Part 18
Just an hour before there had been a slight interruption. A bird had suddenly flown through a tree and disappeared beneath the eaves. One of the constables close to the house had noticed it. He had seen the bird fluttering about the roof and then suddenly disappearing without having flown away elsewhere. His conjecture that it was a carrier-pigeon was soon confirmed by the appearance of a second bird, which also disappeared in the eaves. The constable stole softly to the inspector and announced what he had seen and suspected. The latter saw at once what this might indicate. Poldringer had received warning from Munich, from the fugitives. He therefore ordered a constable to proceed with the utmost caution from one outpost to another and relate the fact, saying that those in the house had probably been warned, and that they must redouble their precautions and at the same time be prepared for stronger resistance.
The movements of the constable as he went from post to post had put George on his guard.... Mabuse’s car reached the grounds, and the inspector’s quivering fingers were already raising the whistle to his mouth. At the moment when the occupants of the car should have left it and be about to close the door of the house behind them, he meant to give the signal. Two detectives were lying concealed in the shrubs to the left of the front door, and could reach it before the key was even turned in the lock, but the inspector gave no sign.
The car rushed round the corner, not stopping at the door. It tore frantically round the house as if about to rush pell-mell into the Lake. The inspector, forgetting all caution in the excitement and disappointment of the moment, sprang forward after it, and saw that it actually did disappear in the water. Like a sinister amphibian it leaped over the low wall, thundered down the wooden footway and sprang into the Lake.
Then at last he blew his whistle, and the posse of constables came running from all directions, knocking up against each other.
“To the shore!” shouted the sergeant.
There was no car to be seen anywhere. About two hundred yards from the shore the engines of a motor-boat could be heard in the darkness. They searched beneath the roadway, up and down the lake-side, dazed and disappointed, but in vain.
Then at last the inspector realized what must have happened. The unceasing efforts, strain and hopes of an entire month had come to nought. His prize capture had escaped him. He was so absolutely disheartened by this maddening thought that he unconsciously pressed to his temples the revolver that he held ready-cocked in his hand, as if his very life must be forfeit through the failure of his enterprise. A moment later he lowered the revolver, and the ball, singeing his hair, fell harmless into the night. Upon the Lake a light shone out. Further on, another. The shot had aroused the attention of the spy-boats.
Not till then did the inspector remember these allies, whom in his first access of despair he had completely forgotten. “Bring Morse lamps!” he cried. How _could_ he have overlooked the motor-boats?
Immediately flashes were sent to the two boats: “The fugitives have escaped, and are on a motor-boat on the lake.”
“All right,” was flashed back, and a few minutes later powerful searchlights were directed towards the lake. It was not long before they had located the escaping boat. But they had also warned it, for at that very moment it was about to run into them.
* * * * *
Mabuse and George were at once aware of their danger. The two searchlights advancing on them seemed like the open jaws of a monster approaching to devour them. George steered to larboard, and the boat settled its course in a new direction. The water streamed over the rudder and gleamed about them, frothing in the darkness. “There is only one way,” said Mabuse in a low voice, “the Rhine estuary.”
He considered the matter coolly and boldly. He was once more in a situation quite familiar to him, because he had lived through and overcome it countless times in imagination. On the German shore, whither they could easily return, everyone would be on the lookout for them. On the Austrian shore there was only Bregenz, shown up clearly by the searchlights. Between these two regions there was a large and very sparsely inhabited territory around the Rhine estuary. In twenty minutes they could reach land and then make their choice between Switzerland and Austria. If they were lucky enough to run their vehicle on to land again as easily as they had run it into the water, they would have sufficient start to make their escape certain.
One of the pursuing boats, however, lay right out in the lake. It seemed to guess at the fugitives’ intentions, for it did not follow them in a direct line, but remained to starboard, keeping abreast of them near the Swiss shore, as if awaiting a favourable opportunity to intercept them.
Perhaps it only wanted to keep between them and Switzerland. The searchlights from both boats met above Mabuse’s. The first faint traces of daylight were already appearing. Firing was heard behind them. One of the boats now followed in their wake, but at a little distance to the rear. The two pursuing boats exchanged Morse signals with each other.
For a time George steered a zigzag course, the vehicle swaying hither and thither with the constantly changing displacement of the rudder. George wanted to make it appear that he was trying to break through to the Swiss shore, but he, too, was excited by the searchlights. He did not succeed in getting out of their glare for more than a few moments at a time. The boat which was astern only went so slowly now because it was solely concerned with keeping them under view and cutting off their retreat to the German shore. The Morse signals used were secret ones, and neither Mabuse nor George could make them out although, through their frequent trips by water, they were fairly well acquainted with such things.
Suddenly the boat to the starboard side of them extinguished its searchlight. Above the infernal noise made by their own motor they could hear the engine of this boat ahead, its sound growing shriller and nearer. Their own motor was exerting its utmost pressure. The shooting had now ceased, and above the sounds made by their boat another noise could be heard. Mabuse bent forward towards it, listening with all his ears, the searchlight falling full upon him. He still wore the police uniform which had made his escape possible.
At first the Countess had lain in the boat half-conscious. The shots, the droning of the engines, the haste and excitement of the men beside her, had gradually awakened her, and she began to grasp what was happening. She, too, heard, above the throbbing of the engines, a second sound. She sat up, holding her head over the side whence it came, and listened intently.
“What is that?” she asked Mabuse, who was standing near, planted firmly on the deck with his back to the engine and appearing entirely at ease. He could be clearly seen in the searchlight with his hand on the gunwale, listening intently.
“Nothing!” he hissed; “be quiet!”
“What is it?” she asked again in a sharper tone, and there was something in the sound of her voice that had not been heard for a long time. It seemed as if a stone that had long lain at her heart were now being dissolved into a mass of pulp. To this feeling, still but half-conscious, she yielded herself more and more. By degrees she appeared to realize what was happening within her. Then, rising and standing in front of Mabuse, she suddenly cried out, “Now, at last....”
The sounds of the water and the night stole over her like a joy beyond bound or measure. Eagerly she absorbed with heart and mind the light, sweet rustle they made, and she perceived that every moment they became more pronounced. At last she understood. The pursuer was advancing rapidly upon them, and came ever nearer....
“What do you mean by that ‘at last’?” asked Mabuse roughly. “Sit down and keep quiet!”
“What is that sound we hear?” she said in a ringing voice.
“Death--perhaps!” answered Mabuse calmly.
“For _you_!” cried the woman facing him, above the swirling of the waters. “I shall be able to shake you off at last. I shall be saved from you. The werwolf will be caught, and your power over me and over others be at an end!”
“I will soon show you that,” said Mabuse, advancing and bending over her; and then what happened came so quickly that she could scarcely distinguish the movements.
“George!” called Mabuse, the one word only, and then he unfastened the police uniform which concealed his clothing and threw it towards George, who at once donned it and stood near the Countess, exposing himself to the searchlight, while Mabuse took his place at the wheel.
They heard a shout close to them. “Halt!” cried a voice from out the sounds her eager ears had been absorbing. “Halt!” A shot whizzed in the air, and an echo resounded.
George fired in return. The boat gave an upward lurch and then suddenly two high dams enclosed it. Where was the lake? Where was the wide expanse of night? There was a rustling sound, and a beating against the spring tides of the Rhine. The searchlight had disappeared, and a soft, warm mist covered the stream and the dams. They were smooth as railway lines, and a bridge lay diagonally above them. The throbbing of the engine resounded from its arched vault.
Then a sudden movement flung the Countess to the ground. The boat sprang up into the air with a loud report, but the woman was caught as she fell; she could feel herself lifted; someone held her, and ran swiftly with her; her cries were stifled, and a red mist swam before her eyes.
* * * * *
George lay on the shore, one arm broken. With the sound one he felt for the police helmet and crammed it down on his head. The fall had stunned him slightly, but he could have escaped; nevertheless, he lay still.
It was not long before he saw two revolvers levelled at him. Two electric torches glared before his eyes. “We’ve got the one in uniform!” said a voice. George kept quite quiet. He was carried from the land into a boat and fettered to a thwart. The engine started, and the boat drove across the lake back to Schachen.
The day was dawning when George reached the wooden landing-stage once more. They took him into the villa and locked him into a room with barred windows, out of which he could not escape, even had two men not been in charge of him.
The inspector said to himself, “Thank God, we have caught him at last, and in his police uniform too! thank God!”
* * * * *
At five o’clock that morning Wenk left Munich in a hydroplane, landing two hours later at Schachen. He flew up the stairs of the Villa Elise to reach the room where the imprisoned robber-king was waiting ... waiting for _him_, the conqueror!
“Here is Dr. Mabuse,” called out the inspector, advancing towards him. “We have him safe at last, thank God!”
Wenk, jubilant, victorious, and intoxicated with success, entered the room and saw the man in police uniform fast bound to his chair.
“Where is he?” he asked.
“There ... on that chair!”
Wenk looked at the man more closely. He knew it already: his quarry had escaped! Back into the endless, the dark and empty night, everything fell once more, and at first he could neither hear nor speak a word.
Suddenly the inspector said, “But that is Poldringer, the man we’ve been watching all these weeks!”
“Yes, that is Poldringer,” answered Wenk heavily. Mabuse had escaped.
XIX
Mabuse hastily carried the insensible woman from the bank of the Rhine channel to the nearest house. It was that of an osier-binder.
“We have had an accident,” said Mabuse, and then seated himself at the window to watch the approach.
When an hour had gone by thus, and the Countess opened her eyes again, Mabuse noticed that she started on recognizing him and turned away, overcome with dread. He went hastily towards her and, stooping down, he whispered, “We are saved! We are irrevocably bound together!”
The whispered words impressed her with a certain sense of comfort and security. She no longer withstood him, and soon sat up, the peasant’s wife promising to look after her.
Mabuse sought for the nearest village on the map. Then he went thither, in security, knowing that he was not being followed. George had remained as the victim of the pursuer’s vengeance, and he was saved. The other’s fate was due to the little trick of the police uniform.
The village was not more than twenty minutes’ distance, and in an inn he found a telephone. He ordered coffee, and then rang up Zürich. In half an hour’s time the call came through, and asking who was there, he was answered, “Dr. Ebenhügel, Zürich.”
“Has Spoerri arrived?” he inquired.
“Spoerri has just come: he is still here;” and Spoerri rushed to the telephone.
“Spoerri, I’ve had a misfortune. George is taken, but we have escaped. Bring the car here at once, and put in a travelling dress and coat for my wife. I shall expect you at 2 p.m. at the Au railway-station in the Rhine Valley.”
“Very good, sir,” replied Spoerri.
“I called her my wife, and said it quite coolly and intentionally,” mused Mabuse, dallying with the thought, which yet seemed to imply something like a fetter; but he dismissed the idea, saying, “She _is_ my wife, my own property!... It is true, she _is_ mine.”
* * * * *
Spoerri arrived punctually. “I shall drive you through the Engadine direct to the Italian frontier,” he said, when Mabuse had told him all that had occurred. But to that proposal Mabuse merely uttered one word: “No!”
“But, Doctor,” Spoerri pleaded, “you can’t remain in Switzerland. The Munich police have informed the authorities here of your movements. We shouldn’t get even as far as Toggeburg. It would be almost better to return to Germany.”
“And that’s exactly what I mean to do! Spoerri, from this day forward the State Attorney’s life stands under my protection. You are to revoke my earlier orders to the Removal Committee at once.”
“You are going in for a remarkable friendship, Doctor,” tittered Spoerri.
“He is to remain absolutely under my protection!” repeated Mabuse, and they drove through the flat marsh-land back to the peasant’s hut.
The Countess got into the car, and they were soon hastening to the Austrian frontier. “What sort of passports have you for us?” asked Mabuse.
“Swiss ones: please take them,” answered Spoerri, handing over documents with many visas, calculated to arouse a confidence which was constantly abused yet remained unconscious of the fact.
Three hours later the car was driving along the highroad leading from Bregenz to Kempten. It drove past a house from which, the night before, a message had been flashed through to Munich telling of its passing, and went towards Würtemberg. The travellers spent the night in a village south of Stuttgart.
In the evening Mabuse went to Spoerri’s room, and said to him: “There is just one thing left for me to do in Germany, in Europe ... and that is to get hold of that lawyer, the State Attorney, Wenk, alive. I want him _alive_, mark you! as much alive as a fly under a glass. The Countess and I are staying here to-morrow. You will go to Stuttgart and buy, whatever the price may be, a two-seater aeroplane. We are quite safe here. The landlord did not even register us, so if the police appear he is bound to hold his tongue, or else he will be fined. Have you any brandy?”
Spoerri shrank back in dismay; his martyrdom was about to begin again. Nevertheless, he had smuggled three bottles out of Switzerland.
“Of course you have some brandy!” said Mabuse, before he could even answer.
Mabuse drank from the travelling cup which he always carried in his pocket, and Spoerri had to fill the toothglass on the washhandstand.
Mabuse was longing for a carouse, a really heavy carouse which should seize him by the throat and press him under the water, as if he were being given a millstone for a swimming belt. When he had emptied the second bottle, he saw that he was not likely to get his wish.
“Haven’t you any more?” he asked.
“That’s all there is. I couldn’t venture to bring any more across the frontier.”
Mabuse laughed satirically. “That’s fine. Here is Spoerri, who has brought three railway vans full of salvarsan, two of cocaine, enough prostitutes to fill three brothels across the frontier, yet he hasn’t enough courage to bring more than three bottles of brandy! Empty your glass into mine. Don’t your wages include the getting of brandy?”
When the third bottle had been emptied Mabuse, clear-headed as ever, but more hot-blooded, went back to the room next his own, occupied by the Countess. He was out of sorts, and resembled an engine that had been run too fast, so that the heat had covered the glowing cylinders with vapour, and they could not be set in motion.
He approached the Countess’s bed. “You and I had come to an understanding together. You have broken through it: you were ready to betray me!”
“I was!” said the Countess in a low voice.
Then ungovernable fury seemed to possess the man. He snatched her from the bed, and as he seized her, lifted her high in the air as if he were going to dash her in pieces against the wall like rotting timber. At that moment he hated her; she was the embodiment of all his weaknesses. For ten long minutes, when the patrol-boat was on their track, the power of his will over her had ceased, and now, when he wanted to destroy her and would have dashed against the wall the head that defied him, he could not do it.
With a low cry the woman found herself held on high, and realized the strength of arm and indomitable will-power of the being to whom she was secretly--and yet irrevocably--bound. She longed for death. Softly she repeated a fragment or two of a prayer learnt in her childhood’s days, and she knew that if she were to die now she would draw this man also to his death.
But Mabuse, conscious of his power over the woman he held aloft in his grasp, suddenly came to himself again. Once more he realized that he was alive, was safe, and felt a fierce joy in the knowledge and in his possession of her. Almost gently he laid her down, and the poor woman, condemned afresh to a life of humiliation and degradation, was at the mercy of the tyrant who dominated her, and from whose power there was now no escape. She lay wide-eyed and tearless till the dawn, her only desire for floods and floods of tears wherein to drown for ever the misery of her existence.
* * * * *
On the morning of the following day Mabuse flew with her from Stuttgart to Berlin.
There, caught in the toils of the mighty city, among those whose instincts he developed and used to his own ends, he lived, bent on one aim alone. One idea presented itself with ever-increasing intensity, one vision swam ever before his eyes, intoxicating him with a fury of desire. His phantasies, his strivings, and the goal before him gained their force because born of the strongest impulse within him, his lust for power!
There was one man in the world who had set himself to follow his path, had discovered him in his own territory, and dislodged him from his fortress. There was one alone who had dared to disturb his plans, to oblige him to undertake a flight in which his life had been in danger. It was due to this man’s efforts that the State had interfered with his schemes for getting rid of those whom his imperious will desired to remove from his path.
From the woman who had first moved him to the very depths of his being he had wrested all the power of will with which her personality resisted him. It was his pride to know that. He had taken her being, her beauty, her independence, her exclusiveness, and grappled them to himself, and this work of his was the very highest spiritual expression of his powers and capabilities. But between him and her there was a period of ten minutes in which she had escaped his domination, in which he had to renounce his claim to this symbol of his superhuman force. And that period of time, that barren, useless part of his life, he owed to the power of this one man.
His flight from Germany with this woman and his journey across the Atlantic had been so minutely prepared in all its details that only death could intervene. His empire of Citopomar, with its virgin forests, tigers, rattlesnakes, where death lay in wait at every moment, its mountains and its waterfalls and its rare exotic growths, was waiting for him, waiting to set him free from Europe, to offer him a new life. Any day might see him crowned as emperor.
But he would eat of Dead Sea fruit for the rest of his life, did he take possession of his realm before he had seized upon this man with all the full force of his lust for power and his deadly hatred, had held him within his grasp and annihilated him. Between him and Wenk it was a struggle for existence, and he could know no peace while the other lived.
Once, when the thoughts surging within him would no longer be controlled, he replied to the Countess’s inquiry as to when they would leave Germany, “I shall catch him alive. I shall catch him like a bird in the snare. He will flutter helpless into my hands. Not till then do I go.”
She turned away afraid, guessing the man he meant. Since that moment of her resistance and hope of escape she seemed to have become more subdued than ever, falling deeper under his demon spell. She did not venture to oppose or question more.
Mabuse’s enterprise with regard to Wenk developed slowly. But steadily and surely the net around him was tightening....
* * * * *
Wenk was in Munich again. George had been imprisoned there, and he played the rôle of a deaf mute. No one had heard a word from him since his arrest. He was confronted with the constables and tradespeople from Schachen who had seen him for many weeks, with the young fellows whom he had tried to hand over to the Foreign Legion, all of whom instantly recognized him, but he did not utter a word.
One morning they found he had hanged himself with his braces. He had written one word on the wall of his cell, the word that one of Napoleon’s generals had made renowned after he had lost the battle of Waterloo.