Читать книгу Advice, Ltd. - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 3

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The text below is a restored version of the story as it was originally printed, under the title "Sybil: The Oracle of Merton Mews," in the June 1933 issue of Ladies' Home Journal. The text printed in the book Advice, Ltd., was an abridged version.

THE long boat train, which had only a few minutes before started on its race to Victoria, came to an unexpected halt alongside the almost deserted platform of Dover Town Station. Habitual travelers who knew the irregularity of such a proceeding let down the windows and leaned out from their places. There was little to be seen, however, and nothing to be learned from the various attendants.

About a dozen officials, and men who looked like officials in mufti, were forming a sort of ring around one of the vans in the rear of the train, from which a number of heavy, iron-clamped cases were being unloaded. The proceeding was entirely unusual.

Curious questions and comments flashed backward and forward among the passengers. The train attendants, however, knew nothing of what was going on.

"What the mischief are those boxes they are throwing out?" a well-known, middle-aged Englishman asked irritably. "Surely it is not necessary to stop a Continental train, already an hour late, to bring cases from Dover Pier to Dover Town?"

The attendant's voice trailed off into an almost awed whisper. "Them's what they calls specie cases, sir," he confided. "Used by the big banks for carrying bar gold."

His questioner stared at him. "What in the name of common sense," he demanded, "do they mean by loading up specie boxes or any other sort of box at the pier station, only to throw them out here?"

The man shook his head. "Ask me another, sir," he replied, passing on. "There's none of us knows what's up."

John Woolston, for fifteen years inspector of Pullman cars, had no intention of answering any more questions. He changed his mind, however, when the most beautiful woman of his acquaintance leaned out of the coupe which, according to custom, he had reserved specially for her use.

"What is this delay, Woolston?" she asked pathetically. "And what arc those funny little boxes they are throwing out on to the platform?"

The man stepped a few feet inside the coupe and removed his cap. Except for one mad English duke, who sometimes had lapses of memory and therefore was not altogether to be relied upon, this was the most profitable of all his regular passengers.

"To tell your ladyship the truth," he said, "I'll guarantee there's not one of us on the train—unless maybe the guard—who knows what is going on. I can tell you what the boxes are though. They are made specially down in Tooley Street and they are used for transporting gold."

The lady pushed back the veil she was wearing and looked at him through wide-opened eyes.

"But, my good man," she protested, speaking very musically but with a slight foreign accent, "who on earth in their senses would unload bar gold on the platform of Dover Town Station?"

"All I can say, your ladyship," the man pointed out, "is that they are doing it. The cases came off the boat, the French guard left us and the English took over the job. They were placed in the usual van and here we are—barely started on the journey and an hour late already, when on go the brakes and out come them boxes. If I hear anything later, your ladyship, I will let you know."

"Do," she begged. "It seems such an odd thing to happen."

"Your ladyship's car will be at Victoria as usual?" he asked.

She nodded. "And my maid will see the things through the customs," she said. "I shall hurry away. You might see that I have an intelligent porter. I shall take only my dressing case with me."

The man passed on his way with a final salute. Clara, Baroness von Linz, looked thoughtfully out of the window. Her eyes were fixed upon the curiously silent group of men standing almost in a circle around the pile of boxes. Every few seconds a porter with a box on his shoulder hurried off, escorted as far as the subway by a custodian who was evidently some sort of an official. She yawned and rang the bell.

"Some tea," she ordered a trifle imperiously of the attendant.

Long before it was brought the train, with its snakelike bend, had glided away from the station. The baroness yawned once more, opened a magazine which she had bought on leaving the steamer, and began to read.

THROUGH the grim falling darkness the boat train, flaring with lights, spitting flame and vomiting smoke from the funnels of both its engines, tore through the countryside on its rush to London.

Almost parallel with it but continually veering eastward a motor van, built after the style of the modern armored car, traveling also at great speed, was cleaving the same blackness of the winter night, increased by the gray mists rolling inland from the river. The van came at last to a stretch where the shroud of vapor was less dense, and the chauffeur gave vent to a grunt of relief. Larson, the trusted official of the Bank of England, who was seated by his side with a revolver bulging in his overcoat pocket, frowned.

"This is the rottenest bit of road we've got to tackle, Jim," he reminded his companion. "Not a house for four miles and that filthy canal within a few yards all the way. I wish this beastly job was over. I never did care for it and I'm liking it less every moment."

The driver nodded his head. "So do I, Mr. Larson, sir," he mumbled. "That I do. Gawd!"

The sandy-haired little man gave a start which would have been comical but for the fact that it was the start of death. He lay crumpled over the wheel. His companion, though his movements seemed swift enough, never reached the revolver toward which his fingers were groping. The observation window behind had been broken with a crash and he felt the cold, menacing pressure of metal into his side.

"Take hold of that wheel and stop the car," a harsh voice ordered. "Put your foot on the clutch. Lean over for the foot brake. Keep the car on the road, I tell you, or you 11 get what he got."

Larson had plenty of courage of the ordinary sort, but there was another gun pressing into the small of his back by this time and it was obvious that he was in a hopeless position. He leaned over the limp body of the driver and brought the car almost to a standstill, a great fear all the time chilling his blood and setting his hand shaking. This was no ordinary holdup.

"You fellows from Amsterdam," he faltered, "you've got us cold. What's it—mean?"

He fell over—dead—with a roar like the roar of a cannon in his ears and the smell of gunpowder in his nostrils. A man who had apparently been lurking in the shadows of the hedge boarded the car, took the wheel and drew in to the side of the road.

The door of the van slammed. From invisible places three or four other figures stole into sight.

"Not a light for over a mile either way," one of them declared.

"Get at these two," was the savage order from the man who still stood with his revolver in his hand. "Strip them both and fling them into the canal. We want their clothes-Buddy and I. The rest of you can tramp it to where the car is waiting. We meet at the Orchard Inn by Pender's Creek. Get me?"

There was a muttered assent. The speaker, who appeared to be in charge of these amiable proceedings, was all the time throwing off his coat and waistcoat. In a darkness which was almost complete, with rapid breathing and clumsy fingers, the little group of men went on with their grisly task. Ten minutes had barely passed before the car was once more on its way. Even the stains of blood, which were scanty, were wiped from the seat. The man who had boarded the car drove with one hand and held the flask which he had found in the leather pocket of the door to his lips.

"Not too much of that," a voice from behind snarled. "You can swim in it when we're through with this job we've got on hand."

An arm stretched through the aperture leading to the back of the car. The flask went spinning over the hedge into the darkness and fell in the muddy waters of the canal. After that, except for the roar of the engine as it picked up speed, there was silence.

AS was usually the case, Clara von Linz was the first person to leave Victoria Station that night. Her luxuriously appointed car was waiting at exactly the right place and her chauffeur was already holding the door open as she crossed the platform, followed by a porter carrying her single dressing case. She dismissed the latter with a more than adequate recompense, spoke a word of greeting to the chauffeur and took her place in the car.

"Straight to Merton Street," she directed.

The man saluted and drove off. In less than a quarter of an hour Clara was seated in one of the smallest but most comfortable women's dens in the West End of London.

"Ring for Mrs. Horder," she told the grave-faced manservant who was waiting for orders.

"Mrs. Horder has been inquiring for you, madam," the man remarked.

A moment or two later the thick curtains at the far end of the room were pushed aside, an unseen door traveled over its beautifully adjusted foundations and a woman entered. She was apparently of middle age and heavily built. Her hair, dress and everything about her were severe. She bent over Clara, who saluted her in Continental fashion.

"Sit down for a moment, Gertrude," she invited.

THE woman obeyed. She possessed an air of great composure and also of singular reticence. The eyes behind her glasses were invisible, her features were curiously unemotional.

"There have been urgent messages for me?" the returned traveler asked.

"Only social ones."

"There will be soon," Clara prophesied. "Perhaps not just yet. They generally wait until after Scotland Yard has failed before they come to us."

"Something has happened?"

"I believe so. I believe that there has been a big robbery."

"Of jewels?"

"No. Of gold. Quite an original theft, my dear Gertrude. I was in at the birth and I expect to be in at the death."

"How do you know anything about it?"

"I know nothing," was the smiling reply. "I divine. That is all. I just guess. I feel it in the air. All that I have to go by is that I saw a great many wooden boxes on the platform at Dover Station, and because I saw them there I believe that there has been a great gold robbery."

"You are usually right," the woman with the heavy glasses conceded. "In this case, however, I think you go too far. A robbery of gold is almost impossible."

"Listen!" Clara enjoined, holding up her ringer.

A boy tramped along the pavement below. They heard his nasal singsong through the closely curtained windows.

"Great robbery of gold this afternoon! All about the great robbery!"

"You heard something about it on the journey," Gertrude Horder suggested incredulously.

"Not a thing, Gertrude, nothing," the other assured her.

The servant brought in a paper. There it was in black type with gigantic headlines:

GREATEST ROBBERY IN THE WORLD'S HISTORY

OVER A MILLION POUNDS' WORTH OF GOLD

CONSIGNED TO THE BANK OF ENGLAND MISSING

Neither Scotland Yard nor the Bank of England are willing to give any information as to the reported theft of thirty-nine boxes of gold bars which should by this time have been reposing in the cellars of the Bank of England. They were handed over by the French authorities and signed for at Dover Pier, and it is understood that by means of forged orders they have fallen into the hands of a gang of international thieves. The Thames from Gravesend and all southern ports are under the strictest surveillance, but in the absence of any confirmation we hesitate to give credence to the many wild rumours in circulation. It may be pointed out that the theft of gold in this form is an exceedingly hazardous enterprise, as the markets for its disposal are strictly limited.

"Did this inspiration of yours," Gertrude Horder asked, "include any light upon how and where the theft took place and by whom?"

"There are limits to my powers," Clara confessed. "The theft took place, without a doubt, on Dover Town Station platform, but there is nothing in that because I saw the boxes there. How or by whom I have no idea at present. There was one little thing that struck me," she went on thoughtfully, "which might be helpful, but in any case I shall keep it to myself for the moment."

Gertrude Horder looked at her friend with an almost dazed admiration in her expressionless eyes.

"I wish all those stupid people who lose things would send to us earlier," she sighed. "We only get the business passed on to us when Scotland Yard has bungled all the clues and mucked up things hopelessly."

Clara shook her head. "You ought to know by this time, my dear, that clues are no use to me," she said. "The best moment to solve a mystery is when the people concerned in it have begun to fancy themselves safe... Let us leave the gold robbery alone for the moment. Aren't I going to some sort of dinner tonight?"

The older woman drew a small diary from her pocket and turned over its images.

"You are dining at nine o'clock with the Duchess of Porchester at Porchester House," she reported. "It is a charity invitation affair, but the duchess has sent you a ticket. She rang up this afternoon to ask if you had any choice of tables."

Clara shrugged her shoulders. "I shall bore myself at any," she answered. "I meant to wire from Paris that I could not go. Something stopped me - another idea, perhaps. Why does one give in to ideas, Gertrude?"

"I never have any," was the terse response. "In view of this latest sensation, would you like to sit at Sir Guy Blondel's table? He is either a banker or something like it."

Clara's eyes were almost caressing. "You wonderful person!" she exclaimed. "Do not dare to say you have no inspirations. You must have felt that I want to know a little more about banking. Sooner or later I suppose I shall have to find those gold bars, and there are just one or two points I should like to understand... Anything else happened?"

"Baron Konstam called. He was anxious to know whether you would take a trip to Warsaw. There is a group of Frenchmen there concerning whose activities he is curious."

"The affair does not interest me," Clara said, "and the baron's last check barely paid expenses."

"He is becoming a trifle more generous, perhaps." Gertrude Horder commented grimly. "Someone or other—his embassy probably is intensely curious to discover your identity. He hinted that if I were really only a lay figure here he would give a very large sum of money to know who my principal was—what the power working behind me could be, as he put it. He has never got over his astonishment at your having been able to produce a copy of the German proposals with regard to the Dantzic affair."

Clara von Linz smiled. "I find Konstam a stupid man," she pronounced. "He has no vision. He knows no more of the art of espionage than a baby."

"He was high up in the German secret service during the war," her companion reflected.

"And Germany lost the war."

"Lord Ragley rang up once or twice. I think he wanted you to dine with him."

"As though I would advertise myself in that way! Be a dear. Gertrude, and go and see Ellida for me. I want my bath in half an hour, the three Doucet gowns laid out to choose from, and the car ordered for a quarter to nine. I have a fit of inertia. I wish to do nothing for myself— nothing except think."

"What about?"

"Wooden boxes."

EXCEPT that the company was more brilliant than usual, the Porchester House charity dinner and dance differed very little from most functions of its sort. Clara enjoyed herself extremely. She had chosen to wear a gown of dark violet color which seemed to bring out marvelous lights from her uncannily beautiful eyes, and she was easily the most admired woman in the room. The Duchess of Porchester, who was nominally hostess, looked across the floor with a sigh of regret.

"I cannot imagine," she complained, "why Clara should have chosen a place at Guy Blondel's table. Sir Guy is all very well in his way, of course, but he cannot be a successful banker and remain a human being."

"Clara always has a purpose in everything she does," another woman remarked. "Guy Blondel may have some secret attraction that none of us others have ever been able to discover. In any case bankers arc the fashion this season."

"Blondel isn't exactly a banker, is he?" someone else pointed out. "He buys and sells specie mostly silver. Deals in the real stud, you know. Not in notes and oblong strips of paper. Sits in his office with a million pounds' worth of gold ingots in the cellar underneath him!"

"Anyhow," the duchess observed, "Clara seems to have succeeded in making him talk. Perhaps we may get another check out of him later on?"

CLARA had certainly succeeded in making Guy Blondel talk. He was a small pink-and-white man, the quintessence of neatness and correctness in his attire, speech and general deportment. Tonight, however, he seemed to be letting himself go. With the air of a man upon whom the gods have showered their gifts, he leaned toward his neighbor with unmistakable empressement.

"I suppose you are right, baroness," he admitted. "There is a great deal of romance attached to a business such as ours. We are merchants, it is true, but we are operating behind the barterer in mere commodities. We are dealing in the sinews of the world with what makes commerce possible, in fact."

"You express so well what I was trying to say myself," Clara murmured. "By the bye," she added, after a moment's pause, "is it true that there has been a great robbery of gold this afternoon? I never read the evening paper."

BLONDEL'S expression changed. There was a more serious light in his eyes, although his tone was casual enough.

"There is a report of something of the sort," he acknowledged thoughtfully. "Personally I am inclined to think that it must be greatly exaggerated. There has not been a successful theft of gold in transit during my recollection."

A man opposite leaned across the table. "I believe there has been a robbery," he intervened, "and quite a serious one. A shipment from France to England which seems to have been stolen from under the very noses of the custodians. You are not interested, I hope, Blondel?"

The banker nodded in a superior fashion. "We are not buyers of gold at present," he confided. "We would rather sell if there was anything doing. And I would fill your house with silver. Lord Ragley, if you would give me my price! The gold was consigned to the Bank of England."

"Do tell us some more about it," Clara begged. "I thought gold bars were such heavy, clumsy things."

She shut up her vanity case with a click and smiled invitingly at her neighbor. He shivered with delight.

"I wish I knew more, baroness," he said. "It seems the gold was landed and handed over to messengers from the Bank of England. That lets the senders out, of course. The boxes were packed in the special van of the boat train and then, to everyone's surprise, the train stopped at Dover Town Station and the boxes were all unloaded. What became of them from that moment no one can even guess. Presumably they were handed over to someone else, but to whom and in what manner not a soul seems to know."

"I WAS on the train," Clara sighed. "I wish I had known about it. I am so good at spotting thieves, and there were a strange- looking lot of men on the platform. You seem to know everything, Sir Guy. Can you tell me this? Why with a train of quite ordinary length and having got rid of our gold—did we travel to London from Ashford at half speed?"

"Did you?" Blondel queried.

The violet eyes were studying him with a great deal more than any ordinary inquisitiveness. She laughed softly.

"You arc beginning to alarm me, Sir Guy," she exclaimed. "I believe you know everything, although you are so reticent. Please tell why we traveled so slowly."

The banker opened his lips reluctantly. Suddenly he closed them again. He raised his glass and drained its contents.

"Baroness," he assured her, "there is a limit to the scraps of information which have come my way. I cannot imagine any possible reason why the gold should have been changed or why you should have traveled to London at anything less than the usual speed. Tomorrow I expect the whole story will be told."

Lord Ragley, who was the duchess' second son, rose from the table as the newly arrived orchestra started its dance music. He bowed across to Clara.

"Will you honor me, baroness?"

Clara assented with a smile, but quitted her seat with reluctance.

CLARA VON LINZ, although she gave no indication of the fact, was more than a little bored by the ceaseless round of parties of every description offered to her as soon as her presence in London became known. The days of a too inquisitive social regime had passed with the war, and although everyone felt that there was something unusual about this beautiful Austrian, it only seemed to make her the more sought after. Her family, at any rate, was well known.

She had never been connected with any scandal. All that could be said against her was that there was a certain amount of mystery about the way she spent her time flitting from one part of Europe to another, and her control of what seemed to be illimitable wealth. She was almost always the best dressed woman in any assembly. Her jewels were famous. Her advice was asked by the priestesses of fashion. She was a great linguist. And her love affairs, if she had any, were conducted with the most remarkable discretion.

It was well known that she had been in the Austrian secret service during the war, but of her activities in those days she never spoke. There were times, however, when even her most intimate friends were conscious of a certain aloofness which puzzled them. It was as if she still had interests far more engrossing than the pursuits of the world in which she lived.

FOR the next week she was a flying visitor at many parties, a week-end guest at several great houses, nearly always being the latest arrival and the first to leave. She was prominent at two famous first nights. She attended the first Court of the season with the wife of the Austrian ambassador. She remained in the place which she had occupied during the last few years—a very distinguished and desirable member of the inner set. No one but she herself knew that she was bored.

Then one morning it came to an end. The bell of the private telephone which stood on the table by the easy-chair in her library tinkled. She took down the receiver, glanced at the calendar, murmured an incomprehensible word. The reply was of the same order, but Clara was satisfied. She had no liking for mystery for mystery's sake, but when that particular telephone rang and it was connected only with the office of "Sibyl," a code word and its rejoinder flashed backward and forward decided the genuineness of the summons.

"A Colonel Grainger," Gertrude Horder's voice announced, "is coming at eleven o'clock to consult the firm. He rang up from his private house and he does not wish any communication to be addressed to him officially or his mission here spoken of to anyone."

CLARA's laugh rippled like music along the wire. "Poor man!" she exclaimed. "I can guess who has sent him. Very well, Gertrude. I shall be in my place. Just test the instruments and see that the new microphone in your room is in order. At a quarter to eleven I will give you a short list of the vital points. And Gertrude it is not that our banking account is particularly low, but a time might come when we need money—Sibyl will expect a thousand guineas for a week's work, and twenty thousand pounds for the return of the gold."

"I shall blush when I suggest that," Gertrude declared.

"It will be for the first time in your life, then," her chief replied.

Colonel Grainger, D. S. O., deputy sub-commissioner of Scotland Yard, was fairly true to type. His appearance was a trifle too military for the profession into which he had recently drifted, but he had the keen blue eyes and firm lips of a man of insight and determination. He was perhaps just a little ruffled this morning, for, although Scotland Yard had had earlier relations with the firm he had come to visit, they had not been of his choosing.

"Can I speak to your principal?" he asked, after he had been ushered into Gertrude Horder's office.

She motioned him to a chair. "I am sorry," she said. "I thought you knew the way in which our business is conducted. Everything has to pass through me."

"But surely," he protested, "the representative of Scotland Yard, as I suppose you know me to be, is entitled to consult with the principal of your -shall we say? - intelligence office, however successful and famous you may have become."

"YOUR visit, Colonel Grainger, is of course a great compliment," Gertrude replied. "We acknowledge that freely. Our rules, however, are immutable. Our principal has an exact, even a word-by-word, report of everything that takes place, but keeps aloof."

"H'm," Colonel Grainger grunted. "It saves prejudice, at any rate. Well, I have come to consult you at the urgent request of the directorate of the Bank of England concerning the theft of those gold bars you may have heard about."

"Will you tell me," the representative of the oracle begged, "how far your investigations have gone?"

"I will give you a brief resume of the case," was the somewhat grudging reply. "You can ask any questions you like. We received due notice from the Bank of England that the gold was coming over on the usual boat, The Maid of Kent, and was to be transferred to the boat train in the customary fashion. We sent an adequate number of men to cover the landing and stow the boxes in the special van. The stowing away was on the point of being completed, when the Bank of England representative—who, I understand, is a man absolutely above suspicion received a message written on Bank of England note paper, brought by a Bank of England messenger and written partly in the code used when any matter of the transport of gold is concerned."

"You kept the order, of course?"

"Naturally," was the slightly contemptuous reply. "This poor fellow Larson read it and never for a moment doubted its genuineness. He had the gold transported to Dover Town Station, where it was unloaded and repacked in a Scotland Yard armored car of the latest design—which again, with its chauffeur, had been obtained from the Yard on a forged order signed in my name. The chauffeur was one of our regular and most reliable servants. With him, of course, were Larson and a guard of two men supposed to have been sent from the country to which the gold was to be re-shipped."

"Larson started off with the gold, then?" Gertrude inquired.

"It is Larson's duty not to leave the boxes after he has signed for them until they are in the vaults of the bank to which they are consigned or handed over to some recognized authority."

"That means four men in the car?"

"Precisely," Colonel Grainger agreed. "They started off and Larson's new orders instructed him to proceed direct to a port on the river where a vessel was waiting to transport the gold across the North Sea. You probably do not know Kent intimately, but the bodies of Larson and the chauffeur, stripped of a portion of their clothing, were found in a canal along one of the loneliest stretches of road in Kent. Both had been shot and had been dead many hours. The armored car was found in a deserted lane not many miles farther on."

And the gold?

"The gold had disappeared."

Gertrude leaned back in her chair.

"Your story," she remarked, "is even stranger than the newspaper versions."

"The truth," her visitor replied," is usually stranger than fiction."

The telephone at Gertrude Horder's side rang. She took off the receiver, listened, and hung up in silence.

"There are perhaps some questions you would like to ask," Colonel Grainger inquired stiffly.

"I would like to know the precise spot where the police car was discovered."

The colonel drew a road map from his pocket. "I have prepared this for you. You will find the spot marked near which the bodies of Larson and the chauffeur were found, and farther on the place where the car was discovered abandoned at the bottom of a quarry."

"Why did the boat train proceed to London at half speed?"

Colonel Grainger raised his eyebrows in surprise. "I scarcely see where that comes in," he remarked. "Still, since you have asked the question I will answer it The railway authorities were informed through a private source that bombs had been placed upon the line at various points between Ashford and London. Seems as though the first idea had been to wreck the train and steal the gold. The train was fitted with the same guards on the engine which we used in the war. Hence the slow progress. Now you have heard all I have to say. Miss...."

The colonel hesitated, but Gertrude did not disclose herself.

"Names," she confided, "are not used in this establishment. This is Sibyl. I am a part of Sibyl. I am the part which connects the client with the brains that direct it. That is sufficient."

"You certainly conduct your business on original lines," was the caustic rejoinder. "May I ask whether you think that 'the brains' will be able to elucidate this affair?"

"We have never yet failed in a case," Gertrude reflected, leaning back in her chair, "and I see nothing in the present one to give us the least concern."

"God bless my soul!" her client exclaimed incredulously,

"I am requested to tell you," Gertrude continued, "that our fee for a week's investigations will be a thousand guineas, and if we return you the gold or give you information as to where it is, we shall require a fee of twenty thousand pounds. As the value of the bars is at least a million and a half pounds you will not, I imagine, consider this excessive."

"The bank will pay the sum you suggest, of course, provided you are successful," he assured her. "That is a matter of minor importance."

Colonel Grainger picked up his hat and stick and looked around the apartment. It lacked nothing in the way of comfort, but its only connection with any possible business activities seemed to be the multiplicity of telephones in every conceivable place and a strangely paneled wall with inlays of fretted ivory within a few yards of where Gertrude was seated. It was a room of no definite form, yet a room which suggested mystery. The departing visitor, convinced that it was the abode of a charlatan, wished Gertrude a not-too-gracious good morning and took his leave.

CLARA, contrary to her custom, was lunching a few days later with the little pink-and-white man. They were seated in a corner of the Ritz grill.

"I suppose you know," she said to her companion, "that you are spoiling me shamefully. You are quite one of the most generous of my admirers in London."

He was so much in earnest that his words were almost pathetic. "I wish that you liked London well enough to...."

"To what?"

"To live in."

"But, my dear man," she protested, "you yourself must care for other places too. You have traveled, you are not hopelessly British. In fact, you are not British at all, are you?"

"By naturalization, yes."

"At any rate you have not the prejudices. I wander through Florence, where I have a little flat which I call home. It is a city of beauty. All the time there are things which pull at my heartstrings to be seen and loved. And I walk, or I drive, or I fly over London, and what on earth do I see? A few beautiful buildings wrapped in mist—cold gray mist, unsympathetic, colorless, depressing nothing beautiful. And I say to myself, 'It is time I left this place.' The rivers of the world! Think of some of the beautiful ones, Sir Guy! Look at the Thames. Yesterday afternoon, to please a friend, I flew up the Thames. I ask you to remember it for the last five miles, say, before you come to London Bridge. Those hideous factories belching out smoke and smells. Why, there were some works on what seemed to be a flat mud island with curls of black smoke crawling up to the sky and disfiguring the landscape as far as you could see."

"Whereabouts was that?" he inquired.

"How should I know?" she answered. "Or stop! I think they called it Mud Pie Island. There seemed to be no one at work in the factory, and yet we felt the heat from the furnaces hundreds of feet up. Oh, it is all so ugly."

THE little pink-and-white man was suddenly serious. His eyes seemed to be boring into his companion's. He had the air of one assailed by disturbing thoughts.

"Why do you mention that place particularly?" he asked with an unaccustomed harshness in his tone.

She shrugged her shoulders. Her attention had wandered to the next dish which she was offered by the maître d'hôtel.

"Forgive me," she begged. "This sole Colbert looked so marvelous. You are asking why I mentioned that place particularly. I think it was because of the hugeness of the factory chimney, the emptiness of the whole place, the stark ugliness of it—and also because my pilot told me that it must have been somewhere within about a mile of there that the gang who stole the gold bars from the Bank of England reached the river."

Sir Guy frowned. "How could he or anyone else know that they really did reach the river?" he queried dolefully. "Scotland Yard cannot tell me. No one can tell me. I was keeping the secret to myself, but I was a customer for that gold and I have had to see a profit disappear."

"It may be recovered."

"Little chance."

"Tell me, what could they do with it?" she asked. "Supposing the gang who murdered the two custodians and got away with it reached the river. Supposing then they had had motorboats to meet them—what could they do with the gold? There could be no market for it with the government stamp there. To have even offered it would have given the whole show away."

HE looked at her intently, and if ever she had been inclined to think him the slightest degree of a fool she changed her mind. This man had cunning even if he lacked brain.

"Why are you so interested in the matter of these missing gold bars, baroness?" he asked quietly.

"I cannot tell you," she confessed. "Perhaps because I never heard of gold bars before and I had no idea that all the governments kept them locked up in their strong-rooms. Secondly, because I cannot imagine what use they are unless to make coins out of them. Could I, for instance, go into Cartier's with a gold bar under my arm and buy a diamond bracelet?"

"The necessity for buying a diamond bracelet for yourself should never arise," he said, with a faint meaning underneath his words. "But if it did—supposing you took a gold bar under your arm and Cartier's weighed and tested it, without a doubt they would accept it as payment for your diamond bracelet."

"Supposing you had bought those from the government," she persisted; "what should you have done with them?"

"I should have sold them at a very considerable profit to a firm upon the Continent," he answered. "The business was already arranged. What does it matter? There are other days and larger profits. Large enough," he went on, with another of those sidelong glances which set fear shivering even in a person of Clara's nerve, "to pay for that bracelet at Cartier's!"

She sat in silence for a minute or two. Then she asked him an abrupt question:

"Have you ever been in Russia?"

"Many times," he answered. "I myself am half Russian. My mother was a Lett. My father was English enough, of course, as was my grandfather, the founder of our firm."

"Do you do any business there?"

"Everyone does, more or less secretly. No one can afford to run the risk of offending what may some day become a very great country."

"At present," she remarked, "their methods strike one as a little crude."

HE smiled. "You would think so if you had to do with them. Luftstein, their agent, who is over here now —— All the time," he broke off impatiently, "we talk of such unpleasant subjects! Baroness. I have been wondering whether I dared ask you to honor my little bachelor abode by dining there with me tonight. We might take a stroll up Bond Street and I will show you the way."

"We might look in at the windows of Cartier's!" she suggested, her elbows upon the table supporting her oval face while she looked across at him.

"It would give me great pleasure."

She looked at him long and curiously, and the longer she looked the more poignant grew a certain queer sensation of uneasiness in the pink-and-white man. Women, as a rule, even the most beautiful women, even women of Clara's position, had been so quick to respond to the little hints he had thrown out. Suddenly he had the idea that she had been playing with him. Why? He wondered. She was the famous Baroness von Linz, the great aristocrat, with the entrée to many courts through her own family and the exalted personages who were her friends. Yet in these days nobody was safe.

"I must be going," she said suddenly.

He signed his bill and walked with her toward the door. "But I'll see you this afternoon -this evening?" he whispered softly as they stood on the pavement.

"These tiresome dressmakers," she murmured, stepping into the taxi which the commissionaire had called.

SIR GUY BLONDEL was bowed obsequiously into his own waiting automobile, but for several moments he lingered on the curbstone. His eyes were following that disappearing taxi. A beautiful woman. A fascinating woman. And yet he had always felt something which amounted almost to fear of any personal element in life which he failed to understand. He leaned back in the corner of his very luxurious car, muttered the address to his chauffeur through the tube and became once more, as he drove through the crowded streets, the little pink-and-white millionaire of Mayfair, a man without a care, the head of an old-established and famous banking house.

His thoughts traveled back through the last few years. They traveled forward through the years to come. The present he let alone, for it was the present he feared. He had never meant these wild connections of his to take such risks. He had never meant to have become so closely involved with them.

A hundred thousand pounds was a very nice sum to handle; it had been even necessary money; but he hated risks. He liked to do his business and multiply his capital across his rosewood desk, smiling, but with the cunning of a fox all the time. He understood bargaining, he understood the clever byways of his own business.

He had never been in deep waters before, as he was now. It seemed almost allegorical to him as he passed through the stately thoroughfares of the city into the slums, to the half-empty streets of Dockland, until at last he reached his destination.

A great gate was rolled open, the car moved slowly onto a heavy ferry. There as a moment's delay. He let down the window and looked ahead at the huge, silent factory upon that stretch of land which at high tide was little more than a swamp. From a hundred windows there came scarcely a light, but from the annex, from the great round furnace and the high chimney close at hand, a glimpse of flames leaping through the darkness, great billowy clouds of smoke darker even than the darkness itself.

They moved slowly forward through the black, muddy water. Now he could hear the roar of the flames, the throb of the great generator. A stupid game, this, to have been mixed up in.

He stepped out onto the pier. Almost immediately he was confronted by a couple of watchers, men with dour faces and of threatening aspect. They recognized him, however, and waved him on. He hurried up the short avenue. The doorkeeper looked at him suspiciously, but passed him into a huge, dirty hall. From there he was admitted into a large, untidy office. There were no blinds upon the windows and only one green-shaded lamp in the way of illumination.

A MAN swung round in his chair, a man as alien to his surroundings as Blondel himself. He was elegantly dressed, he smelled of perfume, his long, pale face was lined and anxious.

"What on earth do you want down here, Blondel?" he demanded.

The banker shrugged his shoulders.

"How are things going?"

"Can't you hear the roar of the dynamos? We are ahead of time. By the day after tomorrow we shall be on our way to the Baltic."

"I wish that you were off tonight."

"Is anything wrong?"

Blondel shook his head. "Nothing definite. You have read all the papers, of course. We faded out of the news today. I always think it is a bad sign when the police leave off talking. Nothing happened down here?"

"Not a thing."

"Anyone called?"

"Only oil salesmen and mechanics and people on business. No one is allowed inside the building. No one can possibly make a guess at what we are really doing."

"You think," Blondel asked anxiously, "that you will carry this through?"

His companion laughed harshly. "Too late to have fears, my friend," he said. "We shall carry it through. You shall have your hundred thousand pounds at the end of the week or we shall vanish off the face of the earth. I myself have no wish to vanish off the face of the earth, and what I wish generally happens. Don't be a fool, Blondel. How would you like to have to sit down here morning and night, never sleeping, never eating a decent meal or seeing a pretty woman—doing nothing except listening and watching and goading on these few mechanics? Take my advice. Don't come near here again. I will send you a wireless in code the moment we are in the North Sea."

BLONDEL felt his confidence returning. The man with whom he talked was famous, and he had never known failure. It was his scheme, this, and there were only forty-eight hours more of anxiety.

"Very well, Nicholas," he agreed. "I will be off and keep away. It is best."

"I shall be at the Ritz in Paris the first week in June," the other promised. "See you then."

COLONEL GRAINGER shook hands with the representative of Sibyl and accepted her invitation to be seated.

"Well," he remarked, "the week is up."

"We seem to have timed it exactly," Gertrude replied. "I was just going to ring you up."

"You have news?" he asked quickly.

"Certainly. The gold is at a riverside smelting works on a strip of waste land called Mud Pie Island. I have prepared a plan showing you the locality and how to get there."

She pushed a folded sheet of paper across the table. Her visitor picked it up and stared at it incredulously.

"You will find at least twenty or thirty men to deal with," Gertrude continued; "and a fairly desperate crowd, I should imagine. The principal was on Dover Town Station platform when the gold was unshipped. He passed himself off as the representative of the foreign bank and it was he, no doubt, who committed the murders. The rest of the gang were probably picked up along the road."

"LOOK here," the sub-commissioner said, recovering his calm with a great effort, "are you talking seriously?"

"Why ask me such a foolish question?" she protested. "Remember that, although as a matter of fact I am a very insignificant person, I am in this matter the representative of Sibyl. We have never failed. We never shall fail. We have found your gold. We expect your payment. In ten minutes you had better be on your way to Scotland Yard making your plans. Before you $>o I will put you in possession of a few more facts. These works have an enormous furnace and they were hired by foreigners some months ago, evidently for this exact purpose. The motorboats that were dashing up and down the river and the empty boxes that were found by your police were only meant to put you off. The gold was stored away in the works before daylight the morning after the robbery."

"Why?" he demanded.

"The bars have been through the furnace," she answered, "or most of them. They could not have been taken anyway with their stamps on. I don't suppose they are materially changed, except in shape. There is a steamer lying about a hundred yards off—looks like an old tub but in reality has very fine engines. The gang arc expecting to load her up with the gold tomorrow night and she will be in the Baltic by the end of the week."

Colonel Grainger pulled himself together. The woman spoke convincingly.

"Who was at the top end of this?" he asked rapidly. "Remember, there were the messengers from the Bank of England, there were the code instructions—everything in order."

"A MAN named Blondel—Sir Guy Blondel—was responsible for that," she confided. "The gang who have the gold are associates of his. He is a bullion broker or something of the sort, and has often worked with the Bank of England in arranging shipments."

"And he was dining at the Embassy last night!" Grainger muttered.

"Our information leads us to believe," Gertrude Horder concluded, "that the gold will not be given up without a fight. You ought to take plenty of men, and if you want to avoid bloodshed you should surround the place and rush it as soon as it is dark. We shall expect a settlement from you during the week."

THE little pink-and-white man was in grievous straits. His tie was awry, his hair ruffled. One side of the white slip of his waistcoat had disappeared. He was walking up and down the large, bleak office of the Mud Pie Island works with quick, uneven footsteps. Lounging against the desk the young man, Nicholas—calm and sleekly debonair—was watching him with a half-contemptuous air.

"Nerves." Blondel repeated for the twentieth time, endeavoring to reassure himself. "Nerves. That's what I am suffering from. Do you think you can get the gold safely on board?"

"The last lot is in the cooling vat," Nicholas replied. "They will pack it at midnight. We expect to be on board before dawn."

"I wish you were there now," Blondel groaned. "It came on me all of a sudden, this lit of nerves. I had to come here."

The two men stood before the high, dusty window. Fog had blotted out the world, had deadened sound as well as sight. They gazed out upon nothing.

"It's a loathsome hole, this," Nicholas exclaimed with a shiver. "If you had been down here as I have been all these nights urging them on, watching the furnaces, doing sentinel at night and slave driver by day, you might talk about nerves!"

With a start so slight as to be scarcely noticeable, and without a spoken word, he peered suddenly forward. A row of strange orange flares had appeared on the other bank of the cut. They were moving in line now. Nicholas, stooping down, with a great effort threw open the window. Blondel went choking backward. Nicholas ignored the fog which was drifting in. He was listening. Suddenly the telephone sounded. He stretched out his hand and took off the receiver.

"HOW many?" he asked in response to some spoken words from the other end. "Are you there, Paul? Blow up the ferry. You've got the stuff on?"

Nicholas, too, it seemed, was sometimes subject to nerves. He seized the telephone and dashed it on to the floor. His thumb was pressed upon a bell in the wall.

"Curse you and your nerves, Blondel," he exclaimed. "Anyway, you've got something to be nervous for now," he added, with a fierce laugh. "Listen!"

They heard the ferryboat starting on its creaking and groaning passage. The orange lights seemed somehow or other to be on board. Down the passages of the works overhead and all around was the sound of flying footsteps.

"What is it?" Blondel shrieked. "Tell me what it is, Nicholas. What's wrong?"

"Not much," the young man answered coolly. "There are forty policemen on that ferry halfway across the cut by now, I should think. We had a mine laid on the boat but they found it and cut the wire. Look at the lights down either side. They are trying to hem us in."

He started tearing off his coat and waistcoat.

"What are you going to do?" Blondel cried.

"Swim across to my motorboat behind," was the quick answer. "Are you coming?"

"I can't swim," Blondel sobbed. "Don't leave me here, Nicholas."

The young man laughed. He was in his shirt and trousers now. "A pretty sort of a fool I should be," he scoffed, "to stop and keep you company! Here you can have this," he added, throwing a revolver which he had drawn from his hip pocket on to the table. "Much good may it do you."

HE rushed from the room. Blondel would have followed him, but his knees gave way. The sound of flying footsteps had ceased. The silence of emptiness was upon the place. Blondel staggered to the window. The fog was denser than ever in the room, and he felt himself choking. The ferryboat was looming up, a great black shape, barely fifty yards away. Already he could hear the creaking of the chains. He took up the revolver, laid it down, picked it up again with a sob. The fog drifted in. Somehow the darkness made it easier.

The inspector-in-chief landed his men safely and sent them swarming through the place. The gold was there, lying about in all directions in the great shed near the furnace. There were coats and hats lying about, too, but the only sign of any human being was the little pink-and-white man, stone dead with a revolver still grasped in his hand.