Ernest Bramah

“ The ‘this’ delicately marked Inspector Beedel’s instinctive contempt for Guido. As a craftsman he was compelled, on his reputation, to respect him, and he had accordingly availed himself of Carrados’s friendship for a confabulation. As a man—he was a foreigner: worse, an Italian, and if left to his own resources the inspector would have opposed to his sinuous flexibility those rigid, essentially Britannia-metal, methods of the Force that strike the impartial observer as so ponderous, so amateurish and conventional, and, it must be admitted, often so curiously and inexplicably successful. ”

“ Who recognized you, Nina?”
“How should I know?” demanded the real Madame Dompierre crossly. “This blind man himself, by chance.”
“You pay a poor compliment to your charming wife’s personality to imagine that one could forget her so soon,” put in Carrados. “And you a Frenchman, Dompierre!”
“You knew, Monsieur Carrados,” reiterated Dompierre, “and yet you ventured here. You are either a fool or a hero.”
“An enthusiast—it is the same thing as both,” interposed the lady. “What did I tell you? What did it matter if he recognized? You see?” ”

“ Then with stumbling feet and groping hands the helpless blind man is led forward to give evidence. Sensation! No, no, it isn’t really fair but I can kill you both with absolute certainty and Providence will be saddled with all the responsibility. Please don’t fidget with your feet, Monsieur Dompierre. I know that you aren’t moving but one is liable to make mistakes.”
“Before I die,” said Montmorency—and for some reason laughed unconvincingly in the dark—“before I die, Mr Carrados, I should really like to know what has happened to the light. ”

“ The room they entered was at the back of the house, and from the position of the road it therefore overlooked the park. Again the door was locked behind them.
“The celebrated Mr Carrados!” announced Madame Ferraja, with a sparkle of triumph in her voice. She waved her hand towards a lean, dark man who had stood beside the door as they entered. “My husband.”
“Beneath our poor roof in the most fraternal manner,” commented the dark man, in the same derisive spirit. “But it is wonderful.”
“The even more celebrated Monsieur Dompierre, unless I am mistaken?” retorted Carrados blandly. ”

“ And straightway into it he had blundered!
“And this,” continued the same voice, “is Carrados, Max Carrados, upon whose perspicuity a government—only the present government, let me in justice say—depends to outwit the undesirable alien! My country; O my country!”
“Is it really Monsieur Carrados?” inquired Dompierre in polite sarcasm. “Are you sure, Nina, that you have not brought a man from Scotland Yard instead?”
“Basta! he is here; what more do you want? Do not mock the poor sightless gentleman,” answered Madame Dompierre, in doubtful sympathy. ”

“ Nina, Mr Carrados will not injure you whatever happens—be sure of that. When the moment comes you will rise——”
“One word,” put in Carrados with determination. “My position is precarious and I take no risks. As you say, I cannot injure Madame Dompierre, and you two men are therefore my hostages for her good behaviour. If she rises from the couch you, Dompierre, fall. If she advances another step Mr Montmorency follows you.”
“Do nothing rash, carissima,” urged her husband, with passionate solicitude. “You might get hit in place of me. We will yet find a better way.” ”

“ Guido was not zigzagging a course about Europe in an aimless search for the picturesque, still less inspired by any love of the melodramatic. To him every step was vital, each tangent or rebound the necessary outcome of his much-badgered plans. In his pocket reposed the papers for which he had run grave risks. The price agreed upon for the service was sufficiently lavish to make the risks worth taking time after time; but in order to consummate the transaction it was necessary that the booty should be put into his employer’s hand. ”

“ Well, it seems to me that every big crime done abroad leaves a finger-print here in London—if only, as you say, we look in the right quarter.”
“And at the right moment,” added Carrados. “The time is often the present; the place the spot beneath our very noses. We take a step and the chance has gone for ever.”
The inspector nodded and contributed a weighty monosyllable of sympathetic agreement. ”

“ Without being a precisian, the blind man was usually exact in such matters. There are those who hold that an engagement must be kept at all hazard: men who would miss a death-bed message in order to keep literal faith with a beggar. Carrados took lower, if more substantial, ground. “My word,” he sometimes had occasion to remark, “is subject to contingencies, like everything else about me. If I make a promise it is conditional on nothing which seems more important arising to counteract it. That, among men of sense, is understood.” ”

“ The Countess X. was sufficiently exalted to be personally immune from the high-handed methods of her country’s secret service, but every approach to her was tapped. The problem was for Guido to earn a long enough respite to enable him to communicate his position to the Countess and for her to go or to reach him by a trusty hand. Then the whole fabric of intrigue could fall to pieces, but so far Guido had been kept successfully on the run and in the meanwhile time was pressing.
“They lost him after the Hutola,” Beedel reported, in explaining the circumstances to Max Carrados. ”

“ Judging from the expertness displayed in the selection, we don’t think that there is any danger of the lot being sold to a pawnbroker or a metal-dealer, so that we are running very little real risk in not advertising the loss.”
“Yes; probably it is as well,” replied Carrados. “Is there anything that Mr Brickwill wishes me to do?”
“Only this, sir; if you are offered a suspicious lot of Greek coins, or hear of them, would you have a look—I mean ascertain whether they are likely to be ours, and if you think they are communicate with us and Scotland Yard at once.” ”

“ At the most extreme you would have been but bound and gagged. Take care: killing is a dangerous game.”
“For you—not for me,” was the bland rejoinder. “If you kill me you will be hanged for it. If I kill you I shall be honourably acquitted. ”

“ It is necessary that you alone should accompany me, for my husband is so distraught in this country, where he understands not a word of what is spoken, that his poor spirit would cry ‘We are surrounded!’ if he saw two strangers approach the house. ”

“ By this time the game and the moves were pretty well understood in more than one keenly interested quarter. Diplomacy supplemented justice and the immediate history of Guido became that of a fox hunted from covert to covert with all the familiar earths stopped against him. From Pardubitz he passed on to Glatz, reached Breslau and went down the Oder to Stettin. Out of the liberality of his employer’s advances he had ample funds to keep going, and he dropped and rejoined his accomplices as the occasion ruled. ”

“ Greatorex, his secretary, had taken the call, but came in to say that the caller would give him nothing beyond his name—Brebner. The name was unknown to Carrados, but such incidents were not uncommon, and he proceeded to comply.
“Yes,” he responded; “I am Max Carrados speaking. What is it?” ”

“ I don’t mean ordinary murders or single-handed burglaries, of course, but”—a modest ring of professional pride betrayed the quiet enthusiast—“real First-Class Crimes.”
“The State Antonio Five per cent. Bond Coupons?” suggested Carrados.
“Ah, you are right, Mr Carrados.” Beedel shook his head sadly, as though perhaps on that occasion someone ought to have looked. “A man has a fit in the inquiry office of the Agent-General for British Equatoria, and two hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of faked securities is the result in Mexico. ”

“ We are very cautious, for on every side is extortion and an unjust law. See, it is even forbidden to take these things out of the country, yet if we try to dispose of them at home they will be seized and we punished, for they are tesoro trovato, what you call treasure troven and belonging to the State—these coins which the industry of Gian discovered and which had lain for so long in the ground of my husband’s vineyard. ”