Moon of madness
“Nanette has gone on somewhere to dance,” said O’Shea.
“I know.” I stared out of the window of the taxi. “I take it that she
doesn’t know where _we_ have gone on to?”
“No.”
O’Shea’s reply was little more than a whisper, but it told me that
which made me at once glad and sorry. For good or for ill, Nanette was
winning.
“Two things are rather worrying me,” O’Shea confessed. “It is obvious
enough that Zara is afraid to visit any of the known centres of the S
Group, hence the appointment at Peter Pan. He probably received the
letter--or ‘Order’--at some post office, under an assumed name. But if
he had read it and decoded it before he dropped it in the taxi, where
was he at noon to-day?”
“Unable to approach Peter Pan,” I replied promptly, “because we were
there, not to mention the man from Scotland Yard who was following the
German.”
“Yes,” O’Shea mused. “Zara’s reaction to this check is one of the
points I am wondering about. It may prove to be a snag. The second
snag----”
But as our taxi had turned into Porchester Terrace and was now pulling
up, I did not learn what the second snag might be.
We alighted, and I looked up and down the street. Save for O’Shea’s
assurance, there was nothing to show that our movements were covered
by the squad from Scotland Yard. Porchester Terrace proclaimed itself
empty from end to end, or for as far as I could see.
Number 365A was a prosperous-looking mansion set back beyond a patch
of shrubbery and approached through a sort of arcade guarded by
handsome double doors. What appeared to be a large room on the first
floor was brilliantly lighted, but otherwise the house was in
darkness.
“Pull over to the other side of the street,” O’Shea directed the taxi
driver, “and wait. We shall not be long.”
“Very good, sir.”
As the man turned his cab:
“Now,” said O’Shea, “we are going over the top! Are you fit?”
“All ready,” said I.
O’Shea pressed the bell button.
In the interval that elapsed between the ringing of the bell and the
opening of the door, I conjured up a picture of Nanette dancing with
somebody or another somewhere, perpetually glancing abstractedly about
the room, as I had seen her do so often, in hope of catching a glimpse
of O’Shea.
It was hard to believe that this doorway before which we waited
represented a frontier which, once crossed, shut us off from the life
of empty gaiety which the name of London conveys to so many; difficult
to regard it as the porch of a grim and real underworld, controlled by
enemies of established society, remorseless, almost inhuman in their
bloodthirsty fanaticism.
A saturnine foreign butler admitted us. We had shed our dinner kit and
were wearing tweeds.
“Comrade Zara and Comrade Wilson,” said O’Shea with composure.
The man nodded and stood aside. We entered the arcade, which was
bordered by plants in pots, and saw ahead of us some carpeted steps,
lighted by a hanging lantern.
As the double doors closed behind us, I experienced one of those
indescribable moments compounded of panic and exhilaration. Then
somewhere, very dimly, I heard a clock striking midnight. We were
going upstairs.
“Comrade Zara and Comrade Wilson.”
I found myself in a large room, very simply furnished in library
fashion, and in the presence of six or seven rather unsavoury human
specimens, some of whom bowed curtly, and some of whom did not bow at
all.
Our Peter Pan acquaintance was present; and a short thick-set man, who
had incredibly long arms, and who generally resembled a red baboon,
came forward to greet us. He had incomplete teeth, and those that
survived badly needed scaling. His accent opened up wide
possibilities.
“Greeting, Comrades,” said he. “You are welcome. My name is Schmidt.”
And as he spoke, fixing his piercing glance first upon O’Shea and then
upon myself, I recognized beneath that uncouth exterior the primitive,
formidable force of the man.
He presented the other comrades, by names which are not to be found in
Debrett, and I reflected that impudence is indispensable to success in
this sort of game.
It became evident that, from Comrade Schmidt downward, nobody in the
room was familiar with the appearance of either Zara or Wilson!
An appalling-looking bearded creature attached itself to O’Shea.
“We are anxious, Comrade,” it said, “to hear your personal account of
the state of the work in South Africa.”
“I am not too hopeful,” O’Shea replied gloomily, and glanced aside at
me.
“But,” said Schmidt, turning his dreadful little eyes in my direction,
“Comrade Wilson brings us news from the United States which will be
like new blood in our veins.”
Somehow or another, O’Shea managed to shake off the Missing Link, and
to secure a word aside with me.
“Very full bag,” he murmured. “If we make no mistakes, we shall purge
England and America of some unsavoury elements. But the second snag
which I had foreseen rests on the fact that another steamer from
Madeira has reached Southampton since we returned. There is one member
of the S Group whom we left behind. He knows us both. He might quite
conceivably have been in that steamer! His appearance here would raise
the temperature considerably. And----”
He was interrupted. The door of the room was thrown open and the
foreign butler entered.
“Comrade Macalister,” he announced.
“The snag to which I referred!” said O’Shea.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RAID
I suppose that at some time during his life every man who has
anything of the boy left in him has thought that he would like to take
a fling at the great adventure of Secret Service. I feel called upon
to assure these aspirants that a comfortable armchair is the better
choice.
Accident, or that Higher Power which the Arabs call Kismet, had cast
me into the path of Edmond O’Shea. He had honoured me with his
friendship, but had quite failed to recognize that I was a man of
lesser stature than his own. Whilst granting every honour to marshal
and statesman, personally I am disposed to believe that it was men
such as O’Shea who steered the Allies to victory; and perhaps,
hitherto, I had been inclined to look upon the Secret Service as a job
for highbrows rather than for soldiers.
This error was to be corrected.
Conceive a large room filled with enemies of established order;
fanatics, whose collected scruples would have left a thimble empty.
Conceive that I and O’Shea, posing as members of their bloodthirsty
organization, were amongst them as spies, pledged to bring about their
ruin.
Now, conceive that a “Comrade,” who knows us and has fared ill at our
hands, is suddenly announced.
Perhaps I shall be forgiven when I say that I remembered with
gratitude how Edmond O’Shea had rallied a company of the Guards during
the great retreat, how his presence of mind and consummate
self-possession had helped historians to chronicle Cambrai with pride
rather than with humility.
He edged up beside me. I saw him fumbling for his monocle and saw his
change of expression when he realized that he had left it behind;
then:
“Get near the door,” he murmured. “My fault, Decies, to have let you
in for this. But I had hoped to learn things that police examination
can never bring out.”
Macalister came in.
He was in dinner kit and he smoked a cigar which, to my disordered
vision, appeared to be decorated with two bands. His superb
self-possession was worthy of Tom Mix. He did not merely own the room;
he possessed the property.
“Take the left,” said O’Shea.
Unerringly, instinctively, Macalister’s glance settled upon us at the
moment of his entrance. He had advanced no more than one pace beyond
the butler, and his mouth was agape for excited utterance, when
O’Shea’s revolver had him covered.
Overwhelmed with a sense of utter unreality, I covered the group of
four on my left which included the formidable Schmidt.
Glibly, as though born of long familiarity, the words leapt to my
tongue:
“Hands up!”
The command was obeyed. And I have since thought, paradoxical though
it may appear, that violent men, in these matters, are more tractable
than men of peace. Assessing human life lightly, they credit the brain
behind the gun with compunction no greater than their own.
“By God!” I heard Macalister say--and I hope I shall always find time
to take off my hat to a good loser--“I had you wrong all along,
Major!”
Schmidt looked dangerously ugly for a moment; then:
“Line up,” said O’Shea sharply. “Jump to it. Fall in on the left of
Schmidt.”
Came inarticulate mutterings, but without other audible protest the
group obeyed, forming a line having Schmidt at one end and the
saturnine butler at the other.
“Now,” O’Shea continued, “if any man lowers his hands, I shall not
argue with him. Decies, will you go down to the street door and
whistle? Pass behind me. Keep a sharp look-out. I don’t know who is in
the house.”
I obeyed, the sense of unreality prevailing. But I know I shall always
remember that row of sullen-faced men with raised hands, who watched
as I crossed behind O’Shea.
There was no one on the stairs, and no one in the long, glazed passage
that led to the street. This gained, I ran the length of it, and
throwing open the double doors beheld a seemingly deserted Porchester
Terrace.
I whistled shrilly. The result was magical.
Springing from what hiding places I know not, men appeared running
from right and left! This was the raid squad from Scotland Yard, and I
realized that I was helping to mould history.
Our taximan, who was waiting on the other side of the street, and who
had been peacefully smoking a cigarette, jumped down from his seat and
watched the proceedings with an expression of stupefaction that was
comic in its intensity.
Everything was carried out in a most orderly manner. The members of
the Group were arrested without unnecessary fuss. The whole thing
might have been “produced” by David Belasco. A six-seater car appeared
from somewhere or another, in which the gang was canned as neatly as
tinned sardines.
The police handled the job with such discretion that chance passers-by
never dreamed that anything unusual was going forward. They do these
raids much better on the screen.
Macalister was the last to come down from above, his cigar still held
firmly between his teeth. He was unperturbed. Deportation was the
worst he had to fear, and he knew it quite well. He was smiling slyly.
He paused, looking hard at O’Shea and at myself.
“Listen,” he said, “you two boys have doubled on me pretty badly, but
I don’t bear no malice.” His grammar at times revealed the influence
of the Cubist school. “Zara is different, and he’s still loose. Take
my tip and watch out for Zara. If he’s seeing red, don’t try to pet
him. Good-night!”
He entered the car, urged by two detectives.
“Good-night,” murmured O’Shea thoughtfully, and turned to me.
“You know, Decies,” he went on, “if that man had had our advantages,
he would have made a damned good sportsman.”
There were certain formalities to be attended to, and I suppose it was
close upon two o’clock when O’Shea and I found ourselves outside my
rooms. I suggested a doch-an’-dorris.
“If I were superstitious,” O’Shea declared, “I should refuse.”
He smiled, glancing up at the tall ladder beneath which we must walk
to reach my door.
“Oh!” said I, “they are mending the roof, or something.”
“I suppose we might risk it,” he replied; and we went in.
The incident stuck in my mind, not so much because of any
superstitious significance that I attached to it as because of what
actually happened later.
O’Shea dropped on to the settee in my big room and sighed rather
wearily as he watched me preparing drinks.
“You know, Decies,” said he, “I am both glad and sorry that this job