THE COMPLETE FOUR JUST MEN SERIES (6 Detective Thrillers in One Edition). Edgar Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      He was alone and in darkness. The car moved on and then Schmidt discovered that there were no windows to the vehicle. A wild idea came to him that he might escape. He tried the door of the car; it was immovable. He cautiously tapped it. It was lined with thin sheets of steel.

      ‘A prison on wheels,’ he muttered with a curse, and sank back into the corner of the car.

      He did not know London; he had not the slightest idea where he was going. For ten minutes the car moved along. He was puzzled. These policemen had taken nothing from him, he still retained his pistol. They had not even attempted to search him for compromising documents. Not that he had any except the pass for the conference and — the Inner Code!

      Heavens! He must destroy that. He thrust his hand into the inner pocket of his coat. It was empty. The thin leather case was gone! His face went grey, for the Red Hundred is no fanciful secret society but a bloody-minded organization with less mercy for bungling brethren than for its sworn enemies. In the thick darkness of the car his nervous fingers groped through all his pockets. There was no doubt at all — the papers had gone.

      In the midst of his search the car stopped. He slipped the flat pistol from his pocket. His position was desperate and he was not the kind of man to shirk a risk.

      Once there was a brother of the Red Hundred who sold a password to the Secret Police. And the brother escaped from Russia. There was a woman in it, and the story is a mean little story that is hardly worth the telling. Only, the man and the woman escaped, and went to Baden, and Schmidt recognized them from the portraits he had received from headquarters, and one night…You understand that there was nothing clever or neat about it. English newspapers would have described it as a ‘revolting murder’, because the details of the crime were rather shocking. The thing that stood to Schmidt’s credit in the books of the Society was that the murderer was undiscovered.

      The memory of this episode came back to the anarchist as the car stopped — perhaps this was the thing the police had discovered? Out of the dark corners of his mind came the scene again, and the voice of the man…’Don’t! don’t! O Christ! don’t!’ and Schmidt sweated…

      The door of the car opened and he slipped back the cover of his pistol.

      ‘Don’t shoot,’ said a quiet voice in the gloom outside, ‘here are some friends of yours.’

      He lowered his pistol, for his quick ears detected a wheezing cough.

      ‘Von Dunop!’ he cried in astonishment.

      ‘And Herr Bleaumeau,’ said the same voice. ‘Get in, you two.’

      Two men stumbled into the car, one dumbfounded and silent — save for the wheezing cough — the other blasphemous and voluble.

      ‘Wait, my friend!’ raved the bulk of Bleaumeau; ‘wait! I will make you sorry.’

      The door shut and the car moved on.

      The two men outside watched the vehicle with its unhappy passengers disappear round a corner and then walked slowly away.

      ‘Extraordinary men,’ said the taller.

      ‘Most,’ replied the other, and then, ‘Von Dunop — isn’t he — ?’

      ‘The man who threw the bomb at the Swiss President — yes.’

      The shorter man smiled in the darkness.

      ‘Given a conscience, he is enduring his hour,’ he said.

      The pair walked on in silence and turned into Oxford Street as the clock of a church struck eight.

      The tall man lifted his walkingstick and a sauntering taxi pulled up at the curb.

      ‘Aldgate,’ he said, and the two men took their seats.

      Not until the taxi was spinning along Newgate Street did either of the men speak, and then the shorter asked:

      ‘You are thinking about the woman?’

      The other nodded and his companion relapsed into silence; then he spoke again:

      ‘She is a problem and a difficulty, in a way — yet she is the most dangerous of the lot. And the curious thing about it is that if she were not beautiful and young she would not be a problem at all. We’re very human, George. God made us illogical that the minor businesses of life should not interfere with the great scheme. And the great scheme is that animal men should select animal women for the mothers of their children.’

      ‘Venenum in auro bibitur,’ the other quoted, which shows that he was an extraordinary detective, ‘and so far as I am concerned it matters little to me whether an irresponsible homicide is a beautiful woman or a misshapen negro.’

      They dismissed the taxi at Aldgate Station and turned into Middlesex Street.

      The meeting-place of the great congress was a hall which was originally erected by an enthusiastic Christian gentleman with a weakness for the conversion of Jews to the New Presbyterian Church, With this laudable object it had been opened with great pomp and the singing of anthems and the enthusiastic proselytizer had spoken on that occasion two hours and forty minutes by the clock.

      After twelve months’ labour the Christian gentleman discovered that the advantages of Christianity only appeal to very rich Jews indeed, to the Cohens who become Cowans, to the Isaacs who become Grahames, and to the curious low-down Jews who stand in the same relation to their brethren as White Kaffirs to a European community.

      So the hall passed from hand to hand, and, failing to obtain a music and dancing licence, went back to the mission-hall stage.

      Successive generations of small boys had destroyed its windows and beplastered its walls. Successive fly-posters had touched its blank face with colour. Tonight there was nothing to suggest that there was any business of extraordinary importance being transacted within its walls. A Russian or a Yiddish or any kind of reunion does not greatly excite Middlesex Street, and had little Peter boldly announced that the congress of the Red Hundred were to meet in full session there would have been no local excitement and — if the truth be told — he might still have secured the services of his three policemen and commissionaire.

      To this worthy, a neat, cleanly gentleman in uniform, wearing on his breast the medals for the relief of Chitral and the Soudan Campaigns, the two men delivered the perforated halves of their tickets and passed through the outer lobby into a small room. By a door at the other end stood a thin man with a straggling beard. His eyes were red-rimmed and weak, he wore long narrow buttoned boots, and he had a trick of pecking his head forwards and sideways like an inquisitive hen.

      ‘You have the word, brothers?’ he asked, speaking German like one unaccustomed to the language.

      The taller of the two strangers shot a swift glance at the sentinel that absorbed the questioner from his cracked patent leather boots to his flamboyant watch-chain. Then he answered in Italian:

      ‘Nothing!’

      The face of the guardian flushed with pleasure at the familiar tongue.

      ‘Pass, brother; it is very good to hear that language.’

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