The master of the house is a foreigner. The name in which he dwells in the house is not his own. He is one of the most trusted agents of the great Revolutionary Party, and his guests are "comrades" who come with messages from the capitals of Europe.
More than one plot which has startled the world has been arranged in that ordinary, unromantic-looking house, and its walls have from time to time sheltered men whose whereabouts certain European Governments were exceedingly anxious to discover.
The Mafia! We read of this terrible Italian secret society and its murderous doings in the land of the stiletto, and we accept the printed stories with a vague suspicion that they belong to modern Italian opera rather than real life.
But the emissaries of the Mafia—the Society of Vengeance—are tracking down their prey in the dull, drab streets of our own prosaic city.
If you pass along the Clerkenwell Road you will come to a side street that dips down into a hollow, and this hollow, though open to the view of all who pass along the bustling London thoroughfare, is perhaps the most un-English spot in the whole of England.
As you pass the top of Eyre Street Hill—that is the opening which leads to the district we call Little Italy—you will see two policemen in uniform standing together. You will see two policemen always there after nightfall, and when there is trouble they go down into the hollow together.
For the natives of Little Italy are given to sudden outbursts of anger, and then the knife flashes and the pistol shot rings out on the air. Occasionally, when the quarrel is an ordinary one, which has arisen over a sweetheart, or perhaps over the wine bottles in the kitchen of the padrone, the English police may make a capture.
But when the knife or the pistol is used to carry out the sentence of the Mafia, the agent of that dreaded society who has executed the "order" with which he was entrusted by the chiefs in Naples, or, perhaps, in Palermo, finds it no difficult matter to lie concealed from the most active search the English officers of justice may make.
The ordinary assassin may be denounced and given up by neighbours who were witnesses of the outrage, but the man of the Mafia is not likely to be betrayed by an Italian who wants to continue in the peaceable enjoyment of his life.
It sounds very like a sensational novelette, but it is plain fact. The Mafia agents who stab or shoot in Little Italy are shielded by those who fear to offend the society, and an early opportunity is taken of getting them secretly out of the country. Their mission accomplished, they go back to Italy.