“No, the old tough just died on me! Rotten luck, wasn’t it? He seemed all right, getting better every day; but you know what old men are. I blew in one morning and they told me he was dead. That’s all there was to it!”
“Surely, my friend,” De Richleau raised his slanting eyebrows, “you hardly expected to find the jewels at Romanovsk on so little information. Remember, many people have been seeking this treasure on all the Shulimoff estates for years.”
“No, it’s not all that bad,” Rex shook his head. “When things blew up in Leningrad in 1917, Shulimoff didn’t wait to see the fun; he cleared out to this place here, bringing the goods with him. He thought he’d be safe this side of the Urals till things quietened down, or if they got real bad, he meant to go farther East. What he forgot was that he was the best hated man in Russia. The Reds sent a special mission to hang him to the nearest tree, and they did — as near as dammit! Took the old fox entirely by surprise. He’d have been a dead man then if some bright boy hadn’t cut him down for the fun of hanging him again next day! It was the old man’s cellar that saved him. The bunch got tight that night, and they’d locked him in the foundry without any guards outside.”
“The foundry? In the village was this?” asked the Duke.
“Lord, no, in his own house. He seems to have been a bit of a metallurgist — made locks, like Louis XVI, in his spare time, when he wasn’t out beating peasants or hitting it up with chorus girls from the Folies Bergère.
“This foundry was a kind of laboratory and study all in one. I reckon they chose it as his prison because it was one of the only rooms that had strong iron bars to the windows. That let them all out for the drunk! All being equal in the Red Army, no one wanted to miss a party to do sentry-go.”
“How did he get out, then,” Simon asked, “if the windows were barred?”
“Easy; he had all his gear in the foundry, so he cut those bars like bits of cheese with an oxy-acetylene lamp. But the old man kept his head — as luck would have it, the jewels were in the foundry. He wouldn’t risk taking them with him, in case he was caught, so he occupied the time while the Reds were getting tight in making something at his forge to hide ’em in.”
“What was it?” came Simon’s eager question.
“Now you’ve got me,” Rex shook his head. “That’s just what I never squeezed out of the old fox before he went and died on me.