“Less likely,” Hanaud returned.
“Then you have authority now?”
“Yes. Even if I had not, I should assume that I had.”
“Isn’t that a risk for you?”
“But it is one that I have made up my mind to take.”
“Since when?”
“Since I have learnt why the Vicomte Cassandre de Mirandol was painting his gate with his own hands.”
Mr. Ricardo had to be content with an explanation which to him at all events was no explanation at all. Hanaud shut tight like an oyster. Not an answer to any conjecture, not a comment upon any theory. He just sat and smoked and smoked, lighting a fresh cigar from the stump of the old one, placid, unperturbed, a man enjoying the quiet digestion of an excellent dinner. To all appearances? No, to almost all. Mr. Ricardo would have been so tortured by exasperation that he must have flung reproaches, prayers, objurgations and threats in one incoherent spate across the table but for a lesson which he had learned on the day before. For though Hanaud smoked and smoked, and the disc of red waxed and waned at the end of his cigar with the regularity of a machine, his hands trembled from time to time even as de Mirandol’s had trembled when he was stooping at his gate.
Suddenly he sprang to his feet, and all his agitation was revealed in that spasmodic movement.
“Here is, I think, someone for me.”
A sergent-de-ville was walking at a stiff pace from the direction of the Cours 30th of July. Hanaud leaned out of the window and the sergeant came straight to him.
“Monsieur Hanaud?”
“Yes. Give it to me.”
The sergeant handed in the note through the window. Hanaud tore open the envelope and read, whilst Mr. Ricardo studied the changing expressions of his face. The note was fairly long though hurriedly written, and the expressions, beginning with disappointment, melted into boredom, graduated into perplexity and ended in laughter. Mr. Ricardo was never more startled. Hanaud was laughing aloud — he who ten minutes ago had shuddered. He was laughing pleasantly and happily. He was amused and he was glad. The full-throated roll of the laughter struck upon Mr. Ricardo’s ears as something quite unfamiliar and odd. And he realized with a shock that for two whole days he had heard no one laugh until this moment.
“You have good news at last,” he cried.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “It is not the sort of news you would write to the house.”
“What house?” asked Ricardo in perplexity.
“But your house, of course, my friend,” Hanaud returned.
Julius Ricardo reflected and saw light. “I’ve got it,” he announced resignedly. “It’s not news to write home about, you mean.”
“Mean?” Hanaud inquired indignantly. “It was what I said.”
“Oh, very well! You said it! Now may I hear it?”
“Certainly! There has arrived yet another visitor from London. He, too, read the evening paper. He crossed by the night boat and caught the Sud Express from Paris. The Sud Express is late. Very well, he will write to The Times about it. He drives from the station to the Prefecture. Where is the Prefect? The newspaper says that Hanaud is on the case. Very well, then! Where is Hanaud? Goddam, where is everybody? Oh, I tell you again, he will make money in the City — that young man.”
“Bryce Carter,” Julius Ricardo exclaimed. “He is here?”
“Yes; the Knight of the Burning Letters. Oho! I have still to blow on my fingers when I think of them — so! He takes charge of the Prefecture of Bordeaux. They dare not tell him that Hanaud is eating his dinner. No, for he break up everything if they do. No! But, Goddam, Moreau is a clever fellow. He tells him Hanaud is disguised. Hush! That helps a bit. Hanaud is wearing a beard! What a blessing! Hanaud is once more the Cheka King! So Moreau sends him to your fine hotel on the Cours de L!’Intendance and promises him a note from me if only he will not break up the town. Aha, we must write him a little note. Georges,” he called to the proprietor, “some ink! What shall I write, my friend? A little dose of morphia, eh?” and with that his hilarity ceased and he sat gloomily nodding at his companion.
“Not so easy to concoct — that little dose of morphia—”
He wrote and tore up the sheet on which he had written. “That promises too much.” He wrote a second time and tore that sheet up too. “That does not even hint a promise of anything at all, and he has come so far.” He smiled ruefully and scratched his head, and set to work again. “So! And I underline those words. So! See — I write this:
Some time before morning I come to you. Meanwhile it is wise to put on the clean collar and shave. HANAUD.
And I underline the clean collar and the shave. What do you think?” and he leaned back asking for admiration with every crease of his waistcoat.
“It is not so bad,” Ricardo approved indulgently.
“It is very good,” said Hanaud with simplicity. He put the letter in the envelope, and fastening it down, addressed it and handed it to the sergent-de- ville. “It is a pleasant touch. That young man rushing across England and France to bully the Prefecture of Bordeaux. Where is that lazy-bones Hanaud? Why isn’t he waiting for me on the steps? Goddam! Yes, it is a pleasant touch, and I tell you” — he lit again the cigar which whilst concocting his little dose of morphia he had allowed to go out— “I tell you, we shall need all the pleasant little touches we can find when this dark and ugly story comes to be told from its beginning to its end.”
He relapsed once more into silence. The river was running grey now. The dusk deepened into night. The red and green lights on the great pillars of the Place des Quinconces by the quay glowed into significance. Under the limes the lamps of Ricardo’s motor-car shone bright. Once or twice Hanaud looked towards them. Almost he had made up his mind to wait no longer. But each time he caught himself back. “I must be right,” he said in a low voice; and now not only his hands, but his voice shook to keep them company. Ricardo had never seen him torn by so much doubt or plunged in a distress so deep. A dreadful responsibility weighed upon him and set him now to shuffling his feet upon the floor, now to beating upon the table with his fist. “I said at the beginning that I shrank from this affair,” he muttered, and then with an exclamation of relief he pushed back his chair and ran out on to the pavement. A man was running towards him, a short, stocky, broad man, Moreau.
“At last!” said Mr. Ricardo. He waved his hand to his chauffeur, who climbed down from his seat and opened the door of the limousine. He took down his hat. “Now we shall go,” he said, and he hurried to the car. But he looked back, and to his amazement the two men, the chief and his assistant, with their heads close together, were slowly pacing the dark avenue. The door of the car was open, the engine running, night had come, the Chateau Mirandol was fifty kilometres away — and there they were palavering. Ricardo could have screamed with indignation.
“Wonderful!” he cried, bitterly appealing to the world with outspread arms. “Miraculous! Do they think that I have no nerves — ?”
His invocation was cut short. Hanaud turned and ran towards him, with Moreau at his heels.
“Quick!” he said in a whisper, and there was a thrill of excitement in his voice.
He bundled Ricardo unceremoniously into the car, and jumped in after him. Moreau took the seat beside the chauffeur and the car glided out from beneath the trees. At the top of the square it turned to the left. At once Mr. Ricardo was in a state of extreme agitation.
“He is wrong. He should turn to the right for the Rue de Medoc,” and he leaned across Hanaud to seize the speaking-tube. But Hanaud already held it.
“He is right. He should turn to the left for the Rue Gregoire,” said Hanaud.
The car glided without noise or effort down the long, straight street, left the great clustered lights behind it, and came into a cool gloom of narrower ways and shuttered houses. It turned to the right and again to the left. A wide space opened out. On one side of it the mass of a great church loomed immense and black. In the middle a
great tower shot upwards like a giant’s spear, and the top of it was lost in darkness. By the side of that tower the car stopped.
“The tower of St. Michel,” Mr. Ricardo whispered.
“Quick!” said Hanaud. “We have not a moment to lose.”
At the very spot where Ricardo had stood when he had hesitated at the entrance to the Cave of the Mummies, ages and ages ago, it seemed, this party of pursuit descended.
“Keep close to me,” Hanaud breathed, “and not a word.”
He crossed the square to the mouth of a little street. A gendarme stood near a lamp, the light shining upon his accoutrements. He did not shift from his position. Hanaud and his company were engulfed in the street. It was short and straight. At the far end the lights of the quay were visible. But here the houses, squalid and forbidding and black, rose to so high a level that they seemed to be walking in a cavern. Suddenly two men seemed to spring from the stones of a wall and closed in behind them.
“Not a sound,” whispered Hanaud.
Half-way down the street two other men emerged from the archway of a great porte cochere. “It is here,” said one of them.
“The door,” whispered Hanaud. For the great double doors were closed.
“We opened it when we saw the lights of your car,” said the man, and at his touch the door swung open. One by one they slipped in, and behind them the door was gently closed again and gently locked. They stood in a vault of darkness. Once in the days of the greatness of Bordeaux, when a king held his Court there and Monsieur de Tourny was summoning the great artists of Europe to rebuild it in beauty, this house in the Rue Gregoire sheltered some wealthy merchant. Now fallen upon an evil day, the far end of its archway built up with bricks, in a street grown infamous, it stood noisome and decrepit, its grimy walls running with moisture.
Mr. Ricardo stood in the blackness of the pit, his heart hammering within his breast. He had clamoured for thrills and excitements; he was shaking with them like a leaf. He heard the tiniest clink as though one key touched another, and a whispered “Hush!” from Hanaud. For the fraction of a second, the pencil- light of an electric torch showed him the keyhole of a house door and one of the men bending down in front of it, and then the door opening.
“There is one step,” said Hanaud, but in a breath so low that Ricardo’s neighbour could not have heard it. Ricardo felt his arm grasped firmly and lifted when he reached the step. The air, hot and close and stifling, warned him he was within the vestibule. Once more Hanaud’s voice breathed in his ear; “The house of the widow Chicholle!”
CHAPTER 19
HOME TRUTH FOR WIDOW CHICHOLLE
FOR A FEW moments they stood in silence, their ears alert, holding their breath. But no voice was lifted anywhere, no foot knocked upon a floor. Not even a board creaked or a door rattled in that old house. They might have been standing together in a catacomb a hundred feet beneath the earth. Then the pencil of golden light clove the darkness again, flickered over mildewed wall and discoloured ceiling, and shone steadily upon a distant door. Hanaud moved forward into the light and noiselessly opened that door inch by inch. He let it swing wider and went in. The others followed — Mr. Ricardo with a delicious thrill of fear running up and down his spine. At that moment he would not have exchanged his position for any other in the world. For he was dramatizing himself with a concentration so intense that but for some apprehension of Hanaud, he would have claimed the lead and issued orders aloud. He was his own spectator too. He sat in the stalls and whole-heartedly admired his performance. “The great ones of the earth!” he reflected. “Pooh to them all!” He had seen them or met them — more often seen them than met them, to be sure — and thought nothing of them at all. Which of them had crept at night with plain- clothes men into a house of infamy, searching for a — well, what? He stood stock-still and asked himself that question. The widow Chicholle? Yes, no doubt, since there was so close a cordon round Suvlac that no one could get through. But after all — the widow Chicholle? Were all these precautions necessary?
Hanaud had taken the electric torch into his own hand, and was exploring with its beam this inner hall. But it was rather a corridor than a hall, with a window at the end, a couple of doors upon the left, a broad staircase on the right, and close to the foot of the staircase another door of tattered green baize. But no sound penetrated from behind any of the three doors, nor did any light gleam beneath them. Hanaud opened the two doors upon the left to make sure. The rooms faced the Rue Gregoire, but they were both shuttered and empty. One of them was furnished cheaply as a sitting-room; the other was merely a place of cupboards and bare boards. Thereafter he stood for a while looking up the staircase and listening, it seemed, with every nerve of his body. But the upper storeys were as silent as this hall in which they stood. The stillness of death lay brooding throughout the house.
The door of green baize led to the offices and the kitchen, and here at all events they came upon signs of life, for a clock ticked upon the wall and the grate showed the dull red of an expiring fire.
“There will be good cellars to this old house,” said Hanaud, and though he spoke in a low and quiet voice, to Ricardo’s strained fancies it seemed loud enough to wake the town.
He came at the end of a passage to a narrow flight of stone steps which wound downwards into darkness. He bent his head, then turned it and shook it at his companions. By the light of the torch he carried his face showed white and desperately afraid; and the fear leaped from his face to the faces of all about him. For a moment they were numbed by the chill of an immense failure.
“But it must be!” Hanaud whispered. “It must be!”
No one contradicted him, but no one agreed. They even closed together a little as men will in the presence of some dreadful catastrophe. That tiny movement drove the dismay from Hanaud’s face. He threw back his head with defiance.
“My God, but it has got to be!” he said stubbornly.
With three swift flashes of his hand he bade two of his men and Ricardo to stay where they were and the rest to follow him. Himself he moved downwards, but he was still within their view when from beneath their very feet, so close at hand it seemed, a piercing scream shattered the silence.
Mr. Ricardo was startled out of his wits. Panic seized him by the heart. He reeled back against the wall, gasping for breath. But he was astounded as much as startled. For his eyes were upon Hanaud’s face, and he saw relief and triumph transfigure it. It took Mr. Ricardo a few seconds to reconcile that look with a scream of such terror as he had never thought human being could utter and go on living. Then he understood. Hanaud was in time; Hanaud was right.
He heard a heavy door slam and felt it shake the house. He saw Hanaud leap. Behind Hanaud the whole party clattered and trembled, Ricardo and the two men bidden to wait, with the rest of them.
“This is the moment to disobey orders,” cried Mr. Ricardo, with a vague recollection of other national heroes; and, “Attention!” cried Hanaud in a ringing voice.
The warning reached him just in time. For he tottered on the edge of a gaping hole in the floor of the cellar, and with a gasp recovered his balance. He recovered it to see a line of light beneath a door across the cellar suddenly vanish and to hear a heavy lantern crash upon a floor. Before the sound ceased to echo Hanaud was at the door. It was of thick, solid wood. Hanaud shook it; it was bolted. But there was a Judas at the level of the eyes to ventilate the cellar within. Hanaud tore it open. For a second his torch, held in his left hand, played upon wall and ceiling and floor. Then his right hand flashed to his pocket, something gleamed in it — a pistol barrel — and that hand too slipped within the Judas.
“Up with the hands — all three of you,” he cried. “So!” Then he spoke to the men behind him. “A lantern! Quick!” A match was struck, a lantern lit. “Now you, the widow Chicholle, open this door!”
There was a pause and then the shuffling of feet dragging in carpet slippers across the flags. “The paws up, mother, till you
reach the door!” he commanded. “That’s better!”
He withdrew the pistol as the woman approached, so that it could not be snatched from his hand; and then the bolt grated rustily out of its socket and the door swung open. Hanaud passed through the doorway and hung the lantern upon a nail. He stood in a small square cellar lined with plaster which was flaking off from the brick walls, and no air entered it but through the Judas and beneath the door. It was at once stiflingly close, clammily damp. Shut that heavy door and close the Judas fast, and it was a dungeon as black as night itself. The woman who had unbarred the door had retreated to the corner at the right of the door, and crouched huddled with her companions. There were three of them, all women — a young girl with a sullen face and jet-black hair who crouched on the ground, a woman of middle age, broad and big and strong as a man, with hands covered with clay, and the widow Chicholle herself, a ghoul of a woman with eyes sunk deep in a face which was splashed with black as though even before her death her body had begun to corrupt. Though she shuffled in carpet slippers, she wore an old dress of black silk, as the “patronne” of such a house should, and in spite of its shabbiness, with its trimmings and bugles of a past day, it added a nightmare touch of incongruity to the scene.
“I have done her no harm, m’sieu,” she whined, and, “You can see.”
“No, indeed! You have given her a fine boudoir to rest in whilst her bedroom was being prepared next door, eh, widow?” Hanaud cried with a savage irony, and the old woman shrank from him whimpering excuses and promises.
“Ah, there are others high up in the world more to blame than me! Come now! I am a poor woman , . and ignorant too — What should I do when those great ones order me — terrify me — ? Oh, I shall tell you about them — very sure, I shall tell you — They are wicked ones, trust me—” And with a snarl Hanaud cut her short.
“And that?” he cried, thrusting out his arm. Over his shoulder Mr. Ricardo saw a noose and a foot or so of rope dangling from a hook driven into the low ceiling to hold a lamp. “That pretty necklace goes very well with the boudoir! A present for a good girl, eh, widow? Monsieur!” and he turned to a man in the doorway who waited with an air of authority. “Those animals are for you.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 106