Mrs. Duquesne was already in New York, having a hard time collecting her claim against the German-owned Mannheim Insurance Company for the “sympathy verdict” for damage to the films. He stored the new films he claims to have purchased in the Fulton and Flatbush Warehouse, 437 Carlton Avenue, Brooklyn—stored them as “statuary,” and used to visit the warehouse frequently. On one occasion he arrived after hours, and tried unsuccessfully to bribe the watchman to admit him. He moved to a small hotel in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and about two weeks after the storage of the cases of “statuary” in the Brooklyn warehouse, the warehouse mysteriously caught fire.
By a queer coincidence the “films”—Duquesne has never proved that he did buy them—which of course were destroyed in this fire too, had been insured by their purchaser, “Mr. Frederick Fredericks,” for $33,000 by the Stuyvesant Insurance Company, and he set out to collect the $33,000 for the total loss of his property. If both claims proved successful, he and his wife would have gathered in some $113,000. But they found it one thing to be insured and another thing entirely to get the money. Times were not treating Duquesne well.
Along in July, 1917, when the United States was in the throes of buckling down to the business of war, and Washington was sweltering under its increased load of war-time population and business, Ashton, Duquesne’s old friend, happened to have business in the capital. He dropped in to call on Robert F. Broussard, of New Iberia, Louisiana, who in 1915 had been elected senator from this state ... the same Broussard who had been the author of the hippopotamus bill. Ashton asked the United States Senator from Louisiana if he had heard from Captain Duquesne. Ashton continues: “his secretary overheard the conversation (his secretary is a charming young lady) and I took her out to dinner, and about five days later she wrote me and said, ‘You may be interested to know that Captain Duquesne is in Washington, but does not want it known.’ I immediately became interested and concluded that if Captain Duquesne was in Washington and did not want it known, especially to me, I ... would investigate. So I went to Washington ...” and learned something of Duquesne’s whereabouts and circumstances.
“After hearing this story in Washington,” Ashton continues, “I learned that this man was in desperate need of assistance and I offered to help him in any way that I could.... Senator Broussard was trying to secure a position for him with General Goethals,... also at this time he had plans on file with the Secretary of the Navy, of an invention to destroy mines in harbors, and was hoping that he might secure a position with the Navy Department. I had been offered a position with George Creel, and I also introduced Duquesne to him, and I then got in touch with Major Kendall Barnelli. I advised him to listen to Duquesne and to give him a position. I also advised Barnelli that I was investigating Duquesne’s story.”
Damon Ashton then brought Pythias Duquesne back to New York and put him up in the apartment in which the Bomb Squad men had first been called to investigate the theft of papers. Duquesne begged his friend not to make him known under his own name, as the insurance case for the warehouse fire was still pending. So Duquesne continued to masquerade as “Fredericks.” His health was poor, and he did not go to work at once. At times Ashton’s charity seemed to irk Duquesne, and he even went to the telephone and called up an agency to discuss a lecture tour. The lecture agents told him that only war lectures were making money. There was a real inspiration, and after working for several days to assemble a uniform of the West Australia Light Horse, correct in every detail, he dressed up in it and called at the lecture bureau as Captain Claude Staughton. His Australian experience as chaperone to the camels stood him in good stead, and he went about town mixing with British Army officers without arousing suspicion. He even got on famously with the late Sir George Reed, prime minister of Australia, whom he met one night at the Hotel Astor.
The Pond lecture folk took him up and arranged a tour for him. Consciously or unconsciously, they swallowed Duquesne whole. They had him photographed in his new uniform, with the ribbons of three decorations over his heart, and they reproduced the natty figure on the cover of a publicity folder announcing the subjects on which Captain Claude Staughton was prepared to talk. “Captain Staughton,” read the folder, “has perhaps seen more of the war than any man at present before the public.... He wears ribbons showing that he has received five medals: two of these the King’s and Queen’s for service in the Boer war, carrying seven clasps; one is for service in Natal, and two for bravery in saving lives. A sixth French medal for which he has been cited is yet to be awarded. At the outbreak of the Boer war, Captain, then Lieutenant, Staughton, was an officer in one of Australia’s crack horse regiments, the Mounted Rifles. He went with his regiment to Africa, and served in Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Transvaal, Natal and Basuto Land. He was with Kitchener at the Battle of Paardeburg when General Cronje was captured; was with Lord Roberts at the Capture of Bloemfontein; at the fall of Johannesburg and the seizure of Pretoria. Later, in pursuit of DeWet’s army, he was attached to General Knox’s flying column as intelligence officer and commandeering officer for the Australian Bushmen. He later entered the Cape forces and took active part in the clearing up of Basuto Land, and in the last Natal insurrection he fought with the Natal forces.”
That is a mere fragment of the fighting in which this eulogy proceeded to sketch Captain Staughton’s modest part. New Guinea, Gallipoli, Flanders, the Somme, Arras (illustrated by motion pictures), four times gassed, three times bayoneted, once pronged by a German trench-hook—those were the high lights of the career which, the folder assured the public, had finally brought him face to face with the most fearless lecture audience in the world—the United States. He would be pleased to lecture on the story of the Anzacs, underground warfare—or, on “German Spy Methods,” of which “he had learned much in Egypt.”
One of the sub-topics in this lecture on German spy methods was this: “Germany pays nothing for its spying on us.—We pay it all.—How long will we stand it?”
Well, we stood it for a long time—too long a time by half. But not long enough to permit Captain Staughton to lecture before many audiences, nor to ask this question too frequently. He gulled a few suburban Sunday schools, but his arrest put an end at least to his attempt to pick up a bit of odd change by collecting insurance.
For the steamship Tennyson was British territory, and, as this is written, the report comes that this picturesque charlatan is going back across the Atlantic, to be tried for the murder of a British sailor. So begins the last chapter in the story of Fritz Duquesne.