Whoever the masked man was who was working so deliberately at the back door of Mr. de Costa’s respectable dwelling, he went to work methodically and without any indication that he feared detection. He carried a little tiny kit of tools which he had spread upon the ground, and from time to time he leant down and selected one of these by the light of a small electric lamp which he flashed for a moment upon the kit’s contents.
He took some trouble to avoid anything in the nature of a violent noise, and it was half an hour before the lock, and a portion of the door, came away very gently in his hand.
As methodically he leant down and rolled up the tools, placing them in his pocket; he pushed the door open, and entered.
He had no difficulty in forcing another door, or in gaining the wide hallway which formed the principal entrance to the house.
In half an hour he pursued his inquiries with quiet confidence.
The dining-room yielded nothing; the rather ornate drawing-room no more. Yet he made a systematic search, flickering his light here and there, moving such pictures as he thought might conceal that which he sought.
He reserved his examination of the study till the last. He found some cigarette ends in the fireplace and picked them up cautiously, examining the brand with the light of his lantern. These he wrapped carefully in a piece of paper, and placed in his waistcoat pocket. He opened all the drawers and methodically examined them, replacing them just as he had found them, and relocked the drawers after him with a curious key which he took from his pocket.
After a while he mounted the stairs.
De Costa occupied the first room on the second floor, and the door faced the stairs, and on the right was another door, which led to the dressing-room, which again gave access to the principal bedroom.
The visitor made no attempt to force the door for some minutes, but devoted his attention to the door on the right.
It opened easily. He stood in the doorway listening. For all he knew De Costa may have had alarms fixed; but no bell or buzzer woke the stillness of the night. He closed the door gently behind him; the floor was carpeted with thick felt, and the precaution he had taken of enclosing his feet in goloshes was unnecessary. In this room, as he knew, was the intimate safe of the merchant’s.
He had come prepared to open that safe and inspect its interior. In his pocket was a heavy iron bottle containing sufficient oxygen for his purpose, and in another pocket the blow-pipe and the instruments necessary to burn out the lock of the safe.
He switched on his pocket light, and turned it unhesitatingly in the direction of where the safe was to be found. Instantly his thumb closed upon the switch, and his light went out. Facing him was a man who stood with his back to the safe. His face was covered with a black crêpe mask, and in his hand, pointing insistently in the direction of the other, was a long-barrelled Colt revolver.
He might have saved himself the trouble of switching off his light, for instantly from the stranger’s disengaged hand a white beam of light shot out. He had come similarly equipped.
“Go downstairs,” whispered the man by the safe, “and keep your hands away from your pockets.”
There was nothing for the burglar to do but to obey. Without a word he turned and walked out of the room, the other following a few paces behind.
“To the kitchen!” whispered the second man, and the burglar turned obediently.
They entered the big, underground kitchen together, the second man closing the door behind him before he felt on the wall for the switch. In a minute the room was illuminated, and they stood facing each other.
“Who are you?” asked the second man quietly.
“I prefer to remain anonymous,” said the burglar.
He was the taller of the two, a man above medium height, and his voice had just that touch of culture which one does not expect from a member of the criminal classes.
“I prefer to see your face,” said the second man.
The burglar shrugged his shoulders.
“Existence,” he said oracularly, “is made up of unsatisfied desires. Nature in the ordering of her plans does not take into account the prejudices----”
“Good heavens!” gasped the other. “Captain Talham!”
The burglar was silenced momentarily, apparently annoyed too.
“I am Captain Talham,” he said with ridiculous pride, and took off his mask; “though why you should know me I fail to understand.”
The second man laughed--a low, musical, chuckling laugh.
“I know you all right,” he answered.
Talham stood for a moment fidgeting by the side of the kitchen table; then:
“Let us put our cards on the table, Tillizinni,” he said.
It was the second man’s turn to start.
“Oh, yes, I know you!” Talham went on. “I always remember people by their hands; and as you probably know, the third knuckle of your left is more prominent than any other.”
Tillizinni laughed.
“We seem to have made a pretty mess of it between us,” he said; “as I gather, we are both here on the same errand.”
Talham nodded.
“You can save yourself the trouble of tampering with the safe. I’ve already been to it.”
“How did you get in?” asked Talham.
The detective shook his head with a smile.
“The last thing I can do is to arrange to get out,” he answered evasively. “What did you find?”
Talham hesitated.
“I found nothing, save that our friend T’si Soo has been here. Some of his cigarette ends were in the fireplace; at least, they are Chinese, and I gather----”
Tillizinni nodded.
“I didn’t need his cigarette ends to know that,” he said. “I saw him come out.”
They left the house together, walking arm in arm, through the front door, leaving the door ajar, and walked away under the very nose of a policeman who stood at the corner of a street a hundred yards from the house.
For a long time neither man spoke. Then Tillizinni burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
“You amuse me very much,” he said, “although you annoy me. Here is a situation worthy of a comic opera. I go to burgle a house for my own private ends. I meet another burglar, whom it is my duty, as an officer of the law, to arrest.”
“Let’s go and talk it over!” said Talham.
“You’re a curious man,” said Tillizinni, and Captain Talham did not consider it worth while to correct him, though “curious” was an obvious misapplication of a word.
A bright, cheerful fire burnt in the big Adams’ fireplace, and the shaded lamp on the table afforded enough light to the room. Outside, day was breaking over the dull silver of the river and slow moving tugs were passing up with the tide, drawing a trail of clumsy barges in their wake.
Tillizinni’s rooms in Adelphi Terrace offered the finest view in London, but never was London more attractive than in the early hours of a frosty winter morning.
Neither of the two men had slept that night. A bundle of papers, each giving a brief account of the tragedy, was at the detective’s elbow. He looked across to Talham in his worn garments. You could not pity the tall man. His confidence, his self-satisfaction--in the best sense of the word--precluded pity. He sat now with a fragrant cigar between his teeth, a steaming cup of coffee within reach on a little table by his side, his legs crossed--a model of contentment.
“I gather, of course,” Tillizinni went on, “that you wanted to find the Ts’in tomb, and I must confess that I regarded your search as being little removed, in point of self-interest, from the efforts of our Chinese friends.”
Talham shook his head.
“Accustomed as you are to the venal predilections----” he began.
Tillizinni put up his hands to his ears in mock despair.
“Do you forget that I am Italian?” he asked.
The great anthropologist was a man of quick likes and quicker dislikes. Never before had he found one to whom he felt so warm and so instant a regard as he did with this adventurer. Add the warm and generous qualities of his southern nature, interest in the rara humanis which his science dictated, and there is every excuse for the sudden friendship which has so often been the subject of criticism.
Tillizinni was at the zenith of his fame; he had handled the danger of the Fourth Plague with rare courage and ingenuity, and his name at this time was in all mouths. Even Scotland Yard, a cautious institution which does not take the stranger to its bosom, however brilliant he may be, had succumbed to his fascination, and Room 673E was “Mr. Tillizinni’s Room,” just as surely and unalterably as Room 1 is the Chief Commissioner’s.
He leant forward to stir the fire, and to return an escaping coal to its glowing inferno.
“Will your man do the work you require?” he asked.
“In the time?”
The detective nodded, and Talham pursed his lips thoughtfully.
“He has till eleven,” he said; “and a Chinese mechanic can do much in seven hours.”
There was a restful little interval of silence, which Tillizinni broke.
“It is most fantastic--the most bizarre idea I have ever heard,” he said. “From no other human being in the world would I accept such a story. Yet I believe you.”
“Of course you do,” retorted Talham simply.
Tillizinni stared; then an amused smile crossed his thin lips. The other surveyed him with great earnestness, then leant forward.
“Signor Tillizinni,” he said, “the acquirement of wealth is a process which too often dissipates the qualities of self-respect. I will be a millionaire, not as the thief who robbed a tomb of dross”--he snapped his fingers finely--“but as the genius who wrested from the dead ages the secret and its attainments. I am satisfied that in the tomb of Ts’in I shall have revealed to me that supreme mechanical wonder of all time--perpetual motion.”
His face was tense; his eyes glossed with the splendour of the thought. So the eyes of Christopher Columbus might have burnt as he sighted, through the spray, the low, grey cloud of land upon his bow.
“All this story of mechanical devices,” Talham went on rapidly. “These rivers of quicksilver which run for ever by some complexity of machinery--it is all true. There may be little or no treasure; but that device lies hidden as surely as the bones of the architects are upon the floor of the chasm.”
He rose, and paced the room with short, quick, nervous steps.
“But suppose when you opened the tomb you found nothing?” asked Tillizinni. “Suppose the device was non-existent and the quicksilver rivers had disappeared, and there was nothing but the store of treasure?”
Talham thought for a while.
“I should take the treasure,” he said impressively, “and afterwards I should close the tomb reverently and come away.”
Tillizinni laughed. It was a long, rich, chuckling laugh of pure enjoyment, which not even the reproachful eye of the other could suppress.
“I like you,” said Tillizinni; “and if I do not consider it my duty to hamper you, I shall find a pleasure in helping you in your search.”
Ten minutes later, the two men were dozing in their chairs, proof enough of the ease which comes with friendship.
It was not until ten o’clock, with the bright, winter’s sunlight flooding the room, that Tillizinni awoke with a sense of refreshment. The big lamp upon the table still burnt, and he extinguished it.
His eyes fell upon Talham still fast asleep. His legs outstretched, his hands thrust into trouser pockets, and his chin on his breast.
Tillizinni moved across the room noiselessly, and looked out into the terrace below. There were two tradesmen’s carts delivering goods at a neighbouring club. He closed the French windows of the room and returned to Talham, and dropped his hand upon the other’s shoulder.
Talham was awake instantly.
“Anything wrong?” he asked, as he saw the other’s face.
Tillizinni shook his head.
“That we are both alive is evidence that nothing is wrong,” he said. “Look at the mantelpiece!”
Talham raised his eyes.
On the shelf above the fireplace, between two Tanagra statuettes, was a small, square, black box, as large as a small tea-caddy, and not unlike one in its appearance. Dependent from the case, hung a length of fuse some eight inches long, and the end was burnt black.
“Ashes in the fireplace--obviously fuse,” said Tillizinni, kneeling down. “What made it stop burning, I wonder?”
He examined the little rope minutely, using a reading-glass.
“That’s blood!” He pointed with his finger to a stain near the burnt end. “The man who placed this here had blood on his hands--probably cut himself in making the entrance. Now, where?”
He walked to the door of the room and, opening it, crossed the broad landing. Another room opened from here, and he entered. It was used as a box-room, and should have been locked. For the matter of that, it should have possessed a lock of more service than the twisted piece of metal that lay on the floor.
“Wrenched off with a modern pocket-jack,” said Tillizinni approvingly. “A neat piece of work. Don’t touch the lock; we’ll hunt for a finger-print by and by. Window open! Humph!”
