And I did not know what the huge creature meant. On the night before, some one had called up Scotland Yard and said our man was here; the English Secret Service was giving us all the aid it could. The call from some shop in Regent Street could not be traced—so it had been a woman! I replied as though I were in his secret.
“She knew you were safe.”
He laughed again. “Sure, she knew it!”
He pointed to a chair a few feet beyond him across a table.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk about her—that’s the reason I wanted you to come.” He laughed again. “You thought you’d sleuthed it out, eh? Not by a jugful. I sent her word to put you wise. I wanted to clear some things up before I cashed in. But it was a clean lie. What I wanted was somebody to listen while I talked about her. Sit down.”
It was a strange introductory. But it was a mystery that had puzzled everybody, and I was willing to hear all that he had to say about it. I took the chair beyond him.
He shot his head forward suddenly, in a tense gesture.
“She’s a heavenly angel!” he said. “I don’t know what God Almighty meant by setting her in the game with the bunch of crooks that He’s got running the world—unless He counted on me.” The laugh became a sort of chuckle in his big throat—“Ain’t she a heavenly angel?”
He whipped a worn photograph out of his pocket and reached it across the table to me.
It was the photograph of a girl with a narrow slit cut out across the face. It had been taken from a painting; one could tell from the flat surface. A strange background of beauty and an indescribable charm in the pose of the girl remained even in the mutilated picture.