CHAPTER X
A RETURN STROKE
Vivid memories remained in Fay’s mind as he reached the great Hôtel de Ville and turned toward the hostel where he had left the little silver greyhound.
The key to the dye cipher was safe with him. The blundering attempts of Dutch Gus and the German crooks to obtain this key showed that pressure had been applied from some quarter. The attack upon the embassy’s safe on the same evening of arrival proved that the German gang had wind that Scotland Yard was on the case.
Dutch Gus had failed and the matter was closed, thought Fay. He felt rather kindly for MacKeenon’s fortunate trip-up. He glanced over his shoulder as he passed out of the shadow of the Hôtel de Ville. He heard, as he walked on tiptoes, the far-off braying of the police who had most certainly lost his trail.
A bell still tolled within the city. A light showed here and there. For the most part, however, the way was through dreaming street and snug-wrapped houses whose drawn shutters seemed like night-caps.
Fay sniffed the morning fog and found it laden with promise. It served as a mantle and a cloak. It would be hours before the Lowland sun broke through the mist. By then, he figured on being far from the scene of the robbery. There was nothing whatsoever to be gained by remaining in Holland. He had decided to deliver the cipher-key to Sir Richard Colstrom at the house of the Two Lions in West London. At that same time he would demand a full pardon and the freedom to live by no man’s leave as long as it was within the law.
Old scores would be paid. The way was bright. He searched his mind for any overlooked trifles. There seemed none. He went on, turned a corner and crossed a dark street. He knocked boldly upon the stout door of the hotel.
A second and a third knock brought no answer. A fourth, however, was followed by footfalls inside and then the sudden lifting of a sash. Fay stepped back to the curb-line and glanced upward. The moon-broad face of the proprietor was beaming down upon him. A night cap was on his head.
“The doctor!” said Fay with easy assurance. “Come, let me in!”
Fay heard an exclamation concerning the British and the hours they kept. The sash went down. The proprietor appeared at the door with his great keys jingling like some grotesque St. Nicholas.
“Beastly night,” said Fay, passing him and climbing the stairs.
He opened his door and stepped into his room. He found a candle near the wash place where he had burned Sir Richard’s note. Shading his eyes, he stooped and glanced beneath the bureau. The thin cake of soap, wherein he had pressed the silver greyhound, was within the dust. He reached and secured this with a swift motion. He stood in the center of the room and turned it in his fingers.
There was much to do and little time to do it in. The police of the city could not be rated as total fools. The work at the embassy showed a foreign mind. No man in Holland was capable of opening an inner keister without leaving a trace. Fay broke the cake of soap, took out the insignia and pinned it to his left lapel. He moved toward the bed. It was his intention to place the tools he carried in the bag, wait until the proprietor was slumbering, and then make his way out into the streets and away from the town. There were the quays. Ships sailed and steamed for many ports. Freedom went to the bold!
He had stepped half across the room when a sound in the hall caused him to poise on his toes with his hand held rigid before him. He waited with every sense alert. The sound was repeated. It was the soft fall of steps. There was also the swish of skirts. They rustled silkily and out of place in that hotel.
The door opened slightly. Fay cursed himself for not locking it. Another trifle had come up. He whipped his hand down to his right coat pocket and coiled his fingers about the butt of the American automatic as he lifted its barrel inch by inch.
The door kept opening. It revealed the edge of a purple hat, a shoulder and then the olive features of Saidee Isaacs. She stepped in and pressed the door shut. She turned with her skirts swishing.
“Did you get it?” she asked.
Fay was mute for once in his life. He figured the turn of events as he watched her eyes change color and grow soft. She had hired the auto belonging to the hotel upon her arrival in Holland. It was natural that she should stop at the same hotel after her vain appeal on the quay. Perhaps she had hoped against hope that he would return to the cipher quest.
“Did you turn the trick, Chester?”
He uncoiled his fingers from the automatic revolver and laid a finger across his lips. He nodded with a faint smile as her hand came to him impulsively.
“I got it,” he said. “Dutch Gus was on the steamer coming in. I couldn’t let him take the safe. As it was, he came near getting away with it. Sit down, Saidee, and I’ll tell you what happened.”
He waited as she turned toward the bed and glanced at it. Her chin swung back and upward. Her eyes shimmered over with a moist glaze.
“We must leave here, right away,” she said. “If you got the cipher-key Sir Richard sent you for, my work and your work is done. We’re fearfully rich and respected. Why, Chester, the police will bow every time they see us.”
Fay lowered his voice as he said:
“Not the ones in this town. You’re right—let’s get out of here. Have you any luggage?”
“Just a small bag.”
“Go back to your room and get it.”
“It’s outside your door. I heard you come in, and dressed.” She glanced at her reflection in the mirror over the wash place. She tilted her hat as he crossed the room, removed the tools from his pockets and breast, opened the little surgical bag and dumped them inside.
“I’ve got everything,” he said, turning. “We’ll tiptoe downstairs and make for the Schwartz Canal. There we can wait till I get a line on the boats.”
“MacKeenon and another are in town. Hadn’t you better try and connect with them for protection? It’s wonderful to have the police with you, Chester.”
Fay darted her a sudden look of suspicion. He had not yet learned to trust the police. They were his natural enemies. The five years in Dartmoor had not quenched his old fire. She sensed this as he dropped his hand to his pocket and turned his face toward the door.
“They were only helping you,” she said. “Sir Richard was so interested in the cipher, he thought, perhaps, you might need assistance. That was all there—”
“We’ll drop that subject, Saidee. Drop it now. Sir Richard is like them all—he can’t be trusted. He told me I could come here alone—scot-free. He’d get better results if he’d trust a man. We fellows from the inside are not as black as some people imagine we are.”
“But this cipher-key is so fearfully important, Chester. Where have you got it?”
Fay tapped his left overcoat pocket. “Right there!” he said, glancing from the door to her. “Right where it stays, too, Saidee, till I see Sir Richard.”
“What is it like?”
“I didn’t open the package. I’m not going to. Let Sir Richard do that—after I have a word or two with him.”
She frowned, with faint lines showing at the corners of her mouth.
“It might be something we can memorize,” she suggested.
“It’ll keep.”
“But Dutch Gus and all those Germans are after the clue. Why, Chester, you don’t know how I’ve worked—in Geneva and Zurich, and in Austria before it surrendered. Three or four men were killed over the cipher. You may lose the key. Let me see it.”
He reached upward and buttoned his overcoat by twisting the buttons with his finger. He lifted the surgical bag and turned toward the candle.
“When you explain everything,” he said seriously, “we’ll be pals again. As it is now—you are too close to Scotland Yard and the hounds to suit me. You knew when I was coming out of—that place. You knew I was with Sir Richard in London. You knew I was bound for Holland. You got here almost as soon as I did. You left a mighty nice little house in the West End. Who paid for that house? Who bought you that motor? You say, ‘Be pals,’ but you are not the Saidee Isaacs I used to know. Come on! We’re going out of this trap. The police may hammer on the street door any minute. Dutch Gus ripped the big box in the embassy wide open. He made more ‘rumble’ than an old-time German Prince plundering a French chateau.”
Fay stooped and pinched the candle’s wick with his fingers.
He backed across the floor and found that she had barred the way to the door. He could see her face from the light that sifted in through the curtain.
“Let’s go,” he said as her breath fanned his cheek. “Open the door, Saidee.”
“Wait.”
He felt some pity for her at that instant. The lines about her mouth had softened perceptibly. He had heard that a man who knows little or nothing about a woman—idealizes her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked pityingly. “Are you going to cave in and cry on account of the cipher-key? I’d give it to you, Saidee, but there is still danger.”
“It isn’t that,” she said as she twisted the knob and peered out into the hall. “I wanted to see if you were really in earnest about taking it to Sir Richard. I don’t want you to take it—anywhere else—Germany, for instance.”
“Never,” whispered Fay as he seized her arm and guided her through the hallway.
“Now on tiptoes,” he said as they reached the stairs. “Hold your bag high and walk on the side of the steps. That’s right, Saidee. Now back toward a window I saw. The door is locked toward the street. I heard him lock it.”
Fay unclasped his fingers from her arm and tried the window. It led out into the courtyard. He raised the sash, guided her through the narrow opening, turned and backed out with both bags. He drew down the sash until the window was closed. Then he stepped to her side in the gloom.
“This way, pal,” he said with a world of quiet assurance. “There’s the old auto you hired. And there’s the way out. I don’t believe we got a rumble. We’re like two actors beating a board-bill, aren’t we?”
She nodded her head, the plumes of her hat bobbing. She did not do any of the things which might displease him. She walked at his side with swift strides. Her glance was before her without the furtive back-stare of the amateur. Her voice was natural and pitched in a low key. They passed a sleepy burger or two. Once a watchman stepped out and glanced at them. Fay remembered this and took a side street to throw the police off his trail.
They reached the first of the taverns and the quays. Murky, yellow fog wrapped the dykes and lowland. Spars and masts showed. Funnels and ventilators were thrust over the roofs of the warehouses. Sails hung in buntlines and gaskets. Fisher craft loomed through the mists. The tang of the sea was there in that inland port.
“Four o’clock,” said Fay, listening to the strokes of the bell in the Hôtel de Ville. “The police drag-net will be spread. We’ll go this way, Saidee.”
He grasped her arm and led the way down between two storehouses whose ends were thrust like fingers out into the wide pool of the Schwartz Canal. A small boat with oars was moored to the left-hand pier. Fay dropped into this, reached and caught the bags as she tossed them down, then assisted her to a damp seat in the stern of the boat. He cut the painter with his knife, listened a moment as the boat drifted with the tide, then he got out the oars and started rowing toward the opposite bank.
A winding shroud dropped around them. A billowing mass of wet sea fog rolled over the city and blotted out the view of the shore and the shipping. There was no sound save the rattle of the oars in the locks. Fay bent his back and leaned close to the girl.
“We’re getting on,” he said. “We’ll carry high, Saidee, and go over the top of this cipher matter.”
She shivered slightly and drew her skirt about her knees. Her head turned toward the shore they had quitted. She attempted to pierce the gloom. It was opalescent and filled with strange lights.
“The police,” said she, “will miss this boat.”
“I’ll kick it out when we land.”
“Holland Yard will coöperate with Scotland Yard.”
“Let them. I’m going to take the cipher-key to Sir Richard, in person. He had no right sending MacKeenon on my trail.”
“You still have it, Chester?”
He rested an oar against his knee and drew out the package. “I’ve still got it,” he said. “Otto Mononsonburg left it in a safe place—for a German. There were three doors to take before this package could be gained.”
He glanced up into her eyes. To him they had hardened, despite her weariness. There was an eagerness there he did not like. Calculation had been foreign to her in the old days.
Replacing the packet and taking up the oar, he said:
“You’ve changed, Saidee. If I thought you were going to double-cross me, I’d sink this boat. Your heart, your mind, your soul is in getting the package. What does it mean to you?”
She bit her lip and granted him a wan smile. “It doesn’t mean so much to me, Chester, as it does to others. You really don’t know what you have done tonight. You don’t know!”
Fay swung at the oars and tried to sight the shore of the canal. He sheered the boat and started rowing vigorously.
Between strokes he said:
“Come out with the truth, Saidee. Remember the old days. What have you been doing since then? How did you happen to get mixed up with the Yard? Don’t you know you can’t trust the police?”
“Your viewpoint will change, Chester.”
“Never!”
“Yes—it will. It will if I ask you to change it.”
He was silent at this. He rowed on until the bow of the boat struck a sunken pier close to the shore. He rose, braced his knees against a gunwale and glanced upward. A rotting quay was close at hand. There was a ladder coming down from this quay. He reached, waited, then grasped a rung of the ladder. The boat steadied as he drew it alongside the pier.
“I’ll go up first,” he said. “You hand me the bags and then come up. Push the boat away when you get on the ladder. Push it hard, so it’ll float a long way before the police find it.”
He saw her nod her head. He climbed upward, being careful to avoid the broken rungs of the ladder. He turned at the top and reached down to her. She passed up the two bags which he took and laid on the edge of the pier. Her hand grasped his extended fingers. She thrust out the boat as she leaped the gap and trusted herself to him. They stood in the gloom at the brink of the dark canal.
“All clear,” he said, after listening. “There goes the boat out toward the sea. We’ll hurry inland and find a quiet spot. You’re damp. The feathers of your hat look like Avenue A.”
She drew her jacket about her breast. Her eyes were bright as she turned and pointed toward the two bags.
“Carry them,” she said. “Lead and I’ll follow. It’s almost dawn.”
“We’ll find a dry spot,” said he, lifting the bags and starting over the quay. “We’ll lay low till noon, then we’ll figure out the best get-away from Holland. I think the railroads will be watched.”
“I could carry the package to London without being suspected.”
He squared his shoulders and walked on. His hands gripped the bags with white strength. She realized that she had not gained his confidence in the matter of the cipher-key. Her feet dragged. She glanced back now and then.
He came, after taking a long detour, to another canal which roughly paralleled the one they had crossed. There was a tiny wooded isle in the center of this canal. A narrow bridge of planks stretched from the shore to the island.
“A summer place,” he said. “That’ll do, Saidee.”
She held her hand up toward the sky. A mist was falling. An opal vapor was beyond this mist. The world seemed wrapped in a great yellow blanket.
“Beastly morning,” he said as he dropped the bags to his feet. “Suppose they could follow us to here?”
“I don’t know. I wish the sun would come out. I’m soaked.”
“Come on,” he said, lifting the bags and starting over the plank bridge. “We’ll pull one of these up and then we’ll be safe for a time. Where are we?”
She tiptoed over the bridge and watched him go back and remove the center plank. This he pulled ashore. They walked up through dew-laden grass and entered an open summer-house whose quaint carvings and low benches, made from natural wood knots, showed the hand of a Holland builder.
He sat down, drew his coat around his knees and thrust out his shoes. “I’ll wager, Saidee, we’ve beat the coppers,” he said, fishing for a cigarette and lighting it with a sputtering match. “Now you come clean with what you know and we’ll go back to London together. I’ll see Sir Richard, get an unconditional pardon, and we’ll go to the States. The war is nine months over.”
“But another begins,” she said as she stood before him. “Don’t you know the most terrible struggles are the silent ones—the commercial ones that go on in the dark?”
“Like the underworld against the police.”
“Please don’t mention the underworld. I’ve been out of it for five years—so have you. We’ve squared it. You know my people. I know yours. It’s time we’re living up to our blue china. Thievery is worse than cheating at cards. You should use your talents within the law. Let’s play the game according to the rules.”
He watched her and puffed at his cigarette. She walked back and forth over the planks of the summer-house. The soles of her high-heeled gun-metal shoes were wet. Her skirt hung dejectedly. The ruching about her neck had lost its starch. The crowning touch of the drooping feathers was pathetic.
“I’ve dragged you through hell,” he said, indicating that she should sit down. “I could make a fire, but someone might smell it.”
She went to a rail and stared up the canal. A lighter gray indicated that the sun was breaking through the clouds to the eastward. The rattle of blocks and the creak of a sail going up floated down to them. She turned away and sat down with her hands folded in her lap. She twisted her finger-rings.
“What happened to you when you joined Scotland Yard?” he asked point-blankly. “Did they pinch you for something?”
“No, they did not! They wanted something done and I was about the only one who could do it. The war gave me an opportunity to show them what real good I could do. They paid me for it—paid well. England never forgets!”
Fay thought of Dartmoor. “You’re right!” he exclaimed, tossing the cigarette butt away. “England never does. So they adopted you and you squared it and you acted as their agent in Zurich and other places!”
“Their agents never admit they are their agents.”
“Well put!” said Fay. “I’ve guessed right, though?”
“Yes.”
“And you had something to do with getting that cipher out of Switzerland?”
“I had a lot to do with getting it to England.”
“And when you got it to Sir Richard—the key was missing?”
She laid her hand over his left overcoat pocket. “You’ve finished what I couldn’t,” she said.
Fay leaned back. He listened, then drew out his cigarette-case and selected a cigarette. She watched him intently.
“It’s after six o’clock,” he said as he struck a match. “See, it’s cracking dawn everywhere. The fog will go and leave us sitting in the open. Suppose we plant the bags, walk ashore, and try the north bank of the Schwartz Canal for a ship out of Holland. We don’t care where it goes, if it gets us to England.”
“It would be better for me to look for MacKeenon and give him the package. He will give us a receipt which you can show to Sir Richard. That receipt will free you from the five years hanging over your head, Chester.”
“I don’t play the game that way!” he said, rising and staring down at her. “I’ll be my own messenger. I was sent after a thing, and I got it. That hound, MacKeenon, might claim the credit. He might say I fell down on the job. He’s looking for a reputation.”
She realized that he was not to be moved from his purpose. Her eyes blazed defiance as she sprang up.
“Have it your own way!” she said. “But, Chester, you’re foolish! Don’t you know that Germany would give a million pounds out of the Spandau Tower—to keep England and the States from solving the cipher? It means Germany’s financial ruin in the dye industries. The world learned how to make potash, during the war—it hasn’t learned how to make good dyes cheaply. The whole thing is in that cipher.”
“I saw it, Saidee. There were hundreds and hundreds of sheets of paper with letters on them. The letters seemed to be grouped—three to a group.”
“Oh, I worked on it. We all worked on it! I even got little Danny Nugent from Soho to try his hand. Remember Danny? He used to stay awake nights working out ciphers so the police couldn’t read them. He says the dye cipher is impossible—that it follows no known rule.”
“Sir Richard told me that,” said Fay. “Well, we got the answer,” he added, glancing keenly around. “We got it, Saidee, and we’re going to deliver it in person. We—”
She clutched his arm at that moment.
“What is that moving up the canal?” she asked tensely. “See it, Chester! Is it a boat, close to the bank?”
He drew her down and stared through the latticed bars of the summer-house. A shadow moved within the bank’s shadow. A ripple showed like the gleam of a silver wing. Sounds of oars in locks floated to them. Then, and suddenly, all was still. A murky billow rolled over the lowland and blotted out the canal from view.
He reached and drew the bags to him. He thrust his fingers within a crack and lifted a sodden plank. Leaves and moss were beneath the flooring. A toad hopped away.
“There’s room here,” he said, pressing down the two bags. “We’ll come back for them when we find a ship.”
Replacing the plank, he rose and stared toward where he had seen the shadow. The fog had thickened. He could see nothing save the dark surface of the canal.
They crossed to the shore, after he had closed the little bridge with the board. They glanced back, then hurried on toward the Schwartz Canal. The pathway they took was winding and long.
It was a mile below where they had first crossed the Canal in a boat, before he stopped and pointed ahead.
“A ship,” he said. “See the masts?”
They went on through the lowland path and came to a bridge. The draw was closed. Burgers and lorries passed from bank to bank. The smell of fish and clams was in the air. The fog had not yet cleared from the surfaces. Above the fog, windmills and spires showed in spectral outlines.
Fay led the way to the gangplank of the ship. He paused there and studied its outlines. It was a rusty tramp, engaged in the North Sea trade. Its one funnel bore the Blue-D mark of the Holland line. A row of white doors on the boat deck indicated that passengers were carried.
He told Saidee Isaacs to wait as he turned and climbed up the plank. A sovereign pressed into the hand of a Dutch steward, who stood at the head of the plank, gained an instant ear. Fay took two staterooms on the starboard side after ascertaining that the ship would steam within an hour, and that her destination would be Stavanger, with Lemvig, in Denmark, as a port of call.
“You go aboard and wait,” he said as he descended the plank and moved to her side. “I’ll get the bags and be right back. The ship sails in an hour for Stavanger. From there we can double to Scotland by the Aberdeen Line. From Aberdeen we can catch the Royal Scotch Mail for London.”
“Be careful,” was all she said as she started up the plank.
He hurried back to the bridge, crowded between two burgers who were carrying nets, and gained the opposite bank of the canal. He took the path with his head held high, his arms down at his sides. The fog was thick. There were sounds ahead, of creaking windmills and of lowland cattle.
He went on, picking the dry places between the puddles. He came to a marsh with white stones in a row, across it. The fog hung heavily. The way ahead was through a clinging veil.
Suddenly a whistle shrilled the damp air. A blare sounded behind him. Fay leaped to the bank of the marsh and started running down the narrow path which would take him to the plank bridge and the little summer-house where the bags were.
He struck, with sudden force, a taut wire which was stretched across the trail. He went forward and down upon his knees. His hands were deep in mire. He tried to raise himself, and twisted sideways. His feet were snared.
Out of the fog, on either side of him, there burst two muffled figures. Each had an arm over his face. Both clutched revolvers. One was Dutch Gus!
A blow from a stone thrown by a third enemy drove the cracksman’s head down into the swamp. He attempted to reach his right hand back for his automatic. He felt his senses go, after a whirling struggle to retain consciousness. A second stone spattered mud at his side. A voice cautioned moderation.
Hands crept over his overcoat and then under his vest. The stethoscope and the surgical tools were drawn out. The packet in his pocket decided the searchers. Dutch Gus had found what he was after. He rose and called the name.
“Otto Mononsonburg! Here it is, boys!”
A second whistle shrilled within the fog. Fay lay still as the patter of feet sounded and then died to echoes. He drew up his arm and passed it over his head. Blood was on his fingers. He lifted himself slowly on his right elbow. He stared about and then staggered to his feet. He went through his pockets. Everything had been taken. His hand lifted to the lapel of his coat. The greyhound was still there.
“They left that,” he said slowly. “They left that. Which way did they go?”
He gathered himself together with a final effort. Hot blood surged to his cheeks. He found his cap and pulled it on. He searched the pathway in the direction of the summer-house. The footprints pointed the other way. He retraced his steps and reached the edge of the marsh.
A Bank of England note lay between two stones. It had been dropped by Dutch Gus. Fay picked it up, folded it, and went on toward the Schwartz Canal like an Apache after scalps.
He reached the bridge and stepped into the stream of burgers. He saw them eyeing him. The reason lay in his blood-stained face and muddy overcoat. He crossed to the south bank and turned toward the ship.
Grimly determined to have the thing out, he decided to tell Saidee Isaacs what had happened, and then take up the search for Dutch Gus and the cipher-key. He passed the first of the shore lines. A seaman in a torn blouse was standing by these. A voice was bulling from the ridiculously high bridge of the freighter. The screw churned.
Fay shouted and leaped for the gangplank. He climbed upward and reached the deck. There was still time to get Saidee Isaacs ashore. He would need her now.
A face that was stamped with unforgettable memory stared out from a cabin. A door closed with a slam. Fay backed against the rail of the ship and passed his hand over his forehead.
Dutch Gus had fled to the same ship! They would make the passage to Stavanger together.