The Teeth of the Tiger Part 55

"We've got him! And it's a nasty business for him! Charge of resisting the police!... Complicity ... We shall be able to unmask him at last.

Tally-ho, my lads, tally-ho! Two men to guard Sauverand, four men on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, revolver in hand. Two men on the roof. The rest stick to me. We'll begin with the Leva.s.seur girl's room and we'll take his room next. Hark, forward, my lads!"

Don Luis did not wait for the enemies' attack. Knowing their intentions, he beat a retreat, unseen, toward Florence's rooms. Here, as Weber did not yet know the short cut through the outhouses, he had time to make sure that the trapdoor was in perfect working order, and that there was no reason why they should discover the existence of a secret cupboard at the back of the alcove, behind the curtains of the bed.

Once inside the pa.s.sage, he went up the first staircase, followed the long corridor contrived in the wall, climbed the ladder leading to the boudoir, and, perceiving that this second trapdoor fitted the woodwork so closely that no one could suspect anything, he closed it over him. A few minutes later he heard the noise of men making a search above his head.

And so, on the twenty-fourth of May, at five o'clock in the afternoon, the position was as follows: Florence Leva.s.seur with a warrant out against her, Gaston Sauverand in prison, Marie Fauville in prison and refusing all food, and Don Luis, who believed in their innocence and who alone could have saved them, Don Luis was being blockaded in his own house and hunted down by a score of detectives.

As for the Mornington inheritance, there could be no more question of that, because the legatee, in his turn, had set himself in open rebellion against society.

"Capital!" said Don Luis, with a grin. "This is life as I understand it.

The question is a simple one and may be put in different ways. How can a wretched, unwashed beggar, with not a penny in his pocket, make a fortune in twenty-four hours without setting foot outside his hovel? How can a general, with no soldiers and no ammunition left, win a battle which he has lost? In short, how shall I, a.r.s.ene Lupin, manage to be present to-morrow evening at the meeting which will be held on the Boulevard Suchet and to behave in such a way as to save Marie Fauville, Florence Leva.s.seur, Gaston Sauverand, and my excellent friend Don Luis Perenna in the bargain?"

Dull blows came from somewhere. The men must be hunting the roofs and sounding the walls.

Don Luis stretched himself flat on the floor, hid his face in his folded arms and, shutting his eyes, murmured:

"Let's think."

CHAPTER TWELVE

"HELP!"

When Lupin afterward told me this episode of the tragic story, he said, not without a certain self-complacency:

"What astonished me then, and what astonishes me still, as one of the most amazing victories on which I am ent.i.tled to pride myself, is that I was able to admit Sauverand and Marie Fauville's innocence on the spot, as a problem solved once and for all. It was a first-cla.s.s performance, I swear, and surpa.s.sed the most famous deductions of the most famous investigators both in psychological value and in detective merit.

"After all, taking everything into account, there was not the shadow of a fresh fact to enable me to alter the verdict. The charges acc.u.mulated against the two prisoners were the same, and were so grave that no examining magistrate would have hesitated for a second to commit them for trial, nor any jury to bring them in guilty. I will not speak of Marie Fauville: you had only to think of the marks of her teeth to be absolutely certain. But Gaston Sauverand, the son of Victor Sauverand and consequently the heir of Cosmo Mornington--Gaston Sauverand, the man with the ebony walking-stick and the murderer of Chief Inspector Ancenis--was he not just as guilty as Marie Fauville, incriminated with her by the mysterious letters, incriminated by the very revelation of the husband whom they had killed?

"And yet why did that sudden change take place in me?" he asked. "Why did I go against the evidence? Why did I credit an incredible fact? Why did I admit the inadmissible? Why? Well, no doubt, because truth has an accent that rings in the ears in a manner all its own. On the one side, every proof, every fact, every reality, every certainty; on the other, a story, a story told by one of the three criminals, and therefore, presumptively, absurd and untrue from start to finish. But a story told in a frank voice, a clear, dispa.s.sionate, closely woven story, free from complications or improbabilities, a story which supplied no positive solution, but which, by its very honesty, obliged any impartial mind to reconsider the solution arrived at. I believed the story."

The explanation which Lupin gave me was not complete. I asked:

"And Florence Leva.s.seur?"

"Florence?"

"Yes, you don't tell me what you thought. What was your opinion about her? Everything tended to incriminate her not only in your eyes, because, logically speaking, she had taken part in all the attempts to murder you, but also in the eyes of the police. They knew that she used to pay Sauverand clandestine visits at his house on the Boulevard Richard-Wallace. They had found her photograph in Inspector Verot's memorandum-book, and then--and then all the rest: your accusations, your certainties. Was all that modified by Sauverand's story? To your mind, was Florence innocent or guilty?"

He hesitated, seemed on the point of replying directly and frankly to my question, but could not bring himself to do so, and said:

"I wished to have confidence. In order to act, I must have full and entire confidence, whatever doubts might still a.s.sail me, whatever darkness might still enshroud this or that part of the adventure. I therefore believed. And, believing, I acted according to my belief."

Acting, to Don Luis Perenna, during those hours of forced inactivity, consisted solely in perpetually repeating to himself Gaston Sauverand's account of the events. He tried to reconst.i.tute it in all its details, to remember the very least sentences, the apparently most insignificant phrases. And he examined those sentences, scrutinized those phrases one by one, in order to extract such particle of the truth as they contained.

For the truth was there. Sauverand had said so and Perenna did not doubt it. The whole sinister affair, all that const.i.tuted the case of the Mornington inheritance and the tragedy of the Boulevard Suchet, all that could throw light upon the plot hatched against Marie Fauville, all that could explain the undoing of Sauverand and Florence--all this lay in Sauverand's story. Don Luis had only to understand, and the truth would appear like the moral which we draw from some obscure fable.

Don Luis did not once deviate from his method. If any objection suggested itself to his mind, he at once replied:

"Very well. It may be that I am wrong and that Sauverand's story will not enlighten me on any point capable of guiding me. It may be that the truth lies outside it. But am I in a position to get at the truth in any other way? All that I possess as an instrument of research, without attaching undue importance to certain gleams of light which the regular appearance of the mysterious letters has shed upon the case, all that I possess is Gaston Sauverand's story. Must I not make use of it?"

And, once again, as when one follows a path by another person's tracks, be began to live through the adventure which Sauverand had been through.

He compared it with the picture of it which he had imagined until then.

The two were in opposition; but could not the very clash of their opposition be made to produce a spark of light?

"Here is what he said," he thought, "and there is what I believed. What does the difference mean? Here is the thing that was, and there is the thing that appeared to be. Why did the criminal wish the thing that was to appear under that particular aspect? To remove all suspicion from him?

But, in that case, was it necessary that suspicion should fall precisely on those on whom it did?"

The questions came crowding one upon the other. He sometimes answered them at random, mentioning names and uttering words in succession, as though the name mentioned might be just that of the criminal, and the words uttered those which contained the unseen reality.

Then at once he would take up the story again, as schoolboys do when parsing and a.n.a.lyzing a pa.s.sage, in which each expression is carefully sifted, each period discussed, each sentence reduced to its essential value.

Hours and hours pa.s.sed. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he gave a start. He took out his watch. By the light of his electric lamp he saw that it was seventeen minutes to twelve.

"So at seventeen minutes to twelve at night," he said, "I fathomed the mystery."

He tried to control his emotion, but it was too great; and his nerves were so immensely staggered by the trial that he began to shed tears. He had caught sight of the appalling truth, all of a sudden, as when at night one half sees a landscape under a lightning-flash.

There is nothing more unnerving than this sudden illumination when we have been groping and struggling in the dark. Already exhausted by his physical efforts and by the want of food, from which he was beginning to suffer, he felt the shock so intensely that, without caring to think a moment longer, he managed to go to sleep, or, rather, to sink into sleep, as one sinks into the healing waters of a bath.

When he woke, in the small hours, alert and well despite the discomfort of his couch, he shuddered on thinking of the theory which he had accepted; and his first instinct was to doubt it. He had, so to speak, no time.

All the proofs came rushing to his mind of their own accord and at once transformed the theory into one of those certainties which it would be madness to deny. It was that and nothing else. As he had foreseen, the truth lay recorded in Sauverand's story. And he had not been mistaken, either, in saying to Mazeroux that the manner in which the mysterious letters appeared had put him on the track of the truth.

And the truth was terrible. He felt, at the thought of it, the same fears that had maddened Inspector Verot when, already tortured by the poison, he stammered:

"Oh, I don't like this, I don't like the look of this!... The whole thing has been planned in such an infernal manner!"

Infernal was the word! And Don Luis remained stupefied at the revelation of a crime which looked as if no human brain could have conceived it.

For two hours more he devoted all his mental powers to examining the situation from every point of view. He was not much disturbed about the result, because, being now in possession of the terrible secret, he had nothing more to do but make his escape and go that evening to the meeting on the Boulevard Suchet, where he would show them all how the murder was committed.

But when, wishing to try his chance of escaping, he went up through the underground pa.s.sage and climbed to the top of the upper ladder--that is to say, to the level of the boudoir--he heard through the trapdoor the voices of men in the room.

"By Jove!" he said to himself, "the thing is not so simple as I thought!

In order to escape the minions of the law I must first leave my prison; and here is at least one of the exits blocked. Let's look at the other."

He went down to Florence's apartments and worked the mechanism, which consisted of a counterweight. The panel of the cupboard moved in the groove.

Driven by horror and hoping to find some provisions which enable him to withstand a siege without being reduced to famine, he was about to pa.s.s through the alcove, behind the curtains, when he was stopped short by a sound of footsteps. Some one had entered the room.

"Well, Mazeroux, have you spent the night here? Nothing new!"