that is the one—?”
“That is the one.”
“Gentlemen,” Paul Viotti asked, “my friends and companions, we are here together—it is not wise that we meet too often. For Monsieur Lavalle and his pretty vestiaire there is plenty of time. Let us open our hearts to one another. Is there anything to be spoken of?”
“I should like to ask a question,” Meredith said. “I should like to make it two questions and to address the first to you, Boss. We’ve been picking up the shekels along this coast now for some two months. The treasury pans out well. What about the safety side of it?”
Paul Viotti sank down a little lower in his chair and his fingers played with his platinum and gold watch chain.
“Tom, my boy,” he said, “compared to what things would be like, if we broke into similar business on the other side, this is pie. You and I, Tom, started things in Marseilles. We left the place with the best part of a million francs and I think I dare say, Tom, eh, without a stain upon our characters, without a black mark against our names?”
“Sure,” Meredith agreed. “Only they weren’t our own names.”
“Or our own personalities,” Viotti pointed out “To-day, for instance, we do not look at all as we looked at Marseilles.”
“I give you Marseilles,” Tom Meredith conceded graciously. “What about Cannes?”
Viotti stroked his chin.
“Cannes was difficult,” he admitted. “We were obliged to use severe measures at our very first enterprise, and I think we were wise to leave by the Train Bleu for London. London meant for us Avignon and a motor ride to Nice! Nice,” Paul Viotti went on, with a little roll of the head. “What a mercy that the whole world does not know of Nice!”
“When I think of those bars!” Tom Meredith murmured in ecstasy. “The tourists streaming into the casinos, the suckers everywhere!”
“You didn’t seem to stay there long,” Marcus Constantine reminded him.
“Nice is an Eldorado at any time of the year,” Paul Viotti explained. “Monte Carlo has only a season. I pass on to Monte Carlo. Well, what have we done at Monte Carlo? I will tell you, my dear friends. We have been clever. We have been damn clever. This is what we do. We get rid of the quitter: not only do we get rid of him, but we choose the moment when he has a full wallet. Good for the treasury, yes. And then,” he went on, striking the table with the palm of his hand, “more cleverness. Every one wants that the police look for the murderer of Luke Cheyne. What do we do? A great triumph. We know of Sam Crowley. We got one of his lads when Tim Rooney ran amuck and dared us on that five hundred cases of Scotch. Crowley meant having us. We killed two birds with one stone. We write a nice little confession for Sam Crowley and we make the Monte Carlo police very happy. We drop Crowley into the harbour. Very good place. Not a nice man, Crowley. Every one very happy…. Still, we look about for money. We find that English lord who talks so much. Oh, it was sad about him! What a foolish man to waste his afternoon with those mille notes.”
“Hold on a minute,” Staines admonished. “Supposing your brother’s pigeon had fallen down there, we might have found a spot of trouble. The English lord was a fool, all right, and he’s gone the journey fools generally go when they come up against us, but he got past us with the notes.”
Paul Viotti rolled his head, smiling all the time.
“My brother, he makes no mistakes,” he said. “He couldn’t pick a squealer. Bad young men he knows many of, gigolos in and out of work at the casinos, bar loungers, young foreigners who have lost their money gambling and stay on. Bad enough for the knife, any of them, but not squealers. No one in this world would have got that young man to say that the notes came from anywhere but the bar, and there’s no one could prove that they didn’t.”
“That’s fine,” Meredith declared. “You’ve come through all right with your shoes on, Chief. Now there’s the other question that’s been bothering me a bit. Do any of you think that that young American chap down in Monte Carlo—Roger Sloane—is getting wise to us?”
There was a somewhat impressive silence. Only Pierre Viotti was breathing heavily. There was so much that he wanted to say. Had his time come?
“Of the young man,” Paul Viotti said deliberately, “I know nothing. I work from behind. Some of you others know the tricks of the swell society here better than I. My brother’s coming along, eh, Pierre? But I work as I did in New York—from behind.”
Staines tapped with his fingers upon the table.
“I do not think that there is any immediate danger to be feared from Roger Sloane or from his friend, Lord Erskine. I can tell you this, though; they have the will to interfere, all right, and they have occasionally glimmerings of intelligence. They were on the spot all the time in this Lord Bradley business, and if our man in the motor boat had been a quarter of an hour later, they’d have dragged Bradley away. They are wise to the fact that there’s something going on, all right, but I think I can answer for it that at present they haven’t any idea where to look.”
“I agree,” Marcus Constantine said meditatively. “At the same time, they must be regarded as a possible danger. They are two young men with nothing to do, neither of them are gamblers, so they have little to occupy their thoughts, and they are afflicted with that youthful Anglo-Saxon impulse to thrust themselves blindly into other people’s business if they think it is being conducted on lines which are contrary to their principles.”
Paul Viotti moved uneasily in his chair.
“Hi, hi, hi!” he remonstrated. “Such long words. Such long sentences. I speak English good but I like my talk simple.”
“Well, I’ll make it simple,” Edward Staines intervened. “Roger Sloane might at any time be a danger to us. He has written several stories of crime and detection and the subject evidently appeals to him. He is a born meddler. He is not worth running any risk about, for the moment, but if we could find him sitting upon his own or any one else’s moneybags, we should do ourselves a doubly good turn if we—er—dealt with him. Furthermore, if he should show any disposition to hang around these premises when there is anything doing, Tom had better see that the ‘Wolves’ get at him.”
The bell of a little squat telephone, evidently part of a private installation, tinkled musically. Paul Viotti listened at the receiver and spoke a few words in Italian. Then he rose to his feet.
“My comrades,” he announced, “the affair in Number Fourteen demands our attention. Before we proceed with it, let us come to an understanding. Has any one a suggestion?”
“It’s the girl that’s the nuisance,” Marcus Constantine observed dubiously. “Men can be made to disappear in a most miraculous fashion, especially defaulting cashiers, but there’s always trouble with the women. You can’t make a bargain with them, for they never keep their word.”
“Never knew a jane in my life who knew what it was to possess a sense of honour,” Meredith observed.
“No good jawing about it beforehand,” Staines interposed. “Let’s see how the land lies.”
“Very well, my friends,” Paul Viotti concluded. “Pierre and I will proceed to business.”
CHAPTER X
Somewhere about the time when the little council of men had decided upon the treatment to be meted out to Roger, should he be found haunting the premises of the Hôtel du Soleil at an unpropitious moment, that young man, in mackintosh and cap, pushed open the door of the bar and entered, a little breathless from his struggle with the wind. His old acquaintance, Sam, leaned over the counter and watched his approach