Dead Man's Tale (17 page)

“Gasoline, gasoline,” the girl was saying.

“What?” Andy glanced, startled, at the gas gauge. The tank was almost empty.

“We have lost,” she said with a childlike sigh. “I think I knew this from the beginning. We cannot stop for gasoline; all stations will have been alerted. But you have been so very kind. I wish I knew your name.”

Andy took one hand from the wheel to shake her. “Snap out of it!” he said in English. “I mean,” he added in German, “my name is Andy—Andy—”

“Andy,” she said, as if pleased.

“And we are not lost yet, Fräulein.”

“No?” she said dreamily.

He told her about the truck and where it was parked. “How do I get there from here?”

She seemed to come to life. She sat up straighter and there was awareness in her voice as she gave him directions.

Andy left the sedan a block from the municipal parking lot as a precaution. He took Libusé's arm and they strolled over to the almost deserted lot and got into the cab. Andy started the engine, turned on the lights and drove out.

An ordinary-looking car drove out a half-minute later. The two policemen staked out in it had watched the American with some girl or other get into the truck and drive away. They had made no attempt to interfere because their orders were specific: follow the truck.

They followed the truck.

“He should of been back,” Lou Goody growled. He was hungry and irritable. They had long since finished the last of the bread, cheese and beer.

“All
right,
Lou. But what's the use of beefing? We'll just have to wait,” Steve said.

“What's he trying to pull?”

“He's not trying to pull anything. He'll be back.”

“Oh, yeah? When? You know what time it is? It's damn near one-thirty.”

Steve ground his teeth in silence. Lou Goody was worrying because they hadn't yet found Milo Hacha. That no longer bothered Steve. He was afraid for Andy. It's all my fault, he kept groaning to himself, this whole nutty caper. And on top of everything else, to let Andy go all by himself into the damn city of Red wolves … If anything's happened to him …

If Andy gets back here in one piece, I'll square it with him. If it takes the rest of my life and every crooked dime I've got, I'll square it with him.…

“Listen,” Goody said suddenly. “Hear something?”

Steve listened. It was the sound of an engine, labouring. Labouring up the hill!

“It must be Andy,” Steve cried. “By God, he's made it!”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn't,” Goody said. He took out his Luger.

They waited.

Headlights suddenly pierced the darkness around the last hairpin turn. The engine sounded as if it were picking up speed. Steve started running.

“Steve, you damn fool! What if it ain't—?”

“It is!” Steve shouted exultantly.

The truck stopped and Andy climbed down from the cab.

“Kid, kid,” Steve said, feeling Andy all over. “You're okay. You made it. What happened to you?” he said sharply. “You look as if you've been through a cement mixer!”

“It's a long story,” Andy said tiredly. “By the way, Steve, I'm not alone. There's a girl in the cab.”

“Girl?” Steve said stupidly. “What girl?”

“We'd better hurry. We'll be crowded, but there's that shelf behind the driver's seat—”

“A dame?” Goody snarled. “This is one hell of a time to start playing with dames! What about Hacha? Did you find the bum? Come on, kid, talk!”

“Hacha's dead.”

Goody gaped.

But Steve said in a strangled voice, “Andy, you mean you—?”

“No,” Andy said. “I didn't kill anyone but a policeman—maybe. God, I hope not, I hope not.… Look, we can't stay here. We've got to get going.…”

When the truck trundled out of the dirt road onto the main highway and headed south, away from Prague, the two men in the unmarked Prague police car waited a short time in the bushes where they had been hiding. Then they pulled out onto the highway and followed the truck.

Minister Zander did not think of the Americans until later that night, in his office, when the report came in that their truck had left the municipal parking lot and had driven out of Prague.

The Minister had been enjoying a moment of self-congratulation. All things considered, he had done not badly, not badly at all. A round dozen Social Democrats had been caught. From them the names of all those who had attended the meeting at the café could easily be extracted. In brief interviews with three of them, Minister Zander had expressed his horrified shock over Vaclav Mydlár's assassination by Milo Hacha.

When the substitute Milo Hacha and Dieter Loringhoven had been properly prepared for their trial, they would readily admit their guilt. Hacha would explain that he had killed old Mydlár in revenge for his part in Milo's father's death; Loringhoven would reveal himself as the clever
agent provocateur
who had been in the pay of the capitalist-imperialists all along.

Indeed, the Minister thought, he had not done badly. Mydlár was out of the way; and while the government could be indignant over his assassination, the Social Democrats, shorn of their leader, would become impotent.

A top-level case, no doubt about it. The Premier himself would surely be interested. The Minister especially liked his inspiration about Loringhoven, who had masterminded the spiriting of Hacha into the country. Loringhoven gave the case that touch of perfection.…

Only, there were those Americans.

The Americans were the loose end. Loose ends were intolerable; indeed, one might unravel the entire beautiful fabric. He must have the Americans, so that they could be brainwashed into admitting publicly that they had been Dieter Loringhoven's confederates.

“What time is it?”

“Almost three-forty, Commandant.”

“Alert the Austrian border stations,” Minister Zander said. “Stop the truck at the border. Bring them back.”

It was the only direction in which the Americans could flee.

“The town we passed through was Trebon,” Libusé said. “We are close to the border now. We will enter Austria near Gmünd.”

“In this truck?” Andy asked.

“No, on foot. I will tell you when to stop. There is a barbed-wire fence and there are patrols. But it is not difficult. They would need a million men to guard the border thoroughly. The Reds have learned that.”

“What're you two yapping about?” Lou Goody snapped.

“We're going to park the truck and walk,” Andy said.

He stared ahead along the winding road, the dark pine forest, slipping by swiftly on either side. They passed a clearing, a farmhouse, then more woodland.

“I saw a map once,” Libusé said. “Ahead, on the right, two kilometres, there will be another farmhouse. There the road turns sharply west. Then we stop and walk, Andy. It is not far.”

They passed the farm. Somewhere, far away, a dog barked. A ploughed field, the furrows black in the moonlight. Then more pine forest, and the road curved to the right.

“Here,” Libusé Mydlár said. “In fifteen minutes we'll be in Austria.”

“I don't like leaving the truck,” Goody said.

But when Steve barked at him he pulled up at the side of the road and they all got out. The air smelled wet. It was the first cool night Andy remembered since leaving Switzerland.

“Hold it,” Goody said. “You hear something?”

They heard it. A car, coming along the road, fast. Then, from the other direction, from the border, shouts.

“Quickly!” Libusé cried. She darted towards the woods. Suddenly she stopped.

At the limit of vision, in the moonlight, Steve thought he saw the border shed against the brighter night sky and figures of booted men running down the road in their direction.

Lou Goody dived towards the truck. The rest of them were frozen in the shadow of the woods.

“Halt!”
a heavy voice yelled. (The word is the same in German and English.)

Lou Goody kept going.

“We can still get away,” Libusé called urgently in German. “But you must hurry, Andy. Don't stand there to die!”

“You run,” Andy said to her gently. “I have to stay here.”

“No!” Libusé cried.

Goody had clawed the truck door open. Without warning Steve plunged ahead of him into the truck. Goody scrambled in after him, already slipping the gears into reverse.

“Get out of here, kid!” Steve shouted from the cab. “Go with the girl!”

“No! Steve! Wait—”

The truck shot backward down the road, engine grinding as it pitched from side to side, picking up speed.

At that instant the police car sped around the curve.

Here's your chance, kid, Steve thought. Here's your chance. Lou Goody fought him for control of the wheel, but he was not quick enough. There was a grinding, metal-rending crash.

What was left of Lou Goody went through the roof of the truck cab. Steve's body was flung fifteen yards through the sprung door.

Libusé tugged at Andy's arm and he followed her numbly into the woods. “Come,” she urged. “Please. You must.”

But he waited, and she waited with him, crouched in the bushes, until the border guards arrived. Only when they found Steve's body and Andy heard one of them say he was dead, did he move again.

In less than fifteen minutes they came to the barbed-wire fence. They climbed through the strands and kept walking until they reached the road, the Austrian road, that led to Gmünd.

At Gmünd they surrendered to the Austrian border guards.

24

From Andy Longacre's diary:

He must have thought it was our only chance, mine and Libusé Mydlár's. Maybe it was. I like to think so.

I've seen Philip Dempsey. I've delivered Steve's deposition to the D.A. in Long Island County. It made all the headlines and for the last few days they've been rounding up people nobody knew were hoodlums.

So much has happened so fast. Or maybe that's because Steve's gone. Sometimes I think, he's still alive and we're going to sit down over a beer and talk about what happened.

Libusé Mydlár's in England. I got a letter from her. She's all excited about a book she's going to write. About her father and the setup in Czechoslovakia.

I can't help thinking about her, because thinking about her reminds me of something else and someone else. Trudy, and what she once wrote to me. Because the last time I saw Libusé Mydlár, she was in despair. I didn't know if she'd ever snap out of it, but apparently she did. What was it Trudy wrote? I had had her letter, and I like to remember it: “Masterpieces are not produced from love of life. They are produced from despair.”

So maybe Libusé Mydlár will have her masterpiece and maybe it will be the blow she wants to strike against the ugly thing that cost her father his life.

I keep thinking of Milo Hacha. I think, finally, I know what it was about the idea of him that got me. He was a drifter. He was foot-loose. He didn't care about anyone but himself. He spent all his life running away from something without knowing what he was running away from.

The way I see it, he was running away from himself. Funny, I never even spoke to him.

Right now I've got work to do. I've seen Philip Dempsey about another matter—Barney Street's estate. With Estelle Street dead Dempsey thinks there's a good chance it can be left to Milo Hacha's daughter in Holland, or at least part of it.

If the details can be worked out, I'll bring her the good news myself. Probably on the way I'll stop in England and see Libusé Mydlár.

Meanwhile, I'd better attend to my application for that fellowship out West.

I think Steve would have liked that.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN 978-1-5040-1841-8

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