“Yes—and so will you in a second. Don’t turn—don’t do anything hastily. Just look across the street, at the jeweller’s window, opposite, and tell me what you think of it.”
Narkom’s swift, sidelong glance travelled over the distance like a gunshot, arrowed through the small collection of persons gathered about the shop window inspecting the display of trinkets, and every nerve in his body jumped.
“Good God! Waldemar!” he said, under his breath.
“Exactly. I told you he knew how to wait. Now look farther along the kerb on this side. The closed carriage waiting there. It was dawdling along and keeping pace with him when I saw it first. The man on the box is a fellow named Serpice—an Apache. Chut! Be still, will you?—and look the other way. They will do me no harm—here. It isn’t their game, and, besides, they daren’t. It is too public, too dangerous. It will be done, when it is done, in the dark—when I’m alone, and none can see. And Waldemar will not be there. He will direct, but not participate. But it won’t be to-day nor yet to-night, I promise you. I shall slip them this time if never again.”
The superintendent spoke, but the hard hammering of his heart made his voice scarcely audible.
“How?” he asked. “How?”
“Come and see!” said Cleek for yet a third time. Then with an abruptness and a swiftness that carried everything before it, he caught Narkom by the arm, swept him across the street, and without hint or warning tapped Waldemar upon the shoulder.
“Ah, bon jour, Monsieur le Comte,” he said airily, as the Mauravanian swung round and looked at him, blanching a trifle in spite of himself. “So you are back in England, it seems? Ah, well, we like you so much—tell his Majesty when next you report—that this time we shall try to keep you here.”
Taken thus by assault, the man had no words in which to answer, but merely wormed his way out of the gathering about him and, panic stricken, obliterated himself in the crowd of pedestrians teeming up and down the street.
“You reckless devil!” wheezed Narkom as he was swept back to the limousine in the same cyclonic manner he had been swept away from it. “You might have made the man savage enough to do something to you, even in spite of the publicity, by such a proceeding as that.”