Росс Макдональд - The Dark Tunnel

His desk stood in a corner against the wall between one set of bookshelves and the tall window which faced the door, so that the light came from the left when he worked there in the daytime. He hadn’t used this office to work in for months, but the desk was still the desk of a scholar, littered with books and papers and philological journals. A cradle phone stood clear of the debris on a shelf which projected from the wall beside the window. A lamp with a green glass shade for night work hung on the wall above the telephone.

Alec pulled the chain which turned on the wall lamp and switched off the ceiling light.

“Sit down,” he said and I took the old leather armchair at the end of the desk. He sat down in the swivel-chair facing me across the corner of the desk, and opened a drawer. “Would you like a drink?”

“I think I would.”

He produced a pint of Bourbon and uncorked it and handed it to me. I took a stiff drink and wiped the neck of the bottle and set it on the desk.

“What would the Dean say?” I wondered.

“He’d say give me some.” Alec recorked the bottle and put it back in the drawer without drinking any.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Have you gone into training for the Navy?”

“No, but I’ve got a job to do. I’m going to search Schneider’s office to-night. If there’s anything there, I’ve got to find it before he sees those scratches on the door to-morrow. I wish you’d told me you wanted to get into that office.”

“Why? Because you can walk through locked doors?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m a superior burglar. I borrowed Bailey’s master-key. They gave it to him so he could turn out the lights anywhere in the building for a blackout.”

“I’m sorry if I interfered with your plans. But I’ve started to have plans of my own. Can I help with the search?”

“If you want to. It may be a big job. And it may lead to nothing. Now what’s this about Schneider’s attempting to kill you?”

“It’s a fairly long story.” I told it to him from the beginning, without adjectives but leaving nothing out. Not even the lipstick on Peter’s face and the shadow of a woman I thought I had seen in Schneider’s hallway. I told him what I had found in the German office.

When I finished, he said, “Is it possible that they used Ruth Esch’s name to get you out there so they could kill you?”

I thought a minute. “I don’t think so. Hunter told me about her first, and I went to Schneider and brought up the subject myself. Anyway, he couldn’t very well fake the records in the German office.”

“He could if he wanted to. But you say you don’t know any reason why they should try to kill you.”

“No doubt I’m an irritating type. I was indiscreet enough to blaspheme the organic totalitarian state at dinner. Then I beat Peter at foils. It’s barely possible that he was just trying to frighten me with the sabre to get back at me for that. It’s barely possible, too, that the automobile accident was an automobile accident.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“Are you going to lay charges?”

“I’ve been thinking about it. But there’s not much evidence beyond my personal impressions and a pair of broken glasses. Before I do anything I want to know where Ruth comes into this. And we’ll see what we can find in Schneider’s office. When I get the Schneiders, I want to get them for keeps.”

“So do I,” Alec said, and his mouth shut on the stem of his pipe like a mantrap on a leg.

“Do you know anything against Schneider that you haven’t told me?”

“Very little, unfortunately, and what evidence I have is what you’d call circumstantial, I suppose.”

“What is it? You can hang a man on the right kind of circumstantial evidence.”

“There are two things, really. One of them points in the general direction of Schneider, and the other points straight at him but doesn’t really prove anything. The first thing is this. When the Buchanan-Dineen bunch was rounded up in Detroit, a good deal of information was found in the hands of Nazi agents, information that was known only to certain men in the armed services and to members of our War Board.”

“What kind of information?”

“Largely material on Army and Navy training programs at the university, enrollment figures, length of courses, curriculum of the various programs. They had a detailed analysis of all the courses, A S T P, V-12, and the rest – meteorology, aeronautics, naval architecture, Asiatic and European languages, army engineering – the whole business.”

“It sounds like a leak,” I said, “but not such a bad one.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” The intensity of his seriousness seemed to draw his eyes back into his head. “Information like that can tell a highly trained spy more about the long-range plans of the United Nations than a whole mail-car full of short-term official orders. The Nazis have men who can put two and two together and get twenty-two, men who do research in the history of the future. And stuff like that is perfect raw material for them.

“I’ll give you an obvious example. Last spring the Army speeded up the A S T P course in Italian local government, and a couple of months later all the advanced students in that course were ordered away. Any spy who knew that and who knew his business could figure out where they were going, and why, and approximately when. The idea that enemy spies are interested chiefly in airplane plans and secret formulae is hardly more than a literary convention.”

“I know. It’s just that it’s sometimes hard to recognize something important when it turns up in your own back yard.”

“It’s important all right. A smart German who knew all about our A S T P courses and could correlate the knowledge with information from other sources could figure out a hell of a lot. He could predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy a lot of the things that we’ll be doing five years from now in Europe.”

“In 1948? The war will be over long before then.”

“No doubt it will, but the Nazis won’t be finished if they can help it. Himmler’s boys are laying plans now for carrying on underground even after Germany loses the war. But they’re not going to get any more information from us.”

“You said there was something else, something that pointed directly at Schneider.”

“Right. There’s a young man named Rudolf Fisher who lives in Detroit, a naturalized American of German birth. When the F.B.I. arrested Buchanan-Dineen and her little helpers, they picked up Rudolf for questioning. Evidently they had something which connected him with the Nazis, but they didn’t have enough to make it stick. Anyway, they released him after a day or two.”

“What’s the connection with Schneider?”

“Well, it may be a connection or it may not. I think it is. For the last two winters Schneider’s been giving an Extension Course in German language in Detroit, and Rudolf Fisher’s been enrolled in the course both times and had perfect attendance.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been doing a research job on Schneider. But it’s in the files in the Extension office for anybody that wants to look for it. Now if Schneider’s a spy and Fisher was his go-between, Fisher’s enrollment in Schneider’s course would have given them a very neat and respectable excuse for meeting once a week.”

“That’s supposing quite a lot. Fisher may simply have aspirations to culture.”

“Then he chose a curious way to satisfy them. He was born in Germany and lived there until he was fifteen. What would a German want with a course in German conversation?”

There was no answer to that. Alec went on: “So far this sounds pretty flimsy, too flimsy to turn over to the F.B.I. That’s why I want to search Schneider’s office. We may turn up something concrete.”