The Hand of Peril/Part 1/Chapter 1
THE HAND OF PERIL
I
"That's your woman!"
It was Wilsnach of the Paris Office who spoke. He spoke quietly, over the edge of his Le Journal Amusant, But the fingers that held the sheet were a little unsteady.
"The woman with the bird of paradise plumes?" asked Kestner of the Secret Service, paddling in his half-melted mousse au chocolat with a long-handled spoon.
"Yes," answered Wilsnach. "Get her, and get her good!"
Kestner, the wandering mouchard whose home was under his hat and whose beat was all Europe, quietly took out a cigar and lighted it.
He was not studying the woman. Instead, he was sleepily studying the end of his cigar. Yet he studied it persistently, as though its newly formed ash held the solution of many solemn mysteries.
Across the rue de la Paix, opposite the double row of little iron tables where he sat, his idly wandering gaze caught the gleam of metal letters against a white marble wall. These letters spelt the name of an American jeweller. The afternoon sun made them shine like gold. The same sun glinted pleasantly through the leaves of a sycamore. It shone on motor-busses threading their way through the heart of Paris. It shone on tonneaux in which lounged painted actresses and on taxicabs in which sat tired-eyed tourists. It shone on promenading sidewalk-throngs and red-trousered Zouaves and bare-headed students in black gowns and pastry-boys with trays balanced on their heads and a street-tumbler with a mat under his arm and a haggard-browed old man in frugal search of cigarette-ends along the boulevarde curbing.
Kestner, while his mousse au chocolat deliquesced on the little iron table in front of him, saw all this. But incidentally, and as though by accident, he saw other things. Among these was the woman in the bird of paradise hat.
He sat watching her as his many years in the service had taught him always to watch his quarry, with that casual and intermittent glance, with that discreet obliquity, which could so easily be interpreted as the idle curiosity of an idle-minded sightseer.
Yet Kestner, at the moment, was anything but idle-minded. At each apparently casual side-glance his quick eye was picking up some new point, very much as a magnet catches up its iron filings.
"So that's our woman!" he finally murmured. He spoke without emotion.
Yet he was a little startled, inwardly, by her appearance of youthfulness. At the outside, he concluded, she could not be more than twenty-two or twenty-three. That was younger than most of them. In other ways, too, he saw that she was a distinct deviation from type. She even puzzled him a little. And he was not a man frequently puzzled by the women he encountered.
Still again he studied her from under drooping and indifferent eyelids. He could see that she had taken off her gloves and rolled them up into a tight ball. Her bare hands were linked together, as she leaned forward with her elbows on the round-topped table, and on the delicate bridgeway of those interwoven fingers rested the perfect oval of her chin.
Of these fingers Kestner took especial notice. For all their slenderness there was a nervous strength about them, an odd fastidiousness of movement, a promise of vast executive capabilities. The mam watching them saw at a glance that they were the fingers of an artist.
Kestner's indolent glance went back to her face. The pallor of that youthful yet ascetic-looking face was accentuated by the dark brim of the hat under the bird of paradise plumes. The violet-blue eyes, at the moment almost as sleepy-looking as Kestner's, were made darker by the heavy fringe of their lashes. Yet there seemed nothing suppressed or circuitous in their outlook on the world.
Kestner, in fact, could find no fault with the modelling of the face. It should have had more colour, he might have admitted, yet the ivory creaminess of the skin seemed to atone for that absence of colour. The dull chestnut of the heavily massed hair would have been more effective if done in the mode of the hour—but even that, he concluded, was a matter of taste.
It seemed, on the whole, a face singularly devoid of guile. It was only about the lips, with their vague line of revolt, that Kestner could detect anything Ishmael-like, anything significant of her career and calling.
"That's right," muttered Wilsnach, as he bent over his illustrated paper. "Get her good—she's the kind who'll need it!"
"That's where I think you're wrong," remarked the Secret Agent, as he noted the haughtiness of the well-poised head. "I could spot her among a million."
"But you'll never see her there to be spotted," amended Wilsnach. "She's the one they keep out of sight in working hours."
"Tell me about 'em," said the listless-eyed Kestner.
Wilsnach drew his iron chair a little closer to the table.
"It took us over seven months to fine-comb what we know about them out of six different cities. You see, we could only spot them on the wing, the same as I spotted them to-day when I 'phoned you."
"Who's the man?" asked Kestner.
"He's carrying the name of Lambert, just at present. In Budapest he was known as Hartmann. In Rome it's probably something else. But we're sure of one thing: he's the manager of their little circle. He's also their paper expert. He's perfected a bleaching process of his own, and he's the only man in Europe who can re-fill cheque perforations. He's also a finished etcher and engraver, and an expert in inks and colour-work."
"Now the woman," prompted Kestner.
"She's the old man's daughter, as far as we can learn. In fact there's no doubt of it. He's had her in hand for years. She's the free-hand worker for the gang. She can work on stone or steel or copper, and she can do the best imitation of lathe-work on a Treasury note you ever clapped eyes on. The old man taught her all that, the brush work, the photo-engraving process, the silk-thread trick, and the oil washes for ageing a note."
"Got any samples?" asked Kestner, revolving his cigar-end about his puckered lips as though life held no serious thoughts for him.
"The office has one or two. But look at those hands of hers! You could tell that girl was an adept by those fingers!"
"How about the face?"
"That's what puzzled me. She certainly doesn't look the part. But there were certain things we traced up. This man Lambert brought her to Florence years ago, when she was a mere child. He trained her for miniature painting there. Then he taught her etching and engraving. Then he started her working in oils, and for a couple of years she was forging old masters for him. Next, as far as we can learn, he turned his attention to free-hand script work. He got her copying museum records and manuscripts in the Uffizi., Then they migrated to Pisa for a year. It was there she must have done the ten-kroner Austrian note that the office has a sample of. She also got away with an uncommonly good Italian postage-stamp, for which Lambert had made a waterproof ink of his own. Then they bobbed up in Brussels next, and moved on to London, and a year later were back in Rome, sliding from city to city, and doing the smoothest forging and cheque-raising and counterfeiting and flimflam work of the century."
"But as you say, she certainly doesn't look the part."
"She sure doesn't," admitted Wilsnach. "Poucher's got a theory that the old man hypnotises the girl and makes her do the work without knowing she does it. But that's fantastic. I don't even think it's worth considering."
Wilsnach stared down at his paper again, for at the moment Kestner was speaking sotto voce to a withered-cheeked old man with a trayful of street-toys. He was speaking to the camelot in the patois of the street.
"Galipaux, pipe that woman at the sixth table on my left. Lift her handbag when you get the chance. Take your time about it, and whatever you do, don't mess the job!"
The old toy-vender called Galipaux neither answered nor looked back. He merely passed on his way through the jostling crowd. Kestner continued to puddle lazily with his melted mousse au chocolat.
"What's your theory?" he finally asked.
"I rather think the old man's a nut. As far as we can gather, he was an expert accountant in his time, and later swung into bankwork. Then he fell. He always claimed it was a frame-up. But he did four years in Sing Sing—was the school teacher in the prison there—before the other man confessed. That soured him, and he just went bad after that. He did time again, in Atlanta, but forged his own pardon and got away with it."
"What's the rest of the gang?"
"The only other person we've been able to spot is a Neapolitan named Morello. They call him Tony. He's as big as the old man there, and as smooth as they make 'em. They use him as their breaker and shover. He's been years in America and speaks English without an accent. He was a paying-teller in an Italian bank in New York, and later on an olive-oil importer there. He came under the police eye seven years ago for smuggling."
"Ever indicted?"
"Never in America. He fell in Europe, a year and a half ago. He got the blue-prints of the Heligoland Naval Fortifications and was selling a forged copy to a French secret agent in Brussels when the German government got wise. They got him back across the border and tied him up with a fifteen year sentence. Then the girl and the old man got busy, did the Atlanta trick over again, and got Morello liberated and on a steamer for Harwich before the officials knew the release-order was a forgery. I've every reason to imagine he thinks a lot of that girl. He follows her around like a dog."
"And that's all you know?" asked the unemotional Kestner.
"There's an American girl who calls herself Cherry Dreiser floating somewhere about the fringes of that gang, but we can't connect her with them. She was known in New York as Sadie Wimpel, and has a record as a con-woman. We know she worked with a wire-tapper named Davis, and later decided to leave America for a year or two. That was after a badger-game rake-off over there. We first tailed her in Amsterdam on some diamond smuggling work. Later, we found her on her way to Paris with this woman called Maura Lambert."
"So her name's Maura!" languidly commented Kestner, as he threw away his cigar. "But I think you're wrong about the old gentleman. That man is not a lunatic."
"Oh, he's shrewd and keen enough," admitted Wilsnach. "But he has that one obsession of his."
"Which one?"
"That nut idea that he can stampede all modern commerce off the range, that one woman's hand, properly trained, can crowbar over the whole modern world of business. His claim, I suppose, is that all our money-machinery, all our business, our banks and credit systems and negotiable security methods, actually depend on one thing. And that thing is the integrity of paper. The modern business man has got to know that his documents are genuine, that his bank-notes are bona-fide, that his drafts are authentic, that his currency certificates are unquestioned."
"Naturally!"
"Lambert's got the idea that he can undermine the whole structure of modern commercial life by striking at that one thing, by making men feel that its paper, its bank-notes and bonds and certificates are no longer to be depended upon. He imagines he is going to make banks crumble and governments totter by simply flooding the country with counterfeits, by leaving every one in doubt as to which is the real thing and which is the worthless imitation."
"And thereby add a little to his own income?"
"I don't think that's the prime consideration. He's always had money enough. I know for certain he got eleven thousand marks for supplying the forgeries of the Kiel fortifications when the originals were carried away."
"And his next move?" prompted Kestner.
"We've concluded that his next move must mean America. It's what he's been planning for, for years. He's laid all his ropes. He's going into the thing on a big scale. In six months' time he's going to unload three or four million dollars in counterfeit on the republic. In the second six months he'll put out more than double that amount."
"And then what?"
"Isn't that enough?" inquired Wilsnach.
"It sounds like a very fine plan. But if you knew all this, why haven't you closed in on them?"
"Headquarters said hands off until you could take over the case."
"That was very kind of Headquarters," sighed Kestner. Then Kestner sat without speaking, for a withered-faced street-vendor had placed on his knees a folded copy of an afternoon newspaper. This paper the Secret Agent carefully unfolded and let lie on the table in front of him, and for a short while seemed busied with its contents.
In that brief space of time, however, Kestner had done several things. One was to hold a lady's bag between the flaps of his coatfront, well under the table edge, and there quickly but minutely examine its contents. Another was to register a mental note of every name and address found therein. And still another was to trace on a gilt-edged carte des glaces an outline of each key found in the bag of that quiet unsuspecting lady, while the final movement was to slip the bag back into the adroit hands of one Galipaux, who, in due time, drew the attention of a stately lady in a bird of paradise hat to the fact that her purse had fallen to the pavement. And for this, Kestner saw, the mendacious old scoundrel was rewarded with a franc.
"Her money, I regret to say, was all unmistakably genuine," observed Kestner.
"And so is her appetite, for I notice that she's just made away with her third Coupe Jacques."
"She is certainly not true to type," repeated the perplexed Kestner.
"Well, you'll find her true to her gang!"
"I'll tell you that before midnight."
"You mean you're going to jump right into the case?"
"I'm in it already," retorted Kestner, looking at his watch. "I have located the lady, and, if I am not vastly mistaken, I have located the plant."
"Where?"
"The first in a little street off the Boulevard Montparnasse, and the second in so remote a place as the city of Palermo."
Wilsnach followed the other man as he rose to his feet.
"What'll be your line of procedure?" he inquired.
"That I can't tell until my visit south of the river."
"Then what men will you want?"
Kestner lighted a second cigar—as usual, he was smoking too much—and for a few seconds was deep in thought.
"I think I'll go this alone," was his final answer to Wilsnach.