“A large covered car, travelling about eighty kilometres an hour, has just passed, and taken the Kempten road.”
It was now 2:25 a.m. Wenk began rapidly to make calculations as to the speed of the car, but just then Buchloe rang up again: “A second car has just come through, a small, open car with one person in it!” Ten minutes later Kaufbeuren gave the same report.
“They are escaping in sections. The second car is going faster. Mabuse must be in that one, and his accomplices in the first,” thought Wenk.
From Obergünzburg he had the announcement of both cars in the one communication, for the second went through just as the official had informed him about the first. Buchenberg told him the same.
Then Wenk thought it time to call up Schachen. He gave directions to await the arrival of the two cars and then take action according to the plan arranged. The man whom it was above all important to secure would probably be in the uniform of a Munich constable, and they were not to be misled by this, for it would be Mabuse.
“Now we have him at last,” said Wenk jubilantly, as he received one communication after another, all of them proving that Schachen was the destination aimed at.
Place after place stood out on the map to Wenk, and through the night the villages and tiny towns called to him and ranged themselves on his side. He bound them together with phantom threads, reaching to the very limits of the Empire. He wrung the secret of the broad highroad out of it in the darkness, and the highroad knew nothing of its revelation. With one small lever he held the long, unending avenue, shrouded in darkness, in the hollow of his hand. The forces he had disposed were obedient to him, their general.
Hergatz rang on the telephone, and the sound of its bell seemed to his ears as intimate as if it were his own name being called.
“Yes,” he said, “it is the State Attorney, Wenk, speaking from Munich.
“A little open car has just gone by very rapidly in the Lindau direction. Two persons were in it, but not clearly recognized.”
“Thank you. Hold on a minute. There will be a second car through.”
Wenk waited, hearing in the suspended lines all the sounds occurring through the night between Munich and a little place like Hergatz, which he had never yet visited.
“Are you still connected?” he asked after a while.
“Yes, sir.”
“Hasn’t the second car come through?”
“Not yet, sir.”
After a time he inquired again, and once more he was told No.
A quarter of an hour later he rang up Hergatz again, and the official said that no second car had been seen.
Wenk opened out the map again and made a feverish search. Yes: Buchenberg—Isny—Gestratz—Opfenbach … there was Hergatz! And behind Isny there was a highroad leading to Wangen and the Würtemberg district, or on the left another leading to Austria.
He rang up Wangen, but there was no answer. He repeated the call, and after storming for ten minutes he tried again, but still in vain. He had left Wangen out of his reckoning and made no plans concerning it, and in the direction of Austria he could give no orders, for the power of his lever did not extend so far. A car had disappeared from his ken; a car had been stolen from him in the night, snatched away in the darkness from the strange, unfriendly, gloom-surrounded streets.
And then he thought again that the large car might have had a breakdown. Yes, it must have been so, and that was why the smaller car had two people in it, when there was only one at the previous stage. This new circumstance need not worry him. His luck was not going to desert him: he trusted to it, and it would not fail.
He rang up Schachen. “There will probably be only one car. Let it arrive, and then wait twenty minutes to see whether the other one comes, and surround the villa on all sides. Then deliver your blow, as hard as you can!”
Scarcely had he finished speaking when the telephone rang once more, and the last stage—the Enisweiler railway-station—was heard speaking. A small, open car had turned off the Lindau-Friedrichshafen road, and was rapidly approaching Schachen. Two people were in it.
It was all complete! Wenk himself could do nothing more now. He would have to wait. Perhaps in a few moments now the fight on the lakeside which his tactics had prepared might be going on. He ordered them not to wait for the second car, but to enter the villa immediately after the arrival of the occupants of the first one, to seize and handcuff them, extinguish the lights, and wait a full hour for the second one. He looked at his watch, and laid it on the table before him. It was now 3:18 a.m.
He felt a twitching in the muscles of hands and feet and a throbbing in his brain. It seemed as if a whirlwind of pain were rising from his hips to his head, remaining there a while, and then taking the same direction again and again, times without number.
XVIII
Spoerri had fetched the Countess from the villa in the western suburbs, which she had occupied but half an hour, and hurried off with her in the car. Mabuse, in his light little two-seater, had caught up the heavier car between Kaufbeuren and Günzburg, and both drove on without stopping. This had all been arranged between them long before. Where the road to Wangen diverged from the Lindau road, the large car ahead came to a standstill, and the little car drove close up. The Countess was transferred; Mabuse drove on, and Spoerri took the road leading to Austria.
Mabuse had arranged that at this point their roads should separate. Spoerri should reach Switzerland by way of the Rhine. Each of them must
