“And where,” asked Tarlyon reasonably, “does His Excellency come in?”
“He won’t come in anywhere after to-night. His Excellency is going to die. And with that the Armenian suddenly stopped in his unwilling stride, and looked from one to the other of us. His broken nose made fantasy of his dark face, but I remember thinking that it must once have been a handsome enough face of its kind, for not even a broken nose made him quite ugly. He was as tall as Tarlyon, but slighter; his was a dangerous thinness. He addressed Tarlyon. He did not seem to have a very high opinion of me.
“Sir,” he said—an Armenian habit, I suppose, that “sir”—“you have intruded your company on me, but I have accepted you. I have trusted you. I have treated you as gentlemen, being by nature an optimist, and I take it for granted that you will neither betray me nor try to deter me. You will understand the vigour of my purpose when I say that a young girl is concerned in this, that I have sworn a vow, and that if you were in my position you would do what I am going to do. Good-night, gentlemen. I hope we will meet again when I am less occupied with more important business.”
“Hold on,” cried Tarlyon. “What on earth were you chasing that car for? And who the devil is His Excellency? We’d like to know, you see, so as to be able to pick him out from among the other murders in to-morrow’s papers.”
“Achmed Jzzit Pasha, the Young Turk,” said the Armenian softly.
“Ah!” said George Tarlyon. “I see. Enver Pasha, Djemal Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Achmed Jzzit Pasha, of the Committee of Union and Progress. I see. Talaat Pasha has already been killed, hasn’t he?”
“Four of us,” said the Armenian sombrely, “set out from Armenia last year, and each of us had a mission of revenge. One of us—you will remember?—shot and killed Talaat Pasha in a street in Berlin some months ago. Djemal Pasha was lately slain in Syria. Enver Pasha has fled to Bokhara. A murder has been arranged and will shortly take place in Bokhara. And I, the fourth, have at last found Achmed Jzzit, the foulest murderer of all. There is not an Armenian in the world who would not shoot Achmed Jzzit Pasha on sight if he had the chance—but Armenians who come to Western countries only too soon acquire nasty Western habits of money-grubbing and forget the glory there is in killing. But I, a Zeytounli, have never forgotten it....”
“You speak English very well,” I remarked. “Were you educated at an English public-school?”
“That, sir, is a matter of opinion. But even an English public-school could not make me forget that I am an Armenian, and that an Armenian’s first business is to kill Turks; failing Turks, he may, of course, kill Kurds or ravish Circassian maidens——”
“Oh, not Circassians!” I pleaded.