THE RAID
I suppose that at some time during his life every man who has
anything of the boy left in him has thought that he would like to take
a fling at the great adventure of Secret Service. I feel called upon
to assure these aspirants that a comfortable armchair is the better
choice.
Accident, or that Higher Power which the Arabs call Kismet, had cast
me into the path of Edmond O’Shea. He had honoured me with his
friendship, but had quite failed to recognize that I was a man of
lesser stature than his own. Whilst granting every honour to marshal
and statesman, personally I am disposed to believe that it was men
such as O’Shea who steered the Allies to victory; and perhaps,
hitherto, I had been inclined to look upon the Secret Service as a job
for highbrows rather than for soldiers.
This error was to be corrected.
Conceive a large room filled with enemies of established order;
fanatics, whose collected scruples would have left a thimble empty.
Conceive that I and O’Shea, posing as members of their bloodthirsty
organization, were amongst them as spies, pledged to bring about their
ruin.
Now, conceive that a “Comrade,” who knows us and has fared ill at our
hands, is suddenly announced.
Perhaps I shall be forgiven when I say that I remembered with
gratitude how Edmond O’Shea had rallied a company of the Guards during
the great retreat, how his presence of mind and consummate
self-possession had helped historians to chronicle Cambrai with pride
rather than with humility.
He edged up beside me. I saw him fumbling for his monocle and saw his
change of expression when he realized that he had left it behind;
then:
“Get near the door,” he murmured. “My fault, Decies, to have let you
in for this. But I had hoped to learn things that police examination
can never bring out.”
Macalister came in.
He was in dinner kit and he smoked a cigar which, to my disordered
vision, appeared to be decorated with two bands. His superb
self-possession was worthy of Tom Mix. He did not merely own the room;
he possessed the property.
“Take the left,” said O’Shea.
Unerringly, instinctively, Macalister’s glance settled upon us at the
moment of his entrance. He had advanced no more than one pace beyond
the butler, and his mouth was agape for excited utterance, when
O’Shea’s revolver had him covered.
Overwhelmed with a sense of utter unreality, I covered the group of
four on my left which included the formidable Schmidt.
Glibly, as though born of long familiarity, the words leapt to my
tongue:
“Hands up!”
The command was obeyed. And I have since thought, paradoxical though
it may appear, that violent men, in these matters, are more tractable
than men of peace. Assessing human life lightly, they credit the brain
behind the gun with compunction no greater than their own.
“By God!” I heard Macalister say--and I hope I shall always find time
to take off my hat to a good loser--“I had you wrong all along,
Major!”
Schmidt looked dangerously ugly for a moment; then:
“Line up,” said O’Shea sharply. “Jump to it. Fall in on the left of
Schmidt.”
Came inarticulate mutterings, but without other audible protest the
group obeyed, forming a line having Schmidt at one end and the
saturnine butler at the other.
“Now,” O’Shea continued, “if any man lowers his hands, I shall not
argue with him. Decies, will you go down to the street door and
whistle? Pass behind me. Keep a sharp look-out. I don’t know who is in
the house.”
I obeyed, the sense of unreality prevailing. But I know I shall always
remember that row of sullen-faced men with raised hands, who watched
as I crossed behind O’Shea.
There was no one on the stairs, and no one in the long, glazed passage
that led to the street. This gained, I ran the length of it, and
throwing open the double doors beheld a seemingly deserted Porchester
Terrace.
I whistled shrilly. The result was magical.
Springing from what hiding places I know not, men appeared running
from right and left! This was the raid squad from Scotland Yard, and I
realized that I was helping to mould history.
Our taximan, who was waiting on the other side of the street, and who
had been peacefully smoking a cigarette, jumped down from his seat and
watched the proceedings with an expression of stupefaction that was
comic in its intensity.
Everything was carried out in a most orderly manner. The members of
the Group were arrested without unnecessary fuss. The whole thing
might have been “produced” by David Belasco. A six-seater car appeared
from somewhere or another, in which the gang was canned as neatly as
tinned sardines.
The police handled the job with such discretion that chance passers-by
never dreamed that anything unusual was going forward. They do these
raids much better on the screen.
Macalister was the last to come down from above, his cigar still held
firmly between his teeth. He was unperturbed. Deportation was the
worst he had to fear, and he knew it quite well. He was smiling slyly.
He paused, looking hard at O’Shea and at myself.
“Listen,” he said, “you two boys have doubled on me pretty badly, but
I don’t bear no malice.” His grammar at times revealed the influence
of the Cubist school. “Zara is different, and he’s still loose. Take
my tip and watch out for Zara. If he’s seeing red, don’t try to pet
him. Good-night!”
He entered the car, urged by two detectives.
“Good-night,” murmured O’Shea thoughtfully, and turned to me.
“You know, Decies,” he went on, “if that man had had our advantages,
he would have made a damned good sportsman.”
There were certain formalities to be attended to, and I suppose it was
close upon two o’clock when O’Shea and I found ourselves outside my
rooms. I suggested a doch-an’-dorris.
“If I were superstitious,” O’Shea declared, “I should refuse.”
He smiled, glancing up at the tall ladder beneath which we must walk
to reach my door.
“Oh!” said I, “they are mending the roof, or something.”
“I suppose we might risk it,” he replied; and we went in.
The incident stuck in my mind, not so much because of any
superstitious significance that I attached to it as because of what
actually happened later.
O’Shea dropped on to the settee in my big room and sighed rather
wearily as he watched me preparing drinks.
“You know, Decies,” said he, “I am both glad and sorry that this job
is over. I have blundered through by sheer good luck. Without your
aid, and the aid of someone else, I should have crashed badly.”
“Perhaps not,” I returned. “If you had not succeeded in one way, you
might quite easily have found another.”
“Or I might not,” said he. “No. I am a poor policeman, and peace-time
soldiering is no sort of game.”
“What do you mean, O’Shea?”
“I mean,” he replied, holding up to the light a glass that I had
handed to him, “that I am infernally restless.”
I sighed as loudly as he had done and stooped over the syphon. Then:
“Decies,” said O’Shea, “we live in a generation that grows up very
early.”
“We do,” I agreed.
“I should like to talk to you seriously. There are many men I have
known longer, but none I could sooner trust. Yet in this matter
somehow I don’t feel…”
“Yes?” I prompted.
“Well, I don’t feel quite at liberty to discuss it with you.”
There was a silence that might have been awkward. O’Shea was watching
me almost pathetically; and:
“I know what you want to talk about,” I said. “Nanette is a witch. But
there is only one man in the world for her now. It might be fair,
though, to give her a year to think it over.”
“You don’t doubt _my_ attitude in the matter,” O’Shea murmured.
“No,” I replied, “I know it.”
He looked at me very fixedly, when:
“Coo-ooh!” I heard.
O’Shea’s expression changed; and, turning, I crossed to an open
window, looking down into the street.
Standing just in front of the ladder which disfigured the front of the
premises, was Nanette, staring upward. A two-seater with several
people in it stood at the curb.
“Hello, Nanette,” I called.
“Saw your light,” she shouted, “as we were passing. May we come up, or
are you going to bed?”
“No,” I replied, and hesitated to tell her what I knew she hoped.
“Come right up and bring your friends. I have only just got in.”
“Right-oh!” she cried.