Free Dead Man's Tale by Ellery Queen Page A

Opera House on The Ring in Vienna.
    Gerhard Mueller was waiting at the Goldener Hirsch in Salzburg, Austria, for the bus he was to drive. He was a short, flabby man sweating through the grey Tyrolean jacket that was his uniform. The driver who had brought the bus through the Tyrol from Innsbruck gave Mueller a limp greeting and repaired to the Goldener Hirsch for a cool drink.
    Mueller waited until the tourists took their pictures of the Horse Mural, and then they piled back into the big Mercedes-Benz for more punishment. He held his right hand out and looked at it. The fingers were still trembling. The day before, he had almost been killed.
    Mueller entered the bus and sat down, his heavy, damp thighs filling the driver’s bucket seat. He swivelled his beefy neck once to look at his tourist passengers.
    There was the usual assortment of old maids, school-teachers with guidebooks, harrassed couples with teen-aged children. All were Americans. The passenger representative, in his natty uniform, was explaining in English why on this particular express tour they could not stop over in Salzburg but must drive straight through, beyond Linz, to Vienna.
    It had not been many kilometres from Linz where, yesterday, Gerhard Mueller had almost been killed.
    For a thousand schillings, he thought. Nobody had told him he’d be shot at, and he hadn’t even collected his money yet. He was to get it in Vienna from Dieter Loringhoven, who had a room in the Hotel Astoria on the Kärtnerstrasse. Loringhoven would be pleased. He would get the money. But never again!
    Just as Gerhard Mueller was about to pull out of the broad square between the Goldener Hirsch and the Horse Mural, someone banged on the outside of the door. Mueller pulled the lever and the door opened.
    Two men stood there in the dust of the square. They wore suits with the unmistakable sheen of American wash-and-wear fabric. One looked about forty and the other not much more than half that age. The passenger representative, whose name Mueller did not yet know because he was new, the replacement for Milo Hacha, hurried over and smiled dutifully down at the Americans.
    In German the younger American asked, “Is Gerhard Mueller aboard? In Innsbruck they said Mueller would be with this bus.”
    â€œI am Mueller,” Mueller said. The younger man nodded. The older one looked unhappy, but relieved.
    The passenger representative wrote out two tickets, took their traveller’s cheque and gave them a few schillings in change. They climbed into the bus, found two vacant seats and sat down.
    Gerhard Mueller slipped the big Mercedes-Benz into first and drove off, leaving a dust cloud in the square.
    There had been dust yesterday too, on the border above Linz and Freistadt and more dust, choking yellow swirls of it, on the secondary road which ran north into Czechoslovakia, between the Vltava River and the main highway from Ceske Budejovice through the Tábor in Prague.
    To earn his thousand schillings Mueller had taken Milo Hacha only as far as Ceske Budejovice. He needed the money; what with a wife and two children in Innsbruck and a mistress in Vienna, a bountiful blonde who liked the pastries at Demel’s and the expensive dinners at the Sacher Hotel. So Mueller had agreed to guide Milo Hacha across the border at Dieter Loringhoven’s proposal.
    Hacha, an exile like himself, was going in secrecy to Prague to face a great future, it seemed. At first Hacha had undoubtedly been suspicious. It must have taken all Dieter Loringhoven’s eloquence to persuade him; Hacha was nothing if not canny. Wasn’t the Czech regime widening, like Gomulka’s Polish Communist Party, to include other Socialist elements? And hadn’t Milo Hacha’s father been a hero of the people?
    In the end, Hacha had agreed, and Mueller had been selected to take him across the border, not only because they knew each other, but because Mueller knew the border from his