The Lost Ambassador

The Lost Ambassador by E. Phillips Oppenheim

The Lost Ambassador opens in Paris, where the narrator, Captain Austen Rotherby—a former cavalry officer and brother of the Earl of Welmington—lingers outside the Opera House, ostensibly watching the crowd but actually still searching for a man he has sworn to punish. There he re-encounters Louis, the maitre d'hotel of his favorite London restaurant, the Milan, who is spending a working holiday in Paris. Louis, sensing Rotherby's boredom and loneliness, invites him first to Montmartre and then to a secret, exclusive establishment called the Cafe des Deux Epingles, reached through an ordinary cafe and guarded by a doorkeeper. There Rotherby learns the restaurant caters to Paris's underworld elite, including the crime lord Bartot and his mistress Susette, who wears turquoises and secretly warns Rotherby against Louis. He also observes Monsieur Delora, a wealthy Brazilian coffee planter, and his beautiful young niece Felicia, who had caught his eye earlier at the Opera. The head of the French police, Monsieur Myers, makes a brief, tense inspection of the room. During the evening, James Tapilow—the man who seduced the wife of Rotherby's crippled brother—unexpectedly arrives, and Rotherby savagely beats him in revenge, badly injuring him. The next day, Louis arranges for two mysterious figures, Monsieur Decresson and Monsieur Grisson, representing the shadowy powers behind the cafe, to absolve Rotherby of consequences after hearing his justification, effectively shielding him from the police. Rotherby also keeps a rendezvous with Susette at the Cafe de Paris, where Bartot stages a jealous confrontation that Rotherby suspects is contrived to test him. Advised to leave Paris, Rotherby boards the boat train to London and finds himself sharing a compartment with Delora and Felicia. Felicia initially rebukes him for apparent impertinence, but they gradually grow closer as she recounts her convent upbringing in France and her uncle's coffee business. At Charing Cross, Delora, oddly agitated and unwell, rushes off alone in a cab, leaving Rotherby to escort Felicia to the Milan Hotel—during which they are shadowed by a suspicious young man. Delora never arrives at the hotel. A telephone call, apparently from him, reassures Felicia, but that night police and a Scotland Yard detective question Rotherby about the disappearance, warning him against becoming entangled with the Deloras. The next day Louis reveals that Delora's return is a fiction to deflect the police and press, and asks Rotherby to repay his debt from the Tapilow affair by secretly occupying Delora's hotel room that night to intercept an expected attack, ostensibly protecting Delora, who is said to be carrying a valuable secret coveted by dangerous rivals. Meanwhile Bartot turns up in London and menaces Felicia in the hotel; he is later mysteriously poisoned during dinner. That evening Rotherby dines with Felicia, who warns him to be wary of Louis's schemes. Growing suspicious of drugged coffee and whiskey, and finding his own loaded cane missing, Rotherby enters Delora's supposedly occupied room, finds it empty, and detects tampering with the soda syphon. Feigning drugged sleep, he watches Louis enter and later observes Louis and Felicia conferring anxiously in the sitting room about an expected visitor—the same young man who had shadowed them at Charing Cross. When this man arrives demanding to see Delora, Louis attempts to strike him down with Rotherby's own cane, but Rotherby intervenes just in time, exposing Louis's plot to frame him for murder. Enraged at being used as a pawn and at Felicia's apparent complicity, Rotherby furiously denounces them both and storms off, resolving to quit London for his brother's estate in Norfolk. The following morning, however, a letter from his brother Ralph reveals that their younger brother Dicky, currently in Brazil, has written asking them to be kind to a family called Delora who own an estate there and are shortly arriving in London—confirming that Delora is a genuine, respectable figure rather than a confidence trickster. Softened by this revelation, Rotherby abandons his flight, calls on Ralph in London, and while walking afterward runs into the mysterious young man from the previous night, who introduces himself as Alfonse Lamartine of the Brazilian Legation, tasked with meeting and assisting Delora on his government's behalf but equally baffled by his disappearance. Rotherby then returns to the Milan and finds Felicia alone and distressed, her uncle still missing despite the hotel staff's cover story. Ashamed of his earlier suspicions, Rotherby tells her of his brother's connection to the Delora family and urges her to leave the hotel and its dangerous associations behind, proposing that she come stay with his family in the country.

By E. Phillips Oppenheim · First published 1926 · Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Adventure · 39 chapters · 99,774 words

First lines

There was no particular reason why, after having left the Opera House, I should have retraced my steps and taken my place once more amongst the throng of people who stood about in the _entresol_, exchanging greetings and waiting for their carriages. A backward glance as I had been about to turn into the Place de l'Opera had arrested my somewhat hurried departure. The night was young, and where else was such a sight to be seen? Besides, was it not amongst some such throng as this that the end of my search might come?

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mystery · adventure · espionage · political intrigue · romance · suspense · historical fiction · international relations · betrayal · secrets · detective · thriller

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