"Sonia was only an interlude," Lutchester declared. "She really doesn't come into this affair at all. The one person who does come into it, whom you and I must speak of, is Fischer."
"A most interesting man," Pamela sighed. "I really think his wife would have a most exciting life."
"She would!" Lutchester agreed. "She'd probably be allowed to visit him once every fourteen days in care of a warder."
"Spite!" Pamela exclaimed, with a suspicious little quiver at the corner of her lips.
Lutchester shook his head.
"Fischer is too near the end of his rope for me to feel spiteful," he said, "though I am quite prepared to grant that he may be capable of considerable mischief yet. A man who has the sublime effrontery to attempt to come to an agreement with two countries, each behind the other's back, is a little more than Machiavellian, isn't he?"
"Is that true of Mr. Fischer?"
"Absolutely," Lutchester assured her. "He is over here for the purpose of somehow or other making it known informally in Washington that Germany would be willing to pledge herself to an alliance with America against Japan, after the war, if America will alter her views as to the export of munitions to the Allies."
"Well, that's a reasonable proposition, isn't it, from his point of view?" Pamela remarked. "It may not be a very agreeable one from yours, but it is certainly one which he has a right to make."
"Entirely," Lutchester agreed, "but where he goes wrong is that his primary object in coming here was to meet Hie chief of the Japanese Secret Service, to whom he has made a proposition of precisely similar character."