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

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “So you have been telephoning?”

  “A matter of vanity,” he admitted. “Fortunately I have been somewhat cosmopolitan in my habits and movements—it has been necessary. I have a flat and a servant and clothes in Paris and the servant and most of the clothes are on their way down here now. And you?”

  “I have had plenty of tennis and I have been over to Cagnes twice for golf,” she told him. “I think this is the most wonderful place in the world.”

  “In what way?”

  She laughed happily.

  “Well, people seem so delightful. I came here almost a stranger on a voyage of adventure. I have been here now more than a week and it has been the most enjoyable week of my life.”

  “I have been here four days,” he reflected, “and certainly they have been the quaintest four days of my life. I am a prisoner in paradise. It is too fantastic. I talk to myself with my music, I read from the books which the Baroness has lent me, sometimes I get beautiful thoughts, yet I have the feeling all the time that I am in a frozen world. I think of that mad drive down, of the tragedy at Beaulieu—poor Paul, raving to the very last—and then I look out of my window down on to the Place and see the people entering eagerly the Casino and realize where I am. It is barely credible.”

  They walked on in silence for a few moments. Earlier in the evening it had been raining. The stone pavement of the Terrace when they first reached it was damp under their feet. Now it almost seemed as though that round yellow moon rising in the distance, was wrapping the coming night in her voluptuous embrace, clearing the air and bringing warmth everywhere. A faint breeze blew through the vaporous wreaths of mist, a breeze that came from somewhere the other side of the mountains, which seemed to have crept across their barren places and brought the perfume from the flower fields of Bordighera. Joan turned away from the shadowy vista of the sea. She threw back her head and half-closed her eyes.

  “You are dreaming to-night,” he remarked.

  “Only a momentary lapse,” she assured him. “I am not a dreamer really. It is this wonderful Monte Carlo which gets me sometimes. It seems so difficult to acquire any sort of perspective.”

  “I know nothing about you except that you are charming,” he said simply. “Where do you come from?”

  “From work,” she told him. “I am an American, you know, a graduate of Wellesley, and I went straight into a job on an American newspaper when I left College. I had a little money and I came here for a holiday. I suppose I must have had wonderful good fortune. The first few days were like a fairy dream. Then came the luncheon at Beaulieu, the terror of your expression—I saw you look out of the window. Your panic-stricken face really did frighten me—and those awful men. How you must have felt when you ran upstairs to get your luggage and found your friend—murdered!”

  “And realized,” he added gloomily, “we are all so filthily selfish, you know, that I would probably have been murdered myself, too, if I had come in a little earlier.”

  “Why were you hunted down like that?” she asked. “Have you really done anything very terrible?”

  “I was born a millionaire; I could not quite adapt my political views to this newfangled autocracy, and I financed a great literary journal that was anti-government. No more than that.”

  She turned and looked at him freely and frankly. To the passers-by, of whom, just at that time, there were few, they must have seemed a very handsome couple. Joan, with her long, slim body, her pleasant features, her fresh complexion and clear brown eyes, her carriage—essentially the carriage of the girls of her nation—untrammelled, free, yet somehow rather the carriage of a Diana than of an Aphrodite. He, Rudolph Sagastrada, at that time something a little furtive about his manner, with his fine, intelligent forehead, pleasant voice, something of the lounging grace of the scholarly athlete, his eyes a darkish shade of blue, his complexion pale, redeemed by its slight coating of sunburn, conforming to none of the usual types but possessing without a doubt distinction.

  “The men of my family have helped to make our country what it is—financially, of course,” he went on gloomily. “It is not our fault, that I know of, that we are born with clear heads for figures. I would rather have been a student. I would rather have written that life of Heine which I have always had in mind, written it from a different standpoint, taken more account of his Gallic outlook. I could not do it, of course, but it was not my fault. I did the work I had to do. I took up my inheritance.”

  “You are not really a politician, then?” she asked.

  “Not a practical one,” he confessed. “I have more or less kept my ideas to myself and they are not in any way destructive. Now that I suppose my rooms have been searched,” he went on, frowning, “they may have found papers, articles which I have taken care never to publish, addresses which I have never delivered, which might be termed—well, anti-governmental at any rate. If ever they get me back, I should probably share Paul Rothmann’s fate.”

  He relapsed into a gloomy silence as they continued their slow promenade. A few drops of rain cooled their cheeks and a misty filigree of vapour drifted now and then across the face of the moon. Occasionally a shadowy, unobtrusive figure passed them. They were conscious of others, some on the seats, some leaning over the Terrace. Joan shared his silence, but it was simply because her brain was at work trying to understand.

  “What should you call yourself in politics if you had to define your position?” she asked.

  “Never mind,” he replied, with one of those quick glances around to which she was becoming accustomed. “Politics should never be mentioned in these days between people like you and myself. This is the paradise of the sensuous. I shall do my best to accept it for what it is, to live for each day that is born, for each night that drifts away. Gambling amuses me. If they allow me to I shall gamble. There are many emotions which give me pleasure. I shall embrace them. It is an oasis I have found. If only they will let me remain here, I shall let the others fight it out for a time.”

  They passed up the steps from the Terrace towards the hotel. Joan felt the diaphanous shawl upon her shoulders.

  “I am going in to change,” she announced. “Our promenade has been very pleasant but a little moist.”

  “You will come back to the Sporting Club?” he asked eagerly. “I am permitted to go there now.”

  “If you like—yes,” she assented.

  “Can I come and wait in your salon while you change?” he begged.

  “Of course you must do nothing of the sort,” she reproved him, with a little laugh. “As a matter of fact, I have not a salon. Sit down here in the lounge, if you like, and wait for me, or I will see you at the Baccarat table in half an hour.”

  “In the bar of the Sporting Club?” he suggested. “Until to-morrow I have no money and if I see the Baccarat table I must gamble.”

  She laughed.

  “All right. In the bar,” she agreed.

  Joan went slowly back to her room, found her clothes were even damper than she had imagined, filled her bath, shook bath salts into it, stripped off her clothes and stretched herself out in a cloud of vapour. Somehow, even the soothing luxury of the warm water failed to calm her altogether. She found herself thinking all the time of this strange waif from an unknown world, strange in tongue and ideas and outlook, yet possessing that peculiar appeal, against the lure of which she was fighting all the time. He was unlike her type, unlike the men of her world, who were mostly overgrown college boys. He was something they would half-wonder at, half-despise; yet the recollection of his voice, the even flow of his well-chosen words and phrases, the touch of spirituality in so much that he said, of aspiration, of sorrow, seemed to have cast a curious spell upon her. . . . She stepped from the very nearly cold spray refreshed in body, clearer a little, perhaps, in mind, but still impregnated with a certain indefinable excitement. When she entered the Salle des Jeux in the Sporting Club half an hour later, the Princess, who was just leaving, greeted her with a little exclamati
on.

  “Why, Joan Haskell, what have you done to yourself?”

  “Got wet moon-gazing and had to change my clothes,” Joan laughed.

  “It is not that—I mean your expression. Has anyone been frightening and then soothing you?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Don’t go near any of the menkind—especially that fiery young northerner or my impressionable husband,” the Princess begged her. “You are dangerous to-night, young woman. Perhaps you are in danger yourself—I don’t know. We are always in danger if we begin to feel.”

  Joan smiled.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t that sort of susceptibility,” she declared. “I did promise to meet Rudolph Sagastrada, though. He is sitting in the bar waiting, or ought to be. Come with me.”

  “This is the third time,” Lucille lamented, “that I have tried to leave this room and failed. I cannot let you go alone, though. I must try and get the young man to look at me with those large soulful eyes instead of devouring you all the time, as he did at Beaulieu.”

  She turned and they made their way together to the bar. Rudolph Sagastrada was seated at a faraway table half-hidden by a curtain. He had the air of one trying to escape notice. Directly the Princess and Joan entered, he rose to his feet and placed chairs for them courteously. It was obvious, however, that he was distrait.

  “It is wonderful to be back in this atmosphere again,” he confided. “It is a long time since I ventured to cross the threshold of a Casino.”

  “Why ‘ventured’?” the Princess asked.

  “I do not trust myself,” he explained with an apologetic smile, “in old bookshops, at Christie’s in London on a day when there are pictures to be sold, or at a Baccarat table.”

  “So you are a gambler, amongst all your other extravagances,” Joan said severely.

  “Only when I am in the atmosphere,” he told her. “Whether at my work or my pleasure I am a very sober person. For instance, my people are bankers and sometimes I am in almost sole control at the headquarters where I chance to be. I have never speculated. That is why I have been so much trusted and why I have made my way up in the firm. But I have the gambler’s instinct all right. Nothing but my empty pockets kept me away from the Baccarat when I first entered the room.”

  “I will lend you some money if you really want to play,” the Princess offered.

  He shook his head.

  “Thank you, no,” he answered gently. “I am not one of those who believe in the good fortune of borrowed money. We lend all over the world, even money to the Government which will drive us to the shambles,” he added, a note of bitterness creeping into his tone. “We borrow from no one. By to-morrow I shall have ample supplies. I should like—”

  He hesitated.

  “Well, go on,” the Princess encouraged him.

  “I should like,” he proposed, “to give you all a dinner party to-morrow night or any night soon—a little party of thanks for your kindness to me at Beaulieu.”

  “It sounds like a wonderful idea,” Joan said.

  “It must be soon,” he went on eagerly. “Those two assassins have only half-completed their task. They may have to go into hiding for the present but so long as I am alive I should think that they would hang about the neighbourhood. I am sure that the Baron thinks so too. That is why he has made me stay in the hotel all day.”

  “You will never be able to hide in Monte Carlo,” the Princess remarked.

  “Then I must travel on,” he sighed. “What I thought was, one week here—one week of happiness. When that is over, if I am an embarrassment to anyone I will find some manner of slipping away.”

  “What will happen to your business?” Joan, who was at all times a practical young woman, asked him.

  “There are eleven partners in the firm,” he said. “Three belong to the aristocracy of the country. They will be allowed to remain. They will be allowed to control their affairs. The authorities may rob us but they cannot take everything. Then, too, one of my uncles has always had the fear of something of this sort happening. We have money in most of the capitals of Europe. I have already telegraphed in cipher to London and Paris.”

  “Really, you are a very interesting young man,” Lucille told him softly. “Don’t you like him, Joan? I do. I should like to be a guest at that dinner.”

  He turned to Joan.

  “Would you?”

  “I, too,” she assented.

  “Very well then,” he declared. “I will take that risk. You shall bring whomever you choose. I saw two Austrians whom I know slightly. I might ask them. They are of the haut monde. Then with the Domiloffs and your own people we shall make up a party and dine in the Sporting Club.”

  “Would you rather go to Cannes?” the Princess asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I must stay in the Principality,” he confided. “In fact the Baron has warned me not to cross the frontier. They have queer laws here. The bank manager, too, has been giving me some hints. We will have the dinner within these walls, if you please.”

  The Princess raised her hand suddenly and waved to the man who stood upon the threshold of the bar.

  “The elusive Baron at last,” she exclaimed. “Now we may have some news.”

  CHAPTER XI

  Table of Contents

  PAUL DOMILOFF came at once to the table where the three were seated. Several people who endeavoured to arrest his progress or engage his attention for a moment he waved on one side with a courteous gesture of excuse.

  “Lucille,” he confided, “and Miss Haskell—I agree with our august potentate, Lord Bishopsthorpe, whom I have just left. We all work too hard to make this place attractive. It is not necessary. The fact that we have here the most beautiful women in the world is enough.”

  “Have you come all this way to pay us compliments, Baron?” Lucille laughed.

  “As a matter of fact, the real object of my coming,” he replied, “is to have a few words with you, Sagastrada. I must apologize for having left you altogether to yourself these last few days but I literally have not had a second to spare. I wonder whether I could ask you to come with me now into my bureau for a few minutes.”

  “Here in the building?” Rudolph asked, rising to his feet.

  “Quite close to your own quarters.”

  “If I might be excused, Princess?” the young man begged.

  “You must come back again,” was the imperative reply. “We insist upon that.”

  “I have received a command,” he answered.

  They left the room together—Rudolph half a head taller than his companion, although Domiloff was a fine figure of a man. The latter led the way into a small, plainly furnished room at the back of one of the pulpit-like caisses. The entrance to it was by means of a door let into the panel so ingeniously as to be almost invisible. Domiloff laid his hand on his companion’s shoulder as he turned the key in the door.

  “Sagastrada,” he said, “you will forgive plain speech. It is entirely in your own interests. Although nothing is settled and although I should bitterly regret having to go back upon my word, I think it is possible that you may have to give up the idea of staying for any length of time in Monte Carlo.”

  “Why?”

  Domiloff hesitated for a moment. He was himself somewhat disturbed.

  “It is really your own friend, Townleyes,” he confided, “who has the wind up. Of course, he has been in the English diplomatic service and he is much better informed as to the European situation than I am. I feel one must take what he says seriously.”

  “I do not wish to cause you any embarrassment,” Sagastrada said slowly, “and if you say the word, I must go.”

  “Well, I have not said it yet, have I?” Domiloff pointed out, smiling. “I do not mind telling you, though, that within twenty-four hours of your arrival I was rung up from the Quai d’Orsay. They wanted your tickets taken away, your viatique issued and you yourself placed upon the train.”

  “Wha
t are you going to do about it, Baron?” the young man asked.

  “Well, not that nor anything like it,” Domiloff assured him. “We shall do our best to ensure your safety before we part with you but I do feel that it would be unwise of you to count upon staying here for any length of time.”

  Sagastrada had become very still and cold.

  “You perhaps think that this persecution and massacre of all those whose political views happen to clash with the Chancellor’s is justified?” he asked.

  “Do not put it like that, my dear fellow,” Domiloff begged. “It is a disgusting business. But listen. You must admit that Rothmann’s publications have been stirring up the people, and they are entirely revolutionary in tone.”

  “Yes, that may be,” Rudolph acknowledged. “Still, I, personally, Baron, have I committed any sin? Politically I may be hateful to the rulers of the country, but I cannot continue to finance a journal which no longer exists. Is there anything which would warrant my being sent back there to be massacred?”

  “There is nothing. They do not even claim that there is anything,” the Baron conceded. “But there it is. They want you back. If I were obeying instructions at the present moment, instead of giving you advice I should be taking away your papers and your carte d’entrée to the Casino and this place. I should take away your passport. You would then be arrested by the local police and remain in prison until an accredited envoy from your home town came to fetch you. What about that?”

  Rudolph shrugged his shoulders.

  “Fetch me back to be propped up against a wall and shot, I suppose,” he remarked bitterly.

  Domiloff had seen too many men shot to be greatly stirred by the idea.

  “They seem to be pretty ruthless all over the world nowadays,” he admitted. “It is just a foretaste, I suppose, of what will come when the floodgates are really opened. All the same, Sagastrada, although I have felt justified under the altered conditions here in refusing the suggestions from the French Foreign Office, we are scarcely yet established as an independent State, and I tell you frankly, there may be trouble. A month ago, if I had taken up the attitude I have taken to-day, I should have been packed out of the place. As things are now, they cannot go as far as that but I am bound to warn you of what is going on.”