3. Officers and aspirants of the class which I had to forward over, namely the people, saddled me with a lot of criminals and blackmailers, whose eventual revelations were liable to bring about any day the explosion of the bomb.
4. Mr. Von Papen had repeatedly urgently ordered me to hide myself.
5. Mr. Igel had told me I was taking the matter altogether too lightly and ought to—for God’s sake—disappear.
6. My counsel, ... had advised me to hastily quit New York, inasmuch as a local detective agency was ordered to go after the passport forgeries.
7. It had become clear to me that eventual arrest might yet injure the worthy undertakings and that my disappearance would probably put a stop to all investigation in this direction.
How urgent it was for me to go away is shown by the fact that, two days after my departure, detectives, who had followed up my telephone calls, hunted up my wife’s harmless and unsuspecting cousin in Brooklyn, and subjected her to an interrogatory.
Mr. Von Papen and Mr. Albert have told my wife that I forced myself forward to do this work. That is not true. When I, in Berlin, for the first time heard of this commission, I objected to going and represented to the gentleman that my entire livelihood which I had created for myself in America by six years of labor was at stake therein. I have no other means, and although Mr. Albert told my wife my practice was not worth talking about, it sufficed, nevertheless, to decently support myself and wife and to build my future on. I have finally, at the suasion of Count Wedell, undertaken it, ready to sacrifice my future and that of my wife. I have, in order to reach my goal, despite infinite difficulties, destroyed everything that I built up here for myself and my wife. I have perhaps sometimes been awkward, but always full of good will and I now travel back to Germany with the consciousness of having done my duty as well as I understood it, and of having accomplished my task.
With expressions of the most exquisite consideration, I am, your Excellency.
Very respectfully,
(Signed) Hans Adam von Wedell.
Now we may appropriately return to the conference between the guileless stranger from Tokyo and the guileful agent of the Bureau of Investigation, in another room. The guileless stranger from Tokyo revealed what Ruroede would not disclose—and revealed it all unconsciously. He talked so frankly with “young Ruroede’s father” that he told several most important things. For one, Captain Von Knorr declared that Captain Von Papen had sent him. Whereupon the pretended Ruroede asked him whether the fact that he was expected to assist Von Knorr back to Europe was known to the German Embassy at Washington. To this Von Knorr replied: