(1929) The Three Just Men (8 page)

The store was flush with the canal towing-path; barges had moored here, discharging rubber in bales, palm nut, nitrates even, and had restocked with Manchester cloth and case upon case of Birmingham-made geegaws of brass and lacquer.

Mr. Oberzohn invariably shipped his spirituous cargoes from Hamburg, since Germany is the home of synthesis. In the centre of the triangle was a red-brick villa, more unlovely than the factory, missing as it did that ineffable grandeur, made up of tragedy and pathos, attaching to a burnt-out building, however ugly it may have been in its prime.

The villa was built from a design in Mr. Oberzohn’s possession, and was the exact replica of the house in Sweden where he was born. It had high, gabled ends at odd and unexpected places. The roof was shingled with grey tiles; there were glass panels in the curious-looking door, and iron ornaments in the shape of cranes and dogs flanking the narrow path through the rank nettle and dock which constituted his garden.

Here he dwelt, in solitude, yet not in solitude, for two men lived in the house, and there was a stout Swedish cook and a very plain Danish maid, a girl of vacant countenance, who worked from sun-up to midnight without complaint, who seldom spoke and never smiled. The two men were somewhere in the region of thirty. They occupied the turret rooms at each end of the building, and had little community of interest. They sometimes played cards together with an old and greasy pack, but neither spoke more than was necessary. They were lean, hollow-faced men, with a certain physiognomical resemblance. Both had thin, straight lips; both had round, staring, dark eyes filled with a bright but terrifying curiosity.

“They look,” reported Leon Gonsalez, when he went to examine the ground, “as if they are watching pigs being killed and enjoying every minute of it. Iwan Pfeiffer is one, Sven Gurther is the other. Both have escaped the gallows or the axe in Germany; both have convictions against them. They are typical German-trained criminals, as pitiless as wolves. Dehumanized.”

The “Three,” as was usual, set the machinery of the law in motion, and found that the hands of the police were tied. Only by stretching the law could the men be deported, and the law is difficult to stretch. To all appearance they offended in no respect. A woman, by no means the most desirable of citizens, laid a complaint against one. There was an investigation—proof was absent; the very character of the complainant precluded a conviction, and the matter was dropped—by the police.

Somebody else moved swiftly.

One morning, just before daybreak, a policeman patrolling the tow-path heard a savage snarl and looked round for the dog. He found instead, up one of those narrow entries leading to the canal bank, a man. He was tied to the stout sleeper fence, and his bare back showed marks of a whip. Somebody had held him up at night as he prowled the bank in search of amusement, had tied and flogged him. Twenty-five lashes: an expert thought the whip used was the official cat-o’-nine-tails.

Scotland Yard, curious, suspicious, sought out the Three Just Men. They had alibis so complete as to be unbreakable. Sven Gurther went unavenged—but he kept from the tow-path thereafter.

In this house of his there were rooms which only Dr. Oberzohn visited. The Danish maid complained to the cook that when she had passed the door of one as the doctor came out, a blast of warm, tainted air had rushed out and made her cough for an hour. There was another room in which from time to time the doctor had installed a hotchpotch of apparatus. Vulcanizing machines, electrical machines (older and more used than Mirabelle had seen in her brief stay in the City Road), a liquid air plant, not the most up-to-date but serviceable.

He was not, curiously enough, a doctor in the medical sense. He was not even a doctor of chemistry. His doctorate was in Literature and Law. These experiments of his were hobbies—hobbies that he had pursued from his childhood.

On this evening he was sitting in his stuffy parlour reading close-printed and closer-reasoned volume of German philosophy, and thinking of something else. Though the sun had only just set, the blinds and curtains were drawn; a wood fire crackled in the grate, and the bright lights of three half-watt lamps made glaring radiance.

An interruption came in the shape of a telephone call. He listened, grunting replies.

“So!” he said at last, and spoke a dozen words in his strange English.

Putting aside his book, he hobbled in his velvet slippers across the room and pressed twice upon the bell-push by the side of the fireplace. Gurther came in noiselessly and stood waiting.

He was grimy, unshaven. The pointed chin and short upper lip were blue. The V of his shirt visible above the waistcoat was soiled and almost black at the edges. He stood at attention, smiling vacantly, his eyes fixed at a point above the doctor’s head.

Dr. Oberzohn lifted his eyes from his book.

“I wish you to be a gentleman of club manner to-night,” he said. He spoke in that hard North-German tongue which the Swede so readily acquires.

“Ja, Herr Doktor!”

The man melted from the room.

Dr. Oberzohn for some reason hated Germans. So, for the matter of that, did Gurther and Pfeiffer, the latter being Polish by extraction and Russian by birth. Gurther hated Germans because they stormed the little jail at Altostadt to kill him after the dogs found Frau Siedlitz’s body. He would have died then but for the green police, who scented a Communist rising, scattered the crowd and sent Gurther by road to the nearest big town under escort. The two escorting policemen were never seen again. Gurther reappeared mysteriously in England two years after, bearing a veritable passport. There was no proof even that he was Gurther—Leon knew, Manfred knew, Poiccart knew.

There had been an alternative to the whipping.

“It would be a simple matter to hold his head under water until he was drowned,” said Leon.

They debated the matter, decided against this for no sentimental or moral reason—none save expediency. Gurther had his whipping and never knew how near to the black and greasy water of the canal he had been.

Dr. Oberzohn resumed his book—a fascinating book that was all about the human soul and immortality and time. He was in the very heart of an analysis of eternity when Gurther reappeared dressed in the “gentleman-club manner,” The dress-coat fitted perfectly; shirt and waistcoat were exactly the right cut The snowy shirt, the braided trousers, the butterfly bow, and winged collar…

“That is good.” Dr. Oberzohn went slowly over the figure. “But the studs should be pearl—not enamel. And the watch-chain is demode—it is not worn. The gentleman-club manner does not allow of visible ornament Also I think a moustache…?”

“Ja, Herr Doktor!”

Gurther, who was once an actor, disappeared again. When he returned the enamel studs had gone: there were small pearls in their place, and his white waistcoat had no chain across. And on his upper lip had sprouted a small brown moustache, so natural that even Oberzohn, scrutinizing closely, could find no fault with it. The doctor took a case from his pocket, fingered out three crisp notes.

“Your hands, please?”

Gurther took three paces to the old man, halted, clicked his heels and held out his hands for inspection.

“Good! You know Leon Gonsalez? He will be at the Arts Ball. He wears no fancy dress. He was the man who whipped you.”

“He was the man who whipped me,” said Gurther without heat.

There was a silence, Dr. Oberzohn pursing his lips.

“Also, he did that which brands him as an infamous assassin…I think… yes, I think my dear Gurther…there will be a girl also, but the men of my police will be there to arrange such matters. Benton will give you instructions. For you, only Gonsalez.”

Gurther bowed stiffly.

“I have implored the order,” he said, bowed again and withdrew. Later, Dr. Oberzohn heard the drone of the little car as it bumped and slithered across the grass to the road. He resumed his book: this matter of eternity was fascinating.

The Arts Ball at the Corinthian Hall as one of the events of the season, and the tickets, issued exclusively to the members of three clubs, were eagerly sought by society people who could not be remotely associated with any but the art of living.

When the girl came into the crowded hall, she looked around in wonder. The balconies, outlined in soft lights and half-hidden with flowers, had been converted into boxes; the roof had been draped with blue and gold tissue; at one end of the big hall was a veritable bower of roses, behind which one of the two bands was playing. Masks in every conceivable guise were swinging rhythmically across the polished floor. To the blase, there was little difference between the Indians, the pierrots and the cavaliers to be seen here and those they had seen a hundred times on a hundred different floors.

As the girl gazed round in wonder and delight, forgetting all her misgivings, two men, one in evening dress, the other in the costume of a brigand, came from under the shadow of the balcony towards them.

“Here are our partners,” said Joan, with sudden vivacity. ‘“Mirabelle, I want you to know Lord Evington.”

The man in evening dress stroked his little moustache, clicked his heels and bent forward in a stiff bow. He was thin-faced, a little pallid, unsmiling. His round, dark eyes surveyed her for a second, and then:

“I’m glad to meet you, Miss Leicester,” he said, in a high, harsh voice, that had just the trace of a foreign accent.

This struck the girl with as much surprise as the cold kiss he had implanted upon her hand, and, as if he read her thoughts, he went on quickly:

“I have lived so long abroad that England and English manners are strange to me. Won’t you dance? And had you not better mask? I must apologise to you for my costume.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But there was no gala dress available.”

She fixed the red mask, and in another second she was gliding through the crowd and was presently lost to view.

“I don’t understand it all, Benton.”

Joan was worried and frightened. She had begun to realize that the game she played was something different…her part more sinister than any role she had yet filled. To jolly along the gilded youth to the green tables of Captain Monty Newton was one thing; but never before had she seen the gang working against a woman.

“I don’t know,” grumbled the brigand, who was not inaptly arrayed. “There’s been a hurry call for everybody.” He glanced round uneasily as though he feared his words might be overheard. “All the guns are here—Defson, Cuccini, Jewy Stubbs…”

“The guns?” she whispered in horror, paling under her rouge. “You mean…?”

“The guns are out: that’s all I know,” he said doggedly. “They started drifting in half an hour before you came.”

Joan was silent, her heart racing furiously. Then Monty had told her the truth. She knew that somewhere behind Oberzohn, behind Monty Newton, was a force perfectly dovetailed into the machine, only one cog of which she had seen working. These card parties of Monty’s were profitable enough, but for a long time she had had a suspicion that they were the merest side-line. The organization maintained a regular corps of gunmen, recruited from every quarter of the globe. Monty Newton talked sometimes in his less sober moments of what he facetiously described as the “Old Guard.” How they were employed, on what excuse, for what purpose, she had never troubled to think. They came and went from England in batches. Once Monty had told her that Oberzohn’s people had gone to Smyrna, and he talked vaguely of unfair competition that had come to the traders of the 0. & S. outfit. Afterwards she read in the paper of a “religious riot” which resulted in the destruction by fire of a great block of business premises. After that Monty spoke no more of competition. The Old Guard returned to England, minus one of its number, who had been shot in the stomach in the course of this “religious riot.” What particular faith he possessed in such a degree as to induce him to take up arms for the cause, she never learned. She knew he was dead, because Monty had written to the widow, who lived in the Bronx.

Joan knew a lot about Monty’s business, for an excellent reason. She was with him most of the time; and whether she posed as his niece or daughter, his sister, or some closer relationship, she was undoubtedly the nearest to a confidante he possessed.

“Who is that man with the moustache—is he one?” she asked.

“No; he’s Oberzohn’s man—for God’s sake don’t tell Monty I told you all this! I got orders to-night to put wise about the girl.”

“What about her…what are they doing with her?” she gasped in terror.

“Let us dance,” said Benton, and half guided, half carried her into the throng. They had reached the centre of the floor when, with no warning, every light in the hall went out.

CHAPTER NINE - BEFORE THE LIGHTS WENT OUT

THE band had stopped, a rustle of hand-clapping came from the hot dancers, and almost before the applause had started the second band struck up “Kulloo.”

Mirabelle was not especially happy. Her partner was the most correct of dancers, but they lacked just that unity of purpose, the oneness of interest which makes all the difference between the ill-and the well-matched.

“May we sit down?” she begged. “I am rather hot.”

“Will the gracious lady come to the little hall?” he asked. “It is cooler there, and the chairs are comfortable.”

She looked at him oddly.