PLOTS AND COUNTERPLOTS
It was nine o’clock, and the storm was at its height. The rain came
down in torrents, the wind blew fiercely, lightning blazed and thunder
bellowed. The streets were deserted, for a man must indeed have had
urgent business to call him abroad on such a night.
Apparently such was Jérôme Fandor’s case, for the journalist was
walking fast and resolutely under the pitiless downpour along the quays
bordering the Seine in the direction of Charenton. As he fought his way
against the gale, the belated pedestrian was growling between his teeth:
“Good lord! how my ears sting with the cold! and how pitch dark it
is! Screw up my eyes as I will, I can’t see a thing. All the same,
I’ve got to get to Alfort; but shall I ever find the _rendez-vous_ in
this darkness, I wonder! All the same, how right I was to attend the
marriage of that fool Ascott with the unspeakable Nini Guinon! What a
wedding! and what a crew! And old Moche! what a clever fellow he must
be to keep this gang of scoundrels on the job, always promising the
fellows money and never giving them the pay for the crimes they do at
his bidding! Oh! he’s one in a thousand, he is, the old money-lender
of the Rue Saint-Fargeau! If I hadn’t important reasons for not
wishing him to see me, I’d just go straight, fair and square, to the
abandoned quarry where the confabulation’s to be between the ‘Gasman,’
‘Bull’s-eye,’ Paulet and the rest of that gang of ruffians. But surely I
hear footsteps coming up behind me. Best turn off the road now and make
to the right to get time to find a hiding place. Mustn’t let yourself
be seen, friend Fandor. True, all these chaps are your ‘pals’ and more
or less well disposed; but ’ware Moche, if _he_ spotted you, especially
after yesterday’s business, there’d be trouble, and that wouldn’t help
on poor Juve’s affairs!”
All the while, as he soliloquized thus, Fandor was moving on as
fast as he could in the deep shadows that helped to conceal him,
sometimes crawling, sometimes walking. Still, he was the first to reach
the _rendez-vous_. It was a sinister spot. A sand quarry lay there
abandoned, a hundred yards from the bank of the river. A strike of the
quarrymen had been on foot for a week, and there appeared no present
likelihood of work being resumed. Fantômas’ henchmen were aware of the
fact and knew that nobody would come to disturb them. Besides, the
river was close at hand, and if interruptors appeared, so much the
worse for them! They would make a hole in the water, whether they liked
a bath or no.
But the look of things would not have been half so grim if, moored by
the shore, a dredger had not shown its huge, dark bulk on the black
water, lifting to the sky its slanting spar with an endless chain
running along its length carrying the great buckets that dredge up the
mud and detritus from the bed of the stream.
A sound of footsteps. A cold sweat broke out on Fandor’s temples; like
all truly brave men, he was not rash and deemed it foolish to risk his
life without gain for anybody or anything whatsoever. Now it was very
certain that, if he was seen by Moche, who knew him, and now treated
him openly as an enemy, he would be denounced to the apaches, who would
no longer take him to be one of their own crew and would dub him a
traitor. A summary execution would be the sequel. But what would become
of Juve then? Anyway, what was to be done now under these difficult
circumstances? The intrepid journalist asked himself the question
anxiously, calling up all his ingenuity and cunning to discover an
immediate answer, for it was not hours now that counted, but seconds.
The footsteps came nearer. They were within a hundred yards and the
new arrivals would soon be able to pierce the heavy shadows that,
luckily for Fandor, still hung, a protective screen, between them and
the reporter. A happy thought! a really brilliant idea! Those great
buckets (empty or full, what matter?) that swung in the wind along
the dredger’s spar, were they not observatories all ready made, so
excellently adapted to the purpose that assuredly it would never occur
to the most suspiciously minded of the gang that a spy, however rash,
should have chosen so perilous a hiding place. Fandor did not lose a
moment. Rapidly and dexterously the young man hauled himself up by the
chain and had very soon reached the highest point of the spar, where he
settled himself, crouching down in the topmost bucket of all. By great
good luck it was empty. From there he could both see and hear, while
remaining entirely incognito himself.
He was only just in time. The apaches were arriving one after the other
in quick succession. “Big Ernestine” was the first; behind her came
Paulet, the murderer of the bank messenger, the “Gasman,” “Bull’s-eye,”
the “Beadle,” and other members of the gang, after them, five or six
new recruits, whom Fandor only knew by sight, and who had as yet done
little to get themselves talked about. These were whispering together
under their breath. The rest seemed quite at home, they believed
themselves as much alone as in their regular haunts, and their voices
swelled to the loudest diapason of indignation.
“Eleven gone, and the dirty scamp’s not come! it’s over long the
thief’s been chousing us all with his promises he never keeps. Won’t
stand the cheat any more, what say you, mates?”
“If old man Moche tries on another of his tricks to-night, I’ll do him
in to-morrow!”
“Hark there! what’s that?”
“It’s the old humbug here at last! oh, ho! his pockets are bulging with
brass; that’s why he’s been so slow; it’s over heavy for him, he can’t
walk!”—and the yells and imprecations broke out afresh.
A small, mean, cringing figure, his head almost buried in the collar
of his great-coat, his hands clasped in a suppliant attitude, the old
usurer listened quietly to the recriminations that rose on all sides,
guessing that for sure he would be in the tightest of tight places
before long.
“Good day to you, mates all,” he greeted the angry crowd, and said no
more for the moment. But, after a brief pause, seeing looks of anger
and suspicion scanning him from the soles of his feet to the crown of
his head, he added in a whining voice:
“Beg pardon, but we’d be better elsewhere: suppose we adjourn to the
deck of the _Marie-Salope_ (the dredger) over there?”
All agreed; only “Bull’s-eye” slipped in a question: “There’s nobody
there?”
A general shout reassured him: “Why, who’d ever dare to come?”
Still, by way of further precaution, “Big Ernestine” climbed down into
the lighter, moored in the wake of the dredger, into which the buckets
when working emptied their contents. Another minute and the woman was
up again, satisfied with her inspection, and declaring:
“All clear!”
But Moche now pointed out that they were wasting precious time, gassing
without saying anything to the point.
“We’re here to talk business, so let’s begin.”
The company took seats as they best could, some on the bulwarks, some
on the deck-planks of the dredger, forming a circle in the middle of
which Père Moche took his stand—and the trial opened. “Trial” is the
right word, for truly the speaker was pleading for his life before his
judges seated round him, whom even a superficial observer would have
found no difficulty in recognizing as ready to go to the most violent
extremities.
It was the “Beadle” who undertook the prosecution. All the while
brandishing before the face of the culprit, who stood impassive before
him, his redoubtable clenched fists, the weight of which was familiar
to all the onlookers and which without an effort could have felled the
unhappy old man to the ground, he began with an artful reference that
instantly won him the sympathy of his audience.
“Père Moche,” he said, “you are come, and that is well, for it behooves
us once for all to understand each other, us and you. You can see for
yourself, that, among the chosen few of our band, one only is missing,
poor ‘Beauty Boy,’ and if he has been nabbed, if he is in the stone
jug, waiting till the bigwigs send him overseas, that is entirely your
fault; I don’t mean to say you sold him to the ’tecs, but you left him
without coin, without a yellow boy, without a stiver, and forced him to
muck it somehow or other, so that ...”
A triple round of applause allowed the orator to take breath, which he
did long and noisily, and to add another touch:
“Yes, if ‘Beauty Boy’ was pinched working the Yankees on the
Trans-Atlantic boat-train, and he so clever fingered, it was because he
didn’t have the usual stuff with him. If he hadn’t been forced to pick
up just anything he could to fill his belly, he would never have ...”
Faces grew ugly, fists clenched, every eye glittered with murderous
light. In his hiding-place Fandor congratulated himself on his presence
at this unexpected scene. Moche seemed to be racking his brains to find
a way to exculpate himself. Still the old ruffian managed to conceal
his distress, and it was without any great difficulty he succeeded
in breaking in on the “Beadle’s” eloquence and making himself heard
instead.
“Come, come, you’re never going to eat me, comrades? I’ve got a tough
hide, you know, and you’d only get a belly-ache. Now what makes you go
howling at me that gate when I’m your best chum? What have you against
me, now?”
“The infernal cheek of the chap!” snorted out “Big Ernestine,” looking
as red as a poppy.
“But come now, haven’t I done everything I ought? Sure enough,
Fantômas, who set us to work, don’t pay us as we hoped he would.
There’s been some good business done, I admit, and without you, without
us, it would never have come off. Coin’s been handled by the chief,
and it’s all stuck to his fingers, we’ve not had a chance yet to touch
it. But I’m not Fantômas, I’m only his lieutenant, and to pass on your
complaint to him, I should have to know where he is....”
“You don’t know where Fantômas is? D’ye think we’re going to swallow
that humbug?” vociferated “Big Ernestine.”
“No, I do not know, my pretty dear, and if I did, I should have told
you long ago, if only to satisfy your curiosity.”
“It’s not a plant, that?” asked the “Gasman,” half inclined to come to
the old fellow’s help.
“I swear it isn’t! You think I know more than you do, and that my lot’s
more enviable. Nobody so blind as those who won’t see. I tell you my
look-out is just as pitiable as yours. He owes you your pay, well, he
owes me mine, too. All I’ve been able to do for you is to hinder your
getting disheartened and thinking Fantômas doesn’t care for you any
more. Well, _I_’m convinced Fantômas still looks after us and thinks a
deal of us. If we don’t see him, if we have no direct news from him,
it’s because he has powerful reasons for acting as he does.... What,
isn’t a chap like him cleverer than all the lot of us?”
“Hear, hear! Fantômas for ever!”
“Well and good! Fantômas for ever!... So then, I still deserve your
confidence, eh? I was to come here to explain things. Haven’t I come?
did I shirk away?”
“That’s true enough; but where is the Chief?”
“Where he is precisely, he’d be a mighty cute customer who could tell
us and be sure he was not mistaken. What is unfortunately certain is
that he must have been put in confinement as from time to time we
receive orders from the _Santé_ prison, orders we have, in fact, always
faithfully carried out. And all the same, with Fantômas, we are bound
to look for the most amazing surprises.... Oh! if only we could see
him!”
“We can if we want to!” declared the “Beadle” in a tone of conviction.
Everyone was startled at this bold statement spoken with such
confidence, while Fandor felt his curiosity more keenly excited than
ever.
“Why, yes, we can see him. If Fantômas writes from the _Santé_, that
means he is there. If he’s there, we must manage his escape, that’s
all.”
“You’re not a bit gone in the head, eh?” someone broke the silent pause
of stupefaction that followed.
“I! not a bit of it; I’ve got my notion, and I’m just telling you what
it is, and if you’re not chicken-hearted, it’ll come off. It’s not so
hard as all that to find a crack Fantômas can slip out of gaol by....
Suppose we collar him as they’re taking him along down the passages in
the Palais de Justice to be examined, eh? We’ve done bigger jobs than
that before now. Only ...”
“Only?”
“Only we must have a plan, and it’s none so easy to find a good one.
It’s not to praise up Moche I’m saying it, but there, he’s a mighty
clever chap, and can read a heap of big old books and write like a
schoolmaster.”
Moche was flattered and gave a little nod of the head, as much as to
say they were quite in the right about him and the profundity of his
acquirements. Then the “Beadle” seeing his audience hanging on his
lips, went on with redoubled ardour:
“Well, then, to my thinking we shall do nothing to rights without
Moche; let him make out a plan and we’ll carry it through, dead or
alive. I have spoken. Fantômas for ever!”
“Fantômas for ever!”
Looking on from his point of vantage, Fandor was prodigiously
interested in what he now saw and heard; for all the wealth of the
Indies he would not have surrendered his place to anyone whatsoever.
But suddenly the journalist felt his heart stop beating at a thought
that filled him with consternation; he shuddered as he reflected on the
apaches’ new project. If, by any chance, this bold scheme of rescue
which the gang proposed proved successful, it was not Fantômas they
would lay hands on, but simply Juve! The fact was, the Fantômas of
the _Santé_—Moche, indeed, must know this as certainly as Fandor did
himself—was not Fantômas at all, but Juve, and once the police-officer
fell into the power of the apaches, he was irremediably lost, whether
they took him for Juve or for Fantômas, their perjured and bankrupt
paymaster.
Fandor had guessed right; this he gathered from the decision the artful
old schemer now pronounced in half a dozen short, crisp words: “I’ll
take it on; to-morrow we meet again.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know yet, I must think it over, and once my plan is settled, I
will let you know by Paulet. Is that agreed?”
“Agreed!”
“Nothing more to do here then. Let’s be off and have a cosy drink;
it’ll be warmer than here, what say you?”
“Now you’re talking. Let’s hook it”—and thus the sitting was dissolved.
Threatening dire disaster to Père Moche at the beginning, it had ended
finally in a blaze of triumph for that astute scoundrel.
Fandor found it hard to recover from his wonder and surprise; true, his
poor body was aching and stiff and cramped, and his mind was feeling
the numbing effects of this physical distress, patiently borne, but
prolonged almost beyond human endurance. However, Fandor was young
and energetic, and very soon, by dint of clinging to the chain and so
stretching himself vigorously, he had restored the requisite suppleness
to legs and arms and loins; he was making ready, grasping the spar of
the _Marie-Salope_, to slip down to the deck when, looking before him,
he caught sight of a shadowy figure returning hurriedly to the dredger.
In a moment he was curled up once more in the bottom of the bucket, but
by tilting this over side-ways, he managed to secure a still better
view than before.
It was a wise precaution, and it proved useful. There was no doubt
about it; some member of the gang was coming back, after leaving
his confederates under some pretext or other, to return to Paris by
themselves. But who was it? and what was he after?
For all the cool presence of mind that characterized him, Fandor with
difficulty stifled the cry that rose to his lips. It was Moche! it was
indeed Moche, who, after accompanying the apaches for five hundred
yards or so as far as the fork of the roads that lead in different
directions to Paris and to Alfort, had announced in the most natural
way in the world:
“I am expected at Alfort, so I must leave you here. I’m not in your bad
books any more?”
“No, no!... to-morrow’s the day?”
“To-morrow or next day, not a day later. So once again: Fantômas for
ever!”
“Yes, Fantômas for ever!” echoed “Big Ernestine,” “... but only if he
pays up and can prove he hasn’t choused us!”
“By God! yes, we’ll keep our eyes lifting,” added the “Gasman,”
completing the other worthy’s meaning. “Till we meet again!”
“So long then!”—and Moche, without rousing the slightest suspicion,
had contrived to start back on his road to the dredger. What was he
coming to do? Something underhand, evidently, for instead of advancing
as the first time, walking quietly on his two feet, he was flat on
his belly, crawling on the ground, as he had been doing for the last
two hundred yards or more. Whose notice was the old scamp trying to
evade? Doubtless it was one of the companions he had just left that
he feared. Fandor was burning with impatience, albeit the temperature
had fallen at the approach of the dawn, which was due in another hour.
Moreover, a heavy, drenching rain-storm was beginning, accompanied by
vivid flashes of forked lightning and reverberating thunderclaps.
On reaching the dredger, Moche abandoned his serpentine mode of advance
and rising to his feet, stepped on to the deck and made straight for
the winding-crank fixed at the bottom end of the spar, to put the
buckets in motion. He took the handle in both hands and with legs wide
astraddle and back hunched up, set to work to turn. Looking down at the
old chap from above, Fandor could not restrain a laugh.
“Sweat away!” he grinned, “I’ll give you a dozen of champagne if you
get the old machine to work ... God in heaven! it _is_ turning.”
He had not time to say another word before he was pitched headlong into
the lighter astern, among the rubbish that already half filled it and
which, luckily for him, made a sort of cushion sufficiently yielding to
break his fall. Nor had he time to get to his feet before the contents
of the bucket that had previously hung below him, but was now suspended
above his head as the chain revolved, came tumbling all over him.
“Bad luck again!” was all he said, as he shifted quickly a bit to one
side, so as not to be fouled again if Moche went on working the crank,
which had gone on turning without further application of external
force. But what now? the avalanche had stopped; what did that mean?
Peeping out through the cracks in the ramshackle bulwarks of the
lighter, Fandor could get an excellent view of what old Moche might
be at without any risk of being seen himself. What he did see was so
singular that his face lit up with a broad smile. Something was afoot
of so strange a sort as to force an involuntary exclamation from his
lips. “The artful dodger!” he ejaculated. What the old usurer of the
Rue Saint-Fargeau was doing was, in fact, extraordinary. He had stopped
the crank at the exact moment when the first bucket under water rose
from the depths of the dredger’s hold. At this the old man was gazing
lovingly, and it was only after he had cast a wary glance round the
horizon and made sure there was no one watching his proceedings that
he began groping in it with feverish eagerness. Fandor grinned like a
Cheshire cat, chuckling to himself as he mentally apostrophized the old
fellow:
“Oh, Moche, Moche, what a fool you are!—and just when you’re thinking
yourself the cleverest rogue unhung! What is the fellow after? By the
Lord, he’s hauling out of the mud an iron box, a cashbox. Full of
yellow boys, I wager. Egad, there’s enough and to spare there to pay
the greediest of Fantômas’ regular workers for their trouble! Moche,
my boy, if I wanted to play you a nasty trick, I’d go slap off and
tell the gang what I’ve seen, and I promise you that, two hours from
now, when they’d caught you, you’d be having a devilish bad half-hour!
Luckily for you, I prefer, in Juve’s interests, to find out what you’re
proposing to do with your treasure. Are you an honest agent, is it just
a trust confided to you by Fantômas? _Or_, are you by way of robbing
your master and all his confederates? Oh, ho! it looks as if the
villain is preparing to answer my question himself.”
For now, with a meditative air, Moche was pulling at his hideous red
whiskers, one after the other. Then he took out his watch and made
several unavailing attempts to see the time, for the night was still
so dark he had to wait for a flash of lightning before he could read
the hour, while the wind was blowing too violently for him to dream of
lighting a match. When at last he was able to make out the face, a cry
of annoyance broke from his lips: “Gone three already!”—and without
a moment’s delay he started off at a run in the direction of Alfort,
gripping under his left arm the precious box, which he had hastily
reclosed.
Where was he off to? Fandor took prompt measures to find out, and the
other had not gone three hundred paces before his steps were being
dogged by the pursuing journalist. The pace was hot. It was plain
that Fantômas’ man of business was bent on completing before daylight
whatever the job it was he had made up his mind to do. But to manage it
he must make all possible haste, for, as Moche had noted, it was by now
three o’clock in the morning.
“God Almighty!” Fandor swore, pressing on harder still, “what a racer
the scoundrel is!... Where are we? We’re clean through Alfort, and
there’s nothing else but that hovel ahead there; it looks deserted, but
it’s that way and nowhere else Moche is making across country. Ah, ha!
I think I’m going to know!”
Moche, in fact, was making straight for a tumble-down building that
stood empty and abandoned in the middle of a wide stretch of waste
ground, its shutters hanging from their hinges, its walls dropping to
pieces, and a general look of poverty-stricken dilapidation brooding
over all. Like a person familiar with the locality and having a perfect
right to march in without knocking, he pushed open the door, a strong
and heavy one. Still, the idea occurred to him that tramps might have
taken refuge in the ramshackle hut for shelter from the cold out of
doors; so he took his revolver in hand, and in he went.
The old usurer reclosed the door behind him; then Fandor, who had
been crouching to the ground, advanced with a thousand precautions,
glued his ear to the door, made certain that the outermost room was
unoccupied, and opening in his turn, made his way silently into the
lonely house. Neither did he fail to hold his trusty Browning ready for
action. At first he had some difficulty in making out just where Moche
could be, but soon, noticing a feeble, almost imperceptible glimmer
of light that filtered up through the floor, he realized that the old
usurer was in a cellar, and had pulled to after him the trap-door by
which he had gained access. Fandor threw himself flat on the trap-door
in question and peeped through the cracks between the boards.
But what he saw went far beyond anything he had expected. By the
light of a lantern he had unhooked from the wall Moche, having first
deposited his precious money-chest on the floor, was busy raising with
infinite caution one of the paving-stones in the north corner of the
cellar.
“Evidently,” the journalist thought to himself, “he wants to re-bury
his treasure in a new place!”
And such was in fact the old reprobate’s intention. In the hiding place
he had opened up he now proceeded carefully to place the chest; then he
replaced the flagstone, then he scattered sand and dust all round the
edges, so that it was soon quite impossible to guess that the stone
had ever been disturbed.
Meantime Fandor had moved from his spying place; Moche was about to
take his departure and he must not catch sight of the intruder. The
journalist’s first idea was simply to leave the ruined house before the
old ruffian; but on second thoughts he realized that such a mode of
departure was full of risk.
“Once outside, I shall be on the bare, deserted road, and Moche will
inevitably see me—and that will never do!” But now a happy thought
struck the young man—Moche, never for one moment suspecting the
presence of anyone spying on his actions, would probably not trouble
to search the rooms. All he himself would have to do would be to hide,
let the old man go out first, then slip away after him quietly and in
perfect safety.
A few minutes more and Fandor, concealed behind a forgotten pile of
firewood, saw Moche emerge again from the cellar. The old fellow
crossed the outer room, reached the door and so away.
“A pleasant journey to you!” grinned Fandor.
But the next instant a cold sweat broke out on his brow; Moche, after
pulling the door to after him, had locked it fast.
It was all the young man could do to keep back an oath: “A prisoner! I
am a prisoner, by the lord Harry!”