“Right, my cuckoo. But to-night I do you double honor.”
But seeing that Haeckel was swaying, he turned to Herman Spier. “Go down,” he said, “and bring up some brandy. He can do nothing for us in this state.”
He drank the brandy eagerly when it came, and the concierge poured him a second quantity. What with weakness and slow starvation, it did what no threat of personal danger would have done. It broke down his resistance. Not immediately. He fought hard, when the matter was first broached to him. But in the end he took the letter and, holding it close to the candle, he examined it closely. His hands shook, his eyes burned. The two Terrorists watched him narrowly.
Brandy or no brandy, however, he had not lost his wits. He glanced up suddenly. “Tell me something about this,” he said. “And what will you do for me if I decode it?”
The concierge would promise anything, and did. Haeckel listened, and knew the offer of liberty was a lie. But there was something about the story of the letter itself that bore the hall-marks of truth.
“You see,” finished Black Humbert cunningly, “she—this—lady of the Court—is plotting with some one, or so we suspect. If it is only a liaison—!” He spread his hands. “If, as is possible, she betrays us to Karnia, that we should find out. It is not,” he added, “among our plans that Karnia should know too much of us.”
“Who is it?”
“I cannot betray a lady,” said Black Humbert, and leered.
The brandy was still working, but the spy’s mind was clear. He asked for a pencil, and set to work. After all, if there was a spy of Karl’s in the Palace, it were well to know it. He tried complicated methods first, to find that the body of the letter, after all, was simple enough. By reading every tenth word, he got a consistent message, save that certain supplies, over which the concierge had railed, were special code words for certain regiments. These he could not decipher.
“Whoever was to receive this,” he said at last, “would have been in possession of complete data of the army, equipment and all, and the location of various regiments. Probably you and your band of murderers have that already.”