Part 59

Mabuse drank from the travelling cup which he always carried in his pocket, and Spoerri had to fill the toothglass on the washhandstand.

Mabuse was longing for a carouse, a really heavy carouse which should seize him by the throat and press him under the water, as if he were being given a millstone for a swimming belt. When he had emptied the second bottle, he saw that he was not likely to get his wish.

“Haven’t you any more?” he asked.

“That’s all there is. I couldn’t venture to bring any more across the frontier.”

Mabuse laughed satirically. “That’s fine. Here is Spoerri, who has brought three railway vans full of salvarsan, two of cocaine, enough prostitutes to fill three brothels across the frontier, yet he hasn’t enough courage to bring more than three bottles of brandy! Empty your glass into mine. Don’t your wages include the getting of brandy?”

When the third bottle had been emptied Mabuse, clear-headed as ever, but more hot-blooded, went back to the room next his own, occupied by the Countess. He was out of sorts, and resembled an engine that had been run too fast, so that the heat had covered the glowing cylinders with vapour, and they could not be set in motion.

He approached the Countess’s bed. “You and I had come to an understanding together. You have broken through it: you were ready to betray me!”

“I was!” said the Countess in a low voice.

Then ungovernable fury seemed to possess the man. He snatched her from the bed, and as he seized her, lifted her high in the air as if he were going to dash her in pieces against the wall like rotting timber. At that moment he hated her; she was the embodiment of all his weaknesses. For ten long minutes, when the patrol-boat was on their track, the power of his will over her had ceased, and now, when he wanted to destroy her and would have dashed against the wall the head that defied him, he could not do it.

With a low cry the woman found herself held on high, and realized the strength of arm and indomitable will-power of the being to whom she was secretly--and yet irrevocably--bound. She longed for death. Softly she repeated a fragment or two of a prayer learnt in her childhood’s days, and she knew that if she were to die now she would draw this man also to his death.

But Mabuse, conscious of his power over the woman he held aloft in his grasp, suddenly came to himself again. Once more he realized that he was alive, was safe, and felt a fierce joy in the knowledge and in his possession of her. Almost gently he laid her down, and the poor woman, condemned afresh to a life of humiliation and degradation, was at the mercy of the tyrant who dominated her, and from whose power there was now no escape. She lay wide-eyed and tearless till the dawn, her only desire for floods and floods of tears wherein to drown for ever the misery of her existence.

* * * * *

On the morning of the following day Mabuse flew with her from Stuttgart to Berlin.

There, caught in the toils of the mighty city, among those whose instincts he developed and used to his own ends, he lived, bent on one aim alone. One idea presented itself with ever-increasing intensity, one vision swam ever before his eyes, intoxicating him with a fury of desire. His phantasies, his strivings, and the goal before him gained their force because born of the strongest impulse within him, his lust for power!

There was one man in the world who had set himself to follow his path, had discovered him in his own territory, and dislodged him from his fortress. There was one alone who had dared to disturb his plans, to oblige him to undertake a flight in which his life had been in danger. It was due to this man’s efforts that the State had interfered with his schemes for getting rid of those whom his imperious will desired to remove from his path.

From the woman who had first moved him to the very depths of his being he had wrested all the power of will with which her personality resisted him. It was his pride to know that. He had taken her being, her beauty, her independence, her exclusiveness, and grappled them to himself, and this work of his was the very highest spiritual expression of his powers and capabilities. But between him and her there was a period of ten minutes in which she had escaped his domination, in which he had to renounce his claim to this symbol of his superhuman force. And that period of time, that barren, useless part of his life, he owed to the power of this one man.

His flight from Germany with this woman and his journey across the Atlantic had been so minutely prepared in all its details that only death could intervene. His empire of Citopomar, with its virgin forests, tigers, rattlesnakes, where death lay in wait at every moment, its mountains and its waterfalls and its rare exotic growths, was waiting for him, waiting to set him free from Europe, to offer him a new life. Any day might see him crowned as emperor.

But he would eat of Dead Sea fruit for the rest of his life, did he take possession of his realm before he had seized upon this man with all the full force of his lust for power and his deadly hatred, had held him within his grasp and annihilated him. Between him and Wenk it was a struggle for existence, and he could know no peace while the other lived.

Once, when the thoughts surging within him would no longer be controlled, he replied to the Countess’s inquiry as to when they would leave Germany, “I shall catch him alive. I shall catch him like a bird in the snare. He will flutter helpless into my hands. Not till then do I go.”

She turned away afraid, guessing the man he meant. Since that moment of her resistance and hope of escape she seemed to have become more subdued than ever, falling deeper under his demon spell. She did not venture to oppose or question more.

Mabuse’s enterprise with regard to Wenk developed slowly. But steadily and surely the net around him was tightening....

* * * * *

Wenk was in Munich again. George had been imprisoned there, and he played the rôle of a deaf mute. No one had heard a word from him since his arrest. He was confronted with the constables and tradespeople from Schachen who had seen him for many weeks, with the young fellows whom he had tried to hand over to the Foreign Legion, all of whom instantly recognized him, but he did not utter a word.

One morning they found he had hanged himself with his braces. He had written one word on the wall of his cell, the word that one of Napoleon’s generals had made renowned after he had lost the battle of Waterloo.

An exhaustive search in the Villa Elise brought little to light. It merely revealed proofs that Mabuse employed the money obtained by gambling or theft to carry on smuggling and profiteering on a gigantic scale. The police worked side by side with the Swiss authorities, for it was believed that Mabuse must be in Switzerland, or at any rate that he had passed through. Wenk went once a fortnight to Zürich. Now and then one of Mabuse’s gang was caught, but all were so thoroughly schooled that no word of betrayal escaped them.

News reached Wenk from Frankfurt that a gambler was at work there, whose description so closely resembled Mabuse that Wenk travelled thither at once, but when he arrived there was no trace of the man to be found. Three days later there was a report of a similar kind from Cologne, then from Düsseldorf, and later both from Essen and Hanover.

Wenk went hither and thither, not doubting in his own mind that he was indeed on the track of Mabuse. The latter must have spies in Munich who watched and reported Wenk’s movements. Knowing that he was followed, he took every possible precaution, and employed all the cunning at his command. On his journeys he made use of trains, cars, aeroplanes indiscriminately. Since he could not help suspecting that Mabuse had accomplices among his own subordinates, Wenk watched these very closely. He changed his chauffeur and his housekeeper, altered his address and his telephone number, took rooms in a hotel, or lodged with friends in the suburbs. But as soon as he arrived at the town where the gambler had been seen, he found he had vanished without trace of any kind, only to reappear a few days later in some other part. The whole country already rang with reports of the existence and operations of the robber-king. Dr. Mabuse, the gambler! It was like a ballad, expressing the devilry and defiance of all who offered resistance to existing law and order, and it spread from place to place.

In all the towns the police arrested men in gangs, but when the criminals were sorted out, this man, whose capture was worth more to them than all the rest, was never to be found. Suddenly it struck Wenk that Mabuse must be making his way by a circuitous route to Berlin. From his superior officers Wenk obtained permission to leave Bavaria, and got in touch with the Prussian courts of justice, and these appointed him to Berlin on special duty.