Then I heard voices. They were too dim to distinguish words, but there was a man’s voice and a woman’s. I tiptoed to the wall, and placed my ear against it but could not distinguish words. In a moment the door to the other room closed again, and I walked away from the wall just in time. The lock rattled, and then our door swung inward on its hinges, creaking rustily. Not used much, I noted, which mattered to us in that it suggested that the Black Ghost was not in the habit of harboring many prisoners. A man entered, carrying a tray of food.
“We had orders not to bring lunch because it was thought you would be sleeping,” he said in German, “the Herr Fakat Zol trusts that you have not been inconvenienced.”
“And who,” I asked, “may the Herr Fakat Zol be?”
“The Black Ghost,” he answered, “his name is Fakat Zol.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, we were sleeping. I only just wakened. My watch has stopped. Would you mind telling me the time?”
“I have not a watch, gnädiger Herr, I cannot tell you exactly,” he answered, “but it should be half past four. It is the afternoon coffee on the tray and the paper from Herrovosca.”
John got off the bed sleepily, and the man left us.
More from lack of occupation than for any other reason, I opened the paper. Of course I could not read it. In the exact center of the front page was the portrait of a woman. John came over and stared at the paper over my shoulder. I pointed to the name under the portrait. It read: “Maria Lalena, Rhenia Alariavni.” Which, of course it took no great knowledge of the language to know meant “Maria Lalena, Queen of Alaria.” There was another picture on each side of Maria Lalena’s. One was Conrad’s—we read that, too, and felt like sleuths doing it—and the other was a drawing of the Black Ghost, white Templar’s cross and all. Under it was the legend, “Fakat Zol” and more that we could not understand. And glancing through the rest of the paper, each column seemed peppered with the three names. There was a fourth I feared to find, and did not. It was Helena, Countess Waldek. If Prince Conrad had attacked the validity of Maria Lalena’s claim the name Waldek would have appeared. It did not.
“Oh, Conrad is waiting for something to start, that’s all. You remember what the Black Ghost said yesterday about being an opportunist?”