“Naturally,” Fawley replied. “Anyone who takes an interest in European politics must have heard of Adolf Krust. Come in and sit down, sir.”
The visitor shook hands, but hesitated.
“This is not a formal visit,” he said. “I ventured to look in to ask if you would care to play golf with me to-day. I have heard of you from a mutual friend, besides this letter of introduction of which I spoke.”
“That is quite all right,” Fawley assured him. “You have had your coffee, I suppose?”
“At seven o’clock,” the other answered. “What I wished to explain was that I am not alone. My two nieces are with me. It is permitted to ask them to enter?”
“By all means,” Fawley assented. “I hope they will excuse my rather unconventional attire.”
“They are unconventional themselves,” Krust declared. “Nina!”
Two young women entered at once. They wore the correct tweed clothes of the feminine golfer, but they rather gave one the impression of being dressed for a scene in a musical comedy. Their bérets were almost too perfect, and the delicacy of their complexions could scarcely have survived a strenuous outdoor life. They were, as a matter of fact, exceedingly pretty girls.
“Let me present Major Fawley,” Krust said, waving his hand. “Miss Nina Heldersturm—Miss Greta Müller.”
Fawley bowed, shook hands with the young women, apologised for his costume and disposed of them upon a divan.
“We owe you apologies,” Krust went on, “for descending upon you like this, but the fact of it is our rooms are all upon this floor. I ventured—”
“Not another word, please,” Fawley begged. “I am very glad indeed to meet you, Mr. Krust, and your charming nieces.”
“We go to golf,” Krust declared. “These young ladies are too frivolous for the pursuit. I myself am a serious golfer. It has been said of me that I take my nieces with me to distract my opponents!”
“We never say a word,” one of the young ladies protested.
“We really have very good golf manners,” the other put in. “If we are allowed to walk round we never speak upon the stroke, we never stand in anyone’s line, and we always say ‘hard luck’ when anyone misses a putt.”
“You have been well trained,” Fawley approved.
“To serious conversation they are deaf,” Krust confided. “They have not a serious thought in their brains. How could it be otherwise? They are Bohemians. Nina there calls herself an artist. She paints passably, but she is lazy. Greta has small parts at the Winter Gardens. Just now we are all in the same position. We are out of harness. Our worthy President has put me temporarily upon the shelf. Nina is waiting for a contract and Greta has no engagements until the summer. We were on our way to Italy—as perhaps you know.”
Krust’s suddenly wide-opened eyes, his quick lightning-like glance at Fawley, almost took the latter aback.
“I had no idea of the fact,” he answered.
“I wish to go to Rome. It was my great desire to arrive there yesterday. A mutual friend of ours, however, said ‘No.’ A politician cannot travel incognito. My business, it seems, must be done at second hand.”
“It is,” Fawley ventured, “the penalty of being well known.”
Krust stroked his smooth chin. His eyes were still upon Fawley.
“What our friend lacks,” he observed, “is audacity. If it is dangerous for me to be in a certain place I call for the photographers and the journalists. I announce my intention of going there. I permit a picture of myself upon the railway platform. What a man is willing to tell to the whole world, the public say, can lead nowhere. One succeeds better in this world by bluff than by subtlety.”
“Are you going to play golf with this talkative old gentleman?” Greta asked, smiling at Fawley in heavenly fashion. “We love him, but we are a little tired of him. We should like a change. We should like to walk round with you both, and we promise that our behaviour shall be perfect.”
Fawley reflected for a moment. He had the air of a man briefly weighing up the question of an unimportant engagement, but actually his mind had darted backwards to the seventh gallery in the mountains. Step by step he traced his descent. He considered the matter of the changed cars—the ancient Ford lying at the bottom of the precipice, his Lancia released from its place of hiding in a desolate spot into which he had clambered in the murky twilight after dawn. His change of clothes in a wayside barn. The bundle which lay at the bottom of a river-bed in the valley. Civilian detectives perhaps might have had a chance of tracing that intruder from the hidden galleries, but not military police. If he crossed the frontier now into, say, Switzerland or Germany, he would be weeks ahead of the time and only a trivial part of his task accomplished. The decision which he had intended to take after more leisurely reflection he arrived at now in a matter of seconds.
“If you will wait while I get into some clothes and see my coiffeur, I shall be delighted,” he agreed.
Greta flashed at him a little smile of content which left him pondering. Krust picked up his hat and glanced at his watch.
“At eleven o’clock,” he pronounced, “we will meet you in the bar below. Rudolf shall mix us an Americano before we start. There is no need for you to bring a car. The thing I have hired here is a perfect omnibus and will take us all.”
“Where do we play?” Fawley asked.
“It is a fine morning,” the other pointed out. “The glass is going up. The sun is shining. I will telephone to Mont Agel. If play is possible there they will tell me. If not, we will go to Cagnes.”
“In the bar at eleven o’clock,” Fawley repeated as he showed them out.
Fawley was an absent-minded man that morning. When he submitted himself to the ministrations of the coiffeur and valet his thoughts travelled backwards to his interview with Berati, and travelled forwards exploring the many by-ways of the curious enterprise to which he had committed himself. Krust occupied the principal figure in his reflections. With the papers full of dramatic stories day by day of the political struggle which seemed to be tearing out the heart of a great country, here was one of her principal and most ambitious citizens, with an entourage of frivolity, playing golf on the Riviera. Supposing it were true, as he had hinted, that his presence was due to a desire to visit Berati, why had Berati gone so far as to refuse to see him—a man who might, if chance favoured him, become the ruler of his country? Berati had known of his presence here, had even advised Fawley to cultivate his acquaintance.
“Do you know the gentleman who was in here when you arrived—Monsieur Krust?” he asked his coiffeur abruptly.
The man leaned forward confidentially.
“I shave him every morning, sir,” he announced. “A very great German statesman and a millionaire. They say he could have been President if Hindenburg had retired. Everyone is wondering what he is doing here with things in such a turmoil at home.”
“He seems to have good taste in his travelling companions,” Fawley observed.
The coiffeur coughed discreetly.
“His nieces, sir. Charming young ladies. Very popular, too, although the old gentleman seldom lets them out of his sight. My wife,” the man went on, dropping his voice a little, “was brought up in Germany. She is German, in fact. She knows the family quite well. She does not seem to remember these young ladies, however.”
“I wonder how long he is staying,” Fawley meditated.
“Only yesterday morning,” the man confided, “he told me that he was waiting for news from home which might come at any moment. He is rung up every morning from Germany. He brought his own private telephone instrument and had it fitted here. He has spoken to Rome once or twice, too. It is my belief, sir, that he is up to some game here. From what I can make out by the papers he is just as well out of Germany while things are in this mess. He has plenty working for him there.”
�
�Perhaps you are right,” Fawley observed indifferently. “I only read the papers at intervals, but it seemed to me that he had a party there, and to be rather an odd thing for him to be so far away with the elections coming on…. Just a snip on the left hand side, Ernest,” Fawley went on, glancing into the mirror.
“The usual time to-night, sir?” the man asked, stepping back to observe his handiwork.
His customer nodded. For several moments after the coiffeur had left him he remained in his chair glancing into the mirror. He was utterly free from vanity and his inspection of himself was purely impersonal. Something to thank his ancestry for, he reflected. No one, to look at him, would believe for a moment the story of his last night’s adventures, would believe that he had been for hours in peril of his life, in danger of a chance bullet, in danger of his back to a wall and a dozen bullets concerning which there would be no chance whatever, in danger of broken limbs or a broken neck, committing his body to the perils of the gorges and precipices with only a few feet between him and eternity. There were lines upon his healthy, slightly sunburnt face with its firmly chiselled features and bright hard eyes, but they were the lines of experiences which had failed to age. They were the lines turning slightly upwards from his mouth, the fainter ones at the corners of his eyes, the single furrow across his forehead. Life and his forebears had been kind to him. If he failed in this—the greatest enterprise of his life—it would not be his health or his nerve that would play him false. The turn of the wheel against him might do it…. Below him the people were streaming into the Casino. He smiled thoughtfully as he reflected that amongst these worshippers of the world-powerful false goddess he was the one man of whom a famous American diplomat, praising his work, had declared—Fawley never leaves anything to chance.
The valet put his head in at the door.
“Your bath is ready, sir,” he announced respectfully.
Chapter X
Several minor surprises were in store for Fawley that morning. On the first tee, having to confess to a handicap of two at St. Andrews, and Krust speaking of a nebulous twenty, he offered his opponent a stroke a hole, which was enthusiastically accepted. Fawley, who had an easy and graceful swing, cut his first drive slightly, but still lay two hundred yards down the course a little to the left-hand side. Krust, wielding a driver with an enormous head, took up the most extraordinary posture. He stood with both feet planted upon the ground and he moved on to his toes and back on to his heels once or twice as though to be sure that his stance was rigid. After that he drew the club head back like lightning, lifted it barely past his waist and, without moving either foot from the ground in the slightest degree and with only the smallest attempt at a pivot, drove the ball steadily down the course to within twenty yards of Fawley’s. The latter tried to resist a smile.
“Does Mr. Krust do that every time?” he asked Greta, who had attached herself to his side.
She nodded.
“And you need not smile about it,” she enjoined. “You wait till the eighteenth green.”
For eleven holes Krust played the golf of an automatic but clumsy machine. Only once did he lift his left heel from the ground and then he almost missed the ball altogether. The rest of the time he played every shot, transforming himself into a steady and immovable pillar and simply supplying all the force necessary with his arms and wrists. At the eleventh Fawley, who was two down, paused to look at the view. They all stood on the raised tee and gazed eastwards. The sting from the snow-capped mountains gave just that peculiar tang to the air which seems to supply the alcohol of life. Facing them was a point where the mountains dropped to the sea and the hillside towns and villages boasted their shelf of pasture land above the fertile valleys. Fawley turned towards the north. It was like a dream to remember that less than eleven hours ago he was committing his body to the mercies of those seemingly endless slopes, clutching at tree stumps, partially embedded rocks, clawing even at the ground to brake his progress.
“The frontier over that way,” Krust remarked cheerfully.
“What? Into Italy?” Greta demanded.
“Into Italy,” Fawley replied. “A strange but not altogether barbarous country. Have you ever visited it?”
She indulged in a little grimace.
“Don’t try to be superior, please,” she begged. “Americans and English people are always like that. I studied in Milan for two years.”
“I was only chaffing, of course,” Fawley apologised.
“And I,” Nina confided, tugging at Krust’s arm, “have worked in Florence. This dear uncle of mine sent me there.”
A warning shout from behind sent them on to the tee. In due course the match was finished and Fawley tasted the sweets of defeat.
“I think,” he told his companion good-humouredly, “that you are the most remarkable golfer I have ever seen.”
Krust smiled all over his face.
“With a figure like mine,” he demanded, “what would you do? I have watched others. I have seen how little the body counts for. Only the arms and wrists. I turn my body into a monument. I never move my head or my feet. If I do I fail. It is an idea—yes? All the same it is not a great amusement. I get stiff with the monotony of playing. I miss the exercise of twisting my body. Now, you pay me the price of a ball and I stand drinks for everybody and lunch to follow.”
“The loser pays for lunch,” Fawley declared cheerfully. “I accept the cocktails, warning you that I am going to drink two.”
“And I also,” Greta remarked. “I must console myself for my partner’s defeat!”
Luncheon was a pleasant meal. They sat in the bald, undecorated restaurant with its high windows, out of which they seemed in incredibly close touch with the glorious panorama of snow-capped hills rolling away to the mists.
“There is no worse golf course in the world,” Krust declared enthusiastically, “but there is none set in more beautiful surroundings. My heart is heavy these days, but the air here makes me feel like a boy. I make of life a failure—I come here with the disappointed cry of the people I love in my ears and I can forget.”
“We help,” Nina pleaded softly, laying her hand upon his sleeve.
“Yes, you help,” he admitted, with a curiously clouded look in his blue eyes. “Youth can always help middle age. Still, it remains a terrible thing for a man of action to remain idle. Would it break your hearts, my two little beams of sunshine, if we packed our trunks and sailed away northwards?”
“It would break mine,” Greta declared, touching Fawley’s hand as though by accident.
“And mine,” Nina echoed.
That was the last of serious conversation until they descended, some short time after luncheon, into the Principality. In the hall of the hotel Fawley handed his golf clubs to the porter and took his leave somewhat abruptly. He had scarcely reached his room, however, before there was a knock at the door. Krust entered. Fawley welcomed him a little grudgingly.
“Sorry if I hurried away,” he apologised, “but I really have work to do.”
“Five minutes,” Krust begged. “I understand something of your profession, Major Fawley. I passed some time in our own Foreign Office. For the moment, though, it happens that I must disregard it. I have not the temperament that brooks too long delay. Answer me, please. Our friend in Rome spoke to you of my presence here? Did he give you any message, any word as to his decision?”
“None whatever,” Fawley replied cautiously. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what you are talking about.”
A flaming light shone for a moment in the cold blue eyes.
“That is Berati—the Italian of him—the oversubtlety! The world is ours if he will make up his mind, and he hesitates between me—who have more real power in Germany than any other man—and one who must be nameless even between us, but to whom if he leaned our whole great scheme would go ‘pop’ like an exploded shell. Were you to mak
e reports upon me? To give an opinion of my capacity?”
“I had other work to do here,” Fawley said calmly. “I was simply told to cultivate your acquaintance. The rest I thought would come later.”
“It may come too late,” Krust declared. “Berati cannot trifle and twiddle his thumbs for ever. Listen, Major Fawley. How much do you know of what is on the carpet?”
“Something,” Fawley admitted. “Broad ideas. That’s all. No details. Nothing certain. I am working from hand to mouth.”
“Listen,” Krust insisted. “There is a scheme. It was Berati’s, I admit that, although it came perhaps from a brain greater than his—someone who stands in the shadows behind him. It called for a swift alliance between Germany and Italy. An Anglo-Saxon neutrality. Swift action. Africa for Italy. A non-military Germany, but a Germany which would soon easily rule the world. And when the moment comes to strike, Berati is hesitating! He hesitates only with whom to deal in Germany. He dares to hesitate between one who has the confidence of the whole German nation and a man who has been cast aside like a pricked bladder, whose late adherents are swarming into my camp, and the man whose name, were it once pronounced, would be the ruin of our scheme. And he cannot decide! I have had enough. I am forbidden to approach Berati—courteously, firmly. Very well. By to-morrow morning I come back to you with the truth.”
Fawley was mystified. He knew very well that his companion was moved by a rare passion, but exactly what had provoked it was hard to tell.
“Look here, Herr Krust—” he began.
It was useless. The man seemed to have lost control of himself. He stamped up and down the room. He passed through the inner and the outer doors leading into the corridor. A few moments later Fawley, from his balcony, saw the huge car in which they had driven up to Mont Agel circle round by the Casino and turn northwards…. Fawley, with a constitution as nearly as possible perfect for his thirty-seven years, felt a sense of not altogether unpleasant weariness as he turned away from the window. His night of strenuous endeavour, physical and mental, his golf that morning in the marvellous atmosphere of Mont Agel, had their effect. He was suddenly weary. He discarded his golf clothes, took a shower, put on an old smoking-suit and threw himself upon the bed. In five minutes he was asleep. When he awoke the sunshine had changed to twilight, a twilight that was almost darkness. He glanced at his watch. It was seven o’clock. He had slept for three hours and a half. He swung himself off the bed and suddenly paused to listen. There was a light through the chink of the door leading into his salon. He listened again for a moment, then he opened the first door softly and tried the handle of the second only to find it locked against him. Someone was in his salon surreptitiously, someone who had dared to turn his own key against him! His first impulse was to smile at the ingenuousness of such a proceeding. He thrust on a dressing-gown, took a small automatic from one of the drawers of his bureau, stole out into the corridor and knocked at the door of the sitting-room. For a moment or two there was silence. Whoever was inside had evidently not taken the trouble to prepare against outside callers. A sound like the crumpling of paper had ceased. The light went out and was then turned on again. The door was opened. Greta stood there utterly taken by surprise.
The Spy Paramount Page 5