“Love is out of the question,” the man replied brutally. “With me it is a matter of business. We must all live. You—a Royal Princess—are in no want. I, agent of the Foreign Office at Vienna, am in constant want of money. You gave me plans that were useless. I merely asked you to contrive to obtain for me the missing tracings.”
“In return for my letters to you!” she cried, in bitter reproach.
But the man merely laughed as he replied:
“Have I not told you, my dear Lola, it is with me purely a matter of finance, not of sentiment.” They were together in a small, plainly furnished sitting-room on the first floor of the mediaeval Palazzo Bisenzi, now occupied by the Hôtel Belle Arti, in ignorance that every word spoken could be overheard by the Englishman and his companion.
The two latter were listening intently at the door of an adjoining room—for in Italian hotels the communicating doors are always an invitation to the eavesdropper. The old place had frescoed walls and ceilings, and in some rooms the floors were of marble.
“And because I have failed, you will carry out your disgraceful threat—eh? You told me so on the telephone this morning,” she asked in a low, nervous voice.
“You have failed purposely—because you did not intend that I should gain knowledge of that military secret. I know how strenuously active that English friend of yours has been in endeavouring to elucidate the mystery of the theft—and now, thanks to you, he has succeeded,” replied Mijoux Flobecq, alias Henri Pujalet, the well-known spy of Austria—the man to whom, though young, the authorities in Vienna had practically entrusted the direction of her wide network of spies across the face of Europe. So cleverly had he concealed his identity that even Ghelardi—the great Ghelardi, whose boast it was that he knew every secret agent of importance in Europe—had been utterly unaware that Henri Pujalet and Mijoux Flobecq were one and the same!
Hubert had long ago heard him spoken of as a man whose phenomenal successes in espionage had been most remarkable for their cleverness, ingenuity, and daring. The foreign policy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had practically been based upon his reports—as that of Italy was based upon those of Luigi Ghelardi—and in every chancellerie in Europe the name of Flobecq was synonymous of all that was crafty, cunning, and unscrupulous.
The official head of Austria’s Secret Service was a stout and rather slow-speaking, plethoric man of middle-age, who had graduated under Azeff in Russia, and who was well-known to Ghelardi. But Mijoux Flobecq was a man of meteoric fame, a man who had recently come to be regarded in almost legendary light as one of the most remarkable of the unseen and unknown characters in European espionage.
There are several others, Bylandt of Berlin, Captain Hetherington of London, Gomez of Petersburg, and the mysterious and elusive Monsieur X. of the Quai D’Orsay. Diplomats know them by name, and are too well aware of their successes. But not one of them has ever been identified in the flesh.