Chapter XXV: The Passing of Phadrig

In all London, or, indeed, in any capital of Europe, there were no more angrily puzzled men than Nicol Hendry and his colleague and subordinates. He was perfectly certain now that Phadrig Amena held the key to the conspiracy which had resulted in the disappearance of Prince Zastrow. Oscarovitch had vanished. He had been traced to Copenhagen, and then absolutely lost sight of. Three agents, all picked experts, had been put on to watch Phadrig and the Pentanas, as they were known to him, and within a fortnight they had all died. One had fallen down crossing the north side of Trafalgar Square: the verdict had been heart failure. Another threw himself into the river from the Tower Bridge; and the third, a woman who was one of the most skilful spies in the service of the International, had made his acquaintance and had dinner with him at the “Monico,” and was found dead the next morning with an empty morphia syringe in her hand and a swollen puncture in her left arm.

Thus four more or less valuable lives had been lost, and not a shred of tangible evidence obtained against the Egyptian. Convinced as he was that this man was as responsible for their deaths as he had been for that of Josephus, neither he nor his colleagues could find the slightest grounds for applying for a warrant for his arrest, and meanwhile things were going from bad to worse in Russia. The Romanoff dynasty was tottering to its fall. The responsible leaders of the Revolution, angry and bewildered by the loss of the man whom they had practically chosen to rule over them, were distributing thousands of copies of an unsigned manifesto which could not have come from any one but “the new Skobeleff.” What was left of the army and the navy was rallying to the nameless standard of the still unknown saviour of Russia. Von Kessner and Captain Vollmar had apparently ceased to exist, and the Princess Hermia was living with her lady-in-waiting in the strictest retirement in Dresden.

“It seems to me that things are at an utter deadlock,” said Nicol Hendry to the Chief of the German section, who had come over to London to confer with him. “Four of our best agents have died in a fortnight, and the others are getting shy. Really, we can’t blame them. This is not like fighting the ordinary sort of anarchist or regicide, who, after all, does content himself with physical means. This infernal scoundrel, as I must confess I was warned to begin with, is quite independent of the rules of the game. He kills people by their own hands, not his, and, literally, there seems no way of catching him.”

“There must be a way, my dear Hendry,” replied the German, who was the very incarnation of mechanical officialism. “You look at these things as consequences, I regard them only as rather extraordinary coincidences. If this is anything like what you seem to think it, it is supernatural, and I don’t believe in that.”

“There is a very easy way to convince yourself, my dear Von Hamner,” replied Hendry, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “Suppose you go and interview this modern Mephistopheles yourself?”

“Will you come with me if I do?” asked the German, with a straight stare through his spectacles.

“Certainly. In our profession it is necessary to take risks. The thing has gone far enough. Here we are in my room at New Scotland Yard, the centre and stronghold of the British police system, and there is this man or super-man, if you like, making no sign, doing nothing that will give us a hold upon him, and yet killing our agents as fast as we send them to find out what he is working at, and we know just as much to-day as we did three weeks ago. Now, what is your idea?”

“Just this: if the English law won’t touch him, do as we do in Germany, take the law into your own hands. We know where the fellow is to be found down in that slum near the Borough Road. Send a few of your plain-clothes men there this afternoon, and we will follow in a cab. Bring your bracelets with you, and I shall take my revolver. We don’t want any nonsense this time. If it goes on much longer we shall be the laughing-stock of the whole force from end to end of Europe, and that will not do us any good. Shall it be for this afternoon?”

“It will be better done now. He has worked mischief enough, and if we are going to do it we may as well bring the thing to a head at once, as they say in the States. Now I will give the instructions, and we will go to lunch. It may be the last that either of us will eat, you know.”

“Poof!” exclaimed Von Hamner, who was feeling not a little nettled at this quiet challenge to test his personal courage. “You are the last man on earth that I should have suspected of superstition, my dear Hendry. But, there, give your orders, and we will go to lunch, and then about four o’clock we may make our call in Candler’s Court.”

While the two Chiefs of the International were talking, Phadrig was reading a cypher telegram, of which the meaning was this:

“REVAL.--Professor fell overboard three days ago. Body not

recovered. Horus Stone did its work. N. consents. I marry her at

Oscarburg. Russia ready. Fool International for a few days and come

to Viborg when you have done with them.

O.”

“That is good news,” said Phadrig, in a confidential whisper to himself; “for a man on the lower plane of existence the Prince is wonderfully clever. This is a master-stroke. If he really has the Queen in his power all the rest will be easy.”

“There’s two gentlemen to see you, Mr Amena.” The door opened, and his landlady’s dirty little daughter put her towsled head through the little space behind the doorpost. “They’re down below; shall I send ‘em up?”

“Certainly, Jane. Tell the gentlemen that I shall be pleased to see them.”

The dirty face vanished as the door closed. Phadrig shut down the top of the big escritoire and locked it. Heavy treads sounded on the rickety stairs. There was a shuffle of feet on the little landing, a sharp knock at the door, and he said in a low tone:

“Come in, gentlemen. I have been expecting you.”

The door opened and Nicol Hendry entered, followed by his German colleague. Practised as they were in all the arts of their profession, they looked about the mean, miserably appointed room with curious eyes. Phadrig, dressed in the same shabby semi-Oriental costume in which he had received Isaac Josephus, salaamed, and said:

“Gentlemen, although this is but a poor room to receive you in, I am pleased that you have come. You are officers of the International, if I am not mistaken.”

Then his speech changed to German, and he went on:

“You, sir, are M. Nicol Hendry, and your friend is the Herr von Hamner, Chief of the Berlin Section. What can I do to serve you?”

It was anything but the greeting that they expected. They thought that they had tracked the real criminal to his last hiding-place. They had established the identity between Phadrig, the poor seller of curios, and Phadrig Amena, the worker of miracles, whom all the smart set in London was talking about; and here he was in this miserable, shabby room, dressed in clothes that no pawnbroker would advance a couple of shillings on, smiling and bowing before them as though they were lords of the earth, and he--the man who had sent three men and a woman to their deaths by, as it were, a mere word of command--a worm beneath their feet. Nicol Hendry managed to keep his self-possession, but Von Hamner was already sorry that he had come, and his face showed it.

“We have come to ask you, Mr Amena,” said Hendry, thinking it best to come to the point at once, “why you found it necessary to kill those people. I needn’t mention names. You know them as well as we do.”

“I did not kill them, gentlemen. They killed themselves, according to the newspaper reports. And now, may I ask you why you found it necessary to set these spies of yours to watch my every movement night and day? What have I done to bring myself within the four corners of your English law?”

“Nothing, unfortunately, that we can get a warrant for,” replied Hendry, trying not to look into his eyes, “and so we have taken the law into our own hands. Come, Mr Amena, the game is up. We know all about your share in the conspiracy to remove Prince Zastrow in order to make room for your patron Prince Oscarovitch. We have copies of his manifesto at Scotland Yard, and we know that you received a telegram in cypher from him to-day.”

“Ah!” said Phadrig, in a tone whose smoothness was intensely aggravating, “that is very interesting. May I ask if you have translated the cypher?”

“No, damn you and your Prince!” burst in Von Hamner. “If we had done that we should know even more about you than we do now--and that ought to be enough to hang you.”

He had spluttered the words out before Hendry had time to stop him. He expected a tragedy there and then, but it did not happen. Phadrig took the telegram out of his coat pocket, handed it to Von Hamner with a graceful bow, and said:

“Your information is quite correct, gentlemen. That is the telegram, and this is the meaning of it.”

Then as they read the unintelligible jumble of words, he repeated the meaning of them as though they formed the most ordinary message, instead of a dispatch that might, as they well knew, shake Europe to its social and political foundations within the next week or so.

“Then this is another of your devilries, I suppose,” snarled Von Hamner. “So you have killed the great Professor Marmion, the most gifted genius in the whole world, as you killed the others, to promote your infernal schemes; and you have helped that scoundrel Oscarovitch to abduct his daughter. Well, law or no law, this shall be the end of your doings. You will come with us as our prisoner, or you will not leave this room alive.”