The Great Game (32 page)

             
Paul smiled grimly. "I'm glad you weren't around to give them, whoever they are,
advice
."

             
"I'm sure they thought of that. But they didn't do it. Because they wanted to see you discredited more than they wanted you dead."

             
"Discredited? What do you mean?"

             
"According to your father, your last few reports said that you thought you were being watched—followed."

             
"Yes. I'm pretty sure. I couldn't find out who was doing it, but I suspect it was someone from the anarchist group that I joined."

             
"Professor Moriarty thinks that someone suspects that you are other than you seem, but they don't as yet know just what you are."

             
"I thought so myself," Paul agreed.

             
"So they, whoever they are, wish to discredit you. To assure
themselves
that whatever you might say will not be believed.
"

             
"
But not to kill me?
Why the kindness?"

             
"Professor Moriarty believes that you know something that might prove dangerous to someone, and your enemy doesn't know whether you have passed this information on or not."

             
"What information, and on to whom?"

             
Madeleine sat straight up on her bench, her hands folded demurely on her lap. "There's the question," she said. "But, whatever it is, if you have passed it on, killing you would emphasize its importance, while making you appear to be a mad assassin would cause your masters to doubt whatever you might have told them. Remember, they believe you to be a spy of little worth."

             
"But I know nothing of such value. I report on tendencies and gradual shifts in policy, and who is spying on whom. If it's the anarchists, I report that they go around bombing and shooting; but everybody knows that they go around bombing and shooting."

             
"It is possibly something you know that you don't know you know," Madeleine told him.

             
"I think I understand that," Paul said. "It's true that I have uncovered hints that some major disruptive act is being planned by the anarchists, and curiously by a couple of the other groups that I was gathering reports on. I don't know whether it's the same big event they're all talking about or several that are coincidentally all looming on the horizon. But I know nothing of what this event, or these events, might be. I was preparing to try to find out when this happened."

             
"It may well be something connected with that," Madeleine agreed.

             
"There is one thing—," Paul said. "What?"

             
"I don't know if this is important, but it was peculiar. A man named Hermann Loge, a minor official in the Foreign Ministry, gave me a slip of paper at the opera a few days before—all this. It had a brief numbered list that made no sense to me written on it."

             
"He gave you a slip of paper?"

             
"Yes. He didn't know me at the time. I believe he mistook me for someone else.
"

             
"
How so?"

             
"Well, I gave him an envelope containing a large sum of money, and apparently he expected someone he didn't know to do just that. He was annoyed at me because it wasn't as much as he expected—the money, that is."

             
Madeleine sat back in her chair and stared at Paul. "I believe I've entered Wonderland," she said, "although my name isn't Alice. You gave a complete stranger an envelope containing a
large sum of money, but he was disappointed because he was expecting some other complete stranger to give him an even larger sum of money in return for a slip of paper containing a numbered list that made no sense?"

             
"Admirable," Paul said. "You have it."

             
"I'd better pass it on to the professor," she said. "Where is this list—and why were you giving this stranger an envelope full of money?"

             
Paul explained his method of recruiting unwitting agents for his amateur espionage ring. "The list is in my apartment, if the police don't have it," he said. "But I doubt if they've found it or considered it important. It's on my desk, folded like a small envelope, writing side in, and I put some stamps in it."

             
Madeleine clapped her hands.
" 'The
Purloined Letter!'
" she
said.

             
"Right," Paul admitted. "I borrowed the idea from Poe. Let's hope it still works."

             
"I imagine the professor will want to see if it's still there. Right now what he wants is for you to go over the last few weeks before you were arrested in your mind and tell me everything you can remember.
Every little thing.
Concentrate on events that, no matter how unimportant they might have seemed to you at the time, were out of the ordinary."

             
"Strange events?
I can't recall any such."

             
"No, not strange, just out of the ordinary. For example, if the postman usually brings the morning mail at nine, but one morning he came at eight or at ten, that's not particularly strange, but it is out of the ordinary."

             
"The mail was left in a box downstairs," Paul said.

             
Madeleine sighed. "Let us start on the Sunday two weeks before you were arrested. Cast your mind back and see what you can remember."

             
Paul closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment and then opened them. "Are you going to write this down?" he asked.

             
"No need," she told him. "I never forget anything I hear or see. It's one of the reasons Professor Moriarty asked me to accompany him on this
trip,
he thought that might be useful. And so, at the moment, it is."

             
Paul closed his eyes and thought and pictured each day of those last two weeks as best he could. He told Madeleine about the meeting at the Chocolate Factory and seeing Herr Hessen Kopf in a conductor's uniform, and delivering the mysterious package and everything else he could think of. She stared at him and nodded occasionally. When he was done, she smiled. "Very good," she said.

             
"Was any of that useful?"

             
"I have no idea," she told him. "I will pass it on to the professor, and he will know. Now we'll have to get to work to get you out of here. Actually, that's our second task, but the other doesn't concern you."

             
"What is this other task, or shouldn't I ask?"

             
"Two people, a husband and wife, are being held prisoner in less official circumstances than you. Their position is at least as
dire and
much more precarious than your own. We know nothing of the group that is holding them, or their motives, except that they would seem to also share the belief that Professor Moriarty is some sort of master criminal, or the mastermind of the Secret Service."

             
"They have my best wishes, this husband and wife," Paul said. "It is not pleasant to be held by the state; it must be truly trying to be captives of some criminal group. The state is, at least, predictable."

             
"I will visit with you as much as possible," Madeleine told him, "but I cannot tell you just when. Does your cell window—I assume you have a window—face the street or the courtyard?"

             
"The street."

             
"Good. Then we can communicate with you if we need to."

             
"Of course there's a wide patch of concrete and then the prison wall between my window and the street, if you're thinking of throwing messages back and forth."

             
"Nothing like that.
If we must communicate with you, the professor suggested a musical code."

             
"I used a musical code to send my reports," Paul offered.

             
"Yes, but this can't be written, it will have to be sung outside your window on Grossvogelstrasse. Your father told the professor that you have perfect pitch, is that so?"

             
"Yes."

             
"This will be simpler than the code you used," Madeleine told him. "Starting at middle C and going up, using two octaves of a twelve-tone scale—the professor assumed that you can differentiate that—"

             
"I can."

             
"Good. That gives us twenty-four notes. Messages will be in English. We'll just superimpose the alphabet on the notes going up, with
i
and
j
one note, and
s
for
z.
That gets us down to twenty-four letters."

             
"I think I understand."

             
"Yes, but can you follow it fast enough?"

             
"I should be able to memorize whatever tune—if we can call such a hash of notes a tune—you send, and then work it out."

             
"Well, let's give it a try," Madeleine said. She took a tuning fork out of her string purse and hit it gently against the edge of the table.

             
"A," Paul said.

             
"Right," Madeleine agreed. She tapped the fork again and then went through a series of vocal exercises that sounded vaguely like the sort of modern music that Paul Donzhof wrote.

             
"Almost melodic," Paul said.

             
"Yes, but what was the message?"

             
"Give me a minute," Paul said. He closed his eyes and hummed softly.
" 'Courage
and patience,' " he said. "Very good," she said.

             
"Actually I made it out to be, 'courage and pasience,'
" he
told her, "but I made the correction.
"

             
"
I was flat?
"

             
"
Just a bit, I fancy."

             
"Well," she said. "A perfect memory and perfect pitch are two different things. But I do the best I can."

             
"You do indeed," he assured her. "And you have cheered me
up immeasurably. You've done as well as my real sister might, and I thank you. Do you think Professor Moriarty can really get me out of here?"

             
"You may put your faith in the professor. This will not be the first time he has removed a man from prison. What he says he is going to do, he does. It's as simple as that." She stood up and knocked on the cell door. "Good-bye now, brother. Be of good cheer."