On the morning of the following day Mabuse flew with her from Stuttgart to Berlin.
There, caught in the toils of the mighty city, among those whose instincts he developed and used to his own ends, he lived, bent on one aim alone. One idea presented itself with ever-increasing intensity, one vision swam ever before his eyes, intoxicating him with a fury of desire. His fantasies, his strivings, and the goal before him gained their force because born of the strongest impulse within him, his lust for power!
There was one man in the world who had set himself to follow his path, had discovered him in his own territory, and dislodged him from his fortress. There was one alone who had dared to disturb his plans, to oblige him to undertake a flight in which his life had been in danger. It was due to this man’s efforts that the State had interfered with his schemes for getting rid of those whom his imperious will desired to remove from his path.
From the woman who had first moved him to the very depths of his being he had wrested all the power of will with which her personality resisted him. It was his pride to know that. He had taken her being, her beauty, her independence, her exclusiveness, and grappled them to himself, and this work of his was the very highest spiritual expression of his powers and capabilities. But between him and her there was a period of ten minutes in which she had escaped his domination, in which he had to renounce his claim to this symbol of his superhuman force. And that period of time, that barren, useless part of his life, he owed to the power of this one man.
His flight from Germany with this woman and his journey across the Atlantic had been so minutely prepared in all its details that only death could intervene. His empire of Citopomar, with its virgin forests, tigers, rattlesnakes, where death lay in wait at every moment, its mountains and its waterfalls and its rare exotic growths, was waiting for him, waiting to set him free from Europe, to offer him a new life. Any day might see him crowned as emperor.
But he would eat of Dead Sea fruit for the rest of his life, did he take possession of his realm before he had seized upon this man with all the full force of his lust for power and his deadly hatred, had held him within his grasp and annihilated him. Between him and Wenk it was a struggle for existence, and he could know no peace while the other lived.
Once, when the thoughts surging within him would no longer be controlled, he replied to the Countess’s inquiry as to when they would leave Germany, “I shall catch him alive. I shall catch him like a bird in the snare. He will flutter helpless into my hands. Not till then do I go.”
She turned away afraid, guessing the man he meant. Since that moment of her resistance and hope of escape she seemed to have become more subdued than ever, falling deeper under his demon spell. She did not venture to oppose or question more.
Mabuse’s enterprise with regard to Wenk developed slowly. But steadily and surely the net around him was tightening. …
Wenk was in Munich again. George had been imprisoned there, and he played the role of a deaf mute. No one had heard a word from him since his arrest. He was confronted with the constables and tradespeople from Schachen who had seen him for many weeks, with the young fellows whom he had tried to hand over to the Foreign Legion, all of whom instantly recognized him, but he did not utter a word.
One morning they found he had hanged himself with his braces. He had written one word on the wall of his cell, the word that one of Napoleon’s generals had made renowned after he had lost the battle of Waterloo.
An exhaustive search in the Villa Elise brought little to light. It merely revealed proofs that Mabuse employed the money obtained by gambling or theft to carry on smuggling and profiteering on a gigantic scale. The police worked side by side with the Swiss authorities, for it was believed that Mabuse must be in Switzerland, or at any rate that he had passed through. Wenk went once a fortnight to Zürich. Now and then one of Mabuse’s gang was caught, but all were so thoroughly schooled that no word of betrayal escaped them.
News reached Wenk from Frankfurt that a gambler was at work there, whose description so closely resembled Mabuse that Wenk travelled thither at once, but when he arrived there was no trace of the man to be found. Three days later there was a report of a similar kind from Cologne, then from Düsseldorf, and later both from Essen and Hanover.
Wenk went hither and thither, not doubting in his own mind that he was indeed on the track of Mabuse. The latter must have spies in Munich who watched and reported Wenk’s movements. Knowing that he was followed, he took every possible precaution, and employed all the cunning at his command. On his journeys he made use of trains, cars, aeroplanes indiscriminately. Since he could not help suspecting that Mabuse had accomplices among his own subordinates, Wenk watched these very closely. He changed his chauffeur and his housekeeper, altered his address and his telephone number, took rooms in a hotel, or lodged with friends in the suburbs. But as soon as he arrived at the town where the gambler had been seen, he found he had vanished without trace of any kind, only to reappear
