“The most robotlike gambler,” Lord Henry declared, “I ever knew in my life. Can’t see how he can enjoy it.”
“You are a little peevish, mon ami, because you have been losing,” the Prince, who was enormously wealthy but who played the same sort of modest game, observed.
“Of course I am,” his friend agreed. “What is the good of gambling at all if you are not peevish when you lose and happy when you win? Gambling is worth while simply because the exultation of winning lasts longer than the depression of losing. Observe the joy with which I take up these four mille. Let’s go to the bar and have a drink. The professional will be coming on at two o’clock and I would always rather win from those Johnnies.”
The two men strolled away together towards the bar, which was just then packed with people. Every table was taken and the most polyglot crowd in the world were jammed together at the two oval counters, one at each end of the room, and in all the places where there was an inch or two to breathe. Ardrossen, who had been standing patiently against the wall, moved quietly up to where the American girl was drinking a lemon squash at a small round table for two.
“Mademoiselle is perhaps expecting a friend?” he asked with a slight bow, his fingers resting upon the unoccupied chair.
“No such luck, Monsieur,” she answered.
“You permit me that I sit down then?” he ventured. “I find the atmosphere of these rooms somewhat fatiguing.”
“I wonder whether you remember me?” she asked curiously.
He looked at her with slightly upraised eyebrows.
“I believe I saw you on the train,” he reflected. “You will pardon me if I am mistaken.”
“I was on the Blue Train,” she admitted. “We sat not far away in the dining car—but I have seen you before then.”
“I regret very much,” he said tonelessly. “My memory seems to be at fault.”
“I saw you about two months ago,” she told him, “sitting at a corner table at the Café de l’Univers in Geneva.”
He shook his head.
“I am afraid that was not possible, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Geneva is one of the few continental resorts which I have never visited.”
She accepted his statement without demur.
“That is strange,” she said indifferently. “I have rather a good memory for faces and you—I mean the person I thought was you—were with a man whom everyone was talking about those days.”
“Yes?”
“Litinoff—the Russian, you know.”
“I have read about him,” Mr. Ardrossen admitted, “but I have certainly never sat at a table with him any more than I have ever visited Geneva. You yourself were there for a long time, Mademoiselle?”
“A few months only,” she answered. “I was doing a little very amateurish newspaper work. The bureau came to an end, however, and my occupation was gone. I was on the point of taking my departure for home when a fortunate accident happened.”
“Tell me about it,” he begged. “One is often hearing of the ill luck of one’s acquaintances. It would be a novelty to hear of someone whom chance has befriended.”
She laughed.
“It befriended me all right,” she acknowledged. “I had a legacy just when I needed it, just when I thought I would have to go back home and rejoin my maiden aunts in Washington.”
“That,” he remarked, “was opportune.”
“I should say so,” she agreed. “I don’t want to find fault with it but all the same it was one of those awkward-sized legacies,—you know what I mean, I’m sure,—too small to invest with the idea of adding to one’s income, and too large to ignore. I decided to give myself a holiday.”
“You chose an excellent spot,” he observed.
The waiter, whom it really seemed as though Ardrossen had mesmerized into his act of service, brought two champagne cocktails and set them down. Ardrossen handed him a note and ignored alike the change and the man’s profuse thanks.
“Yes, it is a wonderful place to visit,” she acknowledged, “but I don’t know that it is very cheerful for anyone arriving alone and without friends.”
“It is scarcely probable,” he said, “that you will remain in that unenviable situation. To-night, for instance, I think I saw you dancing with Lord Henry Lancaster. He knows everyone here.”
“He assured me,” she replied, “that he was one of the props of the whole establishment and that he had been practically asked by the manager to act as chaperon to anyone in need of one. I hadn’t the faintest idea who he was until he introduced himself and I don’t suppose I should have danced with him, especially as he belonged to another party. He was very charming, however, and I love dancing. He seems to know all the gossip of the place, too. A good deal of what he told me will be useful.”
“Useful?” Ardrossen repeated speculatively.
“A newspaper has agreed to pay my expenses here if I can send them a few items of news. Perhaps you, too, might help me.”
Something as near a smile as Ardrossen ever permitted himself parted his lips. The eyes of the two met for a moment. The girl stooped down, fumbling in her bag for a cigarette.
“Why should you not help a struggling journalist?” she queried. “You don’t give anyone the idea of being exactly a social butterfly, but I expect you have been here heaps of times before and you must know a good many of the people.”
“The people whom I know,” he replied, “would not, I fear, be interesting to the readers of your newspaper.”
“You are not an American, are you?”
“I am not. I am English.”
“Why did you speak to me just now?”
“Because I wanted your chair. I was tired and I needed to sit down.”
She leaned back in her seat and laughed softly.
“I should never suspect you of being a boulevardier,” she told him. “Still, it seemed odd to have you making overtures to anyone. At the two cafés in Geneva where I imagined that I saw you, or rather at the café and the restaurant, you occupied always the same table; you spoke—if one heard your voice at all—in exactly the same tone, you wore the same sort of clothes, you covered those rather penetrating grey eyes of yours with the thickest of glasses. You just passed from place to place looking at no one—always with the air of one who wished to remain apart.”
“So I, or rather my double, earned nicknames?”
“You did,” she admitted.
“Such as?”
“They got boiled down to one in time,” she told him. “They all called you ‘The Shadow.’”
She knocked the ash from the cigarette she had been smoking.
“‘The Shadow’?” he repeated curiously. “I wonder why? I am not a poseur in any way. The trend of my daily life is always, I think, quite natural. I have an idea that I must seem a hopelessly obvious person to anyone who took the trouble to watch my movements.”
“That, I suppose,” she reflected, looking at her rose-tipped fingernails, “must be the reason. You evidently don’t read fiction, Mr. Ardrossen, or you would know that the old-fashioned type of spy is extinct. A spy nowadays is an insignificant, harmless little man with the appearance of a city clerk, or a blond, loquacious sort of a person looking all the time like a carpetbagger. Even your retiring habits would be out of fashion for the real international disciple of espionage.”
“‘The Shadow,’” he reflected. “I still wonder why they called my double that—especially you.”
Her delicate eyebrows were slightly raised. She looked at him with a puzzled gleam in her clear brown eyes.
“Why especially me?” she asked.
Again there was the beginning of that elusive smile which never developed. He pressed his cigarette into the ashtray and rose to his feet.
“I was forgetting,” he said, “that I have kept a seat at the Baccarat. I must hurry or I shall lose it. I will say au revoir, Miss Haskell.”
“So you know my name!” she exclaimed.
“Co
uld I help it,” he answered, “when I have heard all those introductions? Thank you so much for the few minutes’ rest—and your company.”
He left her with a little bow. His departure was so quiet and unostentatious that she scarcely realized until she looked at his empty chair that she was alone.
CHAPTER VI
Table of Contents
“I AM not sure,” Joan confided, later on in the evening, “that I like to watch you people gambling.”
“Why not?” Townleyes, who had just joined her, enquired. “It is as good a way of passing the time as any.”
“People seem to lose their individuality.”
“Not a bad thing to escape from sometimes,” he replied. “I don’t want to be always remembering that I have responsibilities.”
“What are your responsibilities?” she asked curiously.
He paused to exchange a passing word with an acquaintance.
“My responsibilities,” he repeated, as he fell into step with his companion again. “Oh well, I am still in our Foreign Office, you know.”
“Yes, I have heard that,” she said, “but I don’t think you are very serious about it.”
“Wrong time this for being serious about anything,” he declared.
“Why? Is the world coming to an end or anything of that sort?”
They had gravitated somehow or other towards the bar, which was now almost deserted. He established her at a retired table and ordered drinks.
“To tell you the honest truth,” he said, and it was the first time he had spoken seriously for several days, “I should not be the least surprised if a cataclysm did happen before long.”
She lit a cigarette.
“You alarm me!” she exclaimed, her eyes mocking him. “I wish I had started life a little earlier, then.”
“Oh, you may live on,” he replied, “although this world goes crash. A few of you will survive. I don’t think they will give me a chance. They won’t even let me walk to the scaffold like my great-great-grand-mother, who was a Frenchwoman, and show the world how the really well-bred people go marching into eternity. When the madness comes, it will be a fury such as the world has never known before and they won’t stop to cut off our heads in gentlemanly fashion. They will come out of their hiding places in all the great cities with knives in their hands and the red fire before their eyes.”
“Are you being serious?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” he assured her. “I am not often. I think that the world is moving on towards drastic and horrible changes. Very likely there may be a wholesale purification in the years further ahead than we can see. If so, there will be such an orgy of massacre first, as history has never recorded or the mind of man dreamt of.”
She set down her glass and looked at him fixedly.
“Am I really talking to that butterfly of fashion, Sir Julian Townleyes?”
“You are talking to Julian Townleyes all right,” he acknowledged, “but I assure you I can be a very serious fellow now and then. I am over forty, you know, and I have poked about in all manner of odd corners in Europe. I suppose it was a sort of reaction after Eton and Oxford and doing everything to pattern that when I got old enough to travel I took a fancy to slumming, and I have seen things—things I shouldn’t like to talk to you about. Oscar Dring knows all about them. He belongs to a club in Nice which is about one of the most poisonous spots in Europe.”
The Princess came hurrying in, fanning herself vigorously. She made directly for their corner.
“Sir Julian, get me a drink at once,” she begged. “A glass of champagne—not a cocktail. They’re making the cards and the place is getting hotter and noisier every moment. Present your friend, if you please. I thought you two looked so nice dancing together this evening.”
He summoned a waiter, gave the order and presented Miss Joan Haskell almost in the same breath.
“Sir Julian is not in the least inclined towards such frivolities as dancing, just now,” the girl observed as she smiled at the Princess. “He is foretelling all the horrible things that are likely to happen to the world, or to Europe, at any rate. I think I am beginning to feel like getting back to my own safe country.”
“Not so safe as you imagine,” he assured her. “However, the mood has passed. Henceforth I promise to be frivolous for the rest of the evening.”
“The game is rather tiresome to-night but exciting in patches,” the Princess told them as she sipped her wine approvingly. “That mad young compatriot of ours, Hayden Smith, has lost a million and just cashed in with another.”
“And you?”
“I am two or three hundred thousand up,” she admitted, “chiefly because that queer little grey man whose name I always forget was on our side of the table. He plays a very quiet, pleasant game but he is more like a machine than anyone I ever knew. One cannot imagine his making a mistake. Sir Julian, will you make a fourth at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning, if Léon wants to play, and have a light lunch afterwards? My tennis is pretty rotten these days but I promise I will do my best.”
“You won’t be up at eleven o’clock,” he replied dubiously.
“I shall be if I make a date,” she answered. “If Léon can get Phyllis Mallory—or what about you, Miss Haskell, do you play?”
“Only moderately,” Joan confessed. “I am very fond of it, though.”
“You will be quite good enough for us. We will give the professionals a cold shoulder for once. Shall we meet in the bar at a quarter to eleven and have one little drink before we go down? We might lunch at the Country Club afterwards.”
“I’ll take you to Beaulieu,” Townleyes suggested.
“Fine,” she agreed. “And bring Miss—Miss—”
“Haskell,” the girl reminded her.
“If Miss Haskell is agreeable, I shall be delighted,” he acquiesced, taking the Princess’s glass. “We will come and watch you in a minute or two. Perhaps if you see my reproachful figure in the background you won’t sit up so late.”
The Princess sighed. She was looking very beautiful in her apparently simple but wickedly alluring white gown.
“It’s a filthy game,” she said, “but it’s the hardest to leave so long as it is still going on. Au revoir, anyhow.”
She flitted away with a little gesture of farewell. Joan Haskell looked after her admiringly.
“No wonder everyone is fascinated by her,” she murmured. “Do you really mean that I am to come to luncheon?”
“Of course,” he answered. “You heard what the Princess said.”
“But you don’t know anything about me or who I am,” she protested. “You had not the slightest right really to ask me to dance.”
“Oh, this is Monte Carlo,” he reminded her. “This is the place where we realize that life is short, and if we want to do a thing we had better do it quickly. What about ten minutes more watching the Baccarat and then a sandwich upstairs and a few minutes’ dancing before we finish up?”
“It sounds delightful,” she admitted. “But what about the rest of your party?”
He smiled as he led her across the still crowded salon.
“Dinner parties in Monte Carlo,” he told her, “break up when you leave the restaurant. You look for your hostess towards the end of the evening and make your adieux, but except for that you have no responsibilities. You enter the Salle des Jeux and that is the land of liberty.”
“I felt there must be something like that about it,” she observed. “I am feeling almost lightheaded. It must be this new sense of freedom.”
“You said you knew no one here,” he remarked as they strolled across towards the increasing crowd round the Baccarat. “Didn’t I see you speaking to that strange man, Ardrossen?”
She hesitated.
“I don’t really know him,” she confided. “He spoke to me very much as you did. What is a poor girl to do? Especially if she is lonely.”
“You won’t be lonely long,” he assured her. “I don’t suppose I
should have noticed you together but I have not yet seen him speak to another soul. If you pass him anywhere he has the trick of looking as though he were gazing into another world.”
“Do you know anything about him?” she asked.
He paused for a few seconds before he replied.
“No. I can’t say that I do. I shouldn’t think anyone does,” he went on meditatively. “He is like one of those people you meet in life who seem to come from God knows where and pass on off the edge of the world. There’s nothing remarkable about his appearance, either. He might be anything from a chartered accountant to a gangster.”
“There is nothing remarkable about his appearance,” she agreed, lowering her voice as they approached the table, “and yet in a sort of way he is interesting. I am perfectly certain that I met him in Geneva twice with a very dangerous man—a Russian—but when I tried to remind him of it he assured me blandly that he had never even been in Geneva. As you say, he might be anything.”
“Anything at all. If he is a chartered accountant, I should think he is top of the profession. If he is a gangster, well, I should hate to be a policeman.”
Ardrossen passed them almost at that moment on his way to the caisse, a trim, neat figure, correct in his clothes, correct in his leisurely walk, absolutely negative in his expression. He was carrying plaques in either hand. Sir Julian watched him curiously as he laid them down in neat little piles before the cashier.
“Has he won or lost?” the girl asked.
21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series) Page 480
