this talk we found ourselves in the Austrian capital, and at Lobmeyr's shop, as I have told you. Why Sir Nicolas took the name of the Comte de Laon, you know now. To put it short, we meant to buy the diamond in that name, and to sell it in our own. The count was the intimate friend of Horowitz, a well-known man in Vienna, though then at Rome. We had got letters of introduction from Horowitz, who spent part of his summer holidays in Paris, and we had altered them so that they no longer recommended Nicolas Steele but the Comte de Laon. And armed with these, we began our dealings with Lobmeyr, as you have seen; and it remained only to sell the Golden Fleece to Benjamin King as the identical diamond which Mazarin bought from the Duke of Epernon..
You may ask, and naturally, what were the risks we ran in this, the greatest job of all our lives. I can tell you almost in a word. The risks were two—viz. (1) That Lobmeyr might find out that we were buying a diamond in Vienna under a sham name, and refuse to let the stone go out of his possession; (2) that King might learn the same thing, and decline to believe in our documents. In either case, a visit from the police would be likely to follow the discovery. It is to be understood, therefore, that we preferred private apartments in the Singer Strasse to the publicity of an hotel, and that we had no intention of remaining more than forty-eight hours in Vienna if luck would play the game for us in that time.
