The Assassination Bureau, Ltd.

He was a handsome man, with large liquid-black eyes, an olive complexion that was laid upon a skin clear, clean, and of surpassing smoothness of texture, and with a mop of curly black hair that invited fondling--in short, the kind of a man that women like to look upon, and also, the kind of a man who is quite thoroughly aware of this insinuative quality of his looks. He was lean-waisted, muscular, and broad-shouldered, and about him was a certain bold, masculine swagger that was belied by the apprehensiveness in the glance he cast around the room and at the retreating servant who had shown him in. The fellow was a deaf mute--this he would have guessed, had he not been already aware of the fact, thanks to Lanigan’s description of an earlier visit to this same apartment.

Once the door had closed on the servant’s 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 Ibsen’s Prose Dramas and Shaw’s various plays and novels; editions de luxe of Wilde, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne, and the Arabian Nights; La Fargue’s Evolution of Property, The Students’ Marx, Fabian Essays, Brooks’ Economic Supremacy, Dawson’s Bismarck and State Socialism, Engels’ Origin of the Family, Conant’s The United States in the Orient, and John Mitchell’s 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 it open, and exposed the toy-work mechanism that had exploded the paper cap.

“No wonder creatures like you are compelled to come to me,” he sneered. “You 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?” He was now gravely scornful. “Powder--that’s 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?”