JUVE’S BAG
An hour or so before these events, while it was still night, the
police-officers on duty at the head Commissariat office at Alfort were
roused from the peaceful doze they were indulging in by the unexpected
arrival of an individual who seemed breathless and exhausted as if he
had been running a great distance.
“The Commissary?” he demanded.
The sergeant shrugged his shoulders.
“You may be very sure he’s not here.”
“And his deputy?”
“He’s away too, of course.”
“Who is in command here then?”
The sergeant indicated himself.
“Well, if you must know, I am; who are you? what do you want?”
Curtly, in measured tones, the man explained:
“Who am I! I am Tom Bob, American detective, specially known of late
days at the Prefecture of Police and in the city for his war against
Fantômas!”
The sergeant nodded and saluted; he had heard tell of Tom Bob and
recognized the foreign police-officer from the numerous descriptions
and portraits he had read and seen of him.
“What can I do to serve you?” he asked.
Tom Bob told him: “You can arrest Fantômas!... at this moment he is
close by with his gang of apaches round him; they are all gathered,
he and his confederates, in a deserted house, at the far end of the
military road, right hand side after the second cross-roads.”
“I can see the shanty from here,” announced the sergeant, “a wretched
hovel it is; but who is it tells us ...?”
Tom Bob informed him curtly:
“_I_ tell you, that is sufficient!... how many men have you?”
“Eight.”
“That’s not enough.”
The sergeant was getting alarmed: “I can ask for more from the
Charenton office!”
“That’s the thing.”
The sergeant got into communication by telephone with his colleague at
the neighbouring police post.
“There are fifteen over yonder,” he informed Tom Bob.
“They must all come,” declared the detective, “Fantômas’ band counts at
least a round dozen ruffians.”
The detective’s requirements were transmitted from the Alfort office,
and the fifteen Charenton officers promised to be there in a quarter of
an hour. The gallant sergeant was greatly excited by the coming events;
to avoid all doubt and make sure he was covered by his superiors, he
asked:
“Monsieur Bob, shall you be coming with us?”
“Undoubtedly!” replied the American detective. But the sergeant was not
satisfied yet.
“I have a great mind,” he announced, “to go and inform the Commissary,
he lives close by.”
“You should have done that long ago!” Tom Bob said rebukingly.
Then, while the sergeant was issuing his orders, the detective sat down
in the public office, lit a cigarette, and did not vouchsafe another
word.
* * * * *
Before coming thus rudely to disturb the peace and quietness of the
Alfort Commissariat, Tom Bob had been wandering up and down most
part of the night in perplexity. On quitting the Palais de Justice,
leaving Fuselier to make the best of his absurd plight, that ambiguous
individual had realized one fact quite clearly, viz., that the
magistrate had looked at him in a way that was decidedly disquieting.
An extraordinary thing for him, Tom Bob’s face had blanched somewhat
under the magistrate’s questioning look, but he quickly recovered his
customary coolness. Stepping out on to the Boulevard du Palais, quite
empty and deserted at this late hour, he hailed a passing taxi and
offered the driver a handsome tip to drive him as far as the first
houses of Alfort.
There the detective quitted his conveyance and plunged into the
darkness of the silent lanes of the sleeping village. He entered a
deserted house; and strange to say, a few moments later, it was not Tom
Bob who reappeared, but Père Moche—Moche with his wig, his spectacles,
his big nose, as soft and flabby as an indiarubber ball, and his
red whiskers. It was Moche who was now making his way slowly and
deliberately towards the building where two days before he had gone to
bury the strong box containing his money and where, without his knowing
it, he had imprisoned Fandor when he double locked the door behind him
on his departure. It was Moche who, hidden near by, watched his friends
the apaches one after another approach the house to which he knew
that Juve, mistaken for Fantômas, had been brought. It was Moche who,
as time went by and he sat watching how matters were going, fell to
rubbing his hands in self-congratulation.
“No need,” he thought to himself, “to go myself; I should only be
risking the same fate as Juve. Now, what is happening?... it is three
o’clock in the morning, Juve is on his defence at this very moment,
they are demanding their pay, and he cannot give it them;... I know my
fine fellows—in ten minutes my sweet friend, the police-inspector, will
be put to death, doomed as a Fantômas at once traitor and perjurer!”
Père Moche rose and set off at a run for the more central parts of the
city. Suddenly he snatched away his wig and spectacles, pulled off his
false nose and red whiskers—and, extraordinary to relate, instead of
the old usurer’s ill-omened face appeared the keen, refined countenance
of the American Tom Bob. In a ringing voice the latter cried in
defiance of men and gods:
“Good-bye, old Moche, good-bye, Tom Bob, I thank you both for lending
me your fascinating personalities and enabling me thus to triumph over
my opponents. Fantômas, my boy, you’ve worked to some purpose!”
Could anyone have overheard this extraordinary soliloquy, he would
assuredly have been struck with sheer amazement, for if at a pinch
sundry persons _had_ come to suppose that Père Moche bore so close an
affinity with Fantômas that possibly he was Fantômas himself, none
could ever think that the detective, who had come to France under
official sanction with the express object of hunting down the brigand,
was in fact none other than that same notorious, ever evasive criminal,
now better assured than ever against capture, seeing he was actually
giving chase to himself.
Fantômas stood, a solitary figure in the far-stretching plain, thinking.
“I cannot rest satisfied,” he muttered, “till I see Juve lying dead—as
dead as a man can be! I must also,” he went on, “for a few hours more
keep up my rôle of Tom Bob; I shall score yet another success if by
one triumphant cast of the net I contrive that the French police shall
arrest the whole gang of my confederates ... I should say Fantômas’
confederates!”
Then it was that, calculating his time almost to a minute, the
atrocious scoundrel had given the alarm at the Alfort police-post.
* * * * *
Dawn was breaking fast. The officers from Charenton had joined the
Alfort contingent and the united force was hurrying, Tom Bob and
the Commissary at their head, towards the extremity of the military
road where the mysterious house stood. The sergeant was issuing his
instructions.
“You will surround the building,” he ordered his men; “you will draw
in the circle more and more, but taking cover to avoid accidents; have
your revolvers out, the brigands lurking there are terrible fellows; at
the first suspicious movement, fire without a moment’s hesitation.”
Meantime Tom Bob, quite unruffled, was explaining to the Commissary:
“You know what happened yesterday—Fantômas released from prison,
carried off by the apaches, tried by the villains, doomed and perhaps
executed?...”
But Tom Bob broke off short with a cry of terror. On the threshold of
the ill-omened house, at the opening of the stairs giving entrance to
the cellar, stood a man motionless, with folded arms.
“Fantômas!” exclaimed Tom Bob. But the Commissary set him right at once.
“No, no! it is Juve,” he cried, “Juve! Yes, we heard aright; the
papers that gave the news yesterday spoke the truth, Juve is innocent
and a free man”—and the Commissary sprang forward towards the Inspector
of the Criminal Bureau.
“Juve, Juve,” he questioned, “what are you doing here? What are you
waiting for?”
The officer replied deliberately, in a quiet voice, perfectly calm and
collected:
“Why, my dear Commissary, it was _you_ I was waiting for!”
“The brigands,” went on the official excitedly, “Fantômas’
accomplices—where are they?”
Juve pointed a finger at the door against which he leant.
“They are there,” he said, “inside there; it only remains for us to
have them out one by one; how many men have you with you?”
“Twenty-three,” the Commissary informed him.
After thinking a moment, “Yes, that is sufficient,” Juve declared, “we
can get to work.”
The Commissary, a worthy fellow, once a subordinate under the friendly
Inspector at the Criminal Bureau, could not refrain, despite the
critical conditions of the moment, from expressing his delight.
“Juve, my dear Juve,” he cried, “what a blessed thing! Your innocence
is acknowledged at last; I am so glad, so very glad!...”
But the good man never finished his congratulations. For some minutes
ominous sounds had been heard coming from the cellar, and now a fearful
yell broke out and a hailstorm of bullets, fired at point blank range
from inside, pitted and pierced the door, fortunately a thick, heavy
one. Nevertheless Juve was struck by two or three projectiles, spent
balls luckily, otherwise the inspector would have been shot dead. He
stepped back a pace or two.
“That spoils our game!” he muttered simply, “I suppose our fine fellows
have found out at last that the Fantômas they held prisoner was no
other than Juve, the police-officer!”
“Sir,” demanded the Commissary, consulting the Inspector with enhanced
respect in face of the new danger, “how must we proceed now?”
Juve cast a rapid glance round the house. “We must parley with them to
begin with,” he declared—and in a voice he made big and authoritative,
he challenged the apaches.
“You are taken!” he announced in peremptory tones, “surrender!”
The shouts redoubled, mingled with oaths of the most appalling
profanity. The Commissary, all for making a quick end, suggested:
“For my part, I should make no bones about shooting them all down
through the grated windows, if five minutes from now they haven’t given
in their submission.”
But Juve was biting his lip, a prey to excruciating anxiety. At all
costs firing must be avoided, the ruffians induced to surrender and a
fight prevented; doubtless Juve did not care a straw for the lives of
the monsters who had come so near killing him, but he knew that among
them was one, the least hair of whose head was sacred to him! But would
the apaches give in, or must they be mastered by force or famine?
Either solution was equally repugnant to Juve, always swayed by the
same motive.
Meanwhile a crowd of the honest, hard-working inhabitants of Alfort,
risen early as is their wont, had gathered round, naturally all agog
with curiosity to see this quite unusual display of police activity
round the old building that had always borne something of an evil
reputation. The police, on being questioned, had not hesitated to say
it was a matter of a gang of dangerous apaches they had just brought
to bay. The louder the clamour of oaths and threats that rose from the
cellar, the more excited and angry and impatient grew the crowd.
“Smoke ’em out!” rose the cry, and fists were shaken fiercely at
the wild beasts’ lair, as they remembered how in all the honest,
hard-working population of Alfort there was hardly a soul but had
suffered from the depredations and atrocities of the ill-omened gang,
or at any rate, of similar gangs of marauders ... They had them at
their mercy, why not make an end? Already, in spite of the constables’
efforts to keep order, the crowd was kindling round the walls dry vine
shoots and wisps of straw: through the low grated window someone threw
in a lighted brand.
Juve began to tremble, and once more addressed the apaches:
“Come now, don’t go trying to be too clever; surrender, I tell you!”
Then the “Beadle” spoke out in the name of all. In a quavering voice, a
coward in face of the instant danger, the fellow whined:
“We’re going to give in, Juve; only protect us from the crowd, those
dogs might easy tear us to pieces.”
Juve made no show of insolent triumph. At a nod from him to the
Commissary, a double line of officers, revolvers in hand, formed up
either side of the entrance, while four men stood ready in the doorway
to clap on the bracelets as the ruffians came out. A minute or two
earlier the Commissary had caught sight of an army forage-wagon going
by, and had requisitioned it to serve as an impromptu “Black Maria” for
the conveyance of the sinister crew Juve had so opportunely arrested.
Juve held the heavy door of the cellar ajar. “One by one!” he
ordered—and the apaches obeyed. “Bull’s-eye” was the first to present
himself, wearing a hang-dog look and offering his wrists docilely for
the handcuffs to be adjusted; behind him appeared “Big Ernestine,” with
hard-featured face and rouged cheeks, casting black looks of furious
defiance at the crowd that jeered at the street-walker and her tattered
finery; next came the “Gasman’s” turn, a tall skeleton with enormous
hands; then the “Beadle,” shivering with fear; Paulet, paler than
ever, his features drawn and distorted almost beyond recognition in
sheer terror of the scaffold; then Mère Toulouche, alone and utterly
callous, who the moment she was outside, began to harangue Juve, the
police-officers, the Commissary, chuckling and grinning in hideous
mockery.
All submitted to the same fate with a remarkable docility. But when the
officers prepared to deal with the last of the unfortunates issuing
from the cellar in this ignominious fashion and were going to slip on
the bracelets, Juve threw himself impetuously before them.
“No, oh no!” he cried, “not that one, you shall not pinion him! leave
him to me, I will see to him; for, look you, this is the man who saved
my life, Fandor!”—and to the amazement of all, Juve and Fandor fell
into one another’s arms in a long-drawn embrace.
For Tom Bob, he had vanished long before this!