The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (29 page)

Heidi and Peter did not know what lay on either side of the terrible track they followed, but Hiram did - sheer drops of five thousand feet. The speed increased. The ridge, the only passable link connecting Austria and Italy at that point, had to be taken
at
gravity. The last strength and control went out of Hiram's legs. He could no longer stop. He did not know how he got around the curves. He felt that now he was lost and that the easiest thing would be to give way, to slide off, to right or left and have it over. But the awful terror of the fall into blackness to spin down to the final obliterating crash, kept him going. His chest was burning and his ears roaring. It was no use. There was nothing left. He felt himself sinking into the bottomless darkness, but fell instead on hard snow. The terrible ridge was over. Toni was pouring some brandy down his throat. He recovered.' Can you go on ?' Heidi asked, her voice trembling.

'Yes, yes. I can go on. It can be
done....'

He could never afterwards break down the rest of the descent into any parts. He had entered a nightmare world of grinding rock, pouncing
shadows, ice and
snow, trees into which

he caromed. He had lost his spectacles somewhere, his hands were ripped and one of them, the left, was useless. Sometimes the world of black and white rushed past him with fearful speed, and he thought that he had left the ground and was flying. And then again he was falling, falling, tumble after tumble battering him, and he could not tell whether each contact with the ground was new agony or just the continuation of the last.

He was no more than half-conscious when the last slope finally flattened out and on one side stood a dark, shapeless mass. Both Heidi and Seppl caught him and kept him from pitching into the side of the hut. A light gleamed from an upper window and then a door opened and a stalwart man in a Tyrolean jacket came out and said in German:
^‘
Herr-je
,
where do
you
come from ?'

'From Schwarzenstein,' said Seppl.

'Yessus Maria!
Over the Lattler Rü
cken! Impossible! Mother, come down here. Some people need help. And the little man did it, too ? Yessus.'

Hiram fell to the ground and beat his head with his fists. 'God, oh God,' he groaned,' I've failed. We're still in Austria!'

'N
a,
na
said the man. 'We're Tyroleans on this side, but you are in Italy.' It was the last thing that Hiram heard.

Hours later he came to. He was in a bunk. Heidi was at his side, pressing a cloth to a bruise on the side of his head. He found he could speak.

'Did we make
it?'

'Yes, Hiram
...'

'No one hurt?'

'You have been hurt a little, Hiram,' and then: 'Hiram.
Tell me something. Where did you ever ski before .
..
before
tonight '

Something silly began to quake in Hiram Holliday, some deep-set laughter. There it was again, his great moment of drama! Hiram the king-maker ? Hiram the clown! It would be good for him to tell. He managed to turn his head a little.

'The name of the place probabl
y won't mean a thing to you,
Princess. It was
at
Saks Fifth Avenue in
New York on an indoor alp made of Epsom Salts. I got a diploma after ten lessons. There's your hero. Oh, for God's sake, Heidi, laugh. Laugh as
I'm laughing
at
me, the eternal fool
'He
wrestled bitterly

to retain consciousness, and then lost to a blinding hysteria. The others came and stared wondering at this wild, battered man laughing, laughing unknowingly, while at his side, holding his head to her heart, the Princess Heidi between sobs called his name
:'
Hiram,' time after time, and buried her lips and face in his hair, and called him brave and glorious, and beloved, until the wild laughter that clouded his mind died away, and he grew calm and fell to sleep still in her arms.

DUELLO
IN
ROME

How Hiram Holliday Listened to the Voice of Rome and Acquired an Ancient Sword

It
had been in mid-September of 1938 that passengers on the gigantic liner, S.S.
Britannique,
Europe bound, were asking one another a question, half in jest, half in genuine curiosity, with regard to one of their fellow-passengers. The question was: 'Who is this Hiram Holliday ?'

This curiosity had been engendered by the fact that although a man by that name had distinguished himself most dramatically in certain shipboard competitions and had sent the ship's fencing instructor to the doctor to have three stitches taken in his arm, no one could ever remember having seen or noted him.

But seven months later, April of 1939, to be exact, the same question was being asked, and by no means in jest, in London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, and one other capital city of Europe.

In London, in an inner office of the British Intelligence, an elderly moustached officer called over to a youngster at a nearby desk:
'I
say, Reggie, did we ever find out who did for those Nazi chaps in Green Park, the night of the crisis ?'

The young man consulted a file and said: 'American, by the name of Hiram Holliday.'

The officer looked blank and said: 'Who the devil is Hiram Holliday?'

In Paris, an underling of the famous Deuzieme Bureau, the secret service, was ushered into the presence of his chief, bursting with pride and information. He said:
'Mon Chef!
I
have established it finally after months of work. But never have I given up, never relented. The great clown, Grognolle, who convulsed us so
at
the Cirque Antoine at the time of the Vinovarieff plot. It was the missing American, Hiram Holliday. I have the proof.'

The chief smiled and said:
'Ah
oui! C'est bon, mon vieux.
And now if you could apply this same talent and energy to telling us exactly who is this Monsieur Holliday
...'

But most serious of all were the repercussions in Berlin, where the Gestapo nursed a well-filled dossier labelled, 'Hiram Holliday, American Newspaper Correspondent and Secret Agent.' The last, though it was not true, would have flattered Hiram enormously.

It contained an account of his share in frustrating their plans to seize and hold for ransom the person of Duke Peter, nephew of the Princess Adelheit (Heidi) von Furstenhof of Styria, in London, Prague, and Vienna. And it held the notation: 'Very likely concerned in some manner with the death of Auslands Propaganda Minister Dr Heinrich Grunze, and the disappearance of Grafin Irmgarde von Helm', and concluded:
'At
present in Rome as Foreign Correspondent for the
New York Sentinel.
Under surveillance. It is necessary that an action be taken with regard to this agent.'

And the simple man who had left his mark upon the capitals of Europe stood one afternoon, late in April, on the worn flagstone of the Via Sacra in the Foro Romano, the ancient Roman Forum, and looked up into the light blue Italian sky, through which roared seven giant Caproni bombers, wing to wing, their hooded snouts thrust forward, the sun ringing their whirling propellers. Beneath his feet lay the dust of those who had created and lost the Roman Empire. And in between was Italy.

This combination was as profoundly disturbing to Hiram Holliday as it was at the moment to all Europe, again in the throes of a nerve-racking war crisis. Italy had seized Albania. Greece trembled. The English kept watch at Corfu. Men massed in the Dodecanese. The great booms had been swung into place blocking Gibraltar, the French and British fleets massed in the Mediterranean and three-quarters of Europe was under arms. The powder train was laid again, and this time Italy was holding the match. One more move, and
...

Hiram smiled grimly as the dea
dly scythe of the warplanes
drew across the sky. There seemed to be in his ears not the thunder and grumble of the powerful motors, but mocking laughter that rose from the tufa and all the ancient rubble at his feet. Hiram was listening to ghosts again.

He was in Rome, he knew, as a reporter of the current European scene, and reporters are not supposed to concern themselves with the half-heard voices of the past, but rather are expected to deal with the present and the tangible, the signs and portents that indicate the moving of the minds of the rulers, the dictators and their satellites. But Hiram could never
at
any time in Rome succeed in disassociating himself from the shouts, the groans and warning cries of history that swirled up around him, rising, seemingly from every crack in the pavement. At times it was almost as though the ground was heaving beneath his feet from the pent-up laughter of those who lay beneath.

Past glory! Past glory! It was Mussolini himself who had caused to be affixed to an ancient wall along the broad, compelling Via Impero that led from the Colosseum to the Piazza Venezia, that series of maps in coloured marble that traced the rise of the ancient Roman Empire from the pin-point of the Rome of Romulus and Remus to the vast domain that took in three-quarters of Western Europe and stretched eastward into Mesopotamia. Hiram used to pause whenever he passed them, musing. He could remember no great, dead Empire of the past that had ever sprung resurgent, Phoenix-like from
its own ashes.

The fascination that ancient Rome poured over Hiram was the subject of some laughter in the Rome Bureau of the
Sentinel,
in the Via Colonna. Fred Proggi, the Bureau Chief, was a trifle nettled. Hiram Holliday was always on the Palatine, in the Forum, in museums, or reading in the American Academy. A crisis, thought the Bureau Chief, was no time in which to pursue studies of ancient history.

But then, Holliday was definitely strange; he did things in his own way, and orders from New York were to leave him alone. If he chose to write and mail back home what Proggi considered dull articles on the military organization of the

Empire contrasted to the modern Italy, or comparisons of Mussolini with Julius Caesar, or Gaius Octavian, and if he chose to waste hours puttering in antique and curio shops in the Via Babuino and spend all his money there, why that was undoubtedly his business. Still, Proggi would have appreciated help. The paper wanted to know just one thing - war or peace ? He would have been very much surprised if he had known that in his own way Hiram Holliday was hitting very close to the truth.

No one knew what was going on in Hiram Holliday's mind or the curious things that were happening to him in Rome. There was, for instance, the little incident of his most precious treasure which hung in his rooms in the fine old Hotel Russie. Shortly after his arrival in Rome, when his blood was racing wildly with the excitement of the wonderful city, he had wandered into the curio shop of Salvello Salvelli on the Via Babuino. He loved to inspect and finger the old, old objects, coins and vases, ancient rings and bracelets and statuettes, for the poignant, vivid emotions they shot through him. Among his many curious qualities not to be expected in an ex-copy-reader, Hiram Holliday had a fourth-dimensional sensitiveness, to inanimate objects. Old things sent him vivid, inescapable messages.

Signor Salvelli himself waited upon him. He had grown to like this quiet, shy man. On the curio-crowded wall, back of the counter, two swords hung side by side. They were short, no more than twenty inches in length. The hilts were of bronze with no cross-piece, knobbed and thinner in the middle with welts for gripping. The blades were of iron, broad two-edged, tapering to a sharp point. They were green with the mould patina of the centuries.

Hiram pointed to them. 'What are those
?'

'Ah, ha
!'
said Signor Salvelli.' Well may you ask. That is the
gladius.
The famous sword of the Roman Legionary. One is an original from the excavations
at
Ostia. The other is a reproduction. It is magnificently made. It is nearly impossible to tell the difference. If I did not know
...'

'I
can tell the difference,' said Hiram Holliday. 'Give them to me.'

Smiling, Salvelli took them down and laid them upon the counter.' I will make you a little wager, my
friend....'

'Don't,' said Hiram curtly, 'you'd lose your money,' and took first one and then the other in his hand and balanced it for a moment. Then he handed one of them to Salvelli and said: 'This
...
this is the original
...'
and the proprietor wondered for a moment why the American's voice shook.