Book: The False Faces

V >> Vance, Louis Joseph >> The False Faces




Karl grunted disdainfully. "I told you this would be a waste of time...."

"And I agreed with you entirely. But you would come."

"Lanyard's no such fool as to stick round a place he knows I know about."
Karl's hands twitched and his features worked nervously. "He knows me too
well, knows that if ever I lay hands on him again--"

His voice was rising to an hysterical pitch when the other checked him with
a sibilant hiss. At the same time his hand darted out and switched off the
light. Karl uttered a startled ejaculation.

"_Sssh_!" his companion repeated.

In the street a motor-car was rumbling, stationary before the door. Then
the remote grinding of the house door-bell was heard.

"Let's get out of this," suggested the Irishman. "It's no good waiting,
anyway."

"Hold hard! We won't go till we have a clear field."

The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the
door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air.

"Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper.

"Shut up! Listen...."

Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The
clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a
negro.

"No'm, he ain't in."

The next enquiry was intelligible: the speaker had entered the hallway.

"Are you sure?"

"Yas'm. Sumbody done call him up 'bout ten min'tes ago, an' I rung an' rung
an' he don' answer. He ain't in or he don' mean to answer nobody, tha's
all."

"I am very anxious about him. Have you a key to his rooms?"

"Yas'm, I got a pass-key, but--"

"Please use it. Take this. Go in and make sure he is out, or if at home
that he is all right."

"Yas'm, thanky ma'am, but--"

"Do as I tell you. I will see that you don't get into trouble."

"All right, ma'am." The negro chuckled, probably over his tip. "Yo' sho'
has got the p'suadin'est way...."

The Irishman caught the German's arm. "Come out of this," he pleaded.

"No fear. I'll see it through. That's the Brooke girl the fool got in with
on the boat. She may know something...."

"But--"

"Leave this to me. You look out for the negro. I'll take care of Miss
Cecelia Brooke."

Swearing unhappily, the Irishman flattened against the wall to one side of
the door. Karl waited behind it as it admitted the hall attendant, who made
directly toward the central chandelier.

"Yo' jes' wait, ma'am, an' I'll mek a light an'--"

But the girl had impetuously followed him in.

The light went up, and Karl put a heavy shoulder against the door, closing
it with a slam. The negro turned and stood with gaping mouth and staring
eyes, dumb with terror. The girl recognised Karl with a little cry, and
darted back toward the door. Immediately he caught her in his arms. Her
lips opened, but their utterance was stifled by a handkerchief thrust
between them with the dexterity of a practised hand.

Without one word of warning the Irishman stepped forward and struck the
negro brutally in the face. The boy reeled, whimpering. Two more blows
delivered with murderous ferocity silenced him altogether. He collapsed
like a broken puppet, insensible on the floor, his face a curious ashen
colour beneath its glossy skin of brown.




XX

RIPOSTE


The drizzle had grown thicker, the night blacker, the early morning air
still more chill. But Lanyard was moving too swiftly to be affected by
this last circumstance; the first he anathematised with the perfunctory
bitterness of a skilled artisan who sees his work in a fair way to be
obstructed by elemental depravity. Another of his trade would have termed
such weather conditions ideal, and so might the Lone Wolf on an everyday
job; but the prospect of a footing rendered insecure by rain trebled the
hazards attending a plan of campaign that would brook neither revision nor
delay.

There was only one way to break into the house on Seventy-ninth Street;
this Lanyard had appreciated upon his first reconnaissance of the previous
afternoon. He could have wished for more time in which to prepare and
assemble tested equipment instead of relying upon chance to supply
the requisite gear; but with all time at his disposal the mechanical
difficulties of the problem would remain. Far from indifferent to these,
Lanyard addressed himself to their conquest doggedly and with businesslike
economy of motion.

Shunning the public paths he went over the park wall like a cat, sped
across town through Eightieth Street, and so came to that plot of land upon
which an apartment building was in process of erection, immediately to the
north of the American headquarters of the Prussian spy system.

Walled in with stone two storeys deep, its gaunt skeleton of steel had
been joined together as far as the seventh level. How much higher it was
destined to rise was immaterial; for Lanyard's purpose it was enough that
the frame had already outgrown its neighbour on the south.

A litter of lumber, huge steel girders, and other material narrowed the
side street to half its normal width. The sidewalk space was trampled earth
roofed with heavy planks for the protection of pedestrian heads, a passage
lighted by electric bulbs widely spaced; midway in this an entrance to
the structure was flanked by a wooden shanty, by day a tool house, after
working hours a shelter for the night watchman. This boasted one glazed
window dull with orange light.

Approaching with due precaution, Lanyard peered in. The light came from a
single electric bulb and a potbellied sheet-iron stove, glowing red. Near
by, in a chair tipped against the wall, sat the watchman, corncob pipe
in hand, head drooping, eyes closed, mouth ajar. A snore of the first
magnitude seemed to vibrate the very walls. On the floor beside the chair
stood a two-quart tin pail full of arid emptiness.

Dismissing further consideration of the watchman as a factor, satisfied
that the entire neighbourhood as well was sound asleep, Lanyard darted up
the plank walk that led into the building, then paused to get his bearings.

Effluvia of mortar and damp lumber saluted him in an uncanny place whose
darkness was slightly qualified by a faint refracted glow from the low
canopy of cloud and by equally dim shafts of diffused street light. There
was more or less flooring of a temporary character over a sable gulf of
cellars, and overhead a sullen, weeping sky cross-hatched with stark black
ironwork.

With infinite patience Lanyard groped his way through that dark labyrinth
to the foot of a ladder ascending an open shaft wherein a hoisting tackle
dangled.

Here he stumbled over what he had been seeking, a great coil of one-inch
hempen cable, from which he measured off roughly what he would require, if
his calculations were correct, and something over. This length he re-coiled
and slung over his shoulder: an awkward, weighty handicap. Nevertheless he
began to climb.

Above the third level there was merely steel framework; he had somewhat
more light to guide him, with a view of the north wall of the Seventy-ninth
Street house, bright in the glare of avenue lamps.

The wall was absolutely blank.

At the seventh level the ladders ended. He stepped off upon a foot-wide
beam, paused to make sure of his poise, and began to walk the girders with
a sureness of foot any aviator might have envied.

At regular intervals he encountered uprights: between these he had to
depend upon his sense of direction and equilibrium to guide him safely
across those narrow walks of steel made slippery by rain.

But, thanks to forethought, his footwork was faultless: he wore shoes old,
well-broken, very soft, flexible, and silent.

The building was in the shape of a squat E, with two courts facing south.
On this seventh level the first court was bridged by a single girder, the
middle of which was Lanyard's immediate objective. Since it lacked uprights
he took it cautiously on hands and knees until approximately equidistant
from both ends, when he straddled it, took the cable from his shoulders,
uncoiled a length and made it fast round the girder with a clove hitch:
giddy work, in that darkness, on that greasy span, fashioning by simple
sense of touch the knot upon which his life was to depend, half of the time
prone upon the girder and fishing blindly beneath it for the rope's end,
with nothing but a seventy--foot drop between him and eternity, not even
another girder to break a fall....

He was now immediately opposite the minaret, at an elevation of about
twenty feet above the roof he wished to reach, and as far away, or perhaps
a trifle farther.

Still he detected no signs of life about that nest of spies: if the
wireless were in operation its apparatus was well-housed; there was no
sound of the spark, never a glimmer of its violet flash.

Laboriously--the knot completed to his satisfaction--Lanyard returned via
the eastern arm of the E, paying out the coiled cable as he progressed,
working round to the north side of the court.

Once again pausing opposite the minaret, he knotted the end of the cable
loosely round an upright connecting with the sixth level, let it slide
down, followed it, repeated the process, and rested finally on the fifth.

Now his ordeal approached a climax which he contemplated with what calmness
he could while securing the rope beneath the arms.

In another sixty seconds or less it must be demonstrated whether his dead
reckoning would set him down safe and sound on the roof or dash him against
the walls of the Seventy-ninth Street house, to swing back and dangle
impotently in mid-air till daylight and police discovered him--unless,
escaping injury, he were able to pull himself up hand over hand to the
girder.

With one arm round the upright to prevent the sag of rope from dragging him
over prematurely, he essayed a final survey.

Either the murk deceived or Lanyard had judged shrewdly. His feet were on
an approximate level with the coping round the roof, and he stood about as
far from the upper girder to which the rope was hitched as that was distant
from the coping.

One look up and round at those louring skies, duskily flushed by subdued
city lights: with no more ceremony Lanyard released the upright and
committed his body to space.

If the downward sweep was breathless, what followed was breath-taking:
once past the nadir of that giant swing, he was borne upward by an impetus
steadily and sensibly slackening.

Instant followed leaden-winged instant while the wall, looming like
a mountainside, seemed to be toppling, insensately bent upon his
annihilation; even so his momentum, decreasing with frightful swiftness,
seemed possessed of demoniac desire to frustrate him.

After an age-long agony of doubt it became evident he was not destined
to crash into the wall, but not that he was to gain the coping: through
fractions of a second hideously protracted this last drew near, nearer,
slowly, ever more slowly.

And he was twisting dizzily....

With frantic effort he crooked an arm over the coping at a juncture when,
had he not acted instantly, he must have swung back. There was a racking
wrench, as though his arm were being torn from its socket.

At the end of a struggle even more wearing he flung his other arm across
the ledge, and for some time hung there, at the end of an almost taut rope,
unable to overcome its resistance and pull himself in over the coping,
stubbornly refusing to loose his grasp.

Presently, grown desperate, he let go with his right hand, holding fast
only with the left, fumbled in a pocket, found his knife, opened it with
his teeth, and began, to saw at the rope round his chest.

Strand after strand parted grudgingly till it fell away altogether and
reaction from its tension threw him against the coping with such violence
that he all but lost his hold. Dropping the knife, he swept his right arm
up and once more hooked his fingers over the inside of the ledge.

Far down the knife clinked suggestively upon stone.

Breathing deep, Lanyard braced knees and feet against the wall, worried,
heaved, hauled, squirmed like a mad thing, in the end rolled over the top
and fell at length upon the roof, panting, trembling, bathed in sweat,
temporarily tormented by impulses to retch.

By degrees regaining physical control, he sat up, took his bearings, and
crept toward the foot of the minaret.

A small, narrow doorway in its base was on the latch. He passed through to
the landing of a dark winding stairway with a dim light at the bottom of
its circular well.

While he stood attentive, intermittent stridor troubled the stillness,
originating at some point on the floors below: the proscribed wireless was
at work.

Hearing no other sounds, Lanyard went on down the steps, at their foot
pausing to spy out through a half-open doorway to the topmost storey.

Nobody moved in the corridor. He saw nothing but a line of closed doors,
presumably to servants' quarters. Now, however, the vibrant rasp of the
radio spark was perceptibly stronger and had a background of subdued noise,
echoes of distant voices, deadened sounds of hasty footfalls, now and again
a heavy thump or the bang of a door.

Moving out, he commanded the length of the corridor. Toward one end a door
stood open. He could see no more of the room beyond than a narrow patch of
wall fitfully illuminated by a play of violet light.

Then a man stepped out of this operating room, turning on the threshold to
utter some parting observation; and Lanyard retired hastily to the shaft of
the minaret stairway, but not before recognising Velasco.

A moment later the Brazilian passed his lurking-place, walking with bended
head, a worried frown darkening his swarthy countenance; and Lanyard
emerged in time to see his head and shoulders vanish down a stairway at the
far end of the corridor.

Following with discretion, Lanyard leaned over the head of the main
staircase well, looking down three flights to the ground floor, to which
Velasco was descending.

The house seemed veritably to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of
its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of
rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this
establishment into a state of excited confusion: their nature Lanyard could
not surmise, but their conjunction with his designs was exasperatingly
inopportune. To search this place and find his man--if he were there at
all--without being discovered, while its inmates buzzed about like so many
startled hornets, was a fair impossibility; to attempt it was to court
death.

None the less he was inflexible in determination to go on, to push his luck
to its extremity, by sheer force to bend fortuity to his service and suffer
without complaint whatever the consequences of its recoil.

Yet even as he advanced a foot to begin the descent, he withdrew it.

On the ground floor, a door closing with a resounding crash had proved the
signal for an outburst of expostulant, acrimonious voices: some half a
dozen men giving angry tongue at one and the same time, their roars of
polysyllabic gutturalisms fusing into utterly unintelligible clamour.

One thought of a mutiny in a German madhouse.

Moment after moment passed, the squall persisting with unmitigated
viciousness. If now and again it subsided momentarily, it was only into
uglier growls and swiftly to rise once more to high frenzy of incoherence.

Two of the disputants appeared in the square frame of the staircase well,
oddly foreshortened figures brandishing wild arms, one of them Velasco, the
other a man whom Lanyard failed to identify, seemingly united in common
anger directed at the head of some person invisible.

Abruptly, with a gesture of almost homicidal fury, the Brazilian darted out
of sight. The other followed.

Then the object of their wrath took to the stairs, stopping at the rail
of the first landing and gesticulating savagely over the heads of his
audience, Velasco and the others returning amid a knot of fellows to bay
round the newel post.

His voice, full-throated, cried them all down--Ekstrom's deep and resonant
voice, domineering over the uproar, hectoring one after another into sullen
silence.

In the beginning employing nothing but terms and phrases of insolence and
objurgation untranslatable, when he had secured a measure of attention he
delivered a short address in tones of unqualified contempt.

"I will have obedience!" he stormed. "Let no one misunderstand my status
here: I am come direct from His Majesty the Emperor with full power and
authority to command and direct affairs which you have, individually,
collectively, proved yourselves either unfit or unable to cope with. What I
do, I do in my absolute discretion, with the full sanction and confidence
of the Kaiser. He who questions my judgment or my actions, questions the
wisdom of the All-Highest. Let it be clearly understood I am answerable
to no one under God but myself and my Imperial master. Henceforth be good
enough to hold your tongues or take the consequences--and be damned to you
all!"

Briefly he stood glowering down at their upturned faces, then sneered, and
turned away.

"Come along, O'Reilly," he said. "Fetch the woman, and give no more heed to
swine-dogs!"

His hand slipped up the rail to the first floor, vanished.

If O'Reilly followed with the woman mentioned, both kept back from the rail
and so out of Lanyard's field of vision.

The group at the foot of the stairs moved away, grumbling profanely.

At once Lanyard began to descend, rapidly and without care to avoid
detection.

One flight down he met face to face a manservant, evidently a footman, with
an armful of clothing which he was conveying from one chamber to another.
The fellow stopped short, jaw dropping, eyes popping; whereupon Lanyard
paused and addressed him in German with a manner of overbearing contempt,
that is to say, in character.

"You're wanted upstairs in the radio room," he said--"at once!"

The servant bleated one word of protest: "But--!"

"Be silent. Do as I bid you. It is an emergency. Drop those things and go!
Do you hear, imbecile?"

Completely cowed and cheated, the man obeyed literally, letting his burden
of garments fall to the floor and bounding hurriedly up the stairs.

Another flight was negotiated without misadventure; on this floor as well
servants were flitting busily to and fro, but none favoured the adventurer
with the least attention.

Midway down the third flight he pulled up to one side of the landing, and
reconnoitred. It was on the next floor below, the first above the street,
that Ekstrom had stopped. But in what quarter thereof? The exigency forbade
the risk of one false turn. If Lanyard were to take Ekstrom unawares it
must be at the first cast.

From the ground floor came semi-coherent snatches of surly comment, like
growls of a thunderstorm passing off into the distance:

"_At a time such as this_...."

"... _Secret Service snapping at our heels_ ..."

"... _base on the Vineyard discovered_ ..."

"... _Au Printemps raided, Sophie Weringrode under arrest. God knows
whether she will hold her tongue_!"

"_Trust her! But this ass_ ..."

"_Bringing a woman here, putting all our necks into a halter_ ..."

Immediately opposite the foot of the stairway, on the first storey, a door
opened. O'Reilly came alertly forth, closed the door behind him, paused,
fished in his pocket for a cigarette case, lighted and inhaled with deep
appreciation, meantime eavesdropping on the utterances below with his head
cocked to one side and a malicious smile shadowing his handsome Irish face.

In his own good time he shrugged an indifferent shoulder, thrust his hands
into his pockets, and sauntered coolly on down the stairs.

The moment he disappeared, Lanyard went into action, in two bounds cleared
landing and stairs, in another threw himself upon the door. It opened
readily. Entering, he put his back to it, with his left hand groped for,
found and turned a key, his right holding ready the automatic pistol he had
taken from the lockers of the U-boat.

The room was a combination of administrative bureau and study, very
handsomely if somewhat over-decorated and furnished, with an atmosphere as
distinctively German as that of a Bierstube, the sombreness of its colour
scheme lending weight to its array of massive desks, tables, chairs,
bookcases, and lounges.

Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite,
beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged,
bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles
as well on the floor about her feet.

That woman was Cecelia Brooke.

Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the
gag secure.

For a space of thirty seconds, transfixed by the apparition of his enemy,
he did not stir other than to raise weaponless hands in deference to the
pistol trained upon his head. But the blood ebbed from his face, leaving
it a ghastly mask in which shone the eyes of a man who sees certain death
closing in upon him and is powerless to combat it, even to die fighting for
life. And his lips curled back in a snarl neither of contempt nor of hatred
but of terror.

And for as long Lanyard remained as motionless, rooted in a despondency
of thwarted hopes no less profound than the despair of the Prussian,
apprehending what that one could not yet guess, that once more, and now
certainly for the last time, vengeance was denied him, the fulfilment of
all his labours and their sole purpose snatched from his grasp.

The instincts of a killer were not his. Barring injudicious attempt to
summon aid or take the offensive, Ekstrom was safe from injury at the hands
of Michael Lanyard. His cunning, his favour in the countenance of fortune,
or whatever it was that had enabled him to make the girl his prisoner and
bring her here, bade fair to prove his salvation.

Deep in Lanyard's consciousness an echo stirred of half-forgotten words:
"_Vengeance is mine_...."

The sense of frustration brewed a hopelessness as stark as that of a
brow-beaten child. A blackness seemed to be settling down upon his
faculties. A mist wavered momentarily before his eyes. He gulped
convulsively, swallowing what had almost been a sob.

But he spoke in a voice positively dispassionate.

"Keep your hands up."

Lanyard removed and pocketed the key, crossed to the middle of the room
without once letting his gaze waver from the face of the Prussian,
passed behind him, planted the muzzle of the pistol beneath Ekstrom's
shoulder-blade, and methodically searched him, finding and putting aside on
the desk one automatic, nothing else.

"Stand aside!"

The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust
with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man
was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces.

"Don't move, assassin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard
muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.

He made slow work of that, fumbling while watching Ekstrom with unremitting
intentness, hoping against hope that his enemy might make one false move,
one only, by some infatuate endeavour to turn the tables excuse his
killing.

But Ekstrom would not. Recovery of his equilibrium had been coincident with
the shock administered to his hardihood and sense of security by Lanyard's
entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped
before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set
of his lips--an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of
perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot
him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to
injure him: compunctions unassembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore
when discovered in men of other races at once despicable and ridiculous....

The gag came away.

"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.

The girl coughed and gasped, shaking her head, enunciating with difficulty
in little better than a husky whisper: "... roughly handled, nothing
worse."

Lanyard's face burned as if his blood were molten mercury. "_Nothing
worse_!" Appreciation of what handling she must have suffered, if she had
resisted at all, before those beasts could have bound her, excited an
indignation from whose light, as it blazed in Lanyard's eyes, even Ekstrom
winced.

The hand was tremulous with which he sought to loose her wrists, so much so
that she could not but notice.

"Don't mind me--look to that man!" she begged. "Leave me to unfasten these
with my teeth. He can't be trusted for a single instant."

"Mademoiselle," Lanyard mumbled, instinctively employing the French
idiom--"you have reason."

For an instant only he hesitated, swayed this way and that by the maddest
of impulses, then resigned himself absolutely to their ascendancy.

"This goes beyond all bounds," he said in an undertone.

Deliberately leaving the Englishwoman to free herself according to her
suggestion--forgetful, indeed, for the moment, that she was not altogether
free--he moved to the desk and left his own automatic there beside
Ekstrom's.

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