The adventures of Heine
two fine fellows, true and loyal sons of the Fatherland, drank in a
whisper to the destruction of civilization’s enemy--England!
Klein accompanied Posser to his room. They pulled down the blinds
before they switched on the light. Quickly the drawing pads, the
rulers, the T-squares and the compasses were taken out of Posser’s
suit-case and arrayed on the table.
“Now I will leave you,” said Klein, shook hands heartily with the hero
of that night’s adventure and left the room, as he said, without a
sound.
He had scarcely got into his own room and shut the door when he heard
the click of the lock on Posser’s door and smiled his approval. It was
at a quarter to two when he went to bed and at half-past seven the
maid brought him a cup of coffee and some biscuits. He drank his
coffee and rose, slipped into his dressing-gown and went over to
Posser’s room anxious to know what was the result of the night’s work.
He tapped at the door. There was no answer. He tapped again. There was
still no answer. He tried the handle, remembering at the same time
that Herr Posser had locked the door. He was a little surprised to
find that the door yielded.
The room was in semi-darkness, the blinds were still drawn and he
walked to the window and let the blinds up with a crash.
What he saw, or rather what he did not see, struck him with amazement.
The bed had not been slept in. All the drawing material had been
cleared. Posser’s trunks were still in the position where he had left
them, but there was no sign of Posser.
He went back to his room and rang the bell. The night porter was
summoned, but neither he nor any of the servants had seen Posser, who
from that moment vanished from the earth as completely as though the
ground had opened and swallowed him, and not only vanished but had
taken with him whatever drawings he had made.
In his perturbation Klein went to the room of Mister Haynes, who was
still in bed and sleeping soundly.
“Get up!” said Klein testily; “have you seen Mr.----my secretary?”
Mister Haynes sat up, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
“What’s the time?” he asked.
“Confound it,” said Klein angrily, “what does it matter what the time
is? Have you seen my friend?”
“Why should I have seen your friend?” growled Haynes. “What has
happened to him?”
“He has disappeared,” said Klein.
“Gone out for a walk, I expect; it is a beautiful morning.”
“On the contrary, it is raining and blowing,” said Klein angrily; “why
should he go out on a morning like this?”
Haynes rose and dressed himself leisurely, spending an unconscionable
time in the bathroom for a man whom I never suspected of washing, and
turned up at breakfast, wholly unconcerned in his callous English
fashion as to what had happened to poor Posser.
Klein, who was all nerves, could eat nothing. He had questioned
everybody in the hotel, but nobody had heard a sound in the night and
the night-porter supplemented his previous statement, declaring that
it was impossible for Posser to leave the house except with his
knowledge.
Klein was not satisfied and made an examination of the outside of the
hotel, hoping to pick up some trace of his comrade.
Outside Posser’s window he made a discovery. A line of bushes grew
within a foot of the house-wall, and beneath Posser’s window these had
been broken as though by some heavy body having jumped or fallen upon
them. Moreover, he discovered a small pair of dividers which he
recognized as Posser’s.
Pursuing his investigations beyond the grounds of the hotel, he came
upon the track of motor-car wheels which he followed to the outskirts
of the town where he made another discovery. The road here was
undergoing repair and owing to the wetness of the morning the night
watchman was still on duty, not having been relieved as usually is the
case at the hour when the men started work.
This old man Klein questioned.
“Yes,” said the watchman, “I saw a motor-car. It was an ambulance with
green lights. It went past here a little after one this morning and
came back a little after two. It stopped very near the hotel, because
I could see its tail lights and I saw it turn round.”
Klein went back to the hotel with his nerves shaken and his usually
well-ordered mind in a condition of chaos.
“I am going back to town by the ten o’clock train,” he told Mister
Haynes. “I suppose you will be staying?”
“No,” said Mister Haynes with another yawn. “I shall go back, too.
There is nothing to be got out of this place.”
And so, much to the disgust of Klein, who in his state of mind would
have preferred to have been alone, they went back together.
They had to change at Basingstoke, and there finding that he would
have half an hour to wait, Klein crossed to the nearest hotel and got
me on the ’phone.
It was in this way that he related to me as far as he could with
safety the extraordinary happenings of the previous night.
“It is inexplicable, my dear Heine,” he said, speaking in Spanish. “I
am bewildered, stunned.”
I no less was agitated.
“Did he not communicate anything to you?” I asked.
“Yes, thank our good Gott!” said Klein’s voice; “he gave me a rough
sketch which may be sufficient. Whatever has happened to him the good
fellow’s work is not fruitless.”
Then suddenly his voice sank and he spoke hurriedly.
“I cannot say more,” he said, “that infernal reporter of yours is
outside the box. Does he understand Spanish?”
“He understands no language except bad French,” I replied, and heard
the click of the telephone receiver being hung up.
So distressed and puzzled was I that I went down to the station to
meet my friend.
I walked along the platform as the train came to a slow standstill,
and the first person I met was Mister Haynes, looking more untidy than
ever.
“Where is my friend?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Haynes, yawning; “he went over to the hotel to
telephone to somebody at Basingstoke and left before I did. In fact, I
had to run to catch the train,” he explained. “He is here somewhere.”
But there was no Klein. If he had been left behind he would have
telephoned me. I made inquiries of the guard.
“A gentleman in a check cap and a long ulster?” said that official.
“Yes, I remember him. He got on to the train at Basingstoke,
first-class passenger, wasn’t he? I particularly noticed he was in a
carriage by himself and was reading. This is the carriage,” he said,
pulling the door open, “here is his magazine.”
On the rack above was Klein’s suit-case. It was evident that it had
been rifled because the collars and night-shirt, brushes and combs,
were all mixed together in confusion.
I stared at Haynes and Haynes looked at me.
“How extraordinary!” said Mister Haynes.
It was not until that night that Klein’s body was recovered, lying in
a ditch by the side of the railway, shot through the heart, with every
pocket turned inside out, and yet, curiously enough, with all his
money, his watch and the rings left intact.
Of the rough drawing which he had promised to deliver me there was no
sign. Close at hand was his revolver with one chamber discharged.
Mister Haynes was in the office when the news came. He had been out
all the afternoon and had, he said, met with an accident, for his arm
was bandaged and in a sling. I was so upset by my anxiety over Klein
that I had barely noticed Mister Haynes’s injury, but now I looked at
him narrowly.
“What is the nature of your injury?” I asked.
He laughed.
“Mr. Cannelli,” he said, “I don’t know very much about you. You may be
a very honest man, the tool of very dishonest men.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It may be,” he went on, without taking any notice of my question,
“that you are being duped and that it is only coincidence that you
have friends who pursue extraordinary inquiries. All the records we
have of you,” my heart gave a throb and I could feel my hands
trembling, “all the records we have of you,” he repeated, “seem to be
in good order. I will give you two pieces of advice. The first is to
be careful in your choice of acquaintances. The second is to refrain
from allowing your very natural anxieties to lead you into further
inquiries as to the fate of Mr. Adolph Klein, alias Simpson, and if I
would add a third,” he said, looking out of the window and speaking in
his slow drawl, “it is to advise your friends in communicating with
you to avoid both the telephone and the Spanish language. Good
afternoon.”
He picked up his hat and went out, the picture of a broken-down
journalist, and I did not see him again until one day in Whitehall I
passed an officer, wearing the badge of the Intelligence Department,
who smiled and waved his hand to me. It was my reporter.
CHAPTER V.
THE MAN FROM THE STARS
It is an axiom of mine that news has no value unless it is based
upon somebody’s misfortune. Take your newspaper and scan its close-set
columns. Is there any item in these many pages which does not derive
its importance from a calamity which has overtaken somebody?
Your police courts, your divorce courts, your war--they yield interest
in ratio to the misfortune of one party or the other. Our great
victory is your great defeat, the liberation by the Divorce Court of
this woman is the exposure of that, startling crimes attract only by
the measure of the anguish they impose. In war, when neither army is
destroying the other we vote the news dull, and so I think would you
describe the faithful record of my commonplace days when all went as
smoothly and as evenly as the routine of a well-organized business.
And, after all, the spy’s work is more often than not the most dull
and boring of work. One of my men spent eight weeks in timber yards,
checking the supplies of box-wood and keeping track of its
destination. When a certain noble lord in charge of a great national
factory bought up all the box-wood, we knew by the extent of his
purchases that the work which was being done in his well-guarded
factory was shell-filling on a vast scale.
Here then was a form of “espionage” without adventure, humdrum,
soul-destroying and to all appearance unprofitable. There is no
material for narrative here, good friends. There is nothing of the
bizarre, nothing of the flash, the sparkle, and the thrill of the
work. Therefore, I do not offend you with the banal trivialities of my
profession, otherwise I might present what was little more than a
catalogue of appointments. As for example:
March 3rd.
10 o’clock.--Saw Hefferich and took report of spare ties and sleepers
held by G.W. & C. Ry.
10.15.--Phone message from Stael to say that there was a case of
bubonic plague reported at Gravesend (East India liner _Ratapore_.)
10.20.--Phone from Casey _re_ proscribed meeting at Connemara.
10.30.--Phone weather report from Aberdeen.
10.33.--Phone weather report from Llandudno.
10.35.--Weather report from Southsea.
10.38.--Saw van Heerden _re_ butter shipments for February.
and so and so forth. Yes, I was a weather bureau, and daily
transmitted the barometer reading to Germany--useful information for
our air service.
Many informative isobars would have been absent from the German
meteorological charts but for the industry and organization of Heine!
I have my critics and my enemies. Particularly do I single out amongst
the latter, Trade-Councillor Karl Wesselsmanns, of Hamburg, on the
staff of _Vorwarts_, who had the impertinence to write in his crude
language and un-German spirit that “the work of the Secret Service in
England was distinguished by bungling and stupidity. Whoever was in
control of that work seemed to spend his time getting Germans into
trouble and produced very few satisfactory results that are worthy of
notice.”