The Gay Triangle Part 20

"In which room do they meet?" was Yvette's only reply.

"The one at the back, looking out upon the old courtyard," was Charetier's reply. "I know no more than that."

"Thanks, Charetier," said Yvette as she rose to go.

"But, my dear mademoiselle," implored the innkeeper, "you will not breathe--"

Yvette cut him short.

"That's enough, Charetier," she said in a freezing tone. "You surely know you are safe so far as I am concerned. You have done me a great service to-night and I shall not forget." Five minutes later Yvette and Jules were hastening to the "Chat Mort," a tavern of a gayer night-life than the one they had just quitted. It stood on the corner of two filthy slums in the Villette Quarter and at the rear was one of those tiny courtyards which so often go with old French houses--a place given over to the storage of odds and ends of flotsam and jetsam which are hardly worth the trouble of keeping, or even stealing. Only a rickety wooden fence divided it from the horrible alley deep in mud and refuse.

They realised at once that to enter the house would be impossible. It was now long past two o'clock and the street was deserted; everything was silent as the grave, and from the closely shuttered "Chat Mort"

there was not a glimmer of light. To all appearances the inhabitants were soundly asleep.

But Yvette placed implicit trust in Charetier. She was sure that the mysterious meeting would be held at the appointed hour.

They crept silently to the rear of the building, cautiously forced a way through the crazy fence, and a moment later were outside the window of the room which Charetier had indicated as the meeting-place.

Crouching beneath the window they listened intently. They were safe enough except for some unforeseeable accident.

There was no sound in the room; no glimmer of light through the shutters.

Jules took from his pocket a tiny drill which speedily and silently bit a half-inch hole through the rotting woodwork of the window. Into this he thrust a plug which at the end bore an extremely delicate microphone receiver. With telephones at their ears they listened intently. Not a word would be uttered in the room without their knowledge. They could see nothing, but if anything was whispered they would certainly hear it.

The minutes dragged slowly past until just before three o'clock a slight sound caught Jules' attention. Some one had entered the room. A moment later came the rasp of a match being struck.

Three o'clock boomed from a distant church dock. Footsteps echoed inside. The meeting was a.s.sembling!

How they longed to see into that room of mystery! But that was impossible; they must rely upon the microphone alone for all the information they could obtain. Jules' hand sought Yvette's wrist, and in the Morse code he tapped out with his fingers--he dared not speak--a caution to listen acutely. Their only hope of identifying the criminals was by their voices.

They could see nothing. They could not even tell how many people there were in the room. But the mutter of conversation in varying tones came dearly to their ears. It consisted mainly, as they expected, of fierce denunciation of Monsieur le Prefet of Police, whom they named "the a.s.sa.s.sin."

Soon it became clear that the meeting had been called solely to settle the time and place of the attack; evidently the method had been decided upon earlier. Not a single word could the listeners catch of how the attack was to be carried out, whether by bomb, or bullet, or knife.

Little did they guess the secret and deadly swiftness of the anarchists'

plan.

For some time the discussion continued. Place after place was suggested and rejected upon one ground or another.

Suddenly a hard masterful voice cut across the talking.

"The Place d'Italie will be the best," it declared. "Half the road is up there and the procession must go along the Avenue des Gobelins, close to the old villa. At that distance it will be impossible to miss. And there will be no noise and no fuss till the job is done."

The Old Villa! Jules knew the place well--an ancient building dating back to Louis XV, solidly built, and with all the quaint architectural features of the time. Quite unsuitable for any modern purposes, its vast apartments had by degrees been turned into a queer medley of rooms which served partly as flats and partly as offices to a heterogeneous ma.s.s of tenants, many of them of more than doubtful reputation. But how any attack on Raoul Gregoire could be projected from a building which it was certain would, on the day of the procession, be packed with sightseers, Jules was at a loss to conceive.

That, however, remained to be discovered. For the moment the important thing was to capture the band of conspirators before they could make their escape.

Jules withdrew, and adjusting his portable instrument--a marvel of compactness--placed his foot against an iron lamp-post to make an earth contact, and swiftly called the Prefecture of Police by Morse.

The telephones were on his ears, and almost next second he heard the answering signal. Then he tapped out on his wireless transmitter an urgent message. A moment later he and Yvette had slipped clear of the place, and ran swiftly away. It was no part of their plan to risk recognition by any of the prisoners.

At the head of the alley they waited for about six or seven minutes, when they met Roquet, the inspector of the Surete, who was in charge of the detectives who were rapidly converging on the inn. To him Jules briefly explained the situation.

"We have them safely enough," declared Roquet with a strong accent of the Midi. "Every approach has been guarded for the last hour, and no one has been allowed to pa.s.s in or out. You can now leave it to us, m'sieur."

Yvette and Jules were glad enough to say _au revoir_ and to hurry home for a much-needed rest. They could examine the prisoners at their leisure at the Prefecture and, if possible, identify them by their voices.

But a startling surprise awaited the detectives.

Their imperious knocking at the door of the frowsy Chat Mort at first brought no reply. A few minutes later the proprietor appeared, half-dressed and yawning drowsily as though just awakened from profound sleep. He was instantly arrested and handcuffed and the police poured into the house, revolvers drawn and ready for what they expected would be a furious combat with reckless and desperate men.

To their utter amazement the house was empty!

The room looking on to the courtyard, in which, according to Jules and Yvette, the conspirators had held their meeting, was in perfect order, apparently as it had been left the night before when the place was shut up. There was not a sign that anyone had been there for hours, not even a whiff of fresh tobacco smoke to suggest that the room had been recently occupied.

Roquet was utterly mystified. He had, with very good reason, dreamed any escape impossible. Could Jules and Yvette have been mistaken?

That, he felt, was out of the question. None the less the problem remained--where were the men? The house was speedily searched from attic to cellars, but in vain. There was not the smallest indication that any meeting had been held there!

Roquet naturally felt intensely foolish, and his embarra.s.sment was in no way lessened by the voluble protestations of the proprietor who demanded, with every show of righteous indignation, the reason of what he was pleased to term "an outrageous domiciliary visit." There was, of course, no charge against him, and ultimately the baffled police were compelled to release him and retire, furious and puzzled at the utter failure of what had promised to be a brilliant _coup_.

Three days later the mystery was solved.

From the cellar of the "Chat Mort" a narrow tunnel had been driven to an equally disreputable establishment a short distance away, and when the police had raided the house the plotters had swiftly bolted, leaving the innkeeper to drop behind them the stone slab in the cellar floor which covered the entrance to the tunnel.

The position now was grave enough, and Yvette, Jules, and d.i.c.k discussed it at length with the Prefet and his lieutenants. To all entreaties that he should stay out of the procession the Chief resolutely turned a deaf ear, and they found it impossible to shake his resolve.

Would the conspirators stick to the arrangement made at the "Chat Mort,"

or would they, alarmed by the raid on the house, make an eleventh-hour change in their plans? That was the problem to be solved.

Monsieur le Prefet was living on the edge of a volcano, and all his precautions would, he feared, be of no avail against them.

d.i.c.k felt convinced they would carry out the plan arranged. It could not be imagined, he argued, that they would dream they had been overheard, and it was evident that the plan had been very carefully considered. Ultimately it was decided to relax none of the ordinary precautions, but to keep a specially close watch on the old villa in the Place d'Italie. d.i.c.k decided that, whatever the police did, he would make his own arrangements for that purpose. The sequel proved that it was well he did so.

On the night prior to the procession the police carried out a very drastic _coup_. Every known anarchist in Paris was arrested on some pretext or another and locked up. One by one they were briefly interrogated, while Jules and Yvette, concealed in the room behind a screen, tried to recognise any of the voices they had heard in the Chat Mort.

Fifty or sixty prisoners had been interviewed before Jules and his sister standing behind a screen heard a voice they recognised. It was that of the man who had suggested the old villa in the Place d'Italie as a suitable base for the attempt on the Prefet. None of the others could be identified, and it was evident that the worst of the miscreants were still at large.

The man whom they recognised proved to be Anton Kapok, a Hungarian of whom nothing was known except that he was in the habit of delivering violent harangues at Socialist and Anarchist meetings. But it was evident now that he was far more dangerous than the police had hitherto supposed.

Closely interrogated, he denied everything. He knew nothing, he declared, of the "Chat Mort" and had not been mixed up in any conspiracy. His Anarchist proclivities, however, he boldly admitted and declared that the police knew all there was to know about him.

To the police a search of Kapok's room in Bellville revealed nothing more incriminating than a ma.s.s of Anarchist literature. But d.i.c.k made a discovery which they had overlooked.

Close to the ceiling, immediately above the fireplace, was suspended on two hooks what looked like a rod from which pictures might be hung. The police had, in fact, so regarded it. d.i.c.k never knew what aroused his suspicions, but something impelled him to mount a ladder and fetch the rod down. Then he made a startling discovery.

The supposed rod was nothing less than one of the wonderful blow-pipes used by some of the aboriginal tribes of South America and elsewhere to shoot their poisoned darts with which they either fought their enemies or killed dangerous animals. One of the darts, a tiny affair fashioned out of a sharp thorn with a tuft of cotton which just filled the tube, was actually in position.

Instantly d.i.c.k's mind travelled back to the strange deaths nearly a year before of two police officials who had been specially astute in the anti-anarchist campaign. Both had been found dead in lonely streets, and in each case the only mark on the body was a tiny scratch on the cheek which no one had dreamed of connecting with their inexplicable death. As d.i.c.k gazed at the deadly blow-pipe those scratches a.s.sumed a new and sinister significance.