813 - Maurice LeBlanc (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗
- Author: Maurice LeBlanc
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Valenglay looked at him in amazement..<-Ç
“Four minutes more than you want? What do you mean by that?”
“I mean, Monsieur le President, that the ten minutes which you allow me are superfluous. I want six, and not one minute more.”
“Oh, but look here, Lenormand… if you imagine that this is the time for joking…”
The chief detective went to the window and beckoned to two men who were walking round the courtyard.
Then he returned:
“Mr. Attorney-General, would you have the kindness to sign a warrant for the arrest of Auguste Maximin Philippe Daileron, aged forty-seven? You might leave the profession open.”
He went to the door:
“Come in, Gourel. You, too, Dieuzy.”
Gourel entered, accompanied by Inspector Dieuzy. “Have you the handcuffs, Gourel?”
“Yes, chief.”
M. Lenormand went up to Valenglay:
“Monsieur le President, everything is ready. But I entreat you most urgently to forego this arrest. It upsets all my plans; it may render them abortive; and, for the sake of what, after all, is a very trifling satisfaction, it exposes us to the risk of jeopardizing the whole business.”
“M. Lenormand, let me remark that you have only eighty seconds left.”
The chief suppressed a gesture of annoyance, strode across the room and, leaning on his stick, sat down angrily, as though he had decided not to speak. Then, suddenly making up his mind:
“Monsieur le President, the first person who enters this room will be the man whose arrest you asked for… against my wish, as I insist on pointing out to you.”
“Fifteen seconds, Lenormand!”
“Gourel… Dieuzy… the first person, do you understand?… Mr. Attorney, have you signed the warrant?”
“Ten seconds, Lenormand!”
“Monsieur le PrŽsident, would you be so good as to ring the bell?”
Valenglay rang.
The messenger appeared in the doorway and waited.
Valenglay turned to the chief: “Well, Lenormand, he’s waiting for your orders. Whom is he to show in?”
“No one.”
“But the rogue whose arrest you promised us? The six minutes are more than past.”
“Yes, but the rogue is here!”
“Here? I don’t understand. No one has entered the room!”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Oh, I say… Look here, Lenormand, you’re making fun of us. I tell you again that no one has entered the room.”
“There were six of us in this room, Monsieur le President; there are seven now. Consequently, some one has entered the room.”
Valenglay started:
“Eh! But this is madness!… What! You mean to say…”
The two detectives had slipped between the messenger and the door. M. Lenormand walked up to the messenger, clapped his hand on his shoulder and, in a loud voice:
“In the name of the law, Auguste Maximin Philippe Daileron, chief messenger at the Ministry of the Interior, I arrest you.”
Valenglay burst out laughing.
“Oh, what a joke! What a joke! That infernal Lenormand! Of all the first-rate notions! Well done, Lenormand! It’s long since I enjoyed so good a laugh.”
M. Lenormand turned to the attorney-general:
“Mr. Attorney, you won’t forget to fill in Master Daileron’s profession on the warrant, will you? Chief messenger at the Ministry of the Interior.”
“Oh, good!… Oh, capital!… Chief messenger at the Ministry of the Interior!” spluttered Valenglay, holding his sides. “Oh, this wonderful Lenormand gets hold of ideas that would never occur to anybody else! The public is clamoring for an arrest… Whoosh, he flings at its head my chief messenger… Auguste… the model servant! Well, Lenormand, my dear fellow, I knew you had a certain gift of imagination, but I never suspected that it would go so far as this! The impertinence of it!”
From the commencement of this scene, Auguste had not stirred a limb and seemed to understand nothing of what was going on around him. His face, the typical face of a good, loyal, faithful serving-man, seemed absolutely bewildered. He looked at the gentlemen turn and turn about, with a visible effort to catch the meaning of their words.
M. Lenormand said a few words to Gourel, who went out. Then, going up to Auguste and speaking with great decision, he said:
“There’s no way out of it. You’re caught. The best thing to do, when the game is lost, is to throw down your cards. What were you doing on Tuesday?”
“I? Nothing. I was here.”
“You lie. You were off duty. You went out for the day.”
“Oh, yes… I remember… I had a friend to see me from the country… We went for a walk in the Bois.”
“Your friend’s name was Marco. And you went for a walk in the cellars of the Credit Lyonnais.”
“I? What an idea!… Marco!… I don’t know any one by that name.”
“And these? Do you know these?” cried the chief, thrusting a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles under his nose.
“No… certainly not… I don’t wear spectacles…”
“Yes, you do; you wear them when you go to the Credit Lyonnais and when you pass yourself off asMr. Kesselbach. These come from your room, the room which you occupy, under the name of M. Jerome, at No. 50 Rue du Coh’see.”
“My room? My room? I sleep here, at the office.”
“But you change your clothes over there, to play your parts in Lupin’s gang.”
A blow in the chest made him stagger back. Auguste reached the window at a bound, climbed over the balcony and jumped into the courtyard.
“Dash it all!” shouted Valenglay. ” The scoundrel!”
He rang the bell, ran to the window, wanted to call out. M. Lenormand, with the greatest calm, said:
“Don’t excite yourself, Monsieur le President…”
“But that blackguard of an Auguste…”
“One second, please… I foresaw this ending… in fact, I allowed for it… It’s the best confession we could have…”
Yielding in the presence of this coolness, Valenglay resumed his seat. In a moment, Gourel entered, with his hand on the collar of Master Auguste Maximin Philippe Daileron, alias ‘ J6r6me, chief messenger at the Ministry of the Interior.
“Bring him, Gourel!” said M. Lenormand, as who should say, “Fetch it! Bring it!” to a good retriever carrying the game in its jaws. “Did he come quietly?”
“He bit me a little, but I held tight,” replied the sergeant, showing his huge, sinewy hand.
“Very well, Gourel. And now take this chap off to the Dep6t in a cab. Good-bye for the present, M. Jerome.”
Valenglay was immensely amused. He rubbed his hands and laughed. The idea that his chief messenger was one of Lupin’s accomplices struck him as a most delightfully ludicrous thing.
“Well done, my dear Lenormand; this is wonderful! But how on earth did you manage it?”
“Oh, in the simplest possible fashion. I knew that Mr. Kesselbach was employing the Barbareux agency and that Lupin had called on him, pretending to come from the agency. I hunted in that direction and discovered that, when the indiscretion was committed to the prejudice of Mr. Kesselbach and of Barbareux, it could only have been to the advantage of one Jerome, a friend of one of the clerks at the agency. If you had not ordered me to hustle things, I should have watched the messenger and caught Marco and then Lupin.”
“You’ll catch them, Lenormand, you’ll catch them, I assure you. And we shall be assisting at the most exciting spectacle in the world: the struggle between Lupin and yourself. I shall bet on you.”
The next morning the newspapers published the following letter:
“Open Letter to M. Lenormand, Chief of the Detective-service.
“All my congratulations, dear sir and dear friend, on your arrest of Jerome the messenger. It was a smart piece of work, well executed and worthy of you.
“All my compliments, also, on the ingenious manner in which you proved to the prime minister that I was not Mr. Kesselbach’s murderer. Your demonstration was clear, logical, irrefutable and, what is more, truthful. As you know, I do not kill people. Thank you for proving it on this occasion. The esteem of my contemporaries and of yourself, dear sir and dear friend, are indispensable to my happiness.
“In return, allow me to assist you in the pursuit of the monstrous assassin and to give you a hand with the Kesselbach case, a very interesting case, believe me: so interesting and so worthy of my attention that I have determined to issue from the retirement in which I have been living for the past four years, between my books and my good dog Sherlock, to beat all my comrades to arms and to throw myself once more into the fray.
“What unexpected turns life sometimes takes! Here am I, your fellow-worker! Let me assure you, dear sir and dear friend, that I congratulate myself upon it, and that I appreciate this favor of destiny at its true value.
“ArsŽne Lupin.
“P.S. -One word more, of which I feel sure that you will approve. As it is not right and proper that a gentleman who has had the glorious privilege of fighting under my banner should languish on the straw of your prisons, I feel it my duty to give you fair warning that, in five weeks’ time, on Friday, the 31st of May, I shall set at liberty Master Jerome, promoted by me to the rank of chief messenger at the Ministry of the Interior. Don’t forget the date: Friday, the 3ist of May.
“A. L.”
A GROUND-FLOOR flat, at the corner of the Boulevard Haussmann and the Rue de Courcelles. Here lived Prince Sernine: Prince Sernine, one of the most brilliant members of the Russian colony in Paris, whose name was constantly recurring in the “Arrivals and Departures” column in the newspapers.
Eleven o’clock in the morning. The prince entered his study. He was a man of thirty-eight or forty years of age, whose chestnut hair was mingled with a few silver threads on the temples. He had a fresh, healthy complexion and wore a large mustache and a pair of whiskers cut extremely short, so as to be hardly noticeable against the fresh skin of his cheeks.
He was smartly dressed in a tight-fitting frock-coat and a white drill waistcoat, which showed above the opening.
“Come on!” he said, in an undertone. “I have a hard day’s work before me, I expect.”
He opened a door leading into a large room where a few people sat waiting, and said:
“Is Varnier there? Come in, Varnier.”
A man looking like a small tradesman, squat, solidly built, firmly set upon his legs, entered at the summons. The prince closed the door behind him:
“Well, Varnier, how far are you?”
“Everything’s ready for this evening, governor.”
“Good. Tell me in a few words.”
“It’s like this. After her husband’s murder, Mrs. Kesselbach, on the strength of the prospectuses which you ordered to be sent to her, selected as her residence the establishment known as the Retreat for Gentlewomen, at Garches. She occupies the last of the four small houses, at the bottom of the garden, which the management lets to ladies who prefer to live quite apart from the other boarders, the house known as the Pavilion de 1’Imperatrice.”
“What servants has she?”
“Her companion, Gertrude, with whom she arrived a few hours after the crime, and Gertrude’s sister Suzanne, whom she sent for to Monte Carlo and who acts as her maid. The two sisters are devoted to her.”
“What about Edwards, the valet?”
“She did not keep him. He has gone back to his own country.”
“Does she see people?”
“No. She spends her time lying on a sofa. She seems very weak and ill. She cries a great deal. Yesterday the examining-magistrate was with her for two hours.”
“Very good. And now about the young girl.”
“Mile. GeneviŽve Ernemont lives across the
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