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Page 13
The memoir was a report.
The bulky typewritten manuscript lay on the table beside the
electric lamp, and I stood about uncertain how to tell him.
"Walker," I said, "did nothing wonderful ever happen to you in
the adventure of these cases?"
"What precisely do you mean, Sir Henry?" he replied.
The practical nature of the man tempted me to extravagance.
"Well," I said, "for example, were you never kissed in a lonely
street by a mysterious woman and the flash of your dark lantern
reveal a face of startling beauty?"
"No," he said, as though he were answering a sensible question,
"that never happened to me."
"Then," I continued, "perhaps you have found a prince of the
church, pale as alabaster, sitting in his red robe, who put
together the indicatory evidence of the crime that baffled you
with such uncanny acumen that you stood aghast at his
perspicacity?"
"No," he said; and then his face lighted. "But I'll tell you
what I did find. I found a drunken hobo at Atlantic City who was
the best detective I ever saw."
I sat down and tapped the manuscript with my fingers.
"It's not here," I said. "Why did you leave it out?"
He took a big gold watch out of his pocket and turned it about in
his hand. The case was covered with an inscription.
"Well, Sir Henry," he said, "the boys in the department think a
good deal of me. I shouldn't like them to know how a dirty tramp
faked me at Atlantic City. I don't mind telling you, but I
couldn't print it in a memoir."
He went directly ahead with the story and I was careful not to
interrupt him:
"I was sitting in a rolling chair out there on the Boardwalk
before the Traymore. I was nearly all in, and I had taken a run
to Atlantic for a day or two of the sea air. The fact is the
whole department was down and out. You may remember what we were
up against; it finally got into the newspapers.
"The government plates of the Third Liberty Bond issue had
disappeared. We knew how they had gotten out, and we thought we
knew the man at the head of the thing. It was a Mulehaus job, as
we figured it.
"It was too big a thing for a little crook. With the government
plates they could print Liberty Bonds just as the Treasury would.
And they could sow the world with them."
He paused and moved his gold-rimmed spectacles a little closer in
on his nose.
"You see these war bonds are scattered all over the country.
They are held by everybody. It's not what it used to be, a
banker's business that we could round up. Nobody could round up
the holders of these bonds.
"A big crook like Mulehaus could slip a hundred million of them
into the country and never raise a ripple."
He paused and drew his fingers across his bony protruding chin.
"I'll say this for Mulehaus: He's the hardest man to identify in
the whole kingdom of crooks. Scotland Yard, the Service de la
Surete, everybody, says that. I don't mean dime-novel disguises
- false whiskers and a limp. I mean the ability to be the
character he pretends - the thing that used to make Joe
Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle - and not an actor made up to look like
him. That's the reason nobody could keep track of Mulehaus,
especially in South American cities. He was a French banker in
the Egypt business and a Swiss banker in the Argentine."
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