official apartment in the Plaza Margaretta at Rome.
CHAPTER II
General Berati looked at his visitor, as he motioned to a chair, with very much the same stony indifference with which he had regarded him in the barber’s shop at Nice. Their eyes met and they exchanged one long, calculating glance. Fawley felt the spell of the man from that moment. Often afterwards he wondered why he had not felt it, even when he had seen him with his face half covered with lather and his fingers plunged into the silver bowl.
“You have come direct from Paris?” Berati asked.
“Those were my instructions. I was at your Embassy on Thursday afternoon. I caught the Rome express at seven o’clock.”
“You have an earnest sponsor in Paris?”
“Carlo Antonelli. I have worked with him.”
“So I understand. Why are you not working for your own country?”
“There are half a dozen more of us Americans to whom you might address that question,” Fawley explained. “The department to which I belong has been completely disbanded. M.I.B.C. exists no longer.”
“You mean,” Berati asked, with a keen glance from under his bushy black eyebrows, “that your country has no longer a Secret Service?”
“It amounts to that,” Fawley admitted. “Our present-day politicians believe that all information acquired through Secret Service work is untrustworthy and dangerous. They have adopted new methods.”
“So you are willing to work for another country?”
“Provided,” Fawley stipulated, “I am assured that the work does not conflict directly with American or British interests.”
“The Americans,” Berati observed quietly, “are the only people who have no idea what their real interests are.”
“In what respect?”
The Italian shrugged his shoulders very slightly.
“America,” he said, “needs the information which Secret Service agents could afford them as much or more than any nation in the world. However, you need have no fear nor need you think that you are the only foreigner who is working for us. You will probably become acquainted before your work is over with a German, a Monegasque and a Dane. I am not a believer in using one’s own country-people exclusively.”
“You strip our profession of its honourable side,” Fawley remarked drily. “That does not refer to myself. I am admittedly a free lance. I must have work of an adventurous type, and since my country cannot offer it to me, I must seek for it in any decent way.”
“Patriotism,” Berati sneered, “has been the excuse far many a career of deceit.”
“It has also been its justification,” Fawley ventured.
Berati’s expression did not change an iota, yet somehow his visitor was made to feel that he was not accustomed to argument.
“The present work is worth while for its own sake,” he announced. “It is so dangerous that you might easily lose your life within a fortnight. That is why I shall give you your work chapter by chapter. To-day I propose only to hand you your credentials—which, by the by, will mean sudden death to you if ever they are found by the wrong people upon your person—and explain the commencement of your task.”
Berati touched a concealed bell embedded in the top of his desk. Almost immediately, through a door which Fawley had not previously noticed, a young man entered, noiseless and swift in his movements and of intriguing personality. His head was shaven like the head of a monk, his complexion was almost ivory white, unrelieved by the slightest tinge of colour. His fingers were bony. His frame was thin. The few words he addressed to his Chief were spoken in so low a tone that, although Fawley’s hearing was good and Italian the same to him as most other languages, he heard nothing. To his surprise, Berati introduced the newcomer.
“This is my secretary, Prince Patoni,” he said. “Major Fawley.”
The young man bowed and held out his hand. Fawley found it, as he had expected, as cold as ice.
“Major Fawley’s work was well known to us years ago,” he remarked a little grimly. “As a confrère he will be welcome.”
Almost immediately, in obedience to a gesture from Berati, he departed leaving behind him a sense of unreality, as though he were some phantom flitting across the stage of life rather than a real human being. But then indeed, on that first day, Berati himself seemed unreal to his visitor. The former tore open one of the packages the secretary had brought and tossed its contents across the table.
“Open that,” he directed.
Fawley obeyed. Inside was a plain platinum and gold cigarette case with six cigarettes on either side, neatly kept in place by a platinum clasp.
“Well?” Berati demanded.
“Is that a challenge?” Fawley asked.
“You may accept it as such.”
Fawley held the case with its diagonal corners between two fingers and ran the forefinger of his other hand back and forth over the hinges. Almost instantaneously a third division of the case disclosed itself. Berati’s expression remained unchanged but his eyebrows were slowly and slightly elevated.
“There are three of you alive then,” he remarked coolly. “I thought that there were now only two.”
“You happen to be right,” his visitor told him. “Joseffi died very suddenly.”
“When?”
“The day after he opened the case.”
Berati, who indulged very seldom in gestures, touched his underlip with his long firm forefinger.
“Yet—you came.”
Fawley smiled—perhaps a little sardonically.
“The men who work for you, General,” he observed, “should rid themselves of any fear of death.”
Berati nodded very slowly and very thoughtfully. He seemed to be appraising the man who stood on the other side of his desk.
“It appears to me,” he admitted, “that we may get on.”
“It is possible,” Fawley agreed. “Curiosity prompts me to ask you one question, however. When you sent for me, had you any idea that we had met in that barber’s shop at Nice?”
“I knew it perfectly well.”
“I confess that that puzzles me a little,” Fawley admitted. “I was at my worst that day. I did not show the self-control of a schoolboy. I had not even the excuse of being in a hurry. I was annoyed because you had taken my place and I showed it.”
Berati
