Hunt in the Dark Page 16

  Marta Pauly, the only woman in the world, except Iris, whom I had ever loved this side of idolatry.

  She was tragically different—much older than she had a right to be. The exquisite Viennese bone structure was worn and stark. There were streaks of white in the smooth black hair. And her clothes were dowdy. Marta, who had always been so fantastically chic! But I recognized her at once—although it was against all possible reason that she could be there on the uproarious boardwalk at Coney Island.

  At the sight of her, fifteen years rolled away and I was back in Vienna—a raw-boned, romantic kid worshipping madly and hopelessly at the shrine of Marta Pauly, the operetta idol of Austria; lovely Marta Pauly, who could have had champagne in every slipper and broken hearts in every pocket, but who had preferred a home and a husband; Marta Pauly, who later had become my greatest friend and whose letters had stopped dead one week after a certain house painter had brought his brave boys to the rescue of his Motherland.

  “Marta!” I breathed.

  She didn’t hear or see me. She was hurrying with a queer kind of tautness through the exuberant crowd. I couldn’t let all those memories walk out on me. I grabbed Iris and started after her.

  “That woman in the old black coat, it’s Marta!”

  “Marta Pauly? Your Marta? Peter, it can’t be!”

  “It is.”

  She was right ahead of us. “Marta!” I called it again.

  I reached forward, putting my hand on her slender arm, feeling all of Europe coming back as I touched her. She spun round, and her face suddenly broke into life. It was rather horrible because the sudden life in her eyes was fear. Real fear. She made a little wild attempt to break away, then her arm went limp as if she’d given up, as if something so terrible had happened that there was no use in trying to escape.

  I couldn’t bear to see her that way. “Marta, you’ve got to remember me. It’s Peter—Peter Duluth.”

  Somewhere, far off, The Hut Sut Song was still churning. Voices through loudspeakers boomed enticing overtures above the chatter of the crowds. Gradually, Marta started looking at me instead of some nightmare thing in her own mind. Slowly that pale, care-worn face kindled with a ghost of the old vivid Marta who had Vienna weeping and smiling with her revival of the Merry Widow, all through that long, white Austrian winter.

  “Peter, my dear! Peter, how wonderful!” The voice was still there, that gossamer, moonlit voice. “Oh, you must excuse me. I feel a hand on my arm; I am thinking of something else and I am stupidly afraid. How could I be so foolish? To see you of all people!” A little laugh, sweet as sleigh-bells in the Dolomites, tinkled as she turned to Iris. “And, Peter, this lovely girl?”

  I had often imagined a meeting between Iris and Marta— something fragile and half sorrowful over porcelain teacups. Nothing like this.

  “My wife!” I said.

  “Your wife!” Marta squeezed Iris’ hand. “My dear, I always tell Peter he would find himself the most beautiful wife in America. I am so happy for him.”

  Iris was liking her. I could tell that. She said, “I always thought I’d be jealous of you. I am.”

  It should all have been gay, but it wasn’t, because, in spite of the magical charm, the fear was still there. I could sense it inside her, immense, all-embracing, screaming for expression.

  I wanted to say, Marta, you’re in trouble. Let us help you. But all I managed was. “I was frightfully worried when your letters stopped. Thank heavens you’re here. How long have you been over?”

  “For two and a half years, Peter. My son, Karl, and I.”

  “And you never let me know? Never came to see me?”

  She made a wry little gesture, indicating the thread-bare old coat. “I am a woman. I have a mirror. You think I want my Peter to see me like this?”

  There was absolutely no self-pity in that remark. That’s why it punched right through me like an ice pick. A flat, difficult silence came. And in that silence I noticed that Marta’s smoky blue eyes were darting to left and right, scanning the faces of the passersby with a kind of dread.

  Iris noticed it too, for she said, “We can’t talk in this crowd. Let’s go somewhere and have a drink.”

  Marta hesitated. I could tell she was struggling with an impulse to get rid of us, but I wasn’t going to let her. We were almost at the mouth of Feltman’s Arcade. I put one hand on her elbow, the other on Iris’, and started guiding them through the crowd. Around us, things were becoming even more gala. Although it was only eight o’clock, the soldiers and the sailors and the soda-clerks were discovering that spring nights and girls go together. Balloons and dolls on sticks and other booty won at the stalls bobbed around us colorfully, as we turned out of the main stream into the dark little alley. We passed lurid posters announcing Rudolph Valentino and Old Time Movies. And then, ahead, a garish, bedizened carousel came into view. It was grinding out the Merry Widow Waltz.

  The Merry Widow! Marta’s Merry Widow!

  With the sound of the music, memories thronged. The dazzle of Marta across the footlights at the Franz Joseph Theater— Marta’s first miraculous smile at me in the little bier haus—the sun gleaming on Marta’s hair in the Salzkammergut—that rapturous ski race at St. Anton with the snow tanging Marta’s cheeks and making her eyes shine like black ice.

  I turned to glance at the gray, careworn little figure at my side. I could have wept.

  We reached the restaurant. A tough waiter in elegant tails hovered around us. But it was Marta, with sudden authority, who chose our table. In a corner close to a door and with its back to the wall. We sat down. I ordered beers. That seemed to be the thing to order. When they came I lifted mine to Marta in a toast. “To our reunion,” I said. And then, afraid of what I might hear, but having to say it, “And to your husband. He’s with you?” Marta’s eyes met mine for an instant over the beer glasses. “No, Peter. Walter’s heart was not strong, you know. And then, the winters in concentration camps are hard.”

  It was the quietness with which she said it that was so bad. I thought of Walter Pauly, the calm, quiet spoken college professor with his infinite kindnesses to a callow young American who’d been brash enough to fall in love with his wife. Walter Pauly— dead in a concentration camp!

  I could still hear The Merry Widow from the carousel outside. It was even more poignant now. Beyond it, I could hear the screams of the self-flagellists on the great roller coaster that loomed next to the restaurant.

  Somehow I was in no mood for screams. Iris laid her hand on Marta’s. Their two utterly different beauties, a narcissus and a faded tea-rose, made a moving contrast. “But your son,”—she was trying to make things better—”Karl, you spoke of him. He’s all right.”

  Marta’s voice came so low that I could scarcely catch it. “Karl is gone. They have taken him.”

  “Taken him! But you said he was with you here in America. Who’ve taken him?”

  She looked up. The mask had dropped now. She didn’t try any more to keep that anxiety from gnawing at her eyes. “A man they call Nikki—and his friends. They came for him last night. They took him away.” She paused with a little shiver. “Unless a miracle happens, they will kill him.”

  Iris looked at me and then back to Marta. “I knew you were in trouble from the first moment we saw you. You’ve got to let us help.”

  “No, no. I was wrong to speak to you of Karl, wrong to come here and drink with you. I have no right—”

  She half rose. I stopped her. “Marta, you know there’s no one in the world we’d sooner help. You’ve got to tell us.”

  “Peter, I can’t. There’s too much danger. There …”

  “We don’t care about danger,” said Iris.

  A faint flush colored the ivory of her skin. “If only I could ask you to help. It might mean so much. It might…”

  “Tell us.”

  Her beautiful fingers—slightly rough and worn now—twisted and untwisted around her beer
glass. She wasn’t drinking any of it. “It is Karl,” she said softly, “Karl and his foolish bravery. He is only nineteen and he thinks he is a grown man, he thinks he can do by himself for America what the police, what everyone, had failed to do.”

  The little worn hands fluttered over the tablecloth and out of sight into her lap. “When Walter died, when Karl and I first came to this country it was heaven after Vienna. We had no money, nothing. But we both found work. People were kind. I thought all the nightmares of Europe were over for us. And they were,”—she paused— ”until this Nikki came.”

  “And then—?”

  “It was last autumn. He came to see Karl, not me. We had never seen him before, never. They were together for hours. I was worried. And then, when Nikki left, Karl told me. This Nikki was— how does one say?—an agent. Because of our blood, he had been sent to us to persuade Karl to join them in their work, secret, underground work against this country. Oh, I was frightened. I begged Karl to have nothing to do with it, to go to the police. But he is young, rash. And—and he had not forgotten his father. He said that it would be nothing to have this Nikki arrested; he was only a little man, unimportant. He had another, much bigger plan—to pretend to be one of them, to wait and at last to expose them all, when he had the evidence, to the authorities.”

  A waiter came by, pouring ice water into glasses. He seemed like a creature from another world.

  “Nothing I said could stop him,” Marta went on. “All through the winter it has been terrible for me. Every night Karl was out with this Nikki and his friends. All the time I am terrified they will guess. And slowly Karl tells me a little here, a little there. He finds out that Nikki is part of only one section of them, who work down at the docks; he finds that, behind all these agents, there is one person, one central brain who controls them all and everything they do, one person who is so secret that not even the agents themselves know him or where he lives. His name alone they know and even among them it is like a legend.” She paused. “His name, Karl tells me, is Garr. And it is this Garr whom Karl is after, whom he foolishly was planning to outwit and—and to destroy.”

  As Marta breathed that name it seemed to take on a sinister life of its own. Garr—!

  “And all this time,” she went on, “Karl had been making contact with the police—the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Oh, it was very secret. They give him a secret telephone number to call them, but they will never let him risk meeting one of them. You see, they know of this organization well and they know how clever they are. For months they have been trying to catch them. But the slightest move by the authorities—and instantly the whole group dissolves, only to spring up again in another form. It is this Garr. He has a genius. He seems able to feel danger before it is even there. And so, the people at the FBI station here tell Karl to play a lone hand. He is to work secretly and alone—never contacting them—until he make enough evidence for arrests. Then and only then was he to give the signal which would bring in the authorities.”

  I was listening with a sort of unreal fascination as if I were listening to something in a play.

  “And then, Peter, last night”—Marta hesitated—”last night, late, Karl came home. He was all excited. He tells me that at last the time has come. There is a big scheme which starts, he tells me. And, if he plays his cards right, does the right things, this scheme can lead him to Garr. He can at last discover his identity and get all the evidence in the world against him—and give the signal.”

  She paused, remembered horror taking control of her eyes. “But as he is telling me what he knows, suddenly the door bursts open and Nikki is there with his friends. Karl has not been so clever as he thought. They have discovered that he has been cheating them—and they take him away.”

  Her voice faltered: “And when they took him away, Nikki waits behind and he says to me: ‘If you call the police, if you lift your little finger even, you can say good-by to your son, for we will kill him. And if he has told you anything and if you try to meddle, we will kill you too.’ And he meant it, Peter. I know.”

  There was something appalling about that brutal story, belonging in the chaos overseas, and yet happening right here in New York. Poor Marta! Walter—and then this!

  Iris said quietly, “And this scheme which is starting, this scheme which leads to Garr, did Karl tell you anything about it?”

  “Yes. He told me a little—what little he knew. It is something big—some big scheme for destruction—sabotage. And it is planned to start here at Coney Island—tonight. That is why I am here.”

  Sabotage, Coney Island, the FBI, and this shadowy, ominous Garr. How far Iris and I had come from the Parachute Tower!

  “It starts here in Coney Island tonight?” said Iris.

  “Yes. I do not know really what it is. But it all centers around a woman with a purple hat. This woman has something very, very important which she is to take to Garr. And as I have said, this Garr keeps himself utterly secret, hidden behind a chain of agents. This woman with a purple hat is to be sent, from one agent to another, until she reaches Garr himself. And it begins tonight. Here at Coney Island she is to meet Nikki. Nikki is to give her instructions, to pass her on to the next agent, higher up. He is to meet her at nine o’clock tonight in Potter’s Waxwork Museum. He does not know this woman, but he is to recognize her by the purple hat and by the fact that she is to hum the first bar of The Blue Danube Waltz. Then he gives her her instructions. That is the beginning. From then, as she gets closer to Garr, the whole plot is to mount, to get bigger, bigger—”

  A woman with a purple hat, carrying vital information, humming The Blue Danube in a Coney Island Waxworks Museum, slowly creeping through a maze of agents toward Garr! A madhouse story made horribly real by its undertone of tragedy to Marta and Karl!

  “That,” Marta said, “is all Karl knew. He pieced it together, bit by bit. He listened outside the door while Nikki was given his orders. He had his plan worked out. He was going to come here to the Waxworks Museum, to see this meeting between the woman and Nikki and to follow the woman up, up, until she led him to Garr. He was hoping too to find out what this scheme was, this scheme for destruction. Then, he was to give the signal and at once have this Garr arrested and stop this—this disaster from happening.”

  Iris was looking at her with a kind of wonder. “And so, when they took Karl away, you—you decided to come here tonight to see whether you could do what he had wanted to do?”

  Marta gave a faint little shrug. “Oh, I was desperate. They had Karl. I could not go to the people at the Federal Bureau for help. I realized that. For months they have been waiting for the right moment to come. They could not throw all that away, risk frightening Garr and having him slip through their fingers again— just for the sake of a poor refugee boy. But I knew there was one thing I could do. It was stupid of me, I suppose. I know so little. I have no experience of these things. But for Karl’s sake, and for America, who has been so kind to me, and for hatred of this Garr and this Nikki and all they stand for, I came here to Coney Island tonight. I thought that perhaps I might do what Karl had planned to do, follow the woman up to Garr, somehow get evidence. Then I could call, give the signal, and destroy these people and, yes, perhaps save Karl too.”

  I stared at her—stared at that fragile little thing who had defied Nikki’s threat to murder her and who had come alone to try to unearth the elusive Garr and to foil some vast, nameless disaster. In the old days, I’d always said Marta had the courage of ten grenadiers.

  “But it’s no use.” Marta’s voice came softly. “I told you that last night Nikki said he would kill me if I tried to interfere. He has already seen me here at Coney Island. I think he followed me from my house; I think he was watching there, to find out whether Karl had told me anything, whether I would try to come here. The moment I came out of the subway station, I caught a glimpse of him in the crowd behind me. And, as I came down through the people, he was always there. I know
he is trying to get me out of the way, to kill me before this meeting in the Waxworks Museum takes place. I try to shake him off. But he is clever. I—I was running from him there on the boardwalk when I met you.”

  And she’d been cool enough to stand there and let a couple of imbeciles chat socially to her when every second might have sealed her death warrant.

  “You mustn’t worry, Marta.” The words spilled out impulsively. “We won’t let him get you.”

  “Me! It doesn’t matter about me. You think there is much left in life for Marta Pauly?” Marta’s little hand went out to mine. “But, Peter, there’s Karl. There’s just a chance that he is still alive. Oh, I hate to ask you to help when there is so much danger. But for Karl’s sake, and for the sake of your own country, which these people wish to destroy, perhaps—if something should happen to me, you will go to Potter’s Waxworks Museum at nine; you will try to watch this meeting with the woman with the purple hat?”

  “Of course we will.” It was Iris who actually said it. “We’ll help you get Karl back; we’ll help you fix this Garr and Nikki and all their screwball schemes.”

  “Sure,” I said. And I meant it doubly, for Marta’s sake and for—well, for America too. It isn’t often you get a chance to prove what you think of people who try to kick your country around. “And don’t worry, Marta,” I said firmly. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “You don’t know, Nikki,” she said very softly.

  There was a thick, queerly taut silence. To break it, I said, “This signal Karl was to give when everything was okay, when the time had come for the FBI to step in—do you know it?”

  Marta nodded. “It is very simple. It is just to call the secret number—Pine 3-2323 and ask for Leslie. Then, at any time of day or night, they will come wherever you are.”

  “Pine 3-2323 and ask for Leslie.”

  “But whatever happens, we must not do that—not until we know where Garr is, until we have enough evidence for them to arrest them all. You must understand that.”