THE SPY PARAMOUNT. E. Phillips Oppenheim
shone in her eyes. Her lips quivered. For a moment his attention wandered. He was thinking that her mouth was the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. He was wondering—
“Do not keep me in suspense, please,” she begged. “What terms do you speak of?”
“You will not find them difficult,” he assured her, “especially as you have confessed just now that you are not an assassin at heart. Listen to my proposition.”
“Proposition,” she sighed, her eyes once more dancing. “I am intrigued. Will you commence? I am all eagerness.”
“Fold your hands in front of your bosom and swear to me that you will not repeat this afternoon’s adventure and you shall have your slipper.”
She held out her hands.
“Please place them exactly as you desire.”
Fawley crossed them. Like white flowers they were—soft and fragrant, with nails showing faintly pink underneath but innocent of any disfiguring stain of colour. She repeated after him the few words which form the sacred oath of the Roman woman. When she had finished, she treated him to a little grimace.
“You are too clever, my chivalrous captor,” she complained. “Fancy your being able to play the priest. And now, please, the slipper.”
Fawley drew it from his pocket and laid it upon the table. The exquisite paste buckle with the strangely set crown flamed out its brilliant colouring into the room.
“You regret the buckle?” she asked. “It is very beautiful and very valuable. It is quite authentic too. There is Medici blood in my veins. That, I suppose, is why I have the impulse to kill!”
A single lamp stood upon the table, with a worn shade of rose-coloured silk. Except for its rather fantastic and very dim illumination, they sat amongst the shadows. Her hand touched his, which still rested upon the slipper.
“You will give it to me?” she whispered.
“I shall give it to you,” Fawley agreed, “but please do not think that the buckle or even the fact that you have worn it are the only things I have found precious.”
“What do you mean?” she asked fearfully.
Fawley lifted the delicate inner sole of the slipper and looked up. Their eyes met across the table. She was breathing quickly.
“You have read it?” she gasped.
“Naturally.”
“You are keeping it?”
“On the contrary, I am returning it to you.”
A wave of relief drove the tension from her face. She seemed for the moment speechless. The paper which he handed across the table found its way almost mechanically into the jewelled handbag by her side.
“At the same time,” he went on gravely, “you must not hope for too much. I am in the service of Berati. I must tell him what I found in the slipper of the woman who tried to kill him.”
“You will tell him who it was?”
“I think that I am wrong, but that I propose to forget,” he told her. “You have probably made many men forget themselves in your brief years, Princess. You will make many more. What I read, I shall communicate to Berati. The source of my information I shall keep to myself. Take the slipper.”
Her hands were drawing it off the table but, as though by accident, they passed over Fawley’s and he felt their shivering warmth. There was a softer light in her eyes than he had ever seen.
“Princess—Elida—” he whispered.
She leaned towards him but Fawley swung suddenly around in his chair. Patoni, stark and sinister, was standing by the side of the screen, looking in. His smile was one of composed malevolence.
“I beg a thousand pardons,” he apologised, with a stiff little bow. “I am here on a mission of great importance.”
Fawley rose to his feet. He was as tall as Patoni and at that moment his face was as hard and set.
“It is part of your Italian manners,” he asked, “to play the spy in this way?”
“I have offered you my apologies,” was the cold retort. “A quarrel between us is not possible, Major Fawley. I am still of the Church and I do not fight duels. I am compelled to ask you to accompany me without a moment’s delay to the Generalissimo.”
“The Princess—” Fawley began.
“Has her duenna,” Patoni interrupted.
Elida leaned forward and suddenly clasped Fawley’s hand. He seemed somehow to have grown in stature, a man on fire with anger and without a doubt dangerous. Even the two carabinieri standing behind Patoni looked at him with respect.
“Please go,” she begged. “Please go with Prince Patoni, my friend. My car is waiting, my servant is here. I need no escort. I wish so much that you do as I ask.”
Fawley bent over her hands and touched them with his lips. Then he turned and left the room with Patoni.
CHAPTER VI
In a life full of surprises Martin Fawley was inclined to doubt whether he had ever received a greater one than when, for the second time during the same day, he was ushered into the presence of General Berati, the most dreaded man in Rome. Gone was the severe high-necked and tight-waisted uniform; gone the iciness of his speech and the cold precision of his words. It was a tolerable imitation of a human being with whom Fawley was confronted—a dark-haired, undersized but sufficiently good-looking man dressed in a suit of apparently English tweeds, stretched at his full length upon the sofa of a comfortable sitting room leading out of his bureau, reading the New York Herald and with something that looked suspiciously like a Scotch whisky and soda by his side. He threw down his paper and welcomed his visitor with a grim cordiality.
“Come in, Major,” he invited. “I will offer you a whisky and soda as soon as you tell me exactly whom you found on the other side of that door.”
Fawley accepted the chair to which his host had pointed.
“May I take the liberty,” he begged, “of asking a question first?”
“Why not?” Berati answered with unabated good humour. “This is an unofficial conversation. Proceed.”
“Where did you disappear to after that first shot?”
Berati chuckled.
“I give audiences too easily,” he confided, “and for that reason, I have several little contrivances of my own invention. Some day I will show you this one. There is a button on my desk which I touch, the rubber floor upon which I sit disappears, and so do I, into the room below. I should explain perhaps that it is only a drop of a few feet and the end is what you call in England a feather bed. And now the answer to my question, please.”
Martin Fawley was probably as near complete embarrassment as ever before in his life. He hated the position in which he found himself. He hated what he was about to do. He kept his countenance but he was bitterly mortified as he felt for a secret pocket inside his coat and silently withdrew his cigarette case.
“General Berati,” he said, “I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself and I shall merit what you will doubtless think of me. At the same time, do remember this—I am to some extent a mercenary in your service. I allow myself that amount of excuse. It was a woman who fired the shot and, as you see, I am handing back my papers.”
“This is most intriguing,” Berati observed. “I gather then that you refuse to tell me her name?”
“Frankly,” Fawley replied,