“How about going under them?” Walter said.
“Too much snow,” Hiram said.
“What’s left?”
“We’ll have to scale the wall in back of the platforms,” Hiram said.
That meant retracing our steps to the place where we had met and leaving the tracks to walk the streets to Fiumei ut, which paralleled the sidewalk in back of the platforms.
We started back the way we’d come, only I led and Hiram came last.
The whole business made no sense to me. Hiram should have known what we would be up against before we started. There must have been some way to find out.
Hiram had said the stone wall around the Jozsefvaros station was ten or twelve feet high. We couldn’t hope to scale a blank wall without a ladder or some other help. And even if we could find such an aid, a thousand to one shot, how could we hope to use it on the Fiumei ut, one of the main streets of Budapest and pretty well traveled even at three-thirty in the morning? I remembered it as a well-lighted street, but it was sufficiently policed to make suicide any such operation as Hiram contemplated, even if the lights were dim.
Then, too, the map had shown a large open space between the loading platforms and the Fiumei ut wall, including a driveway for trucks to deliver shipments to the platforms. If we succeeded in reaching the top of the wall, we’d have to drop twelve feet into that open space, then cross the driveway to the shelter of the platforms. We might not be watched but we wouldn’t know until we hit the top of the wall and then it might be too late.
There had to be some other way to get into the Austrian car to retrieve Marcel Blaye’s envelope. Hiram’s idea of approaching from the yards was sound. What we needed was a diversion to draw the attention of the guards, something to take them away from the passenger car for just enough time to allow our search.
Perhaps one of us could fire a gun out in the yards? The guards would rush to investigate. But I knew that wasn’t any good because it would then be impossible to leave by the tracks, the only exit Hiram had found because of that stone wall.
I think all three of us must have thought of the locomotive at the same time. At any rate, we all tried to talk at once when I went back to Walter and Hiram caught up with us.
We sneaked up alongside the locomotives, and they were deserted. We checked the switches and they were set straight into one of the middle tracks on which three flimsy wooden boxcars were standing at a loading platform.
I mounted to the cab of the locomotive nearest the yards. I gave Hiram and Walter three minutes by my watch to move as close as possible to the Austrian coach. Then I released the brakes, pulled the throttle wide, and jumped as the big machine began to roll.
I fell into a snowbank alongside the track. I picked myself up and ran after the locomotive as fast as I dared in the semidarkness but I was a good hundred yards from the Austrian coach when the engine plowed into the wooden boxcars.
There was a crash that must have been heard a mile. Then the engine jumped the tracks, sideswiped the loading platform and toppled on its side with a great roar of steam. I reached the passenger car, three tracks away, as the boiler blew up, scattering hunks of those matchbox freight cars like rain.
I was in time to boost Hiram over the coupling onto the back platform of the car. Walter had apparently climbed up before him. There was no sign of Walter nor of any guards. They had rushed over to the track where the locomotive struck.
In the next minute, all of Jozsefvaros went crazy. A siren screamed, whistles blew, a bugle echoed from the roof of the army barracks, the sounds accompanied by the hissing of steam from the wrecked locomotive.
Hiram and Walter returned to the back platform. Walter reached the ground first, and I knew by the way he gripped my shoulder that they had found the Manila envelope.
Walter reached out to help Hiram down.
At that moment, the floodlights went on.
We were shielded by the freight cars on the next track, between us and the station offices and the barracks. But our escape route over the tracks, back to the spot where we had left the street, was blocked. The arcs lit up the station and the yards like a baseball stadium at night.
We climbed onto the car platform and hurried through the corridor to the other end. The large space between the backs of the loading platforms and the high stone wall was in half-darkness, illuminated faintly by the light from the yards.
There was a door in the wall, a high wooden door, in the corner nearest the cemetery. We couldn’t have entered that way because the lock was on the inside, but it offered our only chance to get out.
The door in the wall was about a hundred feet from where we stood on the rear platform of the Austrian coach. For most of the distance there were two or three feet of snow. There was no time to lose. The guards who had hurried to the other platform when the locomotive crashed would be back any second.
We walked off the coach onto the platform, then jumped into the snow and waded as fast as we could through the drifts toward the door in the high stone wall. Walter was ahead of me, Hiram behind.
When I caught up with Walter in front of the door, I saw he was trying to pull back the heavy brass bolt. The door would open in, and snow was drifted against it. Hiram and I worked feverishly to clear it away but it was slow going with only our hands as scoops.
Walter got the bolt back and we had cleared enough snow so that the door would open two or three feet, enough for us to slip through.
None of us realized the significance of the thin iron pipe that ran along the wall just above the door. We never noticed it in the half-light until it was too late. You see, the moment Walter started to swing that heavy door, the electrical connection broke and set off an alarm in the station. We couldn’t hear the alarm, which meant we had no warning. We tugged at that big door until the searchlight went on, and then there was no place to hide.
I suppose the alarm went off when anything happened anywhere along that long stretch of wall. The searchlight stabbed back and forth for a few seconds before it came to rest on us, huddled in front of that door. Walter found it on the station roof but there was a burst of shots from a tommy gun before he fired into the searchlight and put it out of commission. The gunner on the roof must have had buck fever because only one bullet took effect. That one plowed into Hiram, and he crumpled without a sound.
There was no telling how much longer we’d have the darkness. There could be another searchlight. At any rate, they’d come after us quick enough. We might have heard shouts if the siren hadn’t resumed its hysterical wailing.
We left Hiram where he’d fallen and pulled desperately at the door. I found I could slip through, but Walter was a lot bigger, and it took a minute or so to give him enough space to pass, dragging Hiram.
By that time, the siren had trailed off into a low moan, and we could hear the voices of the sentries moving across the loading yard toward the door and us. There was no way to pull the door shut behind us; there was no hardware, no handle on the outer side.
I told Walter to get Hiram to the car. I’d try to hold off the guards until he could get a head start. They’d have a chance on the street that paralleled the cemetery. It wasn’t much used, even in the daytime.
Walter took Hiram in his arms like a baby. It was more than half a mile to the car on the Asztalos Sandor ut.
They were swallowed up in the darkness even before I moved to the right of the door. I flattened myself against the wall with my right arm and my gun straight out from the shoulder. It occurred to me they might come over the wall instead of through the door but in that case they’d need to go back for a ladder and that would give Walter and Hiram precious tune.