For four hours the three men worked, one questioning and translating, one answering at first sullenly and with periodic outbursts of temper, and later eagerly, volubly--and all this time the clerk wrote and wrote, until one note-book was exhausted and he sent out for another.
"All?" T. B.'s eyebrows rose. "All? But you have not explained the whereabouts of Lolo?"
"Lolo?" he repeated. "M'sieur, I do not understand."
"But the rendezvous--there was to be some rendezvous where the ship would come to pick up any member of the Nine who might become detached."
The man shook his head, and at that moment an idea occurred to T. B. He drew from his pocket a copy of Baggin's little "cross with the nobs," as it had been named at Scotland Yard.
"Yes--Poltavo drew that for me on the last occasion I met him in Paris."
"I do not know," he said simply. "Poltavo was telling me something of his plans. He drew the cross and was beginning to explain its meaning, and then for some reason he stopped, crumpled up the paper, and threw it into the fireplace. At the time I attached some importance to it, and, after he had gone, I rescued it, but----"
"I don't," said the man, and T. B. knew that he spoke the truth.
It must have been whilst Poltavo was in Paris that the ruling spirit of the _Maria Braganza_ discovered that Count Poltavo was indispensable, and that strange reconciliation occurred. Through what agency Baggin and he came into touch is not known. It is generally supposed that the warship ventured close to the French or Spanish coast and sent a message of good will flickering through space, and that some receiving station, undiscovered and undemolished--there must have been a score of such stations--received it, and transmitted it to Poltavo.
News of him came to Smith from Van Ingen, who, following a faint clue of the Spanish dancer, had gone to Tangier. Work at the Embassy had become unendurable to him, since the disappearance of the Nine Men had marked also the disappearance of Doris, and despite the expostulations of the ambassador, who was sorely distressed by certain international complications of the situation--for both Baggin and Grayson were Americans--despite also the detective's blunt advice to let the business alone and return to the Embassy, Van Ingen had set forth on his wild-goose chase.
