The drapes were closed. Carter found the light switch by feel and flipped it. He was in a rectangular room with windows on both sides. Scatter rugs partially covered the bare wood floors.
He lifted each of the rugs. No safe.
There was a cluttered desk in one corner. It took him five minutes to go through the papers on top and rifle the drawers. He found nothing that would help him down the road.
The bedroom was nearly square in shape, with an alcove that held a stall shower but no tub. A double bed with no footboard stood against one wall, a mahogany highboy against another. A small mirrored vanity occupied part of the third wall. Above the vanity mirror was another, square mirror, slightly recessed into the wall.
Carter went through every drawer and lifted the paintings on the walls.
Nothing.
The kitchen, which was entered through the second living room door, was just a kitchen, rather long but narrow, and had no outside door. The sink was yellow-stained and chipped, with an open space and a garbage pail below, and cabinets above. The stove was a three-burner with a small removable oven; the refrigerator was ancient-looking and noisy.
Back in the living room office, Carter lit a cigarette and made his mind work. It was possible that Huzel kept his illegal records in the safe of his legal shop in the old town.
Possible, Carter thought, but not probable.
If the man was so wary about everything else, he would be especially paranoid about anything on paper that might send him to jail.
And the jewels.
The illegal jewels he was fencing had to be somewhere. Lorena had said that Huzel had made five pickups in the time she had followed him. He would not have had the time to resell those pickups.
Carter wandered back into the bedroom.
Then it hit him. The mirrored vanity. Why a second mirror, and why was it recessed into the wall?
He used a nail file from the vanity on the crack around the mirror. Near the bottom right-hand corner, he hit an obstacle. He heard a click as he pushed harder, and the mirror swung outward.
Carefully, he inspected the safe.
He found the maker’s name, and closed his eyes for a moment while he dusted off the files of his memory. He recalled the system and it took his trained fingertips fifteen minutes to find the combination.
The opening wasn’t large but the safe was deep and the whole of the back was filled with neat packets of currency bound together with paper strips. And if the new one-hundred-dollar bill on the top of the brick Carter lifted out was an indicator, he estimated that, give or take a few grand, he was looking at fifty thousand dollars.
That figured, Carter mused. Huzel was in a cash business.
Underneath the bills, he found a tray of diamonds and two velvet bags of miscellaneous jewels.
Now the safe was empty and he had still struck out.
Then he remembered the manufacturer and a particular added attraction to this model.
Five minutes later he located the pull release that opened a panel in the back of the safe. In the indentation behind the panel was a flat logbook. One glance and Carter knew he had what he wanted. It was all in coded symbols, but easy to decipher if the person doing it knew Huzel’s business.
The jewels and cash he put in a pillowcase. It and the book went into his courier bag. He closed the safe, made sure everything was in place, and moved quickly back to the street.
He rode to the Yum-Yum Club and entered through the rear door. The beautiful Oriental girl was in her office on the second floor. Carter dropped the pillowcase on the desk.
“Put this away for Mr. Potts. He’ll be back in a week or so.”
Back on the bike, he wound his way through late-after-noon traffic to the southern edge of the city. Fifteen minutes later he was coasting through the small village of Weesp. He was just past the old school when the ambulance pulled from the parking lot and fell in behind him.
A mile outside the village he turned left into a narrow tractor lane. Two hundred yards in front of him he could see the Amstel River.
He speeded up and pulled his feet up until he was standing on the seat in a semi-crouch.
Ten feet from the riverbank he jumped straight into the air.
The bike sailed out over the river for several feet before it fell into the water and sank out of sight.
Carter came to earth and rolled to his feet. Lorena had the rear door of the ambulance open. He piled in and at once began peeling off the leathers.
“You found it?” she asked.
Carter nodded. “Yeah. Mortimer?”
“Eh?”
“I’ve just made you a moderately wealthy man.”
“Music to me ears,” the man chuckled, and moved the van back toward the highway.
The road switchbacked for about eight miles and then the lights of the frontier posts gleamed through the fog. A long straight street led directly to the Dutch side. Potts dimmed his headlights and joined the line of vehicles waiting to be processed.
The Dutch border guard barely glanced at Potts and waved them through perfunctorily.
It was a different story a hundred yards farther on at the German gate.
A stern-looking border guard poked his head through the window. “Papers.”
Potts handed over the medical papers and their passports. The guard carried the documents to a lighted window where a colleague sat.
“Don’t sweat it if they check us,” Mortimer murmured. “Dope flows like the river Nile the other way into the Netherlands and Amsterdam, but from Amsterdam into Germany it’s another story.”
He was right. A minute later they were bundled out of the ambulance and it was searched. They and the medical bags were searched.
“You are the doctor?”
“Yes,” Carter replied.
The guard gestured toward Huzel’s blanket-covered form on the gurney. “What is wrong with him?”
“A severe case of hydroxia pormangalia.”
“Eh?” the man said, taking a slight step backward. “Is that a communicable disease?”
“Not at all,” Carter replied. “He needs rest and constant supervision. We are taking him to the clinic in Essen.”
“Ah.”
The papers were handed back to Potts, the gate was lifted, and they were waved through.
On the other side, Lorena tapped Carter’s shoulder. “What is hydroxia pormangalia?”
“Damned if I know,” Carter chuckled.
There was no speed limit on the German side even though they were traveling a secondary road and not on the autobahn. In spite of the slippery road conditions, car after car, usually German, sped past them. Carter shook his head. He was forced by circumstances to take so many chances, he couldn’t understand anyone taking risks who didn’t need to.
The German department of highways had apparently never heard of rock salt or didn’t believe in using it. Although the roads were plowed, only the top layer of snow was off, and the surface was covered with a thick, rutty layer of ice and hard-packed snow.
“Bloody idiots,” Potts groused as a big Mercedes flew by them, fishtailing, the driver nearly losing it.
“It’s getting close,” Carter said. “Not much over a mile.”
It was exactly a mile. Carter pointed and Potts spun the wheel.
“My God,” Lorena exclaimed, her eyes peering upward through the windshield. “It looks like a Gothic movie set!”
Carter chuckled. “It does at that, doesn’t it.”
Potts wasn’t happy. “I got to stay there? The place is probably bloody haunted.”
Otto Krumm opened the massive oak door just as Carter stepped from the rear of the ambulance with Lorena close behind him.
But it was a new Otto. His hair was silver and his face was perfectly aged, with sunken eyes and wrinkles over wrinkles. Even his posture was different, his usually erect body seeming to be shrunken inside his clothes. The voice when he spoke was wheezy, asthmatic.