Chapter I: Part 1

Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.

The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Jack
London

_Completed by Robert L. Fish from notes by Jack London_

The
Assassination
Bureau,
Ltd.

McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
New York Toronto London

The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Copyright © 1963 by Irving Shepard
All Rights Reserved. Printed in the
United States of America. This book or parts
thereof may not be reproduced in any form
without written permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-20448

First Edition

38655

The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

_Chapter I_

He was a handsome man, with large liquid-black eyes, an olive complexion that was laid upon a skin clear, clean, and of surpassing smoothness of texture, and with a mop of curly black hair that invited fondling--in short, the kind of a man that women like to look upon, and also, the kind of a man who is quite thoroughly aware of this insinuative quality of his looks. He was lean-waisted, muscular, and broad-shouldered, and about him was a certain bold, masculine swagger that was belied by the apprehensiveness in the glance he cast around the room and at the retreating servant who had shown him in. The fellow was a deaf mute--this he would have guessed, had he not been already aware of the fact, thanks to Lanigan’s description of an earlier visit to this same apartment.

Once the door had closed on the servant’s back, the visitor could scarcely refrain from shivering. Yet there was nothing in the place itself to excite such a feeling. It was a quiet, dignified room, lined with crowded bookshelves, with here and there an etching, and, in one place, a map-rack. Also against the wall was a big rack filled with railway timetables and steamship folders. Between the windows was a large, flattop desk, on which stood a telephone, and from which, on an extension, swung a typewriter. Everything was in scrupulous order and advertised a presiding genius that was the soul of system.

The books attracted the waiting man, and he ranged along the shelves, with a practiced eye skimming titles by whole rows at a time. Nor was there anything shivery in these solid-backed books. He noted especially Ibsen’s Prose Dramas and Shaw’s various plays and novels; editions de luxe of Wilde, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and the _Arabian Nights_; La Fargue’s _Evolution of Property_, _The Students’ Marx_, _Fabian Essays_, Brooks’ _Economic Supremacy_, Dawson’s _Bismarck and State Socialism_, Engels’ _Origin of the Family_, Conant’s _The United States in the Orient_, and John Mitchell’s _Organized Labor_. Apart, and in the original Russian, were the works of Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Andreyev, Goncharov, and Dostoyevski.

The man strayed on to a library table, heaped with orderly piles of the current reviews and quarterlies, where, at one corner, were a dozen of the late novels. He pulled up an easy chair, stretched out his legs, lighted a cigarette, and glanced over these books. One, a slender, red-bound volume, caught his eyes. On the front cover a gaudy female rioted. He selected it, and read the title: _Four Weeks: A Loud Book_. As he opened it, a slight but sharp explosion occurred within its papers, accompanied by a flash of light and a puff of smoke. On the instant he was convulsed with terror. He fell back in the chair and sank down, arms and legs in the air, the book flying from his hands in about the same fashion a man would dispense with a snake he had unwittingly picked up. The visitor was badly shaken. His beautiful olive skin had turned a ghastly green, while his liquid-black eyes bulged with horror.

Then it was that the door to an inner apartment opened, and the presiding genius entered. A cold mirth was frosted on his countenance as he surveyed the abject fright of the other. Stooping, he picked up the book, spread it open, and exposed the toy-work mechanism that had exploded the paper cap.

“No wonder creatures like you are compelled to come to me,” he sneered. “You terrorists are always a puzzle to me. Why is it that you are most fascinated by the very thing of which you are most afraid?” He was now gravely scornful. “Powder--that’s it. If you had exploded that toy-pistol cap on your naked tongue it would have caused no more than a temporary inconvenience to your facilities of speaking and eating. Whom do you want to kill now?”

The speaker was a striking contrast to his visitor. So blond was he that it might well be described as washed-out blond. His eyes, veiled by the finest and most silken of lashes that were almost like an albino’s, were the palest of pale blue. His head, partly bald, was thinly covered by a similar growth of fine and silky hair, almost snow-white so fairly white it was, yet untinctured by time. The mouth was firm and considerative, though not harsh, and the dome of forehead, broad and lofty, spoke eloquently of the brain behind. His English was painfully correct, the total and colorless absence of any accent almost constituting an accent in itself. Despite the crude practical joke he had just perpetrated, there was little humor in him. A grave and somber dignity, that hinted of scholarship, characterized him; while he emanated an atmosphere of complacency of power and seemed to suggest an altitude of philosophic calm far beyond fake books and toy-pistol caps. So elusive was his personality, his colorless coloring, and his almost lineless face, that there was no clew to his age, which might have been anywhere between thirty and fifty--or sixty. One felt that he was older than he looked.

“You are Ivan Dragomiloff?” the visitor asked.

“That is the name I am known by. It serves as well as any other--as well as Will Hausmann serves you. That is the name you were admitted under. I know you. You are secretary of the Caroline Warfield group. I have had dealings with it before. Lanigan represented you, I believe.”

He paused, placed a black skullcap on his thin-thatched head, and sat down.

“No complaints, I hope,” he added coldly.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Hausmann hastened to assure him. “That other affair was entirely satisfactory. The only reason we had not been to you again was that we could not afford it. But now we want McDuffy, chief of police--”

“Yes, I know him,” the other interrupted.

“He has been a brute, a beast,” Hausmann hurried on with raising indignation. “He has martyred our cause again and again, deflowered our group of its choicest spirits. Despite the warnings we gave him, he deported Tawney, Cicerole, and Gluck. He has broken up our meetings repeatedly. His officers have clubbed and beaten us like cattle. It is due to him that four of our martyred brothers and sisters are now languishing in prison cells.”

While he went on with the recital of grievances, Dragomiloff nodded his head gravely, as if keeping a running account.

“There is old Sanger, as pure and lofty a soul as ever breathed the polluted air of civilization, seventy-two years old, a patriarch, broken in health, dying inch by inch and serving out his ten years in Sing Sing in this land of the free. And for what?” he cried excitedly. Then his voice sank to hopeless emptiness as he feebly answered his own question. “For nothing.”

“These hounds of the law must be taught the red lesson again. They cannot continue always to ill-treat us with impunity. McDuffy’s officers gave perjured testimony on the witness stand. This we know. He has lived too long. The time has come. And he should have been dead long ere this, only we could not raise the money. But when we decided that assassination was cheaper than lawyer fees, we left our poor comrades to go unattended to their prison cells and accumulated the fund more quickly.”

“You know it is our rule never to fill an order until we are satisfied that it is socially justifiable,” Dragomiloff observed quietly.

“Surely.” Hausmann attempted indignantly to interrupt.

“But in this case,” Dragomiloff went on calmly and judicially, “there is little doubt but what your cause is just. The death of McDuffy would appear socially expedient and right. I know him and his deeds. I can assure you that on investigation I believe we are practically certain so to conclude. And now, the money.”

“But if you do not find the death of McDuffy socially right?”

“The money will be returned to you, less ten percent to cover the cost of investigation. It is our custom.”

Hausmann pulled a fat wallet from his pocket, and then hesitated.

“Is full payment necessary?”

“Surely you know our terms.” There was mild reproof in Dragomiloff’s voice.

“But I thought, I hoped--you know yourself we anarchists are poor people.”

“And that is why I make you so cheap a rate. Ten thousand dollars is not too much for the killing of the chief of police of a great city. Believe me, it barely pays expenses. Private persons are charged much more, and merely for private persons at that. Were you a millionaire, instead of a poor struggling group, I should charge you fifty thousand at the very least for McDuffy. Besides, I am not entirely in this for my health.”

“Heavens! What would you charge for a king!” the other cried.

“That depends. A king, say of England, would cost half a million. Little second- and third-rate kings come anywhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand dollars.”

“I had no idea they came so high,” Hausmann muttered.

“That is why so few are killed. Then, too, you forget the heavy expenses of so perfect an organization as I have built up. Our mere traveling expenses are far larger than you imagine. My agents are numerous, and you don’t think for a moment that they take their lives in their hands and kill for a song. And remember, these things we accomplish without any peril whatsoever to our clients. If you feel that Chief McDuffy’s life is dear at ten thousand, let me ask if you rate your own at any less. Besides, you anarchists are poor operators. Whenever you try your hand you bungle it or get caught. Furthermore, you always insist on dynamite or infernal machines, which are extremely hazardous--”

“It is necessary that our executions be sensational and spectacular,” Hausmann explained.

The Chief of the Assassination Bureau nodded his head.

“Yes, I understand. But that is not the point. It is such a stupid, gross way of killing that it is, as I said, extremely hazardous for our agents. Now, if your group will permit me to use, say, poison, I’ll throw off ten percent; if an air-rifle, twenty-five percent.”

“Impossible!” cried the anarchist. “It will not serve our end. Our killings must be red.”

“In which case I can grant you no reduction. You are an American, are you not, Mr. Hausmann?”

“Yes; and American born--over in St. Joseph, Michigan.”

“Why don’t you kill McDuffy yourself and save your group the money?”

The anarchist blanched.

“No, no. Your service is too, too excellent, Mr. Dragomiloff. Also, I have a--er--a temperamental diffidence about the taking of life or the shedding of blood--that is, you know, personally. It is repulsive to me. Theoretically I may know a killing to be just, but, actually, I cannot bring myself to do it. I--I simply can’t, that is all. I can’t help it. I could not with my own hand harm a fly.”

“Yet you belong to a violent group.”

“I know it. My reason compels me to belong. I could not be satisfied to belong with the philosophic, non-resistant Tolstoians. I do not believe in turning the other cheek, as do those in the Martha Brown group, for instance. If I am struck, I must strike back--”

“Even if by proxy,” Dragomiloff interrupted dryly.

Hausmann bowed.

“By proxy. If the flesh is weak, there is no other way. Here is the money.”

As Dragomiloff counted it, Hausmann made a final effort for a bargain.

“Ten thousand dollars. You will find it correct. Take it, and remember that it represents devotion and sacrifice on the parts of many scores of comrades who could ill afford the heavy contributions we demand. Couldn’t you--er--couldn’t you throw in Inspector Morgan for full measure? He is another foul-hearted beast.”

Dragomiloff shook his head.

“No; it can’t be done. Your group already enjoys the biggest cut-rate we have ever accorded.”

“A bomb, you know,” the other urged. “You might get both of them with the same bomb.”

“Which we shall be very careful not to do. Of course, we shall have to investigate Chief McDuffy. We demand a moral sanction for all our transactions. If we find that his death is not socially justifiable--”

“What becomes of the ten thousand?” Hausmann broke in anxiously.

“It is returned to you less ten percent for running expenses.”

“And if you fail to kill him?”

“If, at the end of a year, we have failed, the money is returned to you, plus five percent interest on the same.”

Dragomiloff, indicating that the interview was at an end, pressed a call-button and stood up. His example was followed by Hausmann, who took advantage of the delay in the servant’s coming to ask him another question.

“But suppose you should die?--an accident, sickness, anything. I have no receipt for the money. It would be lost.”

“All that is arranged. The head of my Chicago branch would immediately take charge, and would conduct everything until such time as the head of the San Francisco branch could arrive. An instance of that occurred only last year. You remember Burgess?”

“Which Burgess?”

“The railroad king. One of our men covered that, made the whole transaction and received the payment in advance, as usual. Of course, my sanction was obtained. And then two things happened. Burgess was killed in a railroad accident, and our man died of pneumonia. Nevertheless, the money was returned. I saw to it personally, though it was not recoverable by law. Our long success shows our honorable dealing with our clients. Believe me, operating as we do outside the law, anything less than the strictest honesty would be fatal to us. Now concerning McDuffy--”

At this moment the servant entered, and Hausmann made a warning gesture for silence. Dragomiloff smiled.

“Can’t hear a word,” he said.

“But you rang for him just now. And, by Jove, he answered my ring at the door.”

“A ring for him is a flash. Instead of a bell, an electric light is turned on. He has never heard a sound in his life. As long as he does not see your lips, he cannot understand what you say. And now, about McDuffy. Have you thought well about removing him? Remember, with us, an order once given is as good as accomplished. We cannot carry on our business otherwise. We have our rules, you know. Once the order goes forth it can never be withdrawn. Are you satisfied?”

“Quite.” Hausmann paused at the door. “When may we hear news of--of activity?”

Dragomiloff considered a moment.

“Within a week. The investigation, in this case, is only formal. The operation itself is very simple. I have my men on the spot. Good day.”

_Chapter II_

One afternoon, a week later, an electric cab waited in front of the great Russian importing house of S. Constantine & Co. It was three o’clock when Sergius Constantine himself emerged from the private office and was accompanied to the cab by the manager, to whom he was still giving instructions. Had Hausmann or Lanigan watched him enter the cab they would have recognized him immediately, but not by the name of Sergius Constantine. Had they been asked, and had they answered, they would have named him Ivan Dragomiloff.

For Ivan Dragomiloff it was who drove the cab south and crossed over into the teeming East Side. He stopped, once, to buy a paper from a gamin who was screaming “Extra!” Nor did he start again until he had read the headlines and brief text announcing another anarchist outrage in a neighboring city and the death of Chief McDuffy. As he laid the paper beside him and started on, there was an expression of calm pride on Constantine’s face. The organization which he had built up worked, and worked with its customary smoothness. The investigation--in this case almost perfunctory--had been made, the order sent forth, and McDuffy was dead. He smiled slightly as he drew up before a modern apartment house which was placed on the edge of one of the most noisome East Side slums. The smile was at thought of the rejoicing there would be in the Caroline Warfield group--the terrorists who had not the courage to slay.

An elevator took Constantine to the top floor, and a pushbutton caused the door to be opened for him by a young woman who threw her arms around his neck, kissed him, and showered him with Russian diminutives of affection, and whom, in turn, he called Grunya.

They were very comfortable rooms into which he was taken--and remarkably comfortable and tasteful, even for a model apartment house in the East Side. Chastely simple, culture and wealth spoke in the furnishing and decoration. There were many shelves of books, a table littered with magazines, while a parlor grand filled the far end of the room. Grunya was a robust Russian blonde, but with all the color that her caller’s blondness lacked.

“You should have telephoned,” she chided, in English that was as without accent as his own. “I might have been out. You are so irregular I never know when to expect you.”

Dropping the afternoon paper beside him, he lolled back among the cushions of the capacious window-seat.

“Now Grunya, dear, you mustn’t begin by scolding,” he said, looking at her with beaming fondness. “I’m not one of your submerged-tenth kindergarteners, nor am I going to let you order my actions, yea, even to the extent of being told when to wash my face or blow my nose. I came down on the chance of finding you in, but principally for the purpose of trying out my new cab. Will you come for a little run around?”

She shook her head.

“Not this afternoon. I expect a visitor at four.”

“I’ll make a note of it.” He looked at his watch. “Also, I came to learn if you would come home the end of the week. Edge Moor is lonely without either of us.”

“I was out three days ago,” she pouted. “Grosset said you hadn’t been there for a month.”

“Too busy. But I’m going to loaf for a week now and read up. By the way, why was it necessary for Grosset to tell you I hadn’t been there in a month, unless for the fact that you hadn’t been there?”

“Busy, you inquisitor, busy, just like you.” She bubbled with laughter, and, reaching over, caressed his hand.

“Will you come?”

“It’s only Monday, now,” she considered. “Yes; if--” She paused roguishly. “If I can bring a friend for the week end. You’ll like him, I know.”

“Oh, ho; it’s a _him_, is it? One of your long-haired socialists, I suppose.”

“No; a short-haired one. But you ought to know better, Uncle, dear, than to be repeating those comic-supplement jokes. I never saw a long-haired socialist in my life. Did you?”

“No; but I’ve seen them drink beer,” he announced with conviction.

“Now you shall be punished.” She picked up a cushion and advanced upon him menacingly. “As my kindergarteners say, ‘I’m going to knock your block off.’--There! And there! And there!”

“Grunya! I protest!” he grunted and panted between blows. “It is unbecoming. It is disrespectful, to treat your mother’s brother in such fashion. I’m getting old--”

“Pouf!” the lively Grunya shut him off, discarding the cushion. She picked up his hand and looked at the fingers. “To think I’ve seen those fingers tear a pack of cards in two and bend silver coins.”

“They are past all that now. They ... are quite feeble.”

He let the members in question rest limply and flaccidly in her hand, and aroused her indignation again. She placed her hand on his biceps.

“Tense it,” she commanded.

“I--I can’t,” he faltered. “--Oh! Ouch! There, that’s the best I can do.” A very weak effort indeed he made of it. “I’ve gone soft, you see--the breakdown of tissue due to advancing senility--”

“Tense it!” she cried, this time with a stamp of her foot.

Constantine surrendered and obeyed, and as the biceps swelled under her hand, a glow of admiration appeared in her face.

“Like iron,” she murmured, “only it is living iron. It is wonderful. You are cruelly strong. I should die if you ever put the weight of your strength on me.”

“You will remember,” he answered, “and place it to my credit, that when you were a little thing, even when you were very naughty, I never spanked you.”

“Ah, Uncle, but was not that because you had moral convictions against spanking?”

“True; but if ever those convictions were shaken, it was by you, and often enough when you were anywhere between three and six. Grunya, dear, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but truth compels me to say that at that period you were a barbarian, a savage, a cave-child, a jungle beast, a--a regular little devil, a she-wolf of a cub without morality or manners, a--”

But a cushion, raised and threatening, caused him to desist and to throw up his arms in arches of protection to his head.

“’Ware!” he cried. “By your present actions the only difference I can note is that you are a full-grown cub. Twenty-two, eh? And feeling your strength--beginning to take it out on me. But it is not too late. The next time you attempt to trounce me, I _will_ give you a spanking, even if you are a young lady, a fat young lady.”

“Oh, you brute! I’m not!” She thrust out her arm. “Look at that. Feel it. That’s muscle. I weigh one hundred and twenty-eight. Will you take it back?”

Again the cushion rose and fell upon him, and it was in the midst of struggling to defend himself, laughing and grunting, dodging and guarding with his arms, that a maid entered with a samovar and Grunya desisted in order to serve tea.

“One of your kindergarteners?” he queried, as the maid left the room.

Grunya nodded.

“She looks quite respectable,” he commented. “Her face is actually clean.”

“I refuse to let you make me excited over my settlement work,” she answered, with a smile and caress, as she passed him his tea. “I have been working out my individual evolution, that is all. You don’t believe now what you did at twenty.”

Constantine shook his head.

“Perhaps I am only a dreamer,” he added wistfully.

“You have read and studied, and yet you have done nothing for social betterment. You have never raised your hand.”

“I have never raised my hand,” he echoed sadly, and, at the same moment, his glance falling on the headlines of the newspaper announcing McDuffy’s death, he found himself forced to suppress the grin that writhed at his lips.

“It’s the Russian character,” Grunya cried. “--Study, microscopic inspection and introspection, everything but deeds and action. But I--” Her young voice lifted triumphantly. “I am of the new generation, the first American generation--”

“You were Russian born,” he interpolated dryly.

“But American bred. I was only a babe. I have known no other land but this land of action. And yet, Uncle Sergius, you could have been such a power, if you’d only let business alone.”

“Look at all that you do down here,” he answered. “Don’t forget, it is my business that enables you to perform your works. You see, I do good by....” He hesitated, and remembered Hausmann, the gentle-spirited terrorist. “I do good by proxy. That’s it. You are my proxy.”

“I know it, and it’s horrid of me to say such things,” she cried generously. “You’ve spoiled me. I never knew my father, so it is no treason for me to say I’m glad it was you that took my father’s place. My father--no father--could have been so--so colossally kind.”

And, instead of cushions, it was kisses this time she lavished on the colorless, thin-thatched blond gentleman with iron muscles who lolled on the window-seat.

“What is becoming of your anarchism?” he queried slyly, chiefly for the purpose of covering up the modest confusion and happiness her words had caused. “It looked for a while, several years ago, as if you were going to become a full-fledged Red, breathing death and destruction to all upholders of the social order.”

“I--I did have leanings that way,” she confessed reluctantly.

“Leanings!” he shouted. “You worried the life out of me trying to persuade me to give up my business and devote myself to the cause of humanity. And you spelled ‘cause’ all in capitals, if you will remember. Then you came down to this slum work--making terms with the enemy, in fact--patching up the poor wrecks of the system you despised--”

She raised a hand in protest.

“What else would you call it?” he demanded. “Your boys’ clubs, your girls’ clubs, your little mothers’ clubs. Why, that day nursery you established for women workers! It only meant, by taking care of the children during work hours, that you more thoroughly enabled the employers to sweat the mothers.”

“But I’ve outgrown the day-nursery scheme, Uncle; you know that.”

Constantine nodded his head.

“And a few other things. You’re getting real conservative--er, sort of socialistic. Not of such stuff are revolutionists made.”

“I’m not so revolutionary, Uncle, dear. I’m growing up. Social development is slow and painful. There are no short cuts. Every step must be worked out. Oh, I’m still a philosophic anarchist. Every intelligent socialist is. But it seems more clear to me every day that the ideal freedom of a state of anarchy can only be obtained by going through the intervening stage of socialism.”

“What is his name?” Constantine asked abruptly.

“Who?--What?” A warm flush of maiden blood rose in her cheeks.

Constantine quietly sipped his tea and waited.

Grunya recovered herself and looked at him earnestly for a moment.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “on Saturday night, at Edge Moor. He--he is the short-haired one.”

“The guest you are to bring?”

She nodded.

“I’ll tell you no more till then.”

“Do you...?” he asked.

“I ... I think so,” she faltered.

“Has he spoken?”

“Yes ... and no. He has such a way of taking things for granted. You wait until you meet him. You’ll love him, Uncle Sergius, I know you will. And you’ll respect his mind, too. He’s ... he’s my visitor at four. Wait and meet him now. There’s a dear, do, please.”

But Uncle Sergius Constantine, alias Ivan Dragomiloff, looked at his watch and quickly stood up.

“No; bring him to Edge Moor Saturday, Grunya, and I’ll do my best to like him. And I’ll have more opportunity then than now. I’m going to loaf for a week. If it is as serious as it seems, have him stop the week.”

“He’s so busy,” was her answer. “It was all I could do to persuade him for the week end.”

“Business?”

“In a way. But not real business. He’s not in business. He’s rich, you know. Social-betterment business would best describe what keeps him busy. But you’ll admire his mind, Uncle, and respect it, too.”

“I hope so ... for your sake, dear,” were Constantine’s last words, as they parted in an embrace at the door.

_Chapter III_

It was a very demure young woman who received Winter Hall a few minutes after her uncle’s departure. Grunya was intensely serious as she served him tea and chatted with him--if chat it can be called, when the subject matter ranged from Gorky’s last book and the latest news of the Russian Revolution to Hull House and the shirtwaist-makers’ strike.

Winter Hall shook his head forbiddingly at her reconstructed ameliorative plans.

“Take Hull House,” he said. “It was a point of illumination in the slum wilderness of Chicago. It is still a point of illumination and no more. The slum wilderness has grown, vastly grown. There is a far greater totality of vice and misery and degradation in Chicago today than was there when Hull House was founded. Then Hull House has failed, as have all the other ameliorative devices. You can’t save a leaky boat with a bailer that throws out less water than rushes in.”

“I know, I know,” Grunya murmured sadly.

“Take the matter of inside rooms,” Hall went on. “In New York City, at the close of the Civil War, there were sixty thousand inside rooms. Since then inside rooms have been continually crusaded against. Men, many of them, have devoted their lives to that very fight. Public-spirited citizens by thousands and tens of thousands have contributed their money and their approval. Whole blocks have been torn down and replaced by parks and playgrounds. It has been a great and terrible fight. And what is the result? Today, in the year 1911, there are over three hundred thousand inside rooms in New York City.”

He shrugged his shoulders and sipped his tea.

“More and more do you make me see two things,” Grunya confessed. “First, that liberty, unrestricted by man-made law, cannot be gained except by evolution through a stage of excessive man-made law that will well-nigh reduce us all to automatons--the socialistic stage, of course. But I, for one, would never care to live in the socialist state. It would be maddening.”

“You prefer the splendid, wild, cruel beauty of our present commercial individualism?” he asked quietly.

“Almost I do. Almost I do. But the socialist state must come. I know that, because of the second thing I so clearly see, and that is the failure of amelioration to ameliorate.” She broke off abruptly, favored him with a dazzling, cheerful smile, and announced, “But why should we be serious with the hot weather coming on? Why don’t you leave town for a breath of air?”

“Why don’t you?” he countered.

“Too busy.”

“Same here.” He paused, and his face seemed suddenly to become harsh and grim, as if reflecting some stern inner thought. “In fact, I have never been busier in my life, and never so near accomplishing something big.”

“But you will run up for the week end and meet my uncle?” she demanded impulsively. “He was here just a few minutes ago. He wants to make it a--a sort of house party, just the three of us, and suggests the week.”

He shook his head reluctantly.

“I’d like to, and I’ll run up, but I can’t stay a whole week. This affair of mine is most important. I have learned only today what I have been months in seeking.”

And while he talked, she studied his face as only a woman in love can study a man’s face. She knew every minutest detail of Winter Hall’s face, from the inverted arch of the joined eyebrows to the pictured corners of the lips, from the firm unclefted chin to the last least crinkle of the ear. Being a man, even if he were in love, not so did Hall know Grunya’s face. He loved her, but love did not open his eyes to microscopic details. Had he been called upon suddenly to describe her out of the registered impressions of his consciousness, he could have done so only in general terms, such as vivacious, plastic, delicate coloring, low forehead, hair always becoming, eyes that smiled and glowed even as her cheeks did, a sympathetic and adorable mouth, and a voice the viols of which were wonderful and indescribable. He had also impressions of cleanness and wholesomeness, noble seriousness, facile wit, and brilliant intellect.

What Grunya saw was a well-built man of thirty-two, with the brow of a thinker and all the facial insignia of a doer. He, too, was blue-eyed and blond, in the bronzed American way of those that live much in the sun. He smiled much, and, when he laughed, laughed heartily. Yet often, in repose, a certain sternness, almost brutal, was manifest in his face. Grunya, who loved strength and who was appalled by brutality, was sometimes troubled by fluttering divinations of this other side of his character.

Winter Hall was a rather unusual product of the times. In spite of the easy ways of wealth in which he had spent his childhood, and of the comfortable fortune inherited from his father and added to by two spinster aunts, he had early devoted himself to the cause of humanity. At college he had specialized in economics and sociology, and had been looked upon as somewhat of a crank by his less serious fellow students. Out of college, he had backed Riis, both with money and personal effort, in the New York crusade. Much time and labor spent in a social settlement had left him dissatisfied. He was always in search of the thing behind the thing, of the cause that was really the cause. Thus, he had studied politics, and, later, pursued graft from New York City to Albany and back again, and studied it, too, in the capital of his country.

After several years, apparently futile, he spent a few months in a university settlement that was in reality a hotbed of radicalism, and resolved to begin his studies from the very bottom. A year he spent as a casual laborer wandering over the country, and for another year he wandered as a vagabond, the companion of tramps and yegg men. For two years, in Chicago, he was a professional charity worker, toiling long hours and drawing down a salary of fifty dollars a month. And out of it all, he had developed into a socialist--a “millionaire socialist,” as he was labeled by the press.

He traveled much, and investigated always, studying affairs at first hand. There was never a strike of importance that did not see him among the first on the ground. He attended all the national and international conventions of organized labor, and spent a year in Russia during the impending crisis of the 1905 Revolution. Many articles of his had appeared in the heavier magazines, and he was the author of several books, all well written, deep, thoughtful, and, for a socialist, conservative.

And this was the man with whom Grunya Constantine chatted and drank tea in the window-seat of her East Side apartment.

“But it is not necessary for you to keep yourself mewed up all the time in this wretched, stifling city,” she was saying. “In your case I can’t imagine what imperatively compels you--”

But she did not finish the sentence, for at that moment she discovered that Hall was no longer listening to her. His glance had chanced to rest on the afternoon paper lying on the seat. Entirely oblivious of her existence, he had picked up the paper and begun to read.

Grunya sulked prettily, but he took no notice of her.

“It’s very nice of you, I ... I must say,” she broke out, finally attracting his attention. “Reading a newspaper while I am talking to you.”

He turned the sheet so that she could see the headline of McDuffy’s assassination. She looked up at him with incomprehension.

“I beg your pardon, Grunya, but when I saw that, I forgot everything.” He tapped his forefinger on the headline. “That is why I am so busy. That is why I remain in New York. That is why I can allow myself no more than a week end with you, and you know how dearly I would love to have the whole week.”

“But I do not understand,” she faltered. “Because the anarchists have blown up a chief of police in another city ... I ... I don’t understand.”

“I’ll tell you. For two years I had my suspicions, then they became a certainty, and for months now I have steadily devoted myself to running down what I believe to be the most terrible organization for assassination that has ever flourished in the United States, or anywhere else. In fact, I am almost certain that the organization is international.

“Do you remember when John Mossman committed suicide by leaping from the seventh story of the Fidelity Building? He was my friend, as well as my father’s friend before me. There was no reason for him to kill himself. The Fidelity Trust Corporation was flourishing. So were all his other interests. His home life was unusually happy. His health was prodigiously good. There was nothing on his mind. Yet the stupid police called it suicide. There was some talk about its being tri-facial neuralgia--incurable, unescapable, unendurable. When men get that they do commit suicide. But he did not have it. We lunched together the day of his death. I know he did not have it, and I made a point of verifying the fact by interviewing his physician. It was theory only, and it was poppycock. He never killed himself, never leaped from the seventh story of the Fidelity Building. Then who killed him? And why? Somebody threw him from the seventh story. Who? Why?

“It is likely that the affair would have been dismissed from my mind as an insoluble mystery, had not Governor Northampton been killed by an air-rifle just three days later. You remember?--on a city street, from any one of a thousand windows. They never got a clue. I wondered casually about these two murders, and from then on, grew keenly alive to anything unusual in the daily list of homicides in the whole country.

“Oh, I shall not give you the whole list, but just a few. There was Borff, the organized labor grafter of Sannington. He had controlled that city for years. Graft prosecution after graft prosecution failed to reach him. When they settled his estate they found him possessed of half a dozen millions. They settled his estate just after he had reached out and laid hands on the whole political machinery of the state. It was just at the height of his power and his corruption when he was struck down.

“And there were others--Chief of Police Little; Welchorst, the big promoter; Blankhurst, the Cotton King; Inspector Satcherly, found floating in the East River, and so on, and so on. The perpetrators were never discovered. Then there were the society murders--Charley Atwater, killed on that last hunting trip of his; Mrs. Langthorne-Haywards; Mrs. Hastings-Reynolds; old Van Auston--oh, a long list indeed.

“All of which convinced me that a strong organization of some sort was at work. That it was no mere Black Hand affair, I was certain. The murders were not confined to any nationality nor to any stratum of society. My first thought was of the anarchists. Forgive me, Grunya--” His hand flashed out to hers and retained it warmly. “I had heard much talk of you, and that you were in close touch with the violent groups. I knew that you spent much money, and I was suspicious. And at any rate, you could put me in closer touch with the anarchists. I came suspecting you, and I remained to love you. I found you the gentlest of anarchists and a very half-hearted one at that. You were already started in your settlement work down here--”

“And you remained to dissatisfy me with that, too,” she laughed, at the same time lifting the hand that held hers and resting her cheek against it. “But go on. I’m all excited.”

“I did get in close with the anarchists, and the more I studied them the more confident I became that they were incapable. They were so unpractical. They dreamed dreams and spun theories and raged against police persecution, and that was all. They never got anywhere. They never did anything but get themselves in trouble--I am speaking of the violent groups, of course. As for the Tolstoians and the Kropotkinians, they were no more than mild academic philosophers. They couldn’t harm a fly, and their violent cousins couldn’t.

“You see, the assassinations have been of all sorts. Had they been political alone, or social, they might have been due to some hopelessly secret society. But they were commercial and society as well. Therefore, I concluded, the world must in some way have access to this organization. But how? I assumed the hypothesis that there was some man I wanted killed. And there I stuck. I did not have the address of the firm that would perform that task for me. Here was the flaw in my reasoning, namely, the hypothesis itself. I really did not want to kill any man.

“But this flaw dawned on me afterwards, when Coburn, at the Federal Club, told half a dozen of us of an adventure he had just had this afternoon. To him it was merely a curious incident, but I caught at once the gleam of light in it. He was crossing Fifth Avenue, downtown, on foot, when a man, dressed like a mechanician, dismounted alongside of him from a motorcycle and spoke to him. In a few words, the fellow told him that if there were anyone he wanted put out of the world it could be attended to with safety and dispatch. About that time Coburn threatened to punch the fellow’s head, and he promptly jumped on his motorcycle and made off.

“Now here’s the point. Coburn was in deep trouble. He had recently been double-crossed (if you know what that means) by Mattison, his partner, to the tune of a tremendous sum. In addition, Mattison had cleared out for Europe with Coburn’s wife. Do you see? First, Coburn did have, or might be supposed to have, or ought to have, a desire for vengeance against Mattison. And secondly, thanks to the newspapers, the affair was public property.”

“I see!” Grunya cried, with glowing eyes. “There was the flaw in your hypothesis. Since you could not make public your hypothetical desire to kill a man, the organization, naturally, could make no overtures to you about it.”

“Correct. But I was no forwarder. Or yet, in a way, I was. I saw now how the world got access to the organization and its service. From then on I studied the mysterious and prominent murders with this in mind, and I found, so far as the society ones were concerned, that they were practically always preceded by sensational public exploitation of scandal. The commercial murders--well, the shady and unfair transactions of a fair proportion of the big businessmen are always leaking out, even though they do not get into print. When Hawthorn was found mysteriously dead on his yacht, the gossip of his underhand dealings in the fight against the Combine had been in the clubs for weeks. You may not remember them, but in their day the Atwater-Jones scandal and the Langthorne-Haywards scandal were most sensationally featured by the newspapers.

“So I became certain that this murder organization must approach persons high in political, business, and social life. And I was also certain that its overtures were not always rebuffed as in the case of Coburn. I looked about me and wondered what ones of the very men I met in the clubs or at directors’ meetings had patronized this firm of men-killers. That I must be acquainted with such men I had no doubt, but which ones were they? And imagine my asking them to give me the address of the firm which they had employed to wipe out their enemies.

“But at last, and only now, have I got the direct clue. I kept close eye on all my friends who were high in the world. When any one of them was afflicted by a great trouble, I attached myself to him. For a time this was fruitless, though there was one who must have availed himself of the services of the organization, for, within six months, the man who had been the cause of his trouble was dead. Suicide, the police said.

“And then my chance came. You know of the furor of a few years ago caused by the marriage of Gladys Van Martin with Baron Portos de Moigne. It was one of those unfortunate international marriages. He was a brute. He has robbed her and divorced her. The details of his conduct have only just come out, and they are incredibly horrible. He has even beaten her so badly that the physicians despaired of her life, for a time, and, later, of her reason. And by French law he has possessed himself of their children--two boys.

“Her brother, Percy Van Martin, and I were classmates at college. I promptly made it a point to get in close with him. We’ve seen a good deal of each other the last several weeks. Only the other day the thing I was waiting for happened, and he told me of it. The organization had approached him. Unlike Coburn, he did not drive the man away, but heard him out. If Van Martin cared to go further in the matter, he was to insert the single word MESOPOTAMIA in the personal column of the _Herald_. I quickly persuaded him to let me take hold of the affair. I inserted MESOPOTAMIA, as directed, and, acting as Van Martin’s representative, I have seen and talked with one of the men of the organization. He was only an underling, however. They are very suspicious and careful. But tonight I shall meet the principal. It is all arranged. And then....”

“Yes, yes,” Grunya cried eagerly. “And then?”

“I don’t know. I have no plans.”

“But the danger!”

Hall smiled reassuringly.

“I don’t imagine there will be any risk. I am coming merely to transact some business with the firm, namely, the assassination of Percy Van Martin’s ex-brother-in-law. Firms do not make a practice of killing their clients.”

“But when they find out you are not a client?” she protested.

“I won’t be there at that time. And when they do find out, it will be too late for them to do me any harm.”

* * * * *

“Be careful, do be careful,” Grunya urged as they parted at the door half an hour later. “And you will come up for the week end?”

“Surely.”

“I’ll meet you at the station myself.”

“And I’ll meet your redoubtable uncle a few minutes afterwards, I suppose.” He made a mock shiver. “He’s not a regular ogre, I hope.”

“You’ll love him,” she proclaimed proudly. “He is finer and better than a dozen fathers. He never denies me anything. Not even--”

“Me?” Hall interrupted.

Grunya tried to meet him with an equal audaciousness, but blushed and dropped her eyes, and the next moment was encircled by his arms.

_Chapter IV_

“So you are Ivan Dragomiloff?”

Winter Hall paused a moment to glance curiously around at the book-lined walls and back again to the colorless blond in the black skullcap, who had not risen to greet him.

“I must say access to you is made sufficiently difficult. It leads one to believe that the--er--work of your Bureau is performed discreetly as well as capably.”

Dragomiloff smiled the ghost of a pleased smile.

“Sit down,” he said, indicating a chair that faced him and that threw the visitor’s face into the light.

Again Hall glanced around the room and back at the man before him.

“I am surprised,” was Hall’s comment.

“You expected low-browed ruffians and lurid melodrama, I suppose?” Dragomiloff queried pleasantly.

“No, not that. I knew too keen a mind was required to direct the operations of your--er--institution.”

“They have been uniformly successful.”

“How long have you been in business?--if I may ask.”

“Eleven years, actively--though there was preparation and elaboration of the plan prior to that.”

“You don’t mind talking with me about it?” was Hall’s next query.

“Certainly not,” came the answer. “As a client, you are in the same boat with me. Our interests are identical. And, since we never blackmail our clients after the transaction is completed, our interests remain identical. A little important information can do no harm, and I don’t mind saying that I am rather proud of this organization. It is, as you say, and if I immodestly say so myself, capably directed.”

“But I can’t understand,” Hall exclaimed. “You are the last person in the world I should conceive of as being at the head of a band of murderers.”

“And you are the last person in the world I should expect to find here seeking the professional services of such a person,” was the dry counter. “I like your looks. You are strong, honest, unafraid, and, in your eyes is that undefinable yet unmistakable tiredness of the scholar. You read a great deal, and study. You are as remarkably different from my regular run of clients as I am, obviously, from the person you expected to meet at the head of a band of murderers. Though executioners is the better and truer description.”

“Never mind the name,” Hall answered. “It does not reduce my surprise that you should be conducting this--er--enterprise.”

“Ah, but you scarcely know how we conduct it.” Dragomiloff laced and interlaced his strong, lean fingers and meditated for further answer. “I might explain that we conduct our trade with a greater measure of ethics than our clients bring to us.”

“Ethics!” Hall burst into laughter.

“Yes, precisely; and I’ll admit it sounds funny in connection with an Assassination Bureau.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“One name is as good as another,” the head of the Bureau went on imperturbably. “But you will find, in patronizing us, a keener, a more rigid standard of right-dealing than in the business world. I saw the need of that at the start. It was imperative. Organized as we were, outside the law, and in the very teeth of the law, success was only to be gained by doing right. We have to be right with one another, with our patrons, with everybody, and everything. You have no idea the amount of business we turn away.”

“What!” Hall cried. “And why?”

“Because it would not be right to transact it. Don’t laugh, please. In fact, we of the Bureau are all rather fanatical when it comes to ethics. We have the sanction of right in all that we do. We must have that sanction. Without it we could not last very long. Believe me, this is so. And now to business. You have come here through the accredited channels. You can have but one errand. Whom do you want executed?”

“You don’t know?” Hall asked in wonderment.

“Certainly not. That is not my branch. I spend no time drumming up trade.”

“Perhaps, when I give you the man’s name, you will not find that sanction of right. It seems you are judge as well as executioner.”

“Not executioner. I never execute. It is not my branch. I am the head. I judge--locally, that is--and other members carry out the orders.”

“But suppose these others should prove weak vessels?” Dragomiloff looked very pleased.

“Ah, that was the rub. I studied it a long time. Almost as conclusively as anything else, it was that very thing that made me see that our operations could be conducted only on an ethical basis. We have our own code of right, and our own law. Only men of the highest ethical nature, combined with the requisite physical and nervous stamina, are admitted to our ranks. As a result, almost fanatically are our oaths observed. There have been weak vessels--several of them.” He paused and seemed to ponder sadly. “They paid the penalty. It was a splendid object lesson to the rest.”

“You mean--?”

“Yes; they were executed. It had to be. But it is very rarely necessary with us.”

“How do you manage it?”

“When we have selected a desperate, intelligent, and reasonable man--this selecting, by the way, is done by the members themselves, who, rubbing shoulders everywhere with all sorts of men, have better opportunity than I for meeting and estimating strong characters. When such a man is selected, he is tried out. His life is the pledge he gives for his faithfulness and loyalty. I know of these men, and have the reports on them. I rarely see them, unless they rise in the organization, and by the same token very few of them ever see me.

“One of the first things done is to give a candidate an unimportant and unremunerative murder--say, a brutal mate of some ship, or a bullying foreman, a usurer, or a petty grafting politician. It is good for the world to have such individuals out of it, you know. But to return. Every step of the candidate in this, his first killing, is so marked by us that a mass of testimony is gathered sufficient to convict him before any court in this land. And the affair is so conducted that this testimony proceeds from outside persons. We would not have to appear. For that matter, we have never found it necessary to invoke the country’s law for the castigation of a member.

“Well, when this initial task has been performed, the man is one of us, tied to us body and soul. After that he is thoroughly educated in our methods--”

“Does ethics enter into the curriculum?” Hall interrupted to ask.