The Council of Justice

by Otto Penzler

  It was the story of the campaign that she told. Much of it we know; the story from the point of view of the Reds may be guessed. She finished her speech by recounting the capture of the enemy.

  ‘Tonight we aim a blow at these enemies of progress; if they have been merciless, let us show them that the Red Hundred is not to be outdone in ferocity. As they struck, so let us strike—and, in striking, read a lesson to the men who killed our comrades that they, nor the world, will ever forget.’

  There was no cheering as she finished—that had been the order—but a hum of words as they flung their tributes of words at her feet—a ruck of incoherent phrases of praise and adoration.

  Then two men led in the prisoner.

  He was calm and interested, throwing out his square chin resolutely when the first words of the charge were called and twiddling the fingers of his bound hands absently.

  He met the scowling faces turned to him serenely, but as they proceeded with the indictment, he grew attentive, bending his head to catch the words.

  Once he interrupted.

  ‘I cannot quite understand that,’ he said in fluent Russian; ‘my knowledge of German is limited.’

  ‘What is your nationality?’ demanded the woman.

  ‘English,’ he replied.

  ‘Do you speak French?’ she asked.

  ‘I am learning,’ he said naively and smiled.

  ‘You speak Russian,’ she said. Her conversation was carried on in that tongue.

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘I was there for many years.’

  After this, the sum of his transgressions were pronounced in a language he understood. Once or twice as the reader proceeded—it was Ivan Oranvitch who read—the man smiled.

  The Woman of Gratz recognized him instantly as the fourth of the party that gathered about her door the day Bartholomew was murdered. Formally she asked him what he had to say before he was condemned.

  He smiled again.

  ‘I am not one of the Four Just Men,’ he said; ‘whoever says I am—lies.’

  ‘And is that all you have to say?’ she asked scornfully.

  ‘That is all,’ was his calm reply.

  ‘Do you deny that you helped slay our comrade Starque?’

  ‘I do not deny it,’ he said easily. ‘I did not help—I killed him.’

  ‘Ah!’ the exclamation came simultaneously from every throat.

  ‘Do you deny that you have killed many of the Red Hundred?’

  He paused before he answered.

  ‘As to the Red Hundred—I do not know, but I have killed many people.’ He spoke with the grave air of a man filled with a sense of responsibility, and again the exclamatory hum ran through the hall. Yet the Woman of Gratz had a growing sense of unrest in spite of the success of the examination.

  ‘You have said you were in Russia—did men fall to your hand there?’

  He nodded.

  ‘And in England?’

  ‘Also in England,’ he said.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked. By an oversight, it was a question she had not put before.

  The man shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. A thought struck her. In the hall, she had seen Magnus the Jew. He had lived for many years in England, and she beckoned him.

  ‘Of what class is this man?’ she asked in a whisper.

  ‘Of the lower orders,’ he replied. ‘It is astounding—did you not notice when—no, you did not see his capture. But he spoke like a man of the streets, dropping his aspirates.’

  He saw she looked puzzled and explained.

  ‘It is a trick of the order—just as the Moujik says…’ he treated her to a specimen of colloquial Russian.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked again.

  He looked at her slyly.

  ‘In Russia they called me Father Kopab …’

  The majority of those who were present were Russian, and at the word they sprang to their feet, shrinking back with ashen faces, as though they feared contact with the man who stood bound and helpless in the middle of the room.

  The Woman of Gratz had risen with the rest. Her lips quivered and her wide open eyes spoke her momentary terror.

  ‘I killed Starque,’ he went on, ‘by authority. Francois also. Some day’—he looked leisurely about the room—‘I shall also—’

  ‘Stop!’ she cried, and then:

  ‘Release him,’ she said, and, wonderingly, Schmidt cut the bonds that bound him. He stretched himself.

  ‘When you took me,’ he said, ‘I had a book; you will understand that here in England I find—forgetfulness in books—and I, who have seen so much suffering and want caused through departure from the law, am striving as hard for the regeneration of mankind as you—but differently.’

  Somebody handed him a book.

  He looked at it, nodded, and slipped it into his pocket.

  ‘Farewell,’ he said as he turned to the open door.

  ‘In God’s name!’ said the Woman of Gratz, trembling, ‘go in peace, Little Father.’

  And the man Jessen, sometime headsman to the Supreme Council, and latterly public executioner of England, walked out, no man barring his exit.

  The power of the Red Hundred was broken. This much Falmouth knew. He kept an ever-vigilant band of men on duty at the great termini of London, and to these were attached the members of a dozen secret police forces of Europe. Day by day, there was the same report to make. Such and such a man, whose very presence in London had been unsuspected, had left via Harwich. So-and-so, surprisingly sprung from nowhere, had gone by the eleven o’clock train from Victoria; by the Hull and Stockholm route twenty had gone in one day, and there were others who made Liverpool, Glasgow, and Newcastle their port of embarkation.

  I think that it was only then that Scotland Yard realized the strength of the force that had lain inert in the metropolis or appreciated the possibilities for destruction that had been to hand in the days of the Terror.

  Certainly every batch of names that appeared on the commissioner’s desk made him more thoughtful than ever.

  ‘Arrest them!’ he said in horror when the suggestion was made. ‘Arrest them! Look here, have you ever seen driver ants attack a house in Africa? Marching in, in endless battalions at midnight, and clearing out everything living from chickens to beetles? Have you ever seen them re-form in the morning and go marching home again? You wouldn’t think of arresting ’em, would you? No, you’d just sit down quietly out of their reach and be happy when the last little red leg has disappeared round the corner!’

  Those who knew the Red Hundred best were heartily in accord with his philosophy.

  ‘They caught Jessen,’ reported Falmouth.

  ‘Oh!’ said the commissioner.

  ‘When he disclosed his identity, they got rid of him quick.’

  ‘I’ve often wondered why the Four Just Men didn’t do the business of Starque themselves,’ mused the Commissioner.

  ‘It was rather rum,’ admitted Falmouth, ‘but Starque was a man under sentence, as also was Francois. By some means, they got hold of the original warrants, and it was on these that Jessen—did what he did.’

  The commissioner nodded. ‘And now,’ he asked, ‘what about them?’ Falmouth had expected this question sooner or later.

  ‘Do you suggest that we should catch them, sir?’he asked with thinly veiled sarcasm. ‘Because if you do, sir, I have only to remind you that we’ve been trying to do that for some years.’ The chief commissioner frowned.

  ‘It’s a remarkable thing,’ he said, ‘that as soon as we get a situation such as—the Red Hundred scare and the Four Just Men scare, for instance, we’re completely at sea, and that’s what the papers will say. It doesn’t sound creditable, but it’s so.’

  ‘I place the superintendent’s defence of Scotland Yard on record in extenso.’

  ‘What the papers say,’ said Falmouth, ‘never keeps me awake at night. Nobody’s quite got the hang of the police force i
n this country—certainly the writing people haven’t.

  ‘There are two ways of writing about the police, sir. One way is to deal with them in the newspaper fashion with the headline “Another Police Blunder” or “The Police and The Public”, and the other way is to deal with them in the magazine style, which is to show them as softies on the wrong scent while an ornamental civilian is showing them their business, or as mysterious people with false beards who pop up at the psychological moment and say in a loud voice, “In the name of the Law, I arrest you!”’

  ‘Well, I don’t mind admitting that I know neither kind. I’ve been a police officer for twenty-three years, and the only assistance I’ve had from a civilian was from a man named Blackie, who helped me to find the body of a woman that had disappeared. I was rather prejudiced against him, but I don’t mind admitting that he was pretty smart and followed his clues with remarkable ingenuity.

  ‘The day we found the body I said to him:

  “Mr. Blackie, you have given me a great deal of information about this woman’s movements—in fact, you know a great deal more than you ought to know—so I shall take you into custody on the suspicion of having caused her death.”

  ‘Before he died, he made a full confession, and ever since then, I have always been pleased to take as much advice and help from outside as I could get.

  ‘When people sometimes ask me about the cleverness of Scotland Yard, I can’t tell ’em tales such as you read about. I’ve had murderers, anarchists, burglars, and average low-down people to deal with, but they have mostly done their work in a commonplace way and bolted. And as soon as they have bolted, we’ve employed fairly commonplace methods and brought ’em back.

  ‘If you ask me whether I’ve been in dreadful danger, when arresting desperate murderers and criminals, I say “No”.

  ‘When your average criminal finds himself cornered, he says, “All right, Mr. Falmouth; it’s a cop”, and goes quietly.

  ‘Crime and criminals run in grooves. They’re hardy annuals with perennial methods. Extraordinary circumstances baffle the police as they baffle other folks. You can’t run a business on business lines and be absolutely prepared for anything that turns up. Whiteley’s will supply you with a flea or an elephant, but if a woman asked a shopgirl to hold her baby while she went into the tinned meat department, the girl and the manager and the whole system would be floored because there is no provision for holding babies. And if a Manchester goods merchant, unrolling his stuff, came upon a snake lying all snug in the bale, he’d be floored, too, because natural history isn’t part of their business training, and they wouldn’t be quite sure whether it was a big worm or a boa constrictor.’

  The Commissioner was amused.

  ‘You’ve an altogether unexpected sense of humour,’ he said, ‘and the moral is—’

  ‘That the unexpected always floors you, whether it’s humour or crime,’ said Falmouth and went away fairly pleased with himself.

  In his room, he found a waiting messenger.

  ‘A lady to see you, sir.’

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked in surprise.

  The messenger handed him a slip of paper and when he read it, he whistled.

  ‘The unexpected, by—! Show her up.’

  On the paper was written—‘The Woman of Gratz …’

  CHAPTER XI.

  Manfred

  MANFRED SAT ALONE IN his Lewisham house—he was known to the old lady who was his caretaker as ‘a foreign gentleman in the music line’—and in the subdued light of the shaded lamp, he looked tired. A book lay on the table near at hand, and a silver coffee service and an empty coffee cup stood on the stool by his side. Reaction he felt. This strange man had set himself to a task that was never-ending. The destruction of the forces of the Red Hundred was the end of a fight that cleared the ground for the commencement of another—but physically, he was weary.

  Gonsalez had left that morning for Paris, Poiccart went by the afternoon train, and he was to join them tomorrow.

  The strain of the fight had told on them, all three. Financially, the cost of the war had been heavy, but that strain they could stand better than any other, for had they not the fortune of—Courtlander; in case of need, they knew their man.

  All the world had been searched before they—the first Four—had come together—Manfred, Gonsalez, Poiccart, and the man who slept eternally in the flower-grown grave at Bordeaux. As men taking the oaths of priesthood, they lived down the passions and frets of life. Each man was an open book to the other, speaking his most secret thought in the faith of sympathy, one dominating thought controlling them all.

  They had made the name of the Four Just Men famous or infamous (according to your point of reckoning) throughout the civilized world. They came as a new force into public and private life. There were men, free of the law, who worked misery on their fellows; dreadful human ghouls fattening on the bodies and souls of the innocent and helpless; great magnates calling the law to their aid or pushing it aside as circumstances demanded. All these became amenable to a new law, a new tribunal. There had grown into being systems that defied correction, corporations beyond chastisement, individuals protected by cunningly drawn legislation, and others who knew to an inch the scope of toleration. In the name of justice, these men struck swiftly, dispassionately, mercilessly. The great swindler, the procureur, the suborner of witnesses, the briber of juries—they died.

  There was no gradation of punishment: a warning, a second warning—then death.

  Thus their name became a symbol, at which the evildoer went tremblingly about his work, dreading the warning and ready in most cases to heed it. Life became a sweeter, a more wholesome thing for many men who found the thin greenish-grey envelope on their breakfast table in the morning, but others persisted on their way, loudly invoking the law, which in spirit, if not in letter, they had outraged. The end was very sure, and I do not know of one man who escaped the consequence.

  Speculating on their identity, the police of the world decided unanimously upon two points. The first was that these men were enormously rich—as indeed they were, and the second was that one or two of them were no mean scientists—that also was true. Of the fourth man who had joined them recently, speculation took a wider turn. Manfred smiled as he thought of this fourth member, of his honesty, his splendid qualities of heart and brain, his enthusiasm, and his proneness to ‘lapse from the balance’—Gonsalez coined the phrase. It was an affectionate smile. The fourth man was no longer of the brotherhood; he had gone, the work being completed, and there were other reasons.

  So Manfred was musing, till the little clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, then he lit the spirit kettle and brewed another cup of coffee. Thus engaged, he heard the far-away tinkle of a bell and the opening of a door. Then a murmur of voices and two steps on the stairs. He did not expect visitors, but he was always prepared for them at any hour.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, in answer to the knock; he recognized the apologetic rap of his housekeeper.

  ‘A lady—a foreign lady to see you.’

  ‘Show her in, please,’ he said courteously.

  He was busy with the kettle when she came in. He did not look up, nor did he ask who it was. His housekeeper stood a moment, uncertain, on the threshold, then went out, leaving them together.

  ‘You will excuse me a moment,’ he said. ‘Please sit down.’

  He poured out the coffee with a steady hand, walked to his desk, sorted a number of letters, tossed them into the grate, and stood for a moment watching them burn, then looked at her.

  Taking no notice of his invitation, the girl stood waiting at ease, one hand on her hip, the other hanging loosely.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he asked again.

  ‘I prefer to stand,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Then you are not so tired as I am,’ he said and sank back into the depths of his chair.

  She did not reply, and for a few seconds neither spoke.

  ‘Has the Woman o
f Gratz forgotten that she is an orator?’ he said banteringly. It seemed to him that there was in those eyes of hers a great yearning, and he changed his tone.

  ‘Sit down, Maria,’ he said gently. He saw the flush that rose to her cheek and mistook its significance.

  ‘No, no!’ he hastened to rectify an impression. ‘I am serious now, I am not gibing—why have you not gone with the others?’

  ‘I have work to do,’ she said.

  He stretched out his hands in a gesture of weariness.

  ‘Work, work, work!’ he said with a bitter smile. ‘Isn’t the work finished? Isn’t there an end to this work of yours?’

  ‘The end is at hand,’ she said and looked at him strangely.

  ‘Sit down,’ he commanded, and she took the nearest chair and watched him.

  Then she broke the silence.

  ‘What are you?’ she asked with a note of irritation. ‘Who gave authority?’

  He laughed.

  ‘What am I—just a man, Maria. Authority? As you understand it—none.’

  She was thoughtful for a moment.

  ‘You have not asked me why I have come,’ she said.

  ‘I have not asked myself—yet it seems natural that you and I should meet again—to part.’

  ‘What do they call you—your friends?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Do they say “the man with the beard”, or “the tall man”—did any woman ever nurse you and call you by name?’

  A shadow passed over his face for a second.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I have told you I am human, neither devil nor demigod, no product of seafoam or witches’ cauldron,’ he smiled, ‘but a son of earthly parents—and men call me George Manfred.’

  ‘George,’ she repeated as though learning a lesson. ‘George Manfred.’ She looked at him long and earnestly and frowned.

  ‘What is it you see that displeases you?’ he asked.