Читать книгу Exit A Dictator - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 5

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It was the custom of the passengers on the Queen Anne to dine early, and at eight o’clock that evening there were barely a score of people in the smaller cocktail bar attached to the smoke room. Amongst them were Nicolas Grodin and Joseph Likinski, seated together in a remote corner. Alexander, arriving alone and unnoticed, stood for a few seconds upon the threshold glancing around. He was not a man with whom anyone would associate the idea of indecision, but there was about him that evening, as he lingered there and again hesitated before an empty table, a suggestion of irresolution. In time, however, he made up his mind. He crossed the room and approached the table at which the two men were seated. There was something furtive in Likinski’s manner as he looked up and, recognising the newcomer, shrank a little back into his place. The other, partially recovered from his indisposition, a thickset, burly man, with close-cropped black hair and imperial, flaccid cheeks, a heavy jowl and a determined expression which seemed somehow out of keeping with the upward curve of his mouth, frowned as though inclined to resent the approach of a stranger. It was he whom Alexander addressed.

“You will forgive my intrusion,” he begged. “We are all three known to one another so I will not waste time in useless introductions.”

“I do not think that you know who I am,” the man whom he addressed declared.

“I could more easily forget my own personality,” Alexander continued in a calm, even tone, “than the personality of Nicolas Grodin, the budding diplomatist, the one man in his country who is supposed to possess the complete confidence of his master. As for you, sir,” he went on, turning to Likinski, “I will admit that I know little about you except that I remember you as an underling at Moscow University and later as a secretary to a statesman now leading a retired life in Mexico. You still call yourself, I believe, Joseph Likinski.”

“The immediate question, sir,” Grodin suggested, “is why you have addressed us and what it is that you have to say.”

“It is a poor game that you are playing,” Alexander observed. “I shall not weary you with the repetition of my name because you know it very well already, but this is to let you know, my friends—or perhaps I should say my enemies—that you may have my room searched, or even my person or my trunks in the hold. You may take out the cushions from my automobile and cut them to pieces, you may do the same with my mattress. You may find your way into my private apartments when we arrive at our destination—in comprehensive 27 words you may search, search, search, but you will never find in my possession a single line of writing likely to be of the slightest interest to you. Furthermore, if ever I should find you loitering in my cabin again, taking an interest in the fastenings of my portholes—without any fear of the consequences, I shall shoot you on sight. Even in this centre of civilisation I shall find means to justify myself.”

“We have a madman for company on this pleasant voyage,” Nicolas Grodin declared. “It is of no import. Continue, sir, I beg of you. My friend and I have talked enough good sense for the day. Let us listen further to your ravings.”

“Alas, I have not much more to say,” Alexander concluded. “Only this, which may perhaps interest you. I paused for a few minutes on my way here to write a letter—a thing I seldom do—to the purser of this ship. I have informed him of your names, of the presence of Likinski in my cabin, and two other facts concerning you both which should be enough to set the wireless busy for an hour or so if ever the time comes for the letter to be opened. It is to be delivered only in the event of anything untoward happening to me in my sleep or hours of relaxation. A whim, perhaps, the writing of it at all, but I feel that it will make the voyage a pleasanter one for me and I feel, too, that with the knowledge of the price you would have to pay for expediting my departure from this world you will probably wait until we are on dry land.”

“I myself have been called wordy,” Grodin said. “You, sir, are worse. You are prolix—you are inexplicable.”

“Crazy,” his companion echoed. “Without a doubt, crazy.”

Alexander smiled and turned away with a farewell bow in which there was a touch of irony.

“The letter,” he assured them, “is by this time in safe hands.”

He left them both looking after him. Nicolas Grodin shook his head.

“He is hard to deal with, that one,” he muttered. “He knows too much. The trouble of it is that the authorities are always on his side. He is powerfully protected.”

“What does it matter?” Likinski asked softly, in a voice which sounded like a whisper after his companion’s throaty tone. “Some day he, too, will make the foolish mistake that others have made. There is a lamp, my friend, hung over the frontier of our country and sooner or later they come to it like moths, and then—”

“And then,” Grodin muttered with a cruel gleam in his eyes, “they disappear—as he will. Fate has played us a kindly trick in this matter, Joseph. It has given us the means of leading him towards the menacing light. That will be your task. I would it were mine.”

Likinski stroked his upper lip thoughtfully.

“It will need much manœuvring,” he said, “but I have faith in the workings of the drug. It will be a joy to watch his will grow weaker and weaker, to have him like a puppet obeying my directions.”

Grodin glanced at the speaker and there was a grudging respect in his small eyes.

“I think, Joseph,” he said, “you have more courage than I gave you credit for. It is a serious task that you have chosen.”

“I have faith in the drug,” Likinski repeated. “To-morrow I do not think that the great nobleman will be stalking proudly about the ship. He will be cowering in his cabin. His poise will be broken. He will obey the bidding of even poor Joseph Likinski. He will follow me onto the freight steamer which sails from Southampton to Rotterdam on the day after our arrival. He will cross Europe with me. He will come to where the lamp is burning.”

Grodin chuckled with amusement.

“You make for yourself eloquent words, Joseph,” he declared. “You speak like a prophet.”

Alexander diverted his passage through the crowded dining-room and paused before the small table at which Anna Prestnoff had just taken her place.

“I do not like the situation you have chosen,” he remarked with a little bow.

“Neither do I,” she rejoined. “I did not choose it, 30 however. It was thrust upon me. The ship is very crowded, you see, and I dislike very much being at a table with other people.”

“If a single harmless person could be tolerated,” he proposed, “it would give me great pleasure to offer you the vacant seat at mine.”

She rose to her feet without hesitation.

“You see how quickly I accept your offer.”

He led the way to his own very desirable corner, installed her in his place and took the vacant chair by her side. Anna smiled as she realised, from the respect with which he was greeted by the chief steward and the head waiter who came hurrying up, how little his incognito had availed him.

“It is better, this?” he asked.

“Infinitely,” she replied.

“And for me also,” he assured her with a faint but very attractive smile.

The ordering of dinner, over which Anna had been hesitating, became a simple affair—a suggestion or two from the head waiter, an amendment by Alexander, a courteous reference to her, and the thing was arranged. They exchanged a few commonplace remarks over their hors d’œuvres, then he lowered his voice slightly and leaned towards her.

“You are asking yourself a question. What is it?”

“How clever of you!” she murmured. “Well, I was really wondering why you chose to single me out for this undeserved honour. Why, to be quite frank, you thought it wise to let anyone on the 31 boat who might be interested see us on apparent terms of intimacy.”

“You are old-fashioned, Anna Prestnoff,” he said. “Not in your clothes or your coiffure or your contemptuous disuse of cosmetics, but in your outlook upon the present conditions. You think that because I am the instigator of the European Review and am known to be a serious person devoted to the task of liberating my country, and because you have some connection with the Russian circle in London and are a contributor to my paper, we should remain apart.”

“You should go a little further than that,” she rejoined. “Part of my work, with which you, too, are connected, is done behind the curtain from these people’s eyes. It is, in a sense, secret service, you know. Some of them might guess at our interest.”

“Precisely,” he admitted, “and yet what does it matter? The modern spies, the most successful ones, have adopted modern methods. They have their own names printed on their visiting-cards, they patronise the popular restaurants and they have a flair for baffling the enemy by sheer candour.”

She sipped appreciatively the Berncastler Doctor which had been poured into her glass from a tall, yellow-tinted bottle.

“An intriguing outlook,” she acknowledged, “but I wonder if it is sound. For instance, there are people in the world who know that the European Review is not only the name of a justly famous monthly 32 publication, but amongst its many outside activities it controls, under your guidance, the secret watch over Europe by means of which you who are interested obtain your information of what is going on in Russia. It is one of the most secret of secret associations, that. You are its Chief and its inspiration. I have the honour, and I am proud of it, to be a contributor. There you are. That is why I wonder that I should be in this place at your table. There are two very crafty and dangerous members of the Russian Administration on the boat at the present moment.”

His eyes twinkled.

“Crafty is the word,” he admitted. “If Likinski knows that you are a member of our inner circle it will mean nothing to him that we are here as comrades. If he is not assured of the fact he will doubt it when he sees us together in this fashion.”

“It is a brave outlook,” she said. “I like it and I am the gainer. I subscribe to it willingly. Have you, by the by, congratulated Nicolas Grodin upon his new appointment?”

Alexander shook his head.

“I shall neither congratulate him nor shall I believe as yet that the authorities in Moscow have dared to send him to the English Court as a representative of the Russian nation. I treat the appointment as a jest.”

“Well, I daresay you are right,” she agreed.

“At the same time,” he continued, “Grodin and Likinski between them are a dangerous pair of knaves. Likinski had the bland impertinence to rummage about in my stateroom amongst my belongings this morning. Fortunately, Paul caught him there. That is why I had to leave you so abruptly on the boat deck.”

“A little crude for a front-rank conspirator,” she observed.

Alexander shrugged his shoulders.

“It was probably just one small piece of information he was in search of,” he remarked. “When Paul caught him, however, he was examining the fastenings of my portholes.”

She laughed musically.

“That does not seem very formidable.”

“Neither is Likinski,” he declared. “He is not exactly formidable. Grodin I fear more. There is a man who might do us great harm.”

“Please go on,” she begged. “The more I understand the easier it is to work.”

“Grodin’s appointment as Minister to England could mean only one thing,” Alexander proceeded earnestly. “Whether the man who gave him the appointment realises it or not, it will be Grodin’s ambition to stir up ill-will between his country and Great Britain. Personally, I think that his outlook is a short-visaged one. He is angry because Great Britain permits the establishment and the continuance 34 of the European Review in its capital. It is against us that he wants to strike. I am already taking precautions.”

“Would it matter very much if we had to move to Paris?” she asked.

“Enormously,” he answered. “We should be at the mercy of one of these ever-changing governments. Besides, however much we may regret it, we cannot conceal from ourselves that France and Russia are far nearer to one another politically than Great Britain and Russia. Our establishment in Paris would not be popular. I doubt whether its continuance would be possible.”

“And there is no other place from which we could work?”

“Nowhere in Europe,” he answered.

“You have considered the question then?”

“I have been obliged to. There are obvious objections to every one of the other great capitals. I have a scheme in my mind for solidifying our position in London without alienating in any way France’s sympathies . . . Now I think that we have talked seriously long enough. Will you join me in the lounge for a cigarette and coffee?”

“With great pleasure,” she replied.