train at Kelenfold. And hadn’t she thrown her arms around my neck and kissed me when I left her to enter the Keleti yards? Hadn’t she tried to go with me?
“I don’t get it.” I said it out loud in English because Mrs. Szabo’s mother said in Hungarian, “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking of. You were asking me about the Brooklyn Bridge?” The unidentified brother-in-law promptly pumped out an off-key rendition of “The Sidewalks of New York,” and Papa Szabo stuck his head in the door to tell him to be careful because the People’s Democracy does not favor fraternization with foreigners. Then Walter, who didn’t speak a word of Hungarian, told the fascinated children, who didn’t understand a word of English, the story of Br’er Rabbit.