Graham Greene (21 page)

When we again were safe at sea, I said: “Schnitzel, how much did you pay that Frenchman to let you read my second cable?”

Schnitzel's reply was prompt and complacent.

“One hundred dollars gold. It was worth it. Do you want to know how I doped it out?”

I even challenged him to do so.

“ ‘Roses red'—war declared: ‘violets blue'—outlook bad, or blue; ‘send snow'—send squadron, because the white squadron is white like snow. See? It was too easy.”

“Schnitzel,” I cried, “you are wonderful!”

Schnitzel yawned in my face.

“Oh, you don't have to hit the soles of my feet with a nightstick to keep me awake,” he said.

After I had been a week at sea, I found that either I had to believe that in all things Schnitzel was a liar, or that the men of the Nitrate Trust were in all things evil. I was convinced that instead of the people of Valencia robbing them, they were robbing both the people of Valencia and the people of the United States.

To go to war on their account was to degrade our Government. I explained to Schnitzel it was not becoming that the United States Navy should be made the cat's-paw of a corrupt corporation. I asked his permission to repeat to the authorities at Washington certain of the statements he had made.

Schnitzel was greatly pleased.

“You're welcome to tell 'em anything I've said,” he assented. “And,” he added, “most of it's true, too.”

I wrote down certain charges he had made, and added what I had always known of the nitrate fight. It was a terrible arraignment. In the evening I read my notes to Schnitzel, who, in a corner of the smoking-room, sat frowning importantly, checking off each statement, and where I made an error of a date or a name, severely correcting me.

Several times I asked him, “Are you sure this won't get you into trouble with your ‘people'? You seem to accuse everybody on each side.”

Schnitzel's eyes instantly closed with suspicion.

“Don't you worry about me and my people,” he returned sulkily. “That's
my
secret, and you won't find it out, neither. I may be as crooked as the rest of them, but I'm not giving away my employer.”

I suppose I looked puzzled.

“I mean not a second time,” he added hastily. “I know what
you're thinking of, and I got five thousand dollars for it. But now I mean to stick by the men that pay my wages.”

“But you've told me enough about each of the three to put any one of them in jail.”

“Of course I have,” cried Schnitzel triumphantly. “If I'd let down on any one crowd you'd know I was working for that crowd, so I've touched ‘em all up. Only what I told you about my crowd—isn't true.”

The report we finally drew up was so sensational that I was of a mind to throw it overboard. It accused members of the Cabinet, of our Senate, diplomats, business men of national interest, judges of the Valencia courts, private secretaries, clerks, hired bullies, and filibusters. Men the trust could not bribe it had blackmailed. Those it could not corrupt, and they were pitifully few, it crushed with some disgraceful charge.

Looking over my notes, I said:

“You seem to have made every charge except murder.”

“How'd I come to leave that out?” Schnitzel answered flippantly. “What about Coleman, the foreman at Bahia, and that German contractor, Ebhardt, and old Smedburg? They talked too much, and they died of yellow-fever, maybe, and maybe what happened to them was they ate knock-out drops in their soup.”

I disbelieved him, but there came a sudden nasty doubt.

“Curtis, who managed the company's plant at Barcelona, died of yellow-fever,” I said, “and was buried the same day.”

For some time Schnitzel glowered uncertainly at the bulkhead.

“Did you know him?” he asked.

“When I was in the legation I knew him well,” I said.

“So did I,” said Schnitzel. “He wasn't murdered. He murdered himself. He was wrong ten thousand dollars in his accounts.
He got worrying about it and we found him outside the clearing with a hole in his head. He left a note saying he couldn't bear the disgrace. As if the company would hold a little grafting against as good a man as Curtis!”

Schnitzel coughed, and pretended it was his cigarette.

“You see you don't put in nothing against him,” he added savagely.

It was the first time I had seen Schnitzel show emotion, and I was moved to preach.

“Why don't you quit?” I said. “You had an A 1 job as a stenographer. Why won't you go back to it?”

“Maybe, some day. But it's great being your own boss. If I was a stenographer, I wouldn't be helping you send in a report to the State Department, would I? No, this job is all right. They send you after something big, and you have the devil of a time getting it, but when you get it, you feel like you had picked a hundred-to-one shot.”

The talk or the drink had elated him. His fish-like eyes bulged and shone. He cast a quick look about him. Except for ourselves, the smoking-room was empty. From below came the steady throb of the engines, and from outside the whisper of the waves and of the wind through the cordage. A barefooted sailor pattered by to the bridge. Schnitzel bent toward me, and with his hand pointed to his throat.

“I've got papers on me that's worth a million to a certain party,” he whispered. “You understand, my notes in cipher.”

He scowled with intense mystery.

“I keep 'em in an oiled-silk bag, tied around my neck with a string. And here,” he added hastily, patting his hip, as though to forestall any attack I might make upon his person, “I carry my automatic. It shoots nine bullets in five seconds. They got to be quick to catch me.”

“Well, if you have either of those things on you,” I said
testily, “I don't want to know it. How often have I told you not to talk and drink at the same time?”

“Ah, go on,” laughed Schnitzel. “That's an old gag, warning a fellow not to talk so as to
make
him talk. I do that myself.”

That Schnitzel had important papers tied to his neck I no more believe than that he wore a shirt of chain armour, but to please him I pretended to be greatly concerned.

“Now that we're getting into New York,” I said, “you must be very careful. A man who carried such important documents on his person might be murdered for them. I think you ought to disguise yourself.”

A picture of my bag being carried ashore by Schnitzel in the uniform of a ship's steward rather pleased me.

“Go on, you're kidding!” said Schnitzel. He was drawn between believing I was deeply impressed and with fear that I was mocking him.

“On the contrary,” I protested, “I don't feel quite safe myself. Seeing me with you they may think I have papers around
my
neck.”

“They wouldn't look at you,” Schnitzel reassured me. “They know you're just an amateur. But, as you say, with me, it's different. I
got
to be careful. Now, you mightn't believe it, but I never go near my uncle nor none of my friends that live where I used to hang out. If I did, the other spies would get on my track. I suppose,” he went on grandly, “I never go out in New York but that at least two spies are trailing me. But I know how to throw them off. I live ‘way down town in a little hotel you never heard of. You never catch me dining at Sherry's nor the Waldorf. And you never met me out socially, did you, now?”

I confessed I had not.

“And then, I always live under an assumed name.”

“Like ‘Jones'?” I suggested.

“Well, sometimes ‘Jones',” he admitted.

“To me,” I said, “ ‘Jones' lacks imagination. It's the sort of name you give when you're arrested for exceeding the speed limit. Why don't you call yourself Machiavelli?”

“Go on, I'm no dago,” said Schnitzel, “and don't you go off thinking ‘Jones' is the only disguise I use. But I'm not tellin' what it is, am I? Oh, no.”

“Schnitzel,” I asked, “have you ever been told that you would make a great detective?”

“Cut it out,” said Schnitzel. “You've been reading those fairy stories. There's no fly cops nor Pinks could do the work I do. They're pikers compared to me. They chase petty-larceny cases and kick in doors. I wouldn't stoop to what they do. It's being mixed up the way I am with the problems of two governments that catches me.” He added magnanimously, “You see something of that yourself.”

We left the ship at Brooklyn, and with regret I prepared to bid Schnitzel farewell. Seldom had I met a little beast so offensive, but his vanity, his lies, his moral blindness, made one pity him. And in ten days in the smoking-room together we had had many friendly drinks and many friendly laughs. He was going to a hotel on lower Broadway, and as my cab, on my way uptown, passed the door, I offered him a lift. He appeared to consider the advisability of this, and then, with much by-play of glancing over his shoulder, dived into the front seat and drew down the blinds. “This hotel I am going to is an old-fashioned trap,” he explained, “but the clerk is wise to me, understand, and I don't have to sign the register.”

As we drew nearer to the hotel, he said: “It's a pity we can't dine out somewheres and go to the theatre, but—you know?”

With almost too much heartiness I hastily agreed it would be imprudent.

“I understand perfectly,” I assented. “You are a marked man.
Until you get those papers safe in the hands of your ‘people,' you must be very cautious.”

“That's right,” he said. Then he smiled craftily.

“I wonder if you're on yet to which my people are.”

I assured him that I had no idea, but that from the avidity with which he had abused them I guessed he was working for the Walker-Keefe crowd.

He both smiled and scowled.

“Don't you wish you knew?” he said. “I've told you a lot of inside stories, Mr Crosby, but I'll never tell on my pals again. Not me! That's
my
secret.”

At the door of the hotel he bade me a hasty good-bye, and for a few minutes I believed that Schnitzel had passed out of my life forever. Then, in taking account of my belongings, I missed my field-glasses. I remembered that, in order to open a trunk for the customs inspectors, I had handed them to Schnitzel, and that he had hung them over his shoulder. In our haste at parting we both had forgotten them.

I was only a few blocks from the hotel, and I told the man to return.

I enquired for Mr Schnitzel, and the clerk, who apparently knew him by that name, said he was in his room, number eighty-two.

“But he has a caller with him now,” he added. “A gentleman was waiting for him, and's just gone up.”

I wrote on my card why I had called, and soon after it had been borne skyward the clerk said: “I guess he'll be able to see you now. That's the party that was calling on him, there.”

He nodded toward a man who crossed the rotunda quickly. His face was twisted from us, as though, as he almost ran toward the street, he were reading the advertisements on the wall. He reached the door, and was lost in the great tide of Broadway.

I crossed to the elevator, and as I stood waiting, it descended with a crash, and the boy who had taken my card flung himself, shrieking, into the rotunda.

“That man—stop him!” he cried. “The man in eighty-two—he's murdered.”

The clerk vaulted the desk and sprang into the street, and I dragged the boy back to the wire rope and we shot to the third storey. The boy shrank back. A chambermaid, crouching against the wall, her face colourless, lowered one hand, and pointed at an open door.

“In there,” she whispered.

In a mean, common room, stretched where he had been struck back upon the bed, I found the boy who had elected to meddle in the “problems of two governments.”

In tiny jets, from three wide knife-wounds, his blood flowed slowly. His staring eyes were lifted up in fear and in entreaty. I knew that he was dying, and as I felt my impotence to help him, I as keenly felt a great rage and a hatred toward those who had struck him.

I leaned over him until my eyes were only a few inches from his face.

“Schnitzel?” I cried. “Who did this? You can trust me. Who did this? Quick!”

I saw that he recognised me, and that there was something which, with terrible effort, he was trying to make me understand.

In the hall was the rush of many people, running, exclaiming, the noise of bells ringing; from another floor the voice of a woman shrieked hysterically.

At the sounds the eyes of the boy grew eloquent with entreaty, and with a movement that called from each wound a fresh outburst, like a man strangling, he lifted his fingers to his throat.
Voices were calling for water, to wait for the doctor, to wait for the police. But I thought I understood.

Still doubting him, still unbelieving, ashamed of my own credulity, I tore at his collar, and my fingers closed upon a package of oiled silk.

I stooped, and with my teeth ripped it open, and holding before him the slips of paper it contained, tore them into tiny shreds.

The eyes smiled at me with cunning, with triumph, with deep content.

It was so like the Schnitzel I had known that I believed still he might have strength enough to help me.

“Who did this?” I begged. “I'll hang him for it! Do you hear me?” I cried.

Seeing him lying there, with the life cut out of him, swept me with a blind anger, with a need to punish.

“I'll see they hang for it. Tell me!” I commanded. “Who did this?”

The eyes, now filled with weariness, looked up and the lips moved freely.

“My own people,” he whispered.

In my indignation I could have shaken the truth from him. I bent closer.

“Then, by God,” I whispered back, “you'll tell me who they are!”

The eyes flashed sullenly.