“Anything you could tell me to help identify the man you shot?” Roger asked wistfully.
“Nasty pale face, small eyes. His foot was on the step and I saw that he was wearing patent shoes and purple socks. I’ll swear he came from Nice. I have seen—the type.”
The door of the room was softly but firmly opened. The matron glanced at her patient and, turning to Roger, motioned him away.
“Quite enough for the first time,” she insisted.
Erskine smiled faintly and glanced at the glass in her hand.
“I’ll swallow anything you like now, Matron,” he murmured.
CHAPTER XVI
The complete silence reigning in the fantastic underground apartment which had taken the place of the Manhattan clubroom, during the last sixty seconds, had become impressive. The man who sat at the end of the beautifully polished mahogany table, with its strange inlaid gilt edge, lifted the five cards which lay in front of him and dropped them face downwards, one on the top of the other. The sound of their soft patter was almost a relief. He looked across the table and there was mild reproach in his tone.
“Our friend Marcus throws bombshells to-night.”
Prince Savonarilda leaned back from the table, his hands in his trousers pockets. There was a certain amount of defiance in his face and superciliousness in his tone. He was still wearing the carnation which his hostess of the gala dinner had arranged in his buttonhole a few hours ago.
“You can call them bombshells if you like,” he observed, “but they contain nothing more explosive than sawdust. I simply say that we are becoming less and less cautious with every one of our enterprises. The police system here may be inferior to the police system of New York, but remember—so long as we kept within certain limits—the New York men were ours, body and soul. These fellows aren’t used to our methods and they are bewildered for the moment, but if they once got after us, the Bank of France wouldn’t buy them.”
“We have added seven millions to the treasury,” Paul Viotti murmured, with an ecstatic gesture of the hands.
“And there are three undetected murders which are still engaging the attention of the police,” Savonarilda replied. “Who can tell when they may not stumble upon a clue? Supposing that, for instance,” he went on, pointing to a corner of the room, “had been left upon the road and identified as an acquaintance and hanger-on of Pierre Viotti,—how should we have explained it?”
Savonarilda’s finger had been directed toward a recess in the apartment where, from underneath a sheet, protruded a man’s foot, a foot encased in a purple sock and shod in a patent leather shoe. It was clear enough what lay underneath.
“Who would have come to us for explanations?” Paul Viotti asked, with a smile. “We know every one of the Beausoleil police as well as the Monegasques. We know which ones operate in this direction, we can tell you even where they are. We have already taken extra precautions to meet this attack of nerves on your part, my young friend. We employ always my brother’s watching squad who call themselves ‘The Wolves.’ We have a motor cyclist on the Nice road, one on the Mentone road, one on the Eze byway and one in the byway which passes our doors. No one could arrive here unexpectedly.”
Savonarilda let his chair swing back to the table and tapped a cigarette thoughtfully.
“It is not only an affair of the police,” he pointed out. “There is your compatriot—Roger Sloane. He is too honest to be thoroughly dangerous, but all the same, there is nothing of the fool about Roger. Perhaps you don’t know that he has shown a great deal of curiosity concerning this little domain. He has even crept about amongst the carnations and the rose bushes which grow upon the roof of our enchanted chamber.”
“And what did he find?” Paul Viotti chuckled. “Just what any one else would find, just what the cleverest detective from Police Headquarters in England, France or New York would find—just nothing at all. My brother and his Italian friend did their work too well for that. Our hiding place is undiscoverable—even by that over-curious young American.”
Tom Meredith, wearing the linen coat of his assumed profession, removed the cigar from the corner of his mouth and his thumb from the armlet of his waistcoat.
“There’s some men,” he declared, “who are born into the world with too much curiosity. That young Sloane’s one of ‘em. I tell you, I don’t like the way he’s always nosing round. It ain’t going to be good for his health if he don’t quit it.”
Pierre Viotti chimed in from the other end of the table.
“I think that over here you have all grown soft. Perhaps it is our sunshine and easy life. For many hours I have talked with Paul here of the way you dealt with curious people in New York. They did not live long there. Dead men are no longer dangerous.”
“A bloodthirsty little gentleman for a fruit farmer, your brother,” Edward Staines observed, with a melancholy smile.
Paul Viotti rubbed his hands softly together. There was a twinkle in his beadlike eyes.
“I think my brother does not like this Mr. Sloane,” he confided, with a sly wink. “There has been trouble between them that need not concern us.”
“Sloane,” Marcus Constantine said deliberately, “is a young man whom we have to keep under observation the whole of the time. We are doing so. At present he is more useful to us than dangerous. If ever that pleasant state of things should come to an end, it will be time to deal with him. Not until then, I say. Your brother has done some useful work for us, Paul Viotti, but he is amply repaid by being made a member of our organisation. Private quarrels are not our concern.”
“Quite right, Marcus, quite right,” Paul Viotti assented soothingly. “The young man is useful to us. He must be watched but left alone. If the time should come when he becomes dangerous, it would be easy, very easy, to get rid of him. But not now. He has too many friends.”
“And one who is an enemy,” Pierre Viotti declared, with darkening face.
Savonarilda rose to his feet, crossed the room and lifted the sheet. The body of a young man lay there on a stretcher, ashen-cheeked, with closed eyes—dead. Savonarilda looked down at him curiously, without compassion, without any other sentiment, indeed, except a faint curiosity. Then he replaced the sheet with a careless gesture.
“That blundering fool of a young English lord knew how to hold his gun straight, at any rate,” he remarked.
Paul Viotti shrugged his powerful shoulders.
“I think that he saved us trouble,” he murmured. “The two young men were no good.”
His brother groaned.
“I made a mistake,” he admitted. “Dead, though, they will do nobody any harm. They will put people off the scent. The young Englishman, if he lives, will be a hero. It is the younger one,” he went on, “André, in whom I am disappointed. In Marseilles and in the old parts of Nice they call