“No, your Excellency, she has not left her rooms since this morning, when she arrived from Oderberg. Two of my men have been stationed outside her doors all day, and she has not gone out. Her concierge thinks she has been in bed all day. She drove this morning direct from the station to her room, and had then a large-sized box with her.”
“Very good! I wish you now to take one other man with you and go to the woman’s room, with this warrant to search all her premises. You will seize all the suspicious property you can find. If the woman is there you may arrest her, if not, your men will be having an eye on her, and she can be arrested when she comes home. Monsieur here has my permission to accompany you and to identify certain articles that belong to him, and which you must then bring back here to my office. Do you understand?”
“Yes, your Excellency!”
“Au revoir then, my dear Volenski,” said Baron de Hermansthal, turning to Iván; “I shall expect you here with the candlesticks according to your promise, on which I rely.”
And his Excellency, rising from his seat and dismissing the sergeant with a nod, thereby intimated to Volenski that he had done all his duty allowed him to do, and that the audience was at an end.
Iván once more was profuse in his thanks. Fate indeed favoured him; it was now for him to seize the splendid opportunity with skill and promptitude. He felt in his pocket-book that he was well provided with money; a “douceur” to the sergeant, should he chance to see what Volenski did not intend, might be necessary.
Five minutes afterwards he was in a fiaker with Sergeant Meyer and another member of the corps, and in his heart of hearts he hoped that the next half-hour would see his precious papers transferred once more to the inner pocket of his coat.
CHAPTER X.
It was in a narrow street, in one of the most squalid quarters of Vienna, that the fiaker stopped, after some ten minutes’ rattle over the cobbled streets of the city.
Sergeant Meyer jumped out, followed by Iván and the other police officer, and casting a quick, searching glance along the apparently deserted street, he walked unhesitatingly under one of the wide porticoes in front of him. The house was one of a row of tall buildings, ugly, square, and straight, with a balcony running along outside the first-floor fronts, the whole length of the street, and a wide, open porte cochère, leading, through a square courtyard, to the lodgings at the back of the buildings. There was a lodge for the concierge on the right, at the foot of the wide stone staircase that leads up to the front of the house, but no one guarded the apartments that overlooked the courtyard: there was nothing there worth guarding, the inhabitants belonging mostly to the very poorest classes of Vienna, who had nothing worth stealing.