Frenzied Fiction | Page 2

room," he said, "and give him a bath."
What these two words are that will get a room in New York at once I
must not divulge. Even now, when the veil of secrecy is being lifted,
the international interests involved are too complicated to permit it.
Suffice it to say that if these two had failed I know a couple of others
still better.
I narrate this incident, otherwise trivial, as indicating the astounding
ramifications and the ubiquity of the international spy system. A

similar illustration occurs to me as I write. I was walking the other day
with another man, on upper B. way between the T. Building and the W.
Garden.
"Do you see that man over there?" I said, pointing from the side of the
street on which we were walking on the sidewalk to the other side
opposite to the side that we were on.
"The man with the straw hat?" he asked. "Yes, what of him?"
"Oh, nothing," I answered, "except that he's a Spy!"
"Great heavens!" exclaimed my acquaintance, leaning up against a
lamp-post for support. "A Spy! How do you know that? What does it
mean?"
I gave a quiet laugh--we Spies learn to laugh very quietly.
"Ha!" I said, "that is my secret, my friend. Verbum sapientius! Che
sara sara! Yodel doodle doo!"
My acquaintance fell in a dead faint upon the street. I watched them
take him away in an ambulance. Will the reader be surprised to learn
that among the white-coated attendants who removed him I recognized
no less a person than the famous Russian Spy, Poulispantzoff. What he
was doing there I could not tell. No doubt his orders came from so high
up that he himself did not know. I had seen him only twice
before--once when we were both disguised as Zulus at Buluwayo, and
once in the interior of China, at the time when Poulispantzoff made his
secret entry into Thibet concealed in a tea-case. He was inside the
tea-case when I saw him; so at least I was informed by the coolies who
carried it. Yet I recognized him instantly. Neither he nor I, however,
gave any sign of recognition other than an imperceptible movement of
the outer eyelid. (We Spies learn to move the outer lid of the eye so
imperceptibly that it cannot be seen.) Yet after meeting Poulispantzoff
in this way I was not surprised to read in the evening papers a few
hours afterward that the uncle of the young King of Siam had been
assassinated. The connection between these two events I am

unfortunately not at liberty to explain; the consequences to the Vatican
would be too serious. I doubt if it could remain top-side up.
These, however, are but passing incidents in a life filled with danger
and excitement. They would have remained unrecorded and unrevealed,
like the rest of my revelations, were it not that certain recent events
have to some extent removed the seal of secrecy from my lips. The
death of a certain royal sovereign makes it possible for me to divulge
things hitherto undivulgeable. Even now I can only tell a part, a small
part, of the terrific things that I know. When more sovereigns die I can
divulge more. I hope to keep on divulging at intervals for years. But I
am compelled to be cautious. My relations with the Wilhelmstrasse,
with Downing Street and the Quai d'Orsay, are so intimate, and my
footing with the Yildiz Kiosk and the Waldorf-Astoria and Childs'
Restaurants are so delicate, that a single faux pas might prove to be a
false step.
It is now seventeen years since I entered the Secret Service of the G.
empire. During this time my activities have taken me into every quarter
of the globe, at times even into every eighth or sixteenth of it.
It was I who first brought back word to the Imperial Chancellor of the
existence of an Entente between England and France. "Is there an
Entente?" he asked me, trembling with excitement, on my arrival at the
Wilhelmstrasse. "Your Excellency," I said, "there is." He groaned.
"Can you stop it?" he asked. "Don't ask me," I said sadly. "Where must
we strike?" demanded the Chancellor. "Fetch me a map," I said. They
did so. I placed my finger on the map. "Quick, quick," said the
Chancellor, "look where his finger is." They lifted it up. "Morocco!"
they cried. I had meant it for Abyssinia but it was too late to change.
That night the warship Panther sailed under sealed orders. The rest is
history, or at least history and geography.
In the same way it was I who brought word to the Wilhelmstrasse of
the rapprochement between England and Russia in Persia. "What did
you find?" asked