In the upshot it proved that my two friends could get on very well without me. For the best part of four weeks I was left in peace with my writing, and very often I did not see the Okewoods until the evening when we usually assembled in the bar for a cocktail before dinner. If I had not been so absorbed in my book, I should probably have noticed that Desmond appeared to benefit very little by his change. As it was, it was not until my bulky parcel of manuscript had been posted off to London and I accompanied them to the golf-course for a round before lunch that I observed how quiet and abstracted Desmond had become.
I chaffed him mildly on his low spirits; but he did not, as usual, take up the challenge and my jokes fell flat. He was playing very badly on this morning and, usually a strong and accurate driver, was slicing and pulling his balls all over the place.
We were on the tee near the Captain Digby public-house when a telegraph boy appeared from nowhere, as telegraph boys do, and thrust a telegram into my hand. Absent-mindedly I opened it and read:
Dine with me at Hexagon Saturday night eight P.M.—Chief.
At a glance I realized that the message was not for me and, looking at the envelope, saw that it was addressed to “Major Desmond Okewood.” With a word of apology I handed the telegram to my friend. The change in his face, as he read it, was extraordinary. A long sigh, almost a groan, of relief burst from his lips and his whole face lighted up. He showed the message to Francis, who grinned cheerfully and said “Good.”
“Come on,” cried Desmond, suddenly addressing me. “It’s your honour. I lay you a new ball I take this hole off you.”
Needless to say, for my thoughts were anywhere but on the game, I foozled my drive. But Desmond who, as I have said, had been playing disgracefully, hit a perfect ball, and, from that moment on, recovered his form. He was in the wildest spirits, and to see him one would have said that the telegram which had wrought this astonishing change in him had brought him news of a great inheritance rather than a banal invitation to dinner at that rather disreputable West-End haunt, the Hexagon.
But even if he had known to what perilous enterprise that invitation was the prelude, I believe he would have shown himself no less heartened. Danger, as Francis says, was ever the best pick-me-up for Desmond Okewood.
“Okewood,” said the Chief quietly, “the girl has just come in. Don’t look up for a moment! She’s taken the table next to the door: in black she is: you can’t mistake her, she’s so deathly pale!”
The Chief fell to studying his plate with every appearance of absorption, while Desmond Okewood, from behind the cover of the wine-list, glanced casually across the roaring evening life of the Hexagon Buffet.
He saw the girl at once. Her extreme pallor, as the Chief had been quick to note, was her most distinctive feature. She wore her hair, which was raven-black, piled high in the Spanish fashion with a tall, white ivory comb, richly carved, at the back. She had retained her fur coat and against its shaggy blackness one white shoulder gleamed milkily.
She was obviously a familiar visitor at the Hexagon Buffet, for the head waiter greeted her with a friendly smile as he fussed the table to rights. She ordered her dinner composedly and without hesitation, as one accustomed to fend for herself. In her whole comportment there was an air of dignity, of reserve, which clearly imposed itself on the maitre d’hôtel, accustomed as he was to the rather promiscuous familiarity of the other unaccompanied ladies who frequented the Buffet. Her orders given, the girl dropped her eyes to her plate and remained seemingly lost in thought, her long lashes resting like black crescents upon her dead-white cheeks.
“Not quite the style of the Hexagon, eh?” remarked Desmond.
“They get all sorts here now!” retorted his companion. “The old Hexagon is quite the rage again, I’m told!”
Fashion, always capricious, is never more fickle than in the distribution of her favours among those who cater for the monde ou l’on s’amuse. For no apparent reason a grill-room, a bar, a night-club, or the like will suddenly receive from the hand of the goddess the patent that confers fame. It lives its little hour; for a spell it resounds to laughter and music, the popping of corks, and the scurry of waiters, while the shareholders bask in the warmth of unwonted prosperity like a cat in the sun. Then as mysteriously, but also as suddenly as success, decline sets in: the nightly line of private cars and taxis outside the brilliantly lighted portico dwindles: the gold lace on the porter’s cap begins to tarnish; and ultimately provincials, to whose ears the fame of the resort has only tardily come, find themselves facing fellow provincials across a vista of empty tables.
Sometimes the wheel turns full circle and popularity comes back. So it had gone with the Hexagon Buffet. Time was, in the days of the “Crutch and Toothpick Brigade,” when it had rivalled “Jimmie’s” as the haunt of the jeunesse dorée in their skin-tight clothes, their opera-capes, and their covert-coats. Then oblivion had slowly claimed it and, in the years between, the riff-raff of the West End had gathered nightly at the long bar with the battered brass rail where once the chappies had stood and chaffed “Maudie” and “May” over a “B. and S.”
But now, in the fullness of time, prosperity had returned to the “old Hex.” The fine proportions of its big central room left ample space for a dancing-floor between the long bar at one end and the railed-off enclosure at the other where one dined or supped. A jazz band of negroes and an expatriated mixer who, when America knew not Volstead, had enjoyed continental fame, showed that the Hexagon had adapted itself to the spirit of the age.
Custom flowed back. It was as though the trainers and the jockeys and the bookmakers, the fighting-men and their managers, their impresarii and tame journalists, had suddenly remembered the old Hexagon. At their heels came the wealthy patrons of sport, the older men at first, drawn by memories fast fading of wild nights in the eighties, then the young “knuts,” and with them, to dance a little and eat devilled bones after the theatre, chorus ladies, revue girls, and females, unattached or attached, of varying ages and social standing.
But mingling with this heterogeneous crowd were old frequenters of the Hexagon in its evil days, mysterious “financiers,” confidence trick men with their touts and runners, slim Latins, with hair like blue satin and the gait of a panther, from the dancing-clubs, and benevolent-looking old ladies, a little too freshly complexioned and a little too bejewelled, who take an interest in any girl that is young and pretty. In brief, the Hexagon was preëminently a resort where the head of a Secret Service organization, to say nothing of one of his principal lieutenants, might expect to make fruitful observations.
It was Saturday night and the Hexagon was roaring full. On the dancing-floor, crowded with gliding couples, the red-coated blacks were syncopating themselves into an epileptic frenzy; at the long bar, whence resounded the rattle of the cocktail-shakers, the white-coated attendants were opening oysters as though their lives depended on it; while at the far end of the room, waiters darted incessantly between the thronged tables.
Through the long violet curtains that screened the Buffet from the outer lobby new arrivals kept appearing, men and women, old and young, in evening dress and in tweeds, in ermine-collared opera-cloaks and in tailor-mades. And from the merry, noisy, busy, jostling assembly rose, as persistently as the swathes of blue tobacco smoke that drifted aloft on the overheated air, a confused Babel of voices as incessant as the hum of a threshing-floor or the pounding of the sea.
“Her name,” said the Chief suddenly, as though he divined his companion’s thoughts, “or at any rate the name by which she chooses to be known, is Madeleine McKenzie. She has been coming here now for a week or more. Nobody knows much about her. Ah!”
He nudged Desmond’s elbow. Two youths, very sleek and impeccably attired in evening dress, had sat down at the girl’s table. One of them, a fair-haired, clean-looking boy, was slightly merry with wine.
“And now”—unexpectedly the Chief’s voice had become grave—“watch!”
His tone quickened Desmond’s whole attention. Ever since the Chief had asked him to dine at the Hexagon on this particular Saturday night, he had been cudgelling his brains to discover with what motive his senior officer had wished to entertain him at this amusing but very bohemian night-resort. Over their Clover Club cocktails at the bar and on various pretexts during dinner itself, Desmond had sought in vain to probe the depths of his host’s thoughts. Now came this summons to watchfulness, stirring in the young man that hunger for adventure which had carried him to such heights of success in the Secret Service.
The girl had finished her dinner and was taking her coffee when a woman with a basket of flowers approached the table. Desmond had remarked the flower-seller during the evening, a rather sinister-looking person in black with neat lace apron and cuffs, plying her wares at the bar and among the diners. She stopped in front of the girl and her two companions and, resting her basket on her hip, took from it a little nosegay and laid it silently upon the girl’s plate. The girl smiled and pinned the flowers to the lapel of her fur coat.
“Did you see the flowers?” said the Chief.
“Of course,” replied Desmond.
“I mean, did you notice what flowers they were?”
Desmond glanced across the room. “They seem to be a white carnation with some sort of blue flowers—cornflowers, probably—set round it!”
“I see!” mused the other. “Then I think we can be moving, Okewood!”
“And leave the charming and mysterious Madeleine here?” queried Desmond.
“No,” replied the older man, signing to a waiter, “she’s going too!”
Hardly were the words out of his mouth when the girl rose up from her table by the door, gathering her heavy coat about her. It was quite obvious that the young men were seeking to detain her. But laughingly she put them off.
“Not to-night!” they heard her say as a sudden lull came in the music. “I shall see you here again!”
Then, without looking to left or right, she hurried from the room.
“My dear Okewood,” opened the Chief when, half an hour later, he faced Desmond across the fireside in his library, “you find me grappling with what is probably the most perplexing problem I have ever tackled. For the past four weeks, since your very ugly adventure with our old friend Clubfoot in the affair of the Constantinople courier, I have kept you and your brother deliberately away from the Service . . . against your own wish, I know . . . frankly because you are too valuable to be sacrificed to Dr. Grundt’s personal spite!”
At the mention of the name of his old enemy, Desmond Okewood sat up eagerly in his chair.
“Is Clubfoot up to his tricks again?” he asked quickly.
The Chief shrugged his shoulders. “I used to have the reputation of being a man who knew his own mind,” he replied.
Desmond looked at the beaklike nose and the massive jaw appraisingly. The Chief was worshipped in the Service for his quickness of decision.
“But when I tell you, in answer to your question, that one day I think he is and the next day I think he isn’t, you will realize how badly they’ve got me bothered. It’s not a long story, Okewood, and you may as well hear it because, I tell you honestly, the thing’s got too big for one man to handle alone; I ought to give the whole of my attention to it, but I can’t; I’m too busy. If I did, I should have to neglect other more important affairs, and that is precisely what this campaign of deviltry is meant to achieve.” The Chief drew meditatively on his cigar. “You knew Finucane, I think?”
“Who was lately in Brussels for you?”
The Chief nodded.
“Rather. But why ‘knew’?”
“He’s vanished, Okewood!”
“Kidnapped or . . .?”
“Murdered, almost certainly. It’s more than a week since it happened. He knew too much!”
Desmond nodded his assent. Brussels, the half-way house to everywhere in Europe, is the report centre for the espionage services of every great European Power. The Secret Service agent who can make good in Brussels has little left to learn about the game.
“Yesterday a week ago Finucane crossed over from Brussels to see me,” the Chief resumed. “Between ourselves, Finucane has been tightening up our report centres in industrial Germany. You know Finucane, Okewood: no Vere de Vere about him, but a devilish clever fellow and a damned judgmatical briber. His reports on the German situation have been admirable, and the Prime Minister was delighted. Finucane came over to get his head patted and also to submit certain plans for the development of our arrangements in Germany.
“Finucane got in from Brussels on Friday evening by the train that reaches Victoria at nine-twenty-five. He was to see me on the following morning. He engaged a room at the Nineveh, changed into evening dress, and went off to get a bite to eat and see life at the Hexagon. At five minutes to midnight he left the Hexagon alone and apparently perfectly sober. He never reached his hotel and has neither been seen nor heard of since!”
Desmond whistled. “Did he have the goods on him?”
The Chief laughed dryly. “Not Finucane! He carried it all under his hat!”
“And you’ve got no trace of him, no clue?”
Somewhere in the house an electric bell trilled. The Chief looked at his watch.
“As far as we know the last person to speak to Finucane before he disappeared was Madeleine McKenzie,” he said. “By a fortunate coincidence there happened to be present at the Hexagon that night a young detective from Vine Street named Rimmer, who was keeping observation on a gang of West-End crooks. This bright young man remembers Finucane perfectly. Apparently Finucane spoke to the girl and, sitting down at her table, ordered a bottle of champagne. The McKenzie girl left first and Finucane remained to finish the bottle. Just before midnight he paid the bill and went away. The curious thing is that, while Finucane and the girl were drinking together at the table, the flower-woman approached, just as she did to-night, and gave the girl a bunch of flowers. And, again, just as we saw this evening, on receiving the nosegay the girl promptly left the place . . .”
“A signal, eh?” queried Desmond.
“Obviously,” said the Chief. “But what does it portend?”
The door opened. Watkyn, the Chief’s butler, a massively built ex-petty officer, with a pair of shoulders like an ox, was there.
“Captain Elliott!” he announced.
“Perhaps Elliott can tell us!” remarked the great man as the butler ushered into the library that selfsame youth whom, slightly merry with wine, they had seen but half an hour ago at Madeleine McKenzie’s table at the Hexagon.
The Chief wasted no time on introductions.
“Well?” was his greeting.
“We carried out your instructions to the letter, sir,” said the youth. “She’s a very ladylike, attractive girl, not a bit the sort of skirt you meet knockin’ about places like the ‘old Hex.’ I pressed her very hard to let me drive her home, and I really thought I was getting on with her pretty well. But all of a sudden she kind of dried up and said she had to go . . .”
“When was that?” snapped the Chief.
“How do you mean, ‘when’?”
“At what stage of your conversation, with the lady did this change come over her?” said the Chief testily.
“Oh! after she was given some flowers by old Bessie!”
The Chief nodded grimly. “Well, and then?”
“We followed her taxi. She went home to Duchess Street. I left Robin to keep watch and follow her if she should leave the house.”
Again the Chief nodded. “Thank you, Peter,” he remarked, more gently this time. “That’ll be all for to-night. You can pick Robin up on your way home and send him to bed. And hark’ee, the pair of you steer clear of the Hexagon until further orders, do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the young man. “Good-night, sir.”
“Good-night, Peter.”
After the door had closed on him the Chief turned to Desmond.
“We took a statement from the girl. Her story absolutely tallies with Rimmer’s. She had a touch of neuralgia, she says, and went home early that night. She lives in furnished rooms in a most respectable house near the Langham Hotel, and if she is what she seems to be, she certainly does not ply her trade there. And yet what is the mystery of these flowers?”
“Was she asked about them?”
The Chief shook his head. “I was afraid of raising her suspicions. If it is a code a question like that would make them change it. But three times this week I’ve despatched some of my people to the Hexagon to get into conversation with the girl, different types each time, and I’ve got only negative results. The first man I sent posed as a rich Colonial newly landed in London, exactly the sort of fish that the West-End crooks and their decoys are always trying to land. She let him buy her a drink; Bessie, the flower-woman, came across in due course and gave her a bunch of white carnations, and presently she made an excuse to join a party at another table. But—note this well!—she did not leave the place until closing time, when she took a taxi home alone.
“Two nights later I sent another fellow along. His orders were to sit in the girl’s line of vision, but on no account to address her first. Nothing happened. She made no advances to him; nobody else spoke to her, and she received no flowers. She stayed until closing time and again drove away to Duchess Street by herself.
“To-night, by my instructions, young Elliott took her on. As when Finucane was with her, she received, as you saw, a nosegay, not of white flowers only as my Colonial got, but of white flowers mingled with blue. Forthwith she drops young Peter and his friend and goes home. Strange, isn’t it?”
“It is, indeed,” observed his companion. “It would help us enormously if we knew what flowers she was given the night that Finucane disappeared!”
“I agree. But Rimmer didn’t notice. We could have cross-examined old Bessie; but if this is a code, she’s certainly in it too; and I will not scare them off it until I see more clearly . . .” He paused and, ticking each point off on his fingers, resumed presently: “If it’s a code, this is what I make of it. General instructions to the girl: sit around at the ‘Hex.’ every night, make no advances, but only receive them. A white flower means, ‘Drop the fellow; he does not interest us, but stand by’; a white and a blue say: ‘The fellow does not interest us; you can go home.’”
“By Jove!” commented Desmond, enthusiasm in his voice, “this is getting jolly interesting, sir!”
“Yes,” agreed the Chief. “But where does it take us? Up against a blank wall. And meanwhile Finucane’s disappearance remains a mystery, and the morale of my staff is being ruined! This negative result business leads nowhere. I want something positive to show whether Madeleine McKenzie is or is not at the bottom of this baffling affair.”
“What about old Bessie? Who gives her her orders?”
“We’ve drawn blank there, too! My men are in the crowd at the ‘Hex.’ every night to watch the old strap. Fellows often buy flowers from her for ladies at the ‘Hex.,’ but, as far as my young men have been able to see, no one has sent any flowers to Madeleine!”
Desmond was silent for a moment. “In that case,” he said presently, “there is only one way of finding out whether the young woman is being used as a decoy; that is, to send her some one prominent, a really big fish, and let her employers know, if possible, that he’s coming. We shadow our decoy and see where he leads us!”
The Chief chuckled delightedly. “What I like about you, Okewood,” he said, “is that your instincts are so unerring. You have hit precisely upon my plan. Listen! There is at present working for me in Germany a gentleman who is commonly known in this office as Murchison of Munich, you have never met him, for he is a recent acquisition, a banker by profession and a first-rate economist with a natural ability for Intelligence work. For the last eight weeks he has been in southern Germany carrying out an investigation into the transfer of German wealth abroad. I flatter myself that we have been able to cover up his tracks so successfully that, in his capacity as secret agent, he is actually known by sight to myself alone. Do you follow me?”
Desmond nodded.
“Now,” the Chief continued, “the important thing about his mission, from the standpoint of our present dilemma, is that the big German industrialists have lately become aware of the presence of one of my fellows in the inner ring of their councils without, however, being able to identify him. I am virtually certain that the kidnapping of Finucane (to whom Murchison—did I tell you?—has been reporting) was intended as a warning to me that they are on the alert. A word to a certain ‘double-cross’ of my acquaintance giving away the identity of Murchison of Munich, and a hint dropped in the same quarter that, on a certain evening, the party in question is to be found at the Hexagon, will infallibly bring Clubfoot into the open again . . .”
“Clubfoot? Why Clubfoot?”
“Because,” said the Chief gravely, “our crippled friend, Dr. Grundt, the redoubtable master spy of Imperial Germany, has transferred his allegiance to the German industrialist ring, which, as you know, is the heart and soul of the great conspiracy to restore the fortunes of Germany as a militarist monarchy. Grundt to-day is the instrument of the coal and steel bosses, the real masters of modern Germany . . .”
“He has been working for them ever since his reappearance, do you think?”
“Undoubtedly. Now, see here again. If, when Murchison appears at the Hexagon, Madeleine McKenzie is used as the decoy, we shall have acquired the certainty that it was she who lured Finucane away. And if subsequent developments don’t lead us back to old Clubfoot, damn it, I’ll eat my hat!”
“But supposing your surmise does not prove correct,” Desmond objected, “you’ll have given away one of your best men!”
The Chief smiled and shook his head. “No, I shan’t! Murchison of Munich is going to stay quietly where he is in South Germany . . .”
The eyes of the two men met.
“Bear in mind,” added the Chief, “that nobody has ever seen Murchison of Munich except myself!”
There was a significant pause.
“And I do so hate painting my face!” remarked Desmond irrelevantly.
The Chief laughed. “I knew I could count on you, Okewood. Very little disguise will be necessary if you will consent to sacrifice your moustache. All I ask you to do is to dine at the Hexagon at eight o’clock to-morrow evening in the guise of Mr. Murchison of Munich. You can leave the rest to me. And if, in the course of the evening, you should recognize that brother of yours—well, don’t! Now as to this question of your make-up . . .”
At five minutes to eight on the following evening, Desmond Okewood took his seat at the table which had been reserved for Mr. Murchison at the Hexagon. Next to the door, two tables away, the McKenzie girl was seated, eating her dinner with the air of quiet simplicity that Desmond had already remarked in her. She was again in black, but the Spanish comb was gone, and she now, wore a smart little black hat whose curving brim and sweeping black aigrette emphasized the rather wistful piquancy of her features. Desmond fancied he could detect about her a vague air of excitement, of expectancy. At any rate, there was a faint glow of colour, in her pale cheeks.
Desmond Okewood was feeling particularly pleased with himself. I, who had known him all his life, came in with a party and passed him by without recognizing him, as he told me gleefully afterwards. And yet, as the Chief had said, very little disguise had proved necessary. With grease-paint and powder Desmond had blocked the healthy tan out of his face, a touch of rouge on the cheek-bones had altered the set of his features, and a subtle change had been wrought in the expression of his eyes by the simple process of shaving off the outer corner of the eye-brows and correcting their line with a black pencil. The sacrifice of his moustache and the addition of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles had sufficed to achieve the Chief’s object, which was to render Desmond’s general appearance both nondescript and negligible.
Suddenly the young man felt a little tingle of excitement. Bessie, the flower-woman, whom he had noticed offering her wares among the serried ranks of loungers at the long bar, was crossing the room. A man at a table on the edge of the dancing-floor bought a bunch of violets for the girl with him. A nasty-looking old woman, Desmond decided, as Bessie approached, with small eyes, dull and lifeless, and thin lips set in a fixed, unmeaning smile.
She passed him by and stopped at the McKenzie girl’s table. From her basket rested on the white damask she took a cluster of deep red carnations and laid them silently, with her eternal smirk, beside the girl’s plate. No word was exchanged between them; with a grateful smile at the woman the girl pinned the flowers in the front of her dress and Bessie passed on.
Desmond waited. Excitement had dulled the edge of his appetite, and he made a pretext of eating while he narrowly watched the girl. Once or twice he caught her glancing archly at him from under her heavy black lashes, and now, as he looked at her, she let her dark eyes rest invitingly on his.
He beckoned to the waiter.
“Ask the lady in black by the door whether I may offer her a glass of champagne,” he said.
The man nodded understandingly, and the next moment Desmond was facing Madeleine McKenzie across the table.
Her complete self-possession was the first thing that struck him, for she was obviously quite young. She was not coy about the informality of their meeting, and she received his introductory banalities about the crowd and the band and the food with an air of amused indifference which piqued him.
She made him talk about himself, parrying with skill all his efforts to draw her out. Little by little, so sure and sympathetic was her touch, Desmond found himself entering into the spirit of his part, talking of the life of Munich, the Opera, the little théâtres intimes, the huge, noisy brasseries.
“You are used to a life of excitement, then?” she said.
It was Desmond’s cue. Swiftly he took it.
“Indeed I am,” he answered. “I’ve been only a few hours in London, and I’m sick of it already. Does any one ever have a good time here?”
The girl flashed a glance at him from under her long lashes. “If you know where to look for it,” she said softly.
“I bet you know your way around,” Desmond replied.
She shrugged her shoulders prettily. “My ideas of a good time might not agree with yours,” she countered.
“What are your ideas of a good time?” he asked.
She sighed. “Gambling!” she answered, “if I could afford it.”
Desmond grew alert on the instant. Was this the secret of Finucane’s disappearance, cleaned out in a tripot and ashamed to show his face again?
“Now you’re talking,” he said. He lowered his voice. “Tell me, do you know where there’s a game?”
She scrutinized his face, turned up to hers. “If I thought you were to be trusted . . .” she began.
He shrugged his shoulders. “If you think I’m a police spy! However, I dare say I can find my own way to the roulibouli!”
“Now I’ve offended you,” she said, and laid her hand on his arm. “Are you really keen?”
“Keen? Gambling’s the only sort of excitement worth while, and I’ve tried most sorts. The shaded lights, the green cloth, the click of the ball, the scrape of the rakes—the night should have four and twenty hours if I had my way!”
“Come closer!” said the girl. “Leave me here and drive to the clock outside Victoria Station at the entrance to the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Wait for me there. I mustn’t be seen leaving with you. The police watch the Hexagon!”
The crucial moment had arrived. Desmond glanced quickly round the room. There was no sign of Francis or any of the Chief’s men. Well, his orders were to go through with the adventure. He paid the bill and left the girl at her table. Half an hour later, as he waited in front of the clock-tower at Victoria, a taxi drew up and a white hand tapped softly on the glass.
The girl stopped the cab in front of one of those tall, gloomy houses that face the river in Grosvenor Road. Behind them, over an arch of lights, the trams thumped across Vauxhall Bridge; before them, beyond a wilderness of warehouses and wharves, the glow of South London shone luridly in the night sky.
The house was dark and, save for the taxi quietly chugging at the door, the street was deserted. The girl jumped out first and, a latchkey in her hand, was already at the front door as Desmond alighted. For an instant he hesitated. What had happened to Francis and the others? Had the Chief failed him? Should he go on? His orders left him no choice. He had to play his part and leave the rest to the Chief. He felt in his jacket pocket for the reassuring chill of his automatic as he turned to pay the cab.
“How much?” he asked the driver, an apple-cheeked greybeard.
“Something’s gone wrong, Des.,” replied the man in a low voice, the voice of Francis Okewood. “The Chief’s people were to have followed us. Back out of this while you can!”
“Psst!”
From the top of the steps the girl was signalling to Desmond to make haste.
“Have you change for a ten-shilling note?” Desmond said aloud to his brother, and added in an undertone: “I’m going to see it through. But get help quickly!”
And with that he followed the girl into the house.
They crossed the hall, a dingy place in which a gas-jet in a stained-glass lamp burned dimly. The girl stopped at a door at the end and, producing another key, unlocked it. They entered another lobby, very spick and span with its white paint and red Wilton pile carpet and brilliantly lighted. The murmur of voices came from swing-doors that led off it and the air was heavy with the fragrant aroma of cigars.
At the end of the lobby, with their backs to the entrance door, a man and a girl stood. The man had his arms about the woman and his face was buried in the aureole of her golden hair. Desmond heard a sharp exclamation from Madeleine.
“Paul!” she cried sharply.
The couple sprang apart. Like a fury Madeleine turned on the woman.
“What are you doing with my husband?” she demanded, and advanced menacingly towards her, her eyes blazing with anger and her thin hands shaking. “He’s mine, you . . . you painted slut!”
The woman gave a cry of terror and bolted through the door into the adjacent room. Madeleine would have followed her, but the man stepped between them and seized the girl by the wrists. He was a big, showy fellow, in the forties, in evening dress, very well groomed, with sleek dark hair and a dark moustache.
“Stop that, d’you hear?” he commanded. He spoke with a marked foreign accent.
Furiously the girl wrenched herself free, “I’m sick of it all!” she cried. “Sick of being trifled with. Do you understand? Haven’t I lowered myself to the dirt for you? Haven’t I acted the part of a common prostitute to help you, and this is all the reward I get? . . .”
The man looked apprehensively at Desmond.
“Come, come,” he said to Madeleine in a voice that was intended to be persuasive; “don’t make a scene in front of our friend here! It was—ha, ha—only a joke of mine—to make you jealous, little woman . . .”
“Lies, lies, always lies!” the girl burst in. “But I’m through with you now. Do you understand? You’re welcome to your Lotties and your Nancys and your painted French women! I do no more dirty work for you after this!”
The man bit his moustache. His eyes were very evil. He controlled himself with an effort.
“Dirty work?” he said. “What a horrid word, Mado! Come, now, take your cloak off! I’m sure our friend wants a game . . .”
But the girl would not be pacified. “Horrid word, is it? Then what became of the other I brought here for you?”
The man’s face darkened horribly. “That’s enough. Do you hear?” he cried, and clapped his hand over the girl’s mouth. But, with a fierce effort wrenching herself free: “Go, go!” she cried to Desmond. “For the love of God, get out of this house! If you don’t . . .”
But her voice died away on a stifled scream. Two men in evening dress had suddenly appeared, and, lifting her bodily up, bore her struggling away up a stair that curved upward from the end of the hall. Desmond, springing instinctively forward to her aid, found his way blocked by Paul. Behind him, in the doorway leading off the vestibule, against a background of dim green light, sullen and forbidding faces now scowled. And a burly, thick-set man in a dinner coat, with a broken nose, had quietly posted himself between Desmond and the door.
“Miss McKenzie,” said Paul suavely, “is subject to these crises de nerfs. I must apologize for the disturbance, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”
“Murchison!” said Desmond abstractedly.
He was wondering whether he had alarmed himself unnecessarily. It was not the first time he had been in a London gaming-hell, and the curious muted hush beneath the green-shaded lamps of the room off the lobby was as familiar to him as the dim figures he could descry about the table watching with painful intensity the measured movements of the banker as he drew the cards from the shoe. Perhaps the scene he had just witnessed was merely one of the habitual encounters between a bully and his victims.
Yet the girl’s warning had obviously been sincere. Who was “the other” of whom she had spoken? Finucane? . . .
“My name is Geyer,” the man Paul was saying. “Felix, take the gentleman’s coat.”
So saying, with a gesture of odious familiarity, he clapped his arm about the young man. Before Desmond realized what he was up to, Paul had drawn from the other’s jacket pocket the automatic pistol.
“You don’t mind?” he said. “It’s a rule of the house!” And he handed it to the man he had called Felix.
With a sinking heart, for now he knew he had the worst to fear, Desmond silently followed his mentor through the swing-doors.
An air of expectancy rested over the card-room. The atmosphere was warm and so thick with the fumes of tobacco that at first Desmond was conscious only of a sea of white faces turned towards the door. The throng about the table parted to make way for him as Paul Geyer led him up to the table.
“A new member of our circle, my friends,” Geyer’s voice trumpeted triumphantly through the room; “a desperate gambler who loves the green cloth!”
He stood between Desmond and the table, his hands very white in the pool of light shed by the low-hung, shaded lamps. He stepped aside.
Desmond found himself facing The Man with the Clubfoot.
Grundt was holding the bank. His great hairy hands were spread out on the table, one resting on the sabot, the other with its knotted fingers sprawling over swathes of shining playing-cards. His vast torso was leant back in his chair and his red and fleshy lips drew noisily on a glowing cigar held securely between his strong, yellow teeth. Beneath their shaggy, tufted brows his dark eyes flamed defiance, insolence, triumph; indeed, there was an indescribable air of arrogance about his whole attitude and demeanour.
Desmond’s first thought was Francis. How long would he be in procuring assistance? Help could not arrive yet awhile, for it was not half an hour since they had parted. Was not the immediate question rather how long could Desmond hold Clubfoot off?
And then, with a sudden thrill of hope, he remembered his disguise. Grundt would, he knew, murder Desmond Okewood out of hand. But might not Murchison of Munich gain a brief respite? Yet would the disguise, summary as it was, stand the test of those keen and terrible eyes that even now were searching his face?
There was no light in the room, Desmond reflected with satisfaction, other than the shaded table-lamps; and, for the present, the features of Murchison, fully described and circulated through the medium of the Chief’s “double-cross,” were uppermost in Clubfoot’s mind. But—and with a pang the realization came to Desmond—the voice was the great betrayer. If he must speak—and he could not remain dumb without arousing suspicion—disguise his voice as he would, Grundt must inevitably recognize it.
But now Grundt was addressing him. “Herr Murchison, hein? Es freut mich sehr! A gambler, was?”
He grunted and puffed meditatively at his cigar. “Gambling is a very pleasant pursuit,” he continued amiably. Then his voice grew grim: “But it has its drawbacks, Herr Murchison. The loser pays!”
With an effort he straightened himself up in his chair, shook the ash from his cigar into a tray, and leaned across the table.
“Who’s been leaking to you?” he demanded.
Herr Murchison’s hands were shaking violently. His pallid features seemed to be distraught with sheer fright. Through his large goggles he blinked feebly, idiotically, at his questioner.
“My friend,” said Grundt, placing one black-thatched hand palm downwards on the green cloth, “your activities in South Germany are inconvenient to me. With your English gold you have been corrupting my wretched compatriots, plundered and pillaged by the rapacious French, your allies . . .” His fingers clawed up a card. “I shall crush your organization, you and your helpers and your helpers’ helpers . . . like that!” The gleaming millboard wilted in his powerful grasp. “Where are your headquarters?” he rapped out, snarling, and added over his shoulder: “Meinhardt, take a note of his answers!”
Herr Murchison cast a panic-stricken glance round the silent, forbidding circle of attentive faces.
“Answer me, you dog!” thundered Clubfoot. “I’ve plenty of means at my disposal to banish coyness! Come on! Out with it! I’m not going to waste my time tearing it out of you piecemeal! Are you going to make a clean breast of it? Yes or no!”
Herr Murchison extended two trembling hands. “Give me time!” he murmured weakly. “I will tell you what I can!”
A light of sudden vigilance appeared in Clubfoot’s eyes. The man’s whole manner changed on the instant. He seemed to bristle. “Time?” he repeated as though to himself. “Paul,” he called, “come here!”
Paul Geyer crossed the room and stood behind Grundt’s chair. Clubfoot whispered something in his ear. Without leaving his place, Geyer gave a muttered order to a man at his side, who noiselessly left the room.