Four electric radiators were burning. The room was hot and heavy, and the taint of it caught his throat, as it had caught the throat of the Danish servant. He put on all the lights – and they were many – and then began his tour.
There were two lines of shelves, wide apart, and each supporting a number of boxes, some of which were wrapped in baize, some of which, however, were open to view. All had glass fronts, all had steel tops with tiny air-holes, and in each there coiled, in its bed of wool or straw, according to its requirements, one or two snakes. There were cobras, puff-adders, two rattlesnakes, seemingly dead, but, as he guessed, asleep; there was a South American fer-de-lance, that most unpleasant representative of his species; there were little coral snakes, and, in one long box, a whole nest of queer little things that looked like tiny yellow lobsters, but which he knew as scorpions.
He was lifting a baize cover when: ‘Don’t move, my friend! I think I can promise you more intimate knowledge of our little family.’
Leon turned slowly, his hands extended. Death was behind him, remorseless, unhesitating. To drop his hand to his pocket would have been the end for him – he had that peculiar instinct which senses sincerity, and when Dr Oberzohn gave him his instructions he had no doubt whatever that his threat was backed by the will to execute.
Oberzohn stood there, and a little behind him, white-faced, open-eyed with fear, Mirabelle Leicester.
Digby – where was he? He had left him in the grounds.
The doctor was examining the broken door and grunted his annoyance.
‘I fear my plan will not be good,’ he said, ‘which was to lock you in this room and break all those glasses, so that you might become better acquainted with the Quiet People. That is not to be. Instead, march!’
What did he intend? Leon strolled out nonchalantly, but Oberzohn kept his distance, his eyes glued upon those sensitive hands that could move so quickly and jerk and fire a gun in one motion.
‘Stop!’
Leon halted, facing the open front door and the steps.
‘You will remember my sainted brother, Señor Gonsalez, and of the great loss which the world suffered when he was so vilely murdered?’
Leon stood without a quiver. Presently the man would shoot. At any second a bullet might come crashing on its fatal errand. This was a queer way to finish so full a life. He knew it was coming, had only one regret; that this shaken girl should be called upon to witness such a brutal thing. He wanted to say goodbye to her, but was afraid of frightening her.
‘You remember that so sainted brother?’ Oberzohn’s voice was raucous with fury. Ahead of him the light fell upon a face.
‘Digby! Stay where you are!’ shouted Leon.
The sound of the explosion made him jump. He saw the brickwork above the doorway splinter, heard a little scuffle, and turned, gun in hand. Oberzohn had pulled the girl in front of him so that she afforded a complete cover: under her arm he held his pistol.
‘Run!’ she screamed.
He hesitated a second. Again the pistol exploded and a bullet ricochetted from the door. Leon could not fire. Oberzohn so crouched that nothing but a trick shot could miss the girl and hit him. And then, as the doctor shook free the hand that gripped his wrist, he leapt down the steps and into the darkness. Another second and the door slammed. He heard the thrust of the bolts and a clang as the great iron bar fell into its place. Somehow he had a feeling as of a citadel door being closed against him.
* * *
Dr Oberzohn had returned unobserved, though the night was clear. Passing through the open water-gate he had tied up to the little quay and landed his unwilling passenger. Digby, according to instructions, had been making a careful circuit of the property, and at the moment was as far away from the barge as it was humanly possible to be. Unchallenged, the doctor had worked his way back to the house. The light in the hall warned him that somebody was there. How many? He could not guess.
‘Take off your shoes,’ he growled in Mirabelle’s ear, and she obeyed.
Whatever happened, he must not lose touch of her, or give her an opportunity to escape. Still grasping her arm with one hand and his long Mauser pistol in the other, he went softly up the steps, got into the hall and listened, locating the intruder instantly.
It all happened so quickly that Mirabelle could remember nothing except the desperate lunge she made to knock up the pistol that had covered the spine of Leon Gonsalez. She stood dumbly by, watching this horrible old man fasten the heavy door, and obediently preceded him from room to room. She saw the long cases in the hot room and shrank back. And then began a complete tour of the house. There were still shutters to be fastened, peep-holes to be opened up. He screwed up the shutters of the servants’ room, and then, with a hammer, broke the thumb-piece short.
‘You will stay here,’ he said. ‘I do not know what they will do. Perhaps they will shoot. I also am a shooter!’
Not satisfied with the lock that fastened her door, he went into his workshop, found a staple, hook and padlock, and spent the greater part of an hour fixing this additional security. At last he had finished, and could put the situation in front of four very interested men.
He unlocked the door of the concrete annexe and called the crestfallen gunmen forth, and in a very few words explained the situation and their danger.
‘For every one of you the English police hold warrants,’ he said. ‘I do not bluff, I know. This afternoon I was visited by the police. I tell you I do not bluff you – me they cannot touch, because they know nothing, can prove nothing. At most I shall go to prison for a few years, but with you it is different.’
‘Are they waiting outside?’ asked one suspiciously. ‘Because, if they are, we’d better move quick.’
‘You do not move, quick or slow,’ said Oberzohn. ‘To go out from here means certain imprisonment for you all. To stay, if you follow my plan, means that every one of you may go free and with money.’
‘What’s the idea?’ asked Cuccini. ‘Are you going to fight them?’
‘Sure I am going to fight them,’ nodded Oberzohn. ‘That is my scheme. I have the young miss upstairs; they will not wish to do her any harm. I intend to defend this house.’
‘Do you mean you’re going to hold it?’ asked one of the staggered men.
‘I will hold it until they are tired, and make terms.’
Cuccini was biting his nails nervously.
‘Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, boss,’ he growled. ‘I’ve got an idea you’ve roped us into this.’
‘You may rope yourself out of it!’ snapped Oberzohn. ‘There is the door – go if you wish. There are police there; make terms with them. A few days ago you were in trouble, my friend. Who saved you? The doctor Oberzohn. There is life imprisonment for every one of you, and I can hold this house myself. Stay with me, and I will give you a fortune greater than any you have dreamt about. And, more than this, at the end you shall be free.’
‘Where’s Gurther?’
‘He has been killed – by accident.’ Oberzohn’s face was working furiously. ‘By accident he died,’ he said, and told the truth unconvincingly. ‘There is nothing now to do but to make a decision.’
Cuccini and his friends consulted in a whisper.
‘What do we get for our share?’ he asked, and Oberzohn mentioned a sum which staggered them.
‘I speak the truth,’ he said. ‘In two days I shall have a gold-mine worth millions.’
The habit of frankness was on him, and he told them the story of the golden hill without reservations. His agents at Lisbon had already obtained from the Ministry an option upon the land and its mineral rights. As the clock struck twelve on June 14, the goldfield of Biskara automatically passed into his possession.
‘On one side you have certain imprisonment, on the other you have great moneys a
nd happiness.’
‘How long will we have to stay here?’ asked Cuccini.
‘I have food for a month, even milk. They will not cut the water because of the girl. For the same reason they will not blow in the door.’
Again they had a hasty consultation and made their decision.
‘All right, boss, we’ll stay. But we want that share-out put into writing.’
‘To my study,’ said Oberzohn promptly, ‘march!’
He was half-way through writing the document when there came a thunderous knock on the door and he got up, signalling for silence. Tiptoeing along the passage, he came to the door.
‘Yes – who is that?’ he asked.
‘Open, in the name of the law!’ said a voice, and he recognized Meadows. ‘I have a warrant for your arrest, and if necessary the door will be broken in.’
‘So!’ said Oberzohn, dropped the muzzle of his pistol until it rested on the edge of the little letter-slit and fired twice.
Chapter 33
The siege
Bur Meadows had already been warned to keep clear of the letter-box, and the bullets eventually reached one of the railway viaducts, to the embarrassment of a road ganger who happened to be almost in the line of fire.
Meadows slipped down the steps to cover. Inside the wire fence a dozen policemen were waiting. ‘Sergeant, go back to the station in the police car and bring arms,’ he said. ‘This is going to be a long job.’
Gonsalez had made a very careful reconnaissance of the ground, and from the first had recognized the difficulties which lay ahead of the attacking party. The wall rose sheer without any break; such windows as were within reach were heavily shuttered; and even the higher windows, he guessed, had been covered. The important problem in his mind was to locate the room in which the girl was imprisoned, and making a mental review of the house, he decided that she was either in the servants’ apartment or in that which had held Gurther. By the light of the lantern he made a rapid sketch plan of the floors he had visited.
Meadows had gone away to telephone to police headquarters. He had decided to re-establish telephone connection with the doctor, and when this was done, he called the house and Oberzohn’s voice answered him.
The colloquy was short and unsatisfactory. The terms which the doctor offered were such as no self-respecting Government could accept. Immunity for himself and his companions (he insisted so strongly upon this latter offer that Meadows guessed, accurately, that the gang were standing around the instrument).
‘I don’t want your men at all. So far as I am concerned, they can go free,’ said Meadows. ‘Ask one of them to speak on the ’phone.’
‘Oh, indeed, no,’ said Oberzohn. ‘It is ridiculous to ask me that.’
He hung up at this point and explained to the listening men that the police had offered him freedom if he would surrender the gang.
‘As I already told you,’ he said in conclusion, ‘that is not the way of Dr Oberzohn. I will gain nothing at the expense of my friends.’
A little later, when Cuccini crept into the room to call police head-quarters and confirm this story of the doctor, he found that not only had the wire been cut, but a yard of the flex had been removed. Dr Oberzohn was taking no risks.
The night passed without any further incident. Police reserves were pouring into the neighbourhood; the grounds had been isolated, and even the traffic of barges up and down the canal prohibited. The late editions of the morning newspapers had a heavily head-lined paragraph about the siege of a house in the New Cross area, and when the first reporters arrived a fringe of sightseers had already gathered at every police barrier. Later, special editions, with fuller details, begun to roll out of Fleet Street; the crowd grew in density, and a high official from Scotland Yard, arriving soon after nine, ordered a further area to be cleared, and with some difficulty the solid wedge of humanity at the end of Hangman’s Lane was slowly pushed back until the house was invisible to them. Even here, a passageway was kept for police cars and only holders of passes were allowed to come within the prohibited area.
The three men, with the police chief, had taken up their head-quarters in the factory, from which the body of Gurther had been removed in the night. The Deputy Commissioner, who came on the spot at nine and examined the dead snakes, was something of a herpetologist, and pronounced them to be veritable fers-de-lance, a view from which Poiccart differed.
‘They are a species of African tree snakes that the natives call mamba. There are two, a black and a green. Both of these are the black type.’
‘The Zoo mamba?’ said the official, remembering the sensational disappearance of a deadly snake which had preceded the first of the snake mysteries.
‘You will probably find the bones of the Zoo mamba in some mole run in Regent’s Park – he must have been frozen to death the night of his escape,’ said Poiccart. ‘It was absolutely impossible that at that temperature he could live. I have made a very careful inspection of the land, and adjacent to the Zoological Gardens is a big stretch of earth which is honeycombed by moles. No, this was imported, and the rest of his menagerie was imported.’
The police chief shook his head.
‘Still, I’m not convinced that a snake could have been responsible for these deaths,’ he said, and went over the ground so often covered.
The three listened in polite silence, and offered no suggestion.
The morning brought news of Washington’s arrival in Lisbon. He had left the train at Irun, Leon’s agent in Madrid having secured a relay of aeroplanes, and the journey from Irun to Lisbon had been completed in a few hours. He was now on his way back.
‘If he makes the connections he will be here tonight,’ he told Manfred. ‘I rather think he will be a very useful recruit to our forces.’
‘You’re thinking of the snakes in the house?’
Leon nodded.
‘I know Oberzohn,’ he said simply, and George Manfred thought of the girl, and knew the unspoken fears of his friend were justified.
The night had not been an idle one for Oberzohn and his companions. With the first light of dawn they had mounted to the roof, and, under his direction, the gunmen had dismantled the four sheds which stood at each corner of the parapet. Unused to the handling of such heavy metal, the remnants of the Old Guard gazed in awe upon the tarnished jackets of the Maxim guns that were revealed.
Oberzohn understood the mechanism of the machines so thoroughly that in half an hour he had taught his crew the method of handling and sighting. In the larger shed was a collapsible tripod, which was put together, and on this he mounted a small but powerful searchlight and connected it up with one of the plugs in the roof.
He pointed to them the three approaches to the house: the open railway arches and the long lane, at the end of which the crowd at that moment was beginning to gather.
‘From only these places can the ground be approached,’ he said, ‘and my little quick-firers cover them!’
Just before eleven there came down Hangman’s Lane, drawn by a motor tractor, a long tree-trunk, suspended about the middle by chains, and Oberzohn, examining it carefully through his field-glasses, realized that no door in the world could stand against the attack of that battering-ram. He took up one of the dozen rifles that lay on the floor, sighted it carefully, resting his elbow on the parapet, and fired.
He saw the helmet of a policeman shoot away from the head of the astonished man, and fired again. This time he was more successful, for a policeman who was directing the course of the tractor crumpled up and fell in a heap.
A shrill whistle blew; the policemen ran to cover, leaving the machine unattended. Again he fired, this time at the driver of the tractor. He saw the man scramble down from his seat and run for the shelter of the fence.
A quarter of an hour passed without any sign of activity on the pa
rt of his enemies, and then eight men, armed with rifles, came racing across the ground towards the wire barrier. Oberzohn dropped his rifle, and, taking a grip of the first machine-gun in his hand, sighted it quickly. The staccato patter of the Maxim awakened the echoes. One man dropped; the line wavered. Again the shrill whistle, and they broke for cover, dragging their wounded companion with them.
‘I was afraid of that,’ said Leon, biting his knuckles – sure evidence of his perturbation.
He had put a ladder against the wall of the factory, and now he climbed up on to the shaky roof and focused his glasses.
‘There’s another Maxim on this side,’ he shouted down. And then, as he saw a man’s head moving above the parapet, he jerked up his pistol and fired. He saw the stone splinters fly up and knew that it was not bad practice at four hundred yards. The shot had a double effect; it made the defenders cautious and aroused in them the necessary quantity of resentment.
He was hardly down before there was a splutter from the roof, and the whine and snap of machine-gun bullets; one slate tile shivered and its splinters leapt high in the air and dropped beside his hand.
The presence of the girl was the only complication. Without her, the end of Oberzohn and his companions was inevitable. Nobody realized this better than the doctor, eating a huge ham sandwich in the shelter of the parapet – an unusual luxury, for he ate few solids.
‘This will be very shocking for our friends of Curzon Street,’ he said. ‘At this moment they bite their hands in despair.’ (He was nearly right here.)
He peeped over the parapet. There was no policeman in sight. Even the trains that had roared at regular intervals along the viaduct had ceased to run, traffic being diverted to another route.
At half-past twelve, looking through a peep-hole, he saw a long yellow line of men coming down Hangman’s Lane, keeping to the shelter of the fence.
The Complete Four Just Men Page 96
