The Green Rust by Edgar Wallace

Author:Edgar Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ManyBooks.net

CHAPTER XVII

THE JEW OF CRACOW

If there were committed in London the crime of the century--a crime so tremendous that the names of the chief actors in this grisly drama were on the lips of every man, woman and talkative child in Europe--you might walk into a certain department of Scotland Yard with the assurance that you would not meet within the confining walls of that bureau any police officer who was interested in the slightest, or who, indeed, had even heard of the occurrence save by accident. This department is known as the Parley Voos or P.V. Department, and concerns itself only in suspicious events beyond the territorial waters of Great Britain and Ireland. Its body is on the Thames Embankment, but its soul is at the Central Office, or at the Sûreté or even at the Yamen of the police minister of Pekin.

It is sublimely ignorant of the masters of crime who dwell beneath the shadows of the Yard, but it could tell you, without stopping to look up reference, not only the names of the known gunmen of New York, but the composition of almost every secret society in China.

A Pole had a quarrel with a Jew in the streets of Cracow, and they quarrelled over the only matter which is worthy of quarrel in that part of Poland. The sum in dispute was the comparatively paltry one of 260 Kronen, but when the Jew was taken in a dying condition to the hospital he made a statement which was so curious that the Chief of Police in Cracow sent it on to Vienna and Vienna sent it to Berne and Berne scratched its chin thoughtfully and sent it forward to Paris, where it was distributed to Rio de Janeiro, New York, and London.

The Assistant Chief of the P.V. Department came out of his room and drifted aimlessly into the uncomfortable bureau of Mr. McNorton.

"There's a curious yarn through from Cracow," he said, "which might interest your friend Beale."

"What is it?" asked McNorton, who invariably found the stories of the P.V. Department fascinating but profitless.

"A man was murdered," said the P.V. man lightly, as though that were the least important feature of the story, "but before he pegged out he made a will or an assignment of his property to his son, in the course of which he said that none of his stocks--he was a corn factor--were to be sold under one thousand Kronen a bushel. That's about £30."

"Corn at £30 a bushel?" said McNorton. "Was he delirious?"

"Not at all," said the other. "He was a very well-known man in Cracow, one Zibowski, who during the late war was principal buying agent for the German Government. The Chief of the Police at Cracow apparently asked him if he wasn't suffering from illusions, and the man then made a statement that the German Government had an option on all the grain in Galicia, Hungary and the Ukraine at a lower price. Zibowski held out for better terms. It

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