Chapter 11

Lacking local references as to his character, Lanyard was obliged to pay three months' rent in advance in addition to making a substantial deposit to cover possible damage to the furnishings.

His name, a spur-of-the-moment selection, was recorded in the lease as Anthony Ember.

At noon he brought to his lodgings two trunks salvaged from a storage warehouse wherein they had been deposited more than three years since, on the eve of his flight with his family from America, an affair of haste and secrecy forbidding the handicap of heavy impedimenta.

Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive wardrobe.

But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked, memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.

For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking aimlessly at small broidered garments.

And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.

In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.

He found no more of interest in the newspaper than the information that the _Saratoga_ had been sighted off Fire Island and was expected to dock in New York not later than eight o'clock that night.

This, however, was acceptable reading. Lanyard had work to do which were better done before "Karl" and his crew found opportunity to communicate directly with their collaborators ashore, work which it were unwise to initiate before nightfall lent a cloak of shadows to hoodwink the ever-possible adventitious German spy.

Nor was he so fatuous as to fancy it would profit him to call before nine o'clock at the house on West End Avenue. No earlier might he hope to find Colonel the Honourable George Fleetwood-Stanistreet near the end of his dinner, and so in a mood approachable and receptive.

But there could be no harm in reconnaissance by daylight.

He whiled away the latter part of the afternoon in taxicabs, by dint of frequent changes contriving in the most casual fashion imaginable to pass the Seventy-ninth Street branch of the Wilhelmstrasse no less than four times.

Little rewarded these tactics other than a fairly accurate mental photograph of the building and its situation--and a growing suspicion that the United States Government had profited nothing by England's lessons of early war days in respect of the one way to cope with resident enemy aliens.

The house stood upon a corner, occupying half of an avenue block--the northern half of which was the site of a towering apartment house in course of construction--and loomed over its lesser neighbours a monumental monstrosity of architecture, as formidable as a fortress, its lower tiers of windows barred with iron, substantial iron grilles ready to bar its main entrance, even heavier gates guarding the carriage court in the side street. In all a stronghold not easy for the most accomplished house-breaker to force; yet the heart of it was Lanyard's goal; for there, he believed, Ekstrom (under whatever _nom de guerre_) lay hidden, or if not Ekstrom, at least a clear lead to his whereabouts.

Certainly that one could not be far from the powerful wireless station secretly maintained on the roof of this weird jumble of architectural periods, its aerials cunningly hidden in the crowning atrocity of its minaret: a station reputedly so powerful that it could receive Berlin's nightly outgivings of news and orders, and, in emergency, transmit them to other secret stations in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.

Yet the shrewdest scrutiny of eyes trained to detect police agents at sight, however well disguised, failed to espy one sign of any sort of espionage upon this nest of rattlesnakes.

Apparently its tenants came and went as they willed, untroubled by and contemptuous of governmental surveillance.

A handsome limousine car pulled up at its carriage block as Lanyard drove by, one time, and a pretty woman, exquisitely gowned, alighted and was welcomed by hospitable front doors that opened before she could ring: a woman Lanyard knew as one of the most daring, diabolically clever, and unscrupulous creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse, one whose life would not have been worth an hour's purchase had she ventured to show herself in Paris, London, or Petrograd at any time since the outbreak of the war.

He drove on, deep in amaze.

Indications were not wanting, on the other hand, that enemy spies maintained close watch upon the movements of those who frequented the house on West End Avenue. A German agent whom Lanyard knew by sight was strolling by as his taxi rounded its corner and swung on down toward Riverside Drive.

This more modest residence possessed a brick-walled garden at the back, on the Ninety-fifth Street side. And if the top of the wall was crusted with broken glass in a fashion truly British, it had a door, and the door a lock. And Lanyard made a note thereon.

And when he went home to dress for dinner, he opened up the false bottom of one of his trunks and selected from a store of cloth-wrapped bundles therein one which contained a small bunch of innocent-looking keys whose true _raison d'etre_ was anything in the world but guileless.

Later he did himself very well at Delmonico's, enjoying for the first time in many years a well-balanced dinner faultlessly cooked and served amid quiet surroundings that carried memory back half a decade to the Paris that was, the Paris that nevermore will be....

At nine precisely he paid off a taxicab at the corner of Ninety-fifth Street.

While waiting on the doorstep of the corner house, he raked the street right and left with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured. Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the old-fashioned brownstone houses across the way.

The neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet even for an upper West Side residential quarter. A block over to the east Broadway was strident in the flood of its nocturnal traffic; a like distance to the west Riverside Drive hummed with pleasure cars taking advantage of the first bland night of that belated spring. But here, now that the taxi had wheeled away, there was never a car in sight, nor even a strolling brace of sidewalk lovers.

The door opened, revealing the same footman.

"Colonel Stanistreet? I will see, sir."

Lanyard entered.

"If you will be kind enough to be seated," the footman suggested, indicating a small waiting room. "And what name shall I say?"

It had been Lanyard's intention to have himself announced simply as the author of that telegram from Edgartown. Obscure impulse made him change his mind, some premonition so tenuous as to defy analysis.

"Mr. Anthony Ember."

"Thank you, sir."

After a little the footman returned.

"If you will come this way, sir...."

He led toward the back of the house, introducing Lanyard to a spacious apartment, a library uncommonly well furnished, rather more than comfortably yet without a trace of ostentation in its complete luxury, a warm room, a room intimately lived in, a room, in short, characteristically British in atmosphere.

Waist-high bookcases lined the walls, broken on the right by a cheerful fireplace with a grate of glowing cannel coal, in front of it a great club lounge upholstered, like all the chairs, in well-used leather. Opposite the chimney-piece, a handsome thing in carved oak, a door was draped with a curtain that swung with it. In the back of the room two long and wide French windows stood open to the night, beyond them that garden whose wall had attracted Lanyard's attention. There were a number of paintings, portraits for the most part, heavily framed, with overhead picture-lights. In the middle of the room was a table-desk, broad and long, supporting a shaded reading lamp. On the far side of the table a young man sat writing, with several dockets of papers arranged before him.

As Lanyard entered, this one put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and came round the table: a tallish, well-made young man, dressed a shade too foppishly in spite of an unceremonious dinner coat, his manner assured, amiable, unconstrained, perhaps a little over-tolerant.

"Mr. Ember, I believe?" he said in a voice studiously musical.

"Yes," Lanyard replied, vaguely annoyed with himself because of an unreasoning resentment of this musical quality. "Mr. Blensop?"

"I am Mr. Blensop," that one admitted gracefully. "And how may I have the pleasure of being of service?"

He waved a hand toward an easy chair beside the table, and resumed his own. But Lanyard hesitated.

"I wished to see Colonel Stanistreet."

Mr. Blensop looked up with an indulgent smile. His face was round and smooth but for a perfectly docile little moustache, his lips full and red, his nose delicately chiselled; but his eyes, though large, were set cannily close together.

"Colonel Stanistreet is unfortunately not at home. I am his secretary."

"Yes," said Lanyard, still standing. "In that case I'd be glad if you would be good enough to make an appointment for me with Colonel Stanistreet."

"I am afraid he will not be home till very late to-night, but--"

"Then to-morrow?"

Mr. Blensop smiled patiently. "Colonel Stanistreet is a very busy man," he uttered melodiously. "If you could let me know something about the nature of your business...."

"It is the King's," said Lanyard bluntly.

The secretary went so far as to betray well-bred surprise. "You are an Englishman, Mr. Ember?"

"Yes."

And for all he knew to the contrary, so Lanyard was.

"I am Colonel Stanistreet's secretary," the young man again suggested hopefully.

"That is precisely why I ask you to make an appointment for me with your employer," Lanyard retorted politely.

"You won't say what you wish to see him about?"

A trace of asperity marred the music of those tones; Mr. Blensop further indicated distaste of the innuendo inherent in Lanyard's use of the word "employer" by delicately wrinkling his nose.

"I am sorry," Lanyard replied sufficiently.

The door behind him opened, and the footman intruded.

"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop...."

"Yes, Walker?"

The servant advanced to the table and proffered a visiting card on a tray. Mr. Blensop took it, arched pencilled brows over it.

"To see me, Walker?"

"The gentleman asked for Colonel Stanistreet, sir."

"H'm.... You may show him in when I ring."

The footman retired. Mr. Blensop looked up brightly, bending the card with nervous fingers.

"You were saying your business was...?"

"I was not," Lanyard replied with disarming good humour. "I'm afraid that is something much too important and confidential to reveal even to Colonel Stanistreet's secretary, if you don't mind my saying so."

Mr. Blensop did mind, and betrayed vexation with an impatient little gesture which caused the card to fly from his fingers and fall face uppermost on the table. Almost instantly he recovered it, but not before Lanyard had read the name it bore.

"Of course not," said the secretary pleasantly, rising. "But you understand my instructions are rigid ... I'm sorry."

"You refuse me the appointment?"

"Unless you can give me an inkling of your business--or perhaps bring a letter of introduction."

"I can do neither, Mr. Blensop," said Lanyard earnestly. "I have information of the gravest moment to communicate to the head of the British Secret Service in this country."

The secretary looked startled. "What makes you think Colonel Stanistreet is connected with the British Secret Service?"

"I don't think so; I know it."

After a moment of hesitation Mr. Blensop yielded graciously. "If you can come back at nine to-morrow morning, Mr. Ember, I'll do my best to persuade Colonel Stanistreet--"

"I repeat, my business is of the most pressing nature. Can't you arrange for me to see your employer to-night?"

"It is utterly impossible."

Lanyard accepted defeat with a bow.

"To-morrow at nine, then," he said, turning toward the door by which he had entered.

"At nine," said Mr. Blensop, generous in triumph. "But do you mind going out this way?"

He moved toward the curtained door opposite the chimney-piece. Lanyard paused, shrugged, and followed. Mr. Blensop opened the door, disclosing a vista of Ninety-fifth Street.

"Thank _you_, Mr. Ember. _Good_-night," he intoned.

The door closed with the click of a spring latch.

Lanyard stood alone in the street, looking swiftly this way and that, his hand closing upon that little bunch of keys in his pocket, his humour lawless.

For the name inscribed on that card which Mr. Blensop had so carelessly dropped was one to fill Lanyard with consuming anxiety for better acquaintance with its present wearer.

Written in pencil, with all the individual angularity of French chirography, the name was Andre Duchemin.

XIII

REINCARNATION

It took a little time and patience but, on his third essay, Lanyard found a key which agreed with the lock. He permitted himself a sigh of relief; Ninety-fifth Street was bare, the door set flush with the outside of the wall afforded no concealment to the trespasser, while the direct light of a street lamp at the corner made his lonely figure uncomfortably conspicuous.

Apparently, however, he had not been observed.

Gently pushing the door open, he slipped in, as gently closed it, then for a full minute stood stirless, spying out the lay of the land.

Fitting precisely his anticipations, the garden discovered a fine English flavour; it was well-kept, modest, fragrant and, best of all, quite dark, especially so in the shadow of the street wall. Only a glimmer of starlight enabled him to pick out the course of a pebbled footpath. A border of deep turf between this and the wall muffled his footsteps as he moved toward the back of the house.

The library windows, deeply recessed, opened on a low, broad stoop of concrete, with a pergola effect above, and a few wicker pieces upon a grass mat underfoot.

Noiselessly Lanyard stepped across the low sill and paused in the cover of heavy draperies, commanding a tolerably full view of the library if one somewhat unsatisfactory, since the light within was by no means bright. Still, this circumstance had its advantages for him; with his dark topcoat buttoned to the throat and its collar turned up to hide his linen, he was confident he would not be detected unless he gave his presence away by an abrupt movement--something which the Lone Wolf never made.

At the moment Mr. Blensop seemed to be engaged in the surprising occupation of discoursing upon art to his caller.

The latter occupied that chair which Lanyard had refused, on the far side of the table. Thus placed, the lamplight masked more than revealed him, throwing a dull glare into Lanyard's eyes. His man sat in a pose of earnest attention, bending forward a trifle to follow the exposition of Mr. Blensop, who stood beneath a portrait on the wall between the chimney-piece and the windows, his attitude incurably graceful, a hand on the switch controlling the picture-light. Apparently he had just finished speaking, for he paused, looking toward his guest with a quiet and intimate smile as he turned off the light.

"And that's all there is to it," he declared, moving back to the table.

"I see," said the other thoughtfully.

Lanyard felt himself start almost uncontrollably: rage swept through him, storming brain and body, like a black squall over a hill-bound lake. For the moment he could neither see or hear clearly nor think coherently.

For the voice of this latest incarnation of Andre Duchemin was the voice of "Karl."

When the tumult of his senses subsided he heard Blensop saying, "I'll write it out for you," and saw him pick up a pad and pencil and jot down a memorandum.

"There you are," he added, ripping off the sheet and passing it across the table. "Now you can't go wrong."

"I precious seldom do," his caller commented drily.

"I think--" Blensop began, and checked sharply as the man Walker came into the room.

"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop--"

There was an accent of impatience in those beautifully modulated tones: "Well, what is it now?"

"A lady to see you, sir."

Blensop took the card from the proffered salver. "Never heard of her," he announced brusquely at a glance. "She asked for Colonel Stanistreet or for me?"

"Colonel Stanistreet, sir. But when I said he was not at home, she asked to see his secretary."

"Any idea what she wants?"

"She didn't say, sir--but she seemed much distressed."

"They always are. H'm.... Young and good-looking?"

"Quite, sir."

"Dessay I may as well see her," said Mr. Blensop wearily. "Show her in when I ring."

Walker shut himself out of the room.

"It's just as well," Blensop added to his caller. "You understand, my clear fellow--?"

"Assuredly." The man got up; but Blensop contrived exasperatingly to keep between him and the windows. "I'm to be back at midnight?"

"Twelve sharp; you'll be sure to find him here then. Mind leaving by this emergency exit?"

"Not in the least."

"Then _good_-night, my dear Monsieur Duchemin!"

Was there a hint of irony in Blensop's employment of that style? Lanyard half fancied there was, but did not linger to analyse the impression. Already the secretary had opened the side door.

In a bound Lanyard cleared the stoop, then ran back to the door in the wall. But with all his quickness he was all too slow; already, as he emerged to Ninety-fifth Street, his quarry was rounding the Avenue corner.

Defiant of discretion, Lanyard gave chase at speed but, though he had not thirty yards to cover, again was baffled by the swiftness with which "Karl" got about.

He had still some distance to go when the peace of the quarter was shattered by a door that slammed like a pistol shot, and with roaring motor and grinding gears a cab swung away from the curb in front of the Stanistreet residence and tore off down the Avenue.

Swearing petulantly in his disappointment, Lanyard pulled up on the corner. The number on the license plate was plainly revealed as the vehicle showed its back to the street lamp. But what good was that to him? He memorised it mechanically, in mutinous appreciation of the fact that the taxi was setting a pace with which he could not hope to compete afoot.

The rumble of another motor-car caught his ear, and he looked round eagerly. A second taxicab--undoubtedly that which had brought the young woman now presumably closeted with Mr. Blensop--was moving up into the place vacated by the first.

In two strides Lanyard was at its side.

"Follow that taxi!" he cried--"number seventy-six, three-eighty-five. Don't lose sight of it, but don't pass it--don't let them know we're following!"

"Engaged," the driver growled.

"Hang your engagement! Here"--Lanyard pressed a golden eagle into the fellow's palm--"there will be another of those if you do as I say!"

"Le's go!" the driver agreed with resignation.

If the cab was moving before Lanyard could hop in and shut the door, the other had already established a killing lead; and though Lanyard's man demonstrated characteristic contempt for municipal regulations governing the speed of motor-driven vehicles, and racketed his own madly down the Avenue, he was wholly helpless to do more than keep the tail-lamp of the first in sight.

More than once that dull red eye seemed sardonically to wink.

Still, Lanyard did not think "Karl" knew he was pursued. His conveyance had passed the corner before Lanyard emerged from the side street. There being no reason that Lanyard knew of why the spy should believe himself under suspicion, his haste seemed most probably due to natural desire to avoid adventitious recognition, coupled with, no doubt, other urgent business.

At Seventy-second Street the chase turned east, with Lanyard two blocks behind, and for a few agonizing moments was altogether lost to him. But at Broadway the tide of southbound traffic hindered it momentarily, and it swung into that stream with its pursuer only a block astern.

Thereafter through a ride of another mile and a half, the distance between the two was augmented or abbreviated arbitrarily by the rules of the road.

At one time less than two cab-lengths separated them; then a Ford, driven Fordishly, wandered vaguely out of a crosstown street and hesitated in the middle of the thoroughfare with precisely the air of a staring yokel on a first visit to the city; and Lanyard's driver slammed on the emergency brake barely in time to escape committing involuntary but justifiable flivvercide.

When he was able once more to throw the gears into high, the chase was a long block ahead.

They were entering Longacre Square before he made up that loss.

And at Forty-fourth Street, again, a stream of east-bound cars edged in between the two, reducing Lanyard's driver to the verge of gibbering lunacy.

A car resembling "Karl's" was crossing Broadway at Forty-second Street when Lanyard was still on Seventh Avenue north of the Times Building.

But only a minute later his driver pulled up in front of the Hotel Knickerbocker, and Lanyard, peering through the forward window, saw the number 76-385 on the license plate of a taxicab drawing away, empty, from the curb beneath the hotel canopy.

He tossed the second gold piece to the driver as his feet touched the sidewalk, and shouldered through a cluster of men and women at the main entrance to the lobby.

That rendezvous of Broadway was fairly thronged despite the slack mid-evening hour, between the dinner and the supper crushes; but Lanyard reviewed in vain the little knots of guests and loungers; if "Karl" were among them, he was nobody whom Lanyard had learned to know by sight on board the _Assyrian_.

With as little success he searched unobtrusively all public rooms on the main floor.

It was, of course, both possible and probable that "Karl," himself a guest of the hotel, had crossed directly to the elevators and been whisked aloft to his room.

With this in mind, Lanyard paused at the desk, asked permission to examine the register and, being accommodated, was somewhat consoled; if his chase had failed of its immediate objective, it now proved not altogether fruitless. A majority of the _Assyrian_ survivors seemed to have elected to stop at the Knickerbocker. One after another Lanyard, scanning the entries, found these names:

Edmund O'Reilly--Detroit Arturo Velasco--Buenos Aires Bartlett Putnam--Philadelphia Cecelia Brooke--London Emil Dressier--Geneve

Half inclined to commit the imprudence of sending a name up to Miss Brooke--any name but Andre Duchemin, Michael Lanyard, or Anthony Ember--together with a message artfully worded to fix her interest without giving comfort to the enemy, should it chance to go astray, the adventurer hesitated by the desk; and of a sudden was satisfied that such a move would be not only injudicious but waste of time; for, now that he paused to think of it, he surmised that the young woman--"young and good-looking", on Walker's word--who had called to see Colonel Stanistreet was none other than this same Cecelia Brooke.

What more natural than that she should make early occasion to consult the head of the British Secret Service in America?