A good-sized yacht was moored there. Whose was it? It was not the
_Princess Alice_, Prince Albert of Monaco's boat, which had been used
for so many oceanographic expeditions, and whose lines he knew well.
Suddenly he remembered to whom it belonged--to Jellineck, the motor-car
manufacturer, director of the Mercédès Company, and Austrian Consul
at Monaco, and the whole story of that notorious spy's machinations
flashed back to his mind. Strange that he had not thought of it before,
when it was so recent!
Jellineck, an intimate friend of a French prefect of the
Alpes-Maritimes, whose sister, it is said, had once been a governess
to the children of the Austrian manufacturer, had succeeded in
escaping when war was declared, and some of the blame had been laid by
one of the Nice newspapers on the shoulders of the French official.
Matters were made still worse when Jellineck's yacht, which had been
sequestrated and taken to Cannes, was allowed, in most peculiar
circumstances, to be removed clandestinely to Monaco, where presumably,
it was in neutral waters. The affair created a great commotion locally,
because Jellineck's _rôle_ as a master-spy had long been suspected,
a supposition supported by the fact that a special messenger of his used
to make the journey every week from Nice to Ventimiglia, to receive and
dispatch his correspondence.
Whilst the journalist's eyes were fixed on the dark outline of
Jellineck's yacht, on board of which there was not the slightest
sign of life, his attention was attracted by a strange luminosity
playing, like a will-o'-the-wisp, over the masts. By jove--wireless!
To his observant eye and well-trained technical mind there was not
the slightest doubt about it; that light could be nothing else than
radio-telegraphic sparks, the play of which can so often be seen around
the antennae of wireless telegraphy stations.
This electric phenomenon furnished, as it were, the missing link in
a long chain of deductions which, subconsciously, his brain had been
turning over and over days past--ever since, in fact, he had first
heard from a friendly police-inspector at Nice of the mysterious
messages picked up at Cros-de-Cagnes. The master-spy Jellineck--the
removal of his yacht to Monaco--wireless messages dispatched or
received there. With whom was he still communicating? Surely it must be
Vicht!
No further time to be lost. The journalist left the Terrace
immediately, walked swiftly down to the Condamine, and took a short
cut to the police-commissary's office at Moneghetti. The little
dark-eyed Italianesque official acted with commendable promptness and
circumspection. Before the night was over two wireless installations
were seized--one on board Jellineck's yacht; the other, traced in
the same way, in a Monte Carlo villa residence, which, if it had
not actually been occupied by Vicht or members of his family, had
certainly been rented by an accomplice, who, like himself, cleverly
managed to slip through the fingers of the police. The flight of the
Director-General of the Casino, first to Ventimiglia, afterwards to San
Remo, and then to Diana Marina, coincided with the astute journalist's
discovery--a tell-tale fact indeed.
It has now been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Monaco was, with
Paris, Brussels, and Geneva, one of the Germans' chief spy centres,
and the operations of their innumerable agents naturally spread to
Nice, Cannes, Toulon, and other places along the Riviera. Even after
Vicht's flight this dangerous man preserved sufficient influence in
the principality to obtain his salary, which was brought to him from
Ventimiglia, whilst his accomplice, Kurz, had the impudence to write
to the gas company and order the gas to be laid on at his Monte Carlo
villa, presumably in view of his triumphal return there after the
victory of the Germans! A German millionaire, named Uhde, the owner
of an important building rented by a big bank, situated just beyond
the frontier line between Monaco and France, was arrested on the day
after mobilization, just as he was trying to escape in his car. The
owner of the château and estate of Almanarre, near Hyères, Uhde, who
was formerly an officer in the Zieten Hussars, had chosen his property
with true military foresight. It enjoys an extensive view over the Bay
of Toulon, where he could follow at his ease all the movements of the
French warships. His suspicious behaviour and frequent journeys to
Germany led to a lawsuit, some time before the war, between him and
M. Léon Daudet, whose _ante-bellum_ revelations concerning espionage
in France have been shown to be in a great measure correct. Uhde lost
his action for libel before the Toulon court, which condemned him to
pay the costs, and he met with little better results on appealing to
Aix, where, having claimed four hundred pounds damages, he was awarded
merely two pounds.