“Vy not, my dear Sharles? I too vant dem for myself. For zee Kaiser as well, of course, but me first.”
I decided I rather liked the German ambassador. He was honest anyway.
“I think it best, gentlemen,” Sir Charles said, “if I myself make all the arrangements. I shall write personally to the Professor.”
“The Japanese people,” Mr. Mitsouko said, “are very interested in all massage techniques and hot baths and in all similar technological advances, especially the Emperor himself.”
I allowed them to finish. I was in control now and that gave me a good feeling. I helped myself to another glass of port but refused the huge cigar Sir Charles offered me. “Would you prefer a smaller one, dear boy?” he asked me eagerly. “Or a Turkish cigarette? I have some Balkan Sobranies.”
“No, thank you, sir,” I said. “But the port is delicious.”
“Help yourself, dear boy! Fill your glass!”
“I have some interesting news,” I said, and suddenly everyone became silent. The German ambassador cupped a hand behind his ear. The Russian leaned forward in his seat. So did all the rest of them.
“What I am about to tell you is extremely confidential,” I said. “May I rely upon all of you to keep it to yourselves?”
There was a chorus of “Yes, yes! Of course! Absolutely! Carry on, young fellow!”
“Thank you,” I said. “Now the point is this. As soon as I knew that I was going to Paris I decided I simply must take with me a supply of these pills, especially for my father’s great friend Sir Charles Makepiece.”
“My dear boy!” Sir Charles cried out. “What a generous thought!”
“I could not, of course, ask the Professor to give any of them to me,” I said. “He would never have agreed to that. After all, they are still on the secret list.”
“So what did you do?” asked Sir Charles. He was dribbling with excitement. “Did you purloin them?”
“Certainly not, sir,” I said. “Stealing is a criminal act.”
“Never mind about us, dear boy. We won’t tell a soul.”
“So vot did you do?” the German ambassador asked. “You say you haff dem and you didn’t steal dem?”
“I made them myself,” I said.
“Brilliant!” they cried. “Magnifique!”
“Having assisted the Professor at every stage,” I said, “I naturally knew exactly how to manufacture these pills. So I . . . well . . . I simply made them in his laboratory each day when he was out to lunch.” Slowly, I reached behind me and took one small round box from my tail-coat pocket. I placed it on the low table. I opened the lid. And there, lying in its little nest of cotton-wool, was a single scarlet pill.
Everyone leaned forward to look. Then I saw the plump white hand of the German ambassador sliding across the surface of the table toward the box like a weasel stalking a mouse. Sir Charles saw it, too. He smacked the palm of his own hand on top of the German’s, pinning it down. “Now, Wolfgang,” he said, “don’t be impatient.”
“I vant zee pill!” Ambassador Wolfgang shouted.
Sir Charles put his other hand over the pill-box and kept it there. “Do you have more?” he asked me.
I fished in my tail-coat pockets and brought out nine more boxes. “There is one for each of you,” I said.
Eager hands reached across, grabbing the little boxes. “I pay,” said Mr. Mitsouko. “How much you want?”
“No,” I said. “These are presents. Try them out, gentlemen. See what you think.”
Sir Charles was studying the label on the box. “Ah-ha,” he said. “I see you have your address printed here.”
“That’s just in case,” I said.
“In case of what?”
“In case anyone wishes to get a second pill,” I said.
I noticed that the German ambassador had taken out a little book and was making notes. “Sir,” I said to him, “I expect you are thinking of telling your scientists to investigate the seed of the pomegranate. Am I not right?”
“Zatt iss exactly vot I am tinking,” he said.
“No good,” I said. “Waste of time.”
“May I ask vy?”
“Because it’s not the pomegranate,” I said. “It’s something else.”
“So you lie to us!”
“It is the only untruth I have told you in the entire story,” I said. “Forgive me, but I had to do it. I had to protect Professor Yousoupoff’s secret. It was a point of honour. All the rest is true. Believe me, it’s true. It is especially true that each of you has in his possession the most powerful rejuvenator the world has ever known.”
At that point, the ladies returned, and each man in our group quickly and rather surreptitiously pocketed his pillbox. They stood up. They greeted their wives. I noticed that Sir Charles had suddenly become absurdly jaunty. He hopped across the room and splashed a silly sort of kiss smack on Lady Makepiece’s scarlet lips. She gave him one of those cool what-on-earth-was-that-for looks. Unabashed, he took her arm and led her across the room into a throng of people. I last saw Mr. Mitsouko prowling around the floor inspecting the womanflesh at very close quarters, like a horse-dealer examining a bunch of mares on the marketplace. I slipped quietly away.
Half an hour later, I was back at my boarding-house in the avenue Marceau. The family had retired and all the lamps were out, but as I passed the bedroom of Mademoiselle Nicole in the upstairs corridor, I could see in the crack between the door and the floor a flicker of candlelight. The little trollop was waiting for me again. I decided not to go in. There was nothing new for me in there. Even at this early stage in my career, I had already decided that the only women who interested me were new women. Second time round was no good. It was like reading a detective novel twice over. You knew exactly what was going to happen next. The fact that I had recently broken this rule by visiting Mademoiselle Nicole a second time was beside the point. That was done simply to test my Blister Beetle powder. And by the way, this principle of no-woman-morethan-once is one that I have stuck to rigorously all my life, and I commend it to all men of action who enjoy variety.
5
THAT NIGHT I slept well. I was still fast asleep at eleven o’clock the next morning when the sound of Madame Boisvain’s fists hammering at my door jerked me awake. “Get up, Monsieur Cornelius!” she was shouting. “You must come down at once! People have been ringing my bell and demanding to see you since before breakfast!”
I was dressed and downstairs in two minutes flat. I went to the front door and there, standing on the cobblestones of the sidewalk, were no fewer than seven men, none of whom I had ever seen before. They made a picturesque little group in their many-coloured fancy uniforms with all manner of gilt and silver buttons on their jackets.
They turned out to be embassy messengers, and they came from the British, the German, the Russian, the Hungarian, the Italian, the Mexican, and the Peruvian embassies. Each man carried a letter addressed to me. I accepted the letters and opened them on the spot. All of them said roughly the same thing: They wanted more pills. They begged for more pills. They instructed me to give the pills to the bearer of the letter, etc. etc.
I told the messengers to wait on the street and I went back up to my room. Then, I wrote the following message on each of the letters: Honoured Sir, these pills are extremely expensive to manufacture. I regret that in future the cost of each pill will be one thousand francs. In those days there were twenty francs to the pound, which meant that I was asking exactly fifty pounds sterling per pill. And fifty pounds sterling in 1912 was worth maybe ten times as much as it is today. By today’s standards, I was probably asking about five hundred pounds per pill. It was a ridiculous price, but these were wealthy men. They were also sex-crazy men, and as any sensible woman will tell you, a man who is very wealthy and grossly sex-crazy both at the same time is the easiest touch in the world. I trotted downstairs again and handed the letters back to their respective carriers and told them to deliver them to their masters. As I was doing this, two more messengers arrived, one from the Quai d’Orsay (the foreign minister) and one from the general at the Ministry of War or whatever it is called. And while I was scribbling the same statement about the price on these last two letters, who should turn up in a very fine hansom cab but Mr. Mitsouko himself. His appearance shocked me. The previous night he had been a bouncy, dapper, bright-eyed little Jap. This morning he hardly had the strength to get out of his cab, and as he came tottering toward me, his legs began to buckle. I grabbed hold of him just in time.