He rang up Wangen, but there was no answer. He repeated the call, and after storming for ten minutes he tried again, but still in vain. He had left Wangen out of his reckoning and made no plans concerning it, and in the direction of Austria he could give no orders, for the power of his lever did not extend so far. A car had disappeared from his ken; a car had been stolen from him in the night, snatched away in the darkness from the strange, unfriendly, gloom-surrounded streets. And then he thought again that the large car might have had a breakdown. Yes, it must have been so, and that was why the smaller car had two people in it, when there was only one at the previous stage. This new circumstance need not worry him. His luck was not going to desert him: he trusted to it, and it would not fail. He rang up Schachen. “There will probably be only one car. Let it arrive, and then wait twenty minutes to see whether the other one comes, and surround the villa on all sides. Then deliver your blow, as hard as you can!” Scarcely had he finished speaking when the telephone rang once more, and the last stage--the Enisweiler railway-station--was heard speaking. A small, open car had turned off the Lindau-Friedrichshafen road, and was rapidly approaching Schachen. Two people were in it. It was all complete! Wenk himself could do nothing more now. He would have to wait. Perhaps in a few moments now the fight on the lake-side which his tactics had prepared might be going on. He ordered them not to wait for the second car, but to enter the villa immediately after the arrival of the occupants of the first one, to seize and handcuff them, extinguish the lights, and wait a full hour for the second one. He looked at his watch, and laid it on the table before him. It was now 3.18 a.m. He felt a twitching in the muscles of hands and feet and a throbbing in his brain. It seemed as if a whirlwind of pain were rising from his hips to his head, remaining there a while, and then taking the same direction again and again, times without number. XVIII Spoerri had fetched the Countess from the villa in the western suburbs, which she had occupied but half an hour, and hurried off with her in the car. Mabuse, in his light little two-seater, had caught up the heavier car between Kaufbeuren and Günzburg, and both drove on without stopping. This had all been arranged between them long before. Where the road to Wangen diverged from the Lindau road, the large car ahead came to a standstill, and the little car drove close up. The Countess was transferred; Mabuse drove on, and Spoerri took the road leading to Austria.