II
Kestner, who at times gave the appearance of being as lethargic as a blacksnake, could on occasions move with the astounding rapidity of that reptilious animal.
His activities during the hour that ensued stood proof enough of this. Within that brief space the Lamberts, father and daughter, had been shadowed to the restaurant where they gave every promise of dining; divers messengers had been despatched and interviewed; a number of pass-keys had been freshly cut from the diagrams pencilled on a gilt-edged carte des glaces from the Café de la Paix; an artfully worded telegram had lured Antonio Morello to the Gare de Lyon to meet an Italian confederate arriving unexpectedly from Milan, and a handsome pourboire had engaged the sympathetic attention of the concierge presiding over the entrance to that remarkably ramshackle old studio building in that ramshackle old court just off a side-street leading from the Boulevard Montparnasse in which the Lamberts were temporarily housed. One of the doors on the top floor of this building, in fact, bore the modest inscription
Paul Lambert, Graveur Sur Acier
and it was before this door that Kestner paused, listened, knocked, and then listened again. Taking out one of his newly cut keys, he inserted it in the lock, opened the door, and stepped inside.
Still again he stood just inside the closed door listening, for several moments. With a catlike quietness of tread he moved first to one door, and then to another. Then, having satisfied himself that he was alone in the apartment, he began an expeditious and systematic search of the place. This search soon narrowed itself down to the large studio, lighted only by a skylight of ground glass, which proved itself to be the workroom of his friend, the "graveur sur acier." For in this studio Kestner found many things of interest.
The first thing that caught his attention was a projecting lantern and a white cotton screen. Across the room from this stood a camera hooded by a square of black lustre. In the centre of the room stood a large oak table littered with etchings and art prints, while between two doors leading into two closets stood a cabinet filled with miniatures painted on ivory. On a second table, against the remoter wall of the studio, stood rows of acid bottles, inks, and a collection of engraving-tools.
All of these, Kestner knew, might be used by as etcher on steel or copper, and none of them implied an industry that was illicit. So he continued his search, minutely, and sighed with relief when under a drapery of imitation Gobelin tapestry his exploring knuckles came in contact with the metallic surface of a safe-front.
It took him but a moment to throw back that factory-made affront to the Gobelins and discover himself face to face with an oblong of japanned steel held shut by a combination lock. Within that wall, he felt, lay the object of his search. He tapped the metal aarface, inquiringly, as a physician's fingers tap a patient's chest. He tested the combination, but without success. He examined the armoured hinge-sockets. Then he stood off and studied the oblong of japanned metal.
He was an expert in such things; his life had made him such. He knew that with a little glazier's putty, an air-pump, and a few ounces of nitroglycerine he could in a quarter of an hour have that metal door blown away. Or with a strong enough current he could corrode away its lock bars by electrolysis, or with a forced acetylene flame cut away its lock-dial. But such procedure was not in keeping with either his ends or his aims. He knew that his attack could not be one of force.
He suddenly turned, crossed the studio, and stepped quietly out to the entrance door, making sure that it was locked. Then he returned to the studio, took off his coat, and went to the large worktable in the centre of the room.
There he took a huge sheet of draughting paper, twisting it about into the shape of a cone. He secured it in this shape with liquid glue from the smaller table, fashioning it with a flap lip at the larger end. This lip he in turn glued to the safe-front, over the tumbler, to the left of the combination dial, holding it there until the glue hardened. The pointed apex of the cone he carefully cut away with a pair of scissors, leaving it standing out from the safe-front like a huge speaking-trumpet.
When he knelt before the safe again, however, it was his ear and not his mouth which he pressed closely against the open apex of the draughting paper trumpet. His ear, even without the aid of this roughly improvised microphone, was one of the most sensitive of organs. But now, through even that thick wall of steel, he could hear the soft click of the tumblers and the noise of the dial as he worked the combination. He knew the possible permutations, and he tried them, one after the other, listening always for the deeper sound when a lock-tumbler had engaged.
It was expert work, and it called into play both the patience and the delicacy of touch of an expert. Yet it was a full half-hour before Kestner had mastered the combination, and throwing back the lock-bars, swung the heavy safe-door open.
He was confronted, as he had half-expected, by an array of innocent-looking engravings and art prints. Behind these again was a litter of artist's proofs and etchings, such as might have been gathered together by any collector wandering about the quays and shops of Paris.
He stopped and looked at his watch, and then turned and worked his way deeper into the vault. He worked rapidly now, impressed by the discovery that time was more than precious.
In an inner drawer, which he was reluctantly forced to pry open, he found a trayful of photographic plates, and under them a small old-fashioned mother-of-pearl writing-desk. The lock of this desk he was able to pick. Inside, under a scattering of letters and tradesmen's bills, he unearthed a number of neatly baled packages. Still again he showed no hesitation as he tore the wrapper from the first of these.
He knew, the next moment, that his search had been at least partially rewarded. He held in his hand a package of American yellow-backs. In denomination they were all "tens." The next package, the same in size, was made up of notes in the denomination of "one hundred." Still the next was a twenty-dollar note, and then came more packages, of the "tens," and still more of the "one hundreds."
Kestner turned these packages over, studiously deciding that each package must hold at least three hundred bills. He qualified that estimate, however, for he could see that the bills were not new. They all carried the ear-marks of age and wear. It was to determine whether they had been mechanically abraded and worn that he drew one of the bills from the package and carried it to the centre of the room under the more direct light from the skylight above. He warned himself, as he did so, that he had not yet found the plates, and the plates were the one thing that he wanted, that he must have.
Kestner was familiar enough with counterfeiting in all its forms. In his work as roving agent for the Treasury Department he stumbled across more counterfeit money than did any bank-teller in America. He knew his currency as a mother knows the faces of her children. He knew genuine "paper" instinctively, without hesitation or analysis. He could, in the same way as instinctively detect fraudulent "paper." He did so without conscious thought, by some vague sixth sense, a gift that was not altogether feeling and not altogether the sense of sight. Even before the microscope was put over a counterfeit and the line of divergence was established—for somewhere there was always a line of divergence!—he knew in his own mind that a given note was spurious.
He had long known, too, both the tricks and the limitations of the counterfeiter, the bleaching and raising, the camel-hair brush work, the splitting and pasting, the hand-engraving on steel, and the photographic reproducing. He knew that the camera work was always flat and weak, no matter how artfully retouched and tooled over. He likewise knew that the governmental lathe-work on a note was a series of curves and shadings and backgrounds mathematical in their precision and unvarying in pattern. No human hand could duplicate the nicety of that machine-engraving, each line unvarying and unbroken from end to end. And since these machines cost well upward of one hundred thousand dollars, and their manufacture and sales were closely inspected, no counterfeiter could be expected to possess one.
Yet as Kestner stood in the late afternoon light that streamed into the silent studio and held his newly found yellow-back up before him, he could not restrain a rather solemn gasp of admiration.
The note seemed a perfect one. It was on the first Colonial National, of the series of 1909. It carried the Check Letter "C," and the Charter Number of 8939.
Kestner's first thought was as to the paper itself. It was genuine bond, of good quality and weight, and the closest approximation to the "safety paper" of the American Bank Note Company that he had yet encountered. It did not strike him as being two thinner sheets pasted together, although he could plainly see the silk-fibre in the actual tissue of the paper. How his government's secret process had been so successfully imitated he could not at the moment tell. But as he turned over the note he saw that the engraving had been as expert a piece of work as the paper-making itself.
He saw at once it was not a mere photo-etching process, later tooled out by hand, for every line of the lathe-work was clear-cut, and every touch of colour on the vignette was sharp and full. Even the cross-matching had been worked out with infinite detail and patience. And equally good was the colouring of the border-backs.
It took but a moment to establish the fact that the note had been printed in waterproof ink and not superimposed with a wash-pigment and camel-hair brush. Equally convincing-looking were the denomination counters.
It was, in fact, not one especial feature of the note that won Kestner's admiration. It was the beauty and authoritativeness of the bill as a whole, even to the "ageing" oil-wash to which it had been subjected and the mechanically abraded surface and artfully frayed edges.
He folded up the bill and thrust it down in his vest pocket, chucklingly anticipating Wilsnach's stare of incredulity when it should be passed under the latter's inspection. Then Kestner stepped briskly back to the open safe, dropping on his knees and reaching in for the next package, the one of large denomination. It came home to him, as he did so, that here lay the source and origin of what might indeed prove a tidal-wave of illicit money, that here, indeed, lay the means of debauching and imperilling the currency of an entire country.
Then he stopped short, still kneeling there, and scarcely breathing.
It was just as his fingers had closed about the second package that he heard that first small noise behind him. It sounded like the diminished thud of an outer door being softly closed. A second and nearer sound, that of an inaudible gasp, brought him wheeling about on one knee. He did not rise, but his hand shot down to his hip, where his automatic always rested in its specially padded pocket.
"Not this time, honey-boy!" cried a firm if somewhat nasal young voice.
Facing him, with her back against the closed door of the studio, was a woman who could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. She had a pert young face, with a short nose, a rebellious and slightly heavy-lipped mouth, and a row of singularly white and singularly large teeth.
Kestner noted that she wore the small tiptilted hat affected by the Parisienne of the moment. He further noted that she was startlingly well dressed, and that in this attire she had attempted to approach the chicness of the native. Yet it was plain to see, for all her exotic raiment, that she was American to the finger-tips.
But Kestner's mind did not dwell on these points. His attention was directed to the fact that in her right hand she held a hammerless Colt, and that the barrel of this hammerless Colt was pointed unequivocally at his own head.
He did not like the idea of that Colt, for there was a calm audacity about the young woman in the tiptilted hat that left the next possibility a matter of rather painful conjecture.
"Put 'em up!" commanded the girl, taking a step or two nearer him, "and put 'em up quick!"
Kestner assumed that she meant his hands at the same moment that he decided it to be expedient to do as she ordered.
"Now stand up!" said the girl.
The audacious grey-green eyes looked him over. Then the owner of the audacious eyes sighed audibly.
"Gee, an' you an Amurrican! An' gotta pass away so many miles from home."
"Oh, put that thing down!" cried the impatient Kestner, for his attitude was not a comfortable one.
The girl laughed. But the ever-menacing revolver remained where it was.
"No, honey-child, not on your life!" She took still another step nearer him. "Don't you s'pose I've got me home an' mother to purtect? No sir-ee, not on your retouched negative!"
"Then what do you intend doing?" asked Kestner. He risked the movement, as he spoke, of calmly folding his arms.
Her face hardened, for a second, as she saw the movement. But on second thought she seemed to accept the new position as one sufficiently safe.
"You don't dream you're goin' to get out o' here alive, do you?" innocently demanded the girl.
"Why not?" questioned Kestner. He was watching her closely, every second of the time. And she, in turn, was watching him as closely. His sense of comfort did not increase. Yet the look of fixed somnolence still hung about his eyes.
The girl did not answer him, for at that moment the further studio swung open and with a quick movement a man stepped inside.
Kestner liked neither that man nor his unheralded intrusion. The newcomer stood there, a little breathless, as though he had been conscious of danger impending and had raced up the stairs. He was an olive-skinned, square-shouldered man of about thirty, with close-set eyes, seal-brown in colour. While he was in no way conspicuous as to attire, there was both audacity and cunning in those calm and ever-searching eyes. Kestner knew, even before the girl spoke, that this was the Neapolitan called Morello.
"Got your gink for you, Tony!" said the girl, with a look of relief, clearly at the thought of a confederate's advent.
That confederate, however, still stood by the door, alert and non-committal. It was several moments before he spoke.
"Who is he?" he asked, tensely, yet without moving, and all the while studying the face of Kestner.
"That's what we're goin' to squeeze out o' him," was the girl's reply.
Kestner noticed that the Neapolitan spoke English without a trace of accent. He also noticed the expression in the seal-brown eyes as they turned and studied the open safe.
"What did he get?" asked Morello.
"You mean, what's he goin' to get!" cried the girl, with her curt laugh. She did not lower her fire-arm as the newcomer stepped towards the centre of the room.
"Tony," she suddenly called out, "this guy's heeled. Get his gun!"
She herself stepped still closer to Kestner as she spoke, holding her revolver so that it pointed directly at his upper left-hand vest-pocket. On the whole, Kestner saw with dampening spirits, they were two extremely capable and clear-witted individuals.
So capable were they, in fact, that their prisoner stood silent and helpless, with a revolver-barrel within a yard of his heart, while the quick-fingered Neapolitan explored and felt about Kestner's clothing. He emitted a faint grunt of satisfaction as he drew the automatic from its padded hip-pocket.
"What next?" he asked, as he stepped back with the revolver in his hand.
"Pull out that old oak chair, the one with the high back," commanded the girl. "Then get that bunch o' picture-cord from the top shelf there."
Morello did as directed. But the girl, all the while, kept her eyes on Kestner. His sustained air of composure seemed to worry her.
"Now you back up," she commanded, with sudden roughness. "Back up! Right back until you're sittin' in that chair!"
Kestner turned and looked at the heavy fauteuil of carved oak. A suspicion of what their intentions were crept over him.
"Supposing I don't care to?" he ventured.
The girl confronted him with a show of anger.
"Look here, Mister Pretty-man, you've put yourself in Dutch an' you're goin' to do what I say! D' you get me? Poke him into that chair, Tony, and poke him quick!"
Kestner sat down with a sigh. The sleepy and half-amused smile was still on his face. He was still watching for his chance.
The smile disappeared, however, before the unlooked for and lightning-like movement of Morello. That worthy suddenly garroted his captive's head against the fauteuil back while the girl promptly and securely tied his wrists to the chair-arms. His ankles were also made fast in the same way, and all were for the second time wrapped and reinforced with many yards of the heavy crimson cord. Then his neck was released and he could breathe quite freely again.
There was now something more than a look of concern on the face of that sleepy-eyed captive. Deep down in his heart was a vast rage at the indignities to which his body had been subjected. And when the time came, he inwardly vowed, some one would pay for those outrages. He was still straining uselessly at the cords holding him when he heard a quick cry from the girl.
"Thank Gawd, here's the Governor!" she said over her shoulder, as she helped Morello with the final knots.