Part 17

Suddenly he felt the cold night penetrating his clothing, and he found himself trembling. Was he going to have an attack of ague now, at the very last minute? He struggled to subdue the feelings that threatened to overcome him. In the still night he heard the hammering of the pulses in his brain, and he bent all his energies to the task of listening for what was to happen.

Twelve o’clock struck, and it seemed as if the town were shaken by the powerful strokes, as if these beats must penetrate into the very heart of this house which sheltered the monster, and every vibration become a dagger hacking him to pieces.

The clock had ceased striking, and a footstep sounded, but whether near or far-off Wenk could not at first determine, for the throbbing in his ears. Suddenly the garden gate creaked, and in the starlight he saw a broad expanse of white shirt-front. A man advanced rapidly to Mabuse’s door, and in the instant that he stood on the doorstep, waiting for it to open, the starlight revealed to Wenk that the figure was that of the man he was seeking. And now the net was closing around the victim.

Wenk waited three minutes, four minutes. Would not the world come to an end during these moments? Might not the skies fall, and the last judgment begin?

Then he pulled himself together and climbed stiffly over the fence to return to No. 26. He rushed upstairs in the darkness, seized the telephone, called for the number and gave the guard-room the orders he had arranged. He had but to name the street and give the number of the house, which till now he had kept a secret.

A motor-cyclist was to go to the second guard-room directly the telephone message was received. The car containing the first relay of police was to follow him immediately, and at the second guard-room those aroused by the cyclist’s warning were to be ready to get in the car and proceed with the others at full speed to the villa. Thus it had been arranged.

After Wenk had telephoned he hastened downstairs again. He stood in the dark entrance, waiting for the first sound of the approaching car. Was he not consumed with fever? No, he bit his lips firmly, made his muscles taut and commanded himself to keep cool. He must be cold and hard as steel. Steel it should be!

He had not long to wait.

XVII

The house was surrounded by the police who had been detailed for that duty, while Wenk with the others hastened to the front door and rang the bell loudly, but the explosive was already prepared. Mabuse had not yet gone to bed. The unusual noise in the street had sent him to the spy-hole in the shutters, whence he could see what was happening, and the first glance revealed the police. While he was still looking through his peep-hole, and letting nothing of the happenings outside escape his eye, since the searchlights illuminated everything in the street, he was taking down from the cupboard close by, where it hung in readiness, a police uniform.

He heard the ringing at the door. He had a telephone concealed in the wall, and this George had connected with a villa at the back of his garden. He pressed the connection and called, “Spoerri!”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“The police are about to break in. Make your escape as arranged. Fetch the Countess. Get the new car ready for me. Burn all papers. Send pigeon-post to Schachen. That’s all.” While still speaking, he began hastily to put on the police uniform over his own clothes.

Then there was the sound of explosion, and the door was broken open, a chair flying into the air. With one bound Mabuse was in the corridor. When the explosion occurred he was on the first floor, which was shut off from the stairway.

Close behind the first of the police who entered through the shattered door came Wenk, a heavy revolver in his hand. He was at once struck by the style of the interior, its beautiful carvings and its costly Persian carpets. He took this in at the very first glance as he hurried by. He pointed in silence to the stairs, and while those behind went up them, he and some others inspected the three doors leading to the basement. All were locked, and in a few minutes they had been burst open. The police rushed through all the rooms; one, trying to turn on the electric light, found that it was cut off.

Six policemen had stormed the stairs. The door in the panelled wall of the first floor leading from the stairs was open. The men advanced beyond it into a dark corridor, holding their revolvers cocked, and touching all the objects they encountered in the darkness. Nowhere was there any electric light to be had, and it was some time before they had enough electric torches to suffice them. Then in a moment they had taken possession of all the rooms, and the doors leading to the corridor were shut behind them by the detectives, who removed the keys. Wherever they found the rooms empty, they hacked upon the chests and cupboards. Mabuse heard the sounds, which made his usually silent house as noisy as a factory.

When furnishing the house he had had a little secret chamber made near the doorway leading to the first floor. A carpenter belonging to his band of accomplices had done the work. This chamber was so cunningly concealed in the cleverly contrived decoration of the walls as to be invisible from the corridor outside, and on the inner side the existence of a door would never have been suspected. It was here that Mabuse had concealed himself when he heard the explosion that wrecked his front door. In this hiding-place he had a second telephone connecting him with the other villa. While the noise of the men storming the stairs covered his movements, he tried to make use of this connection, but there was no answer from the other end; therefore Spoerri must already have got away.

Now came the moment when everything must be risked, and the chances of escape or of death were equal. The little chamber had a second door, and this, concealed like the other by the decoration of the panelling, opened directly on to the stairs. It was here that Mabuse stood to listen.

He subdued all his senses with the supernatural powers at his command, subordinating them to his hearing; rustlings, voices, hackings, cries, abuse, orders, the clicking of electric torches, even the spitting sound of the acetylene searchlights, were inscribed on his ear-drum as on a microphone. His powers of hearing must be concentrated on one single moment, and that was the first second, or fraction of a second, in which there should be neither step, nor sound, nor even breathing upon the stairs. If this instant occurred before the systematic search of the house, room by room, had begun, it would give him a favourable opportunity, his only opportunity, for flight. It seemed as if the very blood in his veins stood still, the better to help him discover the fateful moment. All the other senses were in abeyance, and his will concentrated on his hearing alone. He felt as if his ear were as large as the Lake of Constance and his hearing as fine as the vibration of a filament in an electric light. Everything else within him was cold as ice, and anæsthetized, but his ear bore a volcanic life within it, and at last he reached that single heart-beat of time which should prove his salvation.

He pushed open the narrow door on to the stairs. Until he had reconnoitred he ran a risk that his ear might have deceived him, but he saw at once that all was well.

In the corridor below a constable was standing. As he passed him, Mabuse cried, “He has shut himself into the bathroom....”

Then he saw them all running from the rooms downstairs and pressing to the staircase. Two men stood at the entrance, in the midst of the fragments of the shattered door. “I am going for reinforcements,” said Mabuse as he approached them; “he has entrenched himself in the bathroom....”

They let him pass, and he ran, using one hand to brush others aside, the other grasping his Browning pistol. Yes, he was getting away now....

The night was bright with the searchlights, and their rays spoke to him of freedom and good luck. Dazzling, enchanting visions floated before his spirit. He drank in deep draughts of the light outside.

“What’s up?” asked one of the men outside as he rushed out.

“His honour’s orders ... reinforcements wanted; he’s entrenched himself in the bathroom,” called Mabuse in reply.

“Take the motor-cycle,” shouted the other.

What luck! Mabuse already had it between his legs. He fell upon it, mounted, feeling as if he had fallen from a tower on to a bed of down, and the night, like a friendly monster, swallowed him up, protecting him alike from the searchlights and from the violence with which the search-party would have seized him.

A quarter of an hour later he threw the motor-cycle into the canal and rode away on his little racing car as if sailing upon a cloud. The car stretched its nozzle towards the south-west and away it bounded in delight along the boulevard. It was an armoured car....

* * * * *

“What is the matter?” Wenk asked the police as they rushed past him.

“He is in the bathroom, and has entrenched himself,” one of them called back.

Wenk ran up the stairs. “Where is he?” he cried.

“In the bathroom,” they shouted on all sides. “All hands to the bathroom,” ordered Wenk.

They ran hither and thither, and their pocket-torches could be seen gleaming on the walls in all directions. Where are they all going? To the bathroom. Fifteen men are hastening to the bathroom. “But where _is_ the bathroom?” Wenk inquired. Nobody knew where the bathroom was. And now everyone was shouting out, “Halloa, what’s up?”

The electric switches were overhead, and a turn of the loosely fastened screws now gave dazzling light to the whole place. The rooms were brilliant in their wealth and luxuriance--pictures, hangings, carpets, bronzes, furniture. The bathroom was found at last, and the bath in it was of Carrara marble, but the whole house was empty and deserted.

Wenk was almost beside himself. He felt like an empty shaft, down which everything good and beautiful and all that was lofty and successful had fallen into a bottomless abyss. They tapped the walls with their hatchets, suspecting some hidden space, and soon the secret nook was discovered and the riddle solved.

Wenk pulled himself together. There was yet another mouse-hole, and it was in Schachen, at the Villa Elise!

The State Attorney made rapid arrangements at the telephone headquarters. All the lines were connected up with him, and everything had been prepared beforehand. The highroads from Munich in all directions were guarded by police. The stretch of country between Munich and Lindau had eight posting-stations, and at every one there was a telephone ready at any moment throughout the night to inform Munich of anything that had happened there.

Wenk raised the alarm in all directions. Mabuse’s stratagem had given him a half-hour’s start. If things had happened as he imagined, and the car of the fugitive were now eighty or ninety kilometres away, there was yet ten minutes before Buchloe could announce its passing through. He had hardly reckoned up the distance, however, when he heard “Buchloe speaking!” and his heart sang for joy.

“A car has just gone through at terrific speed in the direction of Kempten. It is a large covered car.”

It was 2.10 a.m., and a quarter of an hour later came the Kaufbeuren report.

“A large covered car, travelling about eighty kilometres an hour, has just passed, and taken the Kempten road.”

It was now 2.25 a.m. Wenk began rapidly to make calculations as to the speed of the car, but just then Buchloe rang up again: “A second car has just come through, a small, open car with one person in it!” Ten minutes later Kaufbeuren gave the same report.

“They are escaping in sections. The second car is going faster. Mabuse must be in that one, and his accomplices in the first,” thought Wenk.

From Obergünzburg he had the announcement of both cars in the one communication, for the second went through just as the official had informed him about the first. Buchenberg told him the same.

Then Wenk thought it time to call up Schachen. He gave directions to await the arrival of the two cars and then take action according to the plan arranged. The man whom it was above all important to secure would probably be in the uniform of a Munich constable, and they were not to be misled by this, for it would be Mabuse.

“Now we have him at last,” said Wenk jubilantly, as he received one communication after another, all of them proving that Schachen was the destination aimed at.

Place after place stood out on the map to Wenk, and through the night the villages and tiny towns called to him and ranged themselves on his side. He bound them together with phantom threads, reaching to the very limits of the Empire. He wrung the secret of the broad highroad out of it in the darkness, and the highroad knew nothing of its revelation. With one small lever he held the long, unending avenue, shrouded in darkness, in the hollow of his hand. The forces he had disposed were obedient to him, their general.

“Hergatz” rang on the telephone, and the sound of its bell seemed to his ears as intimate as if it were his own name being called.

“Yes,” he said, “it is the State Attorney, Wenk, speaking from Munich.

“A little open car has just gone by very rapidly in the Lindau direction. Two persons were in it, but not clearly recognized.”

“Thank you. Hold on a minute. There will be a second car through.”

Wenk waited, hearing in the suspended lines all the sounds occurring through the night between Munich and a little place like Hergatz, which he had never yet visited.

“Are you still connected?” he asked after a while.

“Yes, sir.”

“Hasn’t the second car come through?”

“Not yet, sir.”

After a time he inquired again, and once more he was told No.

A quarter of an hour later he rang up Hergatz again, and the official said that no second car had been seen.

Wenk opened out the map again and made a feverish search. Yes: Buchenberg--Isny--Gestratz--Opfenbach ... there was Hergatz! And behind Isny there was a highroad leading to Wangen and the Würtemberg district, or on the left another leading to Austria.

He rang up Wangen, but there was no answer. He repeated the call, and after storming for ten minutes he tried again, but still in vain. He had left Wangen out of his reckoning and made no plans concerning it, and in the direction of Austria he could give no orders, for the power of his lever did not extend so far. A car had disappeared from his ken; a car had been stolen from him in the night, snatched away in the darkness from the strange, unfriendly, gloom-surrounded streets.

And then he thought again that the large car might have had a breakdown. Yes, it must have been so, and that was why the smaller car had two people in it, when there was only one at the previous stage. This new circumstance need not worry him. His luck was not going to desert him: he trusted to it, and it would not fail.

He rang up Schachen. “There will probably be only one car. Let it arrive, and then wait twenty minutes to see whether the other one comes, and surround the villa on all sides. Then deliver your blow, as hard as you can!”

Scarcely had he finished speaking when the telephone rang once more, and the last stage--the Enisweiler railway-station--was heard speaking. A small, open car had turned off the Lindau-Friedrichshafen road, and was rapidly approaching Schachen. Two people were in it.

It was all complete! Wenk himself could do nothing more now. He would have to wait. Perhaps in a few moments now the fight on the lake-side which his tactics had prepared might be going on. He ordered them not to wait for the second car, but to enter the villa immediately after the arrival of the occupants of the first one, to seize and handcuff them, extinguish the lights, and wait a full hour for the second one. He looked at his watch, and laid it on the table before him. It was now 3.18 a.m.

He felt a twitching in the muscles of hands and feet and a throbbing in his brain. It seemed as if a whirlwind of pain were rising from his hips to his head, remaining there a while, and then taking the same direction again and again, times without number.

XVIII

Spoerri had fetched the Countess from the villa in the western suburbs, which she had occupied but half an hour, and hurried off with her in the car. Mabuse, in his light little two-seater, had caught up the heavier car between Kaufbeuren and Günzburg, and both drove on without stopping. This had all been arranged between them long before. Where the road to Wangen diverged from the Lindau road, the large car ahead came to a standstill, and the little car drove close up. The Countess was transferred; Mabuse drove on, and Spoerri took the road leading to Austria.

Mabuse had arranged that at this point their roads should separate. Spoerri should reach Switzerland by way of the Rhine. Each of them must leave an address in Zürich with Dr. Ebenhügel, who could then exchange them. Mabuse, with the Countess, would drive to the Villa Elise, where George, who had been instructed by pigeon-post, would be waiting with the chest containing the securities and the jewels Mabuse would take with him on his flight. Then the three of them would immediately cross the lake to Luxburg, where a motor would be in waiting, and proceed along the Romanshorn main road to Zürich. There would be a brief stop at Zürich for the transaction of business.

It was likely that the authorities in Bavaria would ask the Swiss ones to search for the fugitives, and therefore Mabuse wanted to make his stay in Switzerland as brief as possible, and to push on to the Italian frontier. He had had passes for himself and the Countess prepared in a Portuguese surname. An Italian official had been bribed, and by his help all difficulties disappeared as chaff before the wind.

The Countess sat at the back of the car, behind its high body. In front of her Mabuse, sitting at the wheel, seemed like some monumental image. In the uncertain light the outlines of his powerful figure stood out with ghostly effect. There was not the slightest movement to be seen, and from her seat behind he looked like a block of granite, seen standing alone in a meadow.

They sped by highways, villages, hamlets, and then the waters of the lake gleamed in the night. A few lights at intervals on its shores, shapes appearing and disappearing in the darkness, dimly suggesting human beings, a change in the air one breathed ... two villages appearing to float like illuminated ships upon the water ... there was Switzerland already.

Lindau lay to the side, and their car was now racing along roads bordered by country villas. And then came the last minute. The car bounded across the track to the Enisweiler station, and rushed forward to the Villa Elise. At the first glance Mabuse’s sharp eyes saw that the gates opening on to the drive stood wide open.

The pigeon-post had arrived safely and in good time then. He felt as if the impetuous haste with which he had driven hither in the darkness had yielded him a fresh sensation. It was now just before 3.30 a.m., and he kept his senses constantly on the alert without slackening his speed. When he was about to turn into the drive, he pressed the brakes hard for a moment before allowing the car to run its course; it held up for an instant, then, veering round, went straight through the gates and turned towards the garden.

Just then he felt something spring on to the car. On the clutch side, springing over the door, a form squeezed down on the outer side of Mabuse. Two hands covered his own, snatched the steering-gear from him, and a wild, hoarse, impressive voice whispered, “Doctor, I’m here: it’s George. Give me the wheel. We are surrounded. Straight forward into the lake....”

Mabuse yielded the wheel and let go the brakes. Under its new guide the car dashed ahead, thundered round the grey walls of the villa, abruptly turned a corner, got on to a grass-plot, and raced frantically across it, along the sloping gravel patch to the wall which divided the lake from the garden above. Through the gate in the wall it leaped like a wild horse and then clattered down the inclined wooden footway, the boards thundering beneath it. A moment later its nose was in the water and the lake hissing around it.

George leant forward as quick as lightning and gripped levers, Mabuse helping him. The night re-echoed the Countess’s cry, and then the vehicle, tottering slightly at first, but slowly righting itself, went onward over the surface of the water.

“Splendid!” cried George. “It is working like magic!”

This car was an invention of his own. It could be driven straight from the highroad into the water without stopping, and a couple of levers turned it at once into a motor-boat.

“It is the pigeons that have done the mischief,” said George, when he had gained thorough control of his vessel. “After they arrived in the dark, about an hour ago, I seemed to hear whispering voices behind a shrubbery. I looked very carefully round, and thought I noticed a movement going all round the park. In one place, and then twenty paces further on, and then twenty paces beyond that again, in a circle, the whole way round, so then I knew we were surrounded. However, I managed to get to the gate leading to the garden without being seen. It took me fifty minutes to do the hundred yards. If we had not had this car, we should now be sitting handcuffed inside the Villa Elise.”

The constables, who had distributed themselves with all possible precautions about the villa, and had taken four hours to complete the ring around it, one after another taking up his position, had heard the car thundering along through the silent night. They lay in tense expectation at their posts, awaiting the whistle which should summon them to the house to fall upon the criminals.