The Dumb Gods Speak E-Book

E. Phillips Oppenheim

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This mystery that takes place in 1947 in Nice about conflicting political goals between an American and a Chinese. Shortly thereafter, the granting of independence to the Philippine Islands by the United States, Japan attempts to seize them by force. When the Japanese attempt to invade the newly freed islands, their entire fleet is destroyed by a single battleship of the United States Navy using a weapon that concentrates and amplifies electric currents in the earth’s atmosphere. Much of the story concerns the current state of government of China and Russia, both of which are seen as lawless tyrannies. It is more than slightly ironic that the goal of the heroes is to use advanced technologies to restore the monarchy to these two countries, much in keeping with Oppenheim’s traditionalism.

Leseprobe

Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

FOREWORD

Seven men were seated around a table in a magnificently proportioned but plainly furnished room on the topmost floor of the famous Humberstone Building. That they were men of consequence was evident by their appearance and general bearing. That they were assembled for a serious purpose was clearly apparent from the general atmosphere of gravity and suspense. They appeared to be mostly between the ages of thirty-five and fifty, except for one who might have been a few years older, and who was dressed in the sombre garb of an ecclesiastic of high rank. They sat in silence save for an occasional uneasy observation. They had all moved their chairs to a slight angle as though to be able to face one side of the room, into the wall of which had been set two large sheets of some sort of metal, the top sheet smooth, the lower one honeycombed with small interstices. Suddenly the man at the end of the oval table raised his finger.

“Humberstone is coming,” he announced.

They all turned towards the folding doors, which at that moment swung open. An invalid’s couch on rubber-tyred wheels was pushed quietly into the room by a tall, well-built young man of athletic appearance, but with strongly chiselled features and the fine high forehead of a student. Everyone seated in the room rose for a moment. The man upon the couch, who was propped up into an al most sitting posture, raised his hand in salutation. The couch was wheeled to a convenient position, from which its occupant could see every one of the seven men. His hungry eyes, still bright and powerful, deep-set in his worn face, familiar to the world through the ceaseless efforts of decades of photographers, swept around the table. He ad dressed the man directly opposite him, a man of middle-age and dignified presence. He spoke slowly and his voice was thin. Nevertheless it was marvellously distinct.

“I must conserve my words,” he said. “Digby Long, you are here to represent the President?”

“That is so, Mark,” was the friendly reply. “As Vice President of the United States I am empowered to sign any papers you may present, or to come to any agreement with you which I may consider desirable.”

“I must remind myself of the personality of each one of you,” the man on the couch went on. “I must satisfy my self that you are all here, for my physicians, who are wait ing outside, have issued their last warning.”

No one attempted any sort of conventional protest. There was, indeed, something grotesque in the idea of death venturing to lay its stranglehold upon a man who had defied and conquered so many of the elemental laws of nature. Words would have seemed utterly inadequate. They kept silent.

“You, General, I remember perfectly,” he continued, indicating the Vice President’s neighbour–a fine man of military appearance. “You are General Percheron, Commander in Chief of the Army.”

“That is so, sir,” was the quiet acknowledgment. “Glad you have not forgotten me.”

“Next to you,” Mark Humberstone proceeded, “I recognise Admiral Powers. You have just been appointed Admiral in Command of the entire Fleet.”

“That is so, sir.”

The speaker paused for a moment. He looked around at the others. There was no form of greeting in his gesture or speech. He seemed to recognise them, however, without difficulty.

“My fellow worker, Daniel Rathborne,” he continued thoughtfully, addressing his immediate neighbour. “Yes, it is right that you should be here. The work is finished but it must be held together. Phineas Laythrop, you are here as Secretary of State, and you, Martin Clough, are the newly appointed Secretary of War. Finally, there is my old friend, Dr. Felton, Bishop of New York.”

“You have named them all, sir,” the young man who had wheeled in the couch announced, leaning a little forward.

“I have, alas, no words to spare to bid you greeting or farewell,” Humberstone said, taking into his hand the black cylinder from the bracket attached to the side of the couch. “Will you please, the moment I touch this switch, turn towards the television receiver and listen to the loud speaker. Watch! Now, if you please.”

There was a murmur from the table. Everyone was leaning forward. The young man had taken his father’s wrist, the wrist of a child, into his hand. Upon the screen was suddenly depicted a river, and in the middle of the stream a huge man-of-war making apparently slow progress against a powerful tide.

“The battleship you see,” the man on the couch went on, “is the old City of Washington. She is making her way down the Hudson. You have her visualised?”

There was an affirmative chorus. Mark Humberstone moved an inch or two in his place, white and ghastly in the strong light, his eyes apparently devouring the screen. He leaned slightly to one side and touched the switch attached to the cylinder. For a moment there was a flash of scarlet light which darted around the room like an escaped ray. The Bishop started in his chair. The Vice President rose involuntarily to his feet. There was a faint staccato murmur of amazement.

“Continue to watch, if you please,” the still quiet voice from the couch insisted. “By this time I think you discover that the battleship is out of control. Watch. You see her swinging round in the tide? Already she is in process of disintegration…You observe the list?”

For the last time on earth, Mark Humberstone smiled as he watched their faces.

“She is helpless,” he told them. “She is four hundred and fifty miles away. It would have made no difference if she had been four thousand. I touch a switch and every electrical appliance which she possesses is dumb and nerve less. Our friend the Admiral there knows what that means. She is finished.”

There was a rumble of voices from around the table. Astonishment had given place to awe. Everyone was star ing at the tragedy depicted upon that shining plate of metal.

“Your whole attention, if you please, my friends,” the great scientist begged, and it was noticeable that his voice had become a shade weaker. “What you have seen taking place, the powers which I am handing over can bring about at any time from a battleship, a fort, an observatory. We believed that the discovery of radium itself was the greatest thing that had happened to the world in centuries. Be sides this combination of forces which I present to you, this amplification and concentration of those electric cur rents with which our atmosphere is filled, radium is of no more account than the sands of the desert. I am handing over to you who sit around that table the gravest responsibility that was ever placed upon the shoulders of mankind. The control of these new powers, in collaboration with a staff who know the secret only in sections, will be yours to deal with on these terms: You will each put your signature to the document which the Vice President has already in his hand, and you will swear by the honour of your country that you will never consent to these powers being put into operation except for the holy purpose of proving to the world, by illustration, that war be tween the nations is no longer a possible enterprise. Only if at any time the United States should be attacked by a foreign enemy will you make use of these secret controls, which I have sometimes thought in a nightmare I must have dragged up out of hell. Each one of you will appoint a successor to himself, next in rank and capacity, who will succeed him in the case of his death. Seven you are now, and seven you are to remain till the time of wars is past. This is understood?”

There was a murmur of assent, but not one of them could look away from the screen. The voice of the man who had passed on to them that awful secret had ceased. They watched like men paralysed. Not one of them realised that the miracle worker of his generation, the man who had helped to make his country almighty, was already facing the one insoluble problem.  

The date of the opening of this story is April the fourteenth, 1947, some years after the granting of independence to the Philippine Islands by the United States, and subsequent to the attempted seizure of these islands by Japan, a proceeding which was followed by the greatest naval débâcle in the world’s history, when the Japanese Fleet, at its full strength, was totally destroyed in the Pacific Ocean by a single battleship of the United States Navy, equipped with the full range of the Humberstone discoveries.

The characters in this story are entirely imaginary and have no relation to any living person.

CHAPTER I

At 10:43 on a morning when the deep blue sea of the Mediterranean was flecked with whitecaps and the clear outline of the Estérels suggested a mistral, Mr. Jonson stepped from his compartment in the Train Bleu and, with a suitcase in either hand, alighted upon the platform at Nice. Refusing with dogged politeness the clamorous offers of a crowd of blue-shirted porters, he carried his own bag gage, gave up his ticket at the barriers and summoned a small carriage.

“Le Café des Oiseaux Noirs, Number Seventeen, Avenue Laperle,” he told the cocher. “It is in the direction of the old town.”

The cocher glanced a trifle curiously at his passenger, whipped up his steed and drove off. The latter leaned back amongst the frowsy cushions, produced a cigarette from a neat black metal case and commenced to smoke it with enjoyment. Nice was, he reflected, looking around him, a handsome, populous place, worthy to have become the head quarters of the great institution with whose operations he hoped presently to be connected. The cocher turned round and addressed him.

“Monsieur understands without a doubt that the Avenue Laperle is outside the radius?”

His client grinned.

“Monsieur understands nothing of the sort,” he replied. “Monsieur intends to pay the sum indicated upon the dial, with a suitable pourboire, and any dispute upon arrival will be referred to the nearest gendarme.”

The cocher flicked the air with his whip and turned surlily around. There was something about the brusque air of the small, rosy-cheeked man who had taken possession of his voiture which made it doubtful whether argument would be worth the trouble.

“We shall see,” was all he muttered. “Oh, yes, we shall see.”

Without undue haste on the part of anyone concerned, with many wheezes from the horse, creakings of the ancient vehicle, hoarse encouragements and flicks in the air with his whip from the unsavoury looking cocher, the end of the journey arrived at last. It was without a doubt an unprepossessing neighbourhood. There was little to be discerned of the beauty of one of the Riviera’s principal watering places. The building before which they had stopped was solidly built but was a somewhat sinister-looking tenement house, the ground floor of which was occupied by an apparently low-class café. The pavement was squalid. A sluggish canal, a turgid depository of filth, loomed unpleasantly near on the other side of the way. The cocher pointed to the dial.

“For the voyage itself, monsieur,” he announced, “one demands three francs and forty centimes. To return one must ascend the hill. It is an awkward neighbourhood. Monsieur will remember that in granting the pourboire.”

Mr. Jonson counted out five francs with great care.

“In the matter of pourboires,” he said, “I am a generous fellow. Take that and drive your crazy vehicle off to hell. May I never see it again! It smells. It pleases me not. Be off!”

Mr. Jonson grasped his bags and stepped out. The cocher, suddenly dumb, accepted his money and, with a carefully thought-out mixture of argument and abuse absolutely unuttered, drove off.

“A type,” he muttered to himself. “I wonder!”

The man was perhaps wise. It was one of the worst quarters of Nice and the flap of his passenger’s hip pocket drawn somewhat tightly over his rotund limbs pronounced the fact that he was not a man who took risks. The cocher drove off, but it took him the rest of the day to forget his fare.  

Mr. Jonson seated himself in a discreet corner at a three-legged table of unsavoury appearance, with a bag on either side of him, and summoned a waiter. The latter, dressed in a shabby pullover and a worn pair of trousers with shoes which gapingly displayed the absence of socks, came wearily up. He showed no surprise at the sight of a client obviously of better circumstances than the few others scattered about the place and, though his eyes dwelt for a moment upon the bags, curiosity seemed a dead impulse in him.

“Monsieur désire?” he muttered.

For answer Mr. Jonson tore off a marginal strip of paper from the journal which, wrapped round its stick, lay on a neighbouring table. With a stump of lead pencil which he produced from his pocket he traced a number–1009–and passed it to the man. The latter glanced at it, took the paper, and crumpled it in the palm of his hand.

“Monsieur désire?” he repeated.

“Un café simple,” Mr. Jonson replied.

The waiter departed. On his way he stopped before one of the receptacles for ashes which stood in the place. The crumpled and torn fragments of the scrap of paper which had been handed to him were added to its contents. After wards the man lumbered on and disappeared round an angle of the café. Mr. Jonson disposed himself to wait. As a matter of fact he waited for a very short time. Within five minutes a woman approached his table bearing a tray. She set the contents before him–a metal coffee pot, a single cup, and saucer.

“It is what Monsieur desires?”

He looked at her curiously. She was a stout woman but her black stuff dress was neat and in good repair. Her enormous bosoms were forced back in their place by the tightness of her bodice. She had magnificent black hair smoothly brushed and a faint moustache upon her upper lip. Her eyes were hard and bright. She might have been any age between twenty-five and forty-five.

“Monsieur chooses a strange place to drink his coffee,” she remarked.

Monsieur smiled.

“My name is Jonson,” he said. “I have come to see the jackdaws.”

The woman looked around.

“Do not drink that muck,” she enjoined. “There is better awaits you.”

“I come now?” he asked.

Once more she glanced lazily around to the right and to the left. She stepped out onto the pavement through the opened door. All the time she seemed to be looking nowhere. All the time Mr. Jonson felt that there was nothing she did not see.

“Now as well as any time,” she replied carelessly. “Monsieur must carry his own bags.”

“That is what Monsieur would much prefer,” was the smiling assent.

Out through the back quarters into a villainous-looking courtyard, along a dark passage from which branched several mysterious alleyways, out into another street, a broader street with a row of lime trees on the other side, a street that might not perhaps have been so bad except that the wind was bending back the branches of the trees and raising clouds of stinking dust. The woman pointed to a door in the building from which they had emerged, a few yards up the street.

“Monsieur will find what he wants,” she said, “if he mounts three flights of stairs and knocks at the door of the room Number Seven.”

“And if I do not find it,” he muttered, “I suppose I shall find trouble.”

“One takes one’s risks,” she answered, “when one comes to see the jackdaws. If you please it is well. If you are not acceptable–Well,” she added with a wicked smile, “it is a neighbourhood where things happen.”  

Mr. Jonson took up his bags, parted with one temporarily to open the outside door, picked it up again and passed into a small hall devoid of furniture, yet also devoid of the sickening evidences of filthy neglect of the Café which he had just left. He mounted to the first floor and found indications there that the building had once been the habitation of people of consequence. The doors had a solid appearance and the metal numbers attached to each were of brass. The second floor was better still. There was light here, for the windows had been cleaned, and from one of them he caught glimpses of the town below and a distant peep of the sea. Here were three more rooms: Four, Five and Six. Once more he mounted, and this time things showed still further improvement. There was a large oaken door with a very visible Number Seven facing him. On the right there was a window and a balcony. The walls were clean and had apparently recently been washed. There was an electric push-bell immediately in front of him. Mr. Jon son held his finger steadily upon it. Even before he had had time to remove it, the door was opened. A young woman, plainly dressed, but of neat and distinguished appearance, looked out at him. For the second time that morning Mr. Jonson told himself that these people knew their business. In those few seconds he felt that this girl had scrutinised his every feature and had arrived at an impression concerning himself and his clothes. It almost seemed as though she had seen through the worn exterior and realised the contents of the bags.

“This, perhaps,” Mr. Jonson suggested, removing his hat with great politeness, “is the Bureau of which I am in search?”

“Monsieur by his question has made that apparent,” she replied.

Mr. Jonson and his two bags disappeared behind the door. They were swallowed up in Room Number Seven of the far-reaching annex of the Café des Oiseaux Noirs.  

Mr. Jonson was beginning to be very much interested indeed in this novel byway leading out to the great road of adventure along which he had steadily made his way since his arrival at manhood. Up to the moment of his being ushered into that barely furnished but somehow impressive-looking apartment and finding himself alone with a young woman, whose distinction he was well able to appreciate, he had found the opening-up of this episode of his career a little disappointing. Everyone knew that Nice was a city of mysterious cafés and bands of criminals with secret haunts, and that there were parts of the city into which it was unsafe to venture without police protection. There was an element of staleness in the whole affair which was suddenly dissipated by the appearance upon the scene of his present companion. He leaned slightly back in the easy chair which he had been invited to occupy, and he looked across at the young woman with steady, appraising eyes.

“I begin to find it more difficult than I expected, Mademoiselle,” he confided, “to enlist myself as a member in your famous society. It is for that purpose I an here.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I wonder what you know about us really?” she enquired.

“Very little,” he acknowledged. “I have heard you called the Foreign Legion of Espionage.”

She nodded her head gravely.

“The idea is not a bad one.”

“But whereas,” Mr. Jonson continued, “to join the Foreign Legion the formalities are of a usual type and no penalty seems to be attached to rejection, with you things are different. One has heard of men–and women, too–who set out blithely to become one of your number and who have never been heard of again.”

“Quite true,” she admitted tolerantly. “But you must remember this, Mr. Jonson. These people to whom you allude have been emissaries of the police or emissaries of the foreign powers against whom we have been working. They have come with the idea of double-crossing some special operation in which we have been engaged. We have reckoned them up and studied their past and when we have discovered that their real object in joining us was to frustrate our plans, we have dealt with them as our principals thought fit. Neither Mr. Humberstone nor Mr. Cheng are lenient men to deal with in such circumstances.”

“Now, how do I stand?” he asked her. “I have sent you references from two places which we will not mention in Asia, from Paris and from Moscow. I have done work in the underworld; but now official positions, where there is really scope for enterprise, scope for a man who is not afraid to risk his life, are few. I have come to you as an honest man. I wish to work for you and not against you.”

“Then,” she said, changing her position a little as though to avoid the sunlight which was flooding into the room, “it is a pity that you tried to deceive us about your nationality.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes,” he acknowledged, “that was perhaps a mistake. Yet if I had told you the whole truth I doubt if I would have received this invitation to visit you.”

“Of that I am not so sure,” she said. “It is strange that a man who wields the power Mr. Humberstone wields, who was the instigator and who is now the inspiration of an amazing International Bureau of Espionage, should be such a passionate lover of the truth. I have known him to risk the whole success of a great coup rather than have his principal agent tell a direct lie.”

“It is illogical, that,” Mr. Jonson declared.

“Very likely,” she assented, “but it does not alter the fact that you have come to us with a lie upon your lips. Others before you have found their way to the Café des Oiseaux Noirs, have even in one or two cases reached this chamber, but that has been the end–they have never found their way back into the world.”

“Supposing I make a clean breast of it,” Mr. Jonson suggested amiably.

The girl smiled at him. It became more and more apparent that in her quiet way she was remarkably attractive. She tapped a cigarette upon the table and lit it.

“Is not that just a trifle ingenuous?” she asked. “When we found out that a part of your story was not true it goes without saying that we set ourselves to discover the actual truth.”

Mr. Jonson seemed to grow a little smaller in his chair. He wondered whether those blue eyes, which he admired so much beneath their silky eyebrows, were really blue or whether there was not a glitter of steel in them. Had he been led into a death trap, he wondered. From where he sat he could see the trees waving in some gardens opposite and hear the clang of the electric cars. He read the sign on the smoky orange-coloured building on the other side of the square–the Gendarmerie. He smiled thoughtfully. He began to feel that he was safe. The girl read his thoughts.

“I should not be overconfident if I were you,” she said. “You would be the first man who has ever reached this room under false pretences and left it unharmed.”

Nevertheless Mr. Jonson continued to smile. For a few seconds the girl was busy. There was a confusion of telephones. She handled the situation skillfully, with swift fingers and a voice that changed curiously as she spoke through the various instruments. Finally she leaned back in her chair.

“You will know what is going to happen to you directly,” she announced.

Mr. Jonson nodded gravely.

“Would you have any objection to telling me something about your principals?” he enquired.

She looked across at him speculatively.

“Do you mean that you do not know?”

Mr. Jonson coughed slightly.

“I have heard various stories,” he confided. “I have been told, for instance, that the man who runs this establishment is a young American scientist–Mr. Mark Humberstone, son of the great inventor.”

“Well?”

“Then, on the other hand,” Mr. Jonson continued, “I have been told that there is someone of greater importance who keeps always in the background and who is seldom seen outside his suite of rooms here.”

“And this mysterious person’s name?” she asked.

“You yourself alluded to him just now as Mr. Cheng–” There was a brief silence. The girl tapped with her fingers upon the desk.

“At least,” she said, “you need not concern yourself for the present with idle rumours. There is such a person as Mr. Cheng, of course, but you are not likely to see much of him. Mr. Mark Humberstone is our acting principal.”

The door was opened and closed. A young man smiled pleasantly at the girl as he advanced into the room. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and he carried himself with the easy swing of an athlete. His hair was slightly disarranged, his costume the blue shirt of a matelot and a pair of grey flannel trousers. The coat which he had been carrying he tossed lightly into a chair.

“Good morning, Mademoiselle,” he greeted her. “Forgive my ruffled-up appearance. I have been having half an hour in the gymnasium.”

She nodded and pointed to where Mr. Jonson had risen to his feet. The young man swung round and scrutinised the visitor.

“So this is Mr. Jonson, is it?” he remarked.

The latter beamed acquiescence. He was standing in front of his chair with a bag on either side of him. Mark Humberstone looked him up and down curiously. There was something in his puzzled scrutiny which almost suggested recognition.

“So you want a job here, Mr. Jonson?”

“That is why I came.”

“And you were so sure of getting it,” Mark Humberstone went on with a glance towards the bags, “that you brought your luggage with you.”

“I came straight here from the railway station, sir,” the other explained. “As to my luggage, when I am travelling I never let it out of my sight.”

“Let us see what you have inside.”

Mr. Jonson obediently opened the suitcases. The young man examined their contents in blank surprise, and, stooping down, drew out a pair of scarlet silk tights which he held up wonderingly.

“What in God’s name is this?” he demanded.

“Both these bags,” Mr. Jonson explained, “contain my professional outfit. I have an engagement this week at the Jetée Casino. I imagine there are others in your Bureau, sir, who follow some sort of profession as a cloak to their more serious activities. It has always been my custom.”

He laid out the contents upon the floor. Whilst he was still stooping, Mark Humberstone, with a swift movement, withdrew a very finished article in the way of modern guns from the man’s hip pocket. Mr. Jonson stood suddenly upright.

“I do not suppose,” he remarked with a smile, “that that is any surprise to you. It is a very good gun.”

“I know the make,” Mark acknowledged, opening the breech and satisfying himself that it was unloaded. “It shall be returned to you before you go.”

“So long as I am not expected to work without it,” Mr. Jonson murmured.

Catherine Oronoff looked across at the visitor curiously. “Are you Professor Ventura?” she asked.

“That is my stage name,” he replied. “I am better known as The Man Who Stops the World.”

“One of your tricks?”

He bowed.

“As soon as I have presented myself at the Casino,” he invited, “and reported myself to the management, I shall ask for a handful of tickets and you must do me the honour of witnessing my performance. You may call it a trick if you will. It has puzzled many people.”

Humberstone sank into an easy chair a few yards away. His long nervous fingers were still playing with the revolver which he held in his hand. He looked up suddenly with a frown.

“I am surprised, sir,” he said, addressing Mr. Jonson, “that any man with intelligence enough to discover that there was such an organisation as the International Bureau of Espionage, and with the sense to want to work for it, should be foolish enough to start by attempting to deceive us.”

“I regret already that I made the attempt,” the culprit admitted humbly.

“What post did you hope to fill here?”

“My business for the last two years,” the applicant confided, “has been, in company with two others, to guard the life of a person of some consequence.”

“Your patron still lives?”

“He is, I believe, in the best of health,” was the cheerful reply.

“And why have you abandoned your position?”

“I became out of sympathy with the person whom I was guarding. I realised that I was drifting into a very dangerous position.”

“So you found your way here,” Mark Humberstone meditated. “And now?”

His fingers had ceased to toy with the revolver. His eyes were fixed steadfastly upon the little man whose face had become almost sphinx-like.

“I should like a post upon the personal staff of your executive, sir,” he confided. “I should like to act as a free lance remaining always in the background but always present–the number one bodyguard of you and Mr. Cheng.”

“What do you know about Mr. Cheng?” the young man flashed out.

“Not much, sir,” was the quiet reply. “Not much about you–not much about him. Still, this is a bureau of spies. Where there are spies there is danger. Where there is danger there I love to be.”

Mark Humberstone contemplated his unusual visitor with thoughtful eyes.

“You are a curious sort of fellow,” he remarked.

“So your father said more than once when I guarded for three years his private laboratory at Beaumont Park,” Mr. Jonson observed imperturbably.

Mark Humberstone sat up with a start. His face cleared.

“Now I remember you!” he exclaimed.

Mr. Jonson appeared gratified.

“For three years,” he went on, “my orders were to watch over the person of your father, and if there was trouble to waste no time asking questions–to shoot. That you may remember, sir, I did three times. The professor was always protected. No one was ever able to lay even a finger upon him.”

“You called yourself a Russian in those days, and you came from the staff of some notorious bootlegger.”

“What of it?” Mr. Jonson said placidly. “I have a dozen passports, and if on each one of them I claim a different nationality what does it matter? The bootlegger died a natural death, your father did the same, so now I come to look after you–and Mr. Cheng. It is a post for which I am admirably suited,” he continued after a brief pause. “I am a master of jiu-jitsu, I can fence with my arm against another man’s stick and break it in his hand. I know all the tricks of garrotting and gagging, and I have various other very useful accomplishments which I picked up during my study of Oriental conjuring. With a revolver or any sort of gun I am untouchable.”

“Your drawback in life I should think,” Mark observed drily, “is your overpowering modesty.”

“I am neither modest nor a braggart,” was the carefully spoken rejoinder. “I speak the truth.”

“Why, then,” Mark demanded with a suddenly keener thrust in his tone, “did you lie to us about your nationality when you applied for your position here? Why didn’t you tell me at once who you were? You served my father well.”

Mr. Jonson was the picture of misery. He cast a furtive glance towards the girl. His vis-à-vis understood. “You can say what is in your mind,” the latter enjoined. “This young lady is one of ourselves. She has our entire confidence.”

“It was in my mind,” the visitor admitted, “to enter your service under another identity just for this one reason: my experience has taught me that it is generally against the staff of a threatened man’s own household one has to guard.”

There was another short silence, then Mark rose to his feet and tossed the revolver lightly back into Mr. Jonson’s outstretched hands.

“You are attached to my Bureau,” he announced. “I am not sure,” he went on, “that either Mr. Cheng or myself are in any particular danger but there are certainly people in the world with whom we are not popular. This young lady,” he added, turning to Catherine, “will take you to the staff secretary. He will allot you a room and provide you with what money you require. Until you have definite instructions keep out of sight as much as possible. Afterwards, Mademoiselle, you will be so kind as to send for Suzanne.”

Mr. Jonson picked up his bags, bowed low to his new patron, and followed Catherine Oronoff across the room. From the doorway he looked back. Once more he bowed. There was a suggestion of the Orient about the man which, considering his complexion, his figure, and his neat precise English, seemed ridiculous. He departed without any further spoken word of farewell. Mark watched him with fathomless eyes. Both men seemed to possess the gift of silence.

CHAPTER II

Suzanne of the International Bureau, concerning whose real vocation in life there were various rumours afloat, held in these days a premier position amongst the courtesans of Nice. She was tall, willowy, and exotic in her characteristics. The sheen of her yellow hair, untouched by any form of artificial colouring, was her chief beauty. She had, however, the eyes of an eastern slave–languishing and passionate–the sneering but at times very attractive mouth of a Parisian cocotte of the haut monde. In Nice she had achieved great success, and in the only night restaurant which she frequented she reigned as a queen. She curtsied to Mark Humberstone as she entered his audience chamber a few days later, and assumed an air of devout attention.

“You have sent for your slave,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I was expecting your summons but it is early for me–and a little inconvenient.”

“Yes, I sent for you,” Mark, who had seated himself at Catherine Oronoff’s desk, observed.

“Eh bien?”

“You are living happily these days they tell me, Suzanne.”

“Comme ci, comme ça,” she answered with a little shrug of the shoulders.

“You will perhaps learn presently,” he said, “how to die happily.”

She mocked at him, yet somehow or other there was a chill feeling in her blood. Not many people had seen that look in Mark Humberstone’s eyes without fear.

“Oh la la!” she exclaimed. “Have I not worked well?”

“Your work is an utter failure,” was the calm reply. “Costoli has broken his leave to lie in your arms. Henceforth the man is useless to our clients and I know of no other who could have served their purpose.”

“Useless?” she cried passionately. “What do you mean? You have had the secret sailing orders of September the seventeenth, you have had the new charts of which only a dozen have been issued. Costoli is a ruined man and he knows it. He lies in my flat–he is there now–like a whipped dog. What more can I do?”

“Costoli dismissed from the Service, Costoli no longer Inspector of Naval Gunnery and a member of the Admiralty Board of his country, is useless to those for whom we are working,” Mark said coldly. “I told you what was required. The man was to have been your slave until the moment came when the great things were near. Now, in less than a week, you have made him compromise himself with his government, you have made him desert his post, his honour is gone, his life forfeit. What use is such a pricked bubble to us?”

“Well, he is no more use to me,” the girl declared with a heartless little shrug of the shoulders. “You had better get rid of him. I should not advise you to hand him over to the authorities. He might in a fit of remorse tell them about me and anything that he suspects about the Bureau.”

“So your little tongue has been wagging, eh?” Mark asked quietly.

“It is false!” she shrieked. “You should not accuse me like this–I who have worked for you as a slave. Antonio is not a fool. What does he suppose I want the papers for? He knows that I am a spy. He has given me what you asked for and I have given him the payment he craved. How am I to blame if he loses his head?”

The man whom she was addressing yawned–very lightly and very delicately. It was just an indication of weariness but it brought a shiver to the heart of the girl who watched him.

“You have captured the pawn, Suzanne,” he admitted, “but you have not only failed in the great things, you have made it impossible that you can ever succeed. Costoli in a month’s time could have given us information that would have been worth ten millions. So long as he was going to sell his honour, he might have done it for something worth while. He behaved like a fool. So also have you. A woman of the world knows how to keep a man at her feet better than that.”

She threw herself into a chair and swung her leg. It was obvious, from her scanty attire, that her abode was somewhere under the same roof.

“So I am dragged down here to be found fault with,” she complained, “to be told, I suppose, that the hundred thousand francs I wanted for next week will not be forthcoming.”

“In that you are correct,” Mark agreed. “The hundred thousand francs will not be forthcoming. On the other hand,” he went on, unlocking a drawer and producing a square sheet of paper, “something else may be coming that you will prize less highly. You have heard of the death warrants of the Bureau, Suzanne?”

She went suddenly rigid. There had never at any time been any natural colour in her cheeks but her eyes were terrible in their fixed stare.

“You do not really mean,” she faltered, “that I am to die?”

“Precisely what I am contemplating,” he answered coolly, “and quickly too. You know very well that you could not escape the cordon I have drawn round this little corner of Nice, but one prefers to do things decently. You shall die with your lover–a drama of jealousy or despair, eh? The press will welcome the story.”

She threw herself on her knees by his side. He drew his chair away.

“Don’t dare to touch me,” he ordered. “You know that that sort of thing is forbidden. You have thrown away the chance of a generation. What was at the back of your head? Why did you let Costoli desert his ship?”

Real tears were streaming from her eyes.

“I prayed him not to,” she pleaded. “I pushed him out of my room. I bade him listen to the clock as it struck. I sent for a car. I did all I could. My master, he was drunk–drunk in his soul–drunk with love for me–drunk as you will never be with any wine or for any woman. I lost my senses too, perhaps. I gave myself and then it was–too late. Antonio may know more. What if he joined you?”

“He lies there like a whipped cur,” Mark said calmly. “I have no use, Suzanne, for those who betray their country for such paltry things as you. I thought that Costoli was at least a man–that he would put up a battle–or I would have planned differently. And as for you–any little gamine from the street would have answered my purpose as well as you have done. I would not have such a man as Costoli working for me. There is nothing for him but his revolver, and he must know it. Why not conclude this matter in a friendly fashion–carry out the little drama pleasantly and with all the stage surroundings. Rush to him now, tell him that all is lost, shoot him and then yourself, or vice versa. I promise you that there shall be no scandal. We have our own ways of dealing with that, you know.”

She clutched at the table by his side, breaking her beautiful nails recklessly. She feared to touch him, his disgust was too obvious, yet it was her life for which she pleaded.

“Listen,” she cried, “Costoli has a brother–you know that. He knows as much as Antonio ever knew. He could perhaps satisfy you. Antonio shall die–I promise you that. He will shoot himself this morning if I tell him that I am a spy and never loved him. But the brother–he was wild with love for me but he had brains enough to go to his Admiral. He got a month’s leave. He is in Toulon, I believe. If I send for him he will come.”

The young man smiled sardonically, certainly not pleasantly. He looked down at the-girl who was pleading for her life–beautiful even in those agonies of hers–and his expression was that of one who looks upon some nauseous thing.

“Get up,” he ordered. “Go back to your chair. Do not think that you have triumphed. I have as much pity for you as I have for the rats they kill in the sewers day by day. Still, you have given me an idea. You want to live. It might be arranged.”

“Tell me how,” she implored. “I will do anything. You would be mad to kill me. There is no one else who can turn a man inside out and play upon his heartstrings as I can. Sometimes I feel like a tigress and that men are my food. You can have what you waft from Costoli’s brother–I promise you that. He was madder about me even than Antonio. I thought that Antonio was your man or I should have taken him.”

Mark said nothing and more and more every second Suzanne seemed to feel the terror of his silence. The light had gone out of her face. She was like a whipped animal sprawling in the chair waiting for the final lash.

“Ever been to Warsaw?” he asked.

“I was born there,” she confided.

“A fact which does not appear upon your dossier.”

“What does it matter?” she answered. “I was not born at all if it comes to that–I was kicked into life. My mother was a chorus girl at the opera. She never knew who my father was.”

“How old were you when you left?”

“Four or five–I do not remember.”

“But you went back again there.”

“That is in my dossier all right,” she told him. “I danced there when I was thirteen. When I was fifteen I had a lover with money. He took me back to Paris.”

“Ever hear of a family of the name of Agrestein?”

She became an animate person again through the sheer shock of surprise.

“Warsaw millionaires!” she cried. “It was Paul Agrestein’s grandson who took me to Paris.”

He glanced up from a small book at which he had been gazing.

“These dossiers have their value,” he remarked. “This one, my dear Suzanne, may save your worthless life. You want to live, I gather.”

“As a bird wants to sing,” she answered wildly. “I have life in me. It hurts. I will live.”

“Well, you were the mistress of young Paul Agrestein,” he observed. “That may make a difference. Sit up and listen to me.”

She obeyed at once. Mechanically her fingers stole into the little bag which had fallen to the floor. He laughed as he saw her use her vanity case.

“Not worth while for me,” he told her contemptuously. “Listen–the Costoli business is finished. You yourself have brought it to an end and it will be better for you to disappear for a time. For the moment you are reinstated. You go back to your lover. He is sober now?”

“He is what I choose to have him,” she said carelessly. “Je m’en fiche de lui! He has lost his spirit.”

“Take him away from here in an hour’s time,” Mark directed. “You can order a car. Take him to one of the hotels. Engage a suite of apartments. By the by, be sure that he takes his revolver with him.”

“What is to be the end?”

“He is to shoot himself to-night. See that he does it. There will be very few formalities afterwards. You can return here, then I shall speak to you again about Warsaw.”

“But the French police…” she faltered.

“When have you found the French police interfering with us or anyone belonging to us?” he asked. “You may be served with a notice of deportation, but whatever happens you will come here and nobody will stop you. Is that understood?”

She rose to her feet and drew a little breath.

“Yes,” she answered. “Antonio Costoli is to die tonight. That pleases me. I am to live. That pleases me more still. I submit to the French police. I know nothing of why Costoli committed suicide. He may have talked a little–not my affair.”

He pointed to the door and she slunk away closing it behind her.

“Ciel!” she exclaimed under her breath. She felt her knees trembling. “Pourquoi est-ce qu’on ne tue pas ce sale Americain?”  

“It is the man with the bags,” Catherine Oronoff announced as she stood, a short time later, by the side of Mark Humberstone’s desk.

“What about him? He has all his instructions.”

“He wants to know if he can give his ridiculous show at the Jetée Casino. He prefers,” she continued, “to establish his identity at any place where he is likely to stay for any length of time.”

“I see no objection. As it happens I wish to speak to him. Telephone, if you please, for him to come at once.”

In a few minutes Mr. Jonson appeared. He had changed his clothes to a well-fitting suit of dark blue and he wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. He had evidently paid a visit to the coiffeur, for his pink-and-white cheeks were smooth and his coarse brown hair straight as the fibres of a mat. His new employer looked him over with a scrutiny from which most men would have shrunk. Mr. Jonson welcomed it with a pleased smile.

“What sort of a man are you, I wonder,” Mark speculated.

“My deeds will show.”

“Spoken curiously like an Oriental.”

Mr. Jonson bowed.

“If I undertake service I serve honestly and well, but I choose whom I serve. I choose for what cause.”

“In a strange service, such as this will be, amid strange surroundings,” Mark warned him gravely, “you may come across much which you should ignore.”

“I am not the sort of man who, when he has a mission, looks either to the right or to the left,” Mr. Jonson confided. “I do not run about on four feet and I do not count the grains of dust in the road before me as I walk. The sunshine which you have lent me for a covering is where my eyes turn, and I have kept the soul with which I was born.”

“You are a man of constant purpose, then?”

Then Mr. Jonson did an astonishing thing. He made the sign of the cross. Ever so slightly his questioner frowned upon him.

“What is the meaning of that?” he demanded.

“A cabalistic sign,” was the apologetic reply. “I am not a Catholic. The cross is my visiting card in some places. It is the only fashion in which I talk to myself.”

“I begin to wonder,” Mark exclaimed, “whether it is a lunatic whom I have appointed to take charge of my safety!”

“You need have no fear,” the other assured him. “It was no lunatic who kept your father safe from assassination. I am so far from madness that if you wish it I will answer now one of the unspoken questions you have had in your mind to ask me.”

“Are these the tricks of the Jetée Casino, of the man who stops the spinning of the world when he chooses?”

“I possess the art of divination,” Mr. Jonson asserted, “but not in that fashion. Mine comes from the brain and from a curious apprehension I have always had of the motives of others. I suggest that you have sent for me to ask some question with regard to Warsaw.”

There was a moment’s silence. Catherine Oronoff swung round in her chair to look at this strange man with the egg-shaped head and the curiously precise appearance. Mark, if he felt any surprise, disclosed none. He flicked away the ash from the cigarette which he was smoking.