CHAPTER X

IN WHICH DESMOND OKEWOOD FINDS CLUBFOOT IN STRANGE COMPANY

“You’ve got this spy, Okewood, under lock and key, Herr Doktor?”

The room was sparely lighted by a single reading-lamp with a green shade, and its sickly rays seemed to heighten the pallor of the speaker’s face. He was a round-shouldered man whose high cheek-bones and slanting eyes betrayed his Mongol blood even as his snuffling German jargon revealed his race. He had a rabbit mouth, the upper lip drawn up over long yellow teeth, and the weakness of his chin was in part hidden by a ragged fringe of reddish beard. He sat at the desk, his whole body atwitch with some nervous tic as he gnawed restlessly at his fingers. In the burly apelike figure that confronted him, with the relentless eyes beneath their tufted brows, the cruel, savage mouth and the heavy jowl, any one closely acquainted with the dark ways of international espionage would have recognized the redoubtable Dr. Grundt, better known as The Man with the Clubfoot.

Slowly Grundt opened and shut his great hairy hand.

“I’ve got him—_there_, Mandelstamm!” he said in a voice that purred with exultation. “We are old, we are exiled; but we are not a back number yet. In this last affair of Sir Alexander Bannington’s report in which, I confess, my customary good fortune failed me, this cursed Okewood had odds of three to one on his side. He thought he had me cornered; but now he, not old Clubfoot, sits in the trap.”

He chuckled savagely with a sound that was almost a snarl.

“I think,” he added, “that our young friend will not altogether relish his prospects when he awakes from his long sleep!”

“You drugged him, hein?” asked the Jew. There was something vulpine in the way he lifted his long aquiline nose.

Clubfoot guffawed. “The neatest trick! Max, whose performance as a Scotland Yard detective was erstklassig—kolossal!—gave him a whiff of chloroform just to keep him quiet! And this poor Okewood believed he was taking me off to Scotland Yard! Donnerwetter!”

He slapped his great thigh and laughed uproariously. His companion’s mouth twitched upwards at the corners displaying another inch or two of dripping, yellow fangs. It was like a fox’s grin if such a phenomenon of natural history can be imagined.

“The Soviets find that spies, like meat, don’t keep!” he softly lisped. “Why didn’t you kill him, Herr Doktor?”

“Perhaps,” Grundt answered slowly, “because I have other uses in view for our enterprising young friend!”

Mandelstamm leant forward swiftly. “Also doch!” he ejaculated.

“What Clubfoot promises he accomplishes,” said Grundt, raising his voice menacingly.

“Of course, of course,” hastily agreed _Tavarish_ Mandelstamm, and slyly added: “Only you didn’t secure the Bannington report, did you, Herr Doktor?”

The blood slowly mounted in the other’s swarthy face. “A mere miscalculation, my friend! It was a trifling matter, anyhow, and I have never been able to interest myself in bagatelles. But this commission of yours . . .” He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Do you realize the task you’ve set me? Nein, nicht wahr? Would it surprise you to learn that within the past week the Foreign Office has changed its codes? While the new ones are being revised they are employing, for Most Secret despatches, code 3A of the Secret Service. You didn’t know that, did you? Come closer! Hitherto, the working of code 3A has been known to three persons only—to the Chief of the British Secret Service, to his confidential ciphering clerk, and”—he dropped his voice to a whisper—“to Major Desmond Okewood! . . .”

“Ach nein!” exclaimed the Russian admiringly, cracking his knuckles. “With that draft treaty in our hands . . .”

“_P-sst!_” warned Grundt, pointing at the door.

A broad-shouldered man with a heavy dark moustache stood on the threshold of the room.

“What is it, Max?” asked Grundt.

“The Englishman is coming round, Herr Doktor!”

Clubfoot looked at his watch. “Midnight!” he said. “You did your work thoroughly, Max!”

“One does what one can, Herr Doktor!”

“You and Heinrich will take it in turns to guard the Englishman throughout the night. You can give him food. But watch him, he’s slippery. If he escapes . . .” He broke off and glared at the other. “Go now and remember what I say!”

Grundt turned to the Russian. “The Constantinople courier is expected to leave Calais for Dover by the afternoon boat. Everything is prepared. If all goes well he should be here soon after dark. Sleep well, Mandelstamm! The draft treaty will be in your hands by to-night!”

Limping heavily with his huge misshapen foot, he hobbled briskly from the room.

Desmond Okewood was emerging painfully from a long, incoherent dream. He found his eyes fixed on an electric bulb caged in steel bars, and set in the ceiling high above his head. As he gazed, the light seemed to come and go, to appear and vanish again . . .

And then, with a jerk, he was fully conscious. With a pang the memory of the night came rushing back. The shame of his position almost overwhelmed him. To think that he, Desmond Okewood, had been deceived by the common crooks’ trick of dressing up confederates as detectives!

He looked about him. He was lying on a couch in a bare and lofty room. Heavy oaken shutters, secured with bars of iron solidly padlocked, excluded every vestige of daylight. He had no idea where he was or what the time of day might be. When he looked for his watch, he found that his pockets had been emptied.

The house was wrapped in silence. Not a sound came to him from without. He tried to review the situation. His position was desperate. Clubfoot would not spare him. This time he was doomed beyond hope of escape. A train of odd incidents from his long battle of wits with the master spy came crowding into his aching head . . .

Still drowsy from the drug, he must have dropped off to sleep, for when next he opened his eyes it was to find some one shaking his arm. A fair-haired youth stood beside the couch, his rather crafty face barred by a long white scar. Desmond recognized Heinrich, Clubfoot’s acolyte in many an exploit.

On the table stood a tray decked for a meal.

“Anything you want you can have,” said Heinrich, “as long as it doesn’t require cutting with a knife. I’ve brought you some minced chicken and a whiskey-and-soda . . .”

“Where am I?” asked Desmond.

“My instructions,” retorted the youth with military precision, “are to feed you. Nothing more. I shall return in half an hour for the tray . . .”

“Can’t I have a wash?” demanded Desmond.

The youth pointed to an oaken cabinet in the corner. “You will find all you require there!” he said. Then he left the room.

Hot water stood ready in a brass jug. After he had washed and eaten, Desmond felt his strength returning. When Heinrich came to fetch the tray, he brought a cup of coffee and a box of cigarettes.

“Quite a prison de luxe!” remarked Desmond brightly.

“My orders are to make you comfortable!” was the non-committal reply.

Each time the door opened, Desmond noticed that a light burnt in the corridor. He assumed, therefore, that it must be evening. Consequently he must have slept almost the round of the clock. The hours dragged interminably on. He paced up and down the room, smoking cigarettes, busy with his thoughts. What had become of Clubfoot? What was he waiting for? Why didn’t he come in and finish it?

Slowly the numbing silence of the house, the absence of any indication of time, the artificial light, began to get on Desmond Okewood’s nerves. This restriction on his liberty was intolerable. He looked about for a bell. There was none. He went to the door—it was solid oak with no lock apparent on the inside—and began to hammer it with his fists and feet. He pounded until he was tired. No one came.

He had fallen to striding up and down the room again when suddenly the door opened. Heinrich came in.

“Dr. Grundt is asking for you. Will you come with me?” he said.

“Gladly,” retorted Desmond. “I’m particularly anxious to have a word with the Herr Doktor!”

“Don’t trouble to try to escape,” observed the young man blandly as he held the door for his prisoner. “Doors and windows are barred and the house is closely guarded. You’d only get hurt!”

The warning was spoken sincerely and carried conviction. Desmond felt his heart sink.

It could not yet be morning, Desmond decided, as he followed his escort down a broad corridor with windows shuttered and barred like that of his room. They descended a flight of steps to a small tiled hall, lighted, like corridor and staircase, by artificial light. From a door that stood ajar came the murmur of voices. Heinrich ushered his prisoner into a long low-ceilinged room.

Four men were seated at the end of an oval table, their faces indistinctly seen through a thin haze of blue tobacco smoke that drifted in the close air.

Grundt presided at the head of the board, a round-shouldered, red-bearded Jew on his right, a grossly plebeian-looking man with a face the colour of suet, thin greyish hair plastered across a shining bald pate, and a great paunch, sprawling in the chair on his left. Next to him was a middle-aged man with a stiff grey beard and a stiff face who sat bolt upright, his hands folded in his lap.

“Be seated, Major,” said Clubfoot cordially, and pointed to a chair next to the Jew. “Mr. Blund, the cigars are with you!”

The full, deep voice was courteous, even genial, and a jovial smile played about the full lips. Desmond took the proffered chair, but waved aside the box of Partagas which the fat man pushed in his direction. He felt his hands growing cold. By bitter experience he knew that Clubfoot was never so dangerous as in these moments of expansion.

“The fortune of war!” Grundt resumed. “You played your cards admirably . . . up to a point, lieber Okewood! I have always said you were an opponent worthy of my steel. Perhaps, in this instance, you were just a trifle . . . shall we say over-confident? . . .”

Desmond, who had been taking stock of his surroundings, pulled himself resolutely together. The bland self-assurance of Grundt, he noticed, was far from being shared by his companions. The Jew was a mass of nerves, rapaciously tearing at his yellow, deeply bitten finger-nails, the little pig eyes of the fat man were restless with apprehension, and there was an air of tension about the very rigidity of the enigmatical greybeard across the table.

“You and your rather unsavoury accomplices are playing a dangerous game, Herr Doktor,” he said as bravely as he might. “The riff-raff of international espionage”—he paused and gazed with cool deliberation first at the Jew at his side and then at Greybeard—“live from hand to mouth, as we all know, and cannot be over-scrupulous. But I must say I wonder what an Englishman”—he stared pointedly at the fat man as he spoke—“is doing in your ill-favoured company!”

The fat man struggled up in his chair with malice depicted in every feature of his leaden-hued face.

“You keep a civil tongue in your ’ead, d’jeer?” he spluttered.

But Clubfoot laid a hairy paw on his sleeve. “Let us make allowances for Major Okewood’s natural chagrin,” he counselled. “Believe me, he is full of common sense. He will presently recognize the value of being polite and . . . and obliging with us . . . otherwise”—he paused and looked amiably round the board—“otherwise we shall have to teach him manners, eh, Tarock?”

“A gord round the head, with some hardt knots, tvisted vith a baionette vould be a good lesson to him,” muttered the grey-bearded man.

“Don’t be hasty, Tarock,” said Grundt gently.

“_Not_ Tarock, of Cracow?” exclaimed Desmond. “Why, now, isn’t that interesting? I’ve heard of you so often, and we’ve never met. Let’s see, you commanded a company once in the Deutschmeister Regiment in Vienna, didn’t you? And were cashiered for stealing the company money . . .?”

Greybeard moved uneasily in his seat.

“What a pity that the white-slave traffic laws interfered with your new career at Cracow!” Desmond resumed impassively. “So many of your colleagues regard them as the most unfair restriction of trade! Dear, dear! Was it five or seven years Zuchthaus they gave you?”

“Herr!” thundered Tarock, springing to his feet.

The fox-grin had again appeared about the thin lips of Mr. Mandelstamm. Clubfoot, too, appeared to be enjoying the scene.

“Personally, I always admired your versatility as a spy,” Desmond went on, leaning back out of reach of Tarock’s threatening fist, “though the Austrians didn’t. They sacked you for double-crossing, didn’t they, Tarock? And the Russians followed suit a year later. You were too dirty even for the Okhrana to touch . . .”

“Kreuzsakrament!” roared Greybeard, “I’ll have your life for that!”

His chair overturned with a crash. Everybody had sprung to his feet, talking at the same time. Suddenly the door of the room burst open and three men came tumbling in. Two of them were grappling with a third, who, though gagged and bound and bleeding, was plunging wildly and uttering stifled shouts of rage.