But the Inspector’s mustache grew noticeably ragged.
On Christmas Day Ellery cabled Professor Seligmann that he was being delayed by transportation and other nuisances but that he expected clearance at any hour.
The hour arrived late on December 28, in time to save the crumbs of Ellery’s sanity.
Exactly how his father managed it Ellery never learned, but at dawn on December 29 he found himself on a conspicuously special plane in the company of persons of obvious distinction, all of whom were unmistakably bound on missions of global gravity. He had no idea where the plane was going or when it was scheduled to arrive. He heard murmurs of “London,” “Paris,” and such, but he could detect no Strauss waltzes, and to judge from the pursed blankness that met his worried inquiries the Wiener Wald was something in Moscow.
Neither his nails nor his stomach survived the Atlantic crossing.
When they did touch soil, it was fog-choked and British. Here a mysterious delay occurred. Three and a half hours later they took off again and Ellery sank into a doze. When he awoke it was to no thunder of motors. He sat in a great hush. As far as he could make out through his window, they had landed on an Arctic ice field; his very corpuscles were frozen. He nudged his companion, a U.S. Army officer. “Tell me, Colonel. Is our destination Fridtjof Nansen Land?”
“This is France. Where you going?”
“Vienna.”
The colonel pushed out his lips and shook his head.
Ellery doggedly began to work his glaciated toes. Just as the first motor exploded, the co-pilot tapped his shoulder.
“Sorry, sir. Your space is required.”
“What!”
“Orders, sir. Three diplomats.”
“They must be very thin,” said Ellery bitterly, getting up. “What happens to the bum?”
“You’ll be put up at the field, sir, till they can find space for you on another ship.”
“Can’t I stand? I promise not to sit on anybody’s lap and I’ll gladly drop off over the Ringstrasse by parachute.”
“Your bag’s already off, sir. If you don’t mind...”
Ellery spent thirty-one hours in a whistling billet, surrounded by the invisible Republic of France.
When he did reach Vienna, it was by way of Rome. It seemed impossible, but here he was on a frozen railway station with his bag and a little Italian priest who had unaccountably clung to him all the way from Rome and a sign somewhere that said Westbahnhof, which was certainly in Vienna, so he was in Vienna.
On New Year’s Day.
Where was Professor Seligmann?
Ellery began to worry about the Viennese fuel situation. He had a frostbitten recollection of engine trouble, a forced landing after tumbling over and over among the stars like a passenger on a space ship out of control, and a miserable railway train; but his chief memory was of the cold. As far as Ellery could make out, Europe was in the Second Ice Age; and he fully expected to locate Professor Seligmann imbedded in the heart of a glacier, like a Siberian mastodon, in a perfect state of preservation. He had telephoned Seligmann from Rome, giving the old man such information as he had had about his Italian plane’s scheduled arrival. But he had not foreseen the journey through outer space and the groaning aftermath of the miserable train. Seligmann was probably getting pneumonia at... which airfield had that been?
The hell with it.
Two figures approached, crunching the icy platform. But one was a saber-toothed porter and the other a Schwester of some Austrian Roman Catholic order and neither satisfied Ellery’s conception of a world-famous psychoanalyst.
The Schwester hurried the little Italian priest away and the saber-toothed porter came dashing up, full of colloquialisms and bad breath. Ellery found himself engaged in a battle of unconquerable tongues. Finally he left his bag in the fellow’s charge, although not with confidence; the porter looked exactly like Heinrich Himmler. And he went sleuthing for a telephone. An excited female voice answered. “Herr Kavine? But is not Herr Professor with you? Ach, he will die in the cold! He must meet you. You are to wait, Herr Kavine, to wait where you are. Westbahnhof? Herr Professor will find you. He said it!”
“Bitte schön,” muttered Herr Kavine, feeling like Landru; and he returned to the platform and the glacial epoch. And waited again, stamping, blowing on his fingers, and catching only every fifth word of the porter’s. Probably the coldest winter Austria’s had in seventy-nine years, he thought. It always is. Where was the Föhn, that lecherous Lurleian breeze from the Austrian Alps which reputedly caressed the jeweled hair of Danube’s Queen? Gone, gone with all the winds of myth and fantasy. Gone with Wiener Blut, leichtes Blut, now a sullen mass of crimson icicles; gone with the Frühlingsstimmen, the spring voices, stilled by the throttling winter and the shrilling of boys crying the postwar Morgenblätter, such as they were; gone with the Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, now tales imprisoned in an antique musicbox which was forever broken... Ellery shivered, stamped, and blew as the disguised Himmler whined to him about die guten, alten Zeiten.
In the gas chambers, Ellery thought unreasonably. Tell it to Hitler, he thought.
An der schönen, blauen Donau...
Ellery kept his refrigerated feet pumping and blew pfuis on the whole postwar European world.
Professor Seligmann came along at a little after 10 o’clock. The mere sight of that huge body, made huger by the black sheeplined greatcoat collared with Persian lamb and topped with a Russian-style bashlyk, was thawing; and when he took one of Ellery’s disembodied members in his great, dry, warm hands Ellery melted to the inner man. It was like wandering lost over the earth and coming unexpectedly upon the grandfather of your tribe. The place did not matter; where the patriarch was, there was home. Ellery was struck by Seligmann’s eyes particularly. In the lava of that massive face they were eternal fumaroles.
He barely noticed the changes in the Karlsplatz and on the Mariahilferstrasse as they rode in the psychoanalyst’s ancient Fiat, driven by a scholarly looking chauffeur, into the Inner City through toppling streets toward the Universität district where the old man lived. He was too agreeably occupied in warming himself at his host.
“You find Vienna not as you expected?” asked Professor Seligmann suddenly.
Ellery started; he had been trying to ignore the shattered city. “It’s been so many years since I was here last, Herr Professor. Since long before the War—”
“And the Peace,” said the old man with a smile. “We must not overlook the Peace, Mr. Queen. Those difficult Russians, nyet? Not to mention those difficult English, those difficult French, and — bitte schön — those difficult Americans. Still, with our traditional Schlamperei, we manage to drag along. After the first War there was a song popular in Vienna which went, ‘Es war einmal ein Walzer; es war einmal ein Wien.’ And we survived. Now we are singing it again, when we do not sing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.’ Everywhere in Vienna people are speaking of die guten, alten Zeiten. How do you say this? ‘The good old days.’ We Viennese swim in nostalgia, which has a high saline content; that is how we remain afloat. Tell me about New York, Herr Queen. I have not visited your great city since 1927.”