Dead Man's Tale (12 page)

Steve sounded as if he were strangling. “Will you get the hell out of here?”

Estelle jumped out of the van like a gazelle. Lou Goody lit another cigarette. In the flare of the match. Andy saw Steve glaring at him in a sort of agony. Then the match went out.

It wouldn't be money in Steve's case, Andy thought. Steve didn't need money. It sounded like something else. Something nasty. She had a hold on Steve. A death grip.

The tail gate of the rear van came clanking down. A few moments later an engine exploded into life. Andy poked his head out. The moon had risen, or come out from behind a cloud; in its soft light he saw a motorcycle with a sidecar speeding up the road in the direction from which they had come. The tail gate clanked back.

Then Helmut's big hand was grasping the edge of the door. Andy pulled his head in.

Seconds later, they were once more under way.

The woman was a type, Gerhard Mueller decided.

Another woman would have scrunched down in the sidecar behind the windshield. This one sat calm and straight, letting the wind tumble her hair about. She was attractive but hard-looking, and in the moonlight he could see that her lips were parted in a smile of sheer sensuality.

Well, so she was a strange one. What was it to him? Mueller was feeling good. Good indeed. His work was over. He had done his part, to the letter, and Dieter Loringhoven's fifteen hundred schillings had multiplied astoundingly.

True, Theresa was holding the money. But he had earned it and they would spend it together. There was that about Theresa. Money for her, as for him, was to be spent. Not like his wife who, a lower-class
Hausfrau,
a peasant really, begrudged every groschen.

Headlights blinded him suddenly. The American woman shouted. Mueller barely heard her over the roar of the motorcycle's engine.

What was the damn fool trying to do, run them down?

Mueller wrenched the handle bars and the motorcycle swerved with its sidecar towards the soft shoulder of the road. He fought frantically to control the vehicle, vaguely aware that the car responsible for their plight had jammed to a stop a few yards away.

The motorcycle hurtled over on its side. The American woman was flung out. She landed heavily on Mueller. “You God damn clumsy
oaf
!”

Mueller disentangled himself slowly. By a miracle he was unhurt. He helped the cursing woman to her feet. She cried out, and he saw that she was standing with one foot off the ground, like an injured dog.

Mueller fumed. This would have to happen just as everything was working like a charm! He briefly considered thrashing the driver of the car. But the man climbing out of it looked rather large. Anyway, Mueller told himself, he would need the idiot's help. Perhaps the motorcycle was wrecked. In that case …

Mueller peered. He could not make out the man well. The rascal was standing in the shadow of the dark sedan. He seemed very large indeed. Mueller decided to be generous.

“These things happen,
mein Herr,”
he called in a man-to-man voice. “If you'll be kind enough to help me with my motorcycle …?”

The woman was clinging to him, moaning. Mueller took a step towards the car, assisting her. The man had not moved.

“Mein Herr?”
Mueller said again.

The man spoke. “Gerhard Mueller?”

Mueller's heart leaped like a fish. The man knew his name. How could that be?

Bewildered, Gerhard Mueller watched the man's arms appear from the shadow. They seemed to be holding something.

“I am Gerhard Mueller. But how—?”

Then he saw what it was.

Mueller felt the surge of a great desire to run, to run. But something seemed to have happened to his legs. And there was the woman clinging to him, oblivious to everything but her pain. I will scream, Mueller thought. But his throat was paralysed, too.

I will call out to Theresa, waiting for me in the apartment on the Praterstrasse. I will say, see, I did it, I did it, I did it for us,
liebchen,
I earned all that money for us.…

Very vividly Mueller saw the apartment, the dear apartment, the beautiful old sofa with its frilly antimacassars, the stylish Hungarian lamp with its lovely orange globe, Theresa, the beloved, wearing the new leather coat he had decided they were going to buy for her.…

It was a machine pistol.

That was when Gerhard Mueller's throat came unstuck and he uttered a great scream and he felt the muscles of his legs come to life, but fire was coming out of the machine pistol and immeasurable agony sprayed across his well-filled stomach to the accompaniment of a loud chatter, as of a thousand typewriters, and then Mueller felt and heard nothing more.…

For a moment the man looked down at the quiet bodies of Gerhard Mueller and Estelle Street, tumbled together in the intimate integration of death, then he climbed into his car and drove a little way down the road to swing out and back and out again, past the two bodies once more as he settled contentedly down to the long drive back to Vienna and the successful report he must make to Herr Pilsen Brandenburg.

PART V

MILO HACHA

17

From Andy Longacre's diary:

… funny thing about it was that for a time I assumed Milo Hacha was as good as dead, simply because Steve and Lou Goody were gunning for him.

Actually, it's hard to pinpoint when the change in my thinking occurred. When it did, I went too far in the other direction.

But first things first. When I thought it through, I realized that the sending of Steve and Lou Goody to Czechoslovakia to murder Milo Hacha wasn't too far from the classical
modus operandi
of gangland slayings. In a gangland slaying, the local talent is rarely used. The reason's obvious: if out-of-town killers are brought in, they stand less chance of being identified.

Ideally, the out-of-towner meets the finger man, who identifies the victim for him, does the job as soon as possible and blows right out again.

The one thing missing in our setup was a finger man. Since none of us knew what Milo Hacha looked like or where we could find him, the lack of a finger man could be serious.

Beside this, we had to cross an international border twice without being seen. And it looked like the kind of mob-type hit Lou Goody and Steve could handle.

Then I got to thinking. Steve and Lou Goody couldn't speak a word of anything but English and I couldn't touch Czechoslovak although I spoke German and Russian well enough. The trucker, who turned out to be a big hunk of chicken, would only take us as far as a town called Ceske Budejovice, less than a quarter of the way from the border to Prague. Prague was a city of a million people. Assuming we ever got that far, we'd have to find Hacha somehow without arousing suspicion, do our job and get out before they started looking for us. Also, Steve gave us the lowdown in the truck as he'd gotten it from Mueller.

Milo Hacha had been invited back to Czechoslovakia to assume the post of Assistant Minister of the Interior. In other words, a front man. This was to be a surprise and a delight for the burghers of Prague, who still revered Milo's old man, Rudolf, one of their former Social Democrat leaders in the pre-Communist days. That being the case, Hacha would probably be kept under wraps until the Reds decided it was time to spring their surprise. Then how could we hope to find him?

Steve and Lou Goody were huddled together, talking a mile a minute. I didn't pay much attention to them. Goody was a semi-stupid thug dreaming of ten thousand American bucks and Steve was scared. That left me to do the straight thinking, if any was to be done. The way I saw it, we stood our best chance of returning to Austria in an upright position if we didn't go anywhere near Milo Hacha. I came to that conclusion just before we reached the border. So I decided to get us caught without entrance visas before we even set foot on Czech soil.

It seemed a shame. I did want to meet Milo Hacha face to face. I really did. Henry M. Stanley seeking Dr. Livingstone all over central Africa couldn't have felt worse about it than I did. Hacha had become the pivot around which my life swung. I can't say why.

Anyway, I was going to blow the whole thing on the border, and the hell with Estelle Street.

“Hey, we're slowing down,” Lou Goody said.

The big trailer truck rolled to a stop, its brakes squeaking. For a while nothing happened, then Andy heard boots thudding on concrete. He was tense and ready; he had made up his mind. If he was going to do anything to keep them out of Czechoslovakia, he had to do it now.

Andy got to his feet and walked over to the side door of the van. He could hear voices faintly, Helmut saying something and one of the guards answering. Then the truck driver laughed and the guard laughed.

“Keep still, kid,” Steve's voice said in his ear. Andy hadn't heard Steve approach at all. He felt his brother's hand on his arm. Andy drew back his foot.

That was when Lou Goody grabbed him from behind. It had to be Goody, because Steve was still breathing in his ear. Goody's arm whipped around Andy's neck, crooked and pulled back hard. Andy's brain said, yell! and he yelled like mad; only nothing came out. Also, nothing was going in. A fire started in his lungs and the van began to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

“All right, Lou, all right, Lou,” Steve's voice was saying from far away. “He's out on his feet. Let go.…”

Goody let go. Andy opened his mouth like an auto-intoxicated fish, half-turning in a stagger. That was when the edge of Goody's hand hit him in the Adam's apple, a sharp, precise chop. Darkness fell, a darker darkness.

He opened his eyes to find himself lying on the floor of the van. His neck, throat …

Goody's voice was saying in a whisper, “Look, Steve, brother or no brother, the son of a bitch was trying to get us caught. What was I supposed to do, kiss him?”

Steve's voice was not there. But Steve's hands were. One was over Andy's mouth. The other was gently massaging Andy's neck.

The truck began to roll.

Into Czechoslovakia.

Andy was sitting propped up against the side wall of the van feeling all sorts of miseries. The sizzling roar of the trailer truck, the stifling heat inside the van, made the moment a timeless nightmare.

A new sound obtruded. Like a punching bag in action. Andy opened his eyes, narrowed them in the murk. Lou Goody was tattooing the front wall of the van with both fists.

“What do you think you're doing?” Andy heard Steve ask.

“You just keep watching that wise-guy brother of yours,” Lou shouted back. He kept pounding away.

The truck began to slow down. Finally, it stopped.

“What's the idea?” Steve demanded.

“That's just what, Steve. An idea.” Goody went to the side door. It slid open a foot or two. Helmut's face appeared in the moonlight, alarmed.

“What is it? What's wrong?” Helmut asked in German.

“You—Andy,” Goody said. “Tell him I want to ride up front with him.”

Andy glanced at Steve. Steve said nothing. Andy said to Helmut in German, “This man wishes to get into the cab with you.”

The driver shook his head violently, began to slide the door shut. Lou Goody's foot stopped it.

“Tell the slug there ain't gonna be no arguments.” The Luger was suddenly pointing at Helmut's head.

“I think,” Andy said, in English, “Helmut has seen the eternal truth of your position. Translation unnecessary.”

Helmut disappeared. Goody jumped into the road. He shut the door. A few seconds later the truck resumed its journey.

The brothers rode along in silence for a long time.

Suddenly Andy said, “Is Goody the boss or are you?”

“It's not a question of boss,” Steve said.

“Then why did you let him go up front? That's pretty stupid, Steve. We're deep in Czechoslovakia. Suppose Helmut is stopped?”

“Look who's talking,” Steve said. “Andy. What were you trying to pull?”

“It's a long and very complicated story, Steve,” Andy said wearily. “The story of a thought process. Forget it.”

“Oh, yeah? My own brother? Look, kid.” Steve moved over and squatted beside Andy. “It's probably my fault. I should have levelled with you. Only, well, I sort of didn't want you to know what kind of a horse's patoot you had for a brother.”

“I know, Steve,” Andy said.

“You know from nothing!” Steve said in a choked voice. “You think I'm doing all this for dough? Estelle Street's dough?”

“No. I know you don't need her blood-money.”

“Barney Street left all his dough to this Hacha. Estelle wants it. To get it, she has to have Hacha dead.”

“That much I figured out for myself.”

“Okay, you're a brain. Here's the part you couldn't figure.” Steve paused. Then he said, very fast, “Once, kid, I killed a man. At least I was there with the man who did, which legally boils down to the same thing. Estelle found out. She can strap me in the chair and pull the switch on me any time she chooses. That's why I'm on this junket. I tried to keep you out of it. I'll never forgive myself for letting you con me into taking you along. My only excuse is I kept telling myself Hacha must be dead already.… That stunt of yours, trying to get us stopped at the border, it might have meant curtains for me. From here on in I got to leave it up to you.”

Andy felt a spreading weariness. For no reason at all he could suddenly think only of that night when he had gotten drunk for the first time in his life and Steve had beaten him up like a maniac, a maniac with tears streaming down his cheeks.

He felt a little like crying now himself.

Andy became dimly aware that the truck was slowing to a stop.

“Listen, kid,” Steve was saying eagerly. “We'll go away somewhere afterward. Start over. Some place like Brazil, say. A guy who doesn't mind a little hard work can live like a king down there. What do you say, kid? Is it a deal?… Andy?”