“That’s perfectly natural,” the young man replied, graciously enough, “but I’m not very eloquent. I don’t know how to tell a story; I wander off the point and get lost. If you’d care to question me, Monsieur, I’ll answer as best I can.”
“Very good, very good!” said Monsieur Roudine, smiling broadly, while Comrade Vassily nodded his head approvingly—and, getting straight to the point that intrigued him most, the old man formulated his first question: “What led you to throw a bomb in the Geneva theater?”
The young man lowered his head. He waited a moment before replying. He was evidently concentrating his thoughts. Finally raising his forehead and looking straight through his tinted spectacle-lenses at Monsieur Roudine—slightly behind whom Comrade Vassily, seated on a high stool, opened his eyes excitedly—he replied in slow, curt and sometimes hesitant sentences.
“I won’t hide anything from you, who have given me aid and assistance. My name is Adrien Fortis. My father was a cabinet-maker. After 30 years of hard work, he had amassed a little capital. He chanced to make the acquaintance of a wealthy wood-merchant, a speculator, who seduced him with promises of making a quick fortune. My father wanted to be rich in order to put me through the Ecole Polytechnique or Centrale, and then help me to acquire a strong position. He had invented a plating process that was as good as it was inexpensive. The speculator stole his savings and his profits, and, supported by a crooked contract, put him out of house and home, ruined. In despair, my father committed suicide. My mother died on the very same day, of a heart attack.”
With these terrible words, Adrien Fortis yielded a strangle sob—but Monsieur Roudine asked abruptly: “What was the speculator’s name?”
“His name was Maleste,” the young man relied, hoarsely. “To avenge my father and mother, I killed him.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Vassily, shivering with admiration.
“I’ve nothing to hide,” Fortis repeated, having become calm again. “If you have the means you can make enquiries. Maleste’s factories and villa are in Saint-Ouen, near Paris. The murder of the man passed for a base crime, for I emptied his pockets. That was justice. Then I left France, and under the assumed German name of Nierda Sitrof, a perfect anagram of Adrien Fortis, with false papers that I’d forged, I came to hide in Geneva. I continued my studies in private, but the sum I’d taken from Maleste’s corpse wasn’t very large. I ran out of money. I grew hungry. I lived for three months on things I found in trash-cans on the sidewalks, at dawn. I got some sort of blood-poisoning, which pitted my face with acne and infected my eyelids with a painful blepharitis. In the end, I decided to strike a great blow against bourgeois society and die…”
He sighed.
“Hence the bomb,” said Monsieur Roudine, in a concentrated voice.
“Yes. With my last few sous, I bought shotgun powder. I spiced up it chemically with certain ingredients I was able to steal, by night, from a druggist’s shop. From the deserted terrace of a café I also stole one of those hollow metal balls in which the waiters put their napkins and washcloths, and I made the bomb. I wanted it to claim as many victims as possible of the bourgeois class. That’s why I threw it into the middle of the orchestra stalls at this evening’s gala performance. The bomb was stuffed with fragments of cast-iron and lead, cut up with a saw. It would have been a fine massacre—but I hadn’t anticipated that a man might have the courage to pick up the bomb and put out the fuse. He benefited from a prodigious stroke of luck, in any case, for the fuse was only set to burn for three seconds! That man put it out at the very end of the third second! Bah! That’s fate…”
He fell silent. There was a long silence, during which Adrien Fortis, his head lowered again, rubbed his hands together nervously.
Suddenly, Monsieur Roudine said: “And I assume that you no longer want to die?”
Adrien Fortis raised his head, and pronounced, bitterly and terribly incisively: “Oh, no! No! Since I haven’t succeeded in punishing bourgeois society for the harm that one of its own did to my father and myself, and for the harm it continues to do to people like me…” Carried away by a cold anger, he raised his clenched fists over his head.
What followed was simple and rapid.
Monsieur Roudine got up, took hold of the young man’s fists and opened them, gently caressed the hands, which relaxed, and said, very softly: “My boy, for the moment you have more need of rest and sleep than anything else. I’ll give you a mildly soporific potion to drink, which will set your nervous system to rights. Tomorrow, you’ll appease your hunger for food and spend the day idling on the first floor of the house, where there’s a library and where you’ll have a bedroom. You’ll have a bathroom at your disposal. Do you smoke? Yes? That’s all right; I’ll give you cigarettes, cigars and pipes. Rest, rest, rest—and recover all your mental and physical faculties. I’m a physician. I’ll treat your blood infection and its dermal symptoms, and I’ll cure your blepharitis. That’s not all. In parallel, you’ll be initiated into certain matters, introduced into a certain clan and adopted by it, and you’ll be able to work on a plan for the destruction of bourgeois society—of which we, like you, are enemies—much faster and more efficacious that that of individual and isolated direct action. Do you accept?”
“Oh, Monsieur!” cried Fortis, tremulous with joyful emotion.
“Good. Do you only speak the French language?”
“German too, quite well—my mother was from Alsace. I acquired the habit of talking to her in German from time to time. Poor woman! She had the ideas of an Alsatian woman with a French heart. She didn’t believe in revenge. If not for Maleste, I would have become a man with my mother’s ideas—but it’s quite the contrary, at present.”
“Very good, very good! Don’t weaken, my friend. Souls like yours have Humanity for a fatherland! It’s for the liberation of oppressed Humanity, for its revenge and for is happiness, that you must employ your exceptional faculties. Come on, shake hands with Comrade Vassily, who has saved you from filthy bourgeois ‘justice’ and come upstairs with me, where I’ll set you up.”
After Adrien Fortis and Vassily had exchanged a warm and cordial handclasp, Monsieur Roudine continued: “You’re in no danger here. I’m Alexis Roudine, a knowledgeable and universally respected Egyptologist, very rich, very philanthropic and a trifle eccentric. That’s my façade. What is behind that unassailable façade, which is virtually above suspicion, my lad, you’ll soon find out, for you are worthy of it.”
Twenty minutes later, lying in a good bed in a very pleasant room, having stretched out his arm to switch off the electric lamp beside the bed, the young Adrien Fortis sank into sleep, smiling—a smile so profound that his lips maintained its charming design all night long.
Chapter IV: “When You Mention the Wolf…”
As usual on Tuesdays—this one was Tuesday March 12—Mademoiselle Aurora Malianova, having enjoyed her weekly day off, returned to the Villiers-Pagan Clinic in Lausanne shortly before noon.
She went straight to her room in order to relieve herself of her mantle, hat, gloves and handbag, and immediately telephoned the office of the Chief Medical Director, where a nurse fulfilling the role of temporary secretary and assistant was on duty.
“Hello? Mademoiselle Paschall?”
“Yes. I recognize your voice, Mademoiselle Malianova.”
She laughed brightly. “Yes, it’s me. Anything new?”
“No.”
“The Boss is well?”
“Yes.”
“Is he in a good mood?”
“Perfectly.”
“Thanks! I’ll have lunch, and I’ll come and relieve you in an hour, my dear Paschall.”
“Understood, beautiful Aurora.”
Two bursts of young laughter fell into the telephone, and the receivers at either end were hung up.
Under the authority—rather indulgent and maternal outside business hours—of the windowed Madame Bliss, the clinic’s matron, all but a few of the nurses who were on dut
y or off, according to the day, took their meals in a small and neat refectory which received daylight through a pair of large double-pained French windows overlooking the residents’ garden. The female nursing staff of the Villiers-Pagan Clinic comprised a dozen full-time qualified nurses and six part-time trainees.
That Tuesday, the company at the midday meal numbered fourteen: nine qualified nurses, including Aurora, and five trainees. The meal was served at 12:15 p.m. and could be extended until 1 p.m. Then they had an hour’s free time, to return to their own rooms, to congregate in the room set aside for reading and correspondence, or to walk in the garden.
When Mademoiselle Malianova went into the refectory, thirteen women were sitting around a long rectangular table, at one end of which the tall, wide and buxom Madame Bliss was enthroned.
“Ah, here’s Aurora!... Aurora…. Mademoiselle… Good day… How are you?... Are you hungry?... Good weather we’re having, yesterday and this morning… Have you been lucky enough to take advantage of it?... How is your sister?”
All of these remarks, and others, took flight while Mademoiselle Malianova made a circuit of the table, starting with Madame Bliss, shaking hands, smiling and speaking politely. Finally, she sat down, and they “attacked the starter.”
Afterwards, during the brief lapse of time in which they waited for the two serving-women to serve the main course, each making a half-circuit of the table, they chatted, as usual. It was also usual for the nurse who was coming back from her day off to ask the ritual question, addressing herself primarily to Madame Bliss: “Is there anything new in the house?”
It was always the matron who answered first. Once the recent news had been imparted, until the end of the meal, everyone as at liberty to indulge in one-to-one or general conversation, with neither constraint nor formality, the general ambience, so far as the nurses in the refectory were concerned, traditionally being one of individual independence, reciprocal courtesy and universal good humor. So, also having personal reasons for not missing out on the habitual rite, Mademoiselle Malianova asked: “Is there anything new in the house?”
It was obvious that Madame Bliss was expecting the question. She replied immediately, with her customary complacency, but with an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of events: “New? Yes, indeed. That handsome young Frenchman—his name’s Leo Saint-Clair, isn’t it?—is no longer in the clinic. He left yesterday afternoon, with his friends, at 6 p.m.”
“Ah!” said Aurora. She needed all her self-composure not to betray her immense surprise, in which there as a good deal of disappointment. In the most natural tone that she could contrive, she said: “That’s not surprising. The wound on his temple has almost healed, and there was nothing in his general state of health to prevent him leaving.” While she served herself from the tray that the serving-woman offered to her, she added: “Nothing else?”
“No,” replied Madame Bliss. “Nothing new in matters of duty. But yesterday evening at the theater—that bomb! We were only able to cast an eye over the newspapers. What are they saying about it in town?”
From then until the end of the meal, the conversation was desultory, sometimes individual and sometimes general, and concerned the outrage in the Grand Theater—about which Aurora, prudently reserved, claimed to know nothing, because she had not left her sister’s side, had not gone into town and had not read the newspapers. After the dessert and the regulation cup of coffee, Mademoiselle Malianova retired to her room—but she was unable to settle down to anything there. Disconcerted and irritated, she stamped her feet and threw away the Russian cigarettes that she smoked nervously, without finishing them, until the impatiently-awaited time came for her to go back on duty. The bomb at the Grand Theater? A solitary anarchist, no doubt, since Grigoryi had not said anything about it.
The “departure” of Leo Saint-Clair upset the clever and diabolically perfidious plan that she had agreed with Grigoryi Alexandrovich to lead the son of the engineer Pierre Saint-Clair into a trap in the Rive neighborhood. She was therefore wounded in her feminine vanity—for she had clearly seen the violent and profound impression that her beauty had made on the young man—and, at the same time, furious at the unforeseeable difficulty and cruelly disappointed with respect to her hopes of rapid and complete success.
I’d very much like to know why he left, and where he and his three companions have gone! she said to herself.
Her mind was tense as she went to the directorial office. As she did every day, she had to wait there for Doctor de Villiers-Pagan at 2 p.m., after taking over from the temporary secretary. The latter was a cheerful and pretty 25-year-old native of Bern, romantically named Dorothy Paschall. She “handed over” to the full-time secretary, and rushed off to eat with the nurses in the “guard-room,” for she was very hungry, despite the optional milk chocolate of which she had partaken, as a precaution, at 11 a.m.
Mademoiselle Malianova was not alone for long in front of the forms, files and round schedules in the directorial office. She had only been there five minutes when Monsieur de Villiers-Pagan came in. He was serious, absorbed and rather distant, as usual, but extremely soft-spoken and courteous, speaking in a steady, tranquil and benevolent manner.
“Good day, Monsieur Medical Director!” the nurse said, ritually, as she got up.
“Good day, Mademoiselle. A pleasant day off? Yes? Perfect.” Immediately, in the most normal tone of professional communication, he continued: “Our interesting Nyctalope has departed. He’s going back to France with his comrades. Our care would have been superfluous henceforth. A strange boy, who has become a phenomenon that I would have liked to study further, at leisure—but he’s promised to come back in a few weeks. On his behalf, Mademoiselle, I renew the prescription of absolute secrecy regarding everything that concerns Monsieur Saint-Clair and the adventure in which circumstances have presently embroiled him. That’s understood, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Monsieur,” stammered Aurora, slightly disconcerted by the evidence that a window of opportunity had closed in front of her and that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to open it again.
Should she question Monsieur de Villiers-Pagan? No one ever did that. It would be so unusual that the anomaly might give rise to suspicions. She had, therefore, to keep quiet. Was the matter going to rest there? Yes, at least for the moment—for the medical director went on, as simply and peremptory as ever:
“Let’s see. Bring the round schedule for Ward Three. We’ve done an appendectomy this morning; the patient has been pout in room eight. Come on!”
Mechanically obedient to the normal rules, the nurse opened a cupboard and took out a bonnet, a smock and a pair of rubber gloves, all of which were immaculate, having come directly from the autoclave and the linen-room. Monsieur de Villiers-Pagan did likewise, and the both went out of the directorial office to go, as they did every afternoon, to do their simple duty as physician and assistant nurse.
Now, this is why Leo Saint-Clair and his three companions had left the clinic in which he had become “the Nyctalope” at 6 p.m. the previous evening.
At the Council of War held between the four young men, General le Breuil and Doctor de Villiers-Pagan, Saint-Clair had said: “Let’s deliberate. Let’s take the questions one by one. In the light of the facts we have, we might see some hypotheses emerging, and one or more plans of action.” Then, everyone had talked freely. Each intelligence made its contribution. The deliberation lasted three hours, and it was at the beginning of the third hour that the light finally dawned, astonishing, admirable and with divine clarity, in Leo Saint-Clair’s mind.
The idea that had just occurred to him was a fecund amalgam of everything that had been said thus far; it was as ingenious and wise in reality as it was crazy and hare-brained in appearance. It was audacious and original, and its execution involved terrible dangers. Gradually, however, experience, the official connections in Switzerland of the general, science and the exterior means of Monsieur de Villiers-Pagan contributed t
o the equipment of the idea of genius with a shape that rendered it, in the final analysis, acceptable and practicable. When all the numerous, complicated and delicate details of its execution were finally in place, the session was ended, after everyone had made a solemn oath only to reveal the resolutions that had been taken to those individuals who were directly involved in the plan’s execution.
“I shall succeed,” said Leo Saint-Clair, coldly, “unless death prevents me—that alone will be capable of it.” Suddenly becoming cheerful, he added: “Bah! One doesn’t die at 20!”
The Nyctalope spent an hour in Doctor de Villiers-Pagan’s private laboratory. When he came out again, the upper part of his face was concealed beneath the pulled-down brim of a fur hat, and a muffler was pulled up almost as far as his eyes. In the meantime, General Le Breuil went to use the telephone in his brother-in-law’s private apartment.
During that hour, Champeau, Croqui and Degains went to pick up the automobile, the grey roadster, which had been restored to good working order. They had paid the bill at the Hôtel du Pélican and recovered their luggage.
In the entrance-yard of the clinic, the four young Frenchmen had embarked in their vehicle, which drew away in the midst of cries of “Thanks!... Au revoir!... A bientôt!... Thanks!... Thanks!... We’ll give your regards to Paris!... We’ll be back!... Au revoir!”
Immediately after this departure, General Le Breuil and Monsieur de Villiers-Pagan had gone separately to Geneva, where each of them had important visits to make.
Meanwhile, the grey roadster did not go across the Swiss-French border, as everything had implied; it did not even go into Geneva. Nor far from the town, in the vicinity of the locale known as “Les Paquès,” the automobile suddenly slowed down.
“Anything?” asked Saint-Clair.
“Nothing!” declared Degans, who was inspecting the section of road visible behind the vehicle.
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