Chapter 12: "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 entitled 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-class performance, I swear, and surpassed 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 accumulated 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, dispassionate, 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 Levasseur?"

"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 Vérot'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 assail 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 reconstitute 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 constituted 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 analyzing a passage, in which each expression is carefully sifted, each period discussed, each sentence reduced to its essential value.

Hours and hours passed. 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 Vérot 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 passage 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 pass 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!"

Don Luis recognized the Prefect of Police by his voice; and the question put by the Prefect told him, first, that Mazeroux had been released from the dark closet where he had bound him up, and, secondly, that the sergeant was in the next room. Fortunately, the sliding panel had worked without the least sound; and Don Luis was able to overhear the conversation between the two men.

"No, nothing new, Monsieur le Prefet," replied Mazeroux.

"That's funny. The confounded fellow must be somewhere. Or can he have got away over the roof?"

"Impossible, Monsieur le Prefet," said a third voice, which Don Luis recognized as that of Weber, the deputy chief detective. "Impossible. We made certain yesterday, that unless he has wings..."

"Then what do you think, Weber?"

"I think, Monsieur le Prefet, that he is concealed in the house. This is an old house and probably contains some safe hiding-place..."

"Of course, of course," said M. Desmalions, whom Don Luis, peeping through the curtains, saw walking to and fro in front of the alcove. "You're right; and we shall catch him in his burrow. Only, is it really necessary?"

"Monsieur le Prefet!"

"Well, you know my opinion on the subject, which is also the Prime Minister's opinion. Unearthing Lupin would be a blunder which we should end by regretting. After all, he's become an honest man, you know; he's useful to us and he does no harm..."

"No harm, Monsieur le Prefet? Do you think so?" said Weber stiffly.

M. Desmalions burst out laughing.

"Oh, of course, yesterday's trick, the telephone trick! You must admit it was funny. The Premier had to hold his sides when I told him of it."

"Upon my word, I see nothing to laugh at!"

"No, but, all the same, the rascal is never at a loss. Funny or not, the trick was extraordinarily daring. To cut the telephone wire before your eyes and then blockade you behind that iron curtain! By the way, Mazeroux, you must get the telephone repaired this morning, so as to keep in touch with the office. Have you begun your search in these two rooms?"

"As you ordered, Monsieur le Prefet. The deputy chief and I have been hunting round for the last hour."

"Yes," said M. Desmalions, "that Florence Levasseur strikes me as a troublesome creature. She is certainly an accomplice. But what were her relations with Sauverand and what was her connection with Don Luis Perenna? That's what I should like to know. Have you discovered nothing in her papers?"

"No, Monsieur le Prefet," said Mazeroux. "Nothing but bills and tradesmen's letters."

"And you, Weber?"

"I've found something very interesting, Monsieur le Prefet."

Weber spoke in a triumphant tone, and, in answer to M. Desmalions's question, went on:

"This is a volume of Shakespeare, Monsieur le Prefet, Volume VIII. You will see that, contrary to the other volumes, the inside is empty and the binding forms a secret receptacle for hiding documents."

"Yes. What sort of documents?"

"Here they are: sheets of paper, blank sheets, all but three. One of them gives a list of the dates on which the mysterious letters were to appear."

"Oho!" said M. Desmalions. "That's a crushing piece of evidence against Florence Levasseur. And also it tells us where Don Luis got his list from."

Perenna listened with surprise: he had utterly forgotten this particular; and Gaston Sauverand had made no reference to it in his narrative. And yet it was a strange and serious detail. From whom had Florence received that list of dates?

"And what's on the other two sheets?" asked M. Desmalions.

Don Luis pricked up his ears. Those two other sheets had escaped his attention on the day of his interview with Florence in this room.

"Here is one of them," said Weber.

M. Desmalions took the paper and read:

"Bear in mind that the explosion is independent of the letters, and that it will take place at three o'clock in the morning."

"Yes," he said, "the famous explosion which Don Luis foretold and which is to accompany the fifth letter, as announced on the list of dates. Tush! We have plenty of time, as there have been only three letters and the fourth is due tonight. Besides, blowing up that house on the Boulevard Suchet would be no easy job, by Jove! Is that all?"

"Monsieur le Prefet," said Weber, producing the third sheet, "would you mind looking at these lines drawn in pencil and enclosed in a large square containing some other smaller squares and rectangles of all sizes? Wouldn't you say that it was the plan of a house?"

"Yes, I should."

"It is the plan of the house in which we are," declared Weber solemnly. "Here you see the front courtyard, the main building, the porter's lodge, and, over there, Mlle. Levasseur's lodge. From this lodge, a dotted line, in red pencil, starts zigzagging toward the main building. The commencement of this line is marked by a little red cross which stands for the room in which we are, or, to be more correct, the alcove. You will see here something like the design of a chimney, or, rather, a cupboard—a cupboard recessed behind the bed and probably hidden by the curtains."