IN WHICH DESMOND OKEWOOD FINDS CLUBFOOT IN STRANGE COMPANY
“You’ve got this spy, Okewood, under lock and key, Herr Doktor?”
The room was sparely lighted by a single reading-lamp with a green
shade, and its sickly rays seemed to heighten the pallor of the
speaker’s face. He was a round-shouldered man whose high cheek-bones and
slanting eyes betrayed his Mongol blood even as his snuffling German
jargon revealed his race. He had a rabbit mouth, the upper lip drawn up
over long yellow teeth, and the weakness of his chin was in part hidden
by a ragged fringe of reddish beard. He sat at the desk, his whole body
atwitch with some nervous tic as he gnawed restlessly at his fingers. In
the burly apelike figure that confronted him, with the relentless eyes
beneath their tufted brows, the cruel, savage mouth and the heavy jowl,
any one closely acquainted with the dark ways of international espionage
would have recognized the redoubtable Dr. Grundt, better known as The
Man with the Clubfoot.
Slowly Grundt opened and shut his great hairy hand.
“I’ve got him—_there_, Mandelstamm!” he said in a voice that purred with
exultation. “We are old, we are exiled; but we are not a back number
yet. In this last affair of Sir Alexander Bannington’s report in which,
I confess, my customary good fortune failed me, this cursed Okewood had
odds of three to one on his side. He thought he had me cornered; but now
he, not old Clubfoot, sits in the trap.”
He chuckled savagely with a sound that was almost a snarl.
“I think,” he added, “that our young friend will not altogether relish
his prospects when he awakes from his long sleep!”
“You drugged him, hein?” asked the Jew. There was something vulpine in
the way he lifted his long aquiline nose.
Clubfoot guffawed. “The neatest trick! Max, whose performance as a
Scotland Yard detective was erstklassig—kolossal!—gave him a whiff of
chloroform just to keep him quiet! And this poor Okewood believed he was
taking me off to Scotland Yard! Donnerwetter!”
He slapped his great thigh and laughed uproariously. His companion’s
mouth twitched upwards at the corners displaying another inch or two of
dripping, yellow fangs. It was like a fox’s grin if such a phenomenon of
natural history can be imagined.
“The Soviets find that spies, like meat, don’t keep!” he softly lisped.
“Why didn’t you kill him, Herr Doktor?”
“Perhaps,” Grundt answered slowly, “because I have other uses in view
for our enterprising young friend!”
Mandelstamm leant forward swiftly. “Also doch!” he ejaculated.
“What Clubfoot promises he accomplishes,” said Grundt, raising his voice
menacingly.
“Of course, of course,” hastily agreed _Tavarish_ Mandelstamm, and slyly
added: “Only you didn’t secure the Bannington report, did you, Herr
Doktor?”
The blood slowly mounted in the other’s swarthy face. “A mere
miscalculation, my friend! It was a trifling matter, anyhow, and I have
never been able to interest myself in bagatelles. But this commission of
yours . . .” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Do you
realize the task you’ve set me? Nein, nicht wahr? Would it surprise you
to learn that within the past week the Foreign Office has changed its
codes? While the new ones are being revised they are employing, for Most
Secret despatches, code 3A of the Secret Service. You didn’t know that,
did you? Come closer! Hitherto, the working of code 3A has been known to
three persons only—to the Chief of the British Secret Service, to his
confidential ciphering clerk, and”—he dropped his voice to a whisper—“to
Major Desmond Okewood! . . .”
“Ach nein!” exclaimed the Russian admiringly, cracking his knuckles.
“With that draft treaty in our hands . . .”
“_P-sst!_” warned Grundt, pointing at the door.
A broad-shouldered man with a heavy dark moustache stood on the
threshold of the room.
“What is it, Max?” asked Grundt.
“The Englishman is coming round, Herr Doktor!”
Clubfoot looked at his watch. “Midnight!” he said. “You did your work
thoroughly, Max!”
“One does what one can, Herr Doktor!”
“You and Heinrich will take it in turns to guard the Englishman
throughout the night. You can give him food. But watch him, he’s
slippery. If he escapes . . .” He broke off and glared at the other. “Go
now and remember what I say!”
Grundt turned to the Russian. “The Constantinople courier is expected to
leave Calais for Dover by the afternoon boat. Everything is prepared. If
all goes well he should be here soon after dark. Sleep well,
Mandelstamm! The draft treaty will be in your hands by to-night!”
Limping heavily with his huge misshapen foot, he hobbled briskly from
the room.
Desmond Okewood was emerging painfully from a long, incoherent dream. He
found his eyes fixed on an electric bulb caged in steel bars, and set in
the ceiling high above his head. As he gazed, the light seemed to come
and go, to appear and vanish again . . .
And then, with a jerk, he was fully conscious. With a pang the memory of
the night came rushing back. The shame of his position almost
overwhelmed him. To think that he, Desmond Okewood, had been deceived by
the common crooks’ trick of dressing up confederates as detectives!
He looked about him. He was lying on a couch in a bare and lofty room.
Heavy oaken shutters, secured with bars of iron solidly padlocked,
excluded every vestige of daylight. He had no idea where he was or what
the time of day might be. When he looked for his watch, he found that
his pockets had been emptied.
The house was wrapped in silence. Not a sound came to him from without.
He tried to review the situation. His position was desperate. Clubfoot
would not spare him. This time he was doomed beyond hope of escape. A
train of odd incidents from his long battle of wits with the master spy
came crowding into his aching head . . .
Still drowsy from the drug, he must have dropped off to sleep, for when
next he opened his eyes it was to find some one shaking his arm. A
fair-haired youth stood beside the couch, his rather crafty face barred
by a long white scar. Desmond recognized Heinrich, Clubfoot’s acolyte in
many an exploit.
On the table stood a tray decked for a meal.
“Anything you want you can have,” said Heinrich, “as long as it doesn’t
require cutting with a knife. I’ve brought you some minced chicken and a
whiskey-and-soda . . .”
“Where am I?” asked Desmond.
“My instructions,” retorted the youth with military precision, “are to
feed you. Nothing more. I shall return in half an hour for the
tray . . .”
“Can’t I have a wash?” demanded Desmond.
The youth pointed to an oaken cabinet in the corner. “You will find all
you require there!” he said. Then he left the room.
Hot water stood ready in a brass jug. After he had washed and eaten,
Desmond felt his strength returning. When Heinrich came to fetch the
tray, he brought a cup of coffee and a box of cigarettes.
“Quite a prison de luxe!” remarked Desmond brightly.
“My orders are to make you comfortable!” was the non-committal reply.
Each time the door opened, Desmond noticed that a light burnt in the
corridor. He assumed, therefore, that it must be evening. Consequently
he must have slept almost the round of the clock. The hours dragged
interminably on. He paced up and down the room, smoking cigarettes, busy
with his thoughts. What had become of Clubfoot? What was he waiting for?
Why didn’t he come in and finish it?
Slowly the numbing silence of the house, the absence of any indication
of time, the artificial light, began to get on Desmond Okewood’s nerves.
This restriction on his liberty was intolerable. He looked about for a
bell. There was none. He went to the door—it was solid oak with no lock
apparent on the inside—and began to hammer it with his fists and feet.
He pounded until he was tired. No one came.
He had fallen to striding up and down the room again when suddenly the
door opened. Heinrich came in.
“Dr. Grundt is asking for you. Will you come with me?” he said.
“Gladly,” retorted Desmond. “I’m particularly anxious to have a word
with the Herr Doktor!”
“Don’t trouble to try to escape,” observed the young man blandly as he
held the door for his prisoner. “Doors and windows are barred and the
house is closely guarded. You’d only get hurt!”
The warning was spoken sincerely and carried conviction. Desmond felt
his heart sink.
It could not yet be morning, Desmond decided, as he followed his escort
down a broad corridor with windows shuttered and barred like that of his
room. They descended a flight of steps to a small tiled hall, lighted,
like corridor and staircase, by artificial light. From a door that stood
ajar came the murmur of voices. Heinrich ushered his prisoner into a
long low-ceilinged room.
Four men were seated at the end of an oval table, their faces
indistinctly seen through a thin haze of blue tobacco smoke that drifted
in the close air.
Grundt presided at the head of the board, a round-shouldered,
red-bearded Jew on his right, a grossly plebeian-looking man with a face
the colour of suet, thin greyish hair plastered across a shining bald
pate, and a great paunch, sprawling in the chair on his left. Next to
him was a middle-aged man with a stiff grey beard and a stiff face who
sat bolt upright, his hands folded in his lap.
“Be seated, Major,” said Clubfoot cordially, and pointed to a chair next
to the Jew. “Mr. Blund, the cigars are with you!”
The full, deep voice was courteous, even genial, and a jovial smile
played about the full lips. Desmond took the proffered chair, but waved
aside the box of Partagas which the fat man pushed in his direction. He
felt his hands growing cold. By bitter experience he knew that Clubfoot
was never so dangerous as in these moments of expansion.
“The fortune of war!” Grundt resumed. “You played your cards
admirably . . . up to a point, lieber Okewood! I have always said you
were an opponent worthy of my steel. Perhaps, in this instance, you were
just a trifle . . . shall we say over-confident? . . .”
Desmond, who had been taking stock of his surroundings, pulled himself
resolutely together. The bland self-assurance of Grundt, he noticed, was
far from being shared by his companions. The Jew was a mass of nerves,
rapaciously tearing at his yellow, deeply bitten finger-nails, the
little pig eyes of the fat man were restless with apprehension, and
there was an air of tension about the very rigidity of the enigmatical
greybeard across the table.
“You and your rather unsavoury accomplices are playing a dangerous game,
Herr Doktor,” he said as bravely as he might. “The riff-raff of
international espionage”—he paused and gazed with cool deliberation
first at the Jew at his side and then at Greybeard—“live from hand to
mouth, as we all know, and cannot be over-scrupulous. But I must say I
wonder what an Englishman”—he stared pointedly at the fat man as he
spoke—“is doing in your ill-favoured company!”
The fat man struggled up in his chair with malice depicted in every
feature of his leaden-hued face.
“You keep a civil tongue in your ’ead, d’jeer?” he spluttered.
But Clubfoot laid a hairy paw on his sleeve. “Let us make allowances for
Major Okewood’s natural chagrin,” he counselled. “Believe me, he is full
of common sense. He will presently recognize the value of being polite
and . . . and obliging with us . . . otherwise”—he paused and looked
amiably round the board—“otherwise we shall have to teach him manners,
eh, Tarock?”
“A gord round the head, with some hardt knots, tvisted vith a baionette
vould be a good lesson to him,” muttered the grey-bearded man.
“Don’t be hasty, Tarock,” said Grundt gently.
“_Not_ Tarock, of Cracow?” exclaimed Desmond. “Why, now, isn’t that
interesting? I’ve heard of you so often, and we’ve never met. Let’s see,
you commanded a company once in the Deutschmeister Regiment in Vienna,
didn’t you? And were cashiered for stealing the company money . . .?”
Greybeard moved uneasily in his seat.
“What a pity that the white-slave traffic laws interfered with your new
career at Cracow!” Desmond resumed impassively. “So many of your
colleagues regard them as the most unfair restriction of trade! Dear,
dear! Was it five or seven years Zuchthaus they gave you?”
“Herr!” thundered Tarock, springing to his feet.
The fox-grin had again appeared about the thin lips of Mr. Mandelstamm.
Clubfoot, too, appeared to be enjoying the scene.
“Personally, I always admired your versatility as a spy,” Desmond went
on, leaning back out of reach of Tarock’s threatening fist, “though the
Austrians didn’t. They sacked you for double-crossing, didn’t they,
Tarock? And the Russians followed suit a year later. You were too dirty
even for the Okhrana to touch . . .”
“Kreuzsakrament!” roared Greybeard, “I’ll have your life for that!”
His chair overturned with a crash. Everybody had sprung to his feet,
talking at the same time. Suddenly the door of the room burst open and
three men came tumbling in. Two of them were grappling with a third,
who, though gagged and bound and bleeding, was plunging wildly and
uttering stifled shouts of rage.