Part 21

The next morning, instead of phoning, Williams dropped around to the Vanderbilt and had a short session with the house detective, who had already been notified that the Countess Stefani was being watched by Secret Service operatives. The house man, however, verified the report of the operative who had picked up the countess at the station--she had received no callers and had seen no one save the maid.

"Any phone messages?"

"Not one."

"Any mail?"

"Just a newspaper, evidently one that a friend had mailed from Washington. The address was in a feminine hand and--"

"Tell the maid that I want the wrapper of that paper if it's in the countess's room," interrupted Williams. "I don't want the place searched for it, but if it happens to be in the wastebasket be sure I get it."

A moment later he was calling the Countess Stefani, presumably from the office of a friend of his in Wall Street.

"I'm afraid I can't see you to-day," and Sylvia's voice appeared to register infinite regret. "I wasn't able to complete a little business deal I had on last night--succumbed to temptation and went to the theater, so I'll have to pay for it to-day." (Here Williams suppressed a chuckle, both at the manner in which the lady handled the truth and at the fact that she was palpably ignorant that she had been shadowed.) "I'm returning to Washington on the Congressional, but I'll be sure to see you at the de Maurys', won't I? Please come down--for my sake!"

"I'll do it," was Owen's reply, "and I can assure you that my return to Washington will be entirely because I feel that I must see you again. Au revoir, until Thursday night."

"On the Congressional Limited, eh?" he muttered as he stepped out of the booth. "Maybe it's a stall, but I'll make the train just the same. Evidently one of the lady's plans has gone amiss."

"Here's the wrapper you wanted," said the house detective, producing a large torn envelope, slit lengthwise and still showing by its rounded contour that it had been used to inclose a rolled newspaper.

"Thanks," replied Williams, as he glanced at the address. "I thought so."

"Thought what?"

"Come over here a minute," and he steered the detective to the desk, where he asked to be shown the register for the preceding day. Then, pointing to the name "Countess Sylvia Stefani" on the hotel sheet and to the same name on the wrapper, he asked, "Note everything?"

"The handwriting is the same!"

"Precisely. The countess mailed this paper herself at this hotel before she left Washington. And, if I'm not very much mistaken, she'll mail another one to herself in Washington, before she leaves New York."

"You want it intercepted?"

"I do not! If Sylvia is willing to trust the Post-office Department with her secret, I certainly am. But I intend to be on hand when that paper arrives."

Sure enough, just before leaving for the station that afternoon, Williams found out from his ally at the Vanderbilt that the countess had slipped a folded and addressed newspaper into the mail box in the lobby. She had then paid her bill and entered a taxi, giving the chauffeur instructions to drive slowly through Central Park. Sibert, the operative who was trailing her, reported that several times she appeared to be on the point of stopping, but had ordered the taxi driver to go on--evidently being suspicious that she was followed and not wishing to take any chances.

Of this, though, Williams knew nothing--for a glance into one of the cars on the Congressional Limited had been sufficient to assure him that his prey was aboard. He spent the rest of the trip in the smoker, so that he might not run into her.

In Washington, however, a surprise awaited him.

Instead of returning at once to Brickley Court, the countess checked her bag at the station and hired a car by the hour, instructing the driver to take her to the Chevy Chase Club. Williams, of course, followed in another car, but had the ill fortune to lose the first taxi in the crush of machines which is always to be noted on dance nights at the club, and it was well on toward morning before he could locate the chauffeur he wanted to reach.

According to that individual, the lady had not gone into the club, at all, but, changing her mind, had driven on out into the country, returning to Washington at midnight.

"Did she meet anyone?" demanded Williams.

"Not a soul, sir. Said she just wanted to drive through the country and that she had to be at the Senate Office Building at twelve o'clock."

"The Senate Office Building?" echoed the operative. "At midnight? Did you drop her there?"

"I did, sir. She told me to wait and she was out again in five minutes, using the little door in the basement--the one that's seldom locked. I thought she was the wife of one of the Senators. Then I drove her to Union Station to get her bag, and then to Brickley Court, where she paid me and got out."

The moment the chauffeur had mentioned the Senate Office Building a mental photograph of Senator Lattimer had sprung to Williams's mind, for the affair between the countess and the Iowa statesman was public property.

Telling the chauffeur to wait in the outer room, the operative called the Lattimer home and insisted on speaking to the Senator.

"Yes, it's a matter of vital importance!" he snapped. Then, a few moments later, when a gruff but sleepy voice inquired what he wanted:

"This is Williams of the Secret Service speaking, Senator. Have you any documents of importance--international importance--in your office at the present moment?"

"No, nothing of particular value. Wait a minute! A copy of a certain report to the Committee on Foreign Relations arrived late yesterday and I remember seeing it on my desk as I left. Why? What's the matter?"

"Nothing--except that I don't think that report is there now," replied Williams. "Can you get to your office in ten minutes?"

"I'll be there!"

But a thorough search by the two of them failed to reveal any trace of the document. It had gone--vanished--in spite of the fact that the door was locked as usual.

"Senator," announced the government agent, "a certain woman you know took that paper. She got in here with a false key, lifted the report and was out again in less than five minutes. The theft occurred shortly after midnight and--"

"If you know so much about it, why don't you arrest her?"

"I shall--before the hour is up. Only I thought you might like to know in advance how your friend the Countess Stefani worked. She was also responsible for the theft of the plans of the battleship _Pennsylvania_, you know."

And Williams was out of the room before the look of amazement had faded from the Senator's face.

Some thirty minutes later the Countess Sylvia was awakened by the sound of continued rapping on her door. In answer to her query, "Who's there?" a man's voice replied, "Open this door, or I'll break it in!"

Williams, however, knew that his threat was an idle one, for the doors at Brickley Court were built of solid oak that defied anything short of a battering ram. Which was the reason that he had to wait a full five minutes, during which time he distinctly heard the sound of paper rattling and then the rasp of a match as it was struck.

Finally the countess, attired in a bewitching negligée, threw open the door.

"Ah!" she exclaimed. "So it is you, Mr. Williams! What do you--"

"You know what I want," growled Owen. "That paper you stole from Lattimer's office to-night. Also the plans you lifted from the Navy Department. The ones you mailed in New York yesterday afternoon and which were waiting for you here!"

"Find them!" was the woman's mocking challenge as Williams's eyes roved over the room and finally rested on a pile of crumbled ashes beside an alcohol lamp on the table. A moment's examination told him that a blue print had been burned, but it was impossible to tell what it had been, and there was no trace of any other paper in the ashes.

"Search her!" he called to a woman in the corridor. "I'm going to rifle the mail-box downstairs. She can't get away with the same trick three times!"

And there, in an innocent-looking envelope addressed to a certain personage whose name stood high on the diplomatic list, Williams discovered the report for which a woman risked her liberty and gambled six months of her life!

* * * * *

"But the plans?" I asked as Quinn finished.

"Evidently that was what she had burned. She'd taken care to crumple the ashes so that it was an impossibility to get a shred of direct evidence, not that it would have made any difference if she hadn't. The government never prosecutes matters of this kind, except in time of war. They merely warn the culprit to leave the country and never return--which is the reason that, while you'll find a number of very interesting foreigners in Washington at the present moment, the Countess Sylvia Stefani is not among them. Neither is the personage to whom her letter was addressed. He was 'recalled' a few weeks later."

XXI

A MILLION-DOLLAR QUARTER

"What's in the phial?" I inquired one evening, as Bill Quinn, formerly of the United States Secret Service, picked up a small brown bottle from the table in his den and slipped it into his pocket.

"Saccharine," retorted Quinn, laconically. "Had to come to it in order to offset the sugar shortage. No telling how long it will continue, and, meanwhile, we're conserving what we have on hand. So I carry my 'lump sugar' in my vest pocket, and I'll keep on doing it until conditions improve. They say the trouble lies at the importing end. Can't secure enough sugar at the place where the ships are or enough ships at the place where the sugar is.

"This isn't the first time that sugar has caused trouble, either. See that twenty-five-cent piece up there on the wall? Apparently it's an ordinary everyday quarter. But it cost the government well over a million dollars, money which should have been paid in as import duty on tons upon tons of sugar.

"Yes, back of that quarter lies a case which is absolutely unique in the annals of governmental detective work--the biggest and most far-reaching smuggling plot ever discovered and the one which took the longest time to solve.

"Nine years seems like a mighty long time to work on a single assignment, but when you consider that the Treasury collected more than two million dollars as a direct result of one man's labor during that time, you'll see that it was worth while."

* * * * *

The whole thing really started when Dick Carr went to work as a sugar sampler [continued Quinn, his eyes fixed meditatively upon the quarter on the wall].

Some one had tipped the department off to the fact that phony sampling of some sort was being indulged in and Dick managed to get a place as assistant on one of the docks where the big sugar ships unloaded. As you probably know, there's a big difference in the duty on the different grades of raw sugar; a difference based upon the tests made by expert chemists as soon as the cargo is landed. Sugar which is only ninety-two per cent pure, for example, comes in half-a-cent a pound cheaper than that which is ninety-six per cent pure, and the sampling is accomplished by inserting a thin glass tube through the wide meshes of the bag or basket which contains the sugar.

It didn't take Carr very long to find out that the majority of the samplers were slipping their tubes into the bags at an angle, instead of shoving them straight in, and that a number of them made a practice of moistening the outside of the container before they made their tests. The idea, of course, was that the sugar which had absorbed moisture, either during the voyage or after reaching the dock--would not "assay" as pure as would the dry material in the center of the package. A few experiments, conducted under the cover of night, showed a difference of four to six per cent in the grade of the samples taken from the inside of the bag and that taken from a point close to the surface, particularly if even a small amount of water had been judiciously applied.

The difference, when translated into terms of a half-a-cent a pound import duty, didn't take long to run up into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Carr's report, made after several months' investigating, cost a number of sugar samplers their jobs and brought the wrath of the government down upon the companies which had been responsible for the practice.

After such an exposure as this, you might think that the sugar people would have been content to take their legitimate profit and to pay the duty levied by law. But Carr had the idea that they would try to put into operation some other scheme for defrauding the Treasury and during years that followed he kept in close touch with the importing situation and the personnel of the men employed on the docks.

The active part he had played in the sugar-sampling exposure naturally prevented his active participation in any attempt to uncover the fraud from the inside, but it was the direct cause of his being summoned to Washington when a discharged official of one of the sugar companies filed a charge that the government was losing five hundred thousand dollars a year by the illicit operations at a single plant.

"Frankly, I haven't the slightest idea of how it's being done," confessed the official in question. "But I am certain that some kind of a swindle is being perpetrated on a large scale. Here's the proof!"

With that he produced two documents--one the bill of lading of the steamer _Murbar_, showing the amount of sugar on board when she cleared Java, and the other the official receipt, signed by a representative of the sugar company, for her cargo when she reached New York.

"As you will note," continued the informant, "the bill of lading clearly shows that the _Murbar_ carried eleven million seven hundred thirty-four thousand six hundred eighty-seven pounds of raw sugar. Yet, when weighed under the supervision of the customhouse officials a few weeks later, the cargo consisted of only eleven million thirty-two thousand and sixteen pounds--a 'shrinkage' of seven hundred two thousand six hundred seventy-one pounds, about six per cent of the material shipment."

"And at the present import duty that would amount to about--"

"In the neighborhood of twelve thousand dollars loss on this ship alone," stated the former sugar official. "Allowing for the arrival of anywhere from fifty to a hundred ships a year, you can figure the annual deficit for yourself."

Carr whistled. He had rather prided himself upon uncovering the sampling frauds a few years previously, but this bade fair to be a far bigger case--one which would tax every atom of his ingenuity to uncover.

"How long has this been going on?" inquired the acting Secretary of the Treasury.

"I can't say," admitted the informant. "Neither do I care to state how I came into possession of these documents. But, as you will find when you look into the matter, they are entirely authoritative and do not refer to an isolated case. The _Murbar_ is the rule, not the exception. It's now up to you people to find out how the fraud was worked."

"He's right, at that," was the comment from the acting Secretary, when the former sugar official had departed. "The information is undoubtedly the result of a personal desire to 'get even'--for our friend recently lost his place with the company in question. However, that hasn't the slightest bearing upon the truth of his charges. Carr, it's up to you to find out what there is in 'em!"

"That's a man-sized order, Mr. Secretary," smiled Dick, "especially as the work I did some time ago on the sampling frauds made me about as popular as the plague with the sugar people. If I ever poked my nose on the docks at night you'd be out the price of a big bunch of white roses the next day!"

"Which means that you don't care to handle the case?"

"Not so that you could notice it!" snapped Carr. "I merely wanted you to realize the handicaps under which I'll be working, so that there won't be any demand for instant developments. This case is worth a million dollars if it's worth a cent. And, because it is so big, it will take a whole lot longer to round up the details than if we were working on a matter that concerned only a single individual. If you remember, it took Joe Gregory nearly six months to land Phyllis Dodge, and therefore--"

"Therefore it ought to take about sixty years to get to the bottom of this case, eh?"

"Hardly that long. But I would like an assurance that I can dig into this in my own way and that there won't be any 'Hurry up!' message sent from this end every week or two."

"That's fair enough," agreed the Assistant Secretary. "You know the ins and outs of the sugar game better than any man in the service. So hop to it and take your time. We'll content ourselves with sitting back and awaiting developments."

Armed with this assurance, Carr went back to New York and began carefully and methodically to lay his plans for the biggest game ever hunted by a government detective--a ring protected by millions of dollars in capital and haunted by the fear that its operations might some day be discovered.

In spite of the fact that it was necessary to work entirely in the dark, Dick succeeded in securing the manifests and bills of lading of three other sugar ships which had recently been unloaded, together with copies of the receipts of their cargoes. Every one of these indicated the same mysterious shrinkage en route, amounting to about six per cent of the entire shipment, and, as Carr figured it, there were but two explanations which could cover the matter.

Either a certain percentage of the sugar had been removed from the hold and smuggled into the country before the ship reached New York, or there was a conspiracy of some kind which involved a number of the weighers on the docks.

"The first supposition," argued Carr, "is feasible but hardly within the bounds of probability. If the shortage had occurred in a shipment of gold or something else which combines high value with small volume, that's where I'd look for the leak. But when it comes to hundreds of thousands of pounds of sugar--that's something else. You can't carry that around in your pockets or even unload it without causing comment and employing so many assistants that the risk would be extremely great.

"No, the answer must lie right here on the docks--just as it did in the sampling cases."

So it was on the docks that he concentrated his efforts, working through the medium of a girl named Louise Wood, whom he planted as a file clerk and general assistant in the offices of the company which owned the _Murbar_ and a number of other sugar ships.

This, of course, wasn't accomplished in a day, nor yet in a month. As a matter of fact, it was February when Carr was first assigned to the case and it was late in August when the Wood girl went to work. But, as Dick figured it, this single success was worth all the time and trouble spent in preparing for it.

It would be hard, therefore, to give any adequate measure of his disappointment when the girl informed him that everything in her office appeared to be straight and aboveboard.

"You know, Dick," reported Louise, after she had been at work for a couple of months, "I'm not the kind that can have the wool pulled over my eyes. If there was anything crooked going on, I'd spot it before they'd more than laid their first plans. But I've had the opportunity of going over the files and the records and it's all on the level."

"Then how are you to account for the discrepancies between the bills of lading and the final receipts?" queried Carr, almost stunned by the girl's assurance.

"That's what I don't know," she admitted. "It certainly looks queer, but of course it is possible that the men who ship the sugar deliberately falsify the records in order to get more money and that the company pays these statements as a sort of graft. That I can't say. It doesn't come under my department, as you know. Neither is it criminal. What I do know is that the people on the dock have nothing to do with faking the figures."

"Sure you haven't slipped up anywhere and given them a suspicion as to your real work?"

"Absolutely certain. I've done my work and done it well. That's what I was employed for and that's what's given me access to the files. But, as for suspicion--there hasn't been a trace of it!"

It was in vain that Carr questioned and cross-questioned the girl. She was sure of herself and sure of her information, positive that no crooked work was being handled by the men who received the sugar when it was unloaded from the incoming ships.

Puzzled by the girl's insistence and stunned by the failure of the plan upon which he had banked so much, Carr gave the matter up as a bad job--telling Louise that she could stop her work whenever she wished, but finally agreeing to her suggestion that she continue to hold her place on the bare chance of uncovering a lead.

"Of course," concluded the girl, "you may be right, after all. They may have covered their tracks so thoroughly that I haven't been able to pick up the scent. I really don't believe that they have--but it's worth the gamble to me if it is to you."

More than a month passed before the significance of this speech dawned upon Dick, and then only when he chanced to be walking along Fifth Avenue one Saturday afternoon and saw Louise coming out of Tiffany's with a small cubical package in her hand.

"Tiffany's--" he muttered. "I wonder--"

Then, entering the store, he sought out the manager and stated that he would like to find out what a lady, whom he described, had just purchased. The flash of his badge which accompanied this request turned the trick.

"Of course, it's entirely against our rules," explained the store official, "but we are always glad to do anything in our power to assist the government. Just a moment. I'll call the clerk who waited on her."

"The lady," he reported a few minutes later, "gave her name as Miss Louise Wood and her address as--"

"I know where she lives," snapped Carr. "What did she buy?"

"A diamond and platinum ring."

"The price?"

"Eight hundred and fifty dollars."

"Thanks," said the operative and was out of the office before the manager could frame any additional inquiries.

When the Wood girl answered a rather imperative ring at the door of her apartment she was distinctly surprised at the identity of her caller, for she and Carr had agreed that it would not be wise for them to meet except by appointment in some out-of-the-way place.

"Dick!" she exclaimed. "What brings you here? Do you think it's safe?"

"Safe or not," replied the operative, entering and closing the door behind him. "I'm here and here I'm going to stay until I find out something. Where did you get the money to pay for that ring you bought at Tiffany's to-day?"

"Money? Ring?" echoed the girl. "What are you talking about?"

"You know well enough! Now don't stall. Come through! Where'd you get it?"

"An--an aunt died and left it to me," but the girl's pale face and halting speech belied her words.

"Try another one," sneered Carr. "Where did you get that eight hundred and fifty dollars?"

"What business is it of yours? Can't I spend my own money in my own way without being trailed and hounded all over the city?"

"You can spend your own money--the money you earn by working and the money I pay you for keeping your eyes open on the dock as you please. But--" and here Carr reached forward and grasped the girl's wrist, drawing her slowly toward him, so that her eyes looked straight into his, "when it comes to spending other money--money that you got for keeping your mouth shut and putting it over on me--that's another story."

"I didn't, Dick; I didn't!"