The Thirty-Nine Steps (2 page)

‘But I thought you were dead,’ I put in.

‘
Mors janua vitae
,’ he smiled. (I recognized the quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) ‘I’m
coming to that, but I’ve got to put you wise about a lot of things first. If you read
your newspaper, I guess you know the name of Constantine Karolides?’

I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that very afternoon.

‘He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is the one big brain in the whole
show, and he happens also to be an honest man. Therefore he has been marked down these
twelve months past. I found that out—not that it was difficult, for any fool could
guess as much. But I found out the way they were going to get him, and that knowledge
was deadly. That’s why I have had to decease.’

He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for I was getting interested
in the beggar.

‘They can’t get him in his own land, for he has a bodyguard of Epirotes that would
skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is coming to this city. The
British Foreign Office has taken to having International tea-parties, and the biggest
of them is due on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned the principal guest, and if
my friends have their way he will never return to his admiring countrymen.’

‘That’s simple enough, anyhow,’ I said. ‘You can warn him and keep him at home.’

‘And play their game?’ he asked sharply. ‘If he does not come they win, for he’s the
only man that can straighten out the tangle. And if his Government are warned he won’t
come, for he does not know how big the stakes will be on June the 15th.’

‘What about the British Government?’ I said. ‘They’re not going to let their guests
be murdered. Tip them the wink, and they’ll take extra precautions.’

‘No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes detectives and double the
police and Constantine would still be a doomed man. My friends are not playing this
game for candy. They want a big occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all
Europe on it. He’ll be murdered by an Austrian, and there’ll be plenty of evidence
to show the connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin. It will all be an infernal
lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the world. I’m not talking
hot air, my friend. I happen to know every detail of the hellish contrivance, and
I can tell you it will be the most finished piece of blackguardism since the Borgias.
But it’s not going to come off if there’s a certain man who knows the wheels of the
business alive right here in London on the 15th day of June. And that man is going
to be your servant, Franklin P. Scudder.’

I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a rat-trap, and there
was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he was spinning me a yarn he could
act up to it.

‘Where did you find out this story?’ I asked.

‘I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me inquiring, and
I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers’
Club in Vienna, and in a little bookshop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed
my evidence ten days ago in Paris. I can’t tell you the details now, for it’s something
of a history. When I was quite sure in my own mind I judged it my business to disappear,
and I reached this city by a mighty queer circuit. I left Paris a dandified young
French-American, and I sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant. In Norway I was
an English student of Ibsen collecting materials for lectures, but when I left Bergen
I was a cinema-man with special ski films. And I came here from Leith with a lot of
pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to put before the London newspapers. Till yesterday
I thought I had muddied my trail some, and was feeling pretty happy. Then …’

The recollection seemed to upset him, and he gulped down some more whisky.

‘Then I saw a man standing in the street outside this block. I used to stay close
in my room all day, and only slip out after dark for an hour or two. I watched him
for a bit from my window, and I thought I recognized him … He came in and spoke to
the porter … When I came back from my walk last night I found a card in my letter-box.
It bore the name of the man I want least to meet on God’s earth.’

I think that the look in my companion’s eyes, the sheer naked scare on his face, completed
my conviction of his honesty. My own voice sharpened a bit as I asked him what he
did next.

‘I realized that I was bottled as sure as a pickled herring, and that there was only
one way out. I had to die. If my pursuers knew I was dead they would go to sleep again.’

‘How did you manage it?’

‘I told the man that valets me that I was feeling pretty bad, and I got myself up
to look like death. That wasn’t difficult, for I’m no slouch at disguises. Then I
got a corpse—you can always get a body in London if you know where to go for it. I
fetched it back in a trunk on the top of a four-wheeler, and I had to be assisted
upstairs to my room. You see I had to pile up some evidence for the inquest. I went
to bed and got my man to mix me a sleeping-draught, and then told him to clear out.
He wanted to fetch a doctor, but I swore some and said I couldn’t abide leeches. When
I was left alone I started in to fake up that corpse. He was my size, and I judged
had perished from too much alcohol, so I put some spirits handy about the place. The
jaw was the weak point in the likeness, so I blew it away with a revolver. I daresay
there will be somebody tomorrow to swear to having heard a shot, but there are no
neighbours on my floor, and I guessed I could risk it. So I left the body in bed dressed
up in my pyjamas, with a revolver lying on the bed-clothes and a considerable mess
around. Then I got into a suit of clothes I had kept waiting for emergencies. I didn’t
dare to shave for fear of leaving tracks, and besides, it wasn’t any kind of use my
trying to get into the streets. I had had you in my mind all day, and there seemed
nothing to do but to make an appeal to you. I watched from my window till I saw you
come home, and then slipped down the stair to meet you … There, Sir, I guess you know
about as much as me of this business.’

He sat blinking like an owl, fluttering with nerves and yet desperately determined.
By this time I was pretty well convinced that he was going straight with me. It was
the wildest sort of narrative, but I had heard in my time many steep tales which had
turned out to be true, and I had made a practice of judging the man rather than the
story. If he had wanted to get a location in my flat, and then cut my throat, he would
have pitched a milder yarn.

‘Hand me your key,’ I said, ‘and I’ll take a look at the corpse. Excuse my caution,
but I’m bound to verify a bit if I can.’

He shook his head mournfully. ‘I reckoned you’d ask for that, but I haven’t got it.
It’s on my chain on the dressing-table. I had to leave it behind, for I couldn’t leave
any clues to breed suspicions. The gentry who are after me are pretty bright-eyed
citizens. You’ll have to take me on trust for the night, and tomorrow you’ll get proof
of the corpse business right enough.’

I thought for an instant or two. ‘Right. I’ll trust you for the night. I’ll lock you
into this room and keep the key. Just one word, Mr Scudder. I believe you’re straight,
but if so be you are not I should warn you that I’m a handy man with a gun.’

‘Sure,’ he said, jumping up with some briskness. ‘I haven’t the privilege of your
name, Sir, but let me tell you that you’re a white man. I’ll thank you to lend me
a razor.’

I took him into my bedroom and turned him loose. In half an hour’s time a figure came
out that I scarcely recognized. Only his gimlety, hungry eyes were the same. He was
shaved clean, his hair was parted in the middle, and he had cut his eyebrows. Further,
he carried himself as if he had been drilled, and was the very model, even to the
brown complexion, of some British officer who had had a long spell in India. He had
a monocle, too, which he stuck in his eye, and every trace of the American had gone
out of his speech.

‘My hat! Mr Scudder—’ I stammered.

‘Not Mr Scudder,’ he corrected; ‘Captain Theophilus Digby, of the 40th Gurkhas, presently
home on leave. I’ll thank you to remember that, Sir.’

I made him up a bed in my smoking-room and sought my own couch, more cheerful than
I had been for the past month. Things did happen occasionally, even in this God-forgotten
metropolis.

I woke next morning to hear my man, Paddock, making the deuce of a row at the smoking-room
door. Paddock was a fellow I had done a good turn to out on the Selakwe, and I had
inspanned him as my servant as soon as I got to England. He had about as much gift
of the gab as a hippopotamus, and was not a great hand at valeting, but I knew I could
count on his loyalty.

‘Stop that row, Paddock,’ I said. ‘There’s a friend of mine, Captain—Captain’ (I couldn’t
remember the name) ‘dossing down in there. Get breakfast for two and then come and
speak to me.’

I told Paddock a fine story about how my friend was a great swell, with his nerves
pretty bad from overwork, who wanted absolute rest and stillness. Nobody had got to
know he was here, or he would be besieged by communications from the India Office
and the Prime Minister and his cure would be ruined. I am bound to say Scudder played
up splendidly when he came to breakfast. He fixed Paddock with his eyeglass, just
like a British officer, asked him about the Boer War, and slung out at me a lot of
stuff about imaginary pals. Paddock couldn’t learn to call me ‘Sir’, but he ‘sirred’
Scudder as if his life depended on it.

I left him with the newspaper and a box of cigars, and went down to the City till
luncheon. When I got back the lift-man had an important face.

‘Nawsty business ’ere this morning, Sir. Gent in No. 15 been and shot ‘isself. They’ve
just took ’im to the mortiary. The police are up there now.’

I ascended to No. 15, and found a couple of bobbies and an inspector busy making an
examination. I asked a few idiotic questions, and they soon kicked me out. Then I
found the man that had valeted Scudder, and pumped him, but I could see he suspected
nothing. He was a whining fellow with a churchyard face, and half-a-crown went far
to console him.

I attended the inquest next day. A partner of some publishing firm gave evidence that
the deceased had brought him wood-pulp propositions, and had been, he believed, an
agent of an American business. The jury found it a case of suicide while of unsound
mind, and the few effects were handed over to the American Consul to deal with. I
gave Scudder a full account of the affair, and it interested him greatly. He said
he wished he could have attended the inquest, for he reckoned it would be about as
spicy as to read one’s own obituary notice.

The first two days he stayed with me in that back room he was very peaceful. He read
and smoked a bit, and made a heap of jottings in a note-book, and every night we had
a game of chess, at which he beat me hollow. I think he was nursing his nerves back
to health, for he had had a pretty trying time. But on the third day I could see he
was beginning to get restless. He fixed up a list of the days till June 15th, and
ticked each off with a red pencil, making remarks in shorthand against them. I would
find him sunk in a brown study, with his sharp eyes abstracted, and after those spells
of meditation he was apt to be very despondent.

Then I could see that he began to get edgy again. He listened for little noises, and
was always asking me if Paddock could be trusted. Once or twice he got very peevish,
and apologized for it. I didn’t blame him. I made every allowance, for he had taken
on a fairly stiff job.

It was not the safety of his own skin that troubled him, but the success of the scheme
he had planned. That little man was clean grit all through, without a soft spot in
him. One night he was very solemn.

‘Say, Hannay,’ he said, ‘I judge I should let you a bit deeper into this business.
I should hate to go out without leaving somebody else to put up a fight.’ And he began
to tell me in detail what I had only heard from him vaguely.

I did not give him very close attention. The fact is, I was more interested in his
own adventures than in his high politics. I reckoned that Karolides and his affairs
were not my business, leaving all that to him. So a lot that he said slipped clean
out of my memory. I remember that he was very clear that the danger to Karolides would
not begin till he had got to London, and would come from the very highest quarters,
where there would be no thought of suspicion. He mentioned the name of a woman—Julia
Czechenyi—as having something to do with the danger. She would be the decoy, I gathered,
to get Karolides out of the care of his guards. He talked, too, about a Black Stone
and a man that lisped in his speech, and he described very particularly somebody that
he never referred to without a shudder—an old man with a young voice who could hood
his eyes like a hawk.

He spoke a good deal about death, too. He was mortally anxious about winning through
with his job, but he didn’t care a rush for his life.

‘I reckon it’s like going to sleep when you are pretty well tired out, and waking
to find a summer day with the scent of hay coming in at the window. I used to thank
God for such mornings way back in the Blue-Grass country, and I guess I’ll thank Him
when I wake up on the other side of Jordan.’