Dusty Death

by Clifton Robbins

  “I’m sorry to have worried you to turn out on a Sunday, Mr. Crill,” said Harrison. “But it is important.”

  “I don’t want to appear rude, Mr. Harrison,” answered Crill, rather too politely, “but they all say that.”

  “Let’s find some quiet corner and I can explain a little,” said Harrison, in no wise perturbed by the arctic nature of his reception, and he led the way from the deck and found a spot where it seemed possible to talk in peace. Henry had meantime disappeared but Harrison could be certain he was not very far away and was keeping a benevolently watchful eye on the proceedings.

  “You don’t mind a pipe, I trust?” said Crill.

  “Of course not,” answered Harrison, producing a cigar case. “But possibly you will join me?”

  “Of course not,” said Crill. “Thank you all the same. A pipe’s the best smoke,” and he proceeded to fill up with what Henry would have called “foreign” tobacco.

  After a few clouds of extraordinarily pungent smoke, Crill’s mood seemed to improve.

  “I’m inclined to wonder why you bothered about me at all,” he said, turning to Harrison. “First because the paper I write for is not very interested in sensations. It is still a bit old-fashioned, as some people might say, and the delights and wiles of the modern mystery sensation do not seem to have influenced its readers—and, therefore, its policy.”

  “Rather a pity,” said Harrison, with a smile.

  “To you, maybe, to me, well, I like to think there are still some outposts against this miscalled modernity. Nothing original about it except the crack-brained excess of it. But the outposts are going and you will be acclaimed as a heaven-sent special writer at the moment that I, a trained journalist, am pushed into the street.”

  “You are pessimistic, Mr. Crill.”

  “Hardly that. I suppose it’s the way of the world, and I like the old way better. Still, there’s another reason which you must have realised—you have been in Geneva a whole day, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t quite understand, Mr. Crill.”

  “Your instinct for discovery must be very much at fault then, Mr. Harrison,” said Crill, grimly. “Surely you have discovered that I am the most unpopular man in Geneva?”

  “Hardly that,” answered Harrison.

  “Come now,” said Crill. “Be honest. You will admit, at least, that someone has already warned you against any dealings with me?”

  “Well—” said Harrison, hesitatingly.

  “That I am a dangerous man,” continued Crill. “That I am unscrupulous over news, that I am really an enemy of the League. You’ve heard that, haven’t you?”

  “I must admit I have,” replied Harrison, bluntly.

  “You see it doesn’t take long for a newcomer to know my reputation. Then why in heaven’s name did you want to see me?”

  “That was the reason.”

  “Look here, Mr. Harrison,” said Crill, warmly. “If you’re trying to be humorous, it’s a pretty poor effort. I hope you realise I have put myself out a good deal to oblige you today.”

  “Of course I do, Mr. Crill, and I appreciate it very much,” answered Harrison. “The very fact that I was warned against you made me wonder. Why are you so unpopular—at any rate, as unpopular as you say you are?”

  “Because I try to be honest,” came the short reply.

  “And all the others are dishonest,” said Harrison. “That’s a tall order.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. One or two of the people here are definitely dishonest but they’re a minority. However, they have influence and a large number of the others are sentimental. I’m not.”

  “I should have guessed that,” said Harrison.

  “The dishonest ones hate me because they feel I know what they’re up to, or have a shrewd guess. The sentimentalists think I spend my time crabbing the League, and they think I’m no gentleman. Look here, Mr. Harrison, the League’s a good idea, I agree to that, but it’s not perfect—far from it. And it can be improved. And the only way to improve it is to show up its weak places. That’s what I do and that’s why I’m hated. Whenever I write anything which I think is for the good of the League, they are all up in arms immediately. Another of Crill’s attacks. Disgruntled old sinner. All that sort of thing. They’ve often tried pressure on the paper at home through important people, but they don’t seem to be lucky. Still, my brand of honesty certainly doesn’t seem to make me any friends.”

  “As a matter of fact, Mr. Crill, it isn’t the sentimentalists I’m interested in,” answered Harrison. “It’s the dishonest ones.”

  “Oh,” said Crill, with a puzzled look.

  Harrison paused a moment and then leant towards Crill and said very solemnly: “What do you know about Baron Meyerling, Mr. Crill?”

  Crill gave a start and then pulled himself together.

  “Nothing,” he answered.

  “Come, come, Mr. Crill,” said Harrison, persuasively. “You must know something.”

  “Look here, Mr. Harrison, what’s your game?” asked Crill, emphatically. “You asked me to come out on the boat with you so that I can interview you in comfort and, up to now, you have spent the time asking me questions yourself. Am I interviewing you or are you interviewing me?”

  “It looks as if I am interviewing you,” said Harrison calmly.

  “Well, we’ve had enough of it, then,” answered Crill.

  “Not quite,” said Harrison firmly. “I want to know something about Baron Meyerling.”

  “Not from me,” answered Crill. “And may I suggest that you are just being imprudent, Mr. Harrison? I can quite understand you were misled by my reputation but your judgment must be rather weak if you thought I was going to talk about another journalist.”

  “He talked about you.”

  “Very melodramatic, Mr. Harrison,” said Crill, with a bitter laugh. “But that bait does not tempt me.”

  “He warned me to have nothing to do with you, Mr. Crill.”

  “He would,” answered Crill. “And I would give you the same warning about him.”

  “But why, Mr. Crill?”

  “That is my own affair, Mr. Harrison.”

  “But I must know something about Baron Meyerling,” said Harrison emphatically.

  “Not from me.”

  “Yes from you,” said Harrison, “because you’re an honest man. Look here Mr. Crill, this isn’t an ordinary business. There’s murder in it—”

  “Murder?”

  “Yes, murder, and I’m certain the Baron’s mixed up in it. I’m being watched by him and his friends—I’m certain of that, too—whatever I do in Geneva. That’s why I asked you to come along in the boat. I admit I suggested news, but I didn’t know what else to do. I apologise for that, but I don’t want the Baron to know I’ve been talking to you. Now you must give me an answer.”

  “Murder,” said Crill reflectively. “It’s not surprising. But I must admit I’m rather confused by the whole business. Can’t you tell me anything more?”

  “I’m afraid you must trust me for the moment, Mr. Crill,” answered Harrison. “But it is serious, deadly serious.”

  “Yes, I feel somehow it must be,” said Crill. “But still, Mr. Harrison—”

  “If you are really a friend of the League as you have just said you were,” said Harrison. “In fact, if you have any feelings for justice at all, you will help me. It’s the drug traffic, that’s all I feel I can say, Mr. Crill.”

  “Obviously you could tell me more, Mr. Harrison, but I appreciate that you won’t, and that you probably have very good reasons for not doing so. But I must say I think you are on the right track and therefore a bit brighter than most of the others here—”

  “I thank you for the compliment,” said Harrison with a smile.

  “I don’t pay compliments,” said Crill abruptly. “But I know brain when I meet it. The Baron has brain, quite a lot of it! I wish there was more I could tell you about him, but really it comes to very little. I wo
uld like to say, of course, that anything I tell you is just to help you. Please don’t think I have any personal motives. I hope I am above that.”

  “Of course,” said Harrison.

  “Now what do you want to know?”

  “Well, first of all, if you can help me, I want to know something of the Baron’s history. Do you know anything of that?”

  “A great deal, as a matter of fact,” answered Crill. “That is partly why he would like to see me out of Geneva. Indeed, I don’t think he would be very sorry to see me out of the world. You see, Mr. Harrison, I have knocked about the world a good bit in my time. I won’t say more than that I have seen many employments—shall I say, semi-official ones?—besides that of a journalist.”

  “I understand,” said Harrison.

  “About a year after the Bolshevik regime started in Russia, I had instructions from some nameless Government to do all in my power to assist refugees in getting over the Polish frontier at a certain point. It was a dangerous game because I was not always certain which side of the frontier I was on myself. Well, one of these refugees was the Baron.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Harrison.

  “He wasn’t a Baron then or, at any rate, he didn’t call himself one. He had some kind of mixed Russian and German name—again certainly not Meyerling—but of course names don’t count. I never have attached much importance to names. He was pretty well down and out when I picked him up. He must have been on the run for some considerable time, and the Bolshevik people must have been close after him all the way. I got him to safety and then looked after him a bit until he could push on by himself. In that condition even the most reticent people talk. I won’t say the Baron talked much, but he talked a bit more than he intended to, and I expect he’s regretted it ever since. He told me that he had done something which made the Bolsheviks determined to kill him. That, wherever he had been in Russia, his life hadn’t been worth a moment’s purchase except that the Government was very willing to pay a high price to whoever betrayed him. He said, too, that whatever happened, he would never go back to Russia again. The Russians might forget some things but they wouldn’t forget him. Strangest of all, he told me this in excellent English.”

  “Curious,” commented Harrison. “And what did you make of it?”

  “I thought he was one of those profiteer swindler sort of people who turn yellow when there is real trouble about. I rather despised him for his cowardice.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, of course, his nerve had gone, there’s no doubt about that. But it would take a lot to make his nerve go. I realise that, the man’s not naturally a coward. So I suppose what he said was perfectly true.”

  “And his nationality?”

  “I wouldn’t be certain,” answered Crill. “There are some people who seem to be so cosmopolitan as to have no nationality at all. They seem to talk every possible language but do not claim any particular one as their own. He may be Russian, he may be German, he may be a mixture of both or of some other European country. Thank God, at any rate, one can be practically certain he isn’t British.”

  “Well, that doesn’t really help me much.”

  “Don’t be impatient, Mr. Harrison,” answered Crill. “You asked me for historical details and I have told you what I know. A year or so later he appeared in Geneva as Baron Meyerling, an Austrian, as far as I could make out, connected with some small newspaper and prepared to make himself pleasant to all and sundry.”

  “Good!”

  “Of course, one of his first efforts was to be friendly with his fellow pressmen. Indeed, there were not so many of us here at that time, the League wasn’t so popular an item of news, so it wasn’t difficult. You can imagine how his face fell when he saw me, but he had the wit to recognise me at once, hail me as the saviour of his life and then asked me to keep our former meeting to myself as it might uncomfortably prejudice his position as a journalist.”

  “Which, of course, you did?”

  “Of course,” answered Crill. “What else was there to do? And besides, I rather admired the man for going straight to the heart of the matter directly he met me. That was when I decided the man wasn’t a natural coward. It needed great courage, to my mind, to do that.”

  “I agree,” said Harrison.

  “But I soon realised he wasn’t going to leave it at that,” continued Crill. “I gradually found that a pleasant little campaign of suspicion was being worked against me. There were occasional pinpricks, nothing more, but it showed how things were going. And I understood then that this was the form the Baron’s gratitude was taking. As his stock rose, every effort seemed to be made to make mine steadily diminish. A kind of inverse ratio. The Baron became more and more popular and seemed to be wielding a good bit of influence. He was fast turning into a European figure instead of just representing a small Austrian paper. I don’t know how he did it but what he said went into a number of European papers of great importance in different countries. And then he tried to get me out of Geneva.”

  “The Baron personally?”

  “Yes, it was entirely his own effort. Of course, he had many sympathisers—he had prepared the ground sufficiently for that.”

  “Well?”

  “But, very regrettably, he had forgotten one detail.”

  “And that was—”

  “I told you just now that I have occasionally done semi-official work. The Baron was rather foolish not to recognise that. When the business really got annoying, I felt it was necessary to remind certain Governments of the small obligations they were under to me. It was a pity but my living depended on it. The whole business was stopped immediately and, incidentally, that is how I knew the Baron was so personally interested in it.”

  “A very discreditable episode,” said Harrison.

  “Well, it showed that the Baron wasn’t really a journalist,” answered Crill. “He wouldn’t have manoeuvred so hard to get a fellow journalist out of the way. Of course, I knew too much about him but I had a feeling that he was in Geneva for something much bigger than journalism and that was the real reason why he didn’t want any of the past raked up. So you see the Baron was foolish in a second way because he made me wonder what on earth he might be up to. Once you begin to wonder you begin to try and find out.”

  “And it led to drugs?” asked Harrison anxiously.

  “Emphatically, yes,” answered Crill.

  “Wonderful,” said Harrison, with relief.

  “I have certain channels of inquiry which may not be open to everyone,” Crill went on. “I found out as much as I could about the Baron’s friends—there was not much to be discovered and, I am afraid, what there is won’t help you, because they’re mainly in the different capitals of Europe. I found out the newspapers in which the Baron was known to have a certain influence and everything pointed to the drug traffic. Of course, I wouldn’t swear he is actually mixed up in it himself, but he has some reason for giving it a certain amount of assistance.”

  “You have found out as much as that?”

  “Yes, I think I can claim that.”

  “Have you spoken to anyone in authority about it?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “But, why, Mr. Crill,” asked Harrison. “Surely you couldn’t let things go on, knowing what you do?”

  “I know nothing, Mr. Harrison,” replied Crill. “It’s all inference. And what’s the good of that? Suppose I went along to the League and told them a tale like this, do you think they would believe me? Hardly, I should imagine. The dear Baron couldn’t do a thing like that. Crill again, always making trouble.”

  “I suppose so,” said Harrison

  “Of course,” answered Crill. “Directly I have a few facts to go on, it will be different but until then I shall have to hold my tongue.”

  “And what about Miss Jeanne de Marplay?” asked Harrison.

  “Oh, the de Marplay girl,” said Crill. “Not unattractive.”

  “Anything el
se?”

  “I should say she dopes, by the look of her.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She’s one of the Baron’s recruits. Says she’s English and has an English passport. Mixed parentage, I should say. Quite a smart journalist, in her way. Of course, she has a certain pull, for, say what you like, good looks are still a great help in the world. Many of the statesmen who come here are quite elderly and a pretty face is flattery in itself.”

  “And do you think she has anything to do with the Baron’s special activities?”

  “I should think not,” said Crill. “Even I find her a pleasant person to talk to. Essentially feminine and makes you feel years younger. No, I should say there’s nothing against Miss de Marplay.”

  “Well,” said Harrison, “I am more than grateful, Mr. Crill, for all the help you’ve given me.”

  “I expect you knew as much as that before,” answered Crill.

  “I guessed as much, Mr. Crill,” said Harrison. “But that’s a very different matter.”

  “And now,” said Crill. “I think I am entitled to some kind of news paragraph, don’t you?”

  “I certainly do,” replied Harrison. “What do you want?”

  “A few original theories about passport identification, that’s all,” said Crill.

  Harrison cudgelled his brains and did his best to comply with Crill’s request. He had produced something and the conversation had turned to desultory topics when the boat started drawing in towards Lausanne.

  “I must get off here,” said Harrison. “I know you’ll excuse me.”

  “Of course,” said Crill, shaking his hand. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you and I wish you all success in a dangerous game.”

  “And you forgive me the boat trip?” asked Harrison.

  “It’s so pleasant,” answered Crill. “That I shall go on still further with it.”

  “Oh by the way,” said Harrison. “One final favour. Will you tell your readers who are obviously pining for news of me that I have received urgent messages from London and may have to leave Geneva at any moment?”