The Man Who Bought London (9 page)

‘When a man with no great moral perceptions, with no sense of obligation to his conscience, his pride, or his humanity, finds himself thwarted of his heart’s desire, his mind naturally turns to murder. Murder, indeed, is a natural instinct of man, as maternity is a natural instinct of woman. Thousands of years of civilization have called into being a super-instinct which is voluntary in application and is termed self-restraint. The wild waters of will have been directed through artificial courses, and woe to the errant stream that overleaps the bank and runs to its natural level.’

So wrote Hermann Zeberlieff in his diary two nights after the sentence of his sister. It embodied his philosophy, and was one of the most interesting articles of his creed and certainly one of the most coherent passages in the diary which was read in public on a subsequent occasion, Hermann Zeberlieff being unavoidably absent.

His worst enemies will not deny to this perverse man a certain literary quality or cavil at the description given to him by Simnizberg, the anthropologist of ‘Immoral Visionary’.

He finished the entry and put away the book in its private and proper place. He glanced with a sneer at the little stack of letters he had answered. Everybody who knew him had written kindly, indulgently, or humorously of his sister’s exploit. Little did they know how much that freak of hers had cost him. It might have cost him dearer had she not gone, but this he would never accept as a possibility.

He went to his room to dress. Checked as he was by his sister’s action, he was in a sense relieved that the necessity for removing
her had departed. She would make a will in prison – he did not doubt that. Cassman, her solicitor, had been sent for to Holloway for that purpose. His attitude of mind would have baffled the average psychologist, for now he had no feeling of resentment toward her. Frankly, he wanted her money, as, frankly, he had not abandoned hope of getting it. But the method must be more subtle – he had invited Martin Hubbard to dinner with that object on the night of the extraordinary behaviour of Vera.

‘Bolscombe is a fool’ – he had a trick of talking to himself, and he was dressing without the aid of a valet – ‘to sell the paper to that swine!’

‘That swine’ was King Kerry, toward whom this strange man directed the full force of his implacable hatred. He wondered what use King Kerry would make of his new toy – it was a weapon which might be easily employed to harass Hermann. It would not be the first time that ‘The King of London’ had bought newspapers to harass him. He had finished dressing when a discreet knock came to the door.

‘There is a man who wishes to see you, sir,’ said the servant who entered at Hermann’s invitation.

‘What kind of man?’

The servant was at a loss to describe the visitor.

‘Poorish – foreign,’ he said.

Poorish and foreign! Hermann could not place the visitor.

‘Tell him to come up.’

‘Here, sir?’

‘Here,’ said the master sharply. ‘Where do you think I want to see him?’

The man was used to these unreasonable outbursts and was undisturbed by them. He went away and came back with a little
man, rather pallid of face, who wore a straggling, irregular beard and clothes of sufficient poverty to justify the ‘poorish’ and just enough eccentricity to make ‘foreign’ an accurate guess.

‘Oh, it is you, is it?’ said Hermann coolly. ‘Sit down – you need not wait, Martin.’

‘Well?’ he asked when they were alone. ‘What do you want?’

He spoke in French, and the little man raised his expressive hands deprecatingly.

‘What else,
mon vieu
– but money? Ah, money is a horrible thing, but necessary.’

Hermann opened a gold cigarette case deliberately and selected a cigarette before he replied.

‘Exactly why should you come to me?’

The little man shrugged his shoulders and glanced at the ceiling for inspiration. He was an unpleasant-looking man with a short, squat nose and small, twinkling eyes set wide apart. His skin was blotched and unhealthy, and his hands were big and red.

‘You were generous to us once,
mon aviateur
,’ he said. ‘Ah, the generosity! – but it was for’ – he looked round – ‘murder!’ he whispered dramatically.

‘Are you suggesting that I hired you to kill the young woman who was found dead in Smith Street?’ asked the other coolly. ‘You were told not to kill.’

The man shrugged his shoulders again. ‘She was drunk – we thought she was obstinate,’ he said. ‘How were we to know? Joseph gave her an extra squeeze, and,
voilà
! she was dead.’

Hermann eyed him as a naturalist might eye a new and a strange species of beetle. ‘Suppose I say I will give you nothing?’ he asked.

The big red hands were outstretched in pain. ‘It would be unfortunate,’ said the man, ‘for you, for us, for all!’ He seemed
absurdly pleased with the rhyme of ‘
vous
’, ‘
nous
’, and ‘
tout
’, and repeated it.

He was standing now an arm’s length from the other. ‘Are you very strong, my friend?’ asked Hermann.

‘I am considered so,’ said the man complacently.

‘
Attention
!’ cried Hermann, and his small white hand shot out and gripped the visitor by the throat. He struggled, but he was in the hands of one who had had Le Cinq as a master, and Le Cinq was the greatest strangler of his day.

The fingers tightened on the other’s throat, skilful fingers of steel that gripped the carotid artery and compressed the windpipe in one action. Down he went to the ground limply, then, when death stared at him, the fingers released their clutch. ‘Get up,’ said Hermann, and laughed noiselessly. The man staggered to his feet, fear in his eyes, his face blue and swollen. ‘
Mon Dieu
!’ he gasped.

‘Another minute, my infant,’ said Hermann genially, ‘and you would have been in hell. I do this to show you that I am better than you in your own profession. Years ago,’ he went on reminiscently, ‘your fellow countryman, Le Cinq, escaped from Devil’s Island and came to New York. I paid him five thousand dollars to teach me to grip. You were in good hands,
ma foi
!’

The man stood shaking in every limb, his face twitching horribly, one hand feeling tenderly at his bruised throat.

‘Here is a hundred pounds: if you wish, you may go to the police – but you must not come to me for money unless you have something to offer me for it. When I need you I will send for you.
Bonsoir
.’

‘
Bonsoir, mon professeur
!’ said the man with some remnants of his humour.

Hermann was flattered.

It was he who kept Martin Hubbard waiting, but Martin could afford to wait, though he had ordered dinner to be ready to the minute. Hermann found his host sitting patiently in the Palm Court of the Sweizerhof.

‘Sorry to keep you, but I had an unexpected engagement – a pressing engagement,’ he added with a smile.

‘You millionaires!’ said Martin Hubbard admiringly.

Handsome is a loose word applied to passable people, but Martin Hubbard had the features and the figure of a young Greek god. If his mouth was on the weak side, his small golden moustache was sufficient to hide it. Now, as he walked with his guest through the court, eyes were raised to watch him, eyes admiring, eyes approving, eyes resentful and suspicious.

Hermann Zeberlieff neither admired nor resented the good looks of his friend. Himself a man of striking appearance, with his youthful face and his superb strength visible in the breadth of shoulder and the set of his body, appearances were outside his philosophy. There were certain conventions which must be obeyed, certain ephemeral fashions which must be endured unless one wished to be regarded as eccentric, but he was satisfied to be advised as to these by competent authority.

His vanity ran in the direction of power: he was greedy for tribute to his wealth, his influence, and his position in the world of which he was a member.

‘Here we are,’ said Martin, and indicated a table.

Hermann glanced round the room and an ugly frown settled on his face. Three tables away sat King Kerry with a lady. From where he sat Hermann could not see her face, but a swift survey told him that since her gown was neither modish nor expensive,
and her throat and hair were innocent of jewels, she was one of those pleasant nobodies whom King Kerry was always finding.

‘Old Kerry and his secretary,’ said Hubbard, following the direction of the other’s eyes and desirous of finding an explanation for the frown.

Hermann looked at the girl with a new interest. His lips curled in a sarcastic smile as he remembered that, but for the luck of the game, this girl might have lain where the drunken daughter of her landlady was found.

He went through dinner talking on such events of the time as usually form the subject of prandial conversation. The real business of the meeting came later in the Palm Court when the two sat over their coffees and their cigarettes.

‘Hubbard,’ said the guest, ‘I want you to marry my sister.’

He watched his man as he spoke, and saw a gleam of satisfaction come to the man’s eyes.

‘That’s rather unexpected,’ said Hubbard, stroking his moustache.

‘I want you to marry her,’ Hermann went on, taking no notice of the interruption, ‘because I see no other way of getting her money.’

Hubbard looked across from under his brows and answered with no great show of geniality.

‘Exactly what do you mean?’

‘I shall explain what I mean,’ said Hermann. ‘But before we go any further I would ask that we have no exhibitions of high horse-riding, no family honour, or duties of gentlemen, or any of that highbrow nonsense, if you please.’

He said this quietly, but he was in sober earnest, and Hubbard checked a platitude which rose to his lips.

‘Go on!’ he said.

‘I offer you a share of my sister’s fortune – I offer you exceptional opportunities for meeting her, and I trust your singularly handsome person to do the rest.’

Hubbard caressed his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if the lady is willing?’

‘She isn’t,’ said Hermann frankly. ‘She thinks that you are an insipid ass.’ Mr Hubbard’s face went very red. ‘But she is young, and you haven’t really had an opportunity of impressing your personality upon her.’

‘Where do –’ began Martin Hubbard a little stiffly.

‘Listen,’ commanded the other sharply, ‘and for God’s sake don’t interrupt! By the terms of my father’s will the sum of five million dollars is settled on the man she chooses to marry. Nobody knows this, except her and me and the lawyers. That sum represents about one half of the money which my father left to her. I want you to marry her and give me an agreement to pay me the sum of seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds on the day of your wedding.’

Calmly put, without anything in Hermann’s tone to suggest that he was making a proposition out of the ordinary, it staggered his vis-a-vis. It did not stagger him sufficiently to make him forget that the arrangement was scarcely equitable.

‘That is rather steep!’ he demurred.

‘That you should have a quarter of a million?’ Hermann raised his eyebrows.

‘I am not exactly a beggar, Zeberlieff,’ said ‘The Beauty’, flushed and somewhat angry.

‘You’re not exactly a beggar,’ agreed Hermann. ‘You’re a society sponge – now don’t interrupt,’ as Hubbard half rose
from his seat. ‘I am speaking plainly, but the occasion warrants it. Let us have no beating about the bush. You haven’t a nickel to your name; you’re on the Federated board because I put you there, and I put you there because I thought that sooner or later you would be useful. You are known from Mayfair to Pimlico as a fortune-hunter who has failed, and if you fail here you’ll probably marry your landlady as an easy alternative to paying your arrears.’

Martin Hubbard’s face went pink and white as the other continued with his insolent drawl. For the cursed thing about all that Hermann had said was that it was true – true even to the marked attention which the bourgeoise proprietress of his flat had paid to him. But if he was furious, as only a vain and handsome man could be furious at such a humiliating experience, he had sense to see that a quarter of a million pounds was a fortune beyond his dreams.

‘You’re a damned Jew!’ he growled, and Zeberlieff laughed.

‘As a matter of fact, I have not a drop of Jewish blood in me,’ he said. ‘I often wish I had. I gather you accept?’

‘Suppose she won’t have anything to do with me?’ asked the other.

‘You must trust me,’ said Hermann.

He stopped suddenly. King Kerry was coming toward him walking a little ahead of the girl he had been dining with. Even now Zeberlieff could not see her face, for from where he sat it was hidden by her escort’s shoulder.

‘Suppose –’ Martin Hubbard was suggesting difficulties, but Hermann was not listening. He was curious to see the face of the girl whom Kerry had picked out from a crowd – according to report – to help him manipulate his millions.

They were nearly abreast of the two men when Kerry slackened his pace and for the first time Hermann Zeberlieff looked upon the face of Elsie Marion.

He leapt up from his chair as if he had been shot. His face was white and drawn, and beads of perspiration stood on his temples as he pointed a trembling finger at the startled girl.

‘You – you!’ he croaked hoarsely, and fell fainting to the ground.

The advertisement occupied a full page of the most important of the available full pages in every newspaper in London. It was on a Monday that the first intimation of the sale appeared in the shape of a great poster on every hoarding of the metropolis. The announcement was simple to a point of baldness.

This, in huge letters, confronted the citizens of London wherever they walked abroad. It faced them in the tube trains and in the tube lifts. It was plastered on railway stations and covered the ends of dead walls. It was printed in a modified form on the back of tram tickets and on the boards of buses and cars. Sandwich men in hundreds perambulated London bearing this announcement. It appeared unexpectedly on the screens of cinemas, was to be found in theatre programmes and even crept into the pages of parish magazines.

A week later came the newspaper advertising, and at eleven o’clock on the morning there was formed the most extraordinary queue that London had ever seen. It began forming at seven o’clock in the morning. At nine o’clock reserves of ‘E’ division were called out to marshal the line. Four deep the queue stretched from Kerry’s Store to New Oxford Street, a distance of a mile and a quarter.

There was no doubt in the mind of the thrifty Londoner that the goods were of the quality stated. Endless velvet belts had for three days displayed samples of the treasures within. Still less was there any question as to the willingness of the munificent proprietor to allow all these goods to go out at half price. There was some doubt in the public mind as to how long these sacrifices would go on.

The doors opened at eleven, and Kerry’s system worked with the utmost smoothness. As fast as customers were supplied they
went out through the new doors at the rear of the building. They learnt that they must come on any future occasion with their minds made up as to the article they desired. Once they had passed from the sample room to the rest chamber above they were not re-admitted. If they remembered something they had wanted they must take their place in the queue again.

Every class of society was represented in that mammoth bargain hunt. Motor cars dropped their befurred occupants to walk side by side with the dingy little woman from the poorer streets of the East and South. Women with command of capital went in with well-filled purses and came out proudly conscious of the fact that they had bought double supplies for the price of one.

At three o’clock in the afternoon the queue was a quarter of a mile long, at ten o’clock at night some fifteen hundred people were moving slowly to the doors, and when two o’clock struck a queue of respectable dimensions still waited for the extra reductions.

‘It is wonderful!’

Elsie surveyed the sight from an upper window of the store at half-past one in the morning. The street behind the building was filled with motor lorries and vans which had brought up fresh supplies from the warehouse which King Kerry had taken in South London, and whilst one gang of men was busily unloading, another was stripping the packing cases and sorting out the contents for delivery in the wrapping room on the fourth floor.

King Kerry, smoking a cigar, was by her side.

‘We’re doing fine,’ he said. ‘We can’t have lost more than a thousand pounds. We may not have lost that.

‘My idea is that we shall drop something like a thousand a day,’ he went on, ‘but the margin of profit on these kinds of goods
is so large that we might easily lose nothing after the system has shaken down.’

There were other spectators equally interested. Leete and Zeberlieff sat in the shadowy interior of the latter’s car and watched the midnight queue. ‘How long will this farce last?’ growled Leete.

The other made no reply. He looked ill and weary. There were little lines about his eyes which were unusual in him. He looked malignantly at the building which shielded his enemy. So that was why he had chosen his secretary from the crowd. Because she had resembled to a miraculous degree the girl whose death lay at Hermann’s door.

There had been tragedy there – for the girl. Hermann had been embarrassed, but no more. It had widened the breach with King Kerry, for the grey man – who was not grey in those days – had loved the child in his way. Even Hermann credited that way with being all that was benevolent and sweet. She was a child in King’s eyes, scarcely emerged from the doll and candy stage when all Boston had awakened with a shock to the knowledge that she was indeed a woman, with a woman’s capacity for joy, a woman’s fore-ordained measure of sorrow.

‘He can’t keep this up,’ Leete was saying, and Hermann turned with a start from his bitter memories.

‘Can’t!’ he said savagely. ‘He can and will – you don’t know him. He’s a damned Yankee magnate – you’ve never dealt with that kind before, I guess! Can’t! Don’t you bank on his giving up. Has it affected Goulding’s?’

‘Affected it!’ the other laughed harshly. ‘I doubt if we’ve taken ten pounds today, and the running expenses of the place are from forty to fifty a day. I’ll apply for an injunction to stop this queue – it’s illegal.’

‘And advertise him?’ asked Hermann; ‘give him a gratuitous ad? Nothing doing! We’ve got to find another way.’

He bit his nails in thought, his eyes watching the slow-moving procession of customers as it moved before the gaily lit store.

‘Suppose this goes on,’ he asked, ‘and your takings dwindle to ten pounds or less, what will be the result?’

Mr Leete swallowed something in the darkness.

‘Ruin,’ he said; ‘we should go under. We couldn’t afford to compete, we should pay no dividends, for we’ve no reserves. And it won’t only be us – there are half a dozen firms in the neighbourhood who are worse off than we. They would all go smash.’

‘Suppose you all agree to sell your stuff in competition?’

Leete shook his head with an oath.

‘What is the use of talking? There is a fact we can’t get over. He can afford to throw a million pounds into the gutter – we can’t. Who is going to finance a business under the present conditions? There isn’t a City house which would lend us a red cent till it is definitely known what is the limit of King Kerry’s operations. Our only hope is that he gets tired.’

‘He’ll not get tired,’ said the other.

He glanced round along the pavement by the side of which the car was drawn up. A little group of sightseers were watching the strange scene of London’s midnight shopping. One of these was a young man whose face Hermann remembered having seen before. For a little time he couldn’t ‘place’ the stranger, then he remembered that he had seen him in Park Lane.

This was Vera’s gallant young student. He was alone apparently and was watching with every evidence of interest the remarkable happening. Near by stood another young man, smoking a cigar and watching the proceedings with an approving eye.