“If you bring me good information, why, we can do business,” he said; and Peiffer went away.
I was extremely irritated by the whole interview, and could hardly wait for the door to close.
“What knocks me over,” I cried, “is the impertinence of the man. Does he really think that any old yarn like the fifty thousand rifles is going to deceive you?”
Slingsby lit a cigarette.
“Peiffer’s true to type, that’s all,” he answered imperturbably. “They are vain, and vanity makes them think that you will at once believe what they want you to believe. So their deceits are a little crude.” Then a smile broke over his face, and to some tune with which I was unfamiliar he sang softly: “But he’s coming to Gibraltar in the morning.”
“You think he will?”
“I am sure of it.”
“And,” I added doubtfully—it was not my business to criticize—“on conditions he can walk out again?”
Slingsby’s smile became a broad grin.
“His business in Gibraltar, my friend, is not with me. He will not want to meet us any more; as soon as he has done what he came for he will go—or try to go. He thinks we are fools, you see.”
And in the end it seemed almost as though Peiffer was justified of his belief. He crossed the next morning. He went to a hotel of the second class; he slept in the hotel, and next morning he vanished. Suddenly there was no more Peiffer. Peiffer was not. For six hours Peiffer was not; and then at half-past five in the afternoon the telephone bell rang in an office where Slingsby was waiting. He rushed to the instrument.
“Who is it?” he cried, and I saw a wave of relief surge into his face. Peiffer had been caught outside the gates and within a hundred yards of the neutral zone. He had strolled out in the thick of the dockyard workmen going home to Linea in Spain.
“Search him and bring him up here at once,” said Slingsby, and he dropped into his chair and wiped his forehead. “Phew! Thirty seconds more and he might have snapped his fingers at us.” He turned to me. “I shall want a prisoner’s escort here in half an hour.”
I went about that business and returned in time to see Slingsby giving an admirable imitation of a Prussian police official.
“So, Peiffer,” he cried sternly, “you broke your word. Do not deny it. It will be useless.”
The habit of a lifetime asserted itself in Peiffer. He quailed before authority when authority began to bully.
“I did not know I was outside the walls,” he faltered. “I was taking a walk. No one stopped me.”
“So!” Slingsby snorted. “And these, Peiffer—what have you to say of these?”
There were four separate passports which had been found in Peiffer’s pockets. He could be a Dane of Esbjerg, a Swede of Stockholm, a Norwegian of Christiania, or a Dutchman from Amsterdam. All four nationalities were open to Peiffer to select from.
“They provide you with these, no doubt, in your school at Hamburg,” and Slingsby paused to collect his best German. “You are a prisoner of war. Das ist genug,” he cried, and Peiffer climbed to the internment camp.
So far so good. Slingsby had annexed Peiffer, but more important than Peiffer was Peiffer’s little plot, and that he had not got. Nor did the most careful enquiry disclose what Peiffer had done and where he had been during the time when he was not. For six hours Peiffer had been loose in Gibraltar, and Slingsby began to get troubled. He tried to assume the mentality of Peiffer, and so reach his intention, but that did not help. He got out all the reports in which Peiffer’s name was mentioned and read them over again.
I saw him sit back in his chair and remain looking straight in front of him.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, and he turned over the report to me, pointing to a passage. It was written some months before, at Melilla, on the African side of the Mediterranean, and it ran like this:
Peiffer frequents the low houses and cafés, where he spends a good deal of money and sometimes gets drunk. When drunk he gets very arrogant, and has been known to boast that he has been three times in Bordeaux since the war began, and, thanks to his passports, can travel as easily as if the world were at peace. On such occasions he expresses the utmost contempt for neutral nations. I myself have heard him burst out: “Wait until we have settled with our enemies. Then we will deal properly with the neutral nations. They shall explain to us on their knees. Meanwhile,” and he thumped the table, making the glasses rattle, “let them keep quiet and hold their tongues. We shall do what we like in neutral countries.”
I read the passage.
“Do you see that last sentence? ‘We shall do what we like in neutral countries.’ No man ever spoke the mind of his nation better than Peiffer did that night in a squalid café in Melilla.”
Slingsby looked out over the harbour to where the sun was setting on the sierras. He would have given an arm to be sure of what Peiffer had set on foot behind those hills.
“I wonder,” he said uneasily, and from that day he began to sleep badly.
Then came another and a most disquieting phase of the affair. Peiffer began to write letters to Slingsby. He was not comfortable. He was not being treated as an officer should be. He had no amusements, and his food was too plain. Moreover, there were Germans and Austrians up in the camp who turned up their noses at him because their birth was better than his.
“You see what these letters mean?” said Slingsby. “Peiffer wants to be sent away from the Rock.”
“You are reading your own ideas into them,” I replied.
But Slingsby was right. Each letter under its simple and foolish excuses was a prayer for translation to a less dangerous place. For as the days passed and no answer was vouchsafed, the prayer became a real cry of fear.
“I claim to be sent to England without any delay. I must be sent,” he wrote frankly and frantically.
Slingsby set his teeth with a grim satisfaction.
“No, my friend, you shall stay while the danger lasts. If it’s a year, if you are alone in the camp, still you shall stay. The horrors you have planned you shall share with every man, woman, and child in the town.”
We were in this horrible and strange predicament. The whole colony was menaced, and from the Lines to Europa Point only two men knew of the peril. Of those two, one, in an office down by the harbour, ceaselessly and vainly, with a dreadful anxiety, asked “When?” The other, the prisoner, knew the very hour and minute of the catastrophe, and waited for it with the sinking fear of a criminal awaiting the fixed moment of his execution.
Thus another week passed.
Slingsby became a thing of broken nerves. If you shut the door noisily he cursed; if you came in noiselessly he cursed yet louder, and one evening he reached the stage when the sunset gun made him jump.
“That’s enough,” I said sternly. “Today is Saturday. Tomorrow we borrow the car”—there is only one worth talking about on the Rock—“and we drive out.”
“I can’t do it,” he cried.
I continued:
“We will lunch somewhere by the road, and we will go on to the country house of the Claytons, who will give us tea. Then in the afternoon we will return.”
Slingsby hesitated. It is curious to remember on how small a matter so much depended. I believe he would have refused, but at that moment the sunset gun went off and he jumped out of his chair.
“Yes, I am fairly rocky,” he admitted. “I will take a day off.”
I borrowed the car, and we set off and lunched according to our programme. It was perhaps half an hour afterwards when we were going slowly over a remarkably bad road. A powerful car, driven at a furious pace, rushed round a corner towards us, swayed, lurched, and swept past us with a couple of inches to spare, whilst a young man seated at the wheel shouted a greeting and waved his hand.
“Who the dickens was that?” I asked.
>
“I know,” replied Slingsby. “It’s Morano. He’s a count, and will be a marquis and no end of a swell if he doesn’t get killed motoring. Which, after all, seems likely.”
I thought no more of the man until his name cropped up whilst we were sitting at tea on the Claytons’ veranda.
“We passed Morano,” said Slingsby. And Mrs. Clayton said with some pride—she was a pretty, kindly woman, but she rather affected the Spanish nobility:
“He lunched with us today. You know he is staying in Gibraltar.”
“Yes, I know that,” said Slingsby. “For I met him a little time ago. He wanted to know if there was a good Government launch for sale.”
Mrs. Clayton raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“A launch? Surely you are wrong. He is devoting himself to aviation.”
“Is he?” said Slingsby, and a curious look flickered for a moment over his face.
We left the house half an hour afterwards, and as soon as we were out of sight of it Slingsby opened his hand. He was holding a visiting card.
“I stole this off the hall table,” he said. “Mrs. Clayton will never forgive me. Just look at it.”
His face had become extraordinarily grave. The card was Morano’s, and it was engraved after the Spanish custom. In Spain, when a woman marries she does not lose her name. She may be in appearance more subject to her husband than the women of other countries, though you will find many good judges to tell you that women rule Spain. In any case her name is not lost in that of her husband; the children will bear it as well as their father’s, and will have it printed on their cards. Thus, Mr. Jones will call on you, but on the card he leaves he will be styled:
MR. JONES AND ROBINSON,
if Robinson happens to be his mother’s name, and if you are scrupulous in your etiquette you will so address him.
Now, on the card which Slingsby had stolen, the Count Morano was described:
MORANO Y GOLTZ.
“I see,” I replied. “Morano had a German mother.”
I was interested. There might be nothing in it, of course. A noble of Spain might have a German mother and still not intrigue for the Germans against the owners of Gibraltar. But no sane man would take a bet about it.
“The point is,” said Slingsby, “I am pretty sure that is not the card which he sent in to me when he came to ask about a launch. We will go straight to the office and make sure.”
By the time we got there we were both somewhat excited, and we searched feverishly in the drawers of Slingsby’s writing-table.
“I shouldn’t be such an ass as to throw it away,” he said, turning over his letters. “No! Here it is!” and a sharp exclamation burst from his lips.
“Look!”
He laid the card he had stolen side by side with the card which he had just found, and between the two there was a difference—to both of us a veritable world of difference. For from the second card the “y Goltz,” the evidence that Morano was half-German, had disappeared.
“And it’s not engraved,” said Slingsby, bending down over the table. “It’s just printed—printed in order to mislead us.”
Slingsby sat down in his chair. A great hope was bringing the life back to his tired face, but he would not give the reins to his hope.
“Let us go slow,” he said, warned by the experience of a hundred disappointments. “Let us see how it works out. Morano comes to Gibraltar and makes a prolonged stay in a hotel. Not being a fool, he is aware that I know who is in Gibraltar and who is not. Therefore he visits me with a plausible excuse for being in Gibraltar. But he takes the precaution to have this card specially printed. Why, if he is playing straight? He pretends he wants a launch, but he is really devoting himself to aviation. Is it possible that the Count Morano, not forgetting Goltz, knows exactly how the good Peiffer spent the six hours we can’t account for, and what his little plan is?”
I sprang up. It did seem that Slingsby was getting at last to the heart of Peiffer’s secret.
“We will now take steps,” said Slingsby, and telegrams began to fly over the wires. In three days’ time the answers trickled in.
An agent of Morano’s had bought a German aeroplane in Lisbon. A German aviator was actually at the hotel there. Slingsby struck the table with his fist.
“What a fool I am!” he cried. “Give me a newspaper.”
I handed him one of that morning’s date. Slingsby turned it feverishly over, searching down the columns of the provincial news until he came to the heading “Portugal.”
“Here it is!” he cried, and he read aloud. “ ‘The great feature of the Festival week this year will be, of course, the aviation race from Villa Real to Seville. Amongst those who have entered machines is the Count Morano y Goltz.’ ”
He leaned back and lit a cigarette.
“We have got it! Morano’s machine, driven by the German aviator, rises from the aerodrome at Villa Real in Portugal with the others, heads for Seville, drops behind, turns and makes a bee-line for the Rock, Peiffer having already arranged with Morano for signals to be made where bombs should be dropped. When is the race to be?”
I took the newspaper.
“Ten days from now.”
“Good!”
Once more the telegrams began to fly. A week later Slingsby told me the result.
“Owing to unforeseen difficulties, the Festival committee at Villa Real has reorganized its arrangements, and there will be no aviation race. Oh, they’ll do what they like in neutral countries, will they? But Peiffer shan’t know,” he added, with a grin. “Peiffer shall eat of his own frightfulness.”
THE DONVERS CASE
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
KNOWN AS “The Prince of Storytellers” to the reading public (encouraged by his publishers), Edward Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was a prolific author who gave his readers exactly what they hoped for: thrilling, fast-paced stories that gave them a glimpse of the lives of the rich and famous. He was the right man for the job, as his bestselling books made him both fabulously rich and happy to enjoy every shilling of that wealth.
In addition to his one hundred fifteen novels (including five under the pseudonym Anthony Partridge), Oppenheim produced hundreds of short stories that were published in top magazines for top dollar, all of them being collected in forty-four volumes. His staggering output was achieved by dictating to a secretary (whom he then allowed to edit his work and send it off, commonly not bothering to review it)—but not past the cocktail hour, which frequently meant a party for a hundred people or more aboard the yacht on which he lived.
After leaving school at an early age to work in his father’s leather business, he worked all day and then wrote until late at night. He had thirty books published by the time he turned forty and sold the business to devote full time to writing novels of international intrigue, mystery, and crime. The plot-driven stories feature beautiful, glamorous, mainly vacuous young women, while the men are often heroic, though there is little to distinguish them from one another.
Oppenheim’s most important book is The Great Impersonation (1920), a Haycraft-Queen cornerstone title in which a disgraced English aristocrat overcomes his alcoholism when England needs him to outwit the Germans as the First World War looms. It was filmed three times, all with the same title as the book: it was released in 1921, as a silent starring James Kirkwood; in 1935, starring Edmund Lowe and Valerie Hobson; and in 1942, updating the story line to focus on events leading to World War II, starring Ralph Bellamy and Evelyn Ankers.
In addition to his international espionage stories, Oppenheim was taken with roguery and produced novels and short stories that featured those who stood just on the other side of the law. Among the many crooks whose adventures he recounted were stories about Joseph P. Cray, an utterly charming gentleman who managed to steal in order to help a friend or to line his pock
ets at the expense of those who deserved to have their wallets lightened.
“The Donvers Case” was originally published in the November 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine; it was first collected in The Adventures of Mr. Joseph P. Cray (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1925).
THE DONVERS CASE
E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
I
THE LONG CONTINENTAL train drew slowly into Victoria Station, and through a long vista of wide-flung doors a heterogeneous stream of demobilised soldiers, nurses, “Wrafs,” and other of the picturesque accompaniments of a concluded war, flowed out on to the platform. The majority lingered about to exchange greetings with friends and to search for their luggage. Not so Mr. Joseph P. Cray. Before the train had come to a standstill, he was on his way to the barrier.
“Luggage, sir?” inquired a porter, attracted by the benevolent appearance of this robust-looking, middle-aged gentleman in the uniform of the American Y.M.C.A.
“Checked my baggage right through,” Mr. Cray replied, without slackening speed. “What I need is a taxi. What you need is five shillings. Let’s get together.”
Whether he was serving a lunatic or not, the five shillings was good money and the porter earned it. In exactly two minutes after the arrival of the train, Mr. Cray was on his way to the Milan Hotel. The streets were not overcrowded. The driver had seen the passing of that munificent tip and gathered that his fare was in a hurry. They reached the Milan in exactly nine minutes. Even then Mr. Cray had the strained appearance of a man looking into futurity.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 16
