The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  Another cab took them to the Riverside. A new bond of experience had been established between them. They dined quietly and as the lights grew mellow she told him more of her story than she had ever breathed to any other living soul.

  As Murray listened he looked his admiration for the daring of the little woman opposite him at the table.

  They drifted.…

  It was the day of the threatened exposure. Curiously enough, Dodge felt no nervousness. The understanding which he had reached or felt that he had reached with Constance made him rather eager than otherwise to have the whole affair over with at once.

  Drummond had been shut up for some time in the office of Beverley with Dumont, going over the report which the accountant had prepared and other matters—He had come in without seeing either Constance or Murray, though they knew he must be nursing his chagrin over the episode of the night before.

  “They are waiting to see you,” reported Constance to Dodge, half an hour later, after one of the office boys had been sent over as a formal messenger to their office.

  “We are ready for them?” he asked, smiling at her.

  Constance nodded.

  “Then I shall go in. Wait a moment. When they have hurled their worst at me I shall call on you. Have the stuff ready.”

  There was no hesitation, no misgiving on the part of either, as he strode into Beverley’s office. Constance had prepared the record which they had been working on, and for days had been momentarily expecting this crisis. She felt that she was ready.

  An ominous silence greeted Dodge as he entered.

  “We have had experts on your books, Dodge,” began Beverley, clearing his throat, as Murray seated himself, waiting for them to speak first.

  “I have seen that,” he replied dryly.

  “They are fifty thousand dollars short,” shot out Dumont.

  “Indeed?”

  Dumont gasped at the coolness of the man. “Wh—what? You have nothing to say? Why, sir,” he added, raising his voice, “you have actually made no effort to conceal it!”

  Dodge smiled cynically. “A consultation, will rectify it,” was all he said. “A conference will show you that it is all right.”

  “A consultation?” broke in Beverley in rage. “A consultation in jail!”

  Still Dodge merely smiled.

  “Then you consider yourself trapped. You admit it,” ground out Dumont.

  “Anything you please,” repeated Dodge. “I am perfectly willing—”

  “Let us end this farce—now,” cried Beverley hotly. “Drummond!”

  The detective had been doing some rapid thinking. “Just a moment,” he interrupted. “Don’t be too precipitate. Hear his side, if he has any. I can manage him. Besides, I have something else to say about another person that will interest us all.”

  “Then you are willing to have the consultation!”

  Drummond nodded.

  “Miss Dunlap,” called Murray, taking the words almost from the detective’s lips, as he opened the door and held it for her to enter.

  “No—no. Alone,” almost shouted Beverley.

  The detective signaled to him and he subsided, muttering.

  As she entered Drummond looked hard at her. Constance met him without wavering an instant.

  “I think I’ve seen you before, Mrs. Dunlap,” insinuated the detective.

  “Perhaps,” replied Constance, still meeting his sharp ferret eye squarely, which increased his animosity.

  “Your husband was Carlton Dunlap, cashier of Green & Company, was he not?”

  She bit her lip. The manner of his raking up of old scores, though she had expected it, was cruel. It would have been cruel in court, if she had had a lawyer to protect her rights. It was doubly cruel, merciless, here. Before Dodge could interrupt, the detective added, “Who committed suicide after forging checks to meet his—”

  Murray was at Drummond like a hound. “Another word from you and I’ll throttle you,” he blurted out.

  “No, Murray, no. Don’t,” pleaded Constance. She was burning with indignation, but it was not by violence that she expected to prevail. “Let him say what he has to say.”

  Drummond smiled. He had no scruples about a “third degree” of this kind, and besides there were three of them to Dodge.

  “You were—both of you—at Woodlake not long ago, were you not?” he asked calmly.

  There was no escaping the implication of the tone. Still Drummond was taking no chances of being misunderstood. “There was one man,” he went on, “who embezzled for you. Here is another who has embezzled. How will that look when it goes before a jury!” he concluded.

  The fight had shifted before it had well begun. Instead of being between Dodge on one side and Beverley and Dumont on the other, it now seemed to be a clash between a cool detective and a clever woman.

  “Mrs. Dunlap,” interrupted Murray, with a mocking smile at the detective, “will you tell us what you have found out since you have been my private secretary?”

  Constance had not lost control of herself for a moment.

  “I have been looking over the books a little bit myself,” she began slowly, with all eyes riveted on her. “I find, for instance, that your company has been undervaluing its imported goods. Undervaluing merchandise is considered, I believe, one of the meanest forms of smuggling. The undervaluer has frequently to make a tool of a man in his employ. Then that tool must play on the frailties of an unfortunate or weak examiner at the Public Stores where all invoices and merchandise from foreign countries are examined.”

  Drummond had been trying to interrupt, but she had ignored him, and was speaking rapidly so that he could get no chance.

  “You have cheated the Government of hundreds of thousands dollars,” she hurried on facing Beverley and Dumont. “It would make a splendid newspaper story.”

  Dumont moved uneasily. Drummond was now staring. It was a new phase of the matter to him. He had not counted on handling a woman like Constance, who knew how to take advantage of every weak spot in the armor.

  “We are wasting time,” he interrupted brusquely. “Get back to the original subject. There is a fifty thousand-dollar shortage on these books.”

  The attempt clumsily to shift the case away again from Constance to Dodge was apparent.

  “Mrs. Dunlap’s past troubles,” Dodge asserted vigorously, “have nothing to do with the case. It was cowardly to drag that in. But the other matter of which she speaks has much to do with it.”

  “One moment, Murray,” cried Constance. “Let me finish what I began. This is my fight, too, now.”

  She was talking with blazing eyes and in quick, cutting tone.

  “For three years he did your dirty work,” she flashed. “He did the bribing—and you saved half a million dollars.”

  “He has stolen fifty thousand,” put in Beverley, white with anger.

  “I have kept an account of everything,” pursued Constance, without pausing. “I have pieced the record together so that he can now connect the men higher up with the actual acts he had to do. He can gain immunity by turning state’s evidence. I am not sure but that he might be able to obtain his moiety of what the Government recovers if the matter were brought to suit and won on the information he can furnish.”

  She paused. No one seemed to breathe.

  “Now,” she added impressively, “at ten percent commission the half million that he saved for you yields fifty thousand dollars. That, gentlemen, is the amount of the shortage—an offset.”

  “The deuce it is!” exclaimed Beverley.

  Constance reached for a telephone on the desk near her.

  “Get me the Law Division at the Customs House,” she asked simply.

  Dumont was pale and almost speechless. Bev
erley could ill suppress his smothered rage. What could they do? The tables had been turned. If they objected to the amazing proposal Constance had made they might all go to jail. Dodge even might go free, rich. They looked at Dodge and Mrs. Dunlap. There was no weakening. They were as relentless as their opponents had been before.

  Dumont literally tore the telephone from her. “Never mind about that number, central,” he muttered.

  Then he started as if toward the door. The rest followed. Outside the accountant had been waiting patiently, perhaps expecting Drummond to call on him to corroborate the report. He had been listening. There was no sound of high voices, as he had expected. What did it mean?

  The door opened. Beverley was pale and haggard, Dumont worn and silent. He could scarcely talk. Dodge again held the door for Constance as she swept past the amazed accountant.

  All eyes were now fixed on Dumont as chief spokesman.

  “He has made a satisfactory explanation,” was all he said.

  “I would lock all that stuff up in the strongest safe deposit vault in New York,” remarked Constance, laying the evidence that involved them all on Murray’s desk. “It is your only safeguard.”

  “Constance,” he burst forth suddenly, “you were superb.”

  The crisis was past now and she felt the nervous reaction.

  “There is one thing more I want to say,” he added in a low tone.

  He had crossed to where she was standing by the window, and bent over, speaking with great emotion.

  “Since that afternoon at Woodlake when you turned me back again from the foolish and ruinous course on which I had decided you—you have been more to me than life. Constance, I have never loved until now. Nothing has ever mattered except money. I never had any one else to think of, care for, except myself. You have changed everything.”

  She was gazing out of the window at the tall buildings. There, in a myriad of offices, lay wealth untold, opportunity as yet untasted to seize that wealth. Only for an instant she turned and looked at him, then dropped her eyes. What lay that way?

  “You are clear now, respected, respectable,” she said simply.

  “Yes, thank God. Clear and with a new ambition, thanks to you.”

  She had been expecting this ever since that last night. The relief of Murray to feel that the old score that would have ruined him was now wiped off the slate was precisely what she had anticipated.

  Yet, somehow, it disappointed her. She felt instinctively that her triumph was burning fast to ashes.

  “Keep clear,” she faltered.

  “Constance,” he urged, approaching closer and taking her cold hand.

  Was she to be the one to hold him back in any way from the new life that was now before him? What if Drummond, in his animosity, ever got the truth? She gently unclasped her hand from his. No, that happiness was not for her.

  “I am afraid I am a crook at heart, Murray,” she said sadly. “I have gone too far to turn back. The brand is on me. But I am not altogether bad—yet. Think of me always with charity. Yes,” she cried wildly, “I must return to my loneliness. No, do not try to stop me, you have no right,” she added bitterly as the reality of her situation burned itself into her heart.

  She broke away from him wildly, but with set purpose. The world had taken away her husband; now it was a lover; the world must pay.

  CHAPTER III

  THE GUN RUNNERS

  “We’ll land here, Mrs. Dunlap.”

  Ramon Santos, terror of the Washington State Department and of a half dozen consulates in New York, stuck a pin in a map of Central America spread out on a table before Constance.

  “Insurrectos will meet us,” he pursued, then added, “but we must have money, first, my dear Senora, plenty of money.”

  Dark of eye and skin, with black imperial and mustache, tall, straight as an arrow, Santos had risen and was now gazing down with rapt attention, not at the map, but at Constance herself.

  Every curve of her face and wave of her hair, every line of her trim figure which her filmy gown seemed to accentuate rather than conceal added fire to his ardent glances.

  He touched lightly another pin sticking in a little, almost microscopic island of the Caribbean.

  “Our plan, it is simple,” he continued with animation in spite of his foreign accent. “On this island a plant to print paper money, to coin silver. With that we shall land, pay our men as they flock to us, collect forces, seize cities, appropriate the customs. Once we start, it is easy.”

  Constance looked up quickly. “But that is counterfeiting,” she exclaimed.

  “No,” rejoined Santos, “it is a war measure. We—the provisional government—merely coin our own money. Besides, it will not be done in this country. It will not come under your laws.”

  There was a magnetism about the man that fascinated her, as he stood watching the effect of his words. Instinctively she knew that it was not alone enthusiasm over his scheme that inspired his confidences.

  “Though we are not counterfeiters,” he went on, “we do not know what moment our opponents may set your Secret Service to destroy all our hopes. Besides, we must have money—now—to buy machinery, arms, ammunition. We must find some one,” he lowered his voice, “who can persuade American bankers and merchants to take risks to gain valuable concessions in the new state.”

  Santos was talking rapidly and earnestly, urging his case on her.

  “We are prepared,” he hurried on confidentially, “to give you, Senora, half the money that you can raise for these purposes.”

  He paused and stood before her. He was certainly a handsome figure, this soldier of fortune, and he was at his best now.

  Constance looked out of the window of her sitting room. This was a business proposition, not to be influenced by any sentiment.

  She watched the lights moving up and down the river and bay. There were craft from the ends of the earth. She speculated on the romantic secrets hidden in liner and tramp. Surely they could scarcely be more romantic than the appeal Santos was making.

  “Will you help us?” urged Santos, leaning further over the map to read her averted face.

  In her loneliness after she had given up Murray Dodge, life in New York had seemed even more bitter to Constance than before. Yet the great city cast a spell over her, with its countless opportunities for adventure. She could not leave it, but had taken a suite in a quiet boarding house overlooking the bay from the Heights in Brooklyn.

  One guest in particular had interested her. He was a Latin American, Ramon Santos. She noticed that he seldom appeared at breakfast or luncheon. But at dinner he often, ordered much as if it were seven o’clock in the morning instead of the evening. He was a mystery and mysteries interested her. Did he work all night and sleep all day? What was he doing?

  She was astonished a few nights after her arrival to receive a call from the mysterious evening breakfaster.

  “Pardon—I intrude,” he began gracefully, presenting his card. “But I have heard how clever you are, Senora Dunlap. A friend, in an importing firm, has told me of you, a Mr. Dodge.”

  Constance was startled at the name. Murray had indeed written a little note expressing his entire confidence in Mr. Santos. Formal as it was, Constance thought she could read between the lines the same feeling toward her that he had expressed at their parting.

  Santos gave her no time to live over the past.

  “You see, Mrs. Dunlap,” he explained, as he led up to the object of his visit, “the time has come to overthrow the regime in Central America—for a revolution which will bring together all the countries in a union like the old United States of Central America.”

  He had spread out the map on the table.

  “Only,” he added, “we would call the new state, Vespuccia.”

  “
We?” queried Constance.

  “Yes—my—colleagues-you call it in English! We have already a Junta with headquarters in an old loft on South Street, in New York.”

  Santos indicated the plan of campaign on the map.

  “We shall strike a blow,” he cried, bringing his fist down on the table as if the blow had already fallen, “that will paralyze the enemy at the very start!”

  He paused.

  “Will you help us raise the money?” he repeated earnestly.

  Constance had been inactive long enough. The appeal was romantic, almost irresistible. Besides—no, at the outset she put out of consideration any thought of the fascinating young soldier of fortune himself.

  The spirit of defiance of law and custom was strong upon her. That was all.

  “Yes,” she replied, “I will help you.”

  Santos leaned over, and with a graceful gesture that she could not resent, raised her finger tips gallantly to his lips.

  “Thank you,” he said with, a courtly smile. “We have already won!”

  The next day Ramon introduced her to the other members of the Junta. It was evident that he was in fact as well as name their leader, but they were not like the usual oily plotters of revolution who congregate about the round tables in dingy back rooms of South Street cafes, apportioning the gold lace, the offices, and the revenues among themselves. There was an “air” about them that was different.

  “Let me present Captain Lee Gordon of the Arroyo,” remarked Santos, coming to a stockily-built, sun-burned man with the unmistakable look of the Anglo-Saxon who has spent much time in the neighborhood of the tropical sun. “The Arroyo is the ship that is to carry the arms and the plant to the island—from Brooklyn. We choose Brooklyn because it is quieter over there—fewer people late at night on the streets.”

  Captain Gordon bowed, without taking his eyes off Constance.

  “I am, like yourself, Mrs. Dunlap, a recent recruit,” he explained. “It is a wonderful plan,” he added enthusiastically. “We shall sweep the country with it.”