CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE RAID
I suppose that at some time during his life every man who has anything of the boy left in him has thought that he would like to take a fling at the great adventure of Secret Service. I feel called upon to assure these aspirants that a comfortable armchair is the better choice.
Accident, or that Higher Power which the Arabs call Kismet, had cast me into the path of Edmond O’Shea. He had honoured me with his friendship, but had quite failed to recognize that I was a man of lesser stature than his own. Whilst granting every honour to marshal and statesman, personally I am disposed to believe that it was men such as O’Shea who steered the Allies to victory; and perhaps, hitherto, I had been inclined to look upon the Secret Service as a job for highbrows rather than for soldiers.
This error was to be corrected.
Conceive a large room filled with enemies of established order; fanatics, whose collected scruples would have left a thimble empty. Conceive that I and O’Shea, posing as members of their bloodthirsty organization, were amongst them as spies, pledged to bring about their ruin.
Now, conceive that a “Comrade,” who knows us and has fared ill at our hands, is suddenly announced.
Perhaps I shall be forgiven when I say that I remembered with gratitude how Edmond O’Shea had rallied a company of the Guards during the great retreat, how his presence of mind and consummate self-possession had helped historians to chronicle Cambrai with pride rather than with humility.
He edged up beside me. I saw him fumbling for his monocle and saw his change of expression when he realized that he had left it behind; then:
“Get near the door,” he murmured. “My fault, Decies, to have let you in for this. But I had hoped to learn things that police examination can never bring out.”
Macalister came in.
He was in dinner kit and he smoked a cigar which, to my disordered vision, appeared to be decorated with two bands. His superb self-possession was worthy of Tom Mix. He did not merely own the room; he possessed the property.
“Take the left,” said O’Shea.
Unerringly, instinctively, Macalister’s glance settled upon us at the moment of his entrance. He had advanced no more than one pace beyond the butler, and his mouth was agape for excited utterance, when O’Shea’s revolver had him covered.
Overwhelmed with a sense of utter unreality, I covered the group of four on my left which included the formidable Schmidt.
Glibly, as though born of long familiarity, the words leapt to my tongue:
“Hands up!”
The command was obeyed. And I have since thought, paradoxical though it may appear, that violent men, in these matters, are more tractable than men of peace. Assessing human life lightly, they credit the brain behind the gun with compunction no greater than their own.
“By God!” I heard Macalister say--and I hope I shall always find time to take off my hat to a good loser--“I had you wrong all along, Major!”
Schmidt looked dangerously ugly for a moment; then:
“Line up,” said O’Shea sharply. “Jump to it. Fall in on the left of Schmidt.”
Came inarticulate mutterings, but without other audible protest the group obeyed, forming a line having Schmidt at one end and the saturnine butler at the other.
“Now,” O’Shea continued, “if any man lowers his hands, I shall not argue with him. Decies, will you go down to the street door and whistle? Pass behind me. Keep a sharp look-out. I don’t know who is in the house.”
I obeyed, the sense of unreality prevailing. But I know I shall always remember that row of sullen-faced men with raised hands, who watched as I crossed behind O’Shea.
There was no one on the stairs, and no one in the long, glazed passage that led to the street. This gained, I ran the length of it, and throwing open the double doors beheld a seemingly deserted Porchester Terrace.
I whistled shrilly. The result was magical.
Springing from what hiding places I know not, men appeared running from right and left! This was the raid squad from Scotland Yard, and I realized that I was helping to mould history.
Our taximan, who was waiting on the other side of the street, and who had been peacefully smoking a cigarette, jumped down from his seat and watched the proceedings with an expression of stupefaction that was comic in its intensity.
Everything was carried out in a most orderly manner. The members of the Group were arrested without unnecessary fuss. The whole thing might have been “produced” by David Belasco. A six-seater car appeared from somewhere or another, in which the gang was canned as neatly as tinned sardines.
The police handled the job with such discretion that chance passers-by never dreamed that anything unusual was going forward. They do these raids much better on the screen.
Macalister was the last to come down from above, his cigar still held firmly between his teeth. He was unperturbed. Deportation was the worst he had to fear, and he knew it quite well. He was smiling slyly. He paused, looking hard at O’Shea and at myself.
“Listen,” he said, “you two boys have doubled on me pretty badly, but I don’t bear no malice.” His grammar at times revealed the influence of the Cubist school. “Zara is different, and he’s still loose. Take my tip and watch out for Zara. If he’s seeing red, don’t try to pet him. Good-night!”
He entered the car, urged by two detectives.
“Good-night,” murmured O’Shea thoughtfully, and turned to me.
“You know, Decies,” he went on, “if that man had had our advantages, he would have made a damned good sportsman.”
There were certain formalities to be attended to, and I suppose it was close upon two o’clock when O’Shea and I found ourselves outside my rooms. I suggested a doch-an’-dorris.
“If I were superstitious,” O’Shea declared, “I should refuse.”
He smiled, glancing up at the tall ladder beneath which we must walk to reach my door.
“Oh!” said I, “they are mending the roof, or something.”
“I suppose we might risk it,” he replied; and we went in.
The incident stuck in my mind, not so much because of any superstitious significance that I attached to it as because of what actually happened later.
O’Shea dropped on to the settee in my big room and sighed rather wearily as he watched me preparing drinks.
“You know, Decies,” said he, “I am both glad and sorry that this job is over. I have blundered through by sheer good luck. Without your aid, and the aid of someone else, I should have crashed badly.”
“Perhaps not,” I returned. “If you had not succeeded in one way, you might quite easily have found another.”
“Or I might not,” said he. “No. I am a poor policeman, and peace-time soldiering is no sort of game.”
“What do you mean, O’Shea?”
“I mean,” he replied, holding up to the light a glass that I had handed to him, “that I am infernally restless.”
I sighed as loudly as he had done and stooped over the syphon. Then:
“Decies,” said O’Shea, “we live in a generation that grows up very early.”
“We do,” I agreed.
“I should like to talk to you seriously. There are many men I have known longer, but none I could sooner trust. Yet in this matter somehow I don’t feel…”
“Yes?” I prompted.
“Well, I don’t feel quite at liberty to discuss it with you.”
There was a silence that might have been awkward. O’Shea was watching me almost pathetically; and:
“I know what you want to talk about,” I said. “Nanette is a witch. But there is only one man in the world for her now. It might be fair, though, to give her a year to think it over.”
“You don’t doubt _my_ attitude in the matter,” O’Shea murmured.
“No,” I replied, “I know it.”
He looked at me very fixedly, when:
“Coo-ooh!” I heard.
O’Shea’s expression changed; and, turning, I crossed to an open window, looking down into the street.
Standing just in front of the ladder which disfigured the front of the premises, was Nanette, staring upward. A two-seater with several people in it stood at the curb.
“Hello, Nanette,” I called.
“Saw your light,” she shouted, “as we were passing. May we come up, or are you going to bed?”
“No,” I replied, and hesitated to tell her what I knew she hoped. “Come right up and bring your friends. I have only just got in.”
“Right-oh!” she cried.