Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Stop!” she said. “I surrender. What do you wish me to do?”

  However, Grim went forward. There was a mirror facing him — one of those half-globular abominations in a gilt frame that distort whatever is reflected in them. He had raised his hand to feel the panel on the wall beside it, when the wall moved — outward, toward him. There was a secret door there. To protect himself he stepped behind it as it swung open. Out came three men, one an officer in uniform. They were armed, or at any rate one of them was; I could see the bulge of a revolver on his hip. Grim glanced at me.

  “Vache!” I think the officer in uniform said that, but it may have been one of the others. I was on my way to the door. I opened it and beckoned the Prefect, who summoned the man who was searching bedrooms. The two came and stood in the doorway, the Prefect smiling to himself and the other man making a rather nervous exhibition of his automatic.

  “Colonel Zalinsky,” said the Prefect. “Monsieur Albertini. Monsieur Hugo. You are under arrest. Colonel Zalinsky, you will receive an escort to the barracks. Monsieur Albertini, Monsieur Hugo, you will accompany me.” He approached the two men in civilian clothes and asked them for their weapons, speaking to them very civilly. They hesitated, glancing at the Colonel, who merely scowled and scratched at his moustache, so they handed them over — two pistols, and the Prefect laid them on a settee. Jeff unloaded them. The Prefect went to the secret door and opened it wide; there was a nicely ventilated closet in there, provided with a window in the outer wall and with a cushioned bench that could have seated half a dozen people. He examined the place and then ordered his man to make use of the ‘phone in the corridor:

  “Request a prisoner’s escort for Colonel Zalinsky, who is under arrest.”

  Then Grim, with a gleam in his eyes that always reminds me of John Paul Jones’ retort “I haven’t started yet!” approached the Princess.

  “Did I understand you correctly to say you surrender?” he asked.

  “I did not say that. If you had stopped, yes. But you did not.”

  “Very well then, go with these men. Monsieur le Préfect, I regret that I can be of no more service to you. It appears I was mistaken when I said that the Princess Baltis, who is so notoriously of the secret service, probably was employing her talents to uncover a grave conspiracy. Knowing how a secret service sometimes operates without taking the local police into confidence, I presumed on your very flattering familiarity with my record, and you were kind enough to permit me to ascertain whether or not the Princess is on the same dangerous and important mission as myself. I have even presumed to send a telegram to Paris to a certain Major Bonfils, with whom I have worked in Syria. I have put him to the inconvenience of traveling here by aeroplane, and I shall have to apologize to him also.”

  He was talking, rather obviously, to give the Princess time to think; and she was thinking furiously, behind an almost Chinese mask of inscrutability. Colonel Zalinsky glared at her, his lips moving but no word coming forth; the sort of threats that he intended would be, in any event, more convincing if suggested. Spoken words so often steal the thunder of a thought. The other two men scowled and tried to whisper to each other, but the Prefect courteously stepped between them.

  “Of what am I accused?” Zalinsky demanded suddenly, and Albertini echoed him: “We also, we demand to know that!”

  “Of conspiracy against the Republic,” said the Prefect, “and of acts of commission and of omission that were contributory to the explosion on the cruiser L’Orient.”

  “Ludicrous!” Zalinsky looked maliciously relieved. “You have not one scrap of evidence. Who accuses me?”

  But his relief was short-lived. Grim’s acid had eaten through the immense assurance of the Princess Baltis. Even in defeat, however, she was debonair and changed sides with the gesture of a reigning beauty bestowing prizes at a carnival.

  “Moi, j’accuse!” Then, in rapid French that it was very difficult for me to follow: “It is true, and this Jeemgreem is altogether too astute! I have brought these traitors to the door of justice — and, I suppose, those others also, who were out there — you have arrested them, yes? I have wormed my way into their confidence, and I will tell all I know. Nevertheless, I assure you that this Jeemgreem by impetuously interfering has upset many calculations and has brought exposure too soon. You have caught moths — flies. Eagles you have let go. Wolves — lions — tigers remain at liberty! I am forbidden to name the source of my instructions, but you force me to speak! If you had arrested me — mon Dieu! — that would have given warning to so many people, that—”

  There was a knock at the door. The Prefect’s man opened it.

  “Major Bonfils.”

  The Princess Baltis stood stock-still. I watched her closely and neither her face nor her eyes showed the least trace of emotion. She even breathed steadily. But it is hardly an exaggeration to say that there vibrated from her something like the magnetism of a leopard that sees sudden danger.

  CHAPTER 7. “No longer Number Seventeen?”

  I can read and write French fluently; and I can speak it so that Frenchmen understand me when they genuinely try, which is not often. But to follow closely a four-cornered, quickfire exchange of verbal thrust and counter-thrust interspersed with professional argot and the latest idioms and catch-words, is beyond my powers. So I can only give a resumé of what happened after Bonfils came in, and the greater part of it is summarized from scraps of Grim’s subsequent conversation. Jeff talks better French than I do, but even Jeff was a bit bewildered by the speed, and it took both of us weeks to extract all the details, as a rule one detail at a time, from Grim, who can be as laconic as a stone jug and who hardly ever fully realizes that others are not so quick as himself to pick the fine points from a maze of irrelevant suggestions, hints and purposely confused statements of probable fact.

  Looking back, it is easy enough to summarize. The main point was that the Princess Baltis, having thoroughly established herself in the confidence of the French secret service, had done what almost all spies do eventually, and that Bonfils knew she had been playing false. But it was also true that she knew a lot too much about too many important people; and in peacetime it is no simple matter to dispose of anyone entrenched in that position, since a secret service never courts publicity, and, ever since the Dreyfus scandal, the French have been particularly touchy on that point.

  But there was another complication. Bonfils and Grim had been intimate friends and they had helped each other in the Near East, although employed by mutually suspicious governments. They understood each other’s methods almost perfectly, and Bonfils knew that Grim has very little personal use for nationalism. Bonfils, as a Frenchman, would have liked to see France recognized as the paramount power in the world and he habitually employed his talents toward that end. Grim — a citizen of the United States — ex-major in the British Army — decorated by five governments and trusted, as a rule, by all of them — has never had the slightest interest in what he calls “parish pump politics” and rather agrees with Doctor Johnson of dictionary fame, that patriotism is the last resource of the scoundrel. Grim is the deadly enemy of so-called patriots who ruin other countries that their own may flourish, and then rob their own for the sake of self-importance. He holds that vice and virtue know no boundaries, but that the world is at the mercy of the ignorant, who think they do. He also holds, that in all countries, at all times, there are conscienceless individuals, possessed of a certain psychic sense, who understand how to manipulate crowd-opinion and who never hesitate to do so, in order to make brave and decent men act damnably in the name of patriotic common-sense.

  So Grim is not easy to deal with, from the point of view of a secret service bent on snatching credit for itself and for its own nationals. But on the other hand, Grim was already involved; he understood the situation of the Princess Baltis; he already knew the nature of the problem to be tackled; and his first words, in French, as Bonfils entered the room, amounted, in the circumstances, to
a statement of his intention not to expose the Princess but to use her as an ally, subject of course to Bonfils’ approval.

  “Congratulate the Princess. She has netted a few of the small fry very neatly. She offered now to help us catch the big ones. Can you spare her?”

  Bonfils smiled engagingly. He was a rather small man with a big man’s shoulders and a poet’s way of using them, so that one word conveyed an essay on things unsaid.

  “Cordially!”

  Bonfils’ smile had malice — meant for the Princess, and she knew it; however, he had the subtle courtesy to pretend it was meant for Zalinsky. He turned it on all three prisoners, and the two civilians looked embarrassed, but Zalinsky showed his teeth under the long moustache that almost hid the ferocity of a telltale upper-lip. I did not catch Zalinsky’s words; he spoke sotto voce and extremely rapidly; but it was a threat, as obviously as a rattler’s warning is. I learned from Grim, that evening, that what it amounted to was a promise to create a much worse scandal than the affaire Dreyfus. Bonfils made no audible answer. Then the military escort came; Zalinsky was informed that a car awaited him; he swaggered off; and hardly sixty seconds after that the two civilians were not so courteously hustled downstairs to a motor-van provided by the Prefect.

  Then the fun began — genuine fun, in which Bonfils vied with Grim, and the Prefect competed with both of them, in efforts to force the Princess Baltis so to compromise herself that she would never be able again to escape from the toils they intended to weave around her. And she broke their toils as swiftly as they wove. She was like Penelope, who baffled all the suitors in Odysseus’ absence. It was surprising that she did not claim to have been Penelope in a previous life, but that was about the only argument she did not use; and probably the only reason why she did not use it was that it would have suggested Dorje as Odysseus and herself as being faithful to him.

  Taxed with having admitted to Grim, and to Jeff and myself, her sympathy for Dorje and her complicity in Dorje’s plans, she retorted reasonably that she had supposed we were Dorje’s agents and that she had therefore assumed that attitude in order to tempt us to trust her and reveal Dorje’s secrets. How should she know we were authorized agents of the French Government? And since we were nothing of the kind it was obviously impossible to find fault with her for not knowing it. Besides, were we not intimates of Meldrum Strange? And had not she herself been sent by Bonfils to extract from Strange’s files a document considered scandalously anti-French? If Strange was an abominable person, why were we, his self-confessed friends, not equally fit subjects for her genius, forever ready as it was to labor diligently for the sake of the Republic?

  Taxed with interference without orders into an intrigue that she had neglected even to mention to her superiors, she retorted with the most marvelously impudent alibi that even a secret service ever listened to. She hinted — so adroitly that she avoided compromising herself, and yet so convincingly that the thrust went straight home — that the secret service itself had been corrupted by Dorje’s agents, so that she had not felt justified in making a report until she knew to whom it could be made without risk of playing into Dorje’s hands.

  She herself turned cross-examiner. Did Bonfils not know — or had he not at least suspected for two or three years — that someone by the name of Dorje was attempting to destroy civilization in order to get the entire world into his own control? Did he or did he not know it? If he did not, what kind of an espionage officer did he consider himself? If he had known it all along, by what right had he virtually shelved herself, who had never failed him? Why had he not at once sent for her and assigned her to a task for which she was much better fitted than anyone else in the service? And since he had not sent for her, was she not justified in wondering whether he, too, had been won over by Dorje’s agents?

  Bonfils told her why she had been dropped from the list of active agents during the past year or so. “You are too notorious. Too many people recognize you. To employ you is to advertise that we are conducting an investigation.”

  She exploded — ridiculed him — mocked him: “Nevertheless, you have the impudence to tell me that I worked without your knowledge? If I am so obvious to other people, how is it that you say you did not know I had employed myself in this affaire Dorje? Furthermore, was it not you yourself who embraced me and commended me because, in the affaire Habibullah, I acted without waiting for orders? Mon major, you are inconsistent.”

  She put up an equally vivid defence against the Prefect’s charge that she had guilty knowledge of the presence in Marseilles of those strange instruments that did such damage. Had she warned him, he could have captured them before they were distributed and hidden. She accused the Prefect of having interfered and ruined her last chance of discovering what had become of that shipment of “scrap-brass.” She almost blamed him for the warship disaster; she entirely blamed him for the fire at the Prefecture that had destroyed so many valuable records.

  “You, too! Do you dare to say you did not know me? After what has been said by Major Bonfils, have you the effrontery to declare that you did not suspect me of being engaged on an affaire outside your province, in which it would be an impertinence for you to interfere unless invited? Why did you not consult me? Why did you not assure yourself before you came crashing into my delicate plans, with your long nose and your big feet and your drove of idiots whom it pleases your conceit to call detectives?”

  Grim was the only one she spared. She misunderstood Grim. First and last she feared his malice, all the more suspecting it because no trace of it appeared. As a matter of fact, his lack of malice was his greatest strength and weakness; keeping him clear-visioned and able to weigh one set of circumstances with another, misleading many a rash opponent into one rash step too many. But those to whom he had a right to look for support in a tight place left him in the lurch for fear he might desert them. Too many people think that malice is an essential ingredient of courage. Certainly the Princess Baltis thought so, and she was on perpetual watch for it in Grim, undoubtedly believing he possessed a brand of it that would bowl her over should he loose it.

  Me she roasted mercilessly, calling me a keyhole peeper. She insisted that my permanently bloodshot eye was ruined by the draughts from keyholes and that my knowledge of French was picked up in unmentionable places. She demanded to know why she should not have suspected me; and, since flattery is the best weapon to use against all defectives, why she should not have flattered me by pretending to mistake me for Jeemgreem? She roasted Jeff, too. She called him a buffalo — Jeemgreem’s elephant — a monster, tearing out the nails from window-frames — a “Type” who should be showing off his strength for centimes in the streets of Paris. Every word of that abuse was hurled at us with intent to suggest by inference that Grim was a bird of a totally different feather.

  Then she turned again on Bonfils, perfectly aware by that time that if he could find a way to avoid exposing her he intended to do it. Her tongue and her very mercurial mind had probed the situation. Bonfils was not afraid of her, but others were, of whom some were Bonfils’ seniors in the service. Bonfils had hardly hinted at a tenth of one per cent of what he knew; but then, neither had she. And what both of them knew, in addition to numberless dangerous secrets, was that Dorje’s scope was world-wide; he was not in France or even on French territory; no pursuit of him, no check on him was possible without co-operation among many nations, difficult to attain in principle and much more difficult to put in practice. Every possible weapon would have to be used against him. To throw her into the discard might prove fatal to success, as well as disastrous to dozens of people whose secrets she knew. She led her ace, defiantly:

  “Enfin — s’il vous plaît, me mettez aux arrêts!”

  “You insist?” asked Bonfils — coolly enough; he was not easily bluffed into showing his hand.

  “Why not? You accuse me. You insult me. You invade my domicile. You have submitted me to forcible detention in my own chair while you amuse yourse
lves at peep-holes. Then let l’affaire Dorje wait while you prefer proper charges against me — in secret. My improper friends will have the impropriety to disregard the secrecy; but what does it matter who else is implicated, or on whose neck falls the axe, provided Number Seventeen is punished for the crime of having acted without orders from those who had condemned her to inactivity and oblivion, not — no, no, not from jealousy — but because she had served France too often and too well!”

  It was a masterpiece. It would have been a simple matter for the authorities to accuse her of treason and try her in secret. But if, as she suggested, she had friends who would avenge her by revealing scandals, of which every government on earth has plenty that it would be suicidal to make public, then Bonfils was in a predicament. And she was right, too, about the paramount importance of a campaign against Dorje. If Dorje was what he appeared to be, then her own importance could be measured solely by the value of the information she could produce against him, no matter what her own previous complicity might have been. The question was, could she — would she betray Dorje? Was she any longer to be trusted?

  With an eloquent motion of eyes and shoulders Bonfils beckoned the Prefect and Grim outside into the corridor for a consultation leaving Jeff and me to watch the Princess. I was feeling a bit irritated by her remarks about me, so I kept my distance. On the contrary, Jeff seemed to have enjoyed her criticism; he urged her to be seated and himself sat for the first time, facing her near the open window. Jeff is the last man in the world whom one would suspect of delicate intuition, but as a matter of fact he helps Grim far more by his diplomatic skill than by his physical strength and courage, which are sometimes a source of embarrassment. Unerringly he had spotted the lady’s weakness, although I don’t know how. Perhaps his own prodigious loyalty to Grim enabled him to do it, since loyalty — like love between a man and a woman — is a spiritual force that stirs and strengthens understanding.