“Champagne.  If ever all the truth comes out, I fancy it will transpire that Liane’s getting a rake-off from some vintner.  You see, Friend Employer was displaying a cultivated taste in vintage champagnes, but he’d been culpably negligent in not laying down a large stock for private consumption before the Great Drought set in.  The Delorme found that out, then that his ancestral acres bordered on Long Island Sound, and finally that the Sybarite was loafing its head off.  What could be more simple, she suggested, than that monsieur should ballast his private yacht with champagne on the homeward voyage, make his landfall some night in the dark of the moon, and put the stuff ashore on his own property before morning.  Did he fall for it?  Well, I just guess he did!”

“This is all most interesting, monsieur, but....”  “Where do Monk and I come in?  Oh, like master, like men.  Liane was too wise to crab her act by proposing anything really wicked to the Owner, and wise enough to know nothing could shock the skipper.  And I was wise enough not to let him get away with anything unless I sat in on the deal.

“Mademoiselle played all her cards face upwards with us.  She and de Lorgnes, she said, were losing money by disposing of their loot this side, especially with European currency at its present stage of depreciation.  And so long as the owner was doing a little dirty work, why shouldn’t we get together and do something for ourselves on the side?  If champagne could be so easily smuggled into the States, why not diamonds?  We formed a joint-stock company on the spot.”

“And made your first coup at the Chateau de Montalais!”

“Not the first, but the biggest.  De Lorgnes’ mouth had been watering for the Montalais stuff for a long time, it seems.  My boss had private business of a nature we won’t enter into, in London, and gave me a week off and the use of his car.  We made up the party, toured down the Rhone valley, and then back by way of the Cevennes, just to get the lay of the land.  I don’t think there can be much more you need to know.”

“Monsieur is too modest.”

“Oh, about me?  Why, I guess I’m not an uncommon phenomenon of the times.  I was a good citizen before the War, law-abiding and everything.  If you’d told me then I’d be in this galley to-day, I’d probably have knocked you for a goal.  I had a flourishing young business of my own and was engaged to be married...  When I got back from hell over here, I found my girl married to another man, my business wrecked, what was left of it crippled by extortionate taxation to support a government that was wasting money like a drunken sailor and too cynical to keep its solemn promises to the men who had fought for it.  I had to take a job as secretary to a man I couldn’t respect, and now...  Well, if I can get a bit of my own back by defrauding the government or classing myself with the unorganised leeches on Society, nothing I know is going to stop my doing it!”