Jurka made no reply, but met the boy’s eager gaze with calculating suspicion.
“You are feeling your way through the dark, Steccho. Beware of pricking swords. You have been allotted a certain task, a very easy task, merely to find out where these jewels are if they are concealed in the apartment of Carlota Trelango, and to get them at all risks. You have two women as opponents, and you crawl and creep and shadow them for weeks. You were told to enter their abode and search it. You were told to find out their associates, their circumstances. What have you accomplished save the incessant following of the girl herself. Are you then infatuated, my Steccho? It is the eternal failing of youth.”
Steccho’s face colored dully. Maryna was fifteen, the girl Carlota only four years older. Most of the young girls of Rigl had been given to the Jurka’s soldiery that week, excepting the three loveliest,—little Roziska, the pale Wanda destined for the convent, and radiant Katinka with eyes like Carlota’s, velvety, luminous. He had always watched her in church when she knelt in the long shaft of purple light above the aureole of Saint Genevieve. If there had been no war, he would have married Katinka some day, but the three had been dragged to the rooms above the inn, reserved for the high honor of his excellenza’s favor. Were the jewels but part of his plan? If he had seen Carlota’s beauty, would she not become like the three girls he had seen thrown out to the soldiers after his excellenza had wearied of them? He lifted keen eyes to the suave, smiling face.
“They go nowhere, save to the places I have already told you.”
Georges grimaced at his servility and protesting palms.
“Recount!” ordered Jurka. “The Marchese, Ward, Jacobelli. Are there more?”
“No more.” The boy’s gaze never wavered. Dmitri had said it was a romance, the affair in the Square, and they were his friends. It gave him a curious, inmost thrill of happiness to feel that he was thwarting the man who had killed the other girl, Katinka.
The bell of the suite rang lightly. Georges sprang to his feet, laying an evening suit over the boy’s arm, and pushing him before him into the reception-hall. As he opened the door, he gave voluble directions to the tailor’s assistant for the evening garb of the Count. The hotel page presented several letters on a silver tray and passed on down the corridor.
“It is not safe for you to come here.” Jurka opened the letters with a single thrust of a slender blade. His clean-cut dexterity fascinated Steccho. “Where the devil do you live, anyway?”
“Twenty-Eighth Street, East,” he lied simply. “I change often. A friend told me of this place.”