Maria’s low voice cut into my thoughts. “They’ll know who we are from our baggage, won’t they?” That was just the trouble. I’d very carefully changed the labels on my bags and in my clothing that morning in Vienna. I’d marked everything with the name Marcel Blaye and the address Geneva. Proof to any policeman that I’d robbed Blaye after killing him.
The girl’s cigarette glowed in the dark. She said, “I’ve led you into a lot of trouble. I don’t know why I let you do this for me.”
I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not before we were safely back in Vienna. So I told her half the truth. “I happen to like you. And I’ve been in trouble myself.” Then I said, “Who was Marcel Blaye?” The past tense no longer seemed out of place.
Maria said, “I’m not very sure that I know.” She paused, and I waited for her to go on. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted, and from time to time the limb of a tree would crack like a rifle bullet under the weight of the newly fallen snow.
“Monsieur Blaye described himself as an exporter of watches and clocks. He had an office in Geneva, off the Rue du Mont Blanc near the post office. He came to Geneva just before the end of the war—early in 1945, I think. You see, I don’t know very much about him because I only worked for him six weeks.”
“You mean you didn’t know very much about him, yet you were willing to travel with him to Budapest?”
Maria was silent for a moment. “I don’t think you can understand unless I explain the background. It’s just that I have three younger sisters to support.” She stubbed her cigarette in the snow and pulled my coat closer about her shoulders. “When we were children, we lived in Madrid, where we were born. My father was a lawyer but he was also a republican and when the monarchy was overthrown, he became Spanish consul to Geneva. When Franco made his revolt, my father insisted on returning to Spain to fight. He was killed at Guadalajara.”
I listened, but there was no sound of the sentry returning.
“The Republic took care of Mother and us until it ceased to exist. Mother worked at the League of Nations for a while but she died of pneumonia when I was seventeen. I’ve been working ever since. I went to work for Monsieur Blaye just because he offered a lot more money than I was making at the time.”
I found myself wondering what interest Blaye had taken in Maria Torres.
“He wasn’t interested in me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. “I never knew him before I answered his ad in the Journal de Geneve. He seemed to be very much in love with a Polish girl, a Countess Orlovska, who used to come to the office.”
“Why were you going to Budapest?”
“Monsieur Blaye said he’d arranged a big deal with the Hungarian government. He said it was so important and so secret that I mustn’t say a word to anyone. He even made me tell my sisters that we were only going to Zurich.”
“What about the man on the train? Who is he?”
“He told me his name was Doctor Schmidt,” Maria said, “but I don’t know much about him. I saw him for the first time a week ago when he came to the Geneva office. He and Monsieur Blaye had a terrible row in Monsieur’s private room. The next time I saw him was on the train from Geneva.”
“What did Blaye tell you about him?”
“Monsieur Blaye caught sight of Doctor Schmidt in the dining car. I thought Monsieur would die of fright. He left his dinner half eaten and insisted on locking himself in his compartment. That’s when he told me Schmidt was planning to kill him.”
I lit cigarettes for both of us and passed one to Maria.
“Monsieur Blaye insisted on leaving the train at Zurich and taking the next one. But it didn’t do any good because Doctor Schmidt did the same thing. When we arrived in Vienna, Monsieur took me to the Metropole in a taxi. He gave me an envelope to carry and told me he’d meet me on the Orient this afternoon. That was the last I saw of him.”
I figured Blaye must have been murdered shortly after leaving Maria. Herr Figl would have needed at least twelve hours to substitute my photograph for Blaye’s and to forge a new Swiss foreign-office seal for the picture, apparently the only change he had needed to make.
“You aren’t Swiss, are you?” Maria said.
Something told me to be cautious. “Why do you say that?”
“Because,” Maria said, “when you mentioned the distance to Vienna, you said ‘soixante-dix’ the way a Frenchman does. If you were Swiss you would have said ‘septente.’ ”
“As a matter of fact, I’m American,” I said. The only thing that mattered any longer was Blaye’s passport. There was no reason not to tell her the truth about everything else.
“You speak French without an accent,” the girl said. “You must have lived in France.”
“I was born in Paris,” I told her. “My father was in the American consular service for many years. We lived all over the world. I never learned very much in school but I did pick up languages.”
“Are you a diplomat?”
I laughed. “No,” I said, “I’m a newspaperman. After college in America, I seemed to drift naturally into foreign correspondence, largely because of my languages I guess.”
“Then you’re going to Budapest on assignment?” Maria asked.
I hadn’t talked to anybody about my reasons for going to Budapest. My father and mother thought I was still in Paris. The whole project was something I’d kept locked inside me. It was a mission that had to be accomplished if I were to go on living with myself.
“I’m going to Hungary to look for a man,” I said.
Maria was so close I could hear her breathing.
“It’s a long story,” I said, “and one I’m not very proud of. I don’t think it would interest you.” I found myself wanting desperately to tell her, this girl I’d known less than two hours and whom I’d probably never see again after we returned to Vienna. Because, as soon as I recovered my American passport, I’d have to find another way to enter Hungary.
I felt Maria’s hand on my arm. “Please tell me,” she said. “I want to hear it.”
“I told you my father was in the consular service,” I said. “There were five of us in the family—Father and Mother, of course, my sister Daphne, my brother Bob, and me. We were always very close as a family, perhaps because we shared the same experiences and because we lived so much in foreign surroundings.
“Bob and I were always together although he was”—there was that damned past tense again—“although he was two years younger than I. When we were children Mother taught us together so that when we entered boarding-school in America we were in the same class. We went to college together and shared the same room for four years.”
There was the sound of an airplane overhead, and we could see the running lights blinking against the stars. The Russian plane which wasn’t carrying Marcel Blaye.
“After we graduated, I came to Europe for a news agency, and Bob went on to law school. But I went home just before Pearl Harbor, and my brother and I enlisted in the Air Corps after America went into the war. We took our basic training together and went to Officer Candidate School. Then, because I had been a newspaperman, I was sent to Intelligence School while Bob became a navigator.”
Now that the words were coming out, it was almost as if someone else were talking.
“Strangely enough, we wound up in the same heavy-bomber outfit. I say strange because the Air Corps usually went to lengths to separate brothers. Anyway, we went through the campaign in Italy and when that was cleaned up we were assigned to help the Russians. One of our first missions was to attack the Manfried Weiss steel works—they’re on an island in the Danube at Budapest. They were producing for the Germans who had taken over Hungary.”