Page:William Le Queux - The Czar's Spy.djvu/173

Rh name of Baron Oberg was known, but having referred to a number of German books in his Excellency's library, he returned and told me that the name did not appear in the lists of the German nobility.

"He may be Russian — Polish most probably," added the captain, a tall, fair fellow in gold spectacles, whom I had known when he was third secretary of Embassy at Rome. His opinion was that it was not a German name, for there was a little place called Oberg, he said, on the railway between Lodz and Lowicz.

Then, after luncheon, I went to Albany Road, one of those dreary old-fashioned streets that were pleasant back in the early Victorian days when Camberwell was a suburb and Walworth Common was still an open waste. I found the house where Olinto lived — a small, smoke-blackened, semi-detached place standing back in a tiny strip of weedy garden, with a wooden verandah before the first floor windows. The house, according to the woman who kept a general shop at the corner, was occupied by two families. The "Eye-talians," as she termed them, lived above, while the Gibbonses rented the ground floor.

"Oh, yes, sir. The foreigners are respectable enough. Always pays me ready money for everythink, except the milk. That they pays for weekly."

"I understand that the wife has disappeared. What have you heard about that?"

"They do say, sir, that they 'ad some words