Lacking accommodations for the rescued, it was stated, the destroyer had
summoned by wireless the east-bound freight steamship _Saratoga_, which had
trans-shipped the unfortunates and turned back to New York....
Throughout the best part of that journey from Providence to New York
Lanyard sat blankly staring into the black mirror of the window beside
his chair, revolving schemes for his immediate future in the light of
information derived, indirectly as much as directly, from these newspaper
stories.
Retrospective consideration of that voyage left little room for doubt that
the designs of the German agents had been thoughtfully matured. They had
been quiet enough between their first stroke in the dark and their last,
between the burglary of Cecelia Brooke's stateroom the first night out and
those murderous attacks on Bartholomew and Thackeray. Unquestionably,
had they bided their time pending that hour when, according to their
information, the submersible would be off Nantucket, awaiting their signal
to sink the _Assyrian_--a signal which would never have been given had
their plans proved successful, had they not made the ship too hot to hold
them, and finally had they not made every provision for their own escape
when the ship went down.
Lanyard was confident that all of their company had been warned to hold
themselves ready, and consequently had come off scot free--all, that is,
save that victim of treachery, the unhappy Baron von Harden.
If the number of that group which Lanyard had selected as comprising a
majority of his enemies, those nine who had discussed the Lone Wolf in the
smoking room, was now reduced to five--Becker, Dressier, O'Reilly, Putnam,
and Velasco--or four, eliminating Putnam, of whose loyalty there could be
no question--Lanyard still had no means of knowing how many confederates
among the other passengers these four might not have had.
And even four men who appreciated what peril to their plans inhered in the
Lone Wolf, even four made a ponderable array of desperate enemies to have
at large in New York, apt to be encountered at any corner, apt at any time
to espy and recognise him without his knowledge.
This situation imposed upon him two major tasks of immediate moment: he
must hunt down those four one by one and either satisfy himself as to their
innocence of harmful intent or put them permanently _hors de combat_; and
he must extinguish utterly, once and for all time, that amiable personality
whose brief span had been restricted to the decks of the _Assyrian_,
Monsieur André Duchemin.
That one must be buried deep, beyond all peradventure of involuntary
resurrection.
Fortunately the last step toward the positive metamorphosis indicated had
been taken that very morning, when the Gallic beard of Monsieur Duchemin
was erased by the razor of a New England barber, whose shears had likewise
eradicated every trace of a Continental mode of hair-dressing. There
remained about Lanyard little to remind of André Duchemin but his eyes; and
the look of one's eyes, as every good actor knows, is something far more
easy to disguise than is commonly believed.
But it was hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so
useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable
letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a
solitary fault--too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to
whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard
had moved and had his being. Witness--according to Crane--the demoniac
cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the Duchemin incognito.
Suspicion was taking form in Lanyard's reflections that he had paid far
too little attention to Señor Arturo Velasco of Buenos Aires, whose
avowed avocation of amateur criminologist might easily be synonymous with
interests much less innocuous.
Or why had Velasco been so quick to communicate recognition of Lanyard to
an employee of the United States Secret Service?
For that matter, why had he felt called so publicly to descant upon the
natural history of the Lone Wolf? In order to focus upon that one the
attentions of his enemies? Or to put him on guard?
It was altogether perplexing. Was one to esteem Velasco friend or foe?
Lanyard could comfort himself only with the promise he should one day know,
and that without undue delay.
Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to
Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra,"
read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling
engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something
like eighteen hours out.
Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars
in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all
the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that
he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where
people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled
deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights
of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities
of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few,
infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars
walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and
played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them
homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.
A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to
defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus
incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit
its peril....
Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue
a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....
Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this
late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the
night....
Lanyard lifted a wondering gaze to the livid sky whose far, clear stars
were paled and shamed by the up-flung glare, like eyes of innocence peering
down into a pit of hell.
Inscrutable!
Yet one could hardly be numb to the subtle, heady intoxication of those
cool, immaculate, sea-sweet airs which swept the streets, instilling
self-confidence and lightness of spirit even in heads shadowed with the woe
of war-worn Europe.
Lanyard had not crossed the Avenue before he found himself walking with a
brisker stride, holding his own head high....
On impulse, despite the lateness of the hour, albeit with misgivings
justified in the issue, he hailed a taxicab and had himself driven to the
headquarters of the British Secret Service in America, an unostentatious
dwelling on the northwest corner of West End Avenue at Ninety-fifth Street.
Here a civil footman answered the door and Lanyard's enquiries with the
information that Colonel Stanistreet had unexpectedly been called out
of town and would not return before evening of the next day, while his
secretary, Mr. Blensop, had gone to a play and might not come home till all
hours.
More impatient than disappointed, Lanyard climbed back into his cab, and in
consequence of consultation with its friendly minded chauffeur, eventually
put up for the night in an Eighth Avenue hotel of the class that made
Senator Raines famous, a hostelry brazenly proclaiming accommodations "for
gentlemen only," whereas it offered entertainment for both man and beast
and catered rather more to beast than to man.
However, it served; it was inconspicuous and made no demands upon a shabby
traveller sans luggage, more than payment in advance.
Early abroad, Lanyard breakfasted with attention fixed to the advertising
columns of the _Herald_, and by mid-morning was established as sub-tenant
of a furnished bachelor apartment on Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh
Avenue, a tiny nest of few rooms on the street level, with entrances from
both the general lobby and the street direct: an admirable arrangement for
one who might choose to come and go without supervision or challenge.
Lacking local references as to his character, Lanyard was obliged to pay
three months' rent in advance in addition to making a substantial deposit
to cover possible damage to the furnishings.
His name, a spur-of-the-moment selection, was recorded in the lease as
Anthony Ember.
At noon he brought to his lodgings two trunks salvaged from a storage
warehouse wherein they had been deposited more than three years since, on
the eve of his flight with his family from America, an affair of haste and
secrecy forbidding the handicap of heavy impedimenta.
Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive
wardrobe.
But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled
were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked,
memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient
with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.
For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking
aimlessly at small broidered garments.
And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten
for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this
brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly
entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his
hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.
In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the
private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant
news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul
uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.
He found no more of interest in the newspaper than the information that the
_Saratoga_ had been sighted off Fire Island and was expected to dock in New
York not later than eight o'clock that night.
This, however, was acceptable reading. Lanyard had work to do which were
better done before "Karl" and his crew found opportunity to communicate
directly with their collaborators ashore, work which it were unwise
to initiate before nightfall lent a cloak of shadows to hoodwink the
ever-possible adventitious German spy.
Nor was he so fatuous as to fancy it would profit him to call before nine
o'clock at the house on West End Avenue. No earlier might he hope to find
Colonel the Honourable George Fleetwood-Stanistreet near the end of his
dinner, and so in a mood approachable and receptive.
But there could be no harm in reconnaissance by daylight.
He whiled away the latter part of the afternoon in taxicabs, by dint of
frequent changes contriving in the most casual fashion imaginable to pass
the Seventy-ninth Street branch of the Wilhelmstrasse no less than four
times.
Little rewarded these tactics other than a fairly accurate mental
photograph of the building and its situation--and a growing suspicion that
the United States Government had profited nothing by England's lessons
of early war days in respect of the one way to cope with resident enemy
aliens.
The house stood upon a corner, occupying half of an avenue block--the
northern half of which was the site of a towering apartment house in
course of construction--and loomed over its lesser neighbours a monumental
monstrosity of architecture, as formidable as a fortress, its lower tiers
of windows barred with iron, substantial iron grilles ready to bar its
main entrance, even heavier gates guarding the carriage court in the
side street. In all a stronghold not easy for the most accomplished
house-breaker to force; yet the heart of it was Lanyard's goal; for there,
he believed, Ekstrom (under whatever _nom de guerre_) lay hidden, or if not
Ekstrom, at least a clear lead to his whereabouts.
Certainly that one could not be far from the powerful wireless station
secretly maintained on the roof of this weird jumble of architectural
periods, its aërials cunningly hidden in the crowning atrocity of its
minaret: a station reputedly so powerful that it could receive Berlin's
nightly outgivings of news and orders, and, in emergency, transmit them to
other secret stations in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Yet the shrewdest scrutiny of eyes trained to detect police agents at
sight, however well disguised, failed to espy one sign of any sort of
espionage upon this nest of rattlesnakes.
Apparently its tenants came and went as they willed, untroubled by and
contemptuous of governmental surveillance.
A handsome limousine car pulled up at its carriage block as Lanyard drove
by, one time, and a pretty woman, exquisitely gowned, alighted and was
welcomed by hospitable front doors that opened before she could ring: a
woman Lanyard knew as one of the most daring, diabolically clever, and
unscrupulous creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse, one whose life would not have
been worth an hour's purchase had she ventured to show herself in Paris,
London, or Petrograd at any time since the outbreak of the war.
He drove on, deep in amaze.
Indications were not wanting, on the other hand, that enemy spies
maintained close watch upon the movements of those who frequented the house
on West End Avenue. A German agent whom Lanyard knew by sight was strolling
by as his taxi rounded its corner and swung on down toward Riverside Drive.
This more modest residence possessed a brick-walled garden at the back, on
the Ninety-fifth Street side. And if the top of the wall was crusted with
broken glass in a fashion truly British, it had a door, and the door a
lock. And Lanyard made a note thereon.
And when he went home to dress for dinner, he opened up the false bottom
of one of his trunks and selected from a store of cloth-wrapped bundles
therein one which contained a small bunch of innocent-looking keys whose
true _raison d'être_ was anything in the world but guileless.
Later he did himself very well at Delmonico's, enjoying for the first time
in many years a well-balanced dinner faultlessly cooked and served amid
quiet surroundings that carried memory back half a decade to the Paris that
was, the Paris that nevermore will be....
At nine precisely he paid off a taxicab at the corner of Ninety-fifth
Street.
While waiting on the doorstep of the corner house, he raked the street
right and left with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured.
Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at
the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance
on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the
old-fashioned brownstone houses across the way.
The neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet even for an upper West Side
residential quarter. A block over to the east Broadway was strident in the
flood of its nocturnal traffic; a like distance to the west Riverside Drive
hummed with pleasure cars taking advantage of the first bland night of that
belated spring. But here, now that the taxi had wheeled away, there was
never a car in sight, nor even a strolling brace of sidewalk lovers.
The door opened, revealing the same footman.
"Colonel Stanistreet? I will see, sir."
Lanyard entered.
"If you will be kind enough to be seated," the footman suggested,
indicating a small waiting room. "And what name shall I say?"
It had been Lanyard's intention to have himself announced simply as the
author of that telegram from Edgartown. Obscure impulse made him change his
mind, some premonition so tenuous as to defy analysis.
"Mr. Anthony Ember."
"Thank you, sir."
After a little the footman returned.
"If you will come this way, sir...."
He led toward the back of the house, introducing Lanyard to a spacious
apartment, a library uncommonly well furnished, rather more than
comfortably yet without a trace of ostentation in its complete luxury, a
warm room, a room intimately lived in, a room, in short, characteristically
British in atmosphere.
Waist-high bookcases lined the walls, broken on the right by a cheerful
fireplace with a grate of glowing cannel coal, in front of it a great club
lounge upholstered, like all the chairs, in well-used leather. Opposite the
chimney-piece, a handsome thing in carved oak, a door was draped with a
curtain that swung with it. In the back of the room two long and wide
French windows stood open to the night, beyond them that garden whose
wall had attracted Lanyard's attention. There were a number of paintings,
portraits for the most part, heavily framed, with overhead picture-lights.
In the middle of the room was a table-desk, broad and long, supporting a
shaded reading lamp. On the far side of the table a young man sat writing,
with several dockets of papers arranged before him.
As Lanyard entered, this one put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and
came round the table: a tallish, well-made young man, dressed a shade too
foppishly in spite of an unceremonious dinner coat, his manner assured,
amiable, unconstrained, perhaps a little over-tolerant.
"Mr. Ember, I believe?" he said in a voice studiously musical.
"Yes," Lanyard replied, vaguely annoyed with himself because of an
unreasoning resentment of this musical quality. "Mr. Blensop?"
"I am Mr. Blensop," that one admitted gracefully. "And how may I have the
pleasure of being of service?"
He waved a hand toward an easy chair beside the table, and resumed his own.
But Lanyard hesitated.
"I wished to see Colonel Stanistreet."
Mr. Blensop looked up with an indulgent smile. His face was round and
smooth but for a perfectly docile little moustache, his lips full and red,
his nose delicately chiselled; but his eyes, though large, were set cannily
close together.
"Colonel Stanistreet is unfortunately not at home. I am his secretary."
"Yes," said Lanyard, still standing. "In that case I'd be glad if you would
be good enough to make an appointment for me with Colonel Stanistreet."
"I am afraid he will not be home till very late to-night, but--"
"Then to-morrow?"
Mr. Blensop smiled patiently. "Colonel Stanistreet is a very busy man," he
uttered melodiously. "If you could let me know something about the nature
of your business...."
"It is the King's," said Lanyard bluntly.
The secretary went so far as to betray well-bred surprise. "You are an
Englishman, Mr. Ember?"
"Yes."
And for all he knew to the contrary, so Lanyard was.
"I am Colonel Stanistreet's secretary," the young man again suggested
hopefully.
"That is precisely why I ask you to make an appointment for me with your
employer," Lanyard retorted politely.
"You won't say what you wish to see him about?"
A trace of asperity marred the music of those tones; Mr. Blensop further
indicated distaste of the innuendo inherent in Lanyard's use of the word
"employer" by delicately wrinkling his nose.
"I am sorry," Lanyard replied sufficiently.
The door behind him opened, and the footman intruded.
"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop...."
"Yes, Walker?"
The servant advanced to the table and proffered a visiting card on a tray.
Mr. Blensop took it, arched pencilled brows over it.
"To see me, Walker?"
"The gentleman asked for Colonel Stanistreet, sir."
"H'm.... You may show him in when I ring."
The footman retired. Mr. Blensop looked up brightly, bending the card with
nervous fingers.
"You were saying your business was...?"
"I was not," Lanyard replied with disarming good humour. "I'm afraid that
is something much too important and confidential to reveal even to Colonel
Stanistreet's secretary, if you don't mind my saying so."
Mr. Blensop did mind, and betrayed vexation with an impatient little
gesture which caused the card to fly from his fingers and fall face
uppermost on the table. Almost instantly he recovered it, but not before
Lanyard had read the name it bore.
"Of course not," said the secretary pleasantly, rising. "But you understand
my instructions are rigid ... I'm sorry."
"You refuse me the appointment?"
"Unless you can give me an inkling of your business--or perhaps bring a
letter of introduction."
"I can do neither, Mr. Blensop," said Lanyard earnestly. "I have
information of the gravest moment to communicate to the head of the British
Secret Service in this country."
The secretary looked startled. "What makes you think Colonel Stanistreet is
connected with the British Secret Service?"
"I don't think so; I know it."
After a moment of hesitation Mr. Blensop yielded graciously. "If you can
come back at nine to-morrow morning, Mr. Ember, I'll do my best to persuade
Colonel Stanistreet--"
"I repeat, my business is of the most pressing nature. Can't you arrange
for me to see your employer to-night?"
"It is utterly impossible."
Lanyard accepted defeat with a bow.
"To-morrow at nine, then," he said, turning toward the door by which he had
entered.
"At nine," said Mr. Blensop, generous in triumph. "But do you mind going
out this way?"
He moved toward the curtained door opposite the chimney-piece. Lanyard
paused, shrugged, and followed. Mr. Blensop opened the door, disclosing a
vista of Ninety-fifth Street.
"Thank _you_, Mr. Ember. _Good_-night," he intoned.
The door closed with the click of a spring latch.
Lanyard stood alone in the street, looking swiftly this way and that, his
hand closing upon that little bunch of keys in his pocket, his humour
lawless.
For the name inscribed on that card which Mr. Blensop had so carelessly
dropped was one to fill Lanyard with consuming anxiety for better
acquaintance with its present wearer.
Written in pencil, with all the individual angularity of French
chirography, the name was André Duchemin.