The Thirty-Nine Steps | Page 6

why I have had to decease.'
He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for I was getting
interested in the beggar.
'They can't get him in his own land, for he has a bodyguard of Epirotes
that would skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is
coming to this city. The British Foreign Office has taken to having
International tea-parties, and the biggest of them is due on that date.
Now Karolides is reckoned the principal guest, and if my friends have
their way he will never return to his admiring countrymen.'
'That's simple enough, anyhow,' I said. 'You can warn him and keep
him at home.'
'And play their game?' he asked sharply. 'If he does not come they win,
for he's the only man that can straighten out the tangle. And if his
Government are warned he won't come, for he does not know how big
the stakes will be on June the 15th.'
'What about the British Government?' I said. 'They're not going to let
their guests be murdered. Tip them the wink, and they'll take extra
precautions.'
'No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes detectives and
double the police and Constantine would still be a doomed man. My
friends are not playing this game for candy. They want a big occasion
for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe on it. He'll be murdered
by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of evidence to show the
connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin. It will all be an
infernal lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the world.
I'm not talking hot air, my friend. I happen to know every detail of the
hellish contrivance, and I can tell you it will be the most finished piece

of blackguardism since the Borgias. But it's not going to come off if
there's a certain man who knows the wheels of the business alive right
here in London on the 15th day of June. And that man is going to be
your servant, Franklin P. Scudder.'
I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a rat- trap, and
there was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he was spinning me a
yarn he could act up to it.
'Where did you find out this story?' I asked.
'I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me
inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician
quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little bookshop
off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence ten days
ago in Paris. I can't tell you the details now, for it's something of a
history. When I was quite sure in my own mind I judged it my business
to disappear, and I reached this city by a mighty queer circuit. I left
Paris a dandified young French-American, and I sailed from Hamburg a
Jew diamond merchant. In Norway I was an English student of Ibsen
collecting materials for lectures, but when I left Bergen I was a
cinema-man with special ski films. And I came here from Leith with a
lot of pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to put before the London
newspapers. Till yesterday I thought I had muddied my trail some, and
was feeling pretty happy. Then ...'
The recollection seemed to upset him, and he gulped down some more
whisky.
'Then I saw a man standing in the street outside this block. I used to
stay close in my room all day, and only slip out after dark for an hour
or two. I watched him for a bit from my window, and I thought I
recognized him ... He came in and spoke to the porter ... When I came
back from my walk last night I found a card in my letter-box. It bore
the name of the man I want least to meet on God's earth.'
I think that the look in my companion's eyes, the sheer naked scare on
his face, completed my conviction of his honesty. My own voice

sharpened a bit as I asked him what he did next.
'I realized that I was bottled as sure as a pickled herring, and that there
was only one way out. I had to die. If my pursuers knew I was dead
they would go to sleep again.'
'How did you manage it?'
'I told the man that valets me that I was feeling pretty bad, and I got
myself up to look like death. That wasn't difficult, for I'm no slouch at
disguises. Then I got a corpse - you can always get