“To-morrow!” the chauffeur echoed. “The roads from Paris down to the Riviera are pretty bad just now. I saw in the paper yesterday that there’s heavy snow around Valence.”
“Snow, or no snow, we must go,” the Prince said decisively. “We have a little matter in hand down there—you understand?” he remarked, his dark eyes still fixed upon the chauffeur.
The man wondered what was the nature of the coup intended.
“And now,” he went on, “let me explain something else. There may be some funny proceedings down at San Remo. But just disregard everything you see, and don’t trouble your head about the why, or wherefore. You’re paid to be chauffeur, Garrett—and paid well, too, by your share of the profits—so nothing else concerns you. It isn’t, sparklers we’re after this time—it’s something else.”
The Prince who, speaking English so well, turned his birth and standing to such good account, never told the chauffeur of his plans. His confederates, indeed, were generally kept completely in the dark until the very last moment. Therefore, they were all very frequently puzzled by what seemed to be extraordinary and motiveless actions by the leader of the party of adventurers.
The last coup made was in the previous month, at Aix-les-Bains, the proceeds being sold to the old Jew in Amsterdam for four thousand pounds sterling, this sum being divided up between the Prince, the Parson, a neat-ankled little Parisienne named Valentine Déjardin, and Garrett. And they were now going to spend a week or two in that rather dull and much over-rated little Italian seaside town, where the sharper and crook flourish to such a great extent in spring—San Remo.
They were evidently about to change their tactics, for it was not diamonds they were after, but something else. Garrett wondered as the Count told him to help himself to a whisky and soda what that “something else” would turn out to be.
“I daresay you’ll be a bit puzzled,” he said, lazily lighting a fresh cigarette, “but don’t trouble your head about the why or wherefore. Leave that to me. Stay at the Hotel Regina at San Remo—that big place up on the hill—you know it. You’ll find the Parson there. Let’s see, when we were there a year ago I was Tremlett, wasn’t I?—so I must be that again, I suppose.”
He rose from his couch, stretched himself, and pulling a bookcase from the high old-fashioned wainscoting slid back one of the white enamelled panels disclosing a secret cavity wherein, Garrett knew, reposed a quantity of stolen jewels that he had failed to get rid of to the Jew diamond dealer in Amsterdam, who acted in most cases as receiver.
The chauffeur saw within that small cavity, of about a foot square, a number of little parcels each wrapped in tissue paper—jewels for which the police of Europe for a year or so had been hunting high and low. Putting his hand into the back the Prince produced a bundle of banknotes, from which he counted one “fifty” and ten fivers, and handed them to his man.