IV
It was seven days later that Wilsnach patiently awaited Kestner's visit to that comparatively obscure uptown hotel in which the Agent from the Paris Office had installed himself as a cattle-buyer from the Argentine.
Wilsnach's mood was as dispirited as the weather, for a heavy rain was falling. It was falling without interruption, leaving the upper streets of the city as desolate as a glacial moraine. And the cattle-buyer from the Argentine, quite apart from the weather, found little in which to exult. His week had been a busy enough one. But it had resulted in little beyond a renewed acquaintance with the city of his youth. Official quarters had been unofficially sounded, unsavoury friends of the underworld had been duly interrogated, an unbroken line of espionage had been quietly established, and every likely corner of Greater New York had been invaded and inspected. He had twice encountered Kestner, first as a black-bearded Latin-American in the coffee-business, and later as a municipal water-inspector, but on neither occasion did his fellow-worker have anything definite to tell him. Wilsnach had not happened on the faintest echo as to where Lambert and his confederates were hidden away. And again the Agent from the Paris Office felt that Kestner had made the mistake of his life in keeping
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