Росс Макдональд: Dark Tunnel

“You’ll never forget again. They haven’t got Schneider yet, have they?”

“No. At least I don’t know. There’s still a policeman here.”

“Sergeant Cummings? Let me speak to him, will you?” I was laying down the receiver when Gordon said, “Just a minute. How badly hurt is she?”

“Pretty badly. Concussion and shock. She seems to be recovering – her memory has come back – but she’ll be in bed for quite a while.”

“If I can get permission, I’m going to come and talk to her when she’s able. Are you staying?”

“I’m going to stay here until I can take her back with me. There’s nothing on the books against her?”

“Not on our books. It’s pretty clear that her brother and Schneider sapped her and stole her clothes and papers and identity so that Carl could get away to this country. It not only got him across the border but it provided him with respectable shoes to step into, with very little danger of our investigating him. You were the nigger in the woodpile, Branch. You know now why they tried to kill you.”

“I know now all right. The irony is that when I did see Carl I was taken in. Herman Schneider wasn’t taken in, though. I doubt if they tried to fool him. He saw the whole thing and couldn’t stand it, even if he was working for the Nazis. They probably told him he had to co-operate or else. He co-operated to save himself, but he was cracking. They must have seen that he was both useless and dangerous to them, and had no qualms about killing him. They could get around whatever political morality he had, but his sexual morality was too strong to curb, stronger even than his vanity. Besides, he was a friend of Ruth’s and so far as he knew they had killed her.”

“They may try to yet.”

“What?”

“Look, Branch, she’s got to be guarded. I’ll talk to the police but you see that they’re not niggardly with protection. Her life is in danger.”

“From Schneider?”

“Why else would he go back to Kirkland Lake? Fenton checked that item in the Globe and Mail. He must have been in a hurry, to leave the paper in his car. The item he tore out–”

“I know. I saw it in Toronto.”

Gordon spoke with a harsh sincerity that made the telephone vibrate: “She’s got to be guarded twenty-four hours a day as long as Schneider is at large. They must have thought they killed her and that she wouldn’t be found. Now that he knows she’s alive, he’ll try to finish the job. So far as he knows she’s the only one that can put the finger on him.”

“Do you want to talk to the mountie?”

“Right. I appreciate your calling back right away. I’ll have the charges reversed.”

I called the man in the vestibule to the phone and listened to him asking and answering questions. Then he asked a nurse to get the resident physician, and she fetched a stout man in a white coat.

I heard him tell Gordon that Ruth should be able to talk to him in a week, perhaps sooner if necessary. He hung up.

The plain-clothesman called headquarters and asked for another man to help guard the hospital. When he finished phoning I said:

“Are you going to put a man in her room?”

“What do you think, Dr. Sandiman?” he said to the stout doctor. “The F.B.I. thinks there’s going to be another attempt on her life.”

“They do?” Dr. Sandiman’s chins shook. “We must do everything possible to protect her, Sergeant. Of course. But he’ll have to be very quiet, as inconspicuous as possible. A sudden shock to the patient could have very serious repercussions.”

“Could it?” I said.

“Very serious, indeed.”

“And Schneider was in her room?”

“Yeah,” Cummings said. “I only wish I’d known it sooner.”

“Did he leave those roses by the window?”

“Yeah. But I examined them. They’re O.K.”

“The point is that they’re there, visible from outside. He could have put them there to mark her room.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

I turned to Sandiman. “I have a suggestion, doctor. Miss Esch should be protected against the danger of shock as well as other dangers. Could you move her to another room without disturbing her?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. I think that would be very sensible.”

“Then why not do it now?”

He gave orders to the nurse. As she started down the hall I said to her, “Leave the roses where they are.”

Sergeant Cummings went back to the vestibule. I said to Sandiman:

“Will you let me have the room that Miss Esch is vacating?”

“What on earth for? Are you ill?”

“Not especially, though you might have a look at my eyes. It’s just that if a certain visitor comes to that room I wouldn’t want him to be disappointed.”

“You’d do better to leave it to the police.” There was officious disapproval in his bulging blue eyes.

“The visitor I expect murdered my best friend. Yesterday he tried to hang me.” I showed him the marks on my neck.

He clucked like a sympathetic hen, but he said, “All the more reason for leaving it to the police.”

“Look, doctor,” I said, “I am leaving it to the police. He’ll never reach that room. But if he does I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

“Have you a gun?”

“No.”

“You’ll need a gun. Come along.”

He took me down the hall to his office. On the white wall above his desk there was a photograph of a young man in army uniform who looked like Sandiman’s son. But it was a uniform of the First World War. I looked at his face and saw the unchanging bones under the fat. He was the young man in the photograph.

He opened a drawer and laid a Colt .45 on the desk. “Keep this under your pillow. It’s loaded.”

“Thanks. Now how about bandaging my head. My concussion is paining me something terrible.”

He glanced at me sharply and gradually smiled. “Good idea. What reason shall I give for admitting you? It’s imperative to have a reason.”

“My eyes. Make it my diabolical eyes.”

“By the way, what happened? Haemorrhage?”

“Yes, the hangman’s noose–”

“I see. We’ll put some drops in them while we’re about it.”

I took off my glasses and he put drops in my eyes and covered my hair with bandages. He handed me the Colt and led me down the hall to the room that Ruth had left. “We put her at the other end of the wing,” he said.

“Good.”

“Well, I’ve got work to do. Good luck.” He waved a pudgy hand and closed the door.

I got into bed with my clothes on and pulled the sheet up to my eyes. I held the revolver in my right hand under the cover and watched the window. The scent of the roses reminded me of funerals and weddings, but I felt more like a bridegroom than a corpse.

I lay all afternoon and watched the bright spot the sun made creep down the blind. My mind was keyed up tight. My nerves were taut and brittle, ready to snap. To relieve the tension that made me shiver slightly under the sheet, I thought of great things beyond my reach, the stars and planets, a million luminous balls kept in the air by a juggler nobody had ever seen. To make the sun move down my blind a foot in an hour, the earth’s periphery whirled a thousand miles through space.

I thought of the inevitable past, Alec Judd crushed out with ten million others by the immense millstones of war, the millstones that were already powdering the bones of the men who had set them in motion. I thought of Herman Schneider, morally broken on a neat, cruel wheel devised by the son who had once been seed in his loins. I remembered the hunched despair of his well-fed shoulders when he walked away from the strange lovers in the fencing room, the lost and gone look in his eyes above the Lüger when he was going to shoot me, and the jagged hole that let the desperate conflict out of his head. I felt for him the kind of remote pity I felt for Agamemnon, a weak, well-meaning man betrayed and murdered in a forgotten language on a stage that time had crumbled into dust.