The Czar's Spy: The Mystery of a Silent LoveLe Queux, William
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The Czar's Spy: The Mystery of a Silent Love
Le Queux, William
Spy stories
Next morning I searched up and down Oxford Street for the Restaurant
Milano, but could not find it. I asked shopkeepers, postmen, and
policemen; I examined the London Directory at the bar of the Oxford
Music Hall, and made every inquiry possible. But all was to no purpose.
No one knew of such a place. There were restaurants in plenty in Oxford
Street, from the Frascati down to the humble coffeeshop, but nobody had
ever heard of the "Milano."
Even Olinto had played me false!
I was filled with chagrin, for I had trusted him as honest, upright, and
industrious; and was puzzled to know the reason he had deceived me, and
why he had enticed me to the very brink of the grave.
He had told me that he himself had fallen into the trap laid by my
enemies, and yet he had steadfastly refused to tell me who they were!
The whole thing was utterly inexplicable.
I drove over to Lambeth and wandered through the maze of mean streets
off the York Road, yet for the life of me I could not decide into which
house I had been taken. There were a dozen which seemed to me that they
might be the identical house from which I had so narrowly escaped with
my life.
Gradually it became impressed upon me that my ex-servant had somehow
gained knowledge that I was in London, that he had watched my exit from
the club, and that all his pitiful story regarding Armida was false. He
was the envoy of my unknown enemies, who had so ingeniously and so
relentlessly plotted my destruction.
That I had enemies I knew quite well. The man who believes he has not is
an arrant fool. There is no man breathing who has not an enemy, from the
pauper in the workhouse to the king in his automobile. But the unseen
enemy is always the more dangerous; hence my deep apprehensive
reflections that day as I walked those sordid back streets "over the
water," as the Cockney refers to the district between those two main
arteries of traffic, the Waterloo and Westminster Bridge Roads.
My unknown enemies had secured the services of Olinto in their dastardly
plot to kill me. With what motive?
I wondered as I crossed Waterloo Bridge to the Strand, whether Olinto
Santini would again approach me and make the promised explanation. I had
given my word not to prejudge him until he revealed to me the truth. Yet
I could not, in the circumstances, repose entire confidence in him.
When one's enemies are unknown, the feeling of apprehension is always
much greater, for in the imagination danger lurks in every corner, and
every action of a friend covers the ruse of a suspected enemy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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