"Then all old Kore can say is that the gentleman has come to the right shop, as his gracious brother did. How can we serve the gentleman now? What are his requirements? It is a difficult, a dangerous business. It costs money, much money, but it can be arranged ... it can be arranged." "But if you do for me what you did for my brother," I said, "I don't see how that helps to explain this word, this clue to his address!" "My dear sir, I am as much in the dark as you are yourself about the significance of this word. But I can tell you this, your brother, thanks to my intervention, found himself placed in a situation in which he might well have come across this word...." "Well?" I said impatiently. "Well, if we obliged the gentleman as we obliged his brother, the gentleman might be taken where his brother was taken, the gentleman is young and smart, he might perhaps find a clue ..." "Stop talking riddles, for Heaven's sake!" I cried in exasperation, "and answer my questions plainly. First, what did you do for my brother?" "Your brother had deserted from the front--that is the most difficult class of business we have to deal with--we procured him a _permis de séjour_ for fifteen days and a post in a safe place where no enquiries would be made after him." "And then?" I cried, trembling with curiosity. The Jew shrugged his shoulders, waving his hands to and fro in the air. "Then he disappeared. I saw him a few days before he went, and he gave me the instructions I have repeated to you for anybody who should come asking for him." "But didn't he tell you where he was going?" "He didn't even tell me he was going, Herr. He just vanished." "When was this?" "Somewhere about the first week in July ... it was the week of the bad news from France." The message was dated July 1st, I remembered. "I have a good set of Swedish papers," the Jew continued, "very respectable timber merchant ... with those one could live in the best hotels and no one say a word. Or Hungarian papers, a party rejected medically ... very safe those, but perhaps the gentleman doesn't speak Hungarian. That would be essential." "I am in the same case as my brother," I said, "I must disappear." "Not a deserter, Herr?" The Jew cringed at the word. "Yes," I said. "After all, why not?" "I daren't do this kind of business any more, my dear sir, I really daren't! They are making it too dangerous." "Come, come!" I said, "you were boasting just now that you could smooth out any difficulties. You can produce me a very satisfactory passport from somewhere, I am sure!"