The house was surrounded by the police who had been detailed for that
duty, while Wenk with the others hastened to the front door and rang
the bell loudly, but the explosive was already prepared. Mabuse had
not yet gone to bed. The unusual noise in the street had sent him to
the spy-hole in the shutters, whence he could see what was happening,
and the first glance revealed the police. While he was still looking
through his peep-hole, and letting nothing of the happenings outside
escape his eye, since the searchlights illuminated everything in the
street, he was taking down from the cupboard close by, where it hung in
readiness, a police uniform.
He heard the ringing at the door. He had a telephone concealed in the
wall, and this George had connected with a villa at the back of his
garden. He pressed the connection and called, “Spoerri!”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“The police are about to break in. Make your escape as arranged. Fetch
the Countess. Get the new car ready for me. Burn all papers. Send
pigeon-post to Schachen. That’s all.” While still speaking, he began
hastily to put on the police uniform over his own clothes.
Then there was the sound of explosion, and the door was broken open, a
chair flying into the air. With one bound Mabuse was in the corridor.
When the explosion occurred he was on the first floor, which was shut
off from the stairway.
Close behind the first of the police who entered through the shattered
door came Wenk, a heavy revolver in his hand. He was at once struck
by the style of the interior, its beautiful carvings and its costly
Persian carpets. He took this in at the very first glance as he hurried
by. He pointed in silence to the stairs, and while those behind went
up them, he and some others inspected the three doors leading to the
basement. All were locked, and in a few minutes they had been burst
open. The police rushed through all the rooms; one, trying to turn on
the electric light, found that it was cut off.
Six policemen had stormed the stairs. The door in the panelled wall
of the first floor leading from the stairs was open. The men advanced
beyond it into a dark corridor, holding their revolvers cocked, and
touching all the objects they encountered in the darkness. Nowhere was
there any electric light to be had, and it was some time before they
had enough electric torches to suffice them. Then in a moment they
had taken possession of all the rooms, and the doors leading to the
corridor were shut behind them by the detectives, who removed the keys.
Wherever they found the rooms empty, they hacked upon the chests and
cupboards. Mabuse heard the sounds, which made his usually silent house
as noisy as a factory.
When furnishing the house he had had a little secret chamber made
near the doorway leading to the first floor. A carpenter belonging
to his band of accomplices had done the work. This chamber was so
cunningly concealed in the cleverly contrived decoration of the walls
as to be invisible from the corridor outside, and on the inner side
the existence of a door would never have been suspected. It was here
that Mabuse had concealed himself when he heard the explosion that
wrecked his front door. In this hiding-place he had a second telephone
connecting him with the other villa. While the noise of the men
storming the stairs covered his movements, he tried to make use of
this connection, but there was no answer from the other end; therefore
Spoerri must already have got away.
Now came the moment when everything must be risked, and the chances of
escape or of death were equal. The little chamber had a second door,
and this, concealed like the other by the decoration of the panelling,
opened directly on to the stairs. It was here that Mabuse stood to
listen.
He subdued all his senses with the supernatural powers at his command,
subordinating them to his hearing; rustlings, voices, hackings, cries,
abuse, orders, the clicking of electric torches, even the spitting
sound of the acetylene searchlights, were inscribed on his ear-drum
as on a microphone. His powers of hearing must be concentrated on one
single moment, and that was the first second, or fraction of a second,
in which there should be neither step, nor sound, nor even breathing
upon the stairs. If this instant occurred before the systematic search
of the house, room by room, had begun, it would give him a favourable
opportunity, his only opportunity, for flight. It seemed as if the very
blood in his veins stood still, the better to help him discover the
fateful moment. All the other senses were in abeyance, and his will
concentrated on his hearing alone. He felt as if his ear were as large
as the Lake of Constance and his hearing as fine as the vibration of a
filament in an electric light. Everything else within him was cold as
ice, and anæsthetized, but his ear bore a volcanic life within it, and
at last he reached that single heart-beat of time which should prove
his salvation.
He pushed open the narrow door on to the stairs. Until he had
reconnoitred he ran a risk that his ear might have deceived him, but he
saw at once that all was well.
In the corridor below a constable was standing. As he passed him,
Mabuse cried, “He has shut himself into the bathroom....”
Then he saw them all running from the rooms downstairs and pressing
to the staircase. Two men stood at the entrance, in the midst of the
fragments of the shattered door. “I am going for reinforcements,”
said Mabuse as he approached them; “he has entrenched himself in the
bathroom....”
They let him pass, and he ran, using one hand to brush others aside,
the other grasping his Browning pistol. Yes, he was getting away now....
The night was bright with the searchlights, and their rays spoke to
him of freedom and good luck. Dazzling, enchanting visions floated
before his spirit. He drank in deep draughts of the light outside.
“What’s up?” asked one of the men outside as he rushed out.
“His honour’s orders ... reinforcements wanted; he’s entrenched himself
in the bathroom,” called Mabuse in reply.
“Take the motor-cycle,” shouted the other.
What luck! Mabuse already had it between his legs. He fell upon it,
mounted, feeling as if he had fallen from a tower on to a bed of down,
and the night, like a friendly monster, swallowed him up, protecting
him alike from the searchlights and from the violence with which the
search-party would have seized him.
A quarter of an hour later he threw the motor-cycle into the canal and
rode away on his little racing car as if sailing upon a cloud. The car
stretched its nozzle towards the south-west and away it bounded in
delight along the boulevard. It was an armoured car....
* * * * *
“What is the matter?” Wenk asked the police as they rushed past him.
“He is in the bathroom, and has entrenched himself,” one of them called
back.
Wenk ran up the stairs. “Where is he?” he cried.
“In the bathroom,” they shouted on all sides. “All hands to the
bathroom,” ordered Wenk.
They ran hither and thither, and their pocket-torches could be seen
gleaming on the walls in all directions. Where are they all going? To
the bathroom. Fifteen men are hastening to the bathroom. “But where
_is_ the bathroom?” Wenk inquired. Nobody knew where the bathroom was.
And now everyone was shouting out, “Halloa, what’s up?”
The electric switches were overhead, and a turn of the loosely fastened
screws now gave dazzling light to the whole place. The rooms were
brilliant in their wealth and luxuriance--pictures, hangings, carpets,
bronzes, furniture. The bathroom was found at last, and the bath in it
was of Carrara marble, but the whole house was empty and deserted.
Wenk was almost beside himself. He felt like an empty shaft, down which
everything good and beautiful and all that was lofty and successful
had fallen into a bottomless abyss. They tapped the walls with their
hatchets, suspecting some hidden space, and soon the secret nook was
discovered and the riddle solved.
Wenk pulled himself together. There was yet another mouse-hole, and it
was in Schachen, at the Villa Elise!
The State Attorney made rapid arrangements at the telephone
headquarters. All the lines were connected up with him, and everything
had been prepared beforehand. The highroads from Munich in all
directions were guarded by police. The stretch of country between
Munich and Lindau had eight posting-stations, and at every one there
was a telephone ready at any moment throughout the night to inform
Munich of anything that had happened there.
Wenk raised the alarm in all directions. Mabuse’s stratagem had given
him a half-hour’s start. If things had happened as he imagined, and the
car of the fugitive were now eighty or ninety kilometres away, there
was yet ten minutes before Buchloe could announce its passing through.
He had hardly reckoned up the distance, however, when he heard “Buchloe
speaking!” and his heart sang for joy.
“A car has just gone through at terrific speed in the direction of
Kempten. It is a large covered car.”
It was 2.10 a.m., and a quarter of an hour later came the Kaufbeuren
report.
“A large covered car, travelling about eighty kilometres an hour, has
just passed, and taken the Kempten road.”
It was now 2.25 a.m. Wenk began rapidly to make calculations as to the
speed of the car, but just then Buchloe rang up again: “A second car
has just come through, a small, open car with one person in it!” Ten
minutes later Kaufbeuren gave the same report.
“They are escaping in sections. The second car is going faster. Mabuse
must be in that one, and his accomplices in the first,” thought Wenk.
From Obergünzburg he had the announcement of both cars in the one
communication, for the second went through just as the official had
informed him about the first. Buchenberg told him the same.
Then Wenk thought it time to call up Schachen. He gave directions to
await the arrival of the two cars and then take action according to the
plan arranged. The man whom it was above all important to secure would
probably be in the uniform of a Munich constable, and they were not to
be misled by this, for it would be Mabuse.
“Now we have him at last,” said Wenk jubilantly, as he received one
communication after another, all of them proving that Schachen was the
destination aimed at.
Place after place stood out on the map to Wenk, and through the night
the villages and tiny towns called to him and ranged themselves on his
side. He bound them together with phantom threads, reaching to the very
limits of the Empire. He wrung the secret of the broad highroad out of
it in the darkness, and the highroad knew nothing of its revelation.
With one small lever he held the long, unending avenue, shrouded in
darkness, in the hollow of his hand. The forces he had disposed were
obedient to him, their general.
“Hergatz” rang on the telephone, and the sound of its bell seemed to
his ears as intimate as if it were his own name being called.
“Yes,” he said, “it is the State Attorney, Wenk, speaking from Munich.
“A little open car has just gone by very rapidly in the Lindau
direction. Two persons were in it, but not clearly recognized.”
“Thank you. Hold on a minute. There will be a second car through.”
Wenk waited, hearing in the suspended lines all the sounds occurring
through the night between Munich and a little place like Hergatz, which
he had never yet visited.
“Are you still connected?” he asked after a while.
“Yes, sir.”
“Hasn’t the second car come through?”
“Not yet, sir.”
After a time he inquired again, and once more he was told No.
A quarter of an hour later he rang up Hergatz again, and the official
said that no second car had been seen.
Wenk opened out the map again and made a feverish search. Yes:
Buchenberg--Isny--Gestratz--Opfenbach ... there was Hergatz! And
behind Isny there was a highroad leading to Wangen and the Würtemberg
district, or on the left another leading to Austria.
He rang up Wangen, but there was no answer. He repeated the call, and
after storming for ten minutes he tried again, but still in vain. He
had left Wangen out of his reckoning and made no plans concerning it,
and in the direction of Austria he could give no orders, for the power
of his lever did not extend so far. A car had disappeared from his
ken; a car had been stolen from him in the night, snatched away in the
darkness from the strange, unfriendly, gloom-surrounded streets.
And then he thought again that the large car might have had a
breakdown. Yes, it must have been so, and that was why the smaller car
had two people in it, when there was only one at the previous stage.
This new circumstance need not worry him. His luck was not going to
desert him: he trusted to it, and it would not fail.
He rang up Schachen. “There will probably be only one car. Let it
arrive, and then wait twenty minutes to see whether the other one
comes, and surround the villa on all sides. Then deliver your blow, as
hard as you can!”
Scarcely had he finished speaking when the telephone rang once more,
and the last stage--the Enisweiler railway-station--was heard speaking.
A small, open car had turned off the Lindau-Friedrichshafen road, and
was rapidly approaching Schachen. Two people were in it.
It was all complete! Wenk himself could do nothing more now. He would
have to wait. Perhaps in a few moments now the fight on the lake-side
which his tactics had prepared might be going on. He ordered them not
to wait for the second car, but to enter the villa immediately after
the arrival of the occupants of the first one, to seize and handcuff
them, extinguish the lights, and wait a full hour for the second one.
He looked at his watch, and laid it on the table before him. It was now
3.18 a.m.
He felt a twitching in the muscles of hands and feet and a throbbing
in his brain. It seemed as if a whirlwind of pain were rising from his
hips to his head, remaining there a while, and then taking the same
direction again and again, times without number.