XVII
The house was surrounded by the police who had been detailed for that duty, while Wenk with the others hastened to the front door and rang the bell loudly, but the explosive was already prepared. Mabuse had not yet gone to bed. The unusual noise in the street had sent him to the spyhole in the shutters, whence he could see what was happening, and the first glance revealed the police. While he was still looking through his peephole, and letting nothing of the happenings outside escape his eye, since the searchlights illuminated everything in the street, he was taking down from the cupboard close by, where it hung in readiness, a police uniform.
He heard the ringing at the door. He had a telephone concealed in the wall, and this George had connected with a villa at the back of his garden. He pressed the connection and called, “Spoerri!”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“The police are about to break in. Make your escape as arranged. Fetch the Countess. Get the new car ready for me. Burn all papers. Send pigeon-post to Schachen. That’s all.” While still speaking, he began hastily to put on the police uniform over his own clothes.
Then there was the sound of explosion, and the door was broken open, a chair flying into the air. With one bound Mabuse was in the corridor. When the explosion occurred he was on the first floor, which was shut off from the stairway.
Close behind the first of the police who entered through the shattered door came Wenk, a heavy revolver in his hand. He was at once struck by the style of the interior, its beautiful carvings and its costly Persian carpets. He took this in at the very first glance as he hurried by. He pointed in silence to the stairs, and while those behind went up them, he and some others inspected the three doors leading to the basement. All were locked, and in a few minutes they had been burst open. The police rushed through all the rooms; one, trying to turn on the electric light, found that it was cut off.
Six policemen had stormed the stairs. The door in the panelled wall of the first floor leading from the stairs was open. The men advanced beyond it into a dark corridor, holding their revolvers cocked, and touching all the objects they encountered in the darkness. Nowhere was there any electric light to be had, and it was some time before they had enough electric torches to suffice them. Then in a moment they had taken possession of all the rooms, and the doors leading to the corridor were shut behind them by the detectives, who removed the keys. Wherever they found the rooms empty, they hacked upon the chests and cupboards. Mabuse heard the sounds, which made his usually silent house as noisy as a factory.
When furnishing the house he had had a little secret chamber made near the doorway leading to the first floor. A carpenter belonging to his band of accomplices had done the work. This chamber was so cunningly concealed in the cleverly contrived decoration of the walls as to be invisible from the corridor outside, and on the inner side the existence of a door would never have been suspected. It was here that Mabuse had concealed himself when he heard the explosion that wrecked his front door. In this hiding-place he had a second telephone connecting him with the other villa. While the noise of the men storming the stairs covered his movements, he tried to make use of this connection, but there was no answer from the other end; therefore Spoerri must already have got away.
Now came the moment when everything must be risked, and the chances of escape or of death were equal. The little chamber had a second door, and this, concealed like the other by the decoration of the panelling, opened directly on to the stairs. It was here that Mabuse stood to listen.
He subdued all his senses with the supernatural powers at his command, subordinating them to his hearing; rustlings, voices, hackings, cries, abuse, orders, the clicking of electric torches, even the spitting sound of the acetylene searchlights, were inscribed on his eardrum as on a microphone. His powers of hearing must be concentrated on one single moment, and that was the first second, or fraction of a second, in which there should be neither step, nor sound, nor even breathing upon the stairs. If this instant occurred before the systematic search of the house, room by room, had begun, it would give him a favourable opportunity, his only opportunity, for flight. It seemed as if the very blood in his veins stood still, the better to help him discover the fateful moment. All the other senses were in abeyance, and his will concentrated on his hearing alone. He felt as if his ear were as large as the Lake of Constance and his hearing as fine as the vibration of a filament in an electric light. Everything else within him was cold as ice, and anaesthetized, but his ear bore a volcanic life within it, and at last he reached that single heartbeat of time which should prove his salvation.
He pushed open the narrow door on to the stairs. Until he had reconnoitred he ran a risk that his ear might have deceived him, but he saw at once that all was well.
In the corridor below a constable was standing. As he passed him, Mabuse cried, “He has shut himself into the bathroom. …”
Then he saw them all running from the rooms downstairs and pressing to the staircase. Two men stood at the entrance, in the midst of the fragments of the shattered door. “I am going for reinforcements,” said Mabuse as he approached them; “he has entrenched himself in the bathroom. …”
They let him pass, and he ran, using one hand to brush others aside, the other grasping his Browning pistol. Yes, he was getting away now. …
The night was bright with the searchlights, and their rays spoke to him of freedom and good luck. Dazzling, enchanting visions floated before his spirit. He drank in deep draughts of the light outside.
“What’s up?” asked one of the men outside as he rushed out.
“His honour’s orders … reinforcements wanted; he’s entrenched himself in the bathroom,” called Mabuse in reply.
“Take the motorcycle,” shouted the other.
What luck! Mabuse already had it between his legs. He fell upon it, mounted, feeling as if he had fallen from a tower on to a bed of down, and the night, like a friendly monster, swallowed him up, protecting him alike from the searchlights and from the violence with which the search-party would have seized him.
A quarter of an hour later he threw the motorcycle into the canal and rode away on his little racing car as if sailing upon a cloud. The car stretched its nozzle towards the southwest and away it bounded in delight along the boulevard. It was an armoured car. …
“What is the matter?” Wenk asked the police as they rushed past him.
“He is in the bathroom, and has entrenched himself,” one of them called back.
Wenk ran up the stairs. “Where is he?” he cried.
“In the bathroom,” they shouted on all sides.
“All hands to the bathroom,” ordered Wenk.
They ran hither and thither, and their pocket-torches could be seen gleaming on the walls in all directions. Where are they all going? To the bathroom. Fifteen men are hastening to the bathroom. “But where is the bathroom?” Wenk inquired. Nobody knew where the bathroom was. And now everyone was shouting out, “Halloa, what’s up?”
The electric switches were overhead, and a turn of the loosely fastened screws now gave dazzling light to the whole place. The rooms were brilliant in their wealth and luxuriance—pictures, hangings, carpets, bronzes, furniture. The bathroom was found at last, and the bath in it was of Carrara marble, but the whole house was empty and deserted.
Wenk was almost beside himself. He felt like an empty shaft, down which everything good and beautiful and all that was lofty and successful had fallen into a bottomless abyss. They tapped the walls with their hatchets, suspecting some hidden space, and soon the secret nook was discovered and the riddle solved.
Wenk pulled himself together. There was yet another mouse-hole, and it was in Schachen, at the Villa Elise!
The State Attorney made rapid arrangements at the telephone headquarters. All the lines were connected up with him, and everything had been prepared beforehand. The highroads from Munich in all directions were guarded by police. The stretch of country between Munich and Lindau had eight posting-stations, and at every one there was a telephone ready at any moment throughout the night to inform Munich of anything that had happened there.
Wenk raised the alarm in all directions. Mabuse’s stratagem had given him a half-hour’s start. If things had happened as he imagined, and the car of the fugitive were now eighty or ninety kilometres away, there was yet ten minutes before Buchloe could announce its passing through. He had hardly reckoned up the distance, however, when he heard “Buchloe speaking!” and his heart sang for joy.
“A car has just gone through at terrific speed in the direction of Kempten. It is a large covered car.”
It was 2:10 a.m., and a quarter of an hour later came the Kaufbeuren report.
“A large covered car, travelling about eighty kilometres an hour, has just passed, and taken the Kempten road.”
It was now 2:25 a.m. Wenk began rapidly to make calculations as to the speed of the car, but just then Buchloe rang up again: “A second car has just come through, a small, open car with one person in it!” Ten minutes later Kaufbeuren gave the same report.
“They are escaping in sections. The second car is going faster. Mabuse must be in that one, and his accomplices in the first,” thought Wenk.
From Obergünzburg he had the announcement of both cars in the one communication, for the second went through just as the official had informed him about the first. Buchenberg told him the same.
Then Wenk thought it time to call up Schachen. He gave directions to await the arrival of the two cars and then take action according to the plan arranged. The man whom it was above all important to secure would probably be in the uniform of a Munich constable, and they were not to be misled by this, for it would be Mabuse.
“Now we have him at last,” said Wenk jubilantly, as he received one communication after another, all of them proving that Schachen was the destination aimed at.
Place after place stood out on the map to Wenk, and through the night the villages and tiny towns called to him and ranged themselves on his side. He bound them together with phantom threads, reaching to the very limits of the Empire. He wrung the secret of the broad highroad out of it in the darkness, and the highroad knew nothing of its revelation. With one small lever he held the long, unending avenue, shrouded in darkness, in the hollow of his hand. The forces he had disposed were obedient to him, their general.
Hergatz rang on the telephone, and the sound of its bell seemed to his ears as intimate as if it were his own name being called.
“Yes,” he said, “it is the State Attorney, Wenk, speaking from Munich.
“A little open car has just gone by very rapidly in the Lindau direction. Two persons were in it, but not clearly recognized.”
“Thank you. Hold on a minute. There will be a second car through.”
Wenk waited, hearing in the suspended lines all the sounds occurring through the night between Munich and a little place like Hergatz, which he had never yet visited.
“Are you still connected?” he asked after a while.
“Yes, sir.”
“Hasn’t the second car come through?”
“Not yet, sir.”
After a time he inquired again, and once more he was told No.
A quarter of an hour later he rang up Hergatz again, and the official said that no second car had been seen.
Wenk opened out the map again and made a feverish search. Yes: Buchenberg—Isny—Gestratz—Opfenbach … there was Hergatz! And behind Isny there was a highroad leading to Wangen and the Würtemberg district, or on the left another leading to Austria.
He rang up Wangen, but there was no answer. He repeated the call, and after storming for ten minutes he tried again, but still in vain. He had left Wangen out of his reckoning and made no plans concerning it, and in the direction of Austria he could give no orders, for the power of his lever did not extend so far. A car had disappeared from his ken; a car had been stolen from him in the night, snatched away in the darkness from the strange, unfriendly, gloom-surrounded streets.
And then he thought again that the large car might have had a breakdown. Yes, it must have been so, and that was why the smaller car had two people in it, when there was only one at the previous stage. This new circumstance need not worry him. His luck was not going to desert him: he trusted to it, and it would not fail.
He rang up Schachen. “There will probably be only one car. Let it arrive, and then wait twenty minutes to see whether the other one comes, and surround the villa on all sides. Then deliver your blow, as hard as you can!”
Scarcely had he finished speaking when the telephone rang once more, and the last stage—the Enisweiler railway-station—was heard speaking. A small, open car had turned off the Lindau-Friedrichshafen road, and was rapidly approaching Schachen. Two people were in it.
It was all complete! Wenk himself could do nothing more now. He would have to wait. Perhaps in a few moments now the fight on the lakeside which his tactics had prepared might be going on. He ordered them not to wait for the second car, but to enter the villa immediately after the arrival of the occupants of the first one, to seize and handcuff them, extinguish the lights, and wait a full hour for the second one. He looked at his watch, and laid it on the table before him. It was now 3:18 a.m.
He felt a twitching in the muscles of hands and feet and a throbbing in his brain. It seemed as if a whirlwind of pain were rising from his hips to his head, remaining there a while, and then taking the same direction again and again, times without number.