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

by E. Phillips Oppenheim

  “You seem to get as much out of it as anyone I know,” Joan observed, rising abruptly to her feet. “I have allowed you the caviar,” she went on. “There is another course coming which looks as though it might be terribly bad for you.”

  “Anyway, I would rather dance,” he told her.

  Joan was a beautiful dancer but that night her feet moved unsteadily to the music. They had only gone once round the room when she paused. She turned and looked back at the supper table. Rudolph was leaning towards the Baroness, talking eagerly. Céline was watching him. With every nerve of her body she seemed to be listening and watching. Joan’s eyes swept down the whole length of the table. There were a great many guests there whom she knew only by sight. The Baron had certainly kept his word and given Sagastrada a wonderful show.

  “Shall we go on?” her partner enquired.

  Joan hesitated. She was utterly unconscious of the fact that many people were interested in her. There were few who would not have declared that notwithstanding the simplicity of her toilette and complete absence of jewellery she was the most beautiful person in the room. She was still looking towards the supper table.

  “A wonderful grouping,” she whispered to Lord Henry. “I wish it did not somehow remind me of the greatest picture in the world.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Be happy in your ignorance,” she answered, with a little laugh. “Do you mind doing something for me?”

  “Do I mind?” he repeated. “You ought to know.”

  “Come with me for a short promenade,” she begged.

  “Well, that doesn’t sound much of a feat,” he remarked. “Come along. Where do you want to go to—into the rooms?”

  “Don’t ask any questions, please.”

  Soon he found himself following her along the corridor to the second floor which led from the Sporting Club to the hotel. When she reached her room she stopped abruptly. The door was wide open. She lingered on the threshold and pressed her fingers upon the bell. Presently a sleepy waiter made his appearance.

  “Les bagages sont tous descendus, Mademoiselle,” he explained.

  “Depuis combien de temps?”

  “À l’instant, Mademoiselle. Five minutes.”

  She sped back along the corridor, motioning Lord Henry to follow. They descended to the foyer and made their way out to the entrance yard. The hotel omnibus was standing there laden with luggage. Joan hastened out into the little enclosure and addressed the chef de bagage.

  “What are you doing with those two trunks?” she demanded.

  “Mais Mademoiselle,” he answered, “ces sont pour le bateau.”

  She looked at the labels. There was her name and clearly written: S. S. Hesperides.

  “Where is the dressing case,” she asked, “and the hat box?”

  “Inside, Mademoiselle.”

  “Please have them sent back to my room, and the two trunks,” she told him. “Lord Henry, have you a knife?”

  He produced one—a little dazed.

  “Cut off those labels,” she begged. “Tear them up.”

  The head porter was looking very serious.

  “But Mademoiselle,” he explained, “we have orders from the Baron that these things are to go down to a special tug in a few minutes.”

  “The other things can go,” she said, “but not mine. Send those up to my room, please.”

  The man hesitated.

  “If Mademoiselle insists—” he began unwillingly.

  “I insist!”

  The two trunks were placed upon a barrow and wheeled back to the hotel.

  “Lord Henry, can I ask you one more favour?” she begged, turning to him.

  “Anything you like,” he assured her. “You have made me a happy man, as it is.”

  “Go with the porter. Do not leave him until he has taken those trunks back to my room.”

  “That’s easy. What are you going to do?”

  “I am going to walk in the garden here for ten minutes only,” she said. “In ten minutes I shall be in the bar of the Sporting. From there we can make our way back to the supper party.”

  “Am I to tell them anything?” he asked. She hesitated.

  “Nothing whatever,” she decided.

  He turned away and followed the disappearing porter. Joan watched him out of sight, then she walked very slowly down the gardens until she reached a point from where she could see the huge steamer all ablaze with lights in the bay below. She looked at it for several minutes steadily. Then, with a little shiver, she drew her wrap closer around her throat and retraced her steps.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Table of Contents

  JOAN and Lord Henry drifted back to their places at the table from out of the press of dancers, and apparently no one had noticed their temporary absence from the room. Sagastrada, however, came at once to Joan. Céline had disappeared.

  “I hope you agree that it is time your host had another dance,” he suggested.

  She laughed with a gaiety which scarcely rang true.

  “I agree most certainly,” she said. “I was wondering—”

  “What?” he asked as they moved across the floor.

  “Why you had not asked me before.”

  “It was the coming of Céline,” he admitted frankly.

  “Engaging but rather painful candour,” she sighed.

  “You know how I am about music,” he went on a moment or two later, “or rather perhaps you do not know. All my family are the same. We subsidized two opera houses—one in Hungary and one in Austria—and I have flown many times backwards and forwards from the Continent to London during the Covent Garden season.”

  “Yet you never come to New York,” she reproached him.

  “New York is completely outside my domain,” he explained. “No one would believe that I went there only for music, even if I could spare the time, and our bank there is very jealously conducted by my uncles and cousins.”

  “And now,” she proposed, “let us leave off this small talk. Are you going on board the Hesperides?”

  “Domiloff still wishes it,” he told her gloomily. “He declines otherwise to answer for my safety. I have been talking to Julian Townleyes,” he continued. “He and the Baron are arguing now, as you can see. Townleyes cannot understand how the State of Monaco can possibly agree to having me arrested on their territory. The French are the only people who could do that, as they still have certain rights to control Monaco in all foreign matters. I could not be classed as other than a political refugee. I am not a criminal.”

  “Don’t be silly, please,” she begged. “It is not the giving you up that is the question. I fancy that the Baron has made up his mind about that. It is assassination.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he insisted.

  “Can you?” she queried. “I wonder. If the Baron had not been a very clever man and had not a marvellous organization—the organization of the Société to fall back upon—where would you have been at the present moment? You see that dark, unpleasant-looking maître d’hôtel who has never moved from the back of your chair?”

  “The damn’ fellow haunts me,” Sagastrada declared. “He is no good, either, as a maître d’hôtel.”

  “Naturally,” she replied, “because he is not a maître d’hôtel at all but a very famous detective. He is the head man at Monaco of the secret service branch of the Gendarmerie. He never lets you out of his sight and his eyes search the room continually. Not a chance guest is permitted to accept your invitation even and sit down unless he nods assent. Furthermore, there are at least a score of men whose task it is to parade the rooms and watch the people amongst the guests around your table. There is a ring around you at the present moment. No one could get near enough to shoot for fear of injuring one of the famous people by whom you are surrounded. As Baron Domiloff says—such a system is good enough for twenty-four hours or even forty-eight hours, but can’t go on. However anxious he may be to avoid bloodshed, he cannot de
vote the whole of the resources of the Casino police to protecting you for an indefinite time. He wants you safely out of the place and under the American flag.”

  “I am under the French flag here.”

  “You are not,” she told him bluntly. “At any rate, it is a matter which could always be argued, and when two countries who want to fight begin to argue, you know what happens.”

  They paused for a moment in a distant corner. Her fingers still rested upon his arm and her eyes as she looked into his haggard face were full of sympathy.

  “Listen,” she continued, “I came here for a month’s real holiday. I have been here for a fortnight and if I do what Baron Domiloff wishes me to do I shall never be able to come back here again and hold up my head. You see,” she went on, “what the old-fashioned world used to call morals, have still a few adherents in America. We look at things differently over there. I hesitated earlier this evening because I thought there was a chance that I might perhaps get to care for you and then I should be proud and happy to have done anything to have saved your life. I cannot pretend that I feel just the same now.”

  “Céline,” he muttered.

  Joan’s other hand stole up to his shoulder.

  “Shall we dance again?” she whispered.

  Nina de Broussoire, the famous danseuse, the attraction of the season at the Sporting Club, sat with her partner and watched the two gloomily.

  “That girl,” she said. “I cannot bear to watch her, Armand. I have seen them all. I have wasted ten years of my life practising, practising, practising. What does it all amount to? She is an American journalist and she dances as I could never dance in my life.”

  “The man—he is good,” her companion pointed out.

  “She is by herself,” Nina protested. “She is dancing now without thinking of what she does. Every movement, every bend of the body is graceful. She makes me feel like a mere gymnast.”

  “It may be,” the young man, who was devoted to her, remarked sadly, “because you have never danced with anyone with whom you were in love.”

  “Worse than that,” she answered with a sudden flash of inspiration. “It may be because I have never loved anyone at all.”

  “Do you know who the man is?”

  She shook her head indifferently.

  “What does it matter?”

  “A good deal, I should think. That is Rudolph Sagastrada, the young man they are all talking about here.”

  “I only got back from Cannes a few hours ago,” she said. “What does it matter who he is? Let us get out of this place. I shall go and gamble. I cannot bear to see that girl dance.”

  “I must stay,” he replied sadly as he rose to his feet. “I have engagements.”

  “Do you know that you are dancing like an angel?” Sagastrada whispered in Joan’s ear.

  Her eyes, as she glanced upwards, spoke of a weariness which her movements denied.

  “I was thinking of nothing else,” she confessed. “To dance and think of nothing else is wonderful sometimes.”

  “You seem to become,” he told her, “liquid in my arms. I could feel nothing. I swear that you were floating.”

  “Now you have brought me down to earth,” she said. “I suppose my feet are tired. Shall we sit down?”

  “One more turn,” he begged.

  Nina de Broussoire looked unwillingly back from the door. She watched them for a few seconds and her face lightened. She retraced her steps to the table where her dancing companion was still seated.

  “After all,” she declared as she resumed her place, “I think I must have been dreaming. The girl dances well, she has chic, she wears her clothes well, but for her movements—well, there is nothing wonderful about them. See, they have finished. Give me some champagne, Armand. My courage is fast returning. In a few minutes we will show them.”

  Domiloff’s fine eyebrows were joined together in a portentous frown as he drew Joan, notwithstanding her faintly worded protest, once more out on to the dancing floor.

  “I’m tired,” she complained.

  “Well, we will sit down in a minute,” he promised. “I have to speak to you.”

  “And I to you,” she rejoined. “What do you mean by ordering my trunks to be packed and placed on the omnibus for the Hesperides?”

  “So you discovered that, did you?” he remarked. “I thought it might help you to make up your mind.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” she assured him. “Those trunks are back in my room now. I rather fancy that that is where they will remain.”

  “What do you mean by saying that they are back in your room?”

  “I went and collected them,” she told him.

  “That will not do you any good.”

  “And what about Céline?”

  “The opera, I fear, is finished for the season,” he replied. “I have made an enemy of her. It was necessary. I have sent her away. Sagastrada believes she is coming back. She is not. I have forbidden them to let her pass.”

  “Isn’t that a trifle autocratic?”

  “This place will be governed by an autocracy in a few days’ time,” he told her. “I may as well begin.”

  “Why could Céline not shepherd Rudolph Sagastrada into safety as well as I?”

  “She would inevitably be seasick,” he declared. “Sagastrada would have had enough of her before he got to Naples. He would probably leave the ship and be in trouble in a quarter of an hour.”

  “So long as he doesn’t get into trouble in Monaco, what concern is it of any of ours?” she asked.

  “That sounds a little unfeeling.”

  “I never understood that you were a particularly sentimental person.”

  He turned abruptly away, changed his mind and, passing his arm through hers, led her to an alcove with a couch at the farther end of the supper room.

  “We must not quarrel,” he sighed as he sank wearily down. “If you are going to disappoint me you must.”

  “I never should have considered what you asked me to do,” she acknowledged. “It was foolish of me. Somehow it is not like real life out here. Don’t think I am trying to pose as an ingénue, but there does seem to be rather a perfervid artificial sort of atmosphere which almost chokes one sometimes. It seems to me that I have been marvellously happy every moment of the time since I arrived, but I have failed in everything that I have attempted. So long as I stay here I shall go on failing.”

  “People do not take that view of you,” he assured her. “You are considered to have met with many successes during these last few weeks. Dare I ask you a question, I wonder?”

  “I have never known you timid,” she answered.

  “Have you changed in your feelings towards that young man during the last twenty-four hours?”

  She had been toying with one of the paper fans which the Administration had sent round and she was suddenly glad of its protection. She felt the colour rising almost to her temples. It was an illuminating but very unwelcome moment of self-revelation!

  “Do not think that I am a diviner,” he continued. “It was Lydia who put it into my head. After all, I cannot think of two people more unlike than you and he. You must not worry any more. You know they call me the complete philosopher. I shall prove it by accepting my defeat. I will go further. I advise you to abandon this enterprise.”

  “Why?”

  Domiloff had the appearance for a moment of an older man. The experience of crazy years, the lines graven into his face by the half-cynical pursuit of his fantastic life, seemed suddenly to assert themselves. He was an elderly boulevardier—sardonic and contemptuous—no longer the marvellously preserved beau garçon of the most aristocratic little circle in the world.

  “Because you do not belong here,” he said. “No one who wants to live seriously belongs here. For myself, I cannot escape. I am rather glad that the hour of crisis has come. I would not unpack your trunks, if I were you, Miss Joan, but I would attach to them a different label.”

  Tashoff,
who had come noiselessly up behind them, touched his master on the shoulder. He whispered a single word in his ear. Domiloff rose to his feet.

  “You will excuse?” he whispered to Joan as he hurried off.

  Ardrossen was standing somewhat far back in the shadows of Domiloff’s reception room. He had removed his hat which he was holding in front of him and he was still wearing his motoring coat. In the fingers of one hand crushed up was a cable they had passed to him in the office below. Domiloff crossed the room towards him with that swift characteristic walk of his.

  “It is only one word you wish with me? I will not ask you to sit down.”

  “There is no need,” was the quiet reply. “I am here to deliver one injunction. Rudolph Sagastrada is not to leave by the Hesperides.”

  Domiloff was silent for several moments.

  “It seems to me, then,” he said at last, “that it is to be war.”

  “It is for our masters to decide,” Ardrossen said. “I am the messenger of fate and you are the instrument.”

  CHAPTER XXII

  Table of Contents

  WHEN the sun at last rose from behind the Alpes Maritimes that morning it brought with it the promise of a perfect day. The little Principality, slowly awakening from a somewhat disturbed night, found the soft radiance of its flawless splendour in the flower-circled streets, spreading a canopy of diamonds over the sea, lending a mellow glory even to that relic of hobgoblin architecture—the Casino. The surliest of cochers plucked a flower for his buttonhole and tucked another in the collar of his pet dog. As the hours passed on a little stream of people came light-footed down the hill, carrying themselves hopefully and buoyantly up the steps of the Casino and into its grey mysteries beyond. The leader of the wild Hungarian orchestra which was playing on the Terrace was all smiles and greetings. The people who sat about at the small tables taking their late petit déjeuner or an early apéritif seemed to feel the joy of the coming springtime in their blood. The men read their papers hopefully. The women chattered. The elderly tourists told grim stories of grasping croupiers and misplaced stakes with the same avidity as ever but a little less venom. Céline alone, the great Céline, an object of interest to everyone, sat at a small table with her two companions, pale and emotionnée. She sipped her coffee and devoured her croissants as usual but with less appetite. She was, as she had more than once told Adolf Zabruski, her musical director, who was seated opposite to her, distracted.