“And after I get them, we go back, excellenza?” There was almost a whine in the query. The boy shrank back in the corner of the car. His cigarette had gone out. His face looked narrow and pinched in the darkness. “You will see that I go back to Rigl?”
“Rich for life,” Jurka assured him languidly. “You will be able to buy the yellow castle, if you fancy it, and many cattle and sheep. The queen is not one to forget such services, my Steccho, nor I. When I meet her in Switzerland and give her the jewels, I will tell her of you.”
The muscles of Steccho’s face relaxed. After all, he was a fool to doubt. It was all quite simple. He would get the jewels. There would be the journey back as they had come, Georges as the Count’s courier, he as groom, caring for the two riding-horses, Vriki and Etelka. Then the heaped-up honors from the exiled queen herself, and, yes, the yellow castle if the little tired mother and Maryna still fancied it.
The Count spoke to Georges through the tube. “Drive to the east entrance nearest Sixty-Fourth Street,” he ordered. “Stop inside the Park.”
He did not speak again until they came to the entrance. As Steccho swung down to the pavement, he nodded to him with debonair, care-free grace. The car turned down Fifth Avenue and Steccho paused at the corner to catch the last glimpse of it. Jurka had hummed a few bars from a favorite waltz back in Sofia. The tune touched the chords of memory and home longing as nothing else had done. It was a waltz of the people played often at the little village dances where he had met Katinka. As he walked east on Fifty-Ninth Street he remembered her as he had seen her kneeling in church, bathed in the long glow of purple light that flowed through the stained-glass aureole of Saint Genevieve. Always as he had followed Carlota from the very first she had reminded him of his dead sweetheart. Over and over, when he had been tempted to betray her visits to Ames’s studio, the words had been checked on his lips as he met Jurka’s eyes and remembered the day his excellenza’s soldiery had carried the body of the girl from his quarters above the inn.
Twice before he reached the Saint Germain he stopped dead short, and looked back. But the lure of the yellow castle drew him forward, and he finally faced the east, eager for the night’s work.
CHAPTER XVI
Ward pushed his chair back from the table, lighting a cigarette from the match Ishigaki held towards him.
“Miss Trelango’s call came about half an hour ago?”
“At five minutes past twelve.” The Jap gave the time with exactness. Ward’s face was inscrutable.