Christmas Day, 1916, found Berlin a city of gloom, save for the gorgeous flat where Frau Kupfer was entertaining a score of high-born society dames and a few elderly men to a sumptuous repast. It proved to be the last of a long series, for she was taken ill after the dinner, and for the next three weeks was too ill to leave her room, and in those three weeks the Berlin police discovered all about the great swindle. An accident led to the catastrophe.
I have mentioned that Frau Kupfer had two flats, and that she used the smaller one as a storing place for provisions for her own use. One evening a vigilant-eyed policeman, who was feeling hungry, noticed that several large parcels were being delivered at a certain flat near the Wilhelmstrasse. He had been warned to keep a look-out for food hoarders, and he came to the conclusion that this was an attempt to evade the regulations. He therefore forced his way past the carters into the flat, and, having ordered the terrified maid to clear out, examined the place for himself. It did not take him long to discover enough provisions to stock a grocer's shop. There were scores of hams, thousands of preserves neatly stacked against the walls, boxes of cigars, cigarettes, cases of wine, and plenty of flour, sugar, sweets, etc. I fancy the policeman indulged in a good meal before he reported to Police President von Jagow what he had found.
That night Frau Kupfer and her daughter were arrested on a charge of contravening the food regulations, and with their arrest the bubble burst. The "investors," first uneasy, grew alarmed, and began to talk. A few days later they all knew that they had been swindled.
Inside two years Frau Kupfer had robbed them of two hundred thousand pounds, all of which she had managed to dissipate, leaving nothing for them. The Food Trust had had no existence save in her imagination. Mother and daughter are now in damp cells in the Moabit Prison, and when Frau Kupfer leaves that ghastly prison house she will be in her coffin, for in Germany swindling is considered ten times a greater offence than murder, however brutal that murder may have been, and the greatest of Hun food swindlers will spend the remainder of her life in prison.
Gertrude Kupfer, however, will be released in a few years because it has been held that she acted entirely under the influence of her mother, and was in no way an originator of the swindle.
[CHAPTER VIII]
MADAME GUERIN, MATRIMONIAL AGENT
There have been many matrimonial agency swindlers, but when Madame Guerin, the plump little Frenchwoman with the pleasant and engaging manner, entered that "profession" she introduced new methods into that old form of fraud. She did not hanker after a lot of clients, preferring to find a nice, gullible man with money, scientifically relieve him of it, and then pass on to the next. Her career proved short and exciting, and only by an accident did it fail to wind up with a tragedy. But that was not her fault, for she showed that to obtain a fortune she was capable of running any risk.
It was at Versailles, in the shadow of the old palace, that Madame Guerin, with the assistance of a friend, who was known as Cesbron, but who was really her husband, started her matrimonial agency.