Clubfoot the Avenger

INTRODUCTION

At the risk of straining an old and valued friendship, I have persuaded Major Desmond Okewood and his brother to allow me to set down in narrative form some account of a remarkable series of events that, for reasons sufficiently obvious, have never been fully described.

It is now some eighteen months since Dr. Adolf Grundt, the notorious German Secret Service agent, better known to the British Intelligence Corps as “The Man with the Club Foot,” was last heard of; and there appears to remain no valid grounds why the extraordinary happenings which marked his reappearance in England should not now be related, especially as they were sedulously withheld from the newspapers at the time.

x

Though Major Desmond Okewood and his brother, Mr. Francis Okewood, played a prominent part in these strange adventures, I have been unable to persuade either of them to tell the story himself. It has therefore fallen to my lot to be the Froissart of this chronicle. I do not fear criticism; for my severest critics have been the brothers themselves. Desmond Okewood, for instance, jibs strongly at what he calls my “incurable love of the dramatic”; while Francis, after reading through my much-censored and revised manuscript, pitched it back at me with the curt remark that the interesting thing about Secret Service yarns is what you are obliged to leave out.

On this plea, then, that in Secret Service matters the whole truth can seldom be told, I would claim indulgence; and, further, on the score that this narrative has been pieced together from talks, often spasmodic and disjointed, with my two friends in all manner of odd places—the golf links, the tennis court, in the train, the Berkeley grill, the smoke-room of the Senior. Sometimes I questioned; but more often I was a listener when a chance remark, a name read in a newspaper, a face seen in a crowd, started the flow of reminiscence. And so, little by little, I gathered the facts about the reëmergence out of the fire and smoke of the World War of this extraordinary character, who, in his day, wielded only less power in Imperial Germany than the Emperor himself.

In a short span of years immense changes have taken place in Europe. To-day it is a far cry to the times of Dr. Grundt and the “G” Branch of Section Seven of the Prussian Political Police. As head of the ex-Kaiser’s personal Secret Service, “der Stelze,” as the Germans nicknamed him from his crippled foot, was the all-powerful instrument of the anger and suspicion of the capricious and neurotic William II. In Germany his very existence was a mere rumour whispered only in the highest circles; and abroad, except in the innermost ring of the Secret Service, he was quite unknown. In the archives of the French Foreign Office there is, I understand, a dossier dealing with his activities of the time of the Algeciras Conference and, later, on the occasion of King Edward’s meeting with the Czar at Reval.

xii

My friends, the two Okewoods, are reticent on this point; but I make no doubt that they, who originally encompassed the downfall of “der Stelze,” know more about the secret history of his career than any other man living, except the ex-Emperor himself. Perhaps, now that memoirs are the fashion, from the seclusion of the little property he is known to possess in southern Germany, The Man with the Clubfoot may one day give the world some pages from his career. If he tell the truth—and Desmond Okewood says he is the kind of man who glories in the blackest crimes—his revelations should eclipse the memoirs of Sénart or Vidocq.

xiii

I have begun, as a story-teller should, at the beginning and set down the extraordinary circumstances of the first case to engage the attention of my two friends on the reappearance of Dr. Grundt in England. The affair of the purple cabriolet, which the newspapers at the time reported as a case of suicide, was actually the fourth link in the horrifying chain of crimes which marked Dr. Grundt’s campaign of vengeance against the British Secret Service. I have made it my point of departure, however, because it was not until after the mysterious deaths of Sir Wetherby Soukes, Colonel Branxe, and Mr. Fawcett Wilbur that Desmond and Francis Okewood, who had already retired from the Secret Service, were called back to the sphere of their former activity.