Росс Макдональд: Dark Tunnel

It took me a moment to grasp what he said. Then I said, “Why? She probably went back there because she thought it was the last place you’d look for her.”

“Figure it out,” Gordon said. “It’s about four now. She’s had nine hours at most to get there from here, and it’s over six hundred miles.”

“An airplane could do it.”

“It’s remotely possible that she went there by plane. But we checked the airports, and we’ve been watching all private planes closely since the war broke. Also, she’d have had to fly over a guarded border. I think it’s a bum steer.”

“It’s a hell of a coincidence then. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

“No time to argue,” Gordon said. “I’ve got to catch the Chicago plane. There’s a lead there that isn’t bum. Captain von Esch was recognized in Chicago this afternoon. Pardon me, I’ve got to go and get Fenton to bring my car back from the airport.”

He crossed the sidewalk and re-entered the Federal Building. By the time he disappeared I had decided to go to Kirkland Lake. I followed him into the building and found a pay-phone. The airport told me that I could get a plane to Toronto within an hour – somebody had cancelled his reservation. The New York Central station told me I’d reach Toronto in plenty of time to catch the northbound train. I had a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket and that was enough to go on with.

I went out and climbed into the back of the car and a minute later Gordon and Fenton climbed into the front.

“Where can I drop you, Branch?” Gordon said with a shade of impatience in his voice.

“I’ll go along to the airport, thanks. I’m taking the Toronto plane.”

“What the hell for?”

“I’m going to Kirkland Lake. I want to see if the woman in the hospital is Ruth Esch.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Gordon said, but he started the car and headed out Jefferson. “Even if it is the right woman, she’s injured and under guard. She can’t get away.”

“I like travelling,” I said. “I’ve heard that Kirkland Lake is quite a charming town in its crude way.”

Gordon shrugged his shoulders without looking around. “It’s your time and your money. There’s a faint chance that she went by plane. But we can leave her to the Canadian authorities for the present. Her brother is our responsibility.”

“Captain von Esch is her brother then?”

“His name’s Carl, and he even seems to bear her a family resemblance. Same features, same coloring. We got a complete description of him from the Canadian War Department. How he got from Northern Ontario to Chicago I don’t know. But I do know that he’s not going to get out of Chicago.”

“Did Fisher tell you anything about the Bonamy prison-break?”

“No, he didn’t know anything about that phase of Schneider’s activities,” Fenton said. He half-turned in the seat and hooked a grey herringbone arm over the back. “He claimed he never heard of either of the Esches. He may have been holding out, but I don’t think so. He was scared green.”

“Verbal diarrhoea,” Gordon said. “He dictated over three thousand words in a little over an hour. I could hardly get a question in edgeways.”

“Three thousand words about what?” I said.

“It’s a long story the way he told it,” Fenton said. He turned to Gordon: “Is it all right to tell him, Chet?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just a public-spirited citizen. Read me some selections from Proust instead.”

“Tell him,” Gordon said. “Branch literally risked his neck on this case. God knows he must have learned to keep mum by this time.”

“Well, keep it to yourself until it breaks in the papers,” Fenton said. “If it ever does. According to Fisher, Herman Schneider was a spy in spite of himself. He left Germany in the middle thirties for honest liberal reasons. The Nazis couldn’t risk concentrating him then because too many people in Germany and outside of Germany knew his name. So they let him go, but they kept Peter. Peter was only a kid then, but he was in the Hitler Youth and he didn’t want to leave. He stayed and grew up into a hundred percent Aryan superman with bells on.

“By the time Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, Peter was an officer of Engineers in the regular army. He showed such aptitude for sabotage and psychological warfare that they shifted him to Intelligence and trained him to work here in the United States. They knew they’d be fighting us soon and they were ready for it, they thought. They looked a long way ahead but they didn’t see the right things. For one thing they over-estimated the strength of native fascism in this country. Anyway, Peter was slated for the job of engineering adviser to the Gauleiter of Michigan. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds now, before Russia held the Germans and Pearl Harbor gave us the shock treatment.

“After a year of working with English phonograph records and studying at the Skoda Works and the Ford plant in Belgium and a few other places, Peter was ready to graduate to America in the summer of 1941. We weren’t at war with them yet and it was easy enough for them to get him into this country, but they made it hard for the sake of an added advantage. The Nazis are experts in making everything pay off double–”

“Including trouble,” I said. “Double, double, toil and trouble.”

“That’s true, too,” Fenton said. “Peter contacted his father through a Gestapo stooge in the Free German underground. He said he had had a change of heart and all that crap and he was just dying to get out of Germany but the nasty Nazis wouldn’t let him go. Old man Schneider fell for it and went to the German Consulate in New York. They agreed to let Peter out of Germany and save him from Stalin and the steppes, for a price. If the Herr Doktor would provide them with a certain piece of information – The Herr Doktor had a moral conniption fit and gave them what they wanted. They released Peter, and old man Schneider went to the State Department and got the prodigal son into the country before you could say Heliogabolus Schwartzentruber.

“Ever since then the prodigal has been blackmailing Dr. Schneider for more information, and getting it. But that was just a sideline for Peter. In two years he’s worked in at least six of the important war plants in the Detroit area, under different names with stolen birth certificates. He’s had a hand in psychological sabotage, too. He’s been helping to direct the activities of the native fascists in Detroit, the fanatical anti-Jew anti-Negro anti-labor boys. Fisher didn’t say, but I suspect Peter Schneider played a part in inciting the race riots.”

“Where does Fisher fit into all this?” I said.

“He’s Peter’s friend,” Fenton said with heavy irony, curling his lip as if friend was a four-letter word. “They met at a pansy drag soon after Peter came to this country, isn’t that romantic? Rudy’s a weak willie – at least he’s trying like hell to act like one – and Peter used him for little errands like contacting old man Schneider. That’s Rudy’s story: if it’s not true we’ll break it down. But it’s pretty clear that when we cracked the Buchanan-Dineen circle, Peter dropped his Vlathek alias and cleared out for Canada, leaving Rudy holding the bag with his lily-white hands. I only hope he didn’t leave our Rudolf with child.”

“Have you ever thought of helping to solve the sewage problem by converting your imagination into a septic tank?” Gordon said.

Fenton grinned and said to me, “Chet’s the last Puritan, Mr. Branch. Santayana’s boy was only the second-last. I trust I haven’t offended your delicate shell-like ears with my coarse talking.”