A quarter of an hour later he threw the motor-cycle into the canal and rode away on his little racing car as if sailing upon a cloud. The car stretched its nozzle towards the south-west and away it bounded in delight along the boulevard. It was an armoured car.... * * * * * “What is the matter?” Wenk asked the police as they rushed past him. “He is in the bathroom, and has entrenched himself,” one of them called back. Wenk ran up the stairs. “Where is he?” he cried. “In the bathroom,” they shouted on all sides. “All hands to the bathroom,” ordered Wenk. They ran hither and thither, and their pocket-torches could be seen gleaming on the walls in all directions. Where are they all going? To the bathroom. Fifteen men are hastening to the bathroom. “But where _is_ the bathroom?” Wenk inquired. Nobody knew where the bathroom was. And now everyone was shouting out, “Halloa, what’s up?” The electric switches were overhead, and a turn of the loosely fastened screws now gave dazzling light to the whole place. The rooms were brilliant in their wealth and luxuriance--pictures, hangings, carpets, bronzes, furniture. The bathroom was found at last, and the bath in it was of Carrara marble, but the whole house was empty and deserted. Wenk was almost beside himself. He felt like an empty shaft, down which everything good and beautiful and all that was lofty and successful had fallen into a bottomless abyss. They tapped the walls with their hatchets, suspecting some hidden space, and soon the secret nook was discovered and the riddle solved. Wenk pulled himself together. There was yet another mouse-hole, and it was in Schachen, at the Villa Elise! The State Attorney made rapid arrangements at the telephone headquarters. All the lines were connected up with him, and everything had been prepared beforehand. The highroads from Munich in all directions were guarded by police. The stretch of country between Munich and Lindau had eight posting-stations, and at every one there was a telephone ready at any moment throughout the night to inform Munich of anything that had happened there. Wenk raised the alarm in all directions. Mabuse’s stratagem had given him a half-hour’s start. If things had happened as he imagined, and the car of the fugitive were now eighty or ninety kilometres away, there was yet ten minutes before Buchloe could announce its passing through. He had hardly reckoned up the distance, however, when he heard “Buchloe speaking!” and his heart sang for joy. “A car has just gone through at terrific speed in the direction of Kempten. It is a large covered car.” It was 2.10 a.m., and a quarter of an hour later came the Kaufbeuren report. “A large covered car, travelling about eighty kilometres an hour, has just passed, and taken the Kempten road.”