Johnnie (11 page)

Rudolph wiped his lavender face with his lavender handkerchief. “How will you do it?”

“Leave that to me.” Johnnie spoke with assurance. Not one hundred percent but Rudolph couldn’t know. “It’ll be a pipe to get the gun from that phony guard. Why did you come up here anyway?”

“I heard Magda’s voice, in that back room downstairs. By the time I finished dressing, she wasn’t there. I thought maybe she’d been coming up here. There wouldn’t be any other reason for her to be in that room.”

“You discovered the secret door?”

“I knew about it. Ottomkopf told me before I left Mexico.” He tittered. “How the guard comes up here without anyone knowing, to drill and hold meetings. And how if anyone questions them on the street, they say they are actors, dressed for a performance.”

“Drill in this cracker box?” Johnnie scorned. “No wonder they are undersized. Start with the hands, Rudolph. Get them loose and I can do the ankles.”

Rudolph began fumbling in back of the chair. “There’s a room beyond this, a big one. This little one is for committee meetings.” He was panting like an Airedale pup. “I can’t budge these knots.”

Johnnie’s heart zoomed down into his toes. He wiggled them. Then he perked. “Listen, in my right hand pocket you’ll find a knife. Stick your hand in. I’ll try to lift up a bit. My pants pocket. And no hooking the folding dough there.” He strained at the ropes until Rudolph could edge in a hand. “Any trouble getting past that guard?”

“Certainly not. He saluted and I came in.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. I am his commander. The Rudamian guard has never been loyal to that dreadful man. They wish reinstatement of their rightful rulers.” He drew out the Scout knife. “Is this it?”

“Open the big blade and start sawing. I’m pleased to hear you’re the commandant, brother. If Nosey peeks in tell him to mind his own business. Saw away and mind the arteries.”

“I still don’t see what good this is going to do.”

“You’ll see,” Johnnie told him. “I’m tough. I’ve been trained. We’ll get Stupid’s gun—he doesn’t even know how to handle it—then we’ll march right out of here and if anyone gets in our way they better duck.” There was the rear to be considered on the march. “You don’t by any chance have a gun, do you?”

“Oh my no!” Rudolph exclaimed. “Otto made me carry one on the trip but I’m rid of it. I loathe firearms of any sort.”

“We’ll risk it just the same.” Maybe he could back down the stairs with Rudo as a shield. No one here would potshot the future King of Rudamia. “Once we’re out we’ll grab a car and I’ll drive you to the airport. I’ll see you get on the Clipper. How did they get you into this mess in the first place?”

“It wasn’t a mess. It was wonderful.” Rudolph stopped sawing for the moment to heave a sigh. “Rudamia wanted me to return. Most of Rudamia. Only there’s a man—he used to be in charge of the royal stables but he didn’t like Father. You see, Father used to sneak down to Kraken’s house while he was currying the horses and steal his brandy. That was when Grandmother put Father on brandy rations.”

“Keep sawing. Where’s your Grandmother now?”

“She’s in Lisbon. She’s running a bar there. Father died of apoplexy last year.”

“So I heard.” Johnnie nodded. His hands were free. “Now give me the knife. You got a mother?”

“She divorced Father when I was quite young. She lives in Hollywood. She’s married to a big producer there.”

Johnnie cut the chest and thigh bonds. “Why don’t you go home to Mother?”

“I’d rather be king,” Rudolph stated. He was lighting one of his fancy cased cigarettes. He dusted a chair with his lavender handkerchief, perched on the edge of it. “That’s what I was telling you. The people want me, most of them, but Kraken wants to be president of Rudamia. He tells them lies about me. So unless I can get in fast after Hitler is run out, Kraken will force himself on the people.”

“Tough,” Johnnie murmured. He stepped free. Deliberately he took up the rope and began cutting it into tiny chunks.

“Why are you doing that?”

“For fun,” he retorted. Nobody would tie him up again with this line. Maybe they would have to knit the next.

“Colonel Ottomkopf—he prefers Herr Ottomkopf in these times—is a Prussian baron who has long been the military adviser of our kingdom. He first got wind of Rudamia’s planned revolt against Hitler and then he met Dorp who corroborated it. Otto thought I should return, wait in Switzerland until the time was ripe. I had to get out of Mexico anyway. The Nazis had found out I was there. They were watching me. I never saw them but Otto did. They wanted to take me back to be a puppet king, then you see they could hold on to the country for themselves even with Hitler gone. I won’t be a puppet king.”

“Don’t blame you,” Johnnie grunted.

“Ferenz fixed it up that I could travel over the border. He’s very clever. I pretended I worked for one of his companies in Mexico. The Nazis were after me then, right on my trail. But Otto put me safely on the plane. The trouble is I have to be careful here too until I can get on the Clipper. If the United States government knew that Rudolph of Rudamia was in town, they would intern me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.” He was petulant. “I’ve written them about it time and again. They let Ruprecht stay here but they refuse to let me come into the country.”

“Rupe was in before Rudamia went Nazi, wasn’t he?”

“What difference does that make? I’m more important than he is. But no. They refuse entrance to me—me! Even my government-in-exile hasn’t helped me. Surely the American government cannot believe I am in sympathy with those loathsome Nazis. Peasants! Not a one of them has a pedigree.”

“Bust mah britches,” Johnnie murmured. “And now if you’ll light that candle for me.”

“What for?”

“I want to read a letter.” Johnnie moved to the table.

“Is there time? Hadn’t we better get away first?”

“Won’t take a minute,” Johnnie said.

Rudolph’s hand wobbled with the match. Johnnie took the letter from his pocket. He heated the pen knife and lifted seal upon seal. There were a lot of papers. He examined them.

“Who’s it from?” Rudolph asked.

Johnnie moved to the other side of the table. “My girl.” There was nothing wrong with these as far as he could see. Just Rudo’s real passports and pedigrees. But the weight of the letter had been too heavy. He removed from one fold the thin brown cylinder. And he stared at it.

“Why did she send you a cigar?” Rudolph wanted to know.

His voice was shaky. “Cause I keep running out of cigarettes.” Here he’d been whamming around with the Rudamian boys and this in his pocket. No wonder Dorp had passed it to Theo at the party. He wouldn’t have wanted to take any chance of trouble with this on him. Theo didn’t count. Theo was expendable. But what hit Johnnie right between the eyebrows was that neither did Rudolph count. He wasn’t supposed to reach Rudamia. He was going to carry this thing with him on the Clipper. It was the kind of thing that spies packed in boxes so ships would explode in mid-ocean. Johnnie’d learned about them in bomb strategy.

He let out his breath. It couldn’t be harmful until morning. It wasn’t to be handed to Rudo until then. Rudo might investigate the contents if he had it sooner. Dorp certainly didn’t intend to blow himself up. Johnnie carefully put the cigar in his right hand coat pocket. He heated the knife again, pressed down each seal until it stuck. “We’d better get going, Rudo. I mean going places. You aren’t safe here.” He blew out the candle, replaced the letter in his inner pocket.

Rudolph paled. “You really mean you think—”

“I know, son.” Johnnie nodded grimly. “After this war you can throw a party for me in Rudamia. The guy who saved you from sudden death. Now you step out and speak to the guard and don’t worry about what I do. Don’t mention my name.” He spat on his hands.

Rudolph went first. “Good night,” he quavered.

Johnnie caught the guard on the first heel click. A right behind the ear, swing him, a left to the jaw. He grabbed the rifle as the fellow crumpled.

Rudolph squealed, “Why did you do that?”

“Remember, I’m saving you from sudden death,” Johnnie vowed. He grimaced at the prone guard. “If we have any luck he won’t wake up until we’re safe outside. Now listen, Rudo, we’ll try strategy. If that doesn’t work we go into Commando stuff. You walk ahead. I follow with the shoulder arms—like this. If anyone says, ‘What cha doing?’ you say, ‘One side, Joe.’ But if any of the big guys turn up we change around, me in front, fix bayonets, and then we rush the can. Get it?”

“Not very well,” Rudolph admitted. “Half of what you say has never been intelligible to me. But I shall try to follow you.”

Johnnie patted his shoulder. “That’s the old one-two.”

They met no one in the descent to Theo’s room. The corridor without was dim, silent. Rudolph pulled Johnnie’s sleeve. “I’ll have to stop in my room for a minute.”

“What for?”

“To get my suitcase.”

Johnnie was apprehensive. “Do you have to?”

“Oh, my yes!” Rudolph whispered. “There’s seven thousand dollars in it. I can’t leave that behind.”

Johnnie could understand that even if he didn’t like the waiting, now they’d come this far. Maybe that guard wasn’t out as far as he’d looked. He agreed reluctantly, “All right, we’ll stop.”

“You wait outside,” Rudolph warned. “I won’t be a minute. Keep watch.”

He opened a cautious door at the left, here at the back of the house. Johnnie was glad of its location. He didn’t want to be near Magda’s room, right front. No telling what she might think up if she caught them sneaking out. Rudolph had closed the door after him. Johnnie stood in the semi-darkness listening to the thump of his heart. It didn’t sound good. He hoped Rudo would step on it. Thirty seconds seemed long. And then, unmistakably, he heard footsteps below. He ducked inside the room fast.

Rudolph jumped from the closet, holding a topcoat and a soft gray hat. He shrilled softly, “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Johnnie said. He held the door, listened. “Somebody’s coming up or going down. Either way it isn’t good.” He pressed his ear to the crack. “I don’t think we’d better try it that way,” he decided. He had an idea.

He pushed past Rudolph toward the windows. Before he got quite there, he stopped. The way the bed stuck out had hidden this thing. A guy lying flat on his face. A big hole burned in the back of a pepper and salt topcoat.

Only a gun made a hole like that.

T
HE MAN’S BLACK HOMBURG
lay half under his head. A suitcase was on its side resting under the pepper and salt arm. The man didn’t move. Johnnie bent down, lifted the head by the black hair. It was Theo. Johnnie dropped the head and wiped his hand on his pants leg. He kept wiping it. He felt a little sick.

He’d never heard a throat rattling before. Rudolph stood behind him. “Dead?” he whispered.

Johnnie nodded. He was thinking about this. It was all his fault the squirt was killed. That made a fellow feel terrible. If he hadn’t held on to the papers, Theo wouldn’t be lying here dead.

“Why is he in my room?”

Johnnie said heavily, “I suppose he was coming in to tell you he was still loyal even if he had made a mess of things.”

Rudolph said, “No.” He said it one word at a time as if he couldn’t make his tongue move. “No. He was running away. My room’s on the fire escape. It isn’t really my room. It’s Trudy’s.”

That was the first time Johnnie noticed the room. It was a girl’s room, all clean delft blue and white and a big framed photograph of Ruprecht on the dressing table. It was signed: For Baby Mine from the Wolf.

Theo had been running away. There was his suitcase, a battered brown one, to prove it. Rudolph’s grip was a smart affair, striped, over by the bureau. Theo was running away because everyone was down on him. And it was Johnnie’s fault that everyone was down on him. Theo was scared of what Dorp would do. Dorp had done it. Johnnie’s muscles knotted. He’d beat the hell out of Dorp before he left here.

“Come on. We must go quickly.” Rudolph put on his hat backward, struggled with his topcoat and grip. “This is terrible, terrible.”

“We’re not going,” Johnnie said.

“Not going!”

“We’ve got to call the police.”

“The police!” Rudolph screamed. “We can’t call the police.”

“We got to,” Johnnie repeated. “When you find a body, you have to call the police.”

“But if the police come they won’t let me leave. They won’t let me be King of Rudamia. You told me so.” Rudolph’s chin wiggled. “I don’t want to stay here. Not after this dreadful, terrible thing has happened. In my room, too.”

“That’s another reason we can’t go. Suppose we skip out. What happens? Whoever rubbed out Theo gives the police our identification tags and we’re picked up. If we run away nobody’s going to believe we didn’t do it, or at least that you didn’t. The room is full of your fingerprints.”

“Of course it is. How silly. But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Johnnie hadn’t even considered that. Rudolph could have before he came upstairs. No. He was too dumb.

“Why would I do it?”

“Because he lost your passports.”

“I didn’t.”

“No cop would believe that if we hightailed.” Johnnie looked hard at him. “That’s one reason why we’re not skipping. The other is that somebody’s got to pay out for this. We’re going downstairs and tell that gang we found Theo. And we’ll see who isn’t surprised. Then we’ll call the police. We’ll see who doesn’t want us to call the police.”

Rudolph took off his hat. “I don’t like this.”

Johnnie shouldered the rifle sadly. “Who does? Come on, Prince. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Not now.”

Rudolph followed timidly. There weren’t any guards at the throne-room door. Johnnie opened it. “You first,” he told His Highness.

Rudolph walked in. Johnnie followed with fixed bayonets.

Magda cried, “Rudo!” She wasn’t expecting him, that was a cinch. She had her yellow slacks hanging over the arm of the throne chair, her black velvet shoulders resting on the other arm. She looked comfortable. She looked alluring. The allured was Janssen sitting at the foot of the throne. He picked up the two highball glasses before he jumped to attention, before she rolled to her feet. “Rudo, where have you been?” She looked beyond him and scowled. “You’re supposed to be tied up.”