THE INTOXICATION OF WAR
It was two days later,--and they had been days of blank suspense for
him,--that Durkin made his way to Frank's room, unobserved. His first
resolution had been to wait for a clearer coast, but his anxiety overcame
him, and he could hold off no longer.
As he opened the door and stepped noiselessly inside he caught sight of
her by the window, her face ruminative and in repose. It looked, for the
moment, unhappy and tired and hard. She seemed to stand before him with
a mask off, a designing and disillusioned woman, no longer in love with
the game of life. Or it was, he imagined, as she would look ten years
later, when her age had begun to tell on her, and her still buoyant
freshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on the
Angiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of the
life they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks,
if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and no
longer rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she was
acting a part for him? that all this fine _bravado_ was an attitude, a
rôle, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be--and the sudden
thought stung him to the quick--that she was deliberately and consciously
degrading herself to what she knew was a lower plane of thought and life,
that the bond of their older companionship might still remain unsevered?
But, as her startled eyes caught sight of him, a welcoming light came
into her relaxed face. With her first spoken word some earlier touch of
moroseness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an effort to
shake herself together, she gave no outward sign of it. She had promised
that there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; and
Durkin knew she would adhere to that promise, to the bitter end.
She went to him, and clung to him, a little hungrily. There seemed
something passionate in her very denial of passion. For when he lifted
her drooping head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot through with
paler gold, and gazed at her upturned face between his two hands, with a
little cry of endearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sob.
"You're back--and safe?" he asked.
She forced a smile.
"Yes, back safe and sound!"
"But tired, I know?"
"Yes--a little. But--"
She broke off, and he could see that she was rising from her momentary
luxury of relaxation as a fugitive rises after a minute's breathing-spell.
"Well?" he asked anxiously.
"_Pobloff has found us_!" she said, in her quiet contralto.
"He's here, you mean?"
"He's in Genoa. I caught sight of him in a cab, hurrying from the French
Consulate to the Cafe Jazelli. I slipped into a silversmith's shop, as
he raced past, and escaped him."
"And then what?"
"Then several things happened. But first, tell me this: did you get a
chance to look over Keenan's room?"
"I was bolted inside twenty minutes after you and he had left the hotel.
His trunk was even unlocked; I looked through everything!"
"Which, of course, was charming work!" she interpolated, with not
ungentle scorn.
He shrugged his shoulders deprecatively. "Not quite as charming as
dining with your new friend!"
"I almost like him!" admitted the woman frankly, femininely rejoicing at
the note of jealousy in the other's voice.
"And no worse than some of the work we've done, or may soon have to do!"
Then he went on, with rising passion: "And I'll tell you this, Frank
whatever we do, and whatever we have to go through, we've got to get
those securities out of Keenan! We've got to have them, now! We've got
to pound at it, and dog him, and fight him, and outwit him, until we
either win or lose and go under! It's a big game, and it has big risks,
but we're in it too deep, now, to talk about drawing back, or to complain
about the dirty work it leads to!"
"I wasn't complaining," she reproved, in her dead voice. "I only spoke a
bald truth. But you don't tell me what you've found."
"I got nothing--absolutely nothing; not one shred of information even.
There's nothing in the room. It stands to reason, then, as I told you
from the first, that he is carrying the papers about with him!"
"That will make it harder," she murmured monotonously. "And you're sure
your telegram has sent the Scotland Yard men to Como?"
"It must have, or we'd be running into them. The New Yorker is a
Pinkerton man."
He started pacing back and forth in front of her, frowning with mingled
irritation and impatience.
"Then what about Pobloff?" he suddenly asked.
"Five minutes after we had stepped out of the hotel he met us, face to
face. With Keenan, I had no chance of getting away. So I simply faced
it out. Then Pobloff shadowed us to the Riggi, watched us all through
luncheon, and followed us down to the city again. And here's the strange
part of it all. Keenan saw that we were being shadowed, from the first,
and I could see him fretting and chafing under it, for he imagines that
it's all because of what he's carrying with him. So, on the other hand,
Pobloff has concluded Keenan and I are fellow-conspirators, for he let me
go to the lift alone, just to keep his eye on Keenan, who told me he had
business at the steamship agency."
"But why should we be afraid of Pobloff, then?"
"It's a choice of two evils, I should venture to say. But that's not
all. As soon as I was free from each of them, and had left them there,
carrying out that silent and ridiculous advance and retreat between them,
I had to think both hard and fast. I decided that the best thing for me
to do would be to slip down to Rome, at once, and make my visit to the
Embassy."
"Yes, I found your note, telling me that."
"When I saw that I was being followed at the station I bought a ticket
for Busalla, as a blind, and went in one door of my compartment and then
out the other. My _wagon lit_ was standing on the next track. I didn't
change from the one train to the other until the train for Rome started
to move. Then I slipped out, and jumped for the moving platform, and was
bundled into my right carriage by a guard, who thought I was trying to
commit an Anna Karenina suicide--until I gave him ten francs. Whether I
got away unnoticed or not I can't say for sure. But Pobloff will have
resources here that we know nothing of. From now on, you may be sure, he
will have Keenan watched by one of his agents, night and day!"
"Then, good heavens, we've got to step in and save Keenan from Pobloff!"
"It amounts to that," admitted Frank. "Yet, in some way, if we could
only manage it, the two of them ought to fight our battle out for us,
between themselves!"
"That's true--but _did_ you get to Rome?"
"Yes, without trouble."
"And you got the money?"
"Only half of it. They hedged, and said the other half could not be paid
until Pobloff's arrest. Jim, we must be on our guard against that man."
"Pobloff doesn't count!" ejaculated Durkin impatiently. "It's Keenan we
have to have our fight with--_he's_ the man, the offender, we
want!--_that_ means only two hundred and fifty pounds!"
"But that is money honestly made!"
"And so will this be money honestly made. The one was legalized by the
government authority; the other, in the end, will be recognized as--well,
as detectional and punitive expediency. That's why I say Pobloff doesn't
count!"
"But Pobloff _does_ count," persisted Frank. "He's a vindictive and
resourceful man, and he has a score against us to wipe out. Besides all
that, he's a master of intrigue, and he has the entire secret service of
France behind him, and he knows underground Europe as well as any spy on
the Continent. He will keep at us, I tell you, until he thinks he is
even!"
"Then let him--if he wants to," scoffed Durkin. "My work is with Keenan.
If Pobloff tries interfering with us, the best thing we can do is to get
the British Foreign Office after him. _They_ ought to be big enough for
him!"
"It's not a matter of bigness. _He_ won't fight that way. He would
never fight in the open. He knows his chances, and the country, and just
where to turn, and just how far to go--and where to hide, if he has to!"
"That's true enough, I suppose. But oh, if I only had him in New York,
I'd fight him to a finish, and never edge away from him and keep on the
run this way!"
"Of course; but, as you say, is it worth while? After all, he's only an
accident in the whole affair now, though a disagreeable one. And, what's
more, Pobloff will never follow us out of Europe. This is his stamping
ground. He had misfortune in America, and he's afraid of it. As I said
before, Pobloff and Keenan are the acid and the alkali that ought to make
the neutral salts. I mean, instead of trying to save them from each
other, we ought to fling them together, in some way. Let Pobloff do the
hunting for us--then let us hunt Pobloff!"
"But Keenan is wary, and shrewd, and far-seeing. How is he to be caught,
even by a Pobloff?"
"That only time and Pobloff can tell. It will never be by
brigandage--Keenan will never go far enough afield to give him a chance
for that. But I feel it in my bones--I feel that there is danger
impending, for us all."
Durkin turned and looked at her, wondering if her woman's intuition was
to penetrate deeper into the unknown than his own careful analysis.
"What danger?" he asked.
"Impending dangers cease to be dangers when they can be defined. It's
nothing more than a feeling. But the strangest part of the whole
situation is the fact that not one of us, from any corner of the
triangle, dares turn to the police for one jot of protection. None of us
can run crying to the arms of constituted authority when we get hurt!"
A consciousness of their lonely detachment from their kind, of their
isolation, crept through Durkin's mind. He felt momentarily depressed by
a sense of friendlessness. It was like reverting to primordial
conditions, wherein it was ordained that each life, alone and unassisted,
should protect and save itself. He wondered if primitive man, or if even
wild animals, did not always walk with that vague consciousness of
continual menace, where lupine viciousness seemed eternally at war with
vulpine wariness.
"Then what would you suggest?" he asked the woman, who sat before him
rapt in thought.
"That we watch Keenan, continuously, night and day. He has been hunted
and followed now for over two months, and he is only waiting for a clear
field to take to his heels. And when he goes he is going for America.
That I know. If we lose sight of him, we lose our chance."
Durkin walked to the window, and looked out at the tiled roofs and the
squat chimney-pots, above which he could catch a glimpse of bursting
sky-rockets and the glow of Greek fire from the narrow canyons of the
streets below.
"What are all the fireworks for?" he asked her casually.
"It's a Saint's Day, of some sort, they told me at the office," she
explained.
He was about to turn and speak to her again, after a minute's silence,
when a low knock sounded on the door. He remained both silent and
motionless, and the knock was repeated.
"In a moment!" called the woman, as she motioned Durkin to the door of
her clothes-closet. He drew back, with a shake of the head. He revolted
momentarily against the ignominy of the movement. But she caught him by
the arm and thrust him determinedly in, closing the door on him. Then
she hurriedly let her wealth of chestnut hair tumble about her shoulders.
Then she answered the knock, with the loosened strands of chestnut in one
abashed hand.
It was Keenan himself who stood in the hall before her.