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Help!” Petzer gave a yell of rage, and rushed at Hambledon with his bare fists.

“Here, hold off, you fool,” said Hambledon, parrying the attack, “I don’t want to kill
you
!

Stop it, you idiot—”

Sounds of shouting filled the house, hurrying feet clattered on the stairs, somebody tried

to open the door and failed, because it was bolted inside, so they hammered and kicked it instead.

Hambledon was getting an unpleasant surprise from Petzer, whom he had assumed from the

previous conversation to be something of a pacifist, but apparently the man only had a

conscientious objection to murder, especially when directed against himself. Petzer landed

heavily on Hambledon’s left ear and made his head sing.

“This practice will now cease,” said Tommy, through clenched teeth, hit the man in the

wind, which made his head come forward, and then hit him under the jaw. Petzer threw up his

arms and dropped to the floor.

“Now,” said Tommy, surveying the scene of battle, “what does A do? After all, I am the

Chief of Police, but I do hate making a public exhib—That door’ll be down in a minute.”

Petzer, who was only half stunned, saw Schultz’s automatic on the floor under the table,

picked it up and staggered blindly to his feet. While he stood swaying, and shaking his head to

clear his brain, Hambledon retired hastily to the bedroom as the outer door fell in and two men

with it, backed up by several others who jammed up the doorway and stared. They saw one man

dead on the floor, obviously shot through the head, another man standing over him waving an

automatic, and drew the obvious conclusion.

“He’s shot him!”

“Shot his pal!”

“Murder!”

“Catch him! Tie him up!”

“Police! Murder!”

Petzer finally lost his temper and his head. He didn’t know much but he did know he

hadn’t killed Schultz, and this was too much. He fired a couple of shots at random which happily

hit the wall and not his fellow Danzigers, and made a rush for the door. Room was made for him,

as it usually is for an angry man with an automatic, and he bolted down the stairs, colliding with

people coming up, and finally dropped over the handrail of the last flight into the hall, dodged

out into the street, and ran like a hare, with a couple of policemen and half a dozen agile citizens

in hot pursuit.

The two men who fell in with the door very wisely stayed down and let the wild ass

stamp o’er their heads. When Petzer left the room they picked themselves up, not in the least

surprised to find a third man there who seemed to have come from nowhere in particular, and all

charged down the stairs in pursuit of Petzer together.

Herr Schumbacher, the cobbler, had just made himself some coffee when the uproar

broke out. He lifted the pot off the fire to prevent it from boiling over, and went to the door with

it in his hand. Immediately the crowd, in passing, gathered him in as a twig is swept away in a

current, and the boiling contents of the pot went over the heads and shoulders of Herr Pfaltz,

stevedore, and Frau Braun, wife of Heinrich Braun, scavenger. From spectators in the uproar,

they became participants, and matters were not mended thereby.

Nobody had time to notice Hambledon.

Once out in the street, Tommy ran as fast as he could round two corners, dropped into a

walk, and rejoined Reck in the car near the Heilige-Geist Kirche, panting slightly.

“Not got your man?” asked Reck.

“Oh, yes, I got him. Ginsberg may sleep in peace,” said Hambledon, tenderly caressing

his left ear. “It didn’t turn out quite as I expected, there was something of a brawl. There was to

have been another meeting of the Joy-through-Shooting League to-night, with me for target, but I

should think that’s off now. Schultz’s boy friends were going to pick a quarrel with the

Commission—”

As for Petzer, he made his way to the goods yard, having an idea they might be looking

for him at the passenger station. He dodged round trucks and stumbled over rails; somebody

shouted at him so he dived into a truck of which the doors were open and crouched behind bulky

packages. Probably the truck would go to Berlin; he had a muddled idea that most things went to

Berlin from Danzig, but it didn’t matter. Anywhere out of the place, anywhere—

Five minutes later somebody came along, slammed the truck doors and bolted them,

whistles blew, the truck began to move, bumped over points and gathered speed. Petzer was off

on the long run to Constantinople.

Some half-dozen of the younger members of the Commission set out on a tour of Danzig

at about nine that night. They had a Danzig driver for their seven-seated Mercedes, and

Hambledon, with Reck beside him, followed in the black saloon which had been lent to him. He

thought that they might just as well have gone out in the afternoon and let a fellow get to bed in

decent time, since the only difference between 3 p.m. and nine at night was that most of the

shops were shut, as it was, of course, broad daylight at that hour in those high northern latitudes.

“What’s the programme?” asked Reck, as the cars moved slowly off. “Broadly speaking,

a pub-crawl,” said Hambledon. “We visit a few assorted cafes in Danzig itself, some new, with

chromium plate; some old, with hereditary smells. After which, we drive along the beautiful tree-

lined road to Zoppot, to see the girl dancing in the fountain, play roulette till they chuck us out,

and so to bed. My job is to see that the outing proceeds in a stately and preordained manner, and

now that Schultz is dead I expect it will. I wish I could leave my left ear at home, tenderly

wrapped in cotton-wool in a small box with ‘A Present from Danzig’ on the lid.”

“Girl dancing in the fountain? What’s that?”

“At the casino at Zoppot. There is a fountain. There is a girl. They turn on the fountain,

also coloured floodlights beneath it. She gets in and dances under the arches of water in the

changing lights, you understand. A pretty sight, I’m told, if a trifle French, the Commission’ll

love it, bless their little cotton socks. What’s this? Oh, stop number one. I suppose I must go in,

are you coming?”

“Mine’s a Grenadine,” said Reck, who privately thought the programme sounded rather

amusing. The first café was very modern, of a type to be found in any city from San Francisco

right round to San Francisco, and it did not detain the Commission long. There were plenty like

that in Berlin, they wanted to see something different.

The next place strongly resembled the under-croft of Rochester Cathedral, and had a

damping effect on the spirits of the party which even schnapps failed to counteract.

“Is this tour all prearranged?” asked Reck.

“Of course it is, what did you expect? Those singularly sober men holding large pots

whom you see in all the corners are police.”

“Oh. Suppose the Commission wants to go somewhere else?”

“The driver will dissuade them, that’s part of his job. Besides,” added Hambledon

cheerfully, “Schultz is dead, so I don’t suppose it would matter.”

The third port of call was frankly vulgar without being funny and the Commission

became restive.

“Now we go to Zoppot,” said the driver persuasively. “No we don’t,” said the

Commission. “Aren’t there any real dockside taverns here with sand on the floors and

Norwegian seamen singing choruses?”

“No Norwegian ships in at the moment, gentlemen. It is nearly time to—”

“Swedish seamen, then. Now, in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg I could show you—”

“Harbour’s very empty of ships at this season, gentlemen, and most of the taverns close

for July and August.”

“That be hanged for a tale—”

“Gentlemen,” broke in Hambledon, “the time is going on and it is nearly seven miles to

Zoppot. It would be a pity, would it not, to miss any of the entertainment there?”

The driver threw him a grateful glance and some of the Commission wavered, but the

stalwarts stuck to their point.

“Look here, driver, if you can’t find us something more amusing than this we’ll find it for

ourselves. You hop in and drive where we tell you to drive, and when we say stop, you stop.

See?”

The driver looked at Hambledon, who merely made a gesture of resignation to the

inevitable, so the cars moved off again.

“You can hardly blame them,” said Hambledon, “the tour as arranged was not

particularly inspired. There’s not likely to be any trouble if we keep these fellows in a good

temper.”

The procession took a devious route in the general direction of the Vistula, since the

Commission did not know the way and the driver sulked and refused to tell them. Eventually

someone recognized the Kran-tor at the end of a street and remembered that that was on the

quayside, but they had passed the turning by the time they got their bearings so they took the

next street instead, which was the Heilige-Geist Gasse with another river-gate across the end. At

the bottom of this street they saw something which looked a little more hopeful.

“Here, what about this?”

“This looks better.”

“Stop here, driver, we’ll try this one.”

Hambledon slipped out of his car and had a hasty look inside while the Commission was

disembarking. The place was certainly old and picturesque, with the requisite sanded floor and

polished brass fittings, it really looked the sort of place where tuneful seamen might burst into

song at any moment if there happened to be any tuneful seamen there. At the time, however, it

was practically empty and seemed harmless enough. Hambledon withdrew again and the

Commission entered.

“Shouldn’t think they’d get into mischief in there,” he said to the driver. “Hardly

anybody there.”

“Ah,” said the driver. “It’s quiet enough when it is quiet, if you get me. Aren’t you going

in, sir?”

“No,” said Hambledon, “I’d rather look at the river. Coming, Reck?”

“I’ll just turn the car round,” said the driver. “Save time afterwards.”

“Quite right, I’ll do the same.” They turned the cars to head up the street and all three

strolled through the gate on to the quay. To their left the Kran-tor towered against the sky,

wharves and warehouses faced them across the glassy river, upstream tall houses masked the

sunset. A motor ferry crossed the river lower down and the ripples broke up the inverted gables

in the water, gulls cried, someone laughed in a group of people twenty yards away, and

somewhere far out of sight a steamer hooted.

“Do you get much foreign shipping here?” asked Hambledon.

“Not a lot here, mostly barges and that from up the river. The foreign ships mostly put in

to the Free Harbour down at Neufahrwasser, that’s the real port, like. There’s always ships in

there, German, Swedish, English, Italian, French—all sorts.”

“Is it far down there?”

“ ‘Bout three and a half to four miles. No, not far. I tell you, there was a row down there

last night. Some men off an English ship got into a row-in a pub down there—just such a place

as this one. Two of ’em was properly laid out. The ship’ll have to sail without ’em, for they’re in

hospital and she’s going out in the morning.”

“What will happen to them?”

“Oh, nothing. Get another ship when they come out, I expect. British Consul ‘ull look

after them.”

The conversation languished, and Hambledon looked at his watch.

“Do you think if you blew your horn it would hurry them up?”

“I doubt it,” said the driver, but he strolled off, climbed into his seat and blew the horn.

He was quite right, nothing happened.

“You heard that about the English ship, didn’t you, Reck?” said Hambledon. “When I’ve

got this school-treat home again I think we’ll slide quietly away and board her. I’ve paid Schultz,

so there’s nothing to wait for, if we leave it too long Goebbels might replace him with somebody

more efficient.”

Reck grunted assent and they leaned against the quayside rails and waited while the day

sank into twilight and the colour faded out of the sky. Two sailors passed talking animatedly in

Italian and somewhere among the wharves across the river a dog barked. The street-lamps came

to life, and a man in a peaked cap, under one of them, took a long time to say good night to a girl

in a gaily smocked white blouse with full sleeves like a bishop’s. Hambledon and Reck walked

back through the archway and leaned against their car watching the door of the tavern patronized

by the Commission, it seemed to have livened up a little, snatches of song floated out, and

sounds of merriment. The driver of the big car had apparently fallen asleep. Various people

approached the tavern door and entered, others came out, but none of them looked particularly

truculent.

“I suppose I ought to go in and rout those people out,” yawned Hambledon, “but I’m

blowed if I do. I don’t care if they never go to Zoppot.”

An elderly man in a neat grey suit came down the street, pausing even’ now and then to

glance behind him. He reached the tavern door, decided to go in, looked in, decided not to, and