E. Phillips Oppenheim - 21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series)

“I never have a chance to talk. I am always afraid of speech. I am a man of action, of secret underground action. I like to work where no other men can intrude. I am a rich man but I am not a money grabber. I am a man who loves gratitude but I am not a philanthropist. Within a few hours I shall bring, I hope, to a successful end one of the greatest enterprises of my life. You are a newcomer, Mr. Mildenhall, to the world I have made my own. I saw what was coming to the Jews years before they dreamed of it themselves. As far as I ever feel friendship for anyone I felt friendship and reverence for Leopold Benjamin. I set myself to work on his affairs. Millions upon millions that his father and grandfather had made I removed quietly, inconspicuously from the dangerous places. I made that the business of my life. I encouraged him in those great sums he used to pay for objets d’art . A work of genius is always a marketable thing. Sometimes he was puzzled. It seemed to him that he must be growing poorer. The millions that used to be in Hamburg, the huge iron works that were run entirely with his capital, the ships that took the seas, the streets of palaces in Berlin and Frankfurt—all the money which had brought these things into being and which supported them slipped quietly away. There was always more money to take its place from a hundred different sources. Leopold was sometimes frightened. ‘Blute,’ he used to say to me, ‘you are making a poor man of me.’ And I smiled. It will be a moment of triumph for me when we meet. Not only shall I restore to him the pictures he loves, the treasures of his life, but I shall tell him, and it is a wonderful thing to tell any man, aye, not only tell him but prove to him with the figures which weary him so much, that he is the richest man in the world.”

“Are we still talking fairy stories?” Charles asked.

“I talk because I feel like it,” Blute said calmly. “I very seldom feel like it. You must be a good listener, Mr. Mildenhall. You have an inborn gift for it. Now I am going to sleep.”

He closed his eyes. All around them the murmur of voices was growing fainter and fainter.

Charles was awakened by someone pulling his arm. He heard a scared foreign voice in his ear.

“Wake up, sir, please wake up!”

He opened his eyes and sat up quickly. It was the sandy-haired little manager still in his soiled grey-linen suit.

“It is the young lady who travels with Mr. Blute,” he declared. “She rang the bell. She declares that two men have been in her room. She declares that they were tampering with your luggage, sir.”

Charles, followed by Blute, crossed the lawn swiftly and mounted the now deserted stairs. The door of number seven stood ajar. Patricia was standing upon the threshold clad in a dark green dressing-gown, with slippers upon her bare feet. She was breathing rapidly and there was fear in her eyes.

“I awoke suddenly,” she called out to Charles. “I felt there was someone in the room. There were two men. They were trying to open your tin case.”

“What’s become of them?” Charles asked quickly.

“I turned on the light and screamed,” Patricia told him. “I rang the bell and screamed—”

The little proprietor nodded.

“ Mademoiselle did indeed make herself heard,” he chimed in. “I am sitting up all night myself to collect money from these people before they leave. I ran upstairs. I passed one man on the landing. He was running with his head down.”

Charles handled the despatch box.

“Well,” he remarked, “he was a very poor sort of burglar.”

“Nothing has been stolen?” Patricia gasped.

“Not a thing,” Charles assured her. “A key to the door I dare say the man might find easily, but the key to open this despatch box is a different matter.”

“No papers gone—nothing?” Herr Hauser asked.

“Nothing.”

The proprietor expressed his satisfaction.

“It is useless to give an alarm,” he said. “The police are all called up.”

“How did the fellow open the door?” Blute asked.

“Alas,” the manager confessed, “the keys are all the same. Still, nothing has been stolen,” he continued, looking round. “That is good. I am sorry that Mademoiselle was frightened. It is a difficult time.”

Patricia sat down. She was still trembling.

“You can have your room, please, Mr. Mildenhall,” she said. “The keys are useless. How could I sleep dreading every minute that that man would come back again? Perhaps both of them.”

The manager expressed his sympathy once more.

“The gentlemen have only a seat in the garden,” he told her. “If Mademoiselle does not object, they should lie down here. There is the couch for one gentleman, a rug and a cushion for the other. Remember, gentlemen, if you please, that this is only one night in a lifetime. I do my best, Herr Blute.”

“Quite right, Hauser,” Blute agreed. “If you do not object, Miss Grey,” he added, “we will be your protectors.”

She smiled on them both.

“I think it is a very good arrangement. Now I shall sleep in peace. As the manager has just told us, it is but one night in a lifetime.”

Charles threw himself down on the hearth-rug with a pillow under his head. Blute leaned a little anxiously over him and whispered in his ear.

“Sure they didn’t get at your papers?”

“There are no papers,” Charles whispered back. “The box is full of my soiled linen!”

Blute retired to his couch smiling. This was his own way of doing things. Charles was more than ever a young man after his own heart.

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For some reason or other there was an air of greater calm about the place the next morning when Charles, after his morning coffee with Patricia in the garden, strolled down the road in front of the hotel smoking a cigarette. Some people were already taking their places in the train which, however, was not to start for another half-hour. Blute was engaged in conversation with the four guardians of his treasure who, having had their morning coffee and rolls brought to them, were sitting about on the steps of the van smoking. Herr Hauser, who seemed for some reason or other, Charles thought, to be avoiding him, was back in his place in his bureau collecting money from every one of the hotel visitors of the night before. Blute stepped over the paling which led on to the railway line and joined Charles.

“Get any sleep?” he asked.

“Not much,” Charles answered truthfully. “Cut myself shaving, too. I love cold water for everything in the world except to shave with.”

“You should have waited till we arrived in Zürich,” Blute told him. “All the luxuries in the world there, including a wonderful hairdressing establishment.”

Charles glanced around and dropped his voice a little.

“I have decided not to go on to Zürich,” he confided. “Once across the Swiss frontier you won’t need me any more. I have a small chateau, as you know, that I’ve used for a sort of headquarters when I’ve been doing my tramps round Europe. It’s a little place called Felsen, not many kilometres across the frontier. I have telephoned this morning for my plane to be put in order and got ready for me and I shall fly direct to England. That way I shall avoid all risk of getting into trouble.”

“What does Miss Grey say to that?”

“I haven’t told her yet. I think she’ll be glad. I shall ask her to come with me but I think she’ll decide that she must stay with you.”

“Well, that’s her affair,” Blute observed. “I can’t trust these country telephones. I shan’t attempt to speak to Paris until we get to Zürich, then I know I can find out Mr. Benjamin’s whereabouts. There is to be a passport examination here in the train before we start. They’ve just stuck up a notice.”