To the tale there is no moral unless it be an indirect moral to be derived from contemplation of a strange contradiction in our modern life, to wit: That practical burglary is by law sternly discouraged and practical joking is not.

CHAPTER VIII

HOODWINKED

Spy stories rather went out of fashion when the armistice was signed.

But this one could not have been told before now, because it happened after the armies had quit fighting and while the Peace Conference was busily engaged in belying its first name. Also, in a strict manner of speaking, it is not a spy story at all.

So far as our purposes are concerned, it began to happen on an afternoon at the end of the month of March of this present year, when J. J.

Mullinix, of the Secret Service, called on Miss Mildred Smith, the well-known interior decorator, in her studio apartments on the top floor of one of the best-looking apartment houses in town. For Mullinix there was a short delay downstairs because the doorman, sharp on the lookout to bar pestersome intruders who might annoy the tenants, could not at first make up his mind about Mullinix. In this building there was a rule against solicitors, canva.s.sers, collectors, pedlar men and beggar men; also one against babies, but none against dogs--excepting dogs above a certain specified size, which--without further description--should identify our building as one standing in what is miscalled the exclusive residential belt of Manhattan Island.

The doorman could not make up his mind offhand whether Mullinix was to be cla.s.sified as a well-dressed mendicant or an indifferently dressed book agent; he was pretty sure, though, that the stranger fell somewhere within the general ban touching on dubious persons having dubious intentions. This doubt on the part of the doorman was rather a compliment to Mullinix, considering Mullinix's real calling. For Mullinix resembled neither the detective of fiction nor yet the detective of sober fact, which is exactly what the latter usually is--a most sober fact; sober, indeed, often to the point of a serious and dignified impressiveness. This man, though, did not have the eagle-bird eye with which the detective of fiction so often is favoured. He did not have the low flattened arches--frontal or pedal--which frequently distinguish the bona-fide article, who comes from Headquarters with a badge under his left lapel and a cigar under his right moustache to question the suspected hired girl. About him there was nothing mysterious, nothing portentous, nothing inscrutable. He had a face which favourably would have attracted a person taking orders for enlarging family portraits. He had the accommodating manner of one who is willing to go up when the magician asks for a committee out of the audience to sit on the stage.

Not ten individuals alive knew of his connection with the Secret Service.

Probably in all his professional life not ten others--outsiders--had ever appraised him for what he was. His finest a.s.set was a gift of Nature--a sort of protective colouration which enabled him to hide in the background of commonplaceness and do his work with an a.s.surance which would not have been possible had he worn an air of a.s.surance. In short and in fine, Mullinix no more resembled the traditional hawkshaw than Miss Mildred Smith resembled the fashionable conception of a fashionable artist. She never gestured with an upturned thumb; nor yet made a spy-gla.s.s of her cupped hand through which to gaze upon a painting. She had never worn a smock frock in her life.

The smartest of smart tailor-mades was none too smart for her. Nothing was too smart for her, who was so exquisitely fine and well-bred a creature. She was wearing tailor-mades, with a trig hat to match, when she opened the door of her entry hall for Mullinix.

"Just going out, weren't you?" he asked as they shook hands.

"No, just coming in," she said. "I had only just come in when the hall man called me up saying you were downstairs."

"I had trouble getting him to send up my name at all," he said with a half smile on his face. "He insisted on knowing all about me and my business before he announced me. So I told him everything nearly--except the truth."

"I gathered from his tone he was a bit doubtful about you; but I was glad to get the word. This is the third time you've favoured me with a visit and each of the other times something highly exciting followed.

Come in and let me make you a cup of tea, won't you? Is it business that brings you?"

"Yes," he said, "it's business."

They sat down in the big inner studio room; on one side of the fireplace the short, slow-speaking, colourless-looking man who knew the inner blackness of so many whited sepulchres; and on the other side, facing him from across the tea table, this small patrician lady who, having rich kinfolk and friends still richer and a family tree deep-rooted in the most Knickerbockian stratum of the Manhattan social schist, nevertheless chose to earn her own living; and while earning it to find opportunity for service to her Government in a confidential capacity.

Not all the volunteers who worked on difficult espionage jobs through the wartime carried cards from the Intelligence Department.

"Yes," he repeated, "it's business--a bigger piece of business and a harder one and probably a more interesting one than the last thing you helped on. If it weren't business I wouldn't be coming here to-day, taking up your time. I know how busy you are with your own affairs."

"Oh, I'm not busy," she said. "This is one of my loafing days. Since lunch time I've been indulging in my favourite pa.s.sion. I've been prowling through a secondhand bookstore over on Lexington Avenue, picking up bargains. There's the fruit of my shopping."

She indicated a pile of five or six nibbled-looking volumes in dingy covers resting upon one corner of the low mantelshelf.

"Works on interior decorating?" he guessed.

"Goodness, no! Decorating is my business; this is my pleasure. The top one of the heap--the one bound in red--is all about chess."

"Chess! Did anybody ever write a whole book about chess?"

"I believe more books have been written on chess than on any other individual subject in the world, barring Masonry," she said. "And the next one to it--the yellow-bound one--is a book about old English games; not games of chance, but games for holidays and parties. I was glancing through it in my car on the way here from the shop. It's most interesting. Why, some of the games it tells about were played in England before William the Conqueror landed; at least so the author claims. Did you ever hear of a game called Shoe the Wild Mare? It was very popular in Queen Elizabeth's day. The book yonder says so."

"No, I never heard of it. From the name it sounds as though it might be rather a rough game for indoors," commented Mullinix. "For a busy woman who's made such a big success at her calling, I wonder how you find time to dig into so many miscellaneous subjects."

"I don't call the time wasted," she said. "For example, there's one book in that lot dealing with mushroom culture. It seems there's ever so much to know about mushrooms. Besides, who knows but what some day I might have a wealthy client who would want me to design him a mushroom cellar, combining practicability with the decorative. Then, you see, I would have the knowledge at my finger tips." She smiled at the conceit, busying herself with the tea things.

"Well, I suppose I'm a one-idea-at-a-time sort of person," he said.

"No, you aren't! You only think you are," she amended. "Just now I suppose you are all so wrapped up in the business you mentioned a moment ago that you can't think of anything else."

"That's a fact," he confessed. "And yet all my thinking doesn't seem to have got me anywhere in particular." He paused to glance about. "Where's your maid? Is she, by any chance, where she could overhear us?"

"No, she's out. This is her afternoon off."

"Good! Then I'll start at the beginning and tell you in as few words as possible the whole thing. But before I do begin, let me ask you a question. It may simplify matters. Anyhow it has a bearing on my princ.i.p.al reason for coming to see you to-day. Isn't Mrs. Howard Hadley-Smith your cousin?"

"Only by marriage. Her husband was my second cousin. He belonged to the branch of the family that owns the hyphen and most of the money. He died six or seven years ago. He was not the most perfect creature in the world, but Claire, his wife--his widow, I mean--is a trump. She's one of the finest women and one of the sanest in New York."

"I'm glad to hear that. Because before we're through with this job--you see I'm a.s.suming in advance that you are going to be willing to help me on it--I say, before we get through it, providing of course we do get through it, it may be necessary to take her into our confidence. That is, if you are sure we can trust absolutely to her discretion."

"We can. But please remember that I don't know what the business is all about."

"I'm coming to that. Oh, by the way, there is one question more: To-morrow night your cousin is giving a costume party or a fancy-dress party of some sort or other, isn't she?"

"Yes; an All Fools' Day party; not a very large one though."

"And you will be going to it, won't you?"

"Yes, indeed! I'm doing the decorating and acting as sort of a.s.sistant director of the affair. But what can my cousin and her April Fools' Day party and all that have to do with the matter that brings you here?"

"A good deal, I hope. But I expect I had better go back to the beginning and tell you the tale in some sort of orderly way. Of course I am telling it to you as one responsible representative of our Government to another."

"I understand. But go ahead, won't you? My curiosity is increasing by the moment."

"Well then, here it is: Six days ago there arrived from the conference at Versailles a high army officer, acting for this occasion as a confidential messenger of the Administration. He brought with him a certain communication--a single small sheet or strip of parchment paper containing about twelve or fifteen typewritten lines. But those few lines were about as important and, under certain circ.u.mstances, as dangerous a collection of typewritten lines as it is possible to conceive of."

"Weren't they in code?"

"Naturally. But the signature was not. The signature was in the handwriting of the man--let us say the personage--who dictated the wording of the dispatch. You would know that handwriting if you saw it.

Nearly every man, woman and child in this country who can read would know it and would recognise it at a glance. Even between us, I take it that there is no need of mentioning the name."

"No. Please go on. The thing has a thrilling sound already."

"That communication dealt directly with perhaps the most important single issue now in controversy at the Peace Conference--a phase of the Asiatic muddle. In fact, it was an outline of the private agreement that has been reached as between our envoys and the envoys representing sundry friendly powers in regard to this particular question. If it should fall into the hands of a certain other power--and be translated--the entire negotiation would be jeopardised. Almost inevitably at least one Oriental nation would withdraw from the conference. The future of the great thing for which our own statesmen and the statesmen of some of the countries provisionally leagued together with us are working--well, that result, to put the thing mildly, would be jeopardised. The very least that could happen would be that four governments would be tremendously embarra.s.sed.

"Indeed it is hard offhand to calculate the possibilities of disaster, but this much is quite sure: Our enemy--and Germany is as much our enemy now as she was during active hostilities--would almost inevitably succeed in the very thing she has been plotting to bring about, which is the sowing of discord among the Allies, not to mention the increase of a racial distrust and a racial antagonism which exist in certain quarters, and, on top of all that, the widening and deepening of a problem which already has been sufficiently difficult and delicate."

"I see. Well?"

"Well, naturally everything possible was done at Washington to safeguard a dispatch of such tremendous importance. No copies of the communication were made. The original was put in a place where it was presumed to be absolutely safe. But within forty-eight hours it disappeared from the place where it had been put."