"THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Buchan John)

haven't played their last card by a long sight. They've
gotten the ace up their sleeves, and unless I can keep
alive for a month they are going to play it and win."

"But I thought you were dead," I put in.

"_i_ Mors janua vitae _i_" he smiled. (I recognized the
quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) "I'm
coming to that, but I've got to put you wise about a lot
of things first. If you read your newspaper, I guess you
know the name of Constantine Karolides?"

I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that
very afternoon.

"He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is
the one big brain in the whole show, and he happens
also to be an honest man. Therefore he has been
marked down these twelve months past. I found that
out--not that it was difficult, for any fool could guess as
much. But I found out the way they were going to get
him, and that knowledge was deadly. That's why I have
had to decease."

He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for
I was getting interested in the beggar.

"They can't get him in his own land, for he has a
bodyguard of Epirotes that would skin their
grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is
coming to this city. The British Foreign Office has taken
to having international tea-parties, and the biggest of
them is due on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned
the principal guest, and if my friends have their way he
will never return to his admiring countrymen."

"That's simple enough, anyhow," I said. "You can warn
him and keep him at home."

"And play their game?" he asked sharply. "If he does
not come they win, for he's the only man that can
straighten out the tangle. And if his Government are
warned he won't come, for he does not know how big
the stakes will be on June the 15th."

"What about the British Government?" I said. "They're
not going to let their guests be murdered. Tip them the
wink, and they'll take extra precautions."

"No good. They might stuff this city with plain-clothes