Thus put on the scent, the journalist decided, as I have said, to postpone his departure and await developments, which came much sooner than he expected.
Having dined at the Hôtel de Paris, he went out in the cool of the summer evening to stroll on the Terrace and smoke his cigar. It was a magnificent summer night, one of those soirées d'été when Monte Carlo and Monaco, with their soft-scented breezes from the hillsides and sea and the twinkling lights in the little harbour opposite the Condamine, were steeped in romance—a night for reflection. Thoughts of the war and the astounding fact that an enemy subject was still at liberty in the principality filled the journalist's mind as, at the end of a quarter of an hour's perambulation on the flower-adorned promenade, he stopped to rest and, leaning on the parapet, looked down on the harbour of the Bay of Hercules.
II—STORY OF THE MASTER SPY AND HIS YACHT AT MONACO
A good-sized yacht was moored there. Whose was it? It was not the Princess Alice, Prince Albert of Monaco's boat, which had been used for so many oceanographic expeditions, and whose lines he knew well. Suddenly he remembered to whom it belonged—to Jellineck, the motor-car manufacturer, director of the Mercédès Company, and Austrian Consul at Monaco, and the whole story of that notorious spy's machinations flashed back to his mind. Strange that he had not thought of it before, when it was so recent!
Jellineck, an intimate friend of a French prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, whose sister, it is said, had once been a governess to the children of the Austrian manufacturer, had succeeded in escaping when war was declared, and some of the blame had been laid by one of the Nice newspapers on the shoulders of the French official. Matters were made still worse when Jellineck's yacht, which had been sequestrated and taken to Cannes, was allowed, in most peculiar circumstances, to be removed clandestinely to Monaco, where presumably, it was in neutral waters. The affair created a great commotion locally, because Jellineck's rôle as a master-spy had long been suspected, a supposition supported by the fact that a special messenger of his used to make the journey every week from Nice to Ventimiglia, to receive and dispatch his correspondence.
Whilst the journalist's eyes were fixed on the dark outline of Jellineck's yacht, on board of which there was not the slightest sign of life, his attention was attracted by a strange luminosity playing, like a will-o'-the-wisp, over the masts. By jove—wireless! To his observant eye and well-trained technical mind there was not the slightest doubt about it; that light could be nothing else than radio-telegraphic sparks, the play of which can so often be seen around the antennae of wireless telegraphy stations.
This electric phenomenon furnished, as it were, the missing link in a long chain of deductions which, subconsciously, his brain had been turning over and over days past—ever since, in fact, he had first heard from a friendly police-inspector at Nice of the mysterious messages picked up at Cros-de-Cagnes. The master-spy Jellineck—the removal of his yacht to Monaco—wireless messages dispatched or received there. With whom was he still communicating? Surely it must be Vicht!
No further time to be lost. The journalist left the Terrace immediately, walked swiftly down to the Condamine, and took a short cut to the police-commissary's office at Moneghetti. The little dark-eyed Italianesque official acted with commendable promptness and circumspection. Before the night was over two wireless installations were seized—one on board Jellineck's yacht; the other, traced in the same way, in a Monte Carlo villa residence, which, if it had not actually been occupied by Vicht or members of his family, had certainly been rented by an accomplice, who, like himself, cleverly managed to slip through the fingers of the police. The flight of the Director-General of the Casino, first to Ventimiglia, afterwards to San Remo, and then to Diana Marina, coincided with the astute journalist's discovery—a tell-tale fact indeed.
It has now been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Monaco was, with Paris, Brussels, and Geneva, one of the Germans' chief spy centres, and the operations of their innumerable agents naturally spread to Nice, Cannes, Toulon, and other places along the Riviera. Even after Vicht's flight this dangerous man preserved sufficient influence in the principality to obtain his salary, which was brought to him from Ventimiglia, whilst his accomplice, Kurz, had the impudence to write to the gas company and order the gas to be laid on at his Monte Carlo villa, presumably in view of his triumphal return there after the victory of the Germans! A German millionaire, named Uhde, the owner of an important building rented by a big bank, situated just beyond the frontier line between Monaco and France, was arrested on the day after mobilization, just as he was trying to escape in his car. The owner of the chateau and estate of Almanarre, near Hyères, Uhde, who was formerly an officer in the Zieten Hussars, had chosen his property with true military foresight. It enjoys an extensive view over the Bay of Toulon, where he could follow at his ease all the movements of the French warships. His suspicious behaviour and frequent journeys to Germany led to a lawsuit, some time before the war, between him and M. Léon Daudet, whose ante-bellum revelations concerning espionage in France have been shown to be in a great measure correct. Uhde lost his action for libel before the Toulon court, which condemned him to pay the costs, and he met with little better results on appealing to Aix, where, having claimed four hundred pounds damages, he was awarded merely two pounds.
III—STORY OF THE MYSTERY OF THE MOTOR BOAT RACES