The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (14 page)

'Tell me, Heidi - do you think they still want the boy ? The Nazis, I
mean....'

The girl looked grave.
'I...
I am afraid so, if they could. My brother, Prince Joseph, was a wise and far-seeing man. Before he died he had placed most of our fortune in English and American banks. If they held Peter as they are holding old Baron Rothschild they could force us to bring it back. But they would not dare here. Besides Count d'Aquila, who is a powerful man in Italy, I am also under the protection of Dr Virslany and Captain Ovenecka. And Madame Strakova is high in the Czech Government. I am really safe. Tell me now of yourself, Hiram. Did you know that I was here ?'

'Not until I saw you, Heidi. I knew, somehow, that I would find you in Prague, but
...
well
...
not quite like this. Reck asked me to come to a party and gave the name Schoenau.'

Heidi smiled mischievously and said: 'Schoenau is one of our family names. Shall I tell them all to you: Furstenhof of Styria, von und zu Schoenau und Blankenburg Hohenlohe Altmark, and then there are ten more. You were wonderful when you met me, Hiram, your face never moved. I was so proud of you. Oh, you should have been a European. No, no. I so much prefer to have you an American.'

They talked a while longer
, Hiram with only half his mind
and heart. He wanted to go some place where four walls could enclose him alone with his nakedness. He was sore and raw and hurt, and the pain was not lessened by the knowledge that he had been a fool and the victim of his own imagination. There had been no lack of sincerity, sweetness or graciousness on Heidi's part. She had been genuinely happy to have found him again. But the man that was within Hiram was strong and honest enough to tell him that he had no place in this new and secure world of hers. He prepared to leave.

'Would
...
wouldn't you like to see Peter for a moment before you go ? He has so often spoken of you and asked for you.'

'Yes,' said Hiram Holliday, 'I would very much, Heidi.' He was the last link between Heidi and himself and their other days when she needed him, this quiet, brave boy of eight, with the brown hair and light blue eyes.

Heidi rumpled up her nose deliciously and crooked her finger at Hiram. 'Come. We will go to see him. Johanna will scold that we wake him until she sees who I have brought and then she will be glad, too.'

She led him down the long corridor that he had already once traversed that evening and opened a door and stepped through into the darkness and Hiram followed her. He heard Heidi's fingers searching the wall for the switch, and the lights came on.

Hiram saw the nurse, Johanna, in a woollen nightgown, turning on her elbow at the sudden awakening, in her large bed in the corner. He saw the smaller one nearby, empty, with the top bedclothes still shaping the small body that had been within. Then came Heidi's dreadful, mortal scream:

'Johanna ! Herr Gott! Der Peter !'

'
Herrje! Hohei!
'
Johanna answered the scream and was out of bed, a grotesque, staring figure with two grey braids of hair hanging down her back. Then with a leap she whipped through a door that led apparently into a bathroom, and they heard her half-inarticulate cry there. Another door banged, and then she was back with nearly all sanity gone from her face as she flung herself on to her knees crying:
'Jesus, Maria
..
.Erist nicht da .. .J
esus, Maria. Oh, Gott, Oh, Gott
!
^’

Heavy feet pounded down the corridor and it was Captain Ovenecka who first burst into the room, eyes blazing, one hand at his gun pocket, followed by the puffing, wheezing, elephantine figure of Virslany.
'Was ist los, hier?'

Heidi was sagging at the wall, and Hiram quietly went to her and slipped his shoulder under her arm. 'The boy,' he said, 'the boy is gone. We came in here to see him, and he's gone.'

'Tausend Donner !
'
cried the Captain in a thundering voice. 'He must be here. Look everywhere. It is impossible.'

The remaining half-dozen guests had come, and they scattered and searched the apartment, the kitchen, the maid's room, the bathroom and Heidi's room adjoining, the closets, every nook and cranny. Hiram did not wait. He was already through the service door and out into the hall. It was deserted. Going down the stairs three at a time, he noted by his watch that it was half-past eleven. The light in the concierge's little compartment was still burning, but the man was asleep at his table, his head on his arms. A thousand children could have been carried past him. Hiram ran on out through the great entrance door. The street was dark, quiet and deserted except for three waiting cars with their chauffeurs slumped snoozing at their wheels.

Thirty yards away, its tail light diminishing, a cab was moving off. It passed beneath a bright street lamp and then out of the lighted area, but not before Hiram had caught a glimpse through the rear window of the absurd appendage, the coarse, crinkled hair jutting out from the chin under the Homburg hat of the person he had come to know as the Man with the False Beard.

With a yell he started to give chase. A wild sprint, all out, with every ounce of power and he might catch it. But he had started just too late. The cab speeded up, rounded a corner and was gone.

Hiram turned and roused the sleeping chauffeurs.
'A
child has been stolen,' he shouted. 'Did you see anyone
...
? Has anyone come out with a child ? Did you see a woman with a child, or a man with a beard ?'

They stared
at
him stupidly and then at one another. It was obvious they did not understand a word. 'Oh, God damn it!'

cried Hiram. 'The fools
And the concierge asleep! They
can be miles away with the boy.' He went back into the house and roused the sleeping concierge, but he too spoke no English. He ran back up the stairs and into the apartment, where he found that the Captain and Virslany had taken charge and Heidi was at the side of the hysterical nurse.

'There's nothing below,' said Hiram. 'The concierge was asleep and so were the chauffeurs. And I can't make them understand me.'

'The border is closed,' said the Captain in a voice like the clashing of steel.
'I
have closed it. Not a person can get through.'

Dr Virslany was at the telephone, talking harshly and sharply in Czech.

His great, bubbling merriment had left him. His eyes were stormy and the flabby lines of his face hard and bitter and he looked to Hiram like a veritable mountain of vengeance. 'The Inspector will be here in an instant,' he said.

'Heidi,' Hiram cried, 'what does Johanna
say?'

There then was the white face and the frightened eyes he had seen so often in his mind.

'She heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. She put out the light about ten o'clock. Peter was there. She went to sleep.' She turned to Virslany. 'Anton, call Mario. Tell him to come.'

Dr Virslany's voice rumbled and rasped. 'The telephone in se home of Count d'Aquila does not answer.'

They went back into the nursery. There was a white teddy bear at the foot of the empty bed.

'Gott verdammt!'
roared Dr Virslany, and Hiram saw that there were tears in his eyes.' Se bear that his Uncle Anton gafe him! The poor child.
Gott verdammt.'
They cannot get away
...'

Uniformed men poured into the rooms, soldiers and police. Captain Ovenecka was spitting orders like a machine-gun. Dr Virslany had a worried police inspector by the lapels and was thundering at him. Doors were banging down the hall from other apartments and from floors below, and there was the constant sound of boots on cement flooring.

Hiram stood in the centre of the room, shaken by his thoughts, admiring as the two powerful men set into motion every agency of pursuit and arrest. If the kidnappers could be stopped they would stop them. And he thought he knew who had stolen the child and how it had been done. But there was nothing he could say or do but stand there, ignored by all, all that is except Heidi, who suddenly and swiftly crossed the room to him and threw her arms around his neck and cried: 'Oh, Hiram, Hiram! Help me. Help me. Find him, as you helped us once before,' and then clung there shaking and wept all her heart out into his arms.

How
Because He had Looked upon the Beard, Hiram Holliday was Blind

It had then been to him that Heidi had appealed for help in the time of her trouble. And Hiram Holliday had never in his life been quite so helpless. He was a stranger in a foreign country with an impossible language. When French or German was spoken Hiram knew enough from his schooling to make out the general sense of what was being said, but Czech was pure gibberish to him. And he was no detective. He was a man who had spent a third of his life on a newspaper copy-desk. And that which he needed to recover the child, knowledge and experience and power, he knew he lacked. A Virslany, steeped in the intrigue of Central Europe, might, or a Captain Ovenecka, politician and fearless professional soldier, but not a Holliday, and the thought drove him close to desperation. He could not even, in honour, confide in Reck, who might have helped or advised him, because the Captain had bound all of those present to strict secrecy. If the news were published the boy might be destroyed. His only source of information was Heidi, and it was last of all to Heidi that he could go with his suspicions - suspicions that amounted practically to knowledge. For there was no doubt in Hiram's mind but that Count d'Aquila and Madame Strakova had abducted the child. Somewhere into the picture fitted the Man with the False Beard, exactly how Hiram had not yet been able to determine. But the Count was Heidi's fianc6, and a well-known diplomat, and Madame Strakova her best friend, and a power in the Czech Government,
he could not touch them.

Irrespective of Hiram's instinctive dislike of the small, sleek man with the too small white teeth and sneering face, and the large, painted woman with the protruding eyes, the pieces fitted, and he saw so clearly in his mind how it had been done. Madame Strakova and d'Aquila had left the party together shortly after half-past ten when the nurse would have been in her deepest sleep. D'Aquila had returned for Lola's case and had gone out through the dining-room door into the corridor. He then had walked down to the nursery, entered and taken the sleeping child without waking Johanna. Hiram remembered his cat-like tread.

And he ran absolutely no risk. If the child awoke, he would be in the arms of the fiancee of his aunt, someone he knew and probably liked. And if the nurse awoke, again, it was Heidi's fiancee who had come, perhaps to take the child into the
salon.
But neither had happened. He had simply let himself out of the service door and walked down the service steps where he had rejoined Lola and possibly the Man with the False Beard. The latter might have taken the child. Hiram had not seen him since. And the later actions of d'Aquila and Madame Strakova had not been satisfactory. Hiram had found them out from Heidi. Neither had been reached by telephone until after three o'clock in the morning. Lola's story was that upon returning home she had taken a sleeping drug and it was not until three that she had been roused by the ringing of the bell. The Count, after he had t
aken Lola home, had gone to the
Italian Legation, let himself in with his night key, and had worked over some papers until a late hour.

Hiram was helpless to attack either of their stories, or them. It was the Man with the False Beard, he told himself, who was the key. Who was he ? Hiram racked his brains. Had he been among the guests at the apartment ? Would he have recognized him without the beard and moustache? But there had been close to fifty people there, constantly moving about. He might have walked calmly beneath Hiram's nose. He seemed to recall vaguely that there had been a man among the guests with deep sunken eyes. He knew that if he went to Virslany or Ovenecka with his story they would laugh at him. D'Aquila and Madame Strakova were above suspicion. He would be set down as a meddling busybody and a fool. No place, no place, no place for him. The cry rang through his head. Five days had passed since the kidnapping. He saw himself in his mirror. Hiram Holliday, the great adventurer. He did not look capable of finding a lost dog, he told himself, with his round, plain face, steel-rimmed spectacles, and stoutish frame, he looked like what he was, a copy-reader for the
New York Sentinel
who ought to be sharpening pencils and preparing to mark up the copy of men who by their brains and ingenuity and strength and daring went out into the world and wrested its secrets.

His telephone rang, and when he answered it, it was Heidi. Her voice sounded terribly strained and frightened. She said: ' Oh, Hiram. Can you come to me ? I must talk to you.'

Hiram said
:'
Coming!' It was nine o'clock in the evening. In the cab on the way to Podebradova Street, Hiram noted that it had stopped raining, and that the sky over Prague was copper-coloured from the city lights, th
e same coppery colour that had b
een in the London sky the first night he had ever laid eyes on Heidi.