The Balkan Assignment (3 page)

"Nuts," I snorted. "He's asleep most of the time."

"He has been a hotel desk clerk for forty years," Ley said staunchly. "It is impossible to sneak past him. They had to have been on this floor to get into the room, which means they are already guests."

I pointed to the open window. Ley shook his head.

"No. The snow outside is completely undisturbed. I opened the window after I came into the room and it was locked. Bowen was too careful to have been taken that way. He would have locked the window as soon as he came into the room, and if he did not judge the lock adequate, would have taken precautions. No, someone knocked on the door, misrepresented himself, perhaps as a hotel employee, got Bowen to open the door, and then two or more men forced their way into the room, drugged him and then while he was semiconscious, strangled him."

"Whoa, wait a minute, how do you know all that?"

Ley moved a hard-backed chair to face the door and sat down. He removed his pistol from his shoulder holster, cocked and laid it in his lap.

He said patiently, "I will explain. First, one man alone could not have strangled Major Bowen. At least. two and possibly more would have been needed. Secondly, he would not have opened the door, unless he knew who was on the other side." I remembered the hotel room in Belgrade and the "precautions" Ley had taken when the bellboy delivered the gin. Too bad that Bowen had not been quite as careful.

"Third," Ley continued, "the method of execution is a rather infamous SS terror trick. First the victim is drugged —not unconscious but into immobility with chloroform. Then he is allowed to revive until his mind is awake, but his body is still very weak. The cord is looped around the neck and tightened slowly and the victim strangles, not able to struggle. It is a terrible way to die. It was used against partisans and chetniks both during the war and the bodies left in public places to serve as warnings. I felt sick again but managed to control my stomach. "So," I said shakily, "Bowen serves as a warning to you?"

"Yes. Obviously, their intelligence network is broader and deeper than we suspected. In sending the message to Bowen after Mistako was killed this morning . . . yesterday morning . . . I used the message center at the police headquarters. They have either broken our codes or have infiltrated the Yugoslav police.

"The important question is; how much does your friend Maher know about all this. Is he directing this operation, or is it being directed by someone else? I suspect the latter," he answered his own question. "Communications between the mainland and the islands are very bad. He would need a powerful radio transmitter otherwise. Do you have any transmitters, besides the one in your aircraft?"

I shook my head. "And that one is a crystal set, tuned only to the aircraft and marine bands."

"Could he have brought one aboard without your knowledge?"

"Hardly, I checked and stowed away every piece of that cargo myself. I always do before each flight. PBYs weren't built for hauling cargo. If anything heavy starts to shift, it can go right through the side."

Ley was quiet for a moment, thinking. I occupied myself by checking over the Walther and making sure that the magazine was full.

"All right," he said finally. "We go through it all again. I am sure that I was not followed from Belgrade . . ." "Yeah, why so sure?" I asked. Ley took a blondish wig from his coat pocket and pulled it on over his thinning dark hair. He added a pair of heavy, black-framed glasses, opened his coat and folded back the lining to show a muted plaid design. At a quick glance, he was not Ley. At a second glance, and with that coat, he was not Ley. In a crowd that is about all the time anyone would have had to examine him.

"Rather James Bondish I am sure, but sometimes effective and necessary." I nodded and he continued. "I left your room and the hotel and went out the back way. In the alley I changed my appearance and went directly back to the police headquarters where I reported a traffic violation and when no one was paying any attention to me went to Mistako's office. I changed back before I entered the office, was briefed on the latest developments, apologized, sympathized and told them I was returning to Berlin that evening. I then had dinner and went directly to the station where I boarded the evening train for Berlin. I was followed, but as soon as I got on the train, my shadow seemed to lose all interest and left me. I then got out on the other side of the train, after changing my appearance again, walked around and boarded your train. I checked very carefully to see that I was not followed and then thoroughly combed the train to make sure that you were not being followed. You were not . . . or so I thought."

"Bowen is dead," I pointed out.

"Obviously. But the concern now is how could they have known . . . or, rather, did they know. We have two possibilities here immediately before us. Major Bowen was also engaged in narcotics work . . . and that is very dangerous and the people involved are as bad as the Nazis. They will kill for revenge and just as cruelly. It could be that his death was part of some vendetta that I know nothing of."

"That's not very likely is it? Yugoslavia isn't big in the drug trade, and it doesn't seem likely that if they wanted a revenge killing they would track him all the way to an isolated village in the Dinaric Alps and kill him. The idea behind that killing . . . as you said . . . is revenge and warning."

Ley nodded and shifted in the hard chair. "You are probably right. So we can only infer that Bowen's death is to serve a warning to someone here?"

"But no one knows we are here .. ."

"How do you know that?" Ley asked mildly. "Well damn it, you said we weren't . . ."

"I could have been wrong, you know."

"Look," I said desperately, "it's after two o'clock in the morning and I haven't had any sleep yet. I'm hungry. I find I'm involved in a plot that's right out of a spy thriller —my only companion is a member of Interpol and his superior is deader than a doornail, and here we sit trying to figure out how the hell someone killed him and whether or not they will try to kill us, all when they are not even supposed to know that we are here in a dumb little village in the middle of Yugoslavia—and all the while you get cuter and cuter. How the hell do I know if you're wrong or not! Stop confusing the issue any more than it already is!"

Ley smiled tolerantly at my outburst. "I am sorry if it sounds confusing, but that is exactly the way it appears to me. Obviously, I am not infallible. I thought we had not been followed. It rather seems that we have been. So, what do we know? That there are at least three unknown assailants who are looking or waiting for us?"

"Yeah, great, that's all we know . . . why three?"

"Because it would have taken at least two men to kill Major Bowen and one to follow us. That is the minimum number."

He raised his hand to forestall my next question. "Major Bowen was killed before we got off the train. His body was quite cool when I discovered him; it takes at least an hour for the human body to cool after death, especially in a warm room like this. And that is probably the reason that

I did not find the killers waiting for me. They did not know I . . . we were coming."

"Now they do?"

"It is quite possible. If our organization or the Yugoslav police has been penetrated as far as I think they have, then part of the Nazi organization knew that Bowen was coming here. Since even by code I did not refer to you in any way, they would know only that he was coming to Tobruz to meet someone. They would know only that Bowen's contact was connected with the investigation."

"So, you are saying that they don't know that I'm in Tobruz?"

"That depends on who you mean by they. Surely the man or men who followed you or me know. As by now, do the killers of Major Bowen."

"So, then the Neo-Nazis know that I'm at least traveling with . . ."

"Not necessarily. I have already talked with the desk clerk. He tells me there are only two telephones in all of Tobruz . . . the one downstairs and the one in the local police station. We must gamble that they have not used the police phone."

"What about the hotel's phone?"

"The desk clerk says that no messages have gone through him at all since six o'clock this evening when two men with accents and ski equipment made a call to Belgrade."

"Our two friends?"

"Most likely. He gave me a description of them . . . they are posing as skiers. So my guess at the moment is that they have gone to meet the man who is following us. That is the reason they left the body . . . not as a warning, at least yet, but because they had to leave."

"Okay, so then the only three people connected with the Neo-Nazis who know that I am involved with you are right here somewhere in Tobruz. What do we do about it?"

"We kill them." Ley said it quietly, but with so much unconscious menace in his voice that I knew he was deadly serious.

"Kill them, what the hell for? Let's get the local police to handle them." Ley laughed rudely. "What would you charge them with. The murder of Major Bowen?

How would we prove it, and do you think they would let either of us live long enough? No, there is no other way. They will be returning to the hotel as soon as they find out that the man following you did not get off the train. They will return knowing that somehow I have gotten off the train. I have arranged with the desk clerk to buzz the room as soon as they start up the stairs. If they ask, as they probably will, he will tell them only that I have gone up to this room a minute or so before." Ley smiled slowly, cruelly. "They will come in expecting to find only me. You are my trump card." And it happened that way. A few minutes later, the buzzer sounded. Ley whipped the blanket off Bowen's body and threw it back on the bed. He reached out and opened the door a tiny crack and bent over Bowen's body in such a way that he could still keep an eye on the door. I was out of their line of sight on the far side of the room, squeezed in between the wardrobe and the wall; the position providing an excellent line of fire. Two men, dressed in skiing clothes came through the door silently and fast with guns in their hands. They had Ley covered and the door closed before he could raise his head. The first started to say something in German, motioning with his left hand for Ley to raise his. He never completed the motion. I shot his through the side of the neck once and in the chest as he fell, twisting toward me. A stupid shot, but I was too scared to think. Ley pumped two bullets into the second man as, startled, he swung toward me. He got off one shot that smashed through the wall only inches from my nose. Ley and I put the third and fourth bullets into him so fast that I couldn't tell which shot was which. The shock of the bullets smashing through his body from two directions, slammed him against the wall with enough force to shake the room.

Both men were dead before they reached the floor. The instant's silence following the roar of the pistol shots was almost as deafening; then the silence was broken by screams and shouts from hotel patrons, blasted from sound sleep.

By the time the first semiawake guest had edged open the door, Ley and I were sliding down the steep roof to land in the deep snow drifts below.

Perhaps it was the numbing shock of the almost hundred-degree change in temperature as we plowed through the deep snow away from the hotel in a long circle that would take us back to the far end of town, that kept me from realizing that I had killed one man and helped kill another. In any event, my only thought at the time was to keep up with Ley as we bolted away from the hotel.

Within five minutes of the shooting, we had covered nearly a quarter of a mile in a wide circle that had taken us along the back side of the single village street so fast that various household dogs were only just beginning a puzzled barking in our wake. The hour was nearing three o'clock, the train was due in Mostar by noon and we had less than five hours of darkness in which to catch it.

Ley was heading for the automobile he had examined so closely; the snow-covered one, parked on the far side of the depot, apparently belonging to someone connected with the railroad. The doors were locked, but Ley merely hammered out the glass on the driver's side with his pistol butt and wrenched the door open, snapping away the coating of ice. I brushed away the snow from the front window as fast as possible while Ley ducked under the dashboard, then backed out again and ran around to the front and threw open the hood. He studied the engine compartment for a moment in the feeble light from the depot roof lamp and then tore off his gloves and went to work on the ignition wires.

"Turn on the headlights," he snapped. I climbed behind the wheel and found the switch. The lights came on all right, a feeble orange glow that barely reflected off the wall of the depot.

Ley swore loudly in German. "The battery is nearly dead. Come." I climbed out and followed him around to the front of the station where he repeated his breaking-and-entering trick, smashing out one of the window panes in the door with his pistol and reaching through to unlock the door.

"We need something highly flammable, like petrol or paraffin." Time was of the essence now, not secrecy, and heedlessly he flipped the light switch that lit up the interior of the plain wooden depot with its wooden benches. For some reason I was not surprised to find the interior of this Yugoslavian train depot was little different from the one in the midwestern village where my grandparents lived. Wooden seats like church pews supported on cast-iron legs; a wooden railing with a swinging gate to separate the waiting area from the space in front of the ticket window inset into the wooden wall. The whole interior had been varnished and revarnished so many times that it was almost orange.

An old wood-burning stove was planted in the middle of the waiting room and Ley made straight for it and the beaten old metal can with its corrugated nozzle that stood next to the coal scuttle.

He wrenched the cap off and sniffed. "Paraffin. It will do, but look quickly to see if there is any petrol."

I hurried through the swinging gate and around to the left and through the door into the ticket agent-station master's office. There was nothing but the usual paraphernalia of a train depot still serving passengers as well as freight . . . piles of schedules, a few posters showing pretty girls in bathing suits along the Adriatic, a sign noting in Serbo-Croatian that spitting was forbidden on railroad property and an ancient telegraph key that must have been an immediate descendant of Sam Morse's. Other than that, only a few crates stacked against a wall under an ancient key-wind clock that read 2:56. I backed out quickly shaking my head at Ley. A minute later we were in the parking lot. Ley wrenched the air filter off and liberally poured kerosene into the carburetor. "Try the motor," he commanded.