'You may think it a rather long one, Mr. Levy.'
'Never mind; you say what you want.'
'Leave that money of yours on the mortgage with Mr. Garland; forgive him his other debt as you hope to be forgiven; and either that letter shall be in your hands, or I'll be in the hands of the police, before a week is up!'
Spoken from man to man with equal austerity and resolution, yet in a voice persuasive and conciliatory rather than arbitrary or dictatorial, the mere form and manner of this quixotic undertaking thrilled all my fibres in defiance of its sense. It was like the blare of bugles in a dubious cause; one's blood responded before one's brain; and but for Raffles, little as his friends were to me, and much as I repudiated his sacrifices on their behalf, that very minute I might have led the first assault on their oppressor. In a sudden fury the savage had hurled his empty tumbler into the fireplace, and followed the crash with such a volley of abuse as I have seldom heard from human brute.
'I'm surprised at you, Mr. Levy,' said Raffles, contemptuously; 'if we copied your tactics we should throw you through that open window!'
And I stood by for my share in the deed.
'Yes! I know it'd pay you to break my neck,' retorted Levy. 'You'd rather swing than do time, wouldn't you?'
'And you prefer the other alternative,' said Raffles, 'to loosing your grip upon a man who's done you no harm whatever! In interest alone he's almost repaid all you lent him in the first instance; you've first-class security for the rest; yet you must ruin him to revenge yourself upon us. On us, mark you! It's against us you've got your grievance, not against old Garland or his son. You've lost sight of that fact. That little trick this morning was our doing entirely. Why don't you take it out of us? Why refuse a fair offer to spite people who have done you no harm?'
'It's not a fair offer,' growled Levy. 'I made you the fair offer.'
But his rage had moderated; he was beginning to listen to Raffles and to reason, with however ill a grace. It was the very moment which Raffles was the very man to improve.
'Mr. Levy,' said he, 'do you suppose I care whether you hold your tongue or not on a matter of mere suspicion, which you can't support by a grain of evidence? You lose a piece of jewellery abroad; you recover it intact; and after many days you get the bright idea that I'm the culprit because I happen to have been staying in your hotel at the time. It never occurred to you there or then, though you interviewed the gentleman face to face, as you were constantly interviewing me. But as soon as I borrow some money from you, here in London in the ordinary way, you say I must be the man who borrowed Mrs. Levy's necklace in that extraordinary way at Carlsbad! I should say it to the marines, Mr. Levy, if I were you; they're the only force that are likely to listen to you.'
'I do say it, all the same; and what's more you don't deny it. If you weren't the man you wouldn't be so ready for another game like it now.'
'Ready for it?' cried Raffles, more than ready for an undeniable point. 'I'm always your man for a new sensation, Mr. Levy, and for years I've taken an academic interest in the very fine art of burglary; isn't that so, Bunny?'
'I've often heard you say so,' I replied without mishap.
'In these piping times,' continued Raffles, 'it's about the one exciting and romantic career open to us. If it were not so infernally dishonest I should have half a mind to follow it myself. And here you come and put up a crib for me to crack in the best interests of equity and justice; not to enrich the wicked cracksman, but to restore his rightful property to the honest financier; a sort of teetotal felony—the very ginger-ale of crime! Is that a beverage to refuse—a chance to miss—a temptation to resist? Yet the risks are just as great as if it were a fine old fruity felony; you can't expect me to run them for nothing, or even for their own exciting sake. You know my terms, Mr. Levy; if you don't accept them, it's already two in the morning, and I should like to get to bed before it's light.'
'And if I did accept them?' said Levy, after a considerable pause.
'The letter to which you attach such importance would most probably be in your possession by the beginning of next week.'
'And I should have to take my hands off a nice little property that has tumbled into them?'
'Only for a time,' said Raffles. 'On the other hand, you would be permanently out of danger of figuring in the dock on a charge of blackmail. And you know your profession isn't popular in the courts, Mr. Levy; it's in nearly as bad odour as the crime of blackmail!'
A singular docility had descended like a mantle upon Daniel Levy: no uncommon reaction in the case of very passionate men, and yet in this case ominous, sinister, and completely unconvincing so far as I personally was concerned. I longed to tell Raffles what I thought, to put him on his guard against his obvious superior in low cunning. But Raffles would not even catch my eye. And already he looked insanely pleased with himself and his apparent advantage.
'Will you give me until to-morrow morning?' said Levy, taking up his hat.
'If you mean the morning; by eleven I must be at Lord's.'
'Say ten o'clock in Jermyn Street?'
'It's a strange bargain, Mr. Levy. I should prefer to clinch it out of earshot of your clerks.'
'Then I will come here.'
'I shall be ready for you at ten.'
'And alone?'
There was a sidelong glance at me with the proviso.
'You shall search the premises yourself and seal up all the doors.'
'Meanwhile,' said Levy, putting on his hat, 'I shall think about it, but that's all. I haven't agreed yet, Mr. Raffles; don't you make too sure that I ever shall. I shall think about it—but don't you make too sure.'
He was gone like a lamb, this wild beast of five minutes back. Raffles showed him out, and down into the courtyard, and out again into Piccadilly. There was no question but that he was gone for good; back came Raffles, rubbing his hands for joy.
'A fine night, Bunny! A finer day to follow! But a nice, slow, wicket-keeper's wicket if ever Teddy had one in his life!'
I came to my point with all vehemence.
'Confound Teddy!' I cried from my heart. 'I should have thought you had run risks enough for his sake as it was!'
'How do you know it's for his sake—or anybody's?' asked Raffles, quite hotly. 'Do you suppose I want to be beaten by a brute like Levy, Garlands or no Garlands? Besides, there's far less risk in what I mean to do than in what I've been doing; at all events it's in my line.'
'It's not in your line,' I retorted, 'to strike a bargain with a swine who won't dream of keeping his side.'
'I shall make him,' said Raffles. 'If he won't do what I want he shan't have what he wants.'
'But how could you trust him to keep his word?'
'His word!' cried Raffles, in ironical echo. 'We shall have to carry matters far beyond his word, of course; deeds, not words, Bunny, and the deeds properly prepared by solicitors and executed by Dan Levy before he lays a finger on his own blackmailing letter. You remember old Mother Hubbard in our house at school? He's a little solicitor somewhere in the City; he'll throw the whole thing into legal shape for us, and ask no questions and tell no tales. You leave Mr. Shylock to me and Mother, and we'll bring him up to the scratch as he ought to go.'
There was no arguing with Raffles in such a mood; argue I did, but he paid no attention to what I said. He had unlocked a drawer in the bureau, and taken out a map that I had never seen before. I looked over his shoulder as he spread it out in the light of his reading-lamp. And it was a map of London capriciously sprinkled with wheels and asterisks of red ink; there was a finished wheel in Bond Street, another in Half-Moon Street, one on the site of Thornaby House, Park Lane, and others as remote as St. John's Wood and Peter Street, Campden Hill; the asterisks were fewer, and I have less reason to remember their latitude and longitude.
'What's this, A.J.?' I asked. 'It looks exactly like a war-map.'
'It is one, Bunny,' said he; 'it's the map of one man's war against the ordered forces of society. The spokes are only the scenes of future operations, but each finished wheel marks the field of some past engagement, in which you have usually been the one man's one and only accomplice.'
And he stooped and drew the neatest of blood-red asterisks at the southern extremity of Gray's Inn Square.
