“Let’s see—let me get my bearings,” Castillan murmured. “The safe’s near the fireplace, on the right, sealed into the wall, lacquered in white. It’s this way.”
He drew Forteau along. Then, taking possession of the lantern, he raised it to head height and paraded it over the wall. “Here it is.” Turning toward his accomplice, delighted by the facility of the expedition, he said: “That’s what it’s necessary to open. Can you?”
“Oh la la! Necessary to know me. I’m Le Crabe. I...”
“I know, I know!” Castillan cut in. “Let’s go. Open it. I’ll hold the light.”
Glorious, the scoundrel spat into his hands. He put his bag on the ground. He rummaged in it, and brought out a crowbar, a drill, a stout hammer, a long chisel and a screwdriver. With a sharp rap he tested the sonority of the safe.
“It’s iron,” he affirmed. “Doesn’t matter. There’s plenty of time.”
Taking back the lantern, he examined the lock profoundly. Then he set to work. He deployed, contracted and rotted his crustacean appendices. Sometimes, he paused. He listened. The clock chimed the half hour, holding him alert for a moment. Then he recommenced, with a more prudent tenacity, attacking the hinges.
“Don’t hurry…don’t make a noise…we have all night,” Castillan advised him, striving to project the light usefully.
He was stiff with impatience, though. Every movement of his accomplice, every new bite of the file brought the possession of the world closer. Oh, that serum, how he could profit from it! With its aid, he would become the first among kings, the master of the world. Neither the armies and fleets of a bellicose potentate, nor the billons of a Vanderbilt, nor the domination of a pope would equal his power and glory! With its aid, above all—yes, above all—he would finally hold Lambrine captive, subservient, a prisoner in a cage of gold and diamonds...
“Ha!” said Le Crabe, with a final contraction of his pincers.
The door had just given way. They had to combine their efforts to prevent it from falling. They caught it, and laid it carefully on the ground.
“Well? Is that tidy?” said Forteau, proudly, wiping his face with the back of his sleeve.
“Perfect! You’re a master!”
Feverishly, Castillan illuminated the interior of the cupboard. Rows of flasks labeled in red displayed their unequal silhouettes. He seized one and drew it toward his eyes. A subtle perfume of bitter almonds emerged from it.
“Prussic acid,” he read, in a low voice.
He replaced the redoubtable bottle.
“No, the flasks only contain toxins. The serum is definitely distributed in ampoules, contained in a box. Let’s look on the upper shelf.”
He raised himself up on tiptoe, moved other bottles aide, and scrutinized the depths of the safe.
Suddenly exultant, he exclaimed: “A box! That’s the serum! Yes, it’s labeled. The notes now…the formula.” Drunk with the imminent possession, he added: “Pass me a stool!”
What? Why was Forteau delayed in advancing him a seat? Why was he digging his pincers into his arm and squeezing, squeezing as if to crush him?”
“Don’t move! There’s someone…close the lamp...”
Castillan did not have the time.
The electricity, turned on full, abruptly illuminated the laboratory. From the vast chimney-breast, where she had been hiding behind the fire-screen, a woman emerged.
“Casque de Lune!” bellowed Forteau.
“Yes, my mate, it’s Casque de Lune!”
Very pale beneath the streaks of soot that were staining her face, but pert even so, Francette turned to the physician.
“Yes, M’sieur Castillan, it’s your chambermaid, resuscitated to take a look at your fine work.” A loud burst of laughter uncovered her teeth. Then folding her arms, her eyebrows furrowed, suddenly furious she went on: “It’s stronger than mêlé-cass, eh? You weren’t expecting to see me play Santa Claus, emerging from the chimney? You were saying: ‘Emptied, Francette, dead and gone.’ But no! When Le Crabe planted his shiv in my heart…you remember, my mate?...I certainly thought I wouldn’t be opening my poor peepers again. But M’sieur le Docteur, it’s not only you who has science and skill! There’s another, who saved me, by taking out three ribs! And they were prime ribs, too!”
Again she burst out laughing—a slightly too strident laughter, which still had a hint of fever. Then she looked at the two men. Motionless, in the attitude in which she had frozen them with stupor, they were rolling their eyes like hunted beasts. And Forteau was caressing the knife in his pocket.
“Let me talk, my mate…there’s no point in you preparing your blade. I’m armored…I’m unsplittable. I’ll tell you who fixed me up. It’s Doisteau, M’sieur le Docteur—a true one, a pure one, that one. But less my ribs, I wasn’t content, as you might think. I needed my revenge. Especially since Mademoiselle Jeanne, my petite patronne, suspected that the good doctor was planning a new scheme around the safe, with his mate, So, hup! Out of bed. One ditched the convalescence. And do you know who told me that you were working in the Rue Méchain this evening, my old Crabe? Do you know? Shall I tell you? It’s your mate Asticot, my lover. Or rather, it’s the good doctor’s letter that I read in passing, before he gave it to you...”
But Forteau had brought his knife into the open. Terrible, his face contracted, with the drool of a mad dog on his lips, he pounced upon Francette, his arm raised, in a formidable surge. Briskly, she leapt sideways.
“What a greedyguts! He wants second helpings!”
She had leapt toward the window. With a gesture, she raised the long blind that was hanging down to the floor. Four agents, revolvers in hand, a Commissaire de Police and Monsieur Dutoit appeared.
“Pinched, Le Crabe!” cried Francette.
The revolvers were aimed at him.
“In the name of the law, I arrest you!” declare the Commissaire.
“All right! I’m done!” groaned the brute, dropping his knife. He held out his pincers for the handcuffs.
Castillan, livid, his eyes bulging, watched that coup de théâtre with his entire being in disarray. He calculated his disaster. What a downfall, at the very moment of triumph, at the very moment when his hand had taken possession of the serum! What a collapse of his dreams of domination! It was all over. No escape, no explanation was possible. For those witnesses, hidden behind the curtains, the complicity was undeniable. They would delve into the past. They would demand that he pay for his crimes. What a scandal....
Castillan caught in flagrante delicto committing burglary, accused of murder, dragged to the court of assizes. And Lambrine, who had led him to the crime, Lambrine would pass into other arms, Lambrine was lost forever...
No, no, not that. Better to finish it immediately. Come on, courage! Stick out the shirt-front, one last time...
They were completing the shackling of his accomplice. They were about to turn toward him. He stiffened, stuck out his chest, raised his handsome lustrous head, Rapidly, he seized the bottle whose red label he had read from the safe, uncorked it, recognized the subtle perfume of bitter almonds. For a second, he raised it in front of him, in the elegant gesture of a toast. Then, enveloping the audience with a look of disdain, he put it to his lips before anyone could leap upon him.
They ran forward. He was already nothing more than an inert mass.
“Pig-headed, to the last!” reflected Dutoit, addressing the Commissaire.
“Oh, Monsieur le Conseiller,” the latter replied, “let’s not complain about that! It saves us work!”
Francette, however, was holding on to the curtain with her hand clenched. Her strength had abandoned her. She had wanted to come out too soon, in spite of the worthy Doisteau, for her petit patrons. Her heart was still hurting. She had to sit down.
Gamine to the end, however, she murmured, while they led Forteau away and picked up Castillan’s cadaver:
“All that doesn’t get me my prime ribs back.”
III
<
br /> On the morning that followed that tragic night, Mirande crossed the threshold of the sanitarium. Jeanne had got him released without difficulty. The attempted burglary, followed by Castillan’s suicide, testified that the young scientist had not departed from the truth, prodigious and implausible as it seemed. Brimmel, the medical examiner, was forced to recognize his error and hastened to repair it.
Furthermore, without even waiting for the presence of an advocate, Forteau had talked, before the examining magistrate. Certainly, he was a man to keep his word, to protect his accomplice, to maintain a grim silence regarding the murder in the Avenue Raphael, even though he was henceforth convicted of being its author—but with Castillan dead, there was no need to shield him. And he did not hesitate, in order to attenuate his culpability, to demonstrate that he had only been an instrument in the doctor’s hands.
Those confessions simplified Mirande’s task, for he intended to use his liberty, above all, to obtain that of his friend. When Jeanne told him about the night’s events, he did not abandon himself to triumph, to the great satisfaction of seeing an obscure justice repair so many iniquities at a stroke, nor even to the hopes awakened to him by the sudden widowhood of Simone. He wanted an immediate grace to open the prison gates before Lacaze, while awaiting a certain revision.
Thus far, Raucourt had only had one opportunity to testify his benevolence, by postponing the prisoner’s departure for Guyana. Evidently, he would be favorable to a prompt release. But Mirande was apprehensive of bureaucratic slowness, of the instinctive reluctance of men of law to let go of their prey. He therefore resolved to request a new audience with the Minister and to put himself in possession beforehand of his power of divination.
Since the ordeal from which he had scarcely emerged, the serum inspired a kind of terror and repulsion in him, but he had need of it, in that supreme encounter with Raucourt, to assure himself of a superiority over his adversary.
Already, under the action of the injection, he had presented himself at the Ministry at the same time as the previous occasion. Castillan’s suicide and the confessions of his accomplice were certainly known to Raucourt. He hoped, therefore, to be received without delay, even though he had made no arrangement in advance.
An unexpected hitch, however, derailed his project. The minister was absent, the two sphinxes in the vestibule assured him. On his insistence, a young attaché intervened. He certified that Raucourt was in the Chambre, retained by the budget debate. The session might last a long time; it was impossible to reach him as long as he was on the benches.
Mirande only obtained the meager satisfaction—ordinarily refused to the visitor who finds a door closed—of knowing that the Minister really was absent. The young attaché was speaking as he thought.
Disappointed, he briefly explained the urgency of the matter. In his own interest, Raucourt ought not to leave Lacaze in prison any longer. He was assured that the minister would receive his request as soon as he returned from the Chambre. Mirande would be summoned that evening, as soon as possible, by a telephone call.
He returned, therefore, to the Rue Monge. Jeanne was absent. He was ready to enjoy the repose of solitude, the mental silence whose release was so precious when he exercised his power, but the telephone rang.
What? He was being summoned to the Justice already? Had the Minister returned prematurely? As long as an unexpected fall had not deprived him of that support on the eve of success.
In a glad surprise, however, an expansion of his entire being, he recognized Simone’s voice.
Oh, how he would have liked to read within her, after Castellan’s tragic death, the revelation of the frightful past! Did she miss him after all? Or was she, on the contrary, congratulating herself on being free, on belonging to herself? And, in her most secret self, was she turning toward her childhood friend?
Alas, she was far away. To listen to the sound of her soul, he would have required the radiance of her presence.
And it was a new, irritating sensation, while being in possession of his power, to hear a voice and not to be able to perceive the thought...
His chagrin was brief, however. Simone wanted to see them—him and his sister. She was making sure of their presence.
He replied that she would find him at home, and that Jeanne would soon return. He did not have the courage to pronounce banal condolences. In any case, she was leaving. In ten minutes, she would be there.
To distract his impatience, he sought an explanation for Simone’s visit. Doubtless, in the disturbance into which the tragic disappearance of her husband had cast her, alone and without support, she was taking refuge, on an instinctive impulse, with the companions of her childhood...
And indeed, as soon as he had welcomed her and taken her into the little drawing room, she confessed her solitude and her distress, but also her shame at having been mixed up, involuntarily, in the odious machination, of having drawn to herself the heritage reserved for Lacaze. Although innocent, she wanted to beg Jeanne’s pardon for all that she must have suffered...
She avoided talking about her husband, but every time her thought was brought back to him, she drew away immediately, with a repulsion, horror and alarm that did not escape Mirande’s clairvoyance.
She did not know—and must remain unaware of it forever—that Castillan had wanted to put her in the tomb alive, and that, but for a miracle, she would have counted among the number of his victims.
He tried to soothe her. The entire frightful past ought to be no more than a fever dream, a vision of delirium. Henceforth, she needed calm and quietude, in the interest of her health. At that price, and only at that price, she could avoid a recurrence of the terrible attack that had laid her low and left her for dead. Persuasive and pressing, he begged her to attempt the cure of forgetfulness.
“How good you are,” she murmured.
Then she let herself go, overwhelmed by lassitude.
“Forget…but can one forget? Oh, so it’s true that everything must be paid for, or at least that everything holds one, enchains one? Why did I not find the strength within me to rest all the voices that pushed me toward that marriage, in the name of custom, of convention? All that I could have avoided...”
Softly, he said to her: “But after that frightful detour, you’re returned to yourself. You’ve become once again the Simone of old, the Simone of Chatigny.”
Oh, how he would have liked to complete his thought! But the mourning of the day before…one scorns a living man, but one respects a dead one. And then, the disproportion of fortunes, although attenuated, continued to separate them. Once again, he was a slave to his scruples.
It was her who loosened them. She sighed, gently, seductively: “But those who surrounded me then, they haven’t changed?”
An, overwhelmed by joy, he perceived, prolonging the sentence, the mute, sweet appeal of tenderness that encouraged him.
He put his hands together in a kind of ecstasy. “Oh, Simone, I loved you then, but you’re even dearer to me now.”
Then she murmured, so quietly that the words and the thought were confounded: “Well, we’ll begin our life again...”
He kissed her forehead. So many dramas and alarms, so much blackness, ha brief sojourn among the mad…and that heroic Francette, who had been sent to finish her convalescence in the sun of the Midi, but who, well recompensed with an annual pension, would carry away the bruise of her excessively humble heart, and also the mourning of her ribs, removed from precisely where that heart beat to powerfully for the petit patron…! Yes, so many frightful events, and suddenly, this gift of Simone, his dazzling promise, this splendid dawn! He wondered whether he was living in reality, if that abrupt passage from darkness to light had not blinded his reason.
He stammered: “Is that true? Is that really true?”
But at the same time, his powerful clairvoyance reassured him. He only savored the sweet accord, the delicious harmony of speech and thought. Now, in the meditative silence, he fooled Simone in
her joyful reverie. He heard the voice of the heart, the mute prayer, the hymn of delight that sang the praise of the beloved, the hope of happiness, faith in the future: everything that words translate so poorly, all that they submerge, all that they diminish; everything that freezes and condenses on the lips.
Divinely privileged, he respired directly the incense that rose from the altar, before the exquisite vapor dispersed in the chilly air of the vaults...
Oh, if only he could communicate his power momentarily to Simone! How she would have been able to hear, in her turn, without the tiresome assistance of words, the explosion of gratitude and joy that was bursting forth within him.
He had drawn closer to her, in adoration.
“I wish I could express all that I’m experiencing, all that I feel. There’s such a fête within me...but I can’t talk. If you knew...”
She smile, full of tender and sincere indulgence. “It doesn’t matter. I know, in myself…”
But at that moment, a fatal comparison imposed itself on Simone’s mind. Oh, it was only a flash of memory—but it had the clear, luminous, brutal precision of a snapshot. Her memory evoked, in her parents’ drawing room, in the lamplight, Castillan’s first declaration…his abundant and gilded speech, his easy gesture, his flavorsome accent, his solid smile, his lustrous beard, his firm self-confidence...
A fleeting impression, which Simone was already chasing away in disgust—but Mirande had received it with a cruel rigidity. A fiery point, drilling into his brain, could not have inflicted a more frightful torture on him.
Had he had strength to suppress a cry, but he stood up, all the blood flowing away from his heart, in a heavy mass.
She saw his gesture, his pallor, and, more alarmed than if he had acted of his own accord, she said: “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
The Lynx Page 21