IX
Kestner sat staring at her as she slowly undid that innocent-looking oblong parcel covered with its green baize wrapper. His pulse quickened a little as he caught the glint of polished metal. There were eight plates, he could see, each padded by an oblong of red blotting-paper trimmed to the size of the plate itself.
Maura Lambert looked up and saw the Secret Agent's eyes studying the sheets of metal that lay in her lap.
"It's only natural for you not to believe me any more. I can't even ask you to accept my word. But these," she went on, as she touched the plates with her finger-tips, "you can recognise at a glance. I want you to take them. That will show you I am being sincere!"
She was holding them out to him, but he did not reach for them. Yet the irony of the situation did not escape him. Here he sat face to face with the cleverest counterfeiter in all Europe, the woman he had pursued half way round the world, and she of her own free will was handing over to him the fateful pieces of engraved metal which had once stood the end and object of all that pursuit. Life, he told himself, did not resolve itself into theatricalities like this! Somewhere at the core of all that carefully carpentered structure was the canker of untruth. And it was his duty to break down her arch of deception while there was still time.
"You must believe me!" she cried out, startled by the look of doubt that had swept over his face.
"Why?" he demanded.
"Because I am asking you to help me!" she said with a forlornness of tone which touched him even against his will.
"But how can I do that?"
"By letting things stand as they are," was her quick retort. "By dropping this persecution, of me and my father and giving me the chance of going back to Europe!"
Kestner was watching her closely.
"Who told you to ask for this?" he demanded.
"I am asking it for myself," was her reply. "And in asking it I can give you the promise there will be no need for further action on your part."
"By that you mean no more counterfeiting?"
"Yes."
"But can you answer for your father, and for Morello, when you venture that promise?"
"No, I can't answer for them," she acknowledged, as she looked down at the plates on her knee. Then she turned back to Kestner again. "But, don't you see, without these to print from they will be helpless. They can't carry out what they have planned, without plates. And without me they can never make more!"
That, at least, seemed reasonable enough.
"Then what must I do?" inquired the Secret Agent.
"Let me get away from all this," was her answer. He knew that any such cry for quarter, from that proud spirit, was not easy of utterance.
"But it's not in my hands," he protested. "I'm only one small cog in the wheels of a huge machine they call the law."
"But what does that machine gain by grinding us down, now? What good can it do you, or your government, or the whole world, if you keep me from going back to the decent life I want to live?"
"My personal feelings have nothing to do with the matter. Do you imagine everything that has happened during the last few weeks has been merely a personal matter with me? That I haven't been driven into doing things that were odious to me? That I haven't always wanted to save you from what was ahead of you?"
"You can do that," she interrupted. "All I want is the chance to get away, to save myself from worse things than you can face me with! And you won't even believe me!"
Kestner sat for several moments without speaking.
"You must rather despise me," he ventured, as his meditative eyes met hers.
"Not so much as I despise myself!" was her slightly embittered answer. "And I don't blame you for anything. I think I understand, now. Sometimes I've been almost glad that you were doing what you were. I got a sort of relief from the thought that you were following us, every move we made. I've felt safer, lately, remembering you were somewhere near, even if it was to undo everything my father had been working for. But when I say that, too, you can't believe me, can you?"
"I wish I could," Kestner admitted. He found himself speaking with an earnestness of which on second thought he felt slightly ashamed. He was still torturing his soul with the query as to how much of all she said was genuine and how much was trickery. He could indulge in none of the exultation of a combatant who finds his adversary in an extremity. Her predicament, if such it were, brought him no sense of personal triumph. Yet as he glanced about that dingy and disordered room and then back at the pale oval of her face he felt reassured of the fact that she was ill-suited to the setting in which he had found her. She still impressed him as being intrinsically too fine of fibre for the life of the social free-booter. But he could not forget the fact that she was Paul Lambert's daughter and the agent through whom that master-criminal had planned to debauch a nation's currency.
They sat there, facing each other in one of those pregnant silences which sometimes come when wide issues are at stake. Kestner remembered that she was beleaguering him with none of the artifices of sex. There was something almost judicial in her impassivity, as though her case had been put and her last word had been said. And in that very abnegation of appeal, he felt, she was circuitously assailing his will and breaking down his resolution.
She must have caught from his eyes some vague look of capitulation, for she raised her head, as though to speak to him. But she did not open her lips, and no word passed between them.
For at that moment the silence was broken by another and a quite unexpected sound. It came in the form of a sudden knock on the door, a peremptory and authoritative knock which caused Kestner's figure to stiffen in its chair, and the next moment brought him, alert and tingling, to his feet.
He did not look at the door, for he was watching the woman before whom he stood, wondering if this marked the consummation of her undeciphered plan, speculating as to what his next step should be. Then he suddenly remembered the messenger boy and his undelivered message. Kestner was able to breathe more freely. It left him with still a shadow of hope as to her integrity.
He could see her as she sat there, with her gaze fixed on the locked door. She had made no movement, and she had not changed colour. But as the knock was repeated, more peremptorily than before, her whole face altered. There seemed to be a narrowing of vision, a hardening of the lines about the sensitive mouth, a masking of the spirit which a moment earlier had stood before him like an open book. She was running truer to type, he felt, in that newer pose. It was a nearer approach to what he had expected of her.
"Who is that?" he demanded in a whisper.
The woman sitting in the chair did not answer him. But she made a quick and terrified motion for silence. Then she rose to her feet, glancing wide-eyed about the room.
"Who is that?" again demanded Kestner as he lifted his revolver from its pocket.
Still she did not answer him. But a look of mute protest leaped into her eyes as she saw his fire-arm.
"Wait," she implored in a whisper. She gave him the impression of being afraid to speak. But her eyes seemed to appeal to him for help, touched with the pathos of an animal to whom the power of speech has not been given. And for a moment, in the teeth of the odds that were against her, he believed in her.
"Wait," she whispered again as she pointed towards the door of the dingy little bedroom behind him. He understood her gesture. But for a moment he hesitated, staring down into her face. It was quite colourless, by this time, and oddly twisted, as a child's face is sometimes contorted with pain. But her hand was still stretched half-imploringly towards that dingy room in the rear.
Then, as the knock was repeated, he stepped silently back through that second door, with his hat in one hand and his revolver in another. Then he quietly closed the door and secured it by the heavy brass bolt which he found on the inside. At the same moment he heard the rustle of her skirts and the sound of a key being turned in the lock. He had no time to deliberate on the fact that she had locked him in the room where he stood, for in the next breath he could hear the sound of her voice, addressed to the impatient knocker at the outer door.
"Just a moment," she called out with a slightly rising inflection which gave a note of casualness to her cry. And Kestner, crouching behind that inner door, could easily picture how desperately she was re-marshalling the scattered lines of her composure. He could hear her as she crossed the room again. He could even catch the sound of the key as it was turned in the distant lock.
He knew the door had been opened, but no sound reached his ears. He heard the thud of the door as it was swung shut again. But still no sound of voices came to the listener in the inner room.
That listener suddenly caught his breath, clasped his hat on his head, and swung about. For a moment the suspicion flashed through him that Maura Lambert had cleverly given him the slip. His fingers were already lifted to the brass draw-bolt when the silence was broken by the sound of a laugh, an open-throated and deep-chested laugh of mockery that was not pleasant to hear. Then a voice spoke.
"You are not glad—that I have come!"
And Kestner, as he listened there, knew that the voice was the voice of Morello.