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

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  Montesset sprang towards him. Two of the others came on either side. The other two struggled to find a place. Montesset went down like a log with a straight left-hander which caught him on the point of the jaw, and the right was ready for his successor as he came along. The cousin of the Montelimars made a lunging blow at Hamer, a signet ring on his finger, and cut into his cheek. In another moment he was over the side. The two who were left on their feet paused. Wildburn had had enough hesitation. He closed with both of them. One, a heavy fellow, the most drunken of the lot, he knocked down without the slightest difficulty. The other one, too small to hit, who was already fading away, he caught up round the middle and threw over the side.

  “Now, out you go,” he ordered Montesset, who was sitting up, and his friend who was trying to struggle to his feet. “Quick! Both of you.”

  Montesset swayed for a moment, and then rushed in.

  “This is your trouble—not mine,” Hamer declared, easily, evading his wild blows. “You are drunk—all of you. You can’t fight. You can have all of this medicine you like.”

  After those first few moments there was only a blundering resistance. Wildburn had seen them all swim, and he was reckless. One by one he pushed or threw them overboard, and drew up the steps to which Montesset was already hanging.

  “Get into your boat and clear out,” he shouted, as he shook him loose. “If any one of you wants a hiding in the morning you can have it. You are too drunk now.”

  Montesset, a ludicrous-looking object, his hair plastered down over his face, his clothes clinging to him, stood up and shook his fist. He shouted, but he seemed to have lost control over his voice. What he said was incomprehensible. One by one he pulled the others into the cutter.

  “Be off with you,” Wildburn called out. “What are you doing hanging around here?”

  They rowed a few strokes and still waited, then very slowly they dipped their oars again and went off shorewards. His last glimpse of them, all shouting and talking amongst themselves, puzzled Hamer for the moment. He had a vague feeling that he had forgotten something. Suddenly he felt something clinging softly to his arm, a little body pressed against his, an inch or two of fine muslin with one of the world’s newest perfumes pressed against his cheek.

  “You are a brave man, Monsieur Wildburn,” Tanya murmured. “If you will come downstairs I will bathe your cheek. He was méchant, that man with the ring. He struck you when you were not looking. Soon I will bind it up for you very nicely.”

  He stared down at her in amazement. He realised suddenly what it was he had forgotten. He had forgotten Tanya.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Table of Contents

  A very soft voice sounded in his ear as he remained for the moment thunderstruck.

  “And so I remain, Monsieur Hamer.”

  He opened his lips and, if he had spoken at the moment of his intention, the words would have been very decisive and more than a little harsh, but looking downwards it seemed to him that he was discovering a new Tanya. Out of her pale, beautifully shaped face her eyes were shining pleadingly, sweetly up into his. The diablerie had gone from her. Something had taken its place—something which mocked his intelligence to give it a name.

  “Monsieur Hamer,” she pleaded, “you permit me to stay a little time? I talk with you out here on the deck. First I go down below. I fetch a towel. I bathe your cheek because the blood runs on to your neck. I do that well, for I am a good nurse. Then we talk for a few moments, please. You will hear a Tanya speak to you whom the world has never heard before.”

  A few seconds ago Hamer had fancied himself proof against all the pleading and all the lure in the world, yet at her words he seemed nerveless. He felt like a man who holds in his hands a butterfly and fears to crush it.

  “All right,” he agreed. “My cheek does smart a bit.”

  She walked quickly towards the companionway and disappeared. His eyes followed her critically—dubiously. There were no tricks with her skirt, no backward turn of the head, none of that quaint swaying of the body which seemed a heritage of her dancing. She walked swiftly and with a sylphlike grace, but she walked as any other woman of her charm would have done. Hamer sat down upon a bench and looked out across the expanse of darkened sea.

  “Well,” he exclaimed to himself. “This girl is a witch.”

  She was some little time before she reappeared. When she did so she had a damp towel hanging over her shoulder, a sponge between her fingers, and a glass with something that fizzed in her hand.

  “You drank nothing,” she said, as she came to him. “I watched you. You drink now half a glass of wine.”

  “And you?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “I am like you,” she said. “I drink because it serves my purpose. If I lived the life of an ordinary human being—oh, how wonderful it would be—I should be like others. My single aperitif, my glass of white wine, my glass of champagne, perhaps, for dinner. But fate has me tied. I live as I must…Your head on one side, please. So.”

  With gentle fingers she bathed his wound, looked at it critically, placed upon it a square compress and two pieces of sticking plaster.

  “I think that is best,” she decided. “The disinfectant may hurt for a minute. It will soon be well. You drink your wine—yes? And now, Mr. Hamer Wildburn, because I feel at any moment you may want to send me from your boat, I talk to you as one human being to another—yes’”

  “Why not?” he answered

  “Forget all that you have thought of me,” she continued. “Forget that I tried to win you over to do my will in the way that other women try. I am not good—I do not pretend that—but I do not wish to do evil. The sacrifices I make I make because I have big things in my heart.”

  “You are a very extraordinary person,” he acknowledged, “but if you want to be turned loose on this boat as you told me—”

  “Hush.” she interrupted. “Let me finish. I was not born like that, but I have become heart and soul a slave to one burning desire—to work in the cause of freedom for the people in this world who have never known freedom, but chiefly for the people in the next world who are to come, who might breathe a different air and might climb instead of stumbling all the way through the foul places. There is no name for the need of us who are in earnest. Communism will do as well as any other. But what we want, those of us who are so much in earnest and the thousand who are not for more selfish reasons, perhaps, is to chase away from control this bourgeois money-grabbing Government, and put in a Government of men who are willing to work, not to enrich themselves, but to build the foundations of the future race in different fashion.”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “Your name is Russian,” he said.

  “And I am a Russian,” she answered. “Perhaps some day I will tell you my real name. I am Russian. I have lived in Russia since the Soviet. I have watched the crude beginnings of what will come in fifty years’ time—a glorious climax. I have watched the mistakes we have all deplored. I have watched the miserable futility, the cruelty, the wickedness, the bloodthirstiness of the birth of a new faith, and I am going to say of a new religion. Because I criticised I had to flee for my life. I joined some people, but they had as little as I had. I drifted into becoming a member of what they call The Circle here—the Communists. Russia was badly treated in the old days, Mr. Wildburn. It had a cruel and ignorant aristocracy, who became the ruin of the country, but who are responsible for the coming of the Soviet. France has a greedy and ignorant bourgeoisie who will be responsible for the coming of the French Soviet.”

  “Are you trying to convert me to a new faith?” he asked, in a very different tone to any he had ever used to her before.

  “No,” she said. “I could not do that. You are an Anglo-Saxon. You are too fixed, you are too honest to make believe, you have that terrible facility for taking things as they are. I could do nothing with you, Hamer Wildburn. You are too strong for me. All that I could hope for would be that you shoul
d realise that I am in earnest. I will tell you what I want from you in plainer words than you have ever been told by anyone else, and then you will reflect—you will think perhaps that you would do not much harm if you helped me.”

  He moved uneasily in his place.

  “I am beginning to believe, my dear young lady,” he observed, “that I and the whole world may be mistaken about you. If that is so it is your own fault. On the other hand, so far as regards the concrete thing which you ask of me—the possession of this boat—that is an impossibility.”

  She waved his words away.

  “This boat was built by Tositi,” she confided. “He, with all his faults, was a man of imagination. He loved the sea and he loved the woman for whom he built it. She cared little for him, perhaps, but she saw through him the means to an end.”

  All the time the sea lapped gently against the sides of the yacht. The long straight beam from the Antibcs lighthouse flashed across its sullen surface and across the sleeping hills. Of found there was none. The world slept.

  “Go on, please,” he begged.

  “Tositi, it is true,” she admitted, “was the tool of many men in greater positions than he, but he was their willing tool. He was their deliberate accomplice. All his life his great ambition had been to move in the greater places of the world. He had no ideals. He was nothing of a dreamer. He was a clod of a man, but he had the greedy ambitions of the egotist. He wanted the applause of the multitude without being capable of doing or producing anything to deserve it.”

  “That is a poor epitaph for a man,” he murmured.

  “It was given to me to see the truth about him,” she answered. “With it all he had the gifts which belong to that order of human being. He was cunning. He helped the greater men than he to rob, and he saw them go off with the greater share of the spoils. He knew perfectly well, although he bore it uncomplainingly, that in two cases out of three the result, if things should ever be discovered, was fastened upon his shoulder. But Tositi never slept. In every one of the great frauds wherein he was at the same time the tool and the instigator, he preserved some little fragment of proof that he was not the only one concerned, that greater than he had planned what he only carried out. He kept these proofs care fully and added to them week by week, month by month. He picked the millions out of the fire for the great men who called themselves his friends but kept him a long way in the background, but he had them all the time safe in his net. He knew it and, when they failed to save him, when one of the schemes went awry and Tositi was to be the sacrifice, he sent them a warning word of what might happen. What did happen was the contents of a dozen revolvers were emptied into his body within twelve hours. That was the end of Tositi. Unfortunately he did not live long enough to protect himself. It was only after his death that they learnt through another man of his cunning The truth is coming to them piece by piece. They know that Tositi’s damning records are concealed somewhere upon this boat where you and I are sitting. They know that if he had had time to get to them he would have been allowed to walk out of the country with millions in his pockets. That, however, never happened. Tositi is dead but the records remain. Two people know where. The man who designed the boat and the builder.”

  “And they—” he began.

  “It is known that they went off together to America.”

  Silently Hamer rose to his feet, went below, busied himself in the galley for a few minutes, and came up carrying a packet of cigarettes.

  They both spoke for a moment or two without speech.

  “So that is the secret of the Bird of Paradise,” he said at last.

  “The secret but not the key,” she reminded him.

  “It can never happen,” he went on “because I do not possess it, but supposing I handed you the key, supposing I turned you loose and you discovered these records?”

  “I should proceed with discretion,” she said, “but what would happen is this. The Government would fall and, as soon as they tried to create another, a little note to one of the proposed members, and that, too, would never come to being. Then the newspapers. We should set a match to the bonfires already built. After that the floodgates would be let loose. The men whom we have already decided upon would march to their places with the millions of people behind them. There would be excesses, of course. There would be bloodshed. Innocent people would suffer. Property would be destroyed. But, at one leap, France would spring into freedom. Those who are behind the scenes in this thing have learnt from the French republic. They have learnt from the Russian Soviet. They learnt what blunders to avoid. They have learnt to rebuild commencing where others have left off. Humanity would owe a great debt, a debt she could never pay, to the man who supplies the key.”

  “I, alas, can never be that man. Mademoiselle,” Hamer announced. “I cannot help believing in you. You are, I think, the most wonderful person I ever met. When I think of what you have sacrificed from sheer devotion to a cause, from consecrated altruism, I respect and honour you. I can say no more except that I am ashamed when I tell you that I am pledged to keep my word to the girl I am going to marry. Frankly, I suspect her father is implicated in these records, but there it is. My word is given. I shall keep it.”

  “It is such a pity,” she sighed “So small the cause; so mighty a result. You and I together could be responsible for the making of a great country. You must keep your word to this nicely brought up young lady who has a devotion to her family.”

  “It has to be like that,” he confessed.

  She looked at him steadily.

  “Yes,” she agreed, “if you say so. I do not fancy that anything I could say or do would change you. It is amazing that you should be the man that you are, the great stumbling block to the coming of the Millennium, but such as you are you must remain…May I be put ashore?”

  Hamer produced his whistle.

  “One word more,” he said. “You have given me a great deal of your confidence. You knew without asking that you were safe. What are you going to do about this business?”

  “I am going to take the Bird of Paradise from you if I can,” she told him. “If they had dared, if they had felt convinced, as I could have convinced them, that the records they sought were here, it would have been destroyed by now a hundred times over. I am the only one who knows, and I must have your boat whole. You have chosen to shelter a group of wicked men, Monsieur Hamer Wildburn. It may cost you your life, though it shall not if I can help it.”

  “That’s kind of you,” he said, “but it must be war, then.”

  “I must have the boat,” she insisted, “and I must see that it is not destroyed. It is not for myself. It is not for any glory that may come to me in the future. Probably no one will know. I shall never be a Joan of Arc to France, because I am not French. It is not for France I offer myself. It is for humanity. The day will come some time when nations will flow the one into the other like the seas. That will be the time of freedom.”

  Hamer blew his whistle, and Auguste appeared from the galley almost at once. Hamer’s instructions were simple and decisive.

  “You will take this young lady to the plage, Auguste,” he said. “You will find my car in the first shed. Drive mademoiselle to the Provençal Hotel, or wherever else she directs. First, get me an overcoat from downstairs.”

  Auguste did as he was bidden. Hamer felt curiously moved as he took her hands at the top of the steps. She seemed very frail and tired in the gleaming light of the dawn, grey and ghastly before the coming of the sun. Yet, when she smiled it was another face.

  “You have been gentle and kind with me, Mr. Wildburn,” she confessed. “I have met with the great failure of my life just when success seemed so near, but I can feel no bitterness towards you. You see with the eyes given you. No one can change them.”

  He kissed her cold fingers, threw the coat over her shoulders, and stood on deck till the dinghy passed into the little wisp of mist which hung over the border of the plage.

  CHAPTER XXIII


  Table of Contents

  Lucienne arrived on board the Bird of Paradise towards 5 o’clock on the following afternoon. She had abandoned the absolute negligee in which the Riviera was revelling at the moment, and wore a white beach frock, a panama hat, and carried a sunshade. She came round the point in one of the motor boats which were kept in the private bay of the château, and, though she smiled as she recognised Hamer waiting for her, there was a slight restraint about the wave of her hand.

  “You look terribly formal,” he told her.

  “This is entirely a formal visit,” she assured him, as he drew her chair back under the awning. “I imagine you must have been expecting me. I have come to break off our engagement.”

  “Not a chance,” he answered. “If I was not so pleased to see you I should have sent you back again for that speech.”

  “Where is the scene of this bloody encounter?” she demanded.

  He pointed to the deck. “Up and around there.”

  “And is it true that you threw my alternate suitor, second Duke of France, into the sea?”

  “Absolutely. I should probably do it again unless he came to apologise.”

  “Apologise for what?”

  He told her the story up to his having been left on board with Tanya. Every now and then her eyes lit up, and she had hard work to restrain a smile.

  “Up to the present moment, dear Hamer, my sympathies are with you,” she admitted. “A tiresome lot of young men we seem to have collected at the château, and I knew nothing of the supper party. So it was they who brought Mademoiselle Tanya on board?”

  “It certainly was,” he replied.

  “But there is more to be told,” she insisted. “According to your own story, the prize of the night seems to have been Mademoiselle Tanya.”

  “It might seem so,” he admitted. “She remained on board, sitting just about where you are, and I by her side, for at least an hour and a half after they had left. Then I lent her an overcoat, Auguste rowed her to the plage, and drove her home to the Provençal. If the circumstance,” he went on, “is of any import, I might add that she did not move from that chair from the time of the departure of her friends until I sent her away.”