Gordon surprised me by holding out his hand. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “Frankly, I thought you were a bit of a damn nuisance this morning. I don’t think so now.”
“I have my uses,” I said. “I made a good guinea pig for Schneider to experiment with and give himself away. But he still has to be caught.”
“He still has to be caught,” Gordon agreed. “The woman has disappeared completely, but Peter has been traced as far as the Bomber Plant. I’m on my way there now.”
“Take me along.”
The sullen shadow passed over Gordon’s face and drew down the corners of his mouth. For five seconds he said nothing.
Then he said, “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER XIII
I PICKED UP A trench coat I had hanging in my office and we went down to the President’s office on the first floor. Gordon went in to report to Galloway and I remembered that I had no money in my pockets and went down the hall to the Business Office to cash a check.
On the way out I met Helen Madden in the hall. She was walking slowly and meticulously like a woman learning to walk again after a long illness. She was very well groomed, as if she had had nothing else to do all night. She came up to me and put a kid-gloved hand on my arm and said:
“I’m sorry, Bob. I thought I was doing the right thing but I made a mistake.”
“I make hundreds. I made a dozen last night–”
“I thought you’d gone off the deep end. I was the one that had.”
I said: “We’re all in this together. Death is the least rational thing there is, and it affects everybody whether they know it or not. When a man is murdered, everyone gets a little irrational.”
“Was he murdered, Bob? I was sure he killed himself, but I didn’t know why he should.”
“He was murdered.” I told her because any spoken word is better than newsprint. “Peter Schneider and his woman drugged him and left him on the window to fall out when he came to. He came to and fell when you were at the door.”
“Why did they kill him? They didn’t even know him.”
“To cover up for Dr. Schneider. Three hours later they killed Dr. Schneider to cover up for themselves. It’s the Nazi principle that killing people is less complicated than living with them. If they were allowed to carry it to its logical conclusion, the world would be populated by the 6,600,000 members of the Nazi party and their women and children and some slaves.”
My little lecture sounded gauche in my own ears but I thought it might help Helen to see Alec’s death in perspective. Then I realized that it would take her years. Perhaps it would take me as long.
She said, “Have they been caught?”
“No, but they will be. The F.B.I. is after them and they can’t get away. I’m going to Detroit now with the F.B.I. man, Gordon.”
She said, “Kill them,” through jaws so tense that her teeth chattered.
After a pause I said, “I’d like to talk to you to-morrow or so. You’ll be around?”
“No,” she said. “I hate this city. I’m going away as soon as we bury Alec. I applied at the Red Cross this morning. It’s funny how a city can change overnight. I loved it yesterday and today there’s dust over everything.”
I had nothing to say. I couldn’t even say, “You’ll get over it in time,” because I didn’t think she would.
I said, “I hope I see you before you leave.”
She gave me her hand and said, “I hope so, too.” My eyes followed her down the hall. Something in the way she moved made me think of a naked woman in a cold place.
I went back to the President’s office and sat down in the anteroom to wait for Gordon. Through the closed door to the inner office, I could hear him telephoning.
Galloway’s secretary, a faded blonde who had every department of the university filed and classified in her mind and was always looking for new items to file, stopped typing when I sat down, and started to pump me.
While she was still priming me with rumors, Gordon came out of the inner office and overheard the conversation. He closed the door behind him and said:
“We’re keeping this thing out of the news for the present. It will help us to catch them if they don’t know we’re looking for them, or how hard. So the less talk about it the better.”
The faded secretary faded some more and went back to her typing, jabbing at the keys as if they were hostile eyes.
Gordon said, “Ready, Branch?” and I followed him out to the black sedan. We got in and headed for Detroit.
On the outskirts we passed a police patrol and I said, “There’s been no sign of Ruth Esch?”
“No. Nor Schneider. I’ve just been talking to the Detroit office. They’ve telegraphed their description to police all over the Middle West.”
“What about Kirkland Lake?”
“And Kirkland Lake. All the leading cities in Ontario, in fact. We’re going to send out circulars if they’re not in our hands by to-morrow.”
“Has the Detroit office gotten hold of Rudolf Fisher?”
“Not yet. We’ve got a man watching his house. When he comes home he’ll be picked up. I want to question him myself.”
“And that’s where we’re going now, is it?”
“Eventually. I’m going to stop at the Bomber Plant on the way. The green coupe answering to the description of Schneider’s car was last identified turning in at the Bomber Plant. I’ve got an idea about that.”
I had asked too many questions and I said nothing, but my silence hung question-marks in the air. Gordon went on talking with his eyes on the road ahead:
“Schneider’s car hasn’t been seen on the other side of the Bomber Plant. It may have been missed, but it’s more likely that he turned into the plant to throw off pursuit. The entrance guards insist that he couldn’t get in without an employee’s badge. But his name’s not on the list of employees. For that matter, he hasn’t a car license under his own name either.”
“Is it your idea that he may have been working at the Bomber Plant under another name?”
“Yes. If I’m right I don’t think I have to look any further for the saboteur we’ve been hunting.”
“Galloway said something about your being at the Bomber Plant last night.”
“I’ve been there every day for a month,” Gordon said, “pretending to be a maintenance man. Half the time on the night shift. We’ve had a man in every department – I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself, Branch. We didn’t catch anybody, but there’s been no sabotage for a couple of weeks.”
“Peter Schneider went to Canada a week or two ago,” I said. “Maybe the coincidence isn’t fortuitous. And when he was in Kirkland Lake according to Ruth’s letter, there was a mass escape of German prisoners from a prison camp near there. It could be that he’s a very active and versatile young man. He’s a bungler, though. He sets his hand to too many things. He bungled my execution, and all the prisoners have been caught or killed.”
“Not all,” Gordon said. ‘They killed or recaptured all the Bonamy prisoners but one. A certain Captain von Esch is still at large.”
“Captain von Esch! What’s his first name?”
“I don’t know. We’re looking out for him, of course, but he hasn’t been seen in the United States. I could find out, if you think you know him. Do you know the whole German nation, Branch?”
“I know Captain von Esch if he’s Ruth Esch’s brother. I met him once. Her name was originally von Esch before she dropped the von. Her brother’s name is Carl.”
“I’ll check on it,” Gordon said. “This thing may have greater ramifications than we realized.”
Ruth Esch had greater ramifications than I realized, I said to myself. She must have gone to Kirkland Lake to help her brother to escape. A woman doesn’t travel five hundred miles north to a country of forests and bare rock on a pleasure jaunt. Yet even when I condemned her to myself, there was a residue of my old feeling for her in my mind, an irrational hope that she would escape or die or dissolve into thin air before she was caught. Peter Schneider was the one I wanted to see again. He had taken me in three rounds and I was waiting for the fourth. It was getting to be a long time between rounds.