"You're asking for something what ain't," he was informed, ungrammatically, but truthfully. "We've never been able to get a thing on the count, though we're dead certain that he had a finger in several crooked plays. The Latimer letters were never directly traced to him, but it's a cinch that he had something to do with their preparation, just as he had with the blackmailing of old man Branchfield and the smuggling of the van Husen emeralds. You remember that case, don't you? The one where the stones were concealed in a life preserver and they staged a 'man overboard' stunt just as the ship came into the harbor. Nobody ever got the stones or proved that they were actually smuggled--but the count happened to be on the ship at the time, just as he 'happened' to be in Paris when they were sold. We didn't even dare arrest him, which accounts for the fact that his photograph doesn't ornament the Rogues' Gallery." "Well, what's the idea of trailing him, then?" "Just to find out what he is doing. What d'ye call those birds that fly around at sea just before a gale breaks--stormy petrels? That's the count! He's a stormy petrel of crookedness. Something goes wrong every time he hits a town--or, rather, just after he leaves, for he's too clever to stick around too long. The question now is, What's this particular storm and when is it goin' to break?" "Fine job to turn me loose on," grumbled Randall. "It is that," laughed the captain who was dispensing information. "But you can never tell what you'll run into, me boy. Why I remember once--" Randall, however, was out of the office before the official had gotten well started on his reminiscences. He figured that he had already had too much of a grouch to listen patiently to some long-winded story dug out of the musty archives of police history and he made his way at once to the hotel where Carl Cheney was registered, flaunting his own name in front of the police whom he must have known were watching him. Neither the house detective nor the plain-clothes man who had been delegated to trail Cheney could add anything of interest to the little that Randall already knew. The "count," they said, had conducted himself in a most circumspect manner and had not been actually seen in conference with any of the Germans with whom he was supposed to be in league. "He's too slick for that," added the man from the Central Office. "Whenever he's got a conference on he goes up to the Club and you can't get in there with anything less than a battering ram and raiding squad. There's no chance to plant a dictaphone, and how else are you going to get the information?" "What does he do at other times?" countered Guy, preferring not to reply to the former question until he had gotten a better line on the case.