21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series)

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “But the French police…” she faltered.

  “When have you found the French police interfering with us or anyone belonging to us?” he asked. “You may be served with a notice of deportation, but whatever happens you will come here and nobody will stop you. Is that understood?”

  She rose to her feet and drew a little breath.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Antonio Costoli is to die tonight. That pleases me. I am to live. That pleases me more still. I submit to the French police. I know nothing of why Costoli committed suicide. He may have talked a little—not my affair.”

  He pointed to the door and she slunk away closing it behind her.

  “Ciel!” she exclaimed under her breath. She felt her knees trembling. “Pourquoi est-ce qu’on ne tue pas ce sale Americain?”

  “It is the man with the bags,” Catherine Oronoff announced as she stood, a short time later, by the side of Mark Humberstone’s desk.

  “What about him? He has all his instructions.”

  “He wants to know if he can give his ridiculous show at the Jetée Casino. He prefers,” she continued, “to establish his identity at any place where he is likely to stay for any length of time.”

  “I see no objection. As it happens I wish to speak to him. Telephone, if you please, for him to come at once.”

  In a few minutes Mr. Jonson appeared. He had changed his clothes to a well-fitting suit of dark blue and he wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. He had evidently paid a visit to the coiffeur, for his pink-and-white cheeks were smooth and his coarse brown hair straight as the fibres of a mat. His new employer looked him over with a scrutiny from which most men would have shrunk. Mr. Jonson welcomed it with a pleased smile.

  “What sort of a man are you, I wonder,” Mark speculated.

  “My deeds will show.”

  “Spoken curiously like an Oriental.”

  Mr. Jonson bowed.

  “If I undertake service I serve honestly and well, but I choose whom I serve. I choose for what cause.”

  “In a strange service, such as this will be, amid strange surroundings,” Mark warned him gravely, “you may come across much which you should ignore.”

  “I am not the sort of man who, when he has a mission, looks either to the right or to the left,” Mr. Jonson confided. “I do not run about on four feet and I do not count the grains of dust in the road before me as I walk. The sunshine which you have lent me for a covering is where my eyes turn, and I have kept the soul with which I was born.”

  “You are a man of constant purpose, then?”

  Then Mr. Jonson did an astonishing thing. He made the sign of the cross. Ever so slightly his questioner frowned upon him.

  “What is the meaning of that?” he demanded.

  “A cabalistic sign,” was the apologetic reply. “I am not a Catholic. The cross is my visiting card in some places. It is the only fashion in which I talk to myself.”

  “I begin to wonder,” Mark exclaimed, “whether it is a lunatic whom I have appointed to take charge of my safety!”

  “You need have no fear,” the other assured him. “It was no lunatic who kept your father safe from assassination. I am so far from madness that if you wish it I will answer now one of the unspoken questions you have had in your mind to ask me.”

  “Are these the tricks of the Jetée Casino, of the man who stops the spinning of the world when he chooses?”

  “I possess the art of divination,” Mr. Jonson asserted, “but not in that fashion. Mine comes from the brain and from a curious apprehension I have always had of the motives of others. I suggest that you have sent for me to ask some question with regard to Warsaw.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Catherine Oronoff swung round in her chair to look at this strange man with the egg-shaped head and the curiously precise appearance. Mark, if he felt any surprise, disclosed none. He flicked away the ash from the cigarette which he was smoking.

  “Another Casino trick?” he remarked smiling. “Well, I fall. Have you ever, I wonder, heard of the house of Agrestein there? In the old days when millions flowed into the Riviera banks the Agresteins fashioned tiaras worth a king’s ransom. Is there one of the family still living in Warsaw?”

  “I seem to remember,” Mr. Jonson said, gazing straight into the sunlight with unblinking eyes, “that Paul Agrestein, the head of the family, still lives in the old palace.”

  “He would be a man of what age?”

  “About sixty.”

  “He travels sometimes this way?”

  “I have heard of him in these parts once,” Mr. Jonson admitted. “He and his father before him had the reputation of being great gamblers.”

  “The Poles have that proclivity,” Mark observed, rising to his feet.

  “Have I your permission, sir, to depart?” the visitor asked.

  “Why?”

  “My men are at work fixing my apparatus at the Casino. It has to be very accurate and the performance commences at five o’clock. I need a particular sort of lunch first, and I have not yet cashed any money.”

  “You may go,” Mark acquiesced.

  The magician rose smiling to his feet. He bowed to Catherine Oronoff and he bowed to Mark Humberstone. The latter looked curiously at the door through which, in a moment or two, he had disappeared.

  “I am beginning to wonder,” he speculated, “whether I am wise in accepting the services of a clairvoyant.”

  She shook her head.

  “He is no clairvoyant,” she declared. “When he entered the room you had his passport in your hand. Three times you turned back to the page where his Warsaw visa was inscribed.”

  “That is all very well,” Mark agreed. “A reasonable explanation indeed; but, I ask myself, where did he find that only slightly mutilated quotation he made use of apparently for my benefit? I am becoming suspicious about the fellow,” he went on thoughtfully. “He stops the earth with his forefinger in places of public amusement, he apprehends already, I believe, my interest in Warsaw, and he knows a quotation which it is not humanly possible that he has ever seen.”

  Catherine Oronoff sometimes told herself that it was her mission in life to keep the feet of the man she served upon the earth. She yawned slightly as she turned to a file of papers she was sorting.

  “I do not think that he is quite so wonderful as all that,” she remarked. “There are explanations for everything. Some day or other, I should think, you may find Mr. Jonson quite useful.”

  Mark rose suddenly to his feet. A ripple of the April breeze had stolen into the large, severe-looking room and brought with it a breath of the perfume from the waving lime trees, perhaps also a wave of the odour from the heaped flower stalls in the market. From where he had been seated, too, he had caught a glimpse of the blue sky.

  “We are going to St. Paul for lunch,” he announced. “How long will it take you to get ready?”

  She smiled.

  “I am ready, but—”

  Mark was suddenly the autocrat. He swept away her protests. In less than five minutes they were in his automobile passing along the Promenade des Anglais.

  CHAPTER III

  Table of Contents

  Seated opposite to one another at a small table on the terrace of the restaurant of the Colombe d’Or, drinking the white wine of the country out of thick tumblers whilst they waited for their trout, they breathed the atmosphere of a different world. Spring was warm in the air. The early butterflies were flitting round them. Fleecy clouds were being driven lazily across the blue sky by the south wind.

  “Was this wise?” she asked.

  “It was not only wise,” he answered, “but it was necessary. For days, Catherine Oronoff, you have been looking pale and tired. It was time we broke away. You work too hard. For you, at any rate, it is not worth it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because,” he said, leaning slightly forward in his chair, “you work too conscientiously, and you are simply doing the work which f
inishes each day when the Bureau is closed. You are just where Mr. Cheng has placed you and where I found you.”

  “I am an automaton, of course,” she agreed a little impatiently.

  “Do not resent it,” he begged. “Every task that comes to you to perform is done, and perfectly done. If the French Government closed us down tomorrow, if Cheng or I were assassinated or exiled, as might very well happen, you would still have done your daily work without a moment’s failure or without a single responsibility concerning it.”

  “Even that,” she replied, “can scarcely bring happiness, can it? I have a country which is merely a memory. Almost all my friends and relations I lost before I was old enough to know what they meant. Nearly all of the few connections I have pass their time crawling miserably through life and praying for death. I am the fortunate one, it is true, but do you wonder that I find life bitter?”

  “Not on a morning like this—” he begged. “Forget it. Look at those trout. Delicious! I am going to forget for a time this great business of living. There—I am filling up your glass. We will drink red wine with the chicken when it comes, but we will finish every drop of this Vin Blanc de Saint-Paul.”

  “Spoken like a hero,” she laughed. “I believe that I am silly. When I think of you and Mr. Cheng I know that I am. But then, you see, you are up in the high places, you are working amongst the clouds. It is only now and then that you come down to move the pawns.”

  “We are working at a great scheme,” Mark admitted. “We will talk of it sketchily,” he added glancing around at the empty tables close at hand. “I’ll tell you one thing, Catherine, which impresses me more every day. Mr. Cheng is one of the greatest personalities I have ever come near.”

  She nodded.

  “I am interested,” she acknowledged. “He seems always so remote and yet he never makes a mistake. He seems to have mastered the philosophy of quietism.”

  “He lives in the clouds,” Mark observed, “and yet when he comes down to earth he seems to know everything that has happened. He moves about just as naturally as a courtier or a statesman. And work! Do you know, Catherine, that we were up in the great dispersing room for fourteen hours with those army men from Washington? We had food and wine carried up, but they scarcely left off work. That was all very well for me because I am stronger than most people and my work lies up there, but Cheng never left us. He ate and drank scarcely anything and when we had finished he was the freshest of the lot.”

  “Some day,” she remarked, “I suppose I shall know what it is all about.”

  “Some day, perhaps very soon, you will know everything,” Mark assured her. “Cheng has the same idea as I have. We both of us trust you, as you know, with everything, but we build our scheme as we proceed and there is a great deal which we can tell nobody.”

  “I am not curious,” she told him with a touch of her former weariness. “I walk along the broad level pathway of life and it seems to me when night comes I am breathing the same air, I am looking down the same hopeless avenue. You bring me here to lunch. I wonder why, Mark Humberstone. I cannot amuse you. My heart is always heavy. Why do you not take out one of these gay little French girls who can chatter away and keep you amused?”

  “Mayn’t I choose for myself?” he asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. The cape she had been wearing had fallen back and he saw how thin they were.

  “You choose ill,” she sighed.

  “I still maintain that I am the best judge of that,” he answered smiling. “I watch you every day and you grow more like a ghost the whole of the time. You are going to drive me into an indiscretion. I am perfectly certain of that. I am not sure that I care very much. Take your eyes off that chicken for a moment and look at me.”

  It was a thin sort of smile, yet it was almost a smile.

  “Your position at the present moment,” he went on, “is that you are private secretary to Mr. Cheng when he needs you, and to myself. You do a great deal of work during the day. You think that it is leading nowhere and you are just as disheartened at night as you are in the morning. The days have lost their savour for you, is it not so?”

  “They have never had any,” she told him. “I have never been anything but miserable since I went to that wretched school in that famine-stricken nunnery. Since I came out to share starvation and misery with the others, now in Paris, now in London, I have never known what it was to live or to feel that I wanted to live.”

  “That will do,” he begged. “The red wine, waiter. Good. Now for my great indiscretion.”

  “Alas,” she sighed. “I am still incurious.”

  He looked into her still cold face, into those beautiful eyes which were like pieces of glass under her perfectly shaped eyebrows. She was probably telling the truth.

  “Catherine Oronoff,” he said, “you realise, I suppose, that there is some meaning behind the establishment of the International Bureau? You don’t think that we are keeping hundreds of people working night and day just to do a little ordinary spy business?”

  “I have given up wondering about it,” she acknowledged frankly.

  He reached across the table and clasped the fingers of her left hand. Notwithstanding the warm spring sunshine he was conscious at once of their icy chill.

  “We are working for a great end, Mr. Cheng and I,” he said. “Years ago we talked and dreamed of it when we were at Harvard together. Since I became one of the legatees of my father’s great discoveries we have gradually, step by step, evolved a definite plan of campaign.”

  “For what purpose?” she asked.

  He saw with delight the birth of that faint light of interest in her eyes.

  “We are working,” he confided, “at a vast scheme which is now beginning to take definite shape day by day. We want to succeed where all the more experienced statesmen of the world have failed. We want to bring to the world the genesis, at any rate, of permanent peace.”

  She shook her head dubiously.

  “You are both dreamers,” she said, “you and Mr. Cheng. He lives apart from other men—too far apart—to know what an ugly and sordid place the world has become. And you, my dear Mark—”

  “Leave me out of it for a moment,” he interrupted. “You know very little of Mr. Cheng, Catherine. Let me tell you this: not only has he travelled continually in his own country and brought about the beginnings of great changes there, but he has lived in Russia, he has lived in Germany, he has visited Paris. He was partly educated in England and partly in the United States. He absorbs in a flash what it would take some men weary years to assimilate. His judgments seem to come to him almost as naturally as the breath he draws, and he is always right. You may smile, my dear, but I know him better than anyone else and I tell you that there is something sanctified, godlike, in his swift mastery of all the great problems we set ourselves years ago to solve. As for myself I plod a long way behind, but where he has conceived some marvellous ideas I have been able to carry them out. Everyone who is going to move in the great places of life, Catherine, has to start by being a dreamer; but, believe me, we have our hands upon the great levers which will rock futurity, and we are going to use them.”

  He withdrew his hand from hers and poured out wine. They continued their lunch. Every now arid then he glanced at her. There was a change already, he told himself joyfully.

  “All this coming and going of strangers, of men of every nationality,” he went on presently, “has meant something. I could tell you wonderful things, and I shall before long, of what is happening on the top floor of our huge building. We may not be able yet to speak to the stars, Catherine, but there is never a night when we do not speak for hours, never a day when we are not making plans with Mr. Cheng’s friends in China. We are in touch in a new way with a new world and all the time we are building and making ready. The next thing I shall tell you—well, that will be very soon now,” he went on, watching the waiter who was hovering close at hand, “will do more than awaken a little mild interest
in those wonderful eyes of yours. You will begin to feel that this is a real world and that you are a real human being with your feet planted firmly upon it.”

  “Mark,” she exclaimed, “why are you telling me all this?”

  “I trust you,” he answered.

  “But ought you to? You know the sort of people we are surrounded with at the Bureau. Everyone who comes is suspect. All the time they are expecting to be spied upon just as we use these creatures such as Suzanne to spy upon other people. You know so little about me.”

  “More than you think,” he assured her. “I know, for instance, that Catherine Oronoff is about a tenth part of your name. I know that you are a kinswoman of all the Romanoffs. I know that Alexander is your cousin and I know that it is he, in the eyes of a few at any rate, who is the legitimate ruler of your people. Mr. Cheng knew this when he brought you here. The secrets of the Bureau pass through your hands. Mr. Cheng has placed his absolute trust in you because he possesses that wonderful instinct which never fails him. I trust you, too, for another reason.”

  “You may,” she said softly. “I am beginning to wonder what there is left that you can have to tell me.”

  He leaned across the table. He stretched out his hand and she clasped it eagerly.

  “Our plans,” he told her, “will involve vast changes in your own country, Catherine.”

  His words were quietly spoken but to her they seemed vibrant things. Her fingers gripped his. Her lips were parted. There was a subdued light which he had never seen there before, never even the symptoms of it, blazing in her eyes. Her right hand was pressed against her bosom. Simple words, but a new world seemed to be unfolding itself. She sat for a while in a state in which speech was impossible.

  “We will talk of this again, Catherine,” he said, withdrawing his hand and reaching for the coffee machine. “It is enough, I hope? There is nothing more to be said. Plans are still to be made, and until they are—silence.”

  “There shall be silence,” she promised.