Dine and Die on the Danube Express (28 page)

He talked with Thomas, then shook his head at me. I held up a hand. “Don’t hang up—one other thing.” I took out my notebook, ripped a page from it, and scribbled a short message on it. I riffled through the notebook pages and added an e-mail address. I handed the message to Kramer. “Have Thomas send that.”

He read it out into the phone. First, he gave Thomas an e-mail address in Geneva, Switzerland. There was a note of perplexity in Kramer’s voice as he read my message.

“‘Emil—one, before you drink your next glass of Pinot Noir, ask 121 ADU for full physical description. Two, potential cargo buyer beside original? Urgent response vital.’” Kramer had to repeat it for Thomas. It must have sounded just as mysterious to him. Kramer slapped his cell phone cover back in place.

“It’s a wild idea,” I told him. “A long shot—but it’s worth a try.”

“‘Long shot,’” he repeated, “ah, yes, from the days of horse racing, yes?”

“Correct.”

“And so wild, you don’t want to tell me what this is all about?”

“On the nose,” I said.

He nodded wisely. “Another horse racing expression.”

“Precisely,” I said.

I
WAS STILL FEELING
an immense relief as I left Kramer’s office—relief that it had not been Irena who had been killed. I regretted that Elisha Tabor had to be the victim but I did not feel ashamed of being glad it was not Irena.

That she had been killed was no longer in doubt. The conclusion was that the same person had killed both victims, and it was probable that the motives were closely linked.

I returned to the restaurant coach, and the first person I saw was Irena. She was sitting alone, and I joined her. She smiled brightly, then her expression changed.

“Is something wrong?”

She was very intuitive, I had learned that.

“I’m afraid so,” I said, and told her of Elisha Tabor.

Her face clouded. “Oh, no! That’s terrible! The poor woman! How did she die?”

“The same poisons that were used on Talia Svarovina and Paolo Conti.”

She shuddered. “I hope it was a quick death.”

“It was, and a painless one,” I assured her.

“I didn’t know her really well, but we talked a number of times.” A glint came into Irena’s eyes. “So now we have to find out who killed her—and before we reach Bucharest.”

“Yes, we do.”

She saw me eying her breakfast. It was a boiled egg, a slice each of salami, ham, and cheese and a roll. She had only just started on it. “I felt hungry today,” she explained, eating quickly. “We have to go to work. What can I do?”

“Have you seen Magda Malescu this morning?”

“No, why?” She caught her breath. “You suspect her?”

“Not especially, but a lot of questions still hang over her head.”

“I haven’t seen her in here. Maybe she takes breakfast very late or more likely in her compartment.”

“In her compartment probably. Tell me, did you learn anything at the banquet in Budapest? I didn’t have a chance to ask you last night.”

“Neither of us had much chance for talking about murder, did we?” she said with a mischievous smile. “After the banquet, I talked to Helmut Lydecker.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Making women disappear.”

“I hope he didn’t think you were volunteering.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. No, he talked about Magda Malescu though.”

“Why her?”

“Because I asked him.”

“Good for you,” I said with a smile. “What did he say?”

“Oh, he said she was a very good assistant for the act. She was a fast learner and willing to practice as long as was needed.”

“Did he say anything about her on a personal level?”

“I tried to get him to do that, but he steered away from it. I reached one conclusion though—”

“Go on,” I urged.

“I think he’s still in love with her.”

“After all this time? Surely he—”

“What do you mean, ‘after all this time’? How long is love supposed to last?”

“Well, it’s thirty years ago, isn’t it?” I said weakly.

“So? Couldn’t he be in love with her still?”

“I suppose so. You think he is?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m trying to figure out what that might mean,” I said.

Irena cooled off a little. “He’s a magician, isn’t he? Makes women disappear? Maybe he had something to do with her disappearance the time we all thought she was dead.”

“I wonder how well he knew Talia Svarovina,” I said. “I also wonder just what was the relationship between Malescu and Svarovina.”

“I thought you interrogated Malescu on that subject?”

“Herr Kramer and I did talk to her, and we asked that specific question. Naturally, Malescu said they were good friends. What else would she say?”

Irena looked pensive. “There are many strange relationships between people on this train. Malescu and Doctor Stolz are another—he was once her lover, too, and he’s a doctor, so he has drugs and medicines, doesn’t he?”

“We have no evidence against him at all though.”

Irena tossed me a look of disdain.

I shook my head sorrowfully. “Centuries of barbarian ancestors and decades under Nazism and Communism have given you a disregard for some of the conventions of democracy like evidence and proof, I’m sorry to say.”

“Well, it does sometimes protect wicked people when we have to produce silly things like those,” she protested.

“Do you know any good tortures?” I asked. “Perhaps that would be our best method of getting truthful answers to all our questions.”

“Ha-ha,” she said.

“But as we can’t do that,” I said, “we have to resort to more sophisticated methods.”

“By ‘sophisticated,’ you mean clever.”

“Clever would be good. Do you have any ideas?”

“You’re the detective. What would Scotland Yard do?”

“Kramer and I are going to have to talk to Malescu again. There are still some things she hasn’t told us.”

Irena nodded emphatically. “Torture—you’re right. This may be the time for it—and Malescu would be the one to try it on, perhaps you should—”

“We’ll try a normal interrogation first,” I said.

She pouted in disappointment. “It may be a mistake. She is a devious woman.”

“Nevertheless, we’ll try it first.”

Her shrug said,
All right, go ahead and make your own mistakes.
Aloud, she asked, “What can I do?”

“Larouge still sounds suspicious, probably because we don’t know much about him. Friedlander has more motive than anyone to want to get hold of the Mozart manuscript—”

“I thought he was a famous conductor?”

“Well-known, if not famous.”

“Then he can’t be a crook, can he?”

“Even famous people can be crooked.”

“H’m …” She digested that for a moment. “I suppose I can talk to Herr Lydecker again. He knew both Malescu and Talia Svarovina.”

“All right. Maybe some connection exists between those two women that we haven’t found yet.”

“And I suppose,” she said, with a toss of her head, “that while I’m interrogating the men, you’ll be interrogating the women?”

“Sounds like a sensible division of labor.”

“Who comes after Malescu?”

“Eva Zilinsky.”

“You like her, don’t you?”

“She’s refreshing to talk to and—”

“Refreshing!”

“Yes, you know what I mean—lively.”

“I’m sure she is,” Irena said tartly. She paused to glance out of the window meditatively. “Two women murdered. Both of them sort of attractive …”

“I’m glad you said that. It’s been bothering me. A pattern of some kind might be suggested although two women are not quite enough to reach any conclusion.”

“Would you like more women to be murdered so that your ‘pattern’ could become more definite?”

“Of course not, but it worries me when I think there may be an association I’m missing, that’s all.”

She had a charming smile, and she displayed it. “I know what you mean.” She pointed out the window. “We’re approaching the Iron Gate. Do you know it?”

Sloping, tree-grown hills rose on the left bank, up to high sandhills on the Romanian side. On the Serbian side, large expanses of green grass unfolded like well-kept lawns.

“The Iron Gate is a series of cataracts, isn’t it?” I asked. “I have heard of it but never seen it.”

“Yes, it is. It used to be wild and rushing water, shallow and with huge rocks but a lot of work has been done to clear it and make it safer for boats. I remember learning in school about the stone bridge that crossed the Danube here. It was built by the Romans, but then the Emperor Hadrian destroyed it so the invading Goths couldn’t use it. You can still see a few pieces of the original bridge though, sticking up above the water.”

“The Danube must be shallow all through here.”

“It is, but you can often see dredgers at work—they keep it just deep enough for the passenger boats.” She started to rise. “I’ll see you later, I—oh, I meant to tell you, Elisha Tabor was having an affair with a man on this train.”

“What?” I exploded.

She looked at me innocently. “Yes, she—”

“How do you know this?”

“Oh, I don’t exactly
know
it.”

“Then why do you say—explain yourself, Irena,” I said sternly.

“I mean, she didn’t tell me, and I didn’t see her with any particular man—but I knew.”

“Intuition?”

She shrugged. “If you want to call it that.”

“Your Gypsy ancestors?”

“Don’t make fun of me,” she said with mock anger. “I know that I do, well, sense things.”

“So what else can you tell me? Who the man was, for instance?”

“Just because she was having an affair with a man on the train doesn’t mean that he was the one who killed her.”

“It puts him high on my suspect list,” I said.

“I suppose so. Oh, if I knew who he was, I’d tell you.”

“Can’t you intuit?”

“What’s that?”

“Use intuition to work out who he was.”

She looked out of the window for inspiration. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment.

“Care to guess?”

She pondered. “I don’t think so.”

This investigation is in a sorry state,
I thought to myself,
when here I am asking a girl I had never even met a week ago to guess who had murdered two women.

She saw my doubt. “Does this help?”

“I can’t say. Are you really sure about it?”

“I’m sure that I know this is what I feel. I already told you I don’t actually
know
.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

“Before when? No, you don’t need to answer that—no, it was a sort of confused mixture in my mind, and it all just came together now.”

“Suddenly?”

“I suppose my mind had already registered Elisha’s change of attitude. The shock of hearing that she was dead must have been what sparked the realization that she was having an affair. Does that sound strange?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“I suppose it would to you. After all, you’re a man.”

She said that with a finality that was inarguable. She smiled and resumed her departure. I sat alone thinking.

If she was right, I was inclined to think that any man who had been having an affair on the train with Elisha Tabor was a hot suspect. I debated how much to tell Kramer. It was not that I wanted to withhold any useful information from him, but his reaction when I told him that my “information” came from intuition was predictable. He would scoff. I decided to hold Irena’s suspicions for a while and see if I could make anything of them.

The Danube Express was still following a serpentine route as it wove its way along the track high above the river. Rocks gleamed dully in the desultory sunshine, though they had been cleared from the river’s main course, and their appearances were confined to the shallower edges.

Farms and villages dotted the scene as far as the eye could see, and, in the distance, another of the tall graceful church spires pierced the air.

As I entered the next coach, Kramer and Dr. Stolz were coming toward me. We paused in the corridor. No one was near.

“The doctor finds the cause of death to be undoubtedly the same as before,” Kramer told me, and the doctor nodded agreement. “The symptoms are identical.”

He looked from one to the other of us. “I must leave you. There is a sore throat in Coach 6 that requires attention.”

He left, and Kramer said, “I have some answers from Thomas. First, he has learned that our Swiss friend, Franz Reingold, is a major stockholder in
Ostdeutscher Eisenbahn Gesellschaft
—a very prominent railroad company in Germany. They would like to have the contract to run a luxury train similar to this one. If we were severely behind schedule or if we suffered an accident or if various other things happened—we might lose our contract, and the OEG might be able to pick it up.”

“Might be a motive,” I conceded, “but I don’t see Herr Reingold as a serious suspect.”

“Nor do I,” said Kramer, “but I cannot afford to overlook anything. Further, this morning’s edition of the Budapest
Times
gives its daily report of the progress of the
Donau Schnellzug.
No revelations, but there is a strong recommendation that readers who are following the daily reports should be sure to read tomorrow’s paper for another sensational story.”

“Another? Does that mean even more sensational than the murder of Malescu and her miraculous reappearance?”

“One would presume so.”

“So Czerny—or someone very close to him—is on the train?”

“It looks that way,” Kramer said harshly.

“I have a suggestion …”

“Yes?” Kramer looked at me hopefully

“Let me talk to Malescu alone.”

He frowned. “I had intended that we should interrogate her together. Surely it would be—”

“We can still do that—but let me talk to her first. I have some half-formed theories, and if I can talk to her on a sort of personal basis, I believe I might learn something helpful. I am sure she feels intimidated by you, but she might open up to me.”

Kramer looked doubtful.

“We don’t have much time left,” I urged. “We need to try anything.”

“I am not sure,” he said reluctantly. “When do you propose to do this?”