LITMIR.BIZ

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It will be impossible for me to keep my mouth closed. Miss Grey will be angry. It cannot be helped. Be prepared to be astonished, my friend. Save for the last struggle, that marvellous young woman and I have succeeded in achieving the impossible. All those glorious paintings—the two Andrea del Sartos, the Fra Filippo Lippis, the Murillo, the Titian, the two Spanish pictures, the Cellini handwork—oh! the great list of immortal things, the fit possessions of a god—we have saved them! Not yet have they been touched by one of Hitler’s emissaries, not once have the greedy eyes of his henchmen revelled in their beauties. There were days when we worked from sunrise till night, and if we ate it was without knowing it, and if we drank it was still bending over our tasks. That girl, with the heart of a lioness and the frame of a child, worked with me with the strength of a dozen men. We succeeded. The collection is in our keeping. Never has there been so much fury spent upon any Nazi failure as there has been spent over this one. Everyone wondered at the final rush of that big band of the Gestapo into Vienna. It was to make sure of their loot. It was to make sure of their millions. They came—and what did they find? Half a mile of empty walls.”

      “Do you mean to say that you actually got the whole collection away?” Charles demanded incredulously. ‘T know that a great many of the pictures had gone from the first gallery the night of the scare, but in less than a week the whole house was being ransacked by the Nazis.”

      “The whole collection is still under our control,” Blute declared. “We had even reached the final steps in its disposal. Then our luck failed. Perhaps we were a little careless one day. So many things seemed to have happened between that we began to hope we had been forgotten. Perhaps we were wrong. At any rate, our days of tribulation arrived. We were stripped of every pfennig we possessed, we were questioned and bullied to death. For months I lay in one prison and Patricia Grey in another. We were tortured—but never mind—we have finished with the horrors. Just as summarily as we were imprisoned we were thrown out onto the streets two months ago—penniless. For a time we were followed everywhere we went, then I think they gave us up. They saw me in the clothes of a beggar of the street, they saw me eating crusts at the back doors of the restaurants which in the old days I had patronized. They saw her in the same plight. Then little paragraphs began to appear in the papers that some of the pictures had been seen in Paris and some in London. They cooled off, they left us alone except now and then to mock at us as we passed. There we were starving in the streets, and treasures worth millions still safe here, still waiting only for us to take the final step. And we were without a pfennig towards a meal, without the money now for a letter or a telegram, without any means of opening up communication outside the ring of the city. Have you ever considered, Mr. Charles Mildenhall, the psychological, the actual mental condition of the really penniless man or woman?”

      “No, and I don’t want to just now,” Charles declared. “Let’s get on with this. I gather that by some extraordinary means the pictures remain hidden, that you still have access to them and with money you could carry out your plans to restore them to Leopold Benjamin.”

      “With money and help—yes. But listen, Mr. Mildenhall. The last steps will be the most dangerous. You are still a young man and you have all that you need in life. Why should you risk everything in an enterprise of this sort?”

      Charles smiled deliberately. It was not a humorous effort. It just meant the slow relaxation of his features from his strained period of listening.

      “For the same reason, I suppose,” he replied, “that half the men in the world have, some time or another, made fools of themselves. I don’t admit that I am going to make a fool of myself, but I am going to help you and Patricia to finish your adventure whatever we may have to go through.”

      Blute spent several moments of indecision, his eyes fixed intently upon the speaker.

      “If you were an ordinary young man,” he began, “I should warn you once more. As it is, I shall not do so. I believe that you have made up your mind. Very well, I proceed—”

      “Let me tell you this one thing about myself which may set your mind a little more at ease,” Charles insisted, finishing his brandy and lighting a cigarette. “I started in the diplomatic world with every mortal advantage. Things were made far too easy for me. I abandoned the straightforward course towards the final goal of an ambassadorship solely because the preliminaries were too circumscribed. I felt a craving for adventure. My year as military attache did not help me in the least. I happened to be on friendly terms with our Foreign Secretary. I have one great gift—the gift of languages—so I put it up to him that I could be of more use to the country as a free lance, wandering from one seat of disturbance to another, undertaking special missions, bringing back from remote places at times very valuable information. He agreed and off I went. I shall never earn any great distinctions, I shall never have my chest covered with medals and orders. People will repeat my name and wonder in years to come what I have done to be still hanging about the Foreign Office. I don’t mind. I shall have lived the life I wanted to live.”

      Blute finished his brandy and rose to his feet. With a grin across the table at Charles he put several of the cigars in his pocket.

      “Put on your hat and coat,” he enjoined, “and come with me.”

      CHAPTER XIV

       Table of Contents

      Charles piloted his companion by the intricate route leading through the back quarters of the hotel to the lift and into the courtyard. Fritz was sitting on the box seat of his taxicab smoking a cigarette and reading the evening paper. Blute seized Charles’s arm.

      “This chauffeur!” he exclaimed. “Remember, the fate of our whole enterprise will depend upon his discretion.”

      “I pledge my word upon it,” was the confident reply. “I have known him for years. He is absolutely trustworthy. He is my man body and soul. Apart from that, he has somewhat the spirit of an adventurer and he is an out-and-out Viennese, loathing the Germans.”

      “Satisfied,” Blute said tersely. “I will direct him myself.”

      Fritz, with smiling face, held open the door. Charles entered the vehicle. Blute remained talking with Fritz for almost five minutes. Afterwards he took his place inside. Fritz closed the door and they drove off.

      “I am satisfied with your chauffeur,” Blute declared. “He is intelligent, he worships you, he has quick wit, he is likely to be useful to us.”

      “Is it permitted to ask where we are going?” Charles enquired.

      “We are going by a roundabout course,” Blute confided, “to a compound attached to the garage of Mr. Leopold Benjamin’s palace. It abuts upon a lane where there are no other buildings and it is nearly a quarter of a mile from the house. Listen while I explain something. Do not let your spirits fall when I speak of a secret passage because, although I know these places have no novelty as hiding resorts and would be most unlikely to escape the notice of a trained S.S. man, you will have to take my word for it that this is one of the most wonderful secret passages in Europe. The palace in which Mr. Benjamin lived was built, as you know, by the Hapsburgs, and it has always remained a Royal Domain until it was purchased by Mr. Benjamin’s grandfather from the Archduke Ferdinand. The Archduke had a mistress to whom he was devoted, but he had also a jealous wife and family. He discovered the existence of this passage for himself, spent millions upon its development and built the compound as a villa, where the lady was installed. None of this appears in any published guide-book and most people seem to have forgotten the story. The passage is a quarter of a mile long and it commences fifty feet from the end of the picture gallery. It terminates in the room in which I have slept every night I have been free, before and after I was in prison. The only person to whom Mr. Benjamin ever revealed its intricacies was myself. I can safely say that no one else breathing has ever passed from one end of it to the other, or been shown the exit. No one whom I have ever come across in the city or amongst the hundreds of guests who have visited Mr. Benjamin have ever known that there was such a place. The police have no information

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