Singleton stood there in the middle of the hall, facing the open door,
and still, as though he had the smallest right to touch anything of
hers, he held Miss Anne Ellis's letter in his hand.
"Something must have happened to Sir William," he said.
"Puncture," suggested Napier, all his energies concentrated for the
moment on suppressing every outward sign of concern about the fate of
the letter. He had forced his eyes away from it. Yet, wherever he
looked, he was more aware of that white square in Singleton's hands than
of anything else in the hall.
But Napier had pulled himself together with a strong hand. He mustn't
lose an instant; he shied away from formulating even in secret the idea
of which Singleton's mind must be disabused. He got only as far as to
ask himself, with a ghastly inner sinking, just what danger was
there--could there conceivably be--of Nan's being inadvertently caught
in the net he, Gavan Napier, had helped to spread? _Nan!_ He leaned hard
against the table. Of course--he told himself--of course, they'd find
nothing, nothing in the world to implicate Nan. But the shock, the
wound! How she'd loathe this England! He sat down heavily.
Singleton came sauntering back, the long chin in one hand, the
overbrilliant eyes on Napier. To make an enemy of this man, in the
present universal instability of equilibrium, wouldn't it be a stupid as
well as dangerous mistake?
"Smoke?" suggested Napier. He felt for his cigar case.
Singleton didn't mind if he did. As he sat down on the other side of the
table, he dropped Miss Ellis's letter on the pile.
Oh, but the letter looked well on the table! It suddenly occurred to
Napier, lightly slapping his pockets--what had he done with those
cigars?--there was something not only attractive about Singleton, but
downright likeable.
"It must be a curious life, yours," he said.
"Well, you know how it is yourself."
"_I know?_" It was one thing to leave off hating him, quite another to
ally Gavan Napier with the underground work of the world of spies.
"_Nous pechons aujourd'hui des plus gros poissons, surtout a_,"--he
dropped out as lightly as a smoke-ring the final words, "Gull Island."
Napier, leaning forward to take back the burning match, very nearly fell
off his chair.
"What do _you_ know about--"
"Oh, Gull Island is one of our secret-service pets," Singleton went on,
still in French--though it seemed the height of improbability that, had
he spoken in English, any unseen listener could have distinguished words
falling in the voice you would say was low by nature rather than by
caution. "Jolly little place, Gull Island. I was there last month."
"_Comment!_" Napier said, accepting the medium chosen by his
interlocutor. "You mean before I--"
"Oh, yes, two weeks before you reported. You didn't, so far as I
remember,"--he seemed to indicate a flaw or even a suspicious
circumstance--"you didn't connect this woman with it."
"What woman?"
"Oh, then there _is_ more than one?"
"Oh, see here,"--Napier's patience, perhaps even his self-control, was
wearing thin--"what's the use of going on like this? You know there's
only one suspicious person hereabouts. What you couldn't know is that I
wrote from Scotland a full and complete statement."
"Who to?"
"To Sir William!"
"That was before you were warned?"
"Warned?"
"To keep the Gull Island business to yourself."
Before Napier could bring out his slightly annoyed defense, Singleton
went on: "I wouldn't have dreamed of broaching the matter, if I hadn't
just got my instructions to meet you in London for the express purpose
of telling you that the importance of Gull Island isn't a thing of the
past." He waited while Napier digested the news in a wondering silence.
"In your report to headquarters you didn't, I gather, mention the lady,"
Singleton persisted.
"Why should I? So far as she was concerned I had only my unsupported
suspicions to go on. I thought it only fair to Sir William to leave the
initiative _there_ to him."
"I see. It was perhaps the more convenient thing to do."
"It wasn't at all convenient," Napier assured him with asperity. "I got
into such particularly hot water over my case against the lady that I
don't at this moment know whether I am still private secretary to Sir
William McIntyre or not."
"Why is that?"
"She persuaded him that I was, to put it mildly, salving my wounded
feelings. Oh, she's--" Napier jumped up, and went to the door.
"Yes, she is," Singleton's voice sounded an amused agreement.
"_What_ is she?" Napier demanded, turning round. "Does anybody know?"
"Well, what do you think we're for?"
Napier stood there, an embodied interrogation. How closely did it touch
Nan Ellis, the knowledge this man had?
"We've kept an eye on her for some time. She has been unconsciously--"
Singleton flicked his cigar-ash--"of considerable use to us. Oh, she's
well known. Devils for Pforzheim and Engleberg."
"Engleberg? Who is Engleberg?"
"The older one, who called himself Carl Pforzheim. A slim pair, those
two!"
"He got away?"
Singleton smiled. "One got away--Carl. Ernst is--extremely safe."
The thought of Lady McIntyre came to Napier, along with the horror of
the picture Singleton had evoked; intimates of Kirklamont, donors of
Boris and Ivan; Mr. Ernst, in prison waiting for the firing squad; Mr.
Carl showing his "nice teeth" in a rictus of terror before turning to
take McClintock's knife in his throat.
"There's no call to make a mystery of this little Schwarzenberg affair,"
Singleton was saying. "The woman is better known in Brussels. Better
known still in Cincinnati, Ohio." Singleton smiled. "She has a great
reputation in a certain suburb of that semi-German city. The good people
of New Bonn are proud of her. She has come on so."
"Come on?"
"Oh, she began to 'come on' from the moment she arrived, twenty years
ago, at the age of twelve."
"You don't mean she's thirty-two?"
"Thirty-three, to be exact. She came from a suburb of Berlin with an
older sister, to help in the patriarchal family of the Cincinnati uncle
and aunt."
"The millionaire uncle?"
Singleton's nod of pleasant indulgence accompanied the more exact
information.
"He'd laid by money enough to start a little beer garden. The older
sister soon went out to service. This one insisted on going to school.
But she helped in the beer garden between whiles. Made a friend of one
of the habitues, a fiddler in the local band. She sang for the beer
garden customers, and they threw her dimes. At fourteen she got an
engagement at the little German theater. She sent home the passage money
for a brother. Instead of putting him to a trade, she put him to school.
This girl of fifteen. The next year she sent for another brother. _Meme
jeu._ Oh, she's been very decent to her family. But the voice of great
souls appears always to have been Miss Schwarz's undoing. Her voice was
unformed. She forced it. Broke it. At eighteen an end to hopes of great
operatic career. A year or so later she went on the stage. Played in
German a couple of seasons. Graduated into English. Then there's a
goodish interval which we haven't yet filled. Nearly six years, I make
it. When she next comes to the surface, she had fallen in with Pforzheim
at Washington, and was falling out with him in Paris. The Brussels'
Secret Service had employed him on that Duc de Berry case. _She_ did the
work. Pforzheim, as usual, got the credit, and naturally most of the
cash. She needs an awful lot to keep her going--this woman. They
quarreled over the amount. She washed her hands of the job and of him,
and back she goes to America. Out of the glare and excitement of Paris
and a partnership in Pforzheim's plottings, to--what do you suppose? To
teach music, of all things! In San Francisco, of all places! In a
private family!" Singleton laughed. "These Ellises!" He nodded at Miss
Anne's letters. "Again and again we've traced Greta Schwarz doing this
and that for the International Bureau, being successful and well paid,
and suddenly chucking the whole thing and going back to respectability
and dullness. An inversion of the desire of the moth for the flame. The
desire of the butterfly to labor, to store honey and esteem!"
Napier brought him back to the point. "Now that you've landed Pforzheim,
any more use for her?"
"None on earth."
"But if in this case she's been only Pforzheim's tool, is the evidence
enough--?"
Singleton nodded.
"Her neck's in the noose. You don't believe her neck's in the noose?"
The smile was ugly. It gave a certain sportsman's pleasure to Napier's
reply.
"She's a very clever person--is Miss von Schwarzenberg."
"Well, my experience with all these people," returned Singleton, easily,
"is that the cleverest do the rashest things. Who takes care of
Pforzheim's tracery of fortifications? Pforzheim? Not he. This woman,
with twice his wits. And what do you think of her setting down in that
idiotic diary full reports of conversations among officials? Some at
dinner, some overheard. And do you think Number Eighteen--that is
Pforzheim--do you think he was going to run the risk of having code
messages traced to him? Not a bit of it. The compromising messages come
to her."
"How do you know?"
Singleton dropped his long fingers on the orange envelope and played a
brief tattoo.
"We stopped another of the same sort, signed in her name, this morning
at the local post-office."
"And you could read it?"
"Anybody could read it. Order on an Amsterdam broker to buy Tarapaca
nitrates."
"And what did that tell you?"
"Absolutely nothing. We've tapped messages of the same sort before."
"Then you are no forrader."
"We weren't when we got here this afternoon." Although the conversation
had been carried on in low-voiced French, Singleton leaned over the
table and dropped out the next sentence in a tone that barely escaped
the suspicion-stirring whisper, "Grindley found a French dictionary in
her writing-table."
"What good did that do you?"
"All the good in the world." Singleton's face shone with the good it did
him. "You see," he went on, in that careless-sounding undertone, "the
hitch was we couldn't hit on the code. That's why we've been giving her
rope."
"And now?"
"Now--?" In a flash of pantomime Singleton with one hand suggested the
knotting round the throat. His quick fingers carried the invisible cord
above his head. He dangled the phantom felon in the air. "And the beauty
of it is, she's done it herself."
"I wonder," said Napier.
"You wouldn't if you knew Grindley!" Singleton smiled comfortably as he
lay back in the high carved chair. "Frightfully intelligent boy,
Grindley. You see,"--suddenly he bent over the table again--"it's like
this. They send about a devilish lot of their information in the form of
brokers' orders. I dare say, if you've noticed, she'll pretend to read
the 'Financial Times.'"
He waited only a second for the verification Napier withheld. But the
familiar picture sprang up at call: Miss Greta half coquettish, half
girlishly--appealing, "I must see what's happened to my poor little
earnings." Sir William amused, pleasantly malicious, "As if you'd know,
even if they told you! You'd far better ask me."
"Thank you immensely, but women oughtn't to be so dreadfully dependent.
I'd like to _make_ myself understand. Perhaps in time--"
And Sir William's laughter: "When rivers run uphill and kittens cry
to-whitt, to-whoo!"
Singleton had taken out a note-book and scribbled two or three lines.
"She'll telegraph something like that." He held the book open on the
table under Napier's eyes. "She wouldn't care a button if the
post-office people gave that up or whose hands it fell into."
Certainly in Napier's hands it would have made Miss Greta no trouble.
"You might call it stupid," was his comment.
"Exactly. Nobody could be expected to see danger to the state in an
order to buy Nepaul rice or Sumatra cigars. It's all right and runs on
greased rails, till Grindley comes along. He turns over that La Motte of
hers, till he notices some minute pencil-marks on one of the green
advertisement pages at the back. The marks were so small that no eyes
but Grindley's would have noticed them at all. And even Grindley
couldn't read them without a magnifying glass." Singleton leaned over
suddenly till he could command the avenue, stretching, sun-flecked,
empty to the gates.
"Do you always hear the motor before it gets to the plantation?"
"Always."
"Well, the kind of thing that came out under the glass was: 'Market
dull--Ascertain R--activity.' R," interpreted Singleton, "meaning
Hosyth, of course. 'Prices falling--Leaving Southampton. Advise
purchase--Report to Seventy-Six.'
"Seventy-six is the number of the German agent at Amsterdam. We've
learned a good deal since we discovered that is where seventy-six hangs
out. This message, for instance,"--he nodded at the one between them on
the table--"says, 'Advise immediate purchase Erie at 22-1/4--3/4 and
steel 129-5/8, market rising.' It's clear, according to the La Motte
code, that something's got to be reported instantly to the German secret
service agent at Amsterdam. The question is what? Even if we intercepted
the message, we shouldn't be any the wiser. Or, rather, we shouldn't
have been, if Grindley hadn't gone juggling with the numbers of the
stock quotations till it occurred to him, after trying the thing twenty
other ways." He stopped.
"Yes," Napier threw in. "I've been wondering why you tell me all this."
His smile was slightly abstracted.
"It's all right, I thought I heard a motor," said Singleton. He met
Napier's eyes. "It's my business to know men, and before it was my
business I knew you." That was the sole reference made to the Oxford
episode. "Grindley's got an idea," Singleton went on and his face
reflected the brilliance of it, "that the consonants in the occasional
short-code words interpolated into some of the messages--words like
Tubu, and so on--stand for the class of ship the submarines are to look
out for. Tubu equals Torpedo boat. Kreuzer, Kleinkreuzer, Zerstorer, and
so on, are indicated, we think now, in the same way."
Napier made no pretense at sharing Singleton's delight in these
speculations.
"All this information," he exclaimed, "going back and forth with
absolute impunity!"
"Until to-day," Singleton breathed out from full lungs. "Great day this
for the service!"
But Napier sat appalled. No ship to leave our harbors, but its character
and course might be known to the enemy lying in wait! He began to
believe things he'd scoffed at. It was true, then, the Germans had coded
in their secret-service ciphers every naval base, every ammunition
center, every camp, every war-vessel of the British fleet. He said as
much, with raging in his heart.
"And while ship after ship, crew after crew, goes down, what is _our_
secret service doing!"
One member of it was blowing smoke-rings. Not till the supply of smoke
gave out, did Singleton fall back on words:
"You hear very little about the English secret service, and you hear a
lot about the German. That, to begin with, is an advantage, greater than
you can appreciate. I don't propose to subtract from it. But there's no
law against my talking about the German system. Their greatest technical
flaw is that they lose themselves in a wilderness of detail. Their men
will know all about the trajectory and penetration of the fourteen-inch
gun, and they'll understand so little the men who make the guns that our
quarrels among ourselves, our industrial unrest, is taken to mean that
we're ready to consent to 'a German peace.' They'll report reams--we've
seen 'em, got 'em docketed in our drawers--reams about the ordnance
factories of the Argyle works. But as for the new projectile we're
turning out a few hundred yards away, they'll have no more idea of
_that_--till it goes whistling and roaring through their compact
formations--than they have that the money they're still secretly
supplying to Pforzheim comes straight to our Intelligence Department.
All the same, where the Germans fail isn't in brains. Trouble with the
ruck of 'em is, they go from the extreme of sentimentality at one end,
to the extreme of brutality at the other. Pforzheim! A sort of modern
Werther, with a capacity for cruelty that would turn a South Sea
cannibal sick. This woman, too. Risk her own life and lose Pforzheim
his, colossal business in hand, and goes on like the heroine of a
shilling shocker. Can't resist collecting all the silly 'properties.'
Simply dotes on the paraphernalia, pistol, and what not. One of the
unwritten rules of the service: 'Make no memoranda. Carry no documents;
only by rare exception carry arms.' She goes putting down compromising
details, in a letter, for the amateurish pleasure of airing her 'inside
knowledge' of the British Cabinet, and making use of invisible ink. No
self-respecting British spy would be caught dead with most of the truck
she'd collected in that box."
Napier had the very soundest conviction that, however poorly Singleton
thought, or pretended to think, of Miss Greta's qualifications, he had
set a guard of some sort at every possible avenue of escape. The woman
was already as much a prisoner as any badger in the bottom of a bag. "If
she's a specimen of the amateur," Napier said, "Heaven save us from the
professional!"
Singleton laughed. "Heaven would need to look lively. I'd hate to be
the custodian of damaging secrets with a fellow like Grindley about.
You'll see." He struck his fist on the table. "A hundred pound sterling
to a German pfennig, Grindley'll come back with that message from the
Dutch agent neatly decoded. Oh, Grindley's immense!" Singleton rolled
one long leg over the other, luxuriating in Grindley's immensity. "We
aren't supposed to know each other--Grindley and I. But who wouldn't
know Grindley! As a matter of fact, I introduced him to the chief, and
the chief luckily isn't a stickler for the continental rules in this
business. We English humanize it. What's the result? We totally mystify
the rule-ridden Hun, and we've got the most efficient secret service in
the world."
"Have we?" Napier started involuntarily at the sound of the motor
turning off the high road and running now through the plantation with a
muffled hum. "Here comes the--amateur!"
No acumen was required to read the fact that, in Napier's opinion,
Singleton underestimated the noxious power of the amateur agent.
"I don't deny,"--the secret-service man stood up, but he dropped his
voice to a lower register, as though the invisible comer were already at
the door--"I'm not for a moment denying that this woman can do a certain
amount of harm. She's got to be suppressed. But think of what she
_might_ do! She's had every opportunity, and she'll always fall short."
"Not ruthless enough?"
"Oh, she can be as ruthless as you please,"--Singleton for some reason
had crossed the hall. He stood leaning against the wall near the
billiard-room. "She could put a bullet in you nicely, after she'd
blinded you with cayenne. But,"--Singleton shook his head--"she hasn't
the right standards."
"Oh, standards?" echoed Napier. It seemed a queer word.
"At heart," said Singleton, "she has longings, as I read per
record--ineradicable longings--for, what do you think? Respectability!"
He smiled and then shook his fine head. "To be any good as a spy you
must be either aristocrat--a perfectly satisfying law unto yourself, or
you must be _canaille_. This woman--she's _bourgeoise_ to the core, and
a Romantic to boot. There doesn't exist a more fatal combination. I tell
you,"--he stood erect--"Greta Schwarz is done for. _Kaput!_"
"She doesn't look it." Napier, leaning over, had caught sight of the
car.
Gliding round the drive, the handsome occupant visibly luxuriating in
the comfort and elegance of Lady McIntyre's limousine, Greta von
Schwarzenberg lay back against the dove-colored cushions, with only her
heightened color to show her the least stirred by the unexpected
summons. Or was the color there, like a couple of flags, hung out in
honor of Napier's return?
"_Ecoutez!_" Singleton's head appeared an instant out of the
drawing-room door. "There's just one thing missing in that box of tricks
upstairs--pinch of white powder. You must look out for that if we don't
want a corpse on our hands."
"_I_ must look out? See here--"
Singleton's head vanished.