Graham Greene (16 page)

Hewitt produced the stick. It was an ordinary thick Malacca cane, with a buck-horn handle and a silver band. Hewitt bent it across his knee, and laid it on the table.

“Yes,” Dixon answered, “that is Ritter's stick. I think I have often seen it in the stand. But what in the world——”

“One moment; I'll just fetch the stick Mirsky left behind.” And Hewitt stepped across the corridor.

He returned with another stick, apparently an exact facsimile of the other, and placed it by the side of the other.

“When your assistants went into the inner room, I carried this stick off for a minute or two. I knew it was not Worsfold's, because there was an umbrella there with his initial on the handle. Look at this.”

Martin Hewitt gave the handle a twist, and rapidly unscrewed it from the top. Then it was seen that the stick was a mere tube of very thin metal, painted to appear like a Malacca cane.

“It was plain at once that this was no Malacca cane—it wouldn't bend. Inside it, I found your tracings, rolled up tightly. You can get a marvellous quantity of thin tracing-paper into a small compass by tight rolling.”

“And this—this was the way they were brought back!” the engineer exclaimed. “I see that, clearly. But how did they get away? That's as mysterious as ever.”

“Not a bit of it. See here. Mirsky gets hold of Ritter, and they agree to get your drawings and photograph them. Ritter is to let his confederate have the drawings, and Mirsky is to bring them back as soon as possible, so that they shan't be missed for a moment. Ritter habitually carried his Malacca cane, and the cunning of Mirsky at once suggests that this tube should be made in outward facsimile. This morning, Mirsky keeps the actual stick and Ritter comes to the office with the tube. He seizes the first opportunity—probably when you were in this private room, and Worsfold was talking to you from the corridor—to get at the tracings, roll them up tightly, and put them in the tube, putting the tube back into the umbrella stand. At half-past twelve, or whenever it was, Mirsky turns up for the first time with the actual stick, and exchanges them, just as he afterwards did when he brought the drawings back.”

“Yes, but Mirsky came half an hour after they were—oh, yes, I see. What a fool I was! I was forgetting. Of course, when I first missed the tracings they were in this walking-stick, safe enough, and I was tearing my hair out within arm's reach of them!”

“Precisely. And Mirsky took them away before your very eyes. I expect Ritter was in a rare funk when he found that the
drawings were missed. He calculated, no doubt, on your not wanting them for the hour or two they would be out of the office.”

“How lucky that it struck me to jot a pencil note on one of them! I might easily have made my note somewhere else, and then I should never have known that they had been away.”

“Yes, they didn't give you any too much time to miss them. Well, I think the rest's pretty clear. I brought the tracings in here, screwed up the sham stick and put it back. You identified the tracings and found none missing, and then my course was pretty clear, though it looked difficult. I knew you would be very naturally indignant with Ritter, so as I wanted to manage him myself, I told you nothing of what he had actually done, for fear that, in your agitated state, you might burst out with something that would spoil my game. To Ritter I pretended to know nothing of the return of the drawings or
how
they had been stolen—the only things I did know with certainty. But I
did
pretend to know all about Mirsky—or Hunter—when, as a matter of fact, I knew nothing at all, except that he probably went under more than one name. That put Ritter into my hands completely. When he found the game was up he began with a lying confession. Believing that the tracings were still in the stick and that we knew nothing of their return, he said that they had not been away, and that he would fetch them—as I had expected he would. I let him go for them alone, and when he returned, utterly broken up by the discovery that they were not there, I had him altogether at my mercy. You see, if he had known that the drawings were all the time behind your bookcase, he might have brazened it out, sworn that the drawings had been there all the time, and we could have done nothing with him. We couldn't have sufficiently frightened him by a threat of prosecution for theft, because there the things were, in your possession, to his knowledge.

“As it was, he answered the helm capitally: gave us Mirsky's address on the envelope, and wrote the letter that was to have got him out of the way while I committed burglary, if that disgraceful expedient had not been rendered unnecessary. On the whole, the case has gone very well.”

“It has gone marvellously well, thanks to yourself. But what shall I do with Ritter?”

“Here's his stick—knock him downstairs with it, if you like. I should keep the tube, if I were you, as a memento. I don't suppose the respectable Mirsky will ever call to ask for it. But I should certainly kick Ritter out of doors—or out of window, if you like—without delay.”

Mirsky was caught, and after two remands at the police court was extradited on the charge of forging Russian notes. It came out that he had written to the Embassy, as Hewitt had surmised, stating that he had certain valuable information to offer, and the letter which Hewitt had seen delivered was an acknowledgment, and a request for more definite particulars. This was what gave rise to the impression that Mirsky had himself informed the Russian authorities of his forgeries. His real intent was very different, but was never guessed.

“I wonder,” Hewitt has once or twice observed, “whether, after all, it would not have paid the Russian authorities better on the whole if I had never investigated Mirsky's little note-factory. The Dixon torpedo was worth a good many twenty-rouble notes.”

ARTHUR MORRISON

ROOM AT THE BOTTOM

“Ye have scarce the soul of a louse,” he said, “but the roots of sin are there.”

RUDYARD KIPLING

LEON KARFF'S ROUGH DRAWING OF THE NEW BRITISH SUBMARINE

The letters refer to the notes which were also found and which ran as follows: AA, Conning Tower; BB, Telephone Buoys; CC, Hatchways; D, Lifeboat (detachable); EE, Rudder; FF, Wells with Horizontal Propellers; GG, Planes; H, Hatch from Diving Chamber; II, Wheels in Recesses; K, Detachable Safety Weight in Recess; L, Tiller; TTTT, Torpedo Tubes;

PPPP, Propellers.
I, Side View (in awash position).
II, Horizontal Position (from above).
Scale
½
inch to
12
feet.

he expulsion of the enemy consuls at Salonica [in January 1916] and the occupation of their consulates was followed by similar action in Mytilene and Corfu, and when the news about Corfu reached Athens the enemy Legations began to wonder if even they were immune from violation.

The nervousness of the personnel turned to panic when one morning H.M.S.
Folkestone,
a 496-ton armed packet-boat, dropped anchor in Phaleron Bay, for
Folkestone
was presumed to herald the arrival of the British Fleet. The Turkish Consul at the Piraeus hurriedly packed a valise and fled to Athens for protection, followed by many of the Germans living at the Piraeus and Phaleron. This incursion upset the nerves of the diplomatic representatives, who began to burn their archives. Smoke poured from the chimneys of the Legations all day long, and during the night what was left of the archives was distributed among various houses in Athens. One packet was sent to Mr Rhallis, the Minister for Communications. Two other packets were traced by devious ways to the German Girls' School and the Parnassus School. Three hundred thousand francs were withdrawn from the National Bank. Information reached us that von Dueffel, the assistant of the German Marine Attaché, with one of the secretaries of the Turkish Legation and a Greek courier, had been entrusted with the task of taking the archives that must be preserved to Larissa, whence they were to be sent on to Monastir. I suggested to Ricaud, my French colleague, that we should have a try at intercepting them. Ricaud was agreeable to share expenses, and we enlisted the services of five ex-brigands from Crete who, under the command of the agent Bonaparte, were to go to Larissa and there await instructions.

Twenty-three years have gone by since Bonaparte stood in the little room of those early offices at 3 Visarionos Street, but I still see him swelling with the mystery and importance of his errand, and I still hear the deep unctuous tones of his farewell:

“Skipper,” he breathed hoarsely, “if they get me, you'll send my old sergeant's uniform, the one I wore at La Bassée, to my old mother in Salonique?”

“I will, Bonaparte.”

He wrung my hand and moved heavily towards the door. Then he came back.

“And, Skipper, you'll tell her I died game?”

“I will, Bonaparte.”

With sesquipedalian gait he plunged towards the door, only to turn back once more.

“Skipper,” he asked, patting his large posterior, “do I use this?”

“Use that?” I exclaimed. “What are you going to do with that? Sit on the German bags?”

He put his hand in his hip pocket, and drew out a pistol which he looked at reverently.

“I don't want to kill anybody,” he protested. “But if it's me or them, Skipper, I have your permish?”

He tapped the pistol significantly.

“You'll exercise your own discretion, Bonaparte, bearing in mind that if you make a blasted fool of yourself I shall disown you.”

“Gawd bless you, Skipper, I knew I could trust you to give me a dog's chance.”

With this, after once more warmly wringing me by the hand, he plunged through the door, and forth upon his secret errand.

“And a blasted fool he probably will make of himself,” Tucker observed pessimistically.

“If you think that, Tucker, I'll send you instead.”

“No, no, no, no,” Tucker demurred hastily. “There are all these reports to get off for the Alex bag. I shall be kept pretty busy for the next few days, Captain Z.”

We had given Bonaparte before he left an assumed name under which we were to communicate with him, and on the chance that the enemy might travel by train to Larissa instead of by car the railway station was watched day and night.

In the middle of all this, E. C. D. Rawlins, the British Consul at Canea in Crete, suddenly turned up from Salonica in a khaki uniform and announced that Colonel Cunliffe-Owen, the head of Army Intelligence, had told him to recruit brigands in Athens with a view to holding up the German mail after it left Sorovitch.

Rawlins was in a state of great excitement at the prospect of such an adventure, though he felt a little doubtful of the attitude the Minister might take towards such consular pranks. The idea was to dig a hole in the road and wreck the car. Sells and I sent a joint wire to Salonica, suggesting that in future some cooperation with Athens was desirable in such enterprises, because if the German mail was to be stopped on Greek territory and a serious incident provoked it would be as well to make sure beforehand that we were likely to have our money's worth. Salonica telegraphed back that nothing was going to be done there until a brigand they had dispatched to report upon the feasibleness of the scheme had returned. Next day we heard that the enemy with seven pieces of baggage had left by car for Larissa. I at once telegraphed to Bonaparte ordering him to make his dispositions to hold up the car and avoid if possible any loss of life. I instructed him to escape after the attempt across country to Caterina Point, take a caïque thence to Salonica, and deliver the papers to Lieut.-Colonel Cunliffe-Owen at A.H.Q. At the same time Sells warned the naval authorities
of his possible arrival so that there should be no delay through the action of our patrols.