The Hand of Peril

Front matter

"I think I'll go this alone," was Kestner's final answer

Copyright, 1914 and 1915, by International Magazine Company

Copyright, 1915, By ARTHUR STRINGER

PART I: The Quarters in Paris

PART I

THE QUARTERS IN PARIS

I: Chapter 1

THE HAND OF PERIL

I

"That's your woman!"

It was Wilsnach of the Paris Office who spoke. He spoke quietly, over the edge of his Le Journal Amusant, But the fingers that held the sheet were a little unsteady.

"The woman with the bird of paradise plumes?" asked Kestner of the Secret Service, paddling in his half-melted mousse au chocolat with a long-handled spoon.

"Yes," answered Wilsnach. "Get her, and get her good!"

Kestner, the wandering mouchard whose home was under his hat and whose beat was all Europe, quietly took out a cigar and lighted it.

He was not studying the woman. Instead, he was sleepily studying the end of his cigar. Yet he studied it persistently, as though its newly formed ash held the solution of many solemn mysteries.

Across the rue de la Paix, opposite the double row of little iron tables where he sat, his idly wandering gaze caught the gleam of metal letters against a white marble wall. These letters spelt the name of an American jeweller. The afternoon sun made them shine like gold. The same sun glinted pleasantly through the leaves of a sycamore. It shone on motor-busses threading their way through the heart of Paris. It shone on tonneaux in which lounged painted actresses and on taxicabs in which sat tired-eyed tourists. It shone on promenading sidewalk-throngs and red-trousered Zouaves and bare-headed students in black gowns and pastry-boys with trays balanced on their heads and a street-tumbler with a mat under his arm and a haggard-browed old man in frugal search of cigarette-ends along the boulevarde curbing.

Kestner, while his mousse au chocolat deliquesced on the little iron table in front of him, saw all this. But incidentally, and as though by accident, he saw other things. Among these was the woman in the bird of paradise hat.

He sat watching her as his many years in the service had taught him always to watch his quarry, with that casual and intermittent glance, with that discreet obliquity, which could so easily be interpreted as the idle curiosity of an idle-minded sightseer.

Yet Kestner, at the moment, was anything but idle-minded. At each apparently casual side-glance his quick eye was picking up some new point, very much as a magnet catches up its iron filings.

"So that's our woman!" he finally murmured. He spoke without emotion.

Yet he was a little startled, inwardly, by her appearance of youthfulness. At the outside, he concluded, she could not be more than twenty-two or twenty-three. That was younger than most of them. In other ways, too, he saw that she was a distinct devia from type. She even puzzled him a little. And he was not a man frequently puzzled by the women he encountered.

Still again he studied her from under drooping and indifferent eyelids. He could see that she had taken off her gloves and rolled them up into a tight ball. Her bare hands were linked together, as she leaned forward with her elbows on the round-topped table, and on the delicate bridgeway of those interwoven fingers rested the perfect oval of her chin.

Of these fingers Kestner took especial notice. For all their slenderness there was a nervous strength about them, an odd fastidiousness of movement, a promise of vast executive capabilities. The mam watching them saw at a glance that they were the fingers of an artist.

Kestner's indolent glance went back to her face. The pallor of that youthful yet ascetic-looking face was accentuated by the dark brim of the hat under the bird of paradise plumes. The violet-blue eyes, at the moment almost as sleepy-looking as Kestner's, were made darker by the heavy fringe of their lashes. Yet there seemed nothing suppressed or circuitous in their outlook on the world.

Kestner, in fact, could find no fault with the modelling of the face. It should have had more colour, he might have admitted, yet the ivory creaminess of the skin seemed to atone for that absence of colour. The dull chestnut of the heavily massed hair would have been more effective if done in the mode of the hour—but even that, he concluded, was a matter of taste.

It seemed, on the whole, a face singularly devoid of guile. It was only about the lips, with their vague line of revolt, that Kestner could detect anything Ishmael-like, anything significant of her career and calling.

"That's right," muttered Wilsnach, as he bent over his illustrated paper. "Get her good—she's the kind who'll need it!"

"That's where I think you're wrong," remarked the Secret Agent, as he noted the haughtiness of the well-poised head. "I could spot her among a million."

"But you'll never see her there to be spotted," amended Wilsnach. "She's the one they keep out of sight in working hours."

"Tell me about 'em," said the listless-eyed Kestner.

Wilsnach drew his iron chair a little closer to the table.

"It took us over seven months to fine-comb what we know about them out of six different cities. You see, we could only spot them on the wing, the same as I spotted them to-day when I 'phoned you."

"Who's the man?" asked Kestner.

"He's carrying the name of Lambert, just at present. In Budapest he was known as Hartmann. In Rome it's probably something else. But we're sure of one thing: he's the manager of their little circle. He's also their paper expert. He's perfected a bleaching process of his own, and he's the only man in Europe who can re-fill cheque perforations. He's also a finished etcher and engraver, and an expert in inks and colour-work."

"Now the woman," prompted Kestner.

"She's the old man's daughter, as far as we can learn. In fact there's no doubt of it. He's had her in hand for years. She's the free-hand worker for the gang. She can work on stone or steel or copper, and she can do the best imitation of lathe-work on a Treasury note you ever clapped eyes on. The old man taught her all that, the brush work, the photo-engraving process, the silk-thread trick, and the oil washes for ageing a note."

"Got any samples?" asked Kestner, revolving his cigar-end about his puckered lips as though life held no serious thoughts for him.

"The office has one or two. But look at those hands of hers! You could tell that girl was an adept by those fingers!"

"How about the face?"

"That's what puzzled me. She certainly doesn't look the part. But there were certain things we traced up. This man Lambert brought her to Florence years ago, when she was a mere child. He trained her for miniature painting there. Then he taught her etching and engraving. Then he started her working in oils, and for a couple of years she was forging old masters for him. Next, as far as we can learn, he turned his attention to free-hand script work. He got her copying museum records and manuscripts in the Uffizi., Then they migrated to Pisa for a year. It was there she must have done the ten-kroner Austrian note that the office has a sample of. She also got away with an uncommonly good Italian postage-stamp, for which Lambert had made a waterproof ink of his own. Then they bobbed up in Brussels next, and moved on to London, and a year later were back in Rome, sliding from city to city, and doing the smoothest forging and cheque-raising and counterfeiting and flimflam work of the century."

"But as you say, she certainly doesn't look the part."

"She sure doesn't," admitted Wilsnach. "Poucher's got a theory that the old man hypnotises the girl and makes her do the work without knowing she does it. But that's fantastic. I don't even think it's worth considering."

Wilsnach stared down at his paper again, for at the moment Kestner was speaking sotto voce to a withered-cheeked old man with a trayful of street-toys. He was speaking to the camelot in the patois of the street.

"Galipaux, pipe that woman at the sixth table on my left. Lift her handbag when you get the chance. Take your time about it, and whatever you do, don't mess the job!"

The old toy-vender called Galipaux neither answered nor looked back. He merely passed on his way through the jostling crowd. Kestner continued to puddle lazily with his melted mousse au chocolat.

"What's your theory?" he finally asked.

"I rather think the old man's a nut. As far as we can gather, he was an expert accountant in his time, and later swung into bankwork. Then he fell. He always claimed it was a frame-up. But he did four years in Sing Sing—was the school teacher in the prison there—before the other man confessed. That soured him, and he just went bad after that. He did time again, in Atlanta, but forged his own pardon and got away with it."

"What's the rest of the gang?"

"The only other person we've been able to spot is a Neapolitan named Morello. They call him Tony. He's as big as the old man there, and as smooth as they make 'em. They use him as their breaker and shover. He's been years in America and speaks English without an accent. He was a paying-teller in an Italian bank in New York, and later on an olive-oil importer there. He came under the police eye seven years ago for smuggling."

"Ever indicted?"

"Never in America. He fell in Europe, a year and a half ago. He got the blue-prints of the Heligoland Naval Fortifications and was selling a forged copy to a French secret agent in Brussels when the German government got wise. They got him back across the border and tied him up with a fifteen year sentence. Then the girl and the old man got busy, did the Atlanta trick over again, and got Morello liberated and on a steamer for Harwich before the officials knew the release-order was a forgery. I've every reason to imagine he thinks a lot of that girl. He follows her around like a dog."

"And that's all you know?" asked the unemotional Kestner.

"There's an American girl who calls herself Cherry Dreiser floating somewhere about the fringes of that gang, but we can't connect her with them. She was known in New York as Sadie Wimpel, and has a record as a con-woman. We know she worked with a wire-tapper named Davis, and later decided to leave America for a year or two. That was after a badger-game rake-off over there. We first tailed her in Amsterdam on some diamond smuggling work. Later, we found her on her way to Paris with this woman called Maura Lambert."

"So her name's Maura!" languidly commented Kestner, as he threw away his cigar. "But I think you're wrong about the old gentleman. That man is not a lunatic."

"Oh, he's shrewd and keen enough," admitted Wilsnach. "But he has that one obsession of his."

"Which one?"

"That nut idea that he can stampede all modern commerce off the range, that one woman's hand, properly trained, can crowbar over the whole modern world of business. His claim, I suppose, is that all our money-machinery, all our business, our banks and credit systems and negotiable security methods, actually depend on one thing. And that thing is the integrity of paper. The modern business man has got to know that his documents are genuine, that his bank-notes are bona-fide, that his drafts are authentic, that his currency certificates are unquestioned."

"Naturally!"

"Lambert's got the idea that he can undermine the whole structure of modern commercial life by striking at that one thing, by making men feel that its paper, its bank-notes and bonds and certificates are no longer to be depended upon. He imagines he is going to make banks crumble and governments totter by simply flooding the country with counterfeits, by leaving every one in doubt as to which is the real thing and which is the worthless imitation."

"And thereby add a little to his own income?"

"I don't think that's the prime consideration. He's always had money enough. I know for certain he got eleven thousand marks for supplying the forgeries of the Kiel fortifications when the originals were carried away."

"And his next move?" prompted Kestner.

"We've concluded that his next move must mean America. It's what he's been planning for, for years. He's laid all his ropes. He's going into the thing on a big scale. In six months' time he's going to unload three or four million dollars in counterfeit on the republic. In the second six months he'll put out more than double that amount."

"And then what?"

"Isn't that enough?" inquired Wilsnach.

"It sounds like a very fine plan. But if you knew all this, why haven't you closed in on them?"

"Headquarters said hands off until you could take over the case."

"That was very kind of Headquarters," sighed Kestner. Then Kestner sat without speaking, for a withered-faced street-vendor had placed on his knees a folded copy of an afternoon newspaper. This paper the Secret Agent carefully unfolded and let lie on the table in front of him, and for a short while seemed busied with its contents.

In that brief space of time, however, Kestner had done several things. One was to hold a lady's bag between the flaps of his coatfront, well under the table edge, and there quickly but minutely examine its contents. Another was to register a mental note of every name and address found therein. And still another was to trace on a gilt-edged carte des glaces an outline of each key found in the bag of that quiet unsuspecting lady, while the final movement was to slip the bag back into the adroit hands of one Galipaux, who, in due time, drew the attention of a stately lady in a bird of paradise hat to the fact that her purse had fallen to the pavement. And for this, Kestner saw, the mendacious old scoundrel was rewarded with a franc.

"Her money, I regret to say, was all unmistakably genuine," observed Kestner.

"And so is her appetite, for I notice that she's just made away with her third Coupe Jacques."

"She is certainly not true to type," repeated the perplexed Kestner.

"Well, you'll find her true to her gang!"

"I'll tell you that before midnight."

"You mean you're going to jump right into the case?"

"I'm in it already," retorted Kestner, looking at his watch. "I have located the lady, and, if I am not vastly mistaken, I have located the plant."

"Where?"

"The first in a little street off the Boulevard Montparnasse, and the second in so remote a place as the city of Palermo."

Wilsnach followed the other man as he rose to his feet.

"What'll be your line of procedure?" he inquired.

"That I can't tell until my visit south of the river."

"Then what men will you want?"

Kestner lighted a second cigar—as usual, he was smoking too much—and for a few seconds was deep in thought.

"I think I'll go this alone," was his final answer to Wilsnach.

Chapter 2

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 diver 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.