Dr. Mabuse, master of mystery 19 – Clare · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Dr. Mabuse, master of mystery 19Chapter 19
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Dr. Mabuse, master of mystery 19
Chapter 19
ClareEnglish
Mabuse hastily carried the insensible woman from the bank of the Rhine channel to the nearest house. It was that of an osier-binder.
“We have had an accident,” said Mabuse, and then seated himself at the window to watch the approach.
When an hour had gone by thus, and the Countess opened her eyes again, Mabuse noticed that she started on recognizing him and turned away, overcome with dread. He went hastily towards her and, stooping down, he whispered, “We are saved! We are irrevocably bound together!”
The whispered words impressed her with a certain sense of comfort and security. She no longer withstood him, and soon sat up, the peasant’s wife promising to look after her.
Mabuse sought for the nearest village on the map. Then he went thither, in security, knowing that he was not being followed. George had remained as the victim of the pursuer’s vengeance, and he was saved. The other’s fate was due to the little trick of the police uniform.
The village was not more than twenty minutes’ distance, and in an inn he found a telephone. He ordered coffee, and then rang up Zürich. In half an hour’s time the call came through, and asking who was there, he was answered, “Dr. Ebenhügel, Zürich.”
“Has Spoerri arrived?” he inquired.
“Spoerri has just come: he is still here;” and Spoerri rushed to the telephone.
“Spoerri, I’ve had a misfortune. George is taken, but we have escaped. Bring the car here at once, and put in a travelling dress and coat for my wife. I shall expect you at 2 p.m. at the Au railway-station in the Rhine Valley.”
“Very good, sir,” replied Spoerri.
“I called her my wife, and said it quite coolly and intentionally,” mused Mabuse, dallying with the thought, which yet seemed to imply something like a fetter; but he dismissed the idea, saying, “She is my wife, my own property!... It is true, she is mine.”
Spoerri arrived punctually. “I shall drive you through the Engadine direct to the Italian frontier,” he said, when Mabuse had told him all that had occurred. But to that proposal Mabuse merely uttered one word: “No!”
“But, Doctor,” Spoerri pleaded, “you can’t remain in Switzerland. The Munich police have informed the authorities here of your movements. We shouldn’t get even as far as Toggeburg. It would be almost better to return to Germany.”
“And that’s exactly what I mean to do! Spoerri, from this day forward the State Attorney’s life stands under my protection. You are to revoke my earlier orders to the Removal Committee at once.”
“You are going in for a remarkable friendship, Doctor,” tittered Spoerri.
“He is to remain absolutely under my protection!” repeated Mabuse, and they drove through the flat marsh-land back to the peasant’s hut.
The Countess got into the car, and they were soon hastening to the Austrian frontier. “What sort of passports have you for us?” asked Mabuse.
“Swiss ones: please take them,” answered Spoerri, handing over documents with many visas, calculated to arouse a confidence which was constantly abused yet remained unconscious of the fact.
Three hours later the car was driving along the highroad leading from Bregenz to Kempten. It drove past a house from which, the night before, a message had been flashed through to Munich telling of its passing, and went towards Würtemberg. The travellers spent the night in a village south of Stuttgart.
In the evening Mabuse went to Spoerri’s room, and said to him: “There is just one thing left for me to do in Germany, in Europe ... and that is to get hold of that lawyer, the State Attorney, Wenk, alive. I want him alive, mark you! as much alive as a fly under a glass. The Countess and I are staying here to-morrow. You will go to Stuttgart and buy, whatever the price may be, a two-seater aeroplane. We are quite safe here. The landlord did not even register us, so if the police appear he is bound to hold his tongue, or else he will be fined. Have you any brandy?”
Spoerri shrank back in dismay; his martyrdom was about to begin again. Nevertheless, he had smuggled three bottles out of Switzerland.
“Of course you have some brandy!” said Mabuse, before he could even answer.
Mabuse drank from the travelling cup which he always carried in his pocket, and Spoerri had to fill the toothglass on the washhandstand.
Mabuse was longing for a carouse, a really heavy carouse which should seize him by the throat and press him under the water, as if he were being given a millstone for a swimming belt. When he had emptied the second bottle, he saw that he was not likely to get his wish.
“Haven’t you any more?” he asked.
“That’s all there is. I couldn’t venture to bring any more across the frontier.”
Mabuse laughed satirically. “That’s fine. Here is Spoerri, who has brought three railway vans full of salvarsan, two of cocaine, enough prostitutes to fill three brothels across the frontier, yet he hasn’t enough courage to bring more than three bottles of brandy! Empty your glass into mine. Don’t your wages include the getting of brandy?”
When the third bottle had been emptied Mabuse, clear-headed as ever, but more hot-blooded, went back to the room next his own, occupied by the Countess. He was out of sorts, and resembled an engine that had been run too fast, so that the heat had covered the glowing cylinders with vapour, and they could not be set in motion.
He approached the Countess’s bed. “You and I had come to an understanding together. You have broken through it: you were ready to betray me!”
“I was!” said the Countess in a low voice.
Then ungovernable fury seemed to possess the man. He snatched her from the bed, and as he seized her, lifted her high in the air as if he were going to dash her in pieces against the wall like rotting timber. At that moment he hated her; she was the embodiment of all his weaknesses. For ten long minutes, when the patrol-boat was on their track, the power of his will over her had ceased, and now, when he wanted to destroy her and would have dashed against the wall the head that defied him, he could not do it.
With a low cry the woman found herself held on high, and realized the strength of arm and indomitable will-power of the being to whom she was secretly--and yet irrevocably--bound. She longed for death. Softly she repeated a fragment or two of a prayer learnt in her childhood’s days, and she knew that if she were to die now she would draw this man also to his death.
But Mabuse, conscious of his power over the woman he held aloft in his grasp, suddenly came to himself again. Once more he realized that he was alive, was safe, and felt a fierce joy in the knowledge and in his possession of her. Almost gently he laid her down, and the poor woman, condemned afresh to a life of humiliation and degradation, was at the mercy of the tyrant who dominated her, and from whose power there was now no escape. She lay wide-eyed and tearless till the dawn, her only desire for floods and floods of tears wherein to drown for ever the misery of her existence.
On the morning of the following day Mabuse flew with her from Stuttgart to Berlin.
There, caught in the toils of the mighty city, among those whose instincts he developed and used to his own ends, he lived, bent on one aim alone. One idea presented itself with ever-increasing intensity, one vision swam ever before his eyes, intoxicating him with a fury of desire. His phantasies, his strivings, and the goal before him gained their force because born of the strongest impulse within him, his lust for power!
There was one man in the world who had set himself to follow his path, had discovered him in his own territory, and dislodged him from his fortress. There was one alone who had dared to disturb his plans, to oblige him to undertake a flight in which his life had been in danger. It was due to this man’s efforts that the State had interfered with his schemes for getting rid of those whom his imperious will desired to remove from his path.
From the woman who had first moved him to the very depths of his being he had wrested all the power of will with which her personality resisted him. It was his pride to know that. He had taken her being, her beauty, her independence, her exclusiveness, and grappled them to himself, and this work of his was the very highest spiritual expression of his powers and capabilities. But between him and her there was a period of ten minutes in which she had escaped his domination, in which he had to renounce his claim to this symbol of his superhuman force. And that period of time, that barren, useless part of his life, he owed to the power of this one man.
His flight from Germany with this woman and his journey across the Atlantic had been so minutely prepared in all its details that only death could intervene. His empire of Citopomar, with its virgin forests, tigers, rattlesnakes, where death lay in wait at every moment, its mountains and its waterfalls and its rare exotic growths, was waiting for him, waiting to set him free from Europe, to offer him a new life. Any day might see him crowned as emperor.
But he would eat of Dead Sea fruit for the rest of his life, did he take possession of his realm before he had seized upon this man with all the full force of his lust for power and his deadly hatred, had held him within his grasp and annihilated him. Between him and Wenk it was a struggle for existence, and he could know no peace while the other lived.
Once, when the thoughts surging within him would no longer be controlled, he replied to the Countess’s inquiry as to when they would leave Germany, “I shall catch him alive. I shall catch him like a bird in the snare. He will flutter helpless into my hands. Not till then do I go.”
She turned away afraid, guessing the man he meant. Since that moment of her resistance and hope of escape she seemed to have become more subdued than ever, falling deeper under his demon spell. She did not venture to oppose or question more.
Mabuse’s enterprise with regard to Wenk developed slowly. But steadily and surely the net around him was tightening....
Wenk was in Munich again. George had been imprisoned there, and he played the rôle of a deaf mute. No one had heard a word from him since his arrest. He was confronted with the constables and tradespeople from Schachen who had seen him for many weeks, with the young fellows whom he had tried to hand over to the Foreign Legion, all of whom instantly recognized him, but he did not utter a word.
One morning they found he had hanged himself with his braces. He had written one word on the wall of his cell, the word that one of Napoleon’s generals had made renowned after he had lost the battle of Waterloo.
An exhaustive search in the Villa Elise brought little to light. It merely revealed proofs that Mabuse employed the money obtained by gambling or theft to carry on smuggling and profiteering on a gigantic scale. The police worked side by side with the Swiss authorities, for it was believed that Mabuse must be in Switzerland, or at any rate that he had passed through. Wenk went once a fortnight to Zürich. Now and then one of Mabuse’s gang was caught, but all were so thoroughly schooled that no word of betrayal escaped them.
News reached Wenk from Frankfurt that a gambler was at work there, whose description so closely resembled Mabuse that Wenk travelled thither at once, but when he arrived there was no trace of the man to be found. Three days later there was a report of a similar kind from Cologne, then from Düsseldorf, and later both from Essen and Hanover.
Wenk went hither and thither, not doubting in his own mind that he was indeed on the track of Mabuse. The latter must have spies in Munich who watched and reported Wenk’s movements. Knowing that he was followed, he took every possible precaution, and employed all the cunning at his command. On his journeys he made use of trains, cars, aeroplanes indiscriminately. Since he could not help suspecting that Mabuse had accomplices among his own subordinates, Wenk watched these very closely. He changed his chauffeur and his housekeeper, altered his address and his telephone number, took rooms in a hotel, or lodged with friends in the suburbs. But as soon as he arrived at the town where the gambler had been seen, he found he had vanished without trace of any kind, only to reappear a few days later in some other part. The whole country already rang with reports of the existence and operations of the robber-king. Dr. Mabuse, the gambler! It was like a ballad, expressing the devilry and defiance of all who offered resistance to existing law and order, and it spread from place to place.
In all the towns the police arrested men in gangs, but when the criminals were sorted out, this man, whose capture was worth more to them than all the rest, was never to be found. Suddenly it struck Wenk that Mabuse must be making his way by a circuitous route to Berlin. From his superior officers Wenk obtained permission to leave Bavaria, and got in touch with the Prussian courts of justice, and these appointed him to Berlin on special duty.
He at once travelled thither and took lodgings in the Central district. Mabuse saw him arrive at the railway-station, and an hour later he knew where he was staying. At last he had him within reach, in the place where he desired to accomplish his scheme of revenge and towards which he had been working, for Mabuse in reality had never left Berlin. In all the towns to which Wenk had travelled in search of the gambler, Mabuse had doubles, persons of his own gang, instructed by him. Munich was too small for the scheme Mabuse had in hand. The abysses of Berlin would be a safer hunting-ground, and the hunt began on the very next day.
That day Wenk had been describing to a junior colleague in the Berlin police his course of action in “the Mabuse case.” They had talked about it together, discussing a plan of operation, but the only conclusion they had come to was that the gambler should be allowed to show his own hand first. To aim at him in the dark would be likely to reveal to him prematurely the whereabouts of his pursuers.
In the evening, when Wenk had taken a meal in the “Traube” restaurant, he visited a café, and then, tired out by his long discussion, he sought his lodgings. There a man accosted him, standing in a doorway removed from the light.
“If you please, sir ...” said he.
“What do you want?” asked Wenk reluctantly.
“Would some cocaine be useful to you, sir?”
Wenk went on without vouchsafing a reply, and he noticed that the man followed him, but when he came to the busy Friedrichstrasse he lost sight of him.
Wenk soon took himself to task for having let the man escape him thus. He ought to have got into touch with this pedlar of illicit wares, for he belonged to the same stock as Mabuse. He was half inclined to go back, but the feeling of weariness was too strong for him and he went home.
The next night he took the same way home from the restaurant, but the man was not there. Wenk lingered here and there, and then, as he approached his lodgings near the Police Market, a man came out of an entry towards him, saying in a whisper, “Do you want to see some nude dances?”
Wenk stopped still, saying, “You have come just at the right time. I don’t belong to Berlin, and I should like to see the real night-life of this city just for once. Where are your dancers? Go ahead!”
“Follow me, then. I’ll go in front, and when you see me go in somewhere, you come quick, guv’nor, ’cos of the peelers!”
Wenk promised to follow his lead. The man went round the corner, listened to see if he were following, and then went on again. Suddenly he disappeared. Wenk went a few steps straight on. The man must have gone into one of the entries near, and he walked slowly, expecting to find him, and looking round about. Suddenly he heard the man’s voice behind him, speaking low and reproachfully: “I don’t call that quick, guv’nor. You’ll have the bobbies after you if you can’t be more spry. Come on here, then!” and the man pulled him into a house standing far back. The door opened on to a dark corridor, and silently and unawares it closed behind him, while the corridor was lighted up in the same instant. This corridor led into a little living-room, and that again into a hall crowded with people. Two gentlemen sitting near the door made room for Wenk beside them. His guide had disappeared.
What Wenk saw was a simple performance, deriving its interest only from the secrecy with which it was performed.
He heard the conversation of the two men at his table. One of them said, “The only thing that interests me is how this entertainer manages to get a hundred or more persons here, year in and year out, without the police finding it out. Now, as an expert, you just tell me that!”
The other answered in German that sounded unfamiliar, “Well, you can’t really tell whether it is known to the police or not. There are such places winked at by the police because they are traps for criminals--yes, really traps set for them. Now in Budapest....”
Wenk listened eagerly. The gentlemen went on talking, drawing him naturally into their conversation. They disclosed their calling, and then gave their names. One of the gentlemen was, as Wenk had conjectured, a highly placed police official. They frequently met each other. The Hungarian told of various interesting and complicated cases occurring during the practice of his profession. He described the Budapest haunts of crime, touched on the many secret gaming-houses which had sprung up so quickly everywhere since the war, and waxed eloquent against the ever-increasing boldness displayed by criminals and the mob generally.
Wenk, with a certain unconfessed distrust, talked very warily, saying that he was only on leave in Berlin, for the scene of his activities lay in Munich. But Berlin, as the hotbed of crime, afforded a good field of study for a Munich criminal prosecutor. He touched lightly on the existence of Mabuse, though without naming him, and related some of his bold and shameless crimes.
“Just lately,” said the man from Budapest, interrupting him, “we took into custody a similar adventurer, and we did it by curious and not exactly legal methods, but we got no further in any other way. With us in Hungary, as it is with you here, the assistance of hypnotism in the detection of crime is forbidden. We had the man of whom we were almost certain--but, my dear sir, you won’t betray me, I am sure, for the professional interest you feel in putting an end to such aberrations is just as strong in me--well, we were practically certain that he was the leader of a gang which had several murders to their account. He was in prison, as I have told you. He made himself out a deaf mute, and we could glean nothing from his papers. No one knew him, yet we felt almost sure of our man, and that kind of thing is almost unbearable to an expert, isn’t it?--for when he appeared before their worships, there was the risk of his being acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence. That was a most disagreeable idea to me, for I had spent about six months in tracking him down, and if he were discharged the mistake would be due to me. I therefore took a very bold step. A friend of mine had hypnotic powers. He was a barrister, and had often displayed these gifts of his in private. I wanted him to go to the jail with me, but he said, ‘I can operate on him from outside,’ and, indeed, a quarter of an hour later I knew that we had the leader of the gang at last, and various disclosures were made which shortly after sent him to the gallows.”
While the Hungarian was telling this story Wenk experienced an aversion to him. He had a sensation of profound mental resistance to the man, although he could not explain what had caused such a reversal of feeling.
“Are you also interested in persons who possess this gift of suggestion?” asked the police superintendent.
“Uncommonly so!” answered Wenk.
“Perhaps you would like to meet my friend, and see something of his gifts?”
“Is he in Berlin, then? Yes, that I certainly should!”
“Yes, he’s here now. He has given up practising law, and now exercises his gifts openly. He has very quickly become celebrated. You must have heard the name of Weltmann?”
Wenk did not like to say No, so he answered with a subdued “Certainly!”
“Well, he is the celebrated Weltmann. You know he is noticeable on account of his having only one hand. He lost the other in the Carpathians in 1915. Well, we’ll arrange a meeting, then. I will see him in the morning. Are you on the telephone by any chance?”
Wenk mentioned his telephone number. Both the gentlemen then left, to go to a house where ether, cocaine and opium were procurable, and other more obvious vices were pandered to.
On the very next day Wenk was summoned to the telephone. “Police Superintendent Vörös speaking! Things have fallen out most favourably for you, my dear sir! In the home of one of our countrymen, about whom I will tell you a few things in confidence, Weltmann is giving an entertainment this very evening. It is quite enough for you to have expressed the wish; you may consider yourself invited, without any further formality. It is a most hospitable house, and you won’t feel yourself in any way a stranger. There are between sixty and seventy people invited. I’ll undertake all the arrangements, and if it suits you I’ll come in a car for you at nine o’clock. The villa is some distance out behind Nicholas Lake.”
“Thank you very much. Your kindness overwhelms me,” answered Wenk, “and I do not know how to requite it.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” answered the other heartily. “We Hungarians are only too pleased to have such a chance. Then we can regard that as settled?”
“Quite, thank you!”
“How very amiable the Hungarians are,” thought Wenk, as he hung up the receiver. He felt quite ashamed of himself for having had a doubt of the police superintendent’s good faith.
He spent the afternoon among the archives of the Criminal Investigation Department, where he and the colleague with whom he had talked concerning the Mabuse crimes looked through the collection of photographs of criminals. Face after face drew his attention. He would not give up until he had seen them all, and when he came back to his lodgings, tired out with his protracted labours, he had only just time to don his evening clothes in readiness for the function he was to attend.
