“Exactly,” said Gonsalez with satisfaction. “You are beginning to understand the mentality of Oberzohn!”
III
The Vendetta
The man who that morning walked without announcement into Dr. Oberzohn’s office might have stepped from the pages of a catalogue of men’s fashions. He was, to the initiated eye, painfully new. His lemon gloves, his dazzling shoes, the splendour of his silk hat, the very correctness of his handkerchief display, would have been remarkable even in the Ascot paddock on Cup day. He was good-looking, smooth, if a trifle plump, of face, and he wore a tawny little moustache and a monocle. People who did not like Captain Monty Newton—and their names were many—said of him that he aimed at achieving the housemaid’s conception of a guardsman. They did not say this openly, because he was a man to be propitiated rather than offended. He had money, a place in the country, a house in Chester Square, and an assortment of cars. He was a member of several good clubs, the committees of which never discussed him without offering the excuse of wartime courtesies for his election. Nobody knew how he made his money, or, if it were inherited, whose heir he was. He gave extravagant parties, played cards well, and enjoyed exceptional luck, especially when he was the host and held the bank after one of the splendid dinners he gave in his Chester Square mansion.
“Good morning, Oberzohn—how is Smitts?”
It was his favourite jest, for there was no Smitts, and had been no Smitts in the firm since ’96.
The doctor, peering down at the telegram he was writing, looked up.
“Good morning, Captain Newton,” he said precisely.
Newton passed to the back of him and read the message he was writing. It was addressed to “Miss Alma Goddard, Heavytree Farm, Daynham, Gloucester,” and the wire ran:
“Have got the fine situation. Cannot expeditiously return tonight. I am sleeping at our pretty flat in Doughty Court. Do not come up until I send for you.—Miss Mirabelle Leicester.”
“She’s here, is she?” Captain Newton glanced at the laboratory door. “You’re not going to send that wire? ‘Miss Mirabelle Leicester!’ ‘Expeditiously return!’ She’d tumble it in a minute. Who is Alma Goddard?”
“The aunt,” said Oberzohn. “I did not intend the dispatching until you had seen it. My English is too correct.”
He made way for Captain Newton, who, having taken a sheet of paper from the rack on which to deposit with great care his silk hat, and having stripped his gloves and deposited them in his hat, sat down in the chair from which the older man had risen, pulled up the knees of his immaculate trousers, tore off the top telegraph form, and wrote under the address:
“Have got the job. Hooray! Don’t bother to come up, darling, until I am settled. Shall sleep at the flat as usual. Too busy to write. Keep my letters.—Mirabelle.”
“That’s real,” said Captain Newton, surveying his work with satisfaction. “Push it off.”
He got up and straddled his legs before the fire.
“The hard part of the job may be to persuade the lady to come to Chester Square,” he said.
“My own little house—” began Oberzohn.
“Would scare her to death,” said Newton with a loud laugh. “That dog-kennel! No, it is Chester Square or nothing. I’ll get Joan or one of the girls to drop in this afternoon and chum up with her. When does the Benguella arrive?”
“This afternoon: the person has booked rooms by radio at the Petworth Hotel.”
“Norfolk Street … humph! One of your men can pick him up and keep an eye on him. Lisa? So much the better. That kind of trash will talk for a woman. I don’t suppose he has seen a white woman in years. You ought to fire Villa—crude beast! Naturally the man is on his guard now.”
“Villa is the best of my men on the coast,” barked Oberzohn fiercely. Nothing so quickly touched the raw places of his amazing vanity as a reflection upon his organizing qualities.
“How is trade?” Captain Newton took a long ebony holder from his tail pocket, flicked out a thin platinum case and lit a cigarette in one uninterrupted motion.
“Bat!” When Dr. Oberzohn was annoyed the purity of his pronunciation suffered. “There is nothing but expense!”
Oberzohn & Smitts had once made an enormous income from the sale of synthetic alcohol. They were, amongst other things, coast traders. They bought rubber and ivory, paying in cloth and liquor. They sold arms secretly, organized tribal wars for their greater profit, and had financed at least two Portuguese revolutions nearer at home. And with the growth of their fortune, the activities of the firm had extended. Guns and more guns went out of Belgian and French workshops. To Kurdish insurrectionaries, to ambitious Chinese generals, to South American politicians, planning to carry their convictions into more active fields. There was no country in the world that did not act as host to an O. & S. agent—and agents can be very expensive. Just now the world was alarmingly peaceful. A revolution had failed most dismally in Venezuela, and Oberzohn & Smitts had not been paid for two shiploads of lethal weapons ordered by a general who, two days after the armaments were landed, had been placed against an adobe wall and incontinently shot to rags by the soldiers of the Government against which he was in rebellion.
“But that shall not matter.” Oberzohn waved bad trade from the considerable factors of life. “This shall succeed: and then I shall be free to well punish—”
“To punish well,” corrected the purist, stroking his moustache. “Don’t split your infinitives, Eruc—it’s silly. You’re thinking of Manfred and Gonsalez and Poiccart? Leave them alone. They are nothing!”
“Nothing!” roared the doctor, his sallow face instantly distorted with fury. “To leave them alone, is it? Of my brother what? Of my brother in heaven, sainted martyr … !”
He spun round, gripped the
