Passport To Peril by Robert B. Parker

Author:Robert B. Parker [Parker, Robert B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857683991
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

I made the corner all right without a shot being fired but I ran smack into the arms of a policeman.

“What’s your hurry?” he said. He clamped an enormous fist around my wrist. I couldn’t have reached my gun, and he carried a .45 in a holster outside his fur-collared greatcoat.

There was no longer any shouting behind me. Maybe he hadn’t heard it. Maybe he was just pounding his beat.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Pardon me.” I tried to edge past him but he blocked the way.

“What’s your business?” he said. “Explain yourself.”

I knew as well as he that gentlemen in evening clothes don’t run out of the Nagymezo utca at three o’clock in the morning. And he knew I wasn’t a native because I spoke Hungarian with an accent.

“I’m cold,” I said lamely. “My taxi got stuck in the snow. Ask the gendarmes if you don’t believe me. I’m walking back to the Hotel Bristol. I decided to run to get warm.”

He was short and squat, and his slant eyes showed his Tartar ancestry. His eyes also showed he didn’t believe a word I’d said.

“Where are you coming from?” he said, although he must have known there was nothing in the Nagymezo utca except the Arizona and the Moulin Rouge.

“The Arizona,” I said. “I stopped in for a drink.”

“Maybe you’re all right,” he said, “but I think we’d better go back to the Arizona and be sure.”

“I’m a guest of your country,” I said. “What’s wrong with running to keep warm? I’m not used to your cold weather, that’s all. You’ve no right to treat me as a suspicious character. I don’t think your superiors would understand such behavior on your part.”

Then he wasn’t so sure. Perhaps I was a Russian. Hungarian public servants who crossed the Russians usually regretted it. After all why risk trouble? Even if I had done something wrong, he could always deny having seen me.

He shifted uncertainly from foot to foot and then the argument became strictly academic because a third person rounded the corner from the Nagymezo utca and joined our little group.

It was Anna Orlovska, wrapped from head to foot in sables. The cop, who knew quality when he saw it, clicked his heels and saluted. Hungarian Communists click their heels and salute the aristocrats, even when they’re nabbing them for the hangman.

“Thank you, Officer,” Orlovska said sweetly. She called the cop Rendör bacsi, which means Uncle Policeman. Hungarian children call policemen Uncle.

“Your Highness,” the policeman said. He wasn’t going to make another mistake. If the lady was the wife or the mistress of a commissar, so much the better. “Your Highness, may I be of service?”

I expected half a dozen gendarmes to follow Orlovska around the corner at any moment.

“You have been of service, Uncle Policeman,” Orlovska said sweetly. “You have done me a great service in detaining this gentleman.”

All the countess had to do was to point to the yellow poster on the wall behind us. Twenty years of walking a beat at night, arbitrating Mrs.

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