The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

Once the door had closed on the servantÕs back, the visitor could scarcely refrain from shivering. Yet there was nothing in the place itself to excite such a feeling. It was a quiet, dignified room, lined with crowded bookshelves, with here and there an etching, and, in one place, a map-rack. Also against the wall was a big rack filled with railway timetables and steamship folders. Between the windows was a large, flattop desk, on which stood a telephone, and from which, on an extension, swung a typewriter. Everything was in scrupulous order and advertised a presiding genius that was the soul of system.

The books attracted the waiting man, and he ranged along the shelves, with a practiced eye skimming titles by whole rows at a time. Nor was there anything shivery in these solid-backed books. He noted especially IbsenÕs Prose Dramas and ShawÕs various plays and novels; editions de luxe of Wilde, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and the Arabian Nights; La FargueÕs Evolution of Property, The StudentsÕ Marx, Fabian Essays, BrooksÕ Economic Supremacy, DawsonÕs Bismarck and State Socialism, EngelsÕ Origin of the Family, ConantÕs The United States in the Orient, and John MitchellÕs Organized Labor. Apart, and in the original Russian, were the works of Tolstoy, Gorky, Turgenev, Andreyev, Goncharov, and Dostoyevski.

The man strayed on to a library table, heaped with orderly piles of the current reviews and quarterlies, where, at one corner, were a dozen of the late novels. He pulled up an easy chair, stretched out his legs, lighted a cigarette, and glanced over these books. One, a slender, red-bound volume, caught his eyes. On the front cover a gaudy female rioted. He selected it, and read the title: Four Weeks: A Loud Book. As he opened it, a slight but sharp explosion occurred within its papers, accompanied by a flash of light and a puff of smoke. On the instant he was convulsed with terror. He fell back in the chair and sank down, arms and legs in the air, the book flying from his hands in about the same fashion a man would dispense with a snake he had unwittingly picked up. The visitor was badly shaken. His beautiful olive skin had turned a ghastly green, while his liquid-black eyes bulged with horror.

Then it was that the door to an inner apartment opened, and the presiding genius entered. A cold mirth was frosted on his countenance as he surveyed the abject fright of the other. Stooping, he picked up the book, spread itopen, and exposed the toy-work mechanism that had exploded the paper cap.

ÒNo wonder creatures like you are compelled to come to me,Ó he sneered. ÒYou terrorists are always a puzzle to me. Why is it that you are most fascinated by the very thing of which you are most afraid?Ó He was now gravely scornful. ÒPowderÑthatÕs it. If you had exploded that toy-pistol cap on your naked tongue it would have caused no more than a temporary inconvenience to your facilities of speaking and eating. Whom do you want to kill now?Ó

The speaker was a striking contrast to his visitor. So blond was he that it might well be described as washed-out blond. His eyes, veiled by the finest and most silken of lashes that were almost like an albinoÕs, were the palest of pale blue. His head, partly bald, was thinly covered by a similar growth of fine and silky hair, almost snow-white so fairly white it was, yet untinctured by time. The mouth was firm and considerative, though not harsh, and the dome of forehead, broad and lofty, spoke eloquently of the brain behind. His English was painfully correct, the total and colorless absence of any accent almost constituting an accent in itself. Despite the crude practical joke he had just perpetrated, there was little humor in him. A grave and somber dignity, that hinted of scholarship, characterized him; while he emanated an atmosphere of complacency of power and seemed to suggest an altitude of philosophic calm far beyond fake books and toy-pistol caps. So elusive was his personality, his colorless coloring, and his almost lineless face, that there was no clew to his age, which might have been anywhere between thirty and fiftyÑor sixty. One felt that he was older than he looked.