VIa
Kestner, as he stepped into that second room, found himself confronting a figure which at first sight reminded him of a rubicund and weather-beaten old robin.
This figure sat in a wing-chair, at the end of a heavy oak table. Its ample paunch was covered by a cherry-coloured dressing-gown of quilted silk. It had a patriarchal polished dome, and a ruffled fringe of greyish-blonde hair. It also had round and innocent-looking amber-coloured eyes. A terrace of fleshy dewlaps took the place of a chin, and added to the blithe inanity, the cherubic other-worldliness, of the figure's general expression.
The man in the wing-chair, at first sight, seemed querulously invertebrate, a pathetic and foolish figure without guile and without purpose in life. Kestner could not help remembering how good a mask that misleading air of vague imbecility must have proved in the past. It was a pose, and nothing more. For even as he sat there blinking up with his watery-looking amber eyes, it was plain that he was not altogether off his guard. The newcomer noticed that one hand rested in the partly-opened table drawer, as though arrested in that position in search for a paper. But those unseen fingers, Kestner felt sure, held something which in no way resembled paper.
"We meet again, m'sieu, after many years!" said the Secret Agent, as he calmly surveyed the figure in the cherry-coloured gown. It was not so antique a figure as it made a pretence of being.
"You have the advantage of me, young man!" piped up the thin and querulous voice, reviving Kestner's impression of the weather-beaten robin.
"I know it!" was the other's quiet-toned response.
"We've never met before," sharply contended the thin-noted voice.
"On the contrary. Baron Piozzo, we—"
"My name's Nittner, Updyke Nittner! You're mixing me with somebody else!"
"Possibly with Gibraltar Breitmann, who was interested in the Algiceras map-robbery," was Kestner's gentle suggestion.
"My home's in Saginaw, Michigan!"
"And your business is lumbering?"
"It is! And what is yours in this house?"
Kestner noticed that Sadie Wimpel had followed him into the room.
"I'll answer that when you tell me who this woman is!"
"That woman's my niece."
"Are you?" demanded Kestner, turning to the girl.
"Sure," was her solemn response.
The rotund and robin-like figure hopped out of its wing-chair with a celerity that was startling, and a change of colour that tended to add to its rubicund appearance. Then he clapped his two hands sharply together.
The Japanese servant appeared at once in the doorway.
"Miyako! Put on the lights. Then open the front door for this gentleman! And open it wide!"
He was no longer a ludicrous and watery-eyed invertebrate; he was a quick-witted and hornet-like figure hot with the fires of a vast indignation. He swung about and faced the quietly smiling Kestner.
"Have you anything more to say?"
"Just one thing," said Kestner, addressing himself to the girl at the end of the oak table. "And that is, my dear, to warn you that you've hitched your wagon to a star that never came out of the Saginaw valley! Your uncle is Wallaby Sam, who eleven years ago came out of an Australian penal colony and as Gustav Korff stole war-secrets for certain German military attachés. Three years later, a Baron Piozzo was arrested at Boden, a Swedish fortification on the Russian frontier, for selling military maps to Petrograd agents. That Baron was your uncle here! Two years later he was rounded up in Budapest, at the same game, only this time he was operating with a woman he had especially trained for that work. And if you stay with him you'll do more than brush the cigar-ashes off his vest-front and feed the gold-fish, because he wants you for one thing, and only one thing. Inside of two months he'll have you gay-catting for him, the same as he had that Polish countess who didn't happen to be born in Saginaw, Michigan!"
Kestner, as he paused for breath, fell back a step or two, until he stood in the open door. "And I guess that's about all!"
The hornet-like figure was no longer looking at him. The man in the cherry-coloured gown had turned toward the girl, and over that cherubic and chinless face a brick-red colour, apoplectic in intensity, had slowly spread. He became suddenly significant and impressive in his rage.
"This is your doing!" he cried out as he advanced on the wide-eyed girl, who fell back before him, step by step. But it was more bewilderment than fear that caused this retreat.
"Mine? What t' hell have I done?" was her belligerent demand.
The robin-like figure was now all but majestic in its rage.
"Done?" Words seemed beyond him.
"Yes, what have I done, you double-faced old cut-up?"
"What have you done? You've—"
He suddenly stopped, for from the front of the house came a cry that sounded strangely like a cry of warning, or a cry for help. Kestner, at the same moment that he surmised Wilsnach had got through the front door and encountered the Jap, saw the cherry-clad figure wheel suddenly about and run for the door at the far end of the room. He himself dodged out through the doorway in which he stood and ran for the head of the stairs.
On the landing below him he saw Wilsnach and the Japanese valet writhing together, face down on the hardwood boards. Kestner could not decipher the nature of the valet's hold on his colleague. It seemed, at that first fleeting glance, a hold inextricably complicated and yet absurdly powerful.
Even before Kestner realised the need for interference, even before he could descend his wing of the stairway, he saw the figure in the cherry-coloured dressing-gown catapult down the wing that led from the opposite side of the wide hallway. He knew then that it was no longer a time for hesitation. Throwing off his coat, he took the stairs at a bound.
They seemed to come together, those four contending figures, as though drawn to one spot by a magnet. They came together on that landing like kernels thrown into a hopper, like contending acids poured into a test-tube.
Kestner was conscious only of the fact that he and the startlingly robust figure with the cherubic face had come together, had locked arms and legs and were engaged in an Adamitic struggle for supremacy. He knew, in a vague way, that the other struggling couple were involved with them, that a third hand was clawing at his face and hair, that a power which he found it hard to resist was straining itself to force him back and roll him down the wide stairway to the floor below. He scarcely knew, as he fought for anchorage, that he had caught at the clock-base. There was no mental registration of the fact that a rustling figure had slipped down to the landing, switched out the light, and groped her way onward down through the darkness to the street. He had a vague memory of the huge clock coming over, and bringing with it the two suits of factory-made armour. There was the crash of glass, the release of weights and springs, the tumult of contending plates of steel, an intermingling clangour of brass and chains and splintering wood and shouting throats as the great clock and the suits of rattling steel and the four bewilderingly involved human beings went rolling and cascading down that wide stairway to the hall floor below.
Then came gasps and calls and spasmodic movements, a thick grunt or two of satisfaction, a final stir amid the shattered glass and clock entrails, and then nothing but the sound of quickly taken breaths.
"Wilsnach!" called Kestner, with his knees planted firmly on a rotund and heaving chest. But still for several seconds there was silence.
"It's all right!" finally answered Wilsnach, a little thickly. "I've got him! Dam' 'im, he's taken the count!"
"Can you switch on the lights there?"
"Yes."
There was the sound of crunching glass, a clang of metal being struck by a shoe, and the next moment the newel-post lights flashed up.
"Where's Sadie?" asked Kestner, staring a little dazedly about the ruins, and realising for the first time, that he was cut and scratched and streaked with blood.
"I heard her get past us on the stairs!" acknowledged Wilsnach.
Kestner did not hear him.
"Call up headquarters," he said.
"But what's the game?" demanded the bewildered Wilsnach.
Kestner laughed as he wiped the blood from his face.
"Oh, we were trailing a rabbit and rounded up a hyena!" was his answer. "That's all!"