Росс Макдональд - The Dark Tunnel

He couldn’t have bought real estate in a better place. Bingham Heights is an escarpment overlooking Arbana from the north. Cut off from the city proper by a hundred-foot cliff with a stream running along its base like a moat, it constitutes a sort of upper town for the aristocracy, the deans and department heads and retired automobile millionaires. But any ordinary man can reach this plutocratic eyrie by a scenic road which winds up to the heights.

It was just on seven when I reached the top of the cliff, but I stood for a minute to catch my breath. The road ran near the cliff at the top of the rise, and beyond the wire cable and white posts of the guard-fence, fifty feet of scraggly bushes sloped down to the bare lip of the edge. From the road I could look down over the city.

The still trees and the quiet buildings seemed to lie under amber in the evening light. Fifty miles away Detroit vibrated steadily like an engine that could not stop, and planes and tanks in an endless stream roared and rattled away to war. But in the fall of 1943, Arbana seemed as peaceful as ever. I could have stood and watched it for an hour, but Schneider was waiting and like a little man I went to meet my dinner.

The road curved away from the cliff and ran along the top of the escarpment two or three hundred yards from the edge. There were houses standing in spacious grounds on both sides of the road, but the houses to my left, between the road and the cliff, were bigger and looked as if they cost more. The third house on the left, a long, low white brick building with modernistic shoebox lines, was Schneider’s. It stood in several acres of landscaped grounds, terraced down to the cliff edge and surrounded by trees which had been left standing when the house was built. A concrete runaround driveway masked by elms led in from the road. The porch was at the back for the sake of the view, and the front door opened directly onto the driveway.

When I came down the driveway, Schneider was standing in the doorway waiting for me.

“Dr. Branch,” he said, “I was beginning to despair of you.”

“I’m sorry if I’m late. I didn’t hurry particularly because you said you were going to drive into town and I thought you might pass me on the road.”

“Oh, I decided not to go. I can do my errand to-night quite as well. Shall we go in?”

He spoke very amiably but there was awkwardness and strain in his gesture when he moved aside to make way for me. I noticed his eyes when I passed him and they were dull and opaque like brown wood.

He followed me in and took me down the central hall to the living room at the back. The floors were blue varnished concrete, slippery and smooth like semi-precious stones. There was a big Persian rug in the living room with the same deep blue in it, relieved by old, decadent rose. The lights were fluorescent and invisible and came on like dawn when Jupiter pressed the switch. The fireplace was big enough to roast a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound pig.

I wondered where Schneider’s money came from. The Nazi chiefs had always objected to money going out of Germany, except for what they invested abroad themselves. Was Schneider a Nazi investment as Alec thought? It was strange that he had left his son in Germany for seven years after he left himself. But perhaps he couldn’t help himself. I thought of Ruth.

“Won’t you sit down,” Schneider said, nodding towards a chair by the window. “Martini?”

“Thanks, I will.”

He poured and handed me my cocktail and sat down with his own on the curved leather seat in the bay window which overlooked the garden.

I sipped my drink and said, “May I ask how you happened to get in touch with Ruth Esch?”

“Of course, my dear boy.” I have several grey hairs among my raven locks and I dislike being anybody’s dear boy. “It’s really very simple, though it seems strange now that I tell of it.”

“It’s a strange world,” I said. “Melodrama is the norm in 1943.”

“Exactly. Ruth’s story in a case in point. She has had six grim and terrible years, experiences which must have been most arduous to a woman of her culture and sensibility. She was imprisoned by the Nazis for alleged treason activity.”

“When?”

“In 1937, I believe.”

“So that’s what happened. You’ve been in touch with her, then?”

“Yes, of course, during the last few weeks. Ruth has been in Canada for several weeks. There has been some difficulty about her entering this country, but it’s cleared up now. I have been able to prevail upon the Department of Justice to relax, in her case, their somewhat stringent attitude towards so-called enemy aliens.”

He stroked his beard as if it were a trophy he had won, but I didn’t resent his vanity. If he really had helped Ruth to get into the country I’d get up early every morning and currycomb his beard with loving care.

“How on earth did she get out of Germany?”

“She escaped. She has said that she would tell me more when she arrived, but she would not trust the details to the mails. All I know is that she escaped into Vichy France, and from there to Algeria. The Vichy-controlled administration in French North Africa put her in prison in Algiers. This summer I heard of her through the War Department, and was able to procure her release. She was taken to England and from there secured passage to Canada. And now she is to teach here at Midwestern. With her thorough knowledge of the German language and society, she will be a most valuable instructor in the AST Program.”

“There’s no doubt of that,” I said. “But it seems to me that she owes you a very great deal.”

“Do you think so?” he said. There was a deep and tragic irony in his smile. He got up and turned his back on me to look out into the twilight that was rising from the ground like thin smoke into the pale sky. I stood up and looked out of the bay window over his shoulder. A few ragged clouds were scudding north and out of sight above the house. The curved window in which we stood was like the glassed-in prow of a boat, headed nowhere across a darkening sea.

Something moved in the garden and broke the illusion. I looked down towards the far end and saw a man get up out of a deck-chair on the last terrace by the cliff-edge. He stood for a moment with his back to the house, looking up into the moving sky. His body was slim and straight against the horizon and he stood with his legs apart like a young man, but in the evening greyness his hair looked snow white.

Dr. Schneider rapped on the window and the man in the garden turned around and saw us and started up the flagstone path to the house. He moved quickly and easily like a cat, his Angora hair blowing in the wind. When he came closer, I could see that he was a young man, hardly older than some of my students. His face and hair were very blonde, almost albino, and his eyes were as pale and empty as the sky.

Schneider turned to me and said, “My son Peter. I don’t believe you know him.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“I seldom see him myself. He’s a consulting engineer, you know, and his job takes him all over the country. He just got back from Canada and is taking a short holiday.”

“Really? Did he meet Ruth Esch?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Of course not,” Peter Schneider said from the doorway. I turned and looked at him. If his pale eyes had not been incapable of expression, he would have been glaring at his father. “Canada is a large country, you know.”

His accent was surprisingly good, less evident than the old man’s, although Peter had only been in the country two years.

Dr. Schneider moved around me and said, “Of course, you were in Toronto, weren’t you? Peter, I’d like you to meet Dr. Branch. Dr. Branch, my son Peter.” There was no warmth and no fatherly condescension in his voice. The two spoke to each other as equals and their relation puzzled me.