Hard Case Crime: Passport To Peril Read Online Free Page B

addressing a third man who was some distance away. “Hermann, don’t stand there like a dunderhead with your mouth wide open. Quick, go get help. Hurry.”
    I must have passed out again and for quite a time because when I regained consciousness I was being carried on a stretcher. I was wrapped in blankets, and my wet clothes had been removed. I could raise my head enough to see that Maria was on a stretcher ahead.
    Then I heard Otto say, “Bring them in here. Quickly.” We were carried the length of a low wooden porch, then lifted into a brightly lighted room. It was the main room of a typical Central European hunting-lodge. A wood-paneled room with a high peaked roof, huge stone fireplaces at both ends, heads of deer and bear and mountain sheep on the walls, the rustic furniture. The kind of room to which Austro-Hungarian aristocrats repaired after the hunt, to wine and dine, gamble and make love to the music of a gypsy band. Perhaps we had been brought in by some rich man’s gamekeepers, if there were any rich men left other than commissars, someone who might hate Communism enough to help us get away. Otto and his helpers weren’t in uniform. They wore the short fur-lined jackets, the feathered felt hats, and the high laced boots of the Austrian countrymen.
    They lifted me from the stretcher and carried me to a chair in the middle of the room. Otto stuck a glass of apricot brandy in my hand. Otto was a dark, mean-looking character, with a great black mustache and a patch over one eye.
    “Where’s the girl?” I said. “Is she all right? What have you done with her?”
    “You speak German like a Berliner,” Otto said. “The girl’s all right. We put her to bed. You’ll both be all right in the morning. It’s lucky we found you. You might have spent the rest of your lives on crutches.”
    There were two doors at the far side of the room. I guessed they led to bedrooms, the kitchen, and the servants’ quarters.
    The room reminded me of a stage setting and it turned out to be just that. The cuckoo clock on the mantelpiece struck ten. Almost immediately, as if with the rising of a curtain, one of the doors on the far side opened, and a man entered. He was wearing a uniform, complete to gold epaulets and several rows of ribbons. It was a Russian uniform, and the wearer might have come off a Red Square parade. Otto and his helpers clicked their heels and snapped to attention. I should have remembered that the Red Army had recruited thousands of former Wehrmacht soldiers for guard duty in Central Europe. Germans like Otto knew no other trade. Just as their fathers had joined foreign armies after Imperial Germany’s defeat in the First World War, so Otto and many like him were serving their Russian conquerors until they might again wear the uniform of a resurgent Reich.
    The Russian made a stage bow in my direction as he closed the door, then in German banished Otto and the others from the room. He turned his back to the fireplace, locked his hands behind him, and bowed again. He was tall and thin, with graying hair and the bushiest pair of black eyebrows I’d ever seen.
    “Good evening, Monsieur Blaye,” he said in excellent French. “Please, you will permit me to introduce myself. I am Major Ivan Strakhov at your service, Monsieur.”
    Of course Otto had returned to the lodge with the passport before we’d arrived. Major Strakhov had addressed me as Monsieur Blaye for want of another name. He had no way of knowing I was John Stodder, American.
    “I had expected the pleasure of welcoming you at the frontier, at Hegyshalom,” he said with a broad smile. “I’m sorry you did not advise us you were planning to leave the Orient Express somewhat short of the station.”
    It was the major, then, in the military car which had passed us when we first turned off the railway tracks into the side road. The train guards had radioed to Hegyshalom as soon as we jumped.
    “These German peasants aren’t much good,” he