The young man sitting opposite to him smiled. “At least, Excellency, let me hear it. May not the man before whom the danger will lie be the best judge of whether he can undertake it. As to the delicacy involved——”
The Minister made a deprecating gesture.
“I have no fear on that score, so far as you are concerned, my dear Herr Galabin. In fact you are the only man in the Bureau whom I would trust to undertake the affair. The only question is,” he continued, as Galabin bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment, “whether I have any right to risk a valuable life in an undertaking where the very courage which points you out as the right man for the business is likely to minimize the dangers, dangers which I cannot disguise from myself may be very great.”
“Nevertheless, I am impatient to hear your Excellency’s plan.”
The Minister leaned back in his chair thoughtfully stroking his mouth with his long white fingers. “Shortly, it is this,” he said. “The mystery surrounding the extraordinary disappearance of Prince Roel of Rapsberg deepens every day. I say deepens, because, as you know, the agents of our Bureau, all the machinery which we have set working to elucidate it, have given us absolutely blank results. Had it been a mere piece of eccentricity on the Prince’s part, the result, as has been hinted, of disappointment in a love affair, we must have found him, or at least some clue to the direction in which he had disappeared. A man, let alone a prince, cannot vanish from the face of the earth without leaving some trace.”
“That is obvious, Excellency, at any rate in a well-watched community.”
“Just so. Now—and I doubt not you will have come to the same conclusion as myself—the result which our exhaustive inquiries leave us is the inevitable conclusion that the Prince has been spirited away.”
“You think that, Excellency?”
Gersdorff nodded. “I do. And my supposition has the deeper colour in that I can easily account for it. Now, in suggesting, my dear Herr Galabin, that you should take this matter in hand and endeavour to follow up the mystery on political, that is altogether higher, lines, I feel it is only due to you to point out the danger of playing the detective, seeing that we accept the theory that this is not a mere ordinary case of a person’s disappearance, due to eccentricity or commonplace foul play. Behind it I fear we have a strong, ruthless, political motive. And a motive springing from one of the strongest, most Napoleonic brains in Europe, and at the back of that policy the might of a great Power.”
“It is fighting against tremendous odds, certainly, to follow the matter up,” Galabin remarked.