"What does the 'J' stand for?"
"Johan."
Irving put a long string of questions of this kind, and thus obtained much detailed information regarding the spy and his family connections and home surroundings, also concerning the art school he attended in Toronto. He made copious notes of the answers, so that the process of questioning the confessed enemy agent was necessarily much slower than it otherwise would have been.
"I'm up against one difficulty that I'd like to clear away," the inquisitor mused in the course of his examination of the wounded "second looie"; "and that is the fact that this fellow is an artist and I am not. Suppose when I get over in Berlin, some wise fellow, full of information from Canada, should ask me to paint a cubist picture. What would I do? I must find out if there's any danger of my being asked to do anything of that sort to test my identity."
He continued his questioning thus:
"Did those two men who tattooed that picture on your arm know that you were an art student?"
"Oh, sure," Hessenburg replied. "That's how they happened to suggest the art method of conveying the message."
"And how about your credentials, your identification when you got into Germany? How were the German officials to know who you were, that you weren't a fake?"
"By the message itself."
"You think your instructors believed that was enough?"