'Yes, but all the birds aren't caged. There's a few outside the bars and they don't collect noos. They do things. If there's anything desperate they're put on the job, and they've got power to act without waiting on instructions from home. I've investigated till my brain's tired and I haven't made out more than half a dozen whom Ican say for certain are in the business. There's your pal, the Portuguese Jew, ****. Another's a woman in Genoa, a princess of some sort married to a Greek financier. One's the editor of a pro-Ally up-country paper in the Argentine. One passes as a Baptist minister in Colorado. One was a police spy in the Tzar's Government and is now a red-hot revolutionary in the Caucasus. And the biggest, of course, is Moxon Ivery, who in happier times was the Graf von Schwabing. There aren't above a hundred people in the world know of their existence, and these hundred call them the Wild Birds.'
'Do they work together?' I asked.
'Yes. They each get their own jobs to do, but they're apt to flock together for a big piece of devilment. There were four of them in France a year ago before the battle of the Aisne, and they pretty near rotted the French Army. That's so, Colonel?'
The soldier nodded grimly. 'They seduced our weary troops and they bought many politicians. Almost they succeeded, but not quite.
The nation is sane again, and is judging and shooting the accomplices at its leisure. But the principals we have never caught.'
'You hear that, ****,, said Blenkiron. 'You're satisfied this isn't a whimsy of a melodramatic old Yank? I'll tell you more. You know how Ivery worked the submarine business from England.
Also, it was the Wild Birds that wrecked Russia. It was Ivery that paid the Bolshevists to sedooce the Army, and the Bolshevists took his money for their own purpose, thinking they were playing a deep game, when all the time he was grinning like Satan, for they were playing his. It was Ivery or some other of the bunch that doped the brigades that broke at Caporetto. If I started in to tell you the history of their doings you wouldn't go to bed, and if you did you wouldn't sleep ... There's just this to it. Every finished subtle devilry that the Boche has wrought among the Allies since August 1914 has been the work of the Wild Birds and more or less organized by Ivery. They're worth half a dozen army corps to Ludendorff. They're the mightiest poison merchants the world ever saw, and they've the nerve of hell ...'
'I don't know,' I interrupted. 'Ivery's got his soft spot. I saw him in the Tube station.'
'Maybe, but he's got the kind of nerve that's wanted. And now Irather fancy he's whistling in his flock,'
Blenkiron consulted a notebook. 'Pavia - that's the Argentine man - started last month for Europe. He transhipped from a coasting steamer in the West Indies and we've temporarily lost track of him, but he's left his hunting-ground. What do you reckon that means?'
'It means,' Blenkiron continued solemnly, 'that Ivery thinks the game's nearly over. The play's working up for the big climax ...
And that climax is going to be damnation for the Allies, unless we get a move on.'
'Right,' I said. 'That's what I'm here for. What's the move?'
'The Wild Birds mustn't ever go home, and the man they call Ivery or Bommaerts or Chelius has to decease. It's a cold-blooded proposition, but it's him or the world that's got to break. But before he quits this earth we're bound to get wise about some of his plans, and that means that we can't just shoot a pistol at his face.
Also we've got to find him first. We reckon he's in Switzerland, but that is a state with quite a lot of diversified scenery to lose a man in ... Still I guess we'll find him. But it's the kind of business to plan out as carefully as a battle. I'm going back to Berne on my old stunt to boss the show, and I'm giving the orders. You're an obedient child, ****, so I don't reckon on any trouble that way.'
Then Blenkiron did an ominous thing. He pulled up a little table and started to lay out Patience cards. Since his duodenum was cured he seemed to have dropped that habit, and from his resuming it I gathered that his mind was uneasy. I can see that scene as if it were yesterday - the French colonel in an armchair smoking a cigarette in a long amber holder, and Blenkiron sitting primly on the edge of a yellow silk ottoman, dealing his cards and looking guiltily towards me.
'You'll have Peter for company,' he said. 'Peter's a sad man, but he has a great heart, and he's been mighty useful to me already.
They're going to move him to England very soon. The authorities are afraid of him, for he's apt to talk wild, his health having made him peevish about the British. But there's a deal of red-tape in the world, and the orders for his repatriation are slow in coming.' The speaker winked very slowly and deliberately with his left eye.
I asked if I was to be with Peter, much cheered at the prospect.
'Why, yes. You and Peter are the collateral in the deal. But the big game's not with you.'
I had a presentiment of something coming, something anxious and unpleasant.
'Is Mary in it?' I asked.
He nodded and seemed to pull himself together for an explanation.
