# The Hand of Peril/Part 1/Chapter 3

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III
The studio-door opened quietly and the same austere and self-contained man who had sat at the café table stepped into the room.
There was no visible change of facial expression as his eye swept the studio and at one circling glance seemed to take in every detail of the situation.
"What's this?" was his final curt demand.
"We caught this guy rubberin' into our safe," was the girl's answer. She stepped over and swung half-shut the steel door to which still clung Kestner's sounding-tube of pasteboard. "And, say, Governor, he ain't no sandpaper artist, either!"
Kestner saw it was time to talk.
"I want you to listen to me, Lambert," he began, in that clear and steady note of authority which his office could at times give to him.
"Shut up!" was Lambert's command.
"No; I'll not shut up! We've got something to talk out here, and—"
"Gag him, Tony!" cried Lambert, with an impatient gesture towards the door at the far end of the studio.
Morello stepped through this door, and promptly stepped back into the room with a towel in his hands. This towel he quickly tore in two, knotting the two pieces together as he approached the chair where Kestner sat.
​"There's no need to do this, Lam—"
Kestner's cry was shut off by the towel with the tightened knot being dexterously tossed over his head and drawn taut, so taut that the pressure of the knot on his lips became unendurable. Involuntarily the jaws relaxed, to relieve the pain.
"Tighter!" commanded Lambert. The band, now against the slightly parted teeth, was tightened and securely knotted at the back of the captive's head.
It was then that the man designated as the Governor stepped quietly back and closed the door which he had left partly open. Then he stood in silent thought for a moment or two.
It was the girl in the tip-tilted hat who spoke first.
"What's the matter with givin' him a crack on the coco?" she gravely volunteered. "Put 'im to sleep until we're dead sure of a get-away?"
The man called the Governor did not seem to hear her.
"Tony," he suddenly said with a crisp and incisive authority, "take that gun from Cherry. Now hand me that automatic. Keep that man covered. If anything happens, plug him where he sits. If any one tries to get in here, plug him first,—him first, remember. Cherry, you frisk him! I want everything, everything, mind you, out of his pockets."
The girl, with a small frown of intentness, bent over the heavy oak fauteuil and went through Kestner's pockets, one at a time. The man called the Governor stood in deep thought as she did so.
As she placed the fruits of her search upon the drawing-table to the left the older man stepped over ​and examined the little collection. He looked up quickly as he came to the neatly folded bank-note.
"So you wanted only one?" he said, and the grim lines about his mouth hardened a little as he stared at Kestner. Then he bent over the drawing-table again.
"Tell Maura to come here," he said, with a quick motion towards the girl in the tip-tilted hat. He was studying a sheet of writing which had been taken from Kestner's pocket.
"Where'll I get her?" asked the girl.
"Downstairs in Bennoit's. Promptly, please!"
The girl slipped out through the studio-door, and closed it after her. Kestner sat there and watched Lambert wheel a projecting-lantern out into the middle of the studio and direct the lens towards the screen of white cotton at the farther end of the room. He saw the sheet of paper inserted in the lens, heard the snap of a switch, and black across the white screen beheld his own signature, magnified many times, magnified until each letter was at least a foot in height.
Morello, tired of standing, sank into a chair, facing the prisoner. In his hand, however, the Neapolitan still held the revolver, and never for a moment did his gaze wander from Kestner.
Lambert, going back to the drawing-table, suddenly turned and crossed to the open safe. His search there seemed a brief one. But his face paled as he turned and stood erect again. He was still beside the safe when the girl called Cherry stepped back into the room. She was followed by the woman Lambert had spoken of as Maura, the woman whom Kestner had ​watched as she sat at the little round table of the Café de la Paix.
Kestner's intent gaze was fixed on this woman's face as she stepped into the room. More than ever he was struck by its sense of reserve, of spiritual isolation, and more than ever he was impressed by its youthful yet austere beauty. He was struck, too, by a newer note, by something that seemed almost a touch of fragility. And about the softer lines of the mouth he detected a trace of latent rebelliousness.
The newcomer, however, scarcely looked at Kestner. The sight of a man tied and trussed and gagged there seemed in no wise to disturb her. Her eyes went close to the face of Lambert and remained there while she spoke.
"What is it?" she asked, in a clear and reedy voice that made Kestner think of a clarionet.
Lambert waved a hand towards the signature thrown on the screen by the projecting lantern.
"Try that, freehand," he said. "Then do it over again on the tracing-desk. I want it right."
The woman took paper and ink and from a row of pens selected a particular point. She stared for a few seconds at the signature, and then bent over her task.
She did not speak as she handed the slip of paper to Lambert. He took it, too, in silence, switching off his lantern, withdrawing Kestner's signature, and adjusting the newly written imitation in its place. Then he switched on the light again.
Even Kestner, accustomed as he was to the cleverest of forgeries, was plainly startled as he saw that name ​projected on the cotton screen. It disturbed him in a manner which he would have found hard to describe. For even in its magnified form, where any deviation from the original would be doubly and trebly accentuated, it stood out a practically perfect facsimile of his own handwriting.
This quiet-mannered woman with the violet-blue eyes and the misleading delicacy of Dresden china was one of the most accomplished forgers who ever handled a pen. That much Kestner could see at a glance. And at a second glance it came home to him that this same woman, in the right hands, could indeed develop into an actual peril to society.
"Try tracing it," Lambert was saying to her.
She took the Kestner signature and crossed to a small table, the top of which consisted of plate glass. She reached in under this glass and turned a switch. The moment she did so a powerful electric light showed itself directly below the table-top.
On this top she placed the paper, covered by a second sheet. Then she tested a number of pens, and having found one to her purpose, carried on a similar test with regard to her ink. Then for a silent moment or two she bent over her task.
Lambert took the paper from her when she had finished. This time he placed the three signatures in the lens and threw them on the screen, one above the other.
Kestner, studying the three, could not be sure which was his own and which were the imitations. The other occupants of the room, he noticed, were studying the letters quite as intently as he had done.
​It was the girl called Cherry who spoke first.
"Take it from me," she said with sudden conviction, "the freehand wins!"
Lambert turned to the woman who had done the writing.
"Your tracing is stiff to-day. What's the matter?"
The question remained unanswered for several seconds. The troubled violet-blue eyes moved from the screen to the man in the fauteuil and then back to the screen again.
"I'd like to know what this means," she finally declared.
Lambert stepped quickly across the room. For a man of his years and a career such as his that gaunt old counterfeiter retained a startling degree of virility.
"You'll find that out quick enough," was his half impatient retort. He tossed the papers he had withdrawn from the lens across the table and motioned for her to be seated.
"Take half a sheet of that bond and write what I tell you. I want it done in the handwriting of that signature, and I want it done right. Are you ready?"
"I'm ready," answered the woman. She spoke in the flat and lifeless tones of a coerced child.
"Then write this: 'I have made a mess of things, and I am tired of life. I'm sorry, but this seems the only way out.' Then add the signature. No; wait a minute. Add this: 'The finder will please notify the American Embassy, where the secretary, I trust, will cable the Treasury Department at Washington.' Have you got that?"
​The woman at the table went on writing for a second or two.
"Yes," she said at last, with her head a little on one side as she studied the sheet in front of her.
"Then we'll put it on the slide and see how it looks," answered Lambert. He took the sheet from her, adjusted it in the lantern, and turned on the light.
An undeniable tingle crept up and down Kestner's backbone as he read the words on the screen. It was, to the eje, his own handwriting. It would and could be accepted as his own. Not one person in a thousand would even stop to question its authenticity.
The woman named Maura, who had been supporting herself with one hand on the end of the table, turned and faced Lambert.
"Are you going to kill him?"
It was spoken so quietly that Kestner could scarcely hear it. But the last of the colour had gone from the woman's face, and her eyes, as she spoke, took on an animal-like translucence.
"On the contrary," was Lambert's calm retort, "he is going to kill himself."
"Why?" demanded the woman.
"Because, as he himself says, he's tired of living. He confesses that in this paper he's leaving behind. And he's proved it by invading our home the way he did. Homes have to be protected. And I intend to protect mine."
"You're not protecting it," she contended.
"Well, I'm making a stab at it—and a stab at saving your neck at the same time!"
"Oh, what's the good of all this!" cried the ​white-faced woman, with a gesture of both protest and repudiation. For the second time Kestner saw the lines about Lambert's mouth harden. There was no doubt of his domination in that little circle.
"It's necessary, and that's enough. You've done your part, now, Tony and I will do ours."
"But you can't kill a man in cold blood,—you can't!" she cried, her voice shaking with a vibrata of horror.
"I've already told you," retorted Lambert, quite untouched by her outburst, "that he's going to do the thing himself!"
"Himself?"
"He's going to hold his own gun, and pull his own trigger with his own finger. And to make sure it's his own act, he's even going to hold that gun in his mouth, pointing upward and backward!"
He met her staring eyes without a moment's flinching.
"Tony, of course, may help him a trifle, but that's our business. There's one too many in this game. And it's too big a game to drop now. Somebody has to step down and out."
"But you can't do this!" she still protested.
Lambert turned on her.
"Can you suggest something better?" was his quick and half-mocking demand.
She looked from Kestner to Lambert, and then back at the man so securely tied down to the huge oak fauteuil.
"Yes," she replied.
"Well," mocked Lambert. "Out with it."
​"If this man knows what you hint he knows, we can't stay in Paris."
"Naturally not."
"But whatever he knows, or whoever he is, he can't be acting alone."
"I fail to see his friends, at the moment."
"But there must be others, others who—"
"But we've got him!"
"Yes, you've got him—precisely. You've got him there, and he'll be safe there for at least several hours!"
"How about us?"
"Those few hours are all we need. We can leave him as he is. By that time we can be—be wherever you say."
Lambert and Morello did not openly and patently exchange glances; but the watching Kestner knew that a silent message had been given out by one and received by the other.
"All right," suddenly acquiesced the older man. "Go and get your things together—and remember, we've got to travel light!"
He nodded towards the woman called Cherry. "And you do the same. But I want you both to move quick!"
The woman called Cherry stepped towards the door. But the more resolute-eyed woman still hesitated. She seemed to have her doubts as to Lambert's promises. The latter, however, was not in a mood to endure equivocations.
"I said I wanted you to move quick!" was the sharp and sudden cry.
​She stood there, staring at him, almost challengingly at first. Then her eyes fell, as though worsted in that silent duel of wills. She started to speak, hesitated, and remained silent. Then she turned slowly about and walked quietly out of the room.
The moment she was gone Lambert's manner changed. He moved with a celerity surprising in one of his years.
"Now, Tony, quick—get the notes into that bag of yours. And the plates. We must have every plate, remember!" He was himself busy going through the drawers of one of the work-tables as he talked. "Never mind the other stuff—that will take time. And there's been too much time wasted here already."
Lambert snapped shut the club bag into which he had been cramming the different things caught up from the rummaged drawers. Then he stepped quickly to the door, listened for a moment, and crossed to Kestner's side. The expression on his face was extremely disturbing to the man in the high-backed chair.
"So you work alone, Monsieur Kestner!" he said with a cold smile of mockery. "You come after us singlehanded! I admire your courage, sir, but I deplore your lack of judgment!"
With his left hand, as he spoke, he deftly cut the gag which held apart Kestner's aching jaws. With his right hand at the same instant, he reached down into his pocket and brought forth the girl's sombre-looking hammerless Colt. With an equally quick ​movement he cut the cord holding Kestner's right wrist so firmly down to the arm of the chair.
Before Kestner could cry out, before even he could raise that throbbing and stiffened right arm, Lambert had caught him by the hand, forced the prisoner's fingers about the grip of the revolver, and covered those flaccid fingers with his own muscular and bony hand.
It was not until he had forced up Kestner's inert right forearm that the Secret Agent fully awakened to the imminence of his peril. As always, he had counted on some intervention, on some moment of relaxed vigilance when his chance should come. But here there seemed to be no chance.
He saw, in a flash, what it all meant, and how quickly it could all be over. His position was against him. The suspended circulation of that over-bound right arm was against him. But still he fought, fought every inch of the way, with every jot of strength at his command.
The third man stood watching the tableau, his impassive and olive-skinned face giving no sign of heightened emotion as the contending forces centralised in those two quivering arms came into the equilibrium of nicely matched strength. Then one arm weakened a trifle. The dark-barrelled weapon of gun-metal was slowly forced further and further upward.
Kestner knew quite well what it meant. But he was now powerless to withstand that cruel pressure. He knew that the forefinger of that muscular hand, held so firmly over his own, would contract the moment the barrel was levelled in the right direction. He felt it was all but useless to cry out. Under no condition ​would he cry out. Yet at the moment the revolver was in a perpendicular position, a flash of hope came to him.
It was with that flash of hope that he quickly and deliberately did the unexpected thing. He pulled on the trigger with his own finger.
The sharp bark of the revolver reverberated through the high-walled room as the bullet went splintering into the framework of the skylight overhead. Kestner had hoped it might crash through the panes themselves. He doubted if the sound of a small calibre revolver would carry much beyond the closed apartment.
Yet that unexpected discharge of the fire-arm startled Lambert. The arm still forlornly straining against his relentless upward pressure gained several inches of precious space before the struggle could be renewed. But inch by quavering inch the fire-arm was again forced up.
"Tony," panted Lambert, "give me a hand!"
Kestner was only dimly conscious of the other man sliding up to him.
"Get his jaws apart," was the next command gasped out by Lambert.
Kestner was conscious enough now of gross fingers on his face, bruising his lips, of knuckles rowelling the cheek-flaps against his clenched teeth. And a corroding wave of rage and resentment swept through him, at the ignominy of it all. Then he clenched his jaws still closer together, in the face of that rowelling knuckle, for at that moment a second interruption was taking place.
​This interruption took the form of a door flung open and a white-faced woman calling into the studio.
"Stop!" gasped the woman, as she flung through the door and turned the key in the lock.
Both men looked up, a little stupidly, their mouths still open, their postures still those of strained muscles and sinews. Kestner saw it was the woman called Maura.
"Stop!" she gasped, a little weakly. "We're being watched!"
Her hat was awry of her head, her veil was hanging loose, and she was plainly out of breath.
"Quick," she gasped again, leaning against the wall; "there's a man at every door! and two gendarmes are on the stairs! Listen! I hear them coming!"
Morello was the first to stoop and catch up his handbag. Lambert's grip on the prisoner's arm relaxed. He wrenched the revolver from Kestner's fingers, dropped it into his pocket, and darted for his bag.
"Then the closet!" he cried as he ran.
"Why the closet?" asked the bewildered Neapolitan.
"The secret passage, you fool!" called Lambert, as he dove through the door leading into the second closet. He was followed by Morello. Kestner heard the soft scrape and stutter of a sliding-panel. It had been a piece of stupidity, he told himself, to overlook those closet-walls.
"It leads to the roof, and then down through the Poret's passage," explained the woman, still leaning against the wall. She stood watching Kestner as he ​worked frantically at the cord still binding his left arm down to the heavy chair.
"They're safe by now," she murmured.
"But you're not!" cried Kestner, vindictively, all the indignities to which he had been subjected lending anger to his voice.
"Quite safe, monsieur," she replied, as she proceeded to straighten her hat and then adjust the heavy veil about its brim.
"Oh, are you!" cried the infuriated Kestner.
"Yes, monsieur. There are no men, and no gendarmes."
"Then why did you lie?" gasped Kestner.
She smiled a little wanly.
"They would have shot you through the head, monsieur!"
She had turned the key in the lock. Her hand was on the doorknob as she looked back.
"I hope," she said, "that we shall not meet again!"
"One minute," called Kestner, imagining that by hook or crook he might delay her until that fatal cord was loosened. "Pardon my asking, but how long did that plate take you to make?"
"Which plate?"
That First Colonial Ten."
Again he caught a shadow of the wan and half ironical smile.
"Why are you interested?"
"I shall always be interested in you."
"That is something you cannot afford."
Their eyes met. They continued to stare at each other for several seconds.
​"I think we shall meet again," he finally said, with the utmost conviction.
"Adieu, monsieur, for we shall never meet again!"
"You leave that to me!" cried the defeated Kestner, and into those five words he threw both the bitterness and the tenaciousness born of that momentary defeat.
But the woman had already closed the door and locked it after her.