“Going back to the Yard first?” the officer asked.
The inspector assented.
“Got to change my clothes,” he confided. “I only want to have just a glance at the little man, Mr. Jonson he calls himself, and see that he is not in trouble. I think I know where to find him.”
The three men who had left Heston separately came together an hour later in one of the smaller cafés of Soho. Mr. Jonson, the first to enter and seat himself, occupied an empty table in a distant corner; the taller man with whom he had exchanged a single word on the flying ground, who had the appearance of a gaunt and unsuccessful commercial traveller in foreign commodities, joined him within a few minutes; and a third man, wearing a mackintosh over a suit of grease-stained overalls, followed close behind. The proprietor, who had watched their entrance uneasily, came over and accosted them. He was a large fat man and he addressed his apparently unwelcome clients in German.
“If there have been happenings this evening,” he said, “it is not a good place this. Two men who are strangers to me have visited the restaurant. They looked around as though in search of someone and departed. One of the inspectors who comes here in plain clothes has only just left the place.”
Mr. Jonson smiled at him reassuringly.
“Have no fear, my friend,” he enjoined, “but serve us quickly with a large steak and beer. See that it is of the usual quality. At ten o’clock I may be performing at the Palace as an extra turn. I am no conspirator, I can assure you. The police to me are bosom friends. I am the magician who stops the spinning of the earth! Jonson my name is. You have heard of me?”
“Never in my life,” the patron grunted.
“You shall know my stage name, then, and you shall understand how much your little café is honoured. I am Professor Ventura.”
“He speaks the truth,” the man in overalls declared impatiently. “He is a magician. Bring us food and beer.”
“And mark you, Fritz,” Mr. Jonson assured him, “nothing has happened to-night. There has been a little excitement in various quarters, but no cause for it. Nothing has happened. Do us the favour, my friend, of hastening with the food. This wait has already increased my appetite. Vermouth and gin for me—a drink of it, mind—not a sip. The others will ask for vodka, I suppose. So be it.”
He laid a note upon the table. The patron withdrew. The tallest of the three unwelcome visitors produced a crushed packet of cigarettes from which he helped himself and began to smoke furiously.
“That man whose life we seek is a devil,” he pronounced. “This is the third time to my certain knowledge that we have made plans of cast iron. This is the third time we have failed, and Moscow does not understand failure. I ask myself who throws the spanner into the works—who whispers in the ear of that high and mighty Chinese Mandarin and leads him always out of danger into safety?”
The apéritifs were brought. The last speaker drank his vodka savagely, the others with more obvious enjoyment.
“You are a foolish person,” Mr. Jonson said, “to ask questions like that. One would think that you were a newcomer to this business. In the secret councils of the society which employs you, my dear Krakoff, but fails to give you its confidence, they know more about our friend who rides the skies to-night. There are police of a sort in every country, even the English police have their points, but the police of the man who has mocked us to-night are better than any other in the world. They seldom fight, you seldom see even the slightest evidence of their work—not in this hemisphere at any rate—but whenever we are seriously up against them something happens as it did to-night.”
“Why does it happen? How is it?” the third man demanded, beating upon the tablecloth with his pudgy fingers and looking over his shoulder at his neighbour. “I begin to think, my wonderful magician, that you are a bird of ill omen for us. Tell us what went wrong.”
Mr. Jonson pursed his full red lips and raised his hands.
“It was simply this,” he confided. “I had a friend behind the scenes and everything was carefully arranged. The first squad car, which I myself saw standing outside the residence of the Foreign Secretary, was pulled up to a standstill at the corner of the square at exactly the point arranged. I jumped in to find no one there. The chauffeur, when I banged on the window, seemed equally astonished. The police guard who had been sitting by his side had simply disappeared. While we were talking, another squad car rushed up and I saw our man seated inside. We followed him down to Heston. I followed him to the very steps of the plane. He was not there, nor were there Any signs of the other car. Yet I ask you how can I complain? If I went to Scotland Yard they would laugh at me.”
“That is all very well,” Krakoff grumbled. “There is truth always in the information you bring—some truth—and yet whenever we build upon your words something is wrong. We come near the great prize and we fail.”
“What word are we sending eastwards tonight, Krakoff?” the man in overalls asked.
“The same story,” was the sullen reply. “We failed. We followed the wrong man. We always follow the wrong man.”
The food arrived. The man addressed as Krakoff fell upon it ravenously, the others with more moderation. Jonson, indeed, found time to talk.
“Our friend here,” he observed, “speaks of me as bringing to our efforts bad luck.”
“So you do,” Krakoff snarled. “Every time you start off on one of your certain enterprises which should bring us each a fortune we stumble along to within a hair’s breadth of success and then—hey presto!—the cloth is snatched off the table and the gold has vanished!”
“Your simile being, I presume,” Jonson remarked, signalling for more beer, “a compliment to my profession.”
“You may take it so if you like,” was the angry reply. “I do not feel like paying you compliments about anything.”
“You should try, my thickheaded Slav,” Jonson exhorted pleasantly, “to retain your common sense. You have failed in this exploit. You have failed in two others with which I was connected, but—my slow-witted, ill-mannered comrade—reflect upon this: But for me you would never have come into the enterprise at all. There would have been no enterprise. But for me you would not have known that the world’s Enemy Number One had come for a moment out into the open and that the chance was here.”
“The man speaks the truth,” the third in the little party declared. “But for Jonson’s information we should not have been able to make the effort we have made. We should never have heard that he was in England. Further than that I agree with him, too, that when we attempted the grand coup before we could never have got so far as making the movement at all if it had not been for his information.”
“You hear?” Jonson exclaimed, turning towards his neighbour. “Hanson, at least, does me justice. It is the sign of a mean spirit to quarrel amongst ourselves because we have met with failure. It will not always be failure. Why should we ever have hoped that the task would be easy? The man we seek to destroy is famous in every country of the world. He has not won that fame through being a fool.”
“We come so near that huge fortune,” Krakoff muttered. “Hell, how that money—the thought of it—maddens one! I want money. I am sick of this life of danger and poverty. From to-night onwards we have to go back to the old job. We become protectors, not hunters. For that there is only a grudgingly dealt-out wage.”
“There is nothing for us,” Jonson said calmly, “but patience. Patience is not one of the characteristics of your race, Krakoff. You should cultivate it. You are a man of suspicious nature. That is what may destroy you. The greatest enterprises in the world have been broken up when members of a small society have begun to distrust one another.”
“You have a mouth like butter,” Krakoff growled.
Hanson drank long and deeply from his glass mug. He set it down empty with an air of content.
“Jonson has a mouth like butter, perhaps,” he admitted, “and has probably the heart of a Judas also. So have I if there is
anything to be gained by it. So have you, Krakoff. But is there anything to be gained by it? I think not. We—the three men chosen to protect a tyrant who loves life but is too mean to pay more than a pittance to his bodyguard—have still a chance of the great prize. Think of what it means, you two. Our man pays us for protection barely enough to keep us in food and drink and women, yet it was he himself who fixed the price. Thirty thousand pounds divided between three—ten thousand pounds each—for the life of the Chinaman Cheng! The thing stands. Did either of you expect the task to be easy? Never did I. Our quarry has the brains of a Satan.”
“Do you suppose,” Krakoff warned them thickly, “that the man whom we serve takes that into account? In his mind there is a perfect fury. He knows that he and his world—everything he stands for—are in danger. We are killers, all three of us. We have done good work with knife and gun. Five times we have saved the man who pays us so stingily. Now paralysis seems to have set in. Our bullets falter and our knives are blunt.”
“Krakoff,” Jonson sighed, “will never forget that he used to write poetry. There is too much allegory about his conversation. Speak plain words, Krakoff.”
“Well, why cannot we kill this blasted Chinese prince?” the latter demanded. “Tell me that. We are no fools. We have brought death easily enough to others. That is why we have become trusted. Now we fail all the time. We sit here drinking our beer, which should be champagne, and somewhere up in the clouds that man flies precisely where he wishes and leaves us who had the whole game in our hands to-night in this foul den eating coarse food and swilling beer.”
“No philosophy,” Jonson observed shaking his head. “That is what you lack, Krakoff.”
“Blast your philosophy,” the latter spat out. “I want ten thousand pounds. It is little enough, but I need it.”
Then tragedy came very near indeed. A thin, languid-looking man opposite, who had slipped in unseen and at whom they had glanced curiously more than once, paid his bill, folded up his paper and strolled across the room towards them. His destination was obvious. Krakoff, who was in an evil temper, had his hand in that cunningly devised pocket of his before the stranger had come to a standstill. The lust to kill held him in a fierce clutch. Action of any sort he felt would make a stronger man of him.
“My name,” the newcomer announced, “is perhaps known to you three gentlemen. Hendren—Inspector Hendren. I belong to the foreign branch of the C.I.D.”
The three men waited. Their faces were a study in expressions. Jonson’s was bland and enquiring but his underlip clung close to his teeth. Hanson’s eyes were agleam with menace and his frame seemed to have stiffened, yet the smile upon his lips was almost natural. Krakoff alone sat apparently unmoved but with the lust for action hot in his blood.
“Inspector Hendren,” Jonson repeated courteously. “You have business with us?”
“Not at this present moment,” Hendren observed, striking a match, lighting a cigarette, and glancing curiously at Krakoff’s right hand almost at the same time. “I was at Heston this afternoon in the regular course of my duty. I was involved in some slight change in the arrangements to facilitate the departure of a foreign guest.”
“What is this man talking of?” Krakoff demanded truculently.
“You have passports, gentlemen?” the Inspector continued, without taking the slightest notice of the intervener.
“But naturally,” Jonson admitted. “You do not expect, however, that we carry them about with us.”
Inspector Hendren waved his hand.
“That is not necessary,” he said, “but I would like to remind you if I might, without wishing to take a liberty,” he continued smiling at Krakoff, “that passports were meant for use. Yours I think have remained too long in your despatch boxes or pocketbooks. To-morrow would be an excellent time to use them.”
Still silence. Krakoff’s fingers were twitching. He was ghastly pale with the effort to control himself. Hendren deliberately buttoned up his coat.
“To-morrow,” he repeated. “After then there are certain questions my department might feel inclined to ask of any one of you—either you, Paul Hanson, or you, Jonson, or even you, my angry-looking friend with the disturbed wrist—Nikolas Krakoff. Remember, I should use those passports to-morrow.”
Hendren strolled away. Krakoff’s hand was half out of his pocket but Jonson’s fingers were gripping his arm. They sat in silence. The swing door opened and closed.
“The hint of our friend, the Inspector,” Jonson said calmly, “seems to me opportune. We may follow in slower fashion, but it seems to me that our way too should lie southwards.”
CHAPTER IX
Table of Contents
Catherine Oronoff rose from the high-backed chair behind her desk and indulged in a little exclamation of dismay as she welcomed her visitor.
“But my dear Mark,” she cried. “Where on earth have you been all day? You look like a ghost.”
He pointed upwards and threw himself into a chair.
“I have been up in the observatory for something like fourteen hours,” he confided. “No news of Cheng?”
“Nothing yet. You did not really expect him until tomorrow, did you?”
“That’s right,” Mark agreed.
“But what ever have you been doing up there all this time?”
“Talking some of the time—listening the rest. It is the wonder of it all, Catherine, that seems to sweep your senses away. I have seen the streets and the square of Pekin. I have been talking to two of my old friends—staff officers in Manchuria. I have been watching troops march by until my eyes ached. I never realised quite how far on we were with the work. There will have to be a big move soon—a tremendous move.”
She glanced at the calendar.
“Well, you expected something to happen soon, did you not?”
“I scarcely realised,” he confessed, “that we were so far advanced. I have been talking to General Mayne. He tells me that newspaper correspondents, travellers of every sort, are streaming into the capital.”
“Well, it all had to come out some day, did it not?” she observed.
He nodded.
“It’s coming out all right. I cannot help wishing Cheng were here.”
“What could he do?”
“Nothing that I am not doing myself. All the same, he is an inspiring fellow. He never gets flustered, never has any doubts.”
“Have you?” she asked.
He pushed back the unruly masses of hair from his forehead.
“I don’t know, Catherine,” he admitted. “Sometimes the thing seems too vast for me. I am terrified of the powers we are wielding there—of the state of utter confusion we are going to bring upon the world.”
“You are only carrying out your legacy,” she reminded him.
“I know,” he answered, “and yet I cannot help wondering sometimes whether that marvellous old father of mine ever realised what he was doing when he handed over the control of all these forces to just a few of us and pointed out the way we had to go. Supposing things don’t work out just as he planned them, supposing we bring upon the world the one thing he spent his life fighting against—war!”
She came over to his chair. He grasped her hand as she leaned over him.
“Catherine,” he continued hoarsely, “I am nearly—I am almost afraid. Those voices—from those thousands of miles away—the faces I have looked into—the glory and the horror of it all…Supposing they got Cheng and I had to face it all alone! There are dozens of them out after him. That little fellow Jonson—I could not have trusted him as Cheng did.”
She patted his shoulder.
“Have you had anything to eat to-day?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Come with me,” she insisted.
She led him to the small dining room in his own suite, rang a bell and ordered food. He drank a whisky and soda feverishly, then he sprang up.
“I cannot wait, Catherine,” he declared.
&nb
sp; “You are not going to leave this room,” she said firmly. “I shall forbid it. You will drink another whisky and soda—you see, I am not a hard mistress—but you will wait for a minute or two until some food comes. If there is anything pressing I can see to it.”
He sank back into the chair and dozed for a few minutes. When he opened his eyes it was to find sandwiches by his side and his tumbler refilled.
“Don’t think me every sort of an idiot,” he begged as he helped himself. “I am all right now. It was just those few minutes! The thing seemed to be growing bigger all the time up there. I almost thought I should go crazy!”
She laid her cool fingers upon his forehead.
“You are very foolish,” she said, “to have stayed there all that time. You must not do it again.”
“I won’t,” he promised. “Cut me some more sandwiches, please, then I will smoke a cigarette and you’ll see I shall be myself again.”
He was as good as his word. If, indeed, he had been near collapse half-an-hour before, his recovery was amazing.
“For the first time,” he confided, “I am really glad Cheng is away. Do you look after him as well as this, Catherine?”
“He never needs it,” she replied. “Sometimes I ask myself whether he is really human,” she went on after a moment’s pause. “Never at any time, under any conditions, have I ever seen him show any sign of human weakness.”
Mark nodded.
“He has been like that ever since I first knew him. I remember we once persuaded him to take up tennis: that was when we were both at Harvard. In a week he was playing the professional, even. Our best men hadn’t a chance against him. He drives that big plane of his, which I daren’t touch, across Europe and he gets out just as fresh as when he started. I don’t really believe that he has a nerve in his body.”
“He terrifies me,” Catherine confessed. “He is so still and so—what is the word—inevitable. If it were not that I have seen his face soften a little when by chance he has been looking at or talking about something really beautiful, I should be more afraid of him than I am.”
21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series) Page 191
