Part 23 (1/2)

To the tale there is no moral unless it be an indirect moral to be derived from contemplation of a strange contradiction in our modern life, to wit: That practical burglary is by law sternly discouraged and practical joking is not.

CHAPTER VIII

HOODWINKED

Spy stories rather went out of fas.h.i.+on when the armistice was signed.

But this one could not have been told before now, because it happened after the armies had quit fighting and while the Peace Conference was busily engaged in belying its first name. Also, in a strict manner of speaking, it is not a spy story at all.

So far as our purposes are concerned, it began to happen on an afternoon at the end of the month of March of this present year, when J. J.

Mullinix, of the Secret Service, called on Miss Mildred Smith, the well-known interior decorator, in her studio apartments on the top floor of one of the best-looking apartment houses in town. For Mullinix there was a short delay downstairs because the doorman, sharp on the lookout to bar pestersome intruders who might annoy the tenants, could not at first make up his mind about Mullinix. In this building there was a rule against solicitors, canva.s.sers, collectors, pedlar men and beggar men; also one against babies, but none against dogs--excepting dogs above a certain specified size, which--without further description--should identify our building as one standing in what is miscalled the exclusive residential belt of Manhattan Island.

The doorman could not make up his mind offhand whether Mullinix was to be cla.s.sified as a well-dressed mendicant or an indifferently dressed book agent; he was pretty sure, though, that the stranger fell somewhere within the general ban touching on dubious persons having dubious intentions. This doubt on the part of the doorman was rather a compliment to Mullinix, considering Mullinix's real calling. For Mullinix resembled neither the detective of fiction nor yet the detective of sober fact, which is exactly what the latter usually is--a most sober fact; sober, indeed, often to the point of a serious and dignified impressiveness. This man, though, did not have the eagle-bird eye with which the detective of fiction so often is favoured. He did not have the low flattened arches--frontal or pedal--which frequently distinguish the bona-fide article, who comes from Headquarters with a badge under his left lapel and a cigar under his right moustache to question the suspected hired girl. About him there was nothing mysterious, nothing portentous, nothing inscrutable. He had a face which favourably would have attracted a person taking orders for enlarging family portraits. He had the accommodating manner of one who is willing to go up when the magician asks for a committee out of the audience to sit on the stage.

Not ten individuals alive knew of his connection with the Secret Service.

Probably in all his professional life not ten others--outsiders--had ever appraised him for what he was. His finest a.s.set was a gift of Nature--a sort of protective colouration which enabled him to hide in the background of commonplaceness and do his work with an a.s.surance which would not have been possible had he worn an air of a.s.surance. In short and in fine, Mullinix no more resembled the traditional hawkshaw than Miss Mildred Smith resembled the fas.h.i.+onable conception of a fas.h.i.+onable artist. She never gestured with an upturned thumb; nor yet made a spy-gla.s.s of her cupped hand through which to gaze upon a painting. She had never worn a smock frock in her life.

The smartest of smart tailor-mades was none too smart for her. Nothing was too smart for her, who was so exquisitely fine and well-bred a creature. She was wearing tailor-mades, with a trig hat to match, when she opened the door of her entry hall for Mullinix.

”Just going out, weren't you?” he asked as they shook hands.

”No, just coming in,” she said. ”I had only just come in when the hall man called me up saying you were downstairs.”

”I had trouble getting him to send up my name at all,” he said with a half smile on his face. ”He insisted on knowing all about me and my business before he announced me. So I told him everything nearly--except the truth.”

”I gathered from his tone he was a bit doubtful about you; but I was glad to get the word. This is the third time you've favoured me with a visit and each of the other times something highly exciting followed.

Come in and let me make you a cup of tea, won't you? Is it business that brings you?”

”Yes,” he said, ”it's business.”

They sat down in the big inner studio room; on one side of the fireplace the short, slow-speaking, colourless-looking man who knew the inner blackness of so many whited sepulchres; and on the other side, facing him from across the tea table, this small patrician lady who, having rich kinfolk and friends still richer and a family tree deep-rooted in the most Knickerbockian stratum of the Manhattan social schist, nevertheless chose to earn her own living; and while earning it to find opportunity for service to her Government in a confidential capacity.

Not all the volunteers who worked on difficult espionage jobs through the wartime carried cards from the Intelligence Department.

”Yes,” he repeated, ”it's business--a bigger piece of business and a harder one and probably a more interesting one than the last thing you helped on. If it weren't business I wouldn't be coming here to-day, taking up your time. I know how busy you are with your own affairs.”

”Oh, I'm not busy,” she said. ”This is one of my loafing days. Since lunch time I've been indulging in my favourite pa.s.sion. I've been prowling through a secondhand bookstore over on Lexington Avenue, picking up bargains. There's the fruit of my shopping.”

She indicated a pile of five or six nibbled-looking volumes in dingy covers resting upon one corner of the low mantelshelf.

”Works on interior decorating?” he guessed.

”Goodness, no! Decorating is my business; this is my pleasure. The top one of the heap--the one bound in red--is all about chess.”

”Chess! Did anybody ever write a whole book about chess?”

”I believe more books have been written on chess than on any other individual subject in the world, barring Masonry,” she said. ”And the next one to it--the yellow-bound one--is a book about old English games; not games of chance, but games for holidays and parties. I was glancing through it in my car on the way here from the shop. It's most interesting. Why, some of the games it tells about were played in England before William the Conqueror landed; at least so the author claims. Did you ever hear of a game called Shoe the Wild Mare? It was very popular in Queen Elizabeth's day. The book yonder says so.”