"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,
he 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 Préfet," replied Mazeroux.
"That's funny. The confounded fellow must be somewhere. Or can he have
got away over the roof?"
"Impossible, Monsieur le Préfet," 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 Préfet, 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 Préfet!"
"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 Préfet? Do you think so?" said Weber stiffly.