The Three Just Men

Leon Gonsalez

Leon Gonsalez moves through the novel as the most unnerving kind of gentleman: soft-voiced, amused, faintly apologetic about the haste that once cost him a man's cranial measurements. He interrogates Monty Newton with a heated shoehorn and a silken gag, and he is the one who plucks Mirabelle Leicester out of Oberzohn's drugged orangeade. His instinct for truth, not merely espionage, makes him the story's quiet engine — the watcher who arrives just before the worst happens.

Mirabelle Leicester

Mirabelle Leicester arrives at Oberzohn & Smitts as a laboratory secretary and quickly understands she has never once been free to come and go since. She has read much, guessed much, and her childhood habit of linking cause to effect now tells her the drugged orangeade, the German 'Lord Evington,' and Barberton's death are all threads of the same design. Her Aunt Alma's crime scrapbooks have given her an unlikely education in the Just Men — and she will need every scrap of it.

George Manfred

George Manfred runs the Triangle from a Curzon Street house where the servants' hall has long since stopped remarking on his eccentricity of sharing breakfast with his staff. He has been inside a condemned cell, he knows Johnson Lee by telephone, and he warns Meadows to tread carefully around the snake. Where Leon improvises, Manfred calculates — the still center of an organization the police pensioner still half-fears.

Gurther

Gurther dances well, dresses well, and is the man Oberzohn uses when a message must be delivered in a way that cannot be forgotten. But he has begun smoking in the doctor's presence without permission, and Oberzohn's hand has dropped back at his side more than once. The warrant out for him has not made him careless — only more distant, more watchful, and more dangerous to the man who thinks he still owns him.

Dr. Eruc Oberzohn

Dr. Oberzohn admires ingenuity, locks doors to keep his guests from seeing too much, and digs alone in the dark rather than trust his four desperate men with the work. He contemns all things Teutonic yet has a sneaking reverence for the Junker methods he cannot quite bring himself to use on Gurther. He is the spider at the center of the advertisement, the orangeade, and the surveillance Mirabelle cannot shake — and he is beginning to understand that his own web is fraying.

Montague Newton

Monty Newton receives unwelcome visitors, snarls at his footman Fred for thinking too much, and insists to Leon and Meadows that Mirabelle Leicester simply went home. He is not bluffing about the house search — Leon is sure of that — but he is bluffing about something, and Leon has already photographed the contents of his hidden safe. His daughter Joan's entanglement with the Oberzohn circle makes him both a target and a suspect in the story's tightening net.