"Ah! Von Papen gave it you——"
I was doing quick thinking. That little pink check might easily be my death warrant. In that trunkful of documents, it seemed more than likely, were reports and instructions with my name sprinkled through them, since that check had been there. My last chance was gone, after all those months of bluffing.
I have sense enough to know a game is up. If people have positive proof that you have done a thing it's no use saying you have not. I saw one chance—and one chance only—of extricating myself. I must make a confession. But it must be a peculiar sort of confession. To carry conviction it must admit everything material contained in Capt. von Papen's seized papers where my name was implicated. And, not to be disloyal, it must admit nothing more—nothing, in other words, that England was not already cognizant of from other sources. How to do that—to bluff them once more, to a finish.
I swung round on them.
"Are you the executioners of the German Government?" I asked abruptly. "Are you so fond of von Papen that you want to do him a favor? You will be doing just that if you try and shoot me."
"We are going to prosecute you on this evidence," was the only answer.
"You English pride yourselves on not being taken in," I said. "Von Papen is a very clever man—are you going to let him take you in? Do you think he was fool enough not to realize that those papers would be seized? Do you think"—this part of it was a random shot, and lucky—"do you think it is an accident that the only papers among them referring to a live, free, unsentenced man in England refer to me? Just look! Von Papen has been recalled. The United States can investigate his doings now without embarrassment. And he, knowing me to be the connecting link of the chain of his activities, and knowing me to be a prisoner liable to extradition, would ask nothing better than to get permanently rid of me. And in the papers he carried he very obligingly furnished you all the proofs you need before you shoot me. You can choose for yourselves. Do him this favor if you want to. But I think I'm worth more to you alive than dead. Especially now that I see how very willing my own Government is to have me dead."
They got the point and the veiled promise and were willing to give me immunity in return for a confession and revelation of the workings of German secret agencies. So much ground was gained. The hardest stretch still remained to gain—to get some inkling of what I must tell and what I must keep silent about. That knowledge was very hard to come at. But from one of them, who had known me all through my fifteen months' fight for life and liberty, and had sympathized, I managed to get, without arousing his suspicions, a sketchy notion of what ground the seized documents covered.
It sufficed to put the bluff through. That night they lodged me in Brixton Prison, with a supply of stationery, and I wrote down my "voluntary statement," taking care to incorporate in its closing paragraphs the promise already made me verbally, "I have made these statements on the distinct understanding that the statements I have made, or should make in the future, will not be used against me; that I am not to be prosecuted for participation in any enterprise directed against the United Kingdom or her Allies I engaged in at the direction of Capt. von Papen or other representatives of the German Government, and that the promise made to me by Capt. William Hall, Chief of the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty, in the presence of Mr. Basil Thompson, former Governor of Tonga and Assistant Commissioner of Police, and in the presence of Supt. Quinn, political branch of Scotland Yard, that I am not to be extradited or sent to any country where I am liable to punishment for political offenses, is made on behalf of His Majesty's Government."
On Feb. 2 I was asked whether I was willing to swear to the truth of my statements. They were true, as far as they went, and I swore so.