R. smiled with faint irony. He was certainly in a good humour this morning.
“But how did you get hold of all these letters?”
“How did I get hold of them? How do you imagine? Owing to her Italian nationality Giulia Lazzari was eventually expelled from Germany. She was put over the Dutch frontier. Having an engagement to dance in England she was granted a visa and”—R. looked up a date among the papers—“and on the twenty-fourth of October last sailed from Rotterdam to Harwich. Since then she has danced in London, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other places. She was arrested a fortnight ago at Hull.”
“What for?”
“Espionage. She was transferred to London and I went to see her myself at Holloway.”
Ashenden and R. looked at one another for a moment without speaking and it may be that each was trying his hardest to read the other’s thoughts. Ashenden was wondering where the truth in all this lay and R. wondered how much of it he could advantageously tell him.
“How did you get on to her?”
“I thought it odd that the Germans should allow her to dance quite quietly in Berlin for weeks and then for no particular reason decide to put her out of the country. It would be a good introduction for espionage. And a dancer who was not too careful of her virtue might make opportunities of learning things that it would be worth somebody’s while in Berlin to pay a good price for. I thought it might be as well to let her come to England and see what she was up to. I kept track of her. I discovered that she was sending letters to an address in Holland two or three times a week and two or three times a week was receiving answers from Holland. Hers were written in a queer mixture of French, German and English; she speaks English a little and French quite well, but the answers were written entirely in English; it was good English, but not an Englishman’s English, flowery and rather grandiloquent; I wondered who was writing them. They seemed to be just ordinary love-letters, but they were by way of being rather hot stuff. It was plain enough that they were coming from Germany and the writer was neither English, French nor German. Why did he write in English? The only foreigners who know English better than any continental language are Orientals, and not Turks or Egyptians either; they know French. A Jap would write English and so would an Indian. I came to the conclusion that Giulia’s lover was one of that gang of Indians that were making trouble for us in Berlin. I had no idea it was Chandra Lal till I found the photograph.”
“How did you get that?”
“She carried it about with her. It was a pretty good bit of work, that. She kept it locked up in her trunk, with a lot of theatrical photographs, of comic singers and clowns and acrobats; it might easily have passed for the picture of some music-hall artiste in his stage dress. In fact, later, when she was arrested and asked who the photograph represented she said she didn’t know, it was an Indian conjuror who had given it her and she had no idea what his name was. Anyhow I put a very smart lad on the job and he thought it queer that it should be the only photograph in the lot that came from Calcutta. He noticed that there was a number on the back, and he took it, the number, I mean; of course the photograph was replaced in the box.”
“By the way, just as a matter of interest how did your very smart lad get at the photograph at all?”
R.’s eyes twinkled.
“That’s none of your business. But I don’t mind telling you that he was a good-looking boy. Anyhow it’s of no consequence. When we got the number of the photograph we cabled to Calcutta and in a little while I received the grateful news that the object of Giulia’s affections was no less a person than the incorruptible Chandra Lal. Then I thought it my duty to have Giulia watched a little more carefully. She seemed to have a sneaking fondness for naval officers. I couldn’t exactly blame her for that; they are attractive, but it is unwise for ladies of easy virtue and doubtful nationality to cultivate their society in wartime. Presently I got a very pretty little body of evidence against her.”
“How was she getting her stuff through?”
“She wasn’t getting it through. She wasn’t trying to. The Germans had turned her out quite genuinely; she wasn’t working for them, she was working for Chandra. After her engagement was through in England she was planning to go to Holland again and meet him. She wasn’t very clever at the work; she was nervous, but it looked easy; no one seemed to bother about her, it grew rather exciting; she was getting all sorts of interesting information without any risk. In one of her letters she said: ‘I have so much to tell you, mon petit chou darling, and what you will be extrêmement intéressé to know,’ and she underlined the French words.”
R. paused and rubbed his hands together. His tired face bore a look of devilish enjoyment of
