The Crystal Stopper
Maurice Le Blanc




CHAPTER I

THE ARRESTS

The two boats fastened to the little pier that jutted out from the garden
lay rocking in its shadow.  Here and there lighted windows showed through
the thick mist on the margins of the lake.  The Enghien Casino opposite
blazed with light, though it was late in the season, the end of September.
A few stars appeared through the clouds.  A light breeze ruffled the
surface of the water.

Arsene Lupin left the summer-house where he was smoking a cigar and,
bending forward at the end of the pier:

"Growler?" he asked.  "Masher?...  Are you there?"

A man rose from each of the boats, and one of them answered:

"Yes, governor."

"Get ready.  I hear the car coming with Gilbert and Vaucheray."

He crossed the garden, walked round a house in process of construction,
the scaffolding of which loomed overhead, and cautiously opened the door
on the Avenue de Ceinture.  He was not mistaken: a bright light flashed
round the bend and a large, open motor-car drew up, whence sprang two
men in great-coats, with the collars turned up, and caps.

It was Gilbert and Vaucheray: Gilbert, a young fellow of twenty or
twenty-two, with an attractive cast of features and a supple and sinewy
frame; Vaucheray, older, shorter, with grizzled hair and a pale, sickly
face.

"Well," asked Lupin, "did you see him, the deputy?"

"Yes, governor," said Gilbert, "we saw him take the 7.40 tram for Paris,
as we knew he would."

"Then we are free to act?"

"Absolutely.  The Villa Marie-Therese is ours to do as we please with."

The chauffeur had kept his seat.  Lupin gave him his orders:

"Don't wait here.  It might attract attention.  Be back at half-past nine
exactly, in time to load the car unless the whole business falls through."

"Why should it fall through?" observed Gilbert.

The motor drove away; and Lupin, taking the road to the lake with his two
companions, replied:

"Why? Because I didn't prepare the plan; and, when I don't do a thing
myself, I am only half-confident."

"Nonsense, governor!  I've been working with you for three years
now...I'm beginning to know the ropes!"

"Yes, my lad, you're beginning," said Lupin, "and that's just why I'm
afraid of blunders...Here, get in with me...And you, Vaucheray, take
the other boat...That's it...And now push off, boys...and make as
little noise as you can."

Growler and Masher, the two oarsmen, made straight for the opposite bank,
a little to the left of the casino.

They met a boat containing a couple locked in each other's arms, floating
at random, and another in which a number of people were singing at the
top of their voices.  And that was all.

Lupin shifted closer to his companion and said, under his breath:

"Tell me, Gilbert, did you think of this job, or was it Vaucheray's idea?"

"Upon my word, I couldn't tell you: we've both of us been discussing it
for weeks."

"The thing is, I don't trust Vaucheray: he's a low ruffian when one gets
to know him...I can't make out why I don't get rid of him..."

"Oh, governor!"

"Yes, yes, I mean what I say: he's a dangerous fellow, to say nothing of
the fact that he has some rather serious peccadilloes on his conscience."

He sat silent for a moment and continued:

"So you're quite sure that you saw Daubrecq the deputy?"

"Saw him with my own eyes, governor."

"And you know that he has an appointment in Paris?"

"He's going to the theatre."

"Very well; but his servants have remained behind at the Enghien 
villa..."

"The cook has been sent away.  As for the valet, Leonard, who is
Daubrecq's confidential man, he'll wait for his master in Paris.  They
can't get back from town before one o'clock in the morning.  But..."

"But what?"

"We must reckon with a possible freak of fancy on Daubrecq's part, a
change of mind, an unexpected return, and so arrange to have everything
finished and done with in an hour."

"And when did you get these details?"

"This morning.  Vaucheray and I at once thought that it was a favourable
moment.  I selected the garden of the unfinished house which we have just
left as the best place to start from; for the house is not watched at
night.  I sent for two mates to row the boats; and I telephoned to you.
That's the whole story."

"Have you the keys?"

"The keys of the front-door."

"Is that the villa which I see from here, standing in its own grounds?"

"Yes, the Villa Marie-Therese; and as the two others, with the gardens
touching it on either side, have been unoccupied since this day week,
we shall be able to remove what we please at our leisure; and I swear to
you, governor, it's well worth while."

"The job's much too simple," mumbled Lupin.  "No charm about it!"

They landed in a little creek whence rose a few stone steps, under cover
of a mouldering roof.  Lupin reflected that shipping the furniture would
be easy work.  But, suddenly, he said:

"There are people at the villa.  Look...a light."

"It's a gas-jet, governor.  The light's not moving."

The Growler stayed by the boats, with instructions to keep watch, while
the Masher, the other rower, went to the gate on the Avenue de Ceinture,
and Lupin and his two companions crept in the shadow to the foot of the
steps.

Gilbert went up first.  Groping in the dark, he inserted first the big
door-key and then the latch-key.  Both turned easily in their locks, the
door opened and the three men walked in.

A gas-jet was flaring in the hall.

"You see, governor..." said Gilbert.

"Yes, yes," said Lupin, in a low voice, "but it seems to me that the
light which I saw shining did not come from here..."

"Where did it come from then?"

"I can't say...Is this the drawing-room?"

"No," replied Gilbert, who was not afraid to speak pretty loudly, "no.
By way of precaution, he keeps everything on the first floor, in his
bedroom and in the two rooms on either side of it."

"And where is the staircase?"

"On the right, behind the curtain."

Lupin moved to the curtain and was drawing the hanging aside when,
suddenly, at four steps on the left, a door opened and a head appeared,
a pallid man's head, with terrified eyes.

"Help! Murder!" shouted the man.

And he rushed back into the room.

"It's Leonard, the valet!" cried Gilbert.

"If he makes a fuss, I'll out him," growled Vaucheray.

"You'll jolly well do nothing of the sort, do you hear, Vaucheray?" said
Lupin, peremptorily.  And he darted off in pursuit of the servant.  He
first went through a dining-room, where he saw a lamp still lit, with
plates and a bottle around it, and he found Leonard at the further end
of a pantry, making vain efforts to open the window:

"Don't move, sportie!  No kid!  Ah, the brute!"

He had thrown himself flat on the floor, on seeing Leonard raise his arm
at him.  Three shots were fired in the dusk of the pantry; and then the
valet came tumbling to the ground, seized by the legs by Lupin, who
snatched his weapon from him and gripped him by the throat:

"Get out, you dirty brute!" he growled.  "He very nearly did for me...
Here, Vaucheray, secure this gentleman!"

He threw the light of his pocket-lantern on the servant's face and
chuckled:

"He's not a pretty gentleman either... You can't have a very clear
conscience, Leonard; besides, to play flunkey to Daubrecq the deputy...!
Have you finished, Vaucheray?  I don't want to hang about here for ever!"

"There's no danger, governor," said Gilbert.

"Oh, really?...So you think that shots can't be heard?..."

"Quite impossible."

"No matter, we must look sharp. Vaucheray, take the lamp and let's go
upstairs."

He took Gilbert by the arm and, as he dragged him to the first floor:

"You ass," he said, "is that the way you make inquiries?  Wasn't I right
to have my doubts?"

"Look here, governor, I couldn't know that he would change his mind and
come back to dinner."

"One's got to know everything when one has the honour of breaking into
people's houses.  You numskull!  I'll remember you and Vaucheray...a
nice pair of gossoons!..."

The sight of the furniture on the first floor pacified Lupin and he
started on his inventory with the satisfied air of a collector who has
looked in to treat himself to a few works of art:

"By Jingo!  There's not much of it, but what there is is pucka!  There's
nothing the matter with this representative of the people in the question
of taste.  Four Aubusson chairs...A bureau signed 'Percier-Fontaine,' for
a wager...Two inlays by Gouttieres...A genuine Fragonard and a sham
Nattier which any American millionaire will swallow for the asking: in
short, a fortune...And there are curmudgeons who pretend that there's
nothing but faked stuff left.  Dash it all, why don't they do as I do?
They should look about!"

Gilbert and Vaucheray, following Lupin's orders and instructions, at
once proceeded methodically to remove the bulkier pieces.  The first boat
was filled in half an hour; and it was decided that the Growler and the
Masher should go on ahead and begin to load the motor-car.

Lupin went to see them start.  On returning to the house, it struck him,
as he passed through the hall, that he heard a voice in the pantry.  He
went there and found Leonard lying flat on his stomach, quite alone,
with his hands tied behind his back:

"So it's you growling, my confidential flunkey?  Don't get excited: it's
almost finished.  Only, if you make too much noise, you'll oblige us to
take severer measures...Do you like pears?  We might give you one, you
know: a choke-pear!..."

As he went upstairs, he again heard the same sound and, stopping to
listen, he caught these words, uttered in a hoarse, groaning voice, which
came, beyond a doubt, from the pantry:

"Help!...Murder!...Help!...I shall be killed!... Inform the commissary!"

"The fellow's clean off his chump!" muttered Lupin.  "By Jove!...To
disturb the police at nine o'clock in the evening: there's a notion for
you!"

He set to work again.  It took longer than he expected, for they
discovered in the cupboards all sorts of valuable knick-knacks which it
would have been very wrong to disdain and, on the other hand, Vaucheray
and Gilbert were going about their investigations with signs of
laboured concentration that nonplussed him.

At long last, he lost his patience:

"That will do!" he said.  "We're not going to spoil the whole job and
keep the motor waiting for the sake of the few odd bits that remain.
I'm taking the boat."

They were now by the waterside and Lupin went down the steps.  Gilbert
held him back:

"I say, governor, we want one more look round five minutes, no longer."

"But what for, dash it all?"

"Well, it's like this: we were told of an old reliquary, something
stunning..."

"Well?"

"We can't lay our hands on it.  And I was thinking...There's a cupboard
with a big lock to it in the pantry...You see, we can't very well..."
He was already on his way to the villa.  Vaucheray ran back too.

"I'll give you ten minutes, not a second longer!" cried Lupin.  "In ten
minutes, I'm off."

But the ten minutes passed and he was still waiting.

He looked at his watch:

"A quarter-past nine," he said to himself.  "This is madness."

And he also remembered that Gilbert and Vaucheray had behaved rather
queerly throughout the removal of the things, keeping close together
and apparently watching each other.  What could be happening?

Lupin mechanically returned to the house, urged by a feeling of anxiety
which he was unable to explain; and, at the same time, he listened to a
dull sound which rose in the distance, from the direction of Enghien,
and which seemed to be coming nearer...People strolling about, no doubt...

He gave a sharp whistle and then went to the main gate, to take a glance
down the avenue.  But, suddenly, as he was opening the gate, a shot rang
out, followed by a yell of pain.  He returned at a run, went round the
house, leapt up the steps and rushed to the dining-room:

"Blast it all, what are you doing there, you two?"

Gilbert and Vaucheray, locked in a furious embrace, were rolling on the
floor, uttering cries of rage.  Their clothes were dripping with blood.
Lupin flew at them to separate them.  But already Gilbert had got his
adversary down and was wrenching out of his hand something which Lupin
had no time to see.  And Vaucheray, who was losing blood through a wound
in the shoulder, fainted.

"Who hurt him? You, Gilbert?" asked Lupin, furiously.

"No, Leonard."

"Leonard? Why, he was tied up!"

"He undid his fastenings and got hold of his revolver."

"The scoundrel! Where is he?"

Lupin took the lamp and went into the pantry.

The manservant was lying on his back, with his arms outstretched, a
dagger stuck in his throat and a livid face.  A red stream trickled from
his mouth.

"Ah," gasped Lupin, after examining him, "he's dead!"

"Do you think so?...Do you think so?" stammered Gilbert, in a trembling
voice.

"He's dead, I tell you."

"It was Vaucheray...it was Vaucheray who did it..."

Pale with anger, Lupin caught hold of him:

"It was Vaucheray, was it?...And you too, you blackguard, since you were
there and didn't stop him!  Blood!  Blood!  You know I won't have it...
Well, it's a bad lookout for you, my fine fellows...You'll have to pay
the damage!  And you won't get off cheaply either...Mind the guillotine!"
And, shaking him violently, "What was it?  Why did he kill him?"

"He wanted to go through his pockets and take the key of the cupboard
from him.  When he stooped over him, he saw that the man unloosed his
arms.  He got frightened...and he stabbed him..."

"But the revolver-shot?"

"It was Leonard...he had his revolver in his hand...he just had strength
to take aim before he died..."

"And the key of the cupboard?"

"Vaucheray took it..."

"Did he open it?"

"And did he find what he was after?"

"Yes."

"And you wanted to take the thing from him.  What sort of thing was it?
The reliquary?  No, it was too small for that...Then what was it?
Answer me, will you?..."

Lupin gathered from Gilbert's silence and the determined expression on
his face that he would not obtain a reply.  With a threatening gesture,
"I'll make you talk, my man.  Sure as my name's Lupin, you shall come out
with it.  But, for the moment, we must see about decamping.  Here, help
me.  We must get Vaucheray into the boat..."

They had returned to the dining-room and Gilbert was bending over the
wounded man, when Lupin stopped him:

"Listen."

They exchanged one look of alarm...Some one was speaking in the pantry
...a very low, strange, very distant voice...Nevertheless, as they at
once made certain, there was no one in the room, no one except the dead
man, whose dark outline lay stretched upon the floor.

And the voice spake anew, by turns shrill, stifled, bleating, stammering,
yelling, fearsome.  It uttered indistinct words, broken syllables.

Lupin felt the top of his head covering with perspiration.  What was
this incoherent voice, mysterious as a voice from beyond the grave?

He had knelt down by the man-servant's side.  The voice was silent and
then began again:

"Give us a better light," he said to Gilbert.

He was trembling a little, shaken with a nervous dread which he was
unable to master, for there was no doubt possible: when Gilbert had
removed the shade from the lamp, Lupin realized that the voice issued
from the corpse itself, without a movement of the lifeless mass,
without a quiver of the bleeding mouth.

"Governor, I've got the shivers," stammered Gilbert.

Again the same voice, the same snuffling whisper.

Suddenly, Lupin burst out laughing, seized the corpse and pulled it aside:

"Exactly!" he said, catching sight of an object made of polished metal.
"Exactly!  That's it!...Well, upon my word, it took me long enough!"

On the spot on the floor which he had uncovered lay the receiver of a
telephone, the cord of which ran up to the apparatus fixed on the wall,
at the usual height.

Lupin put the receiver to his ear.  The noise began again at once, but
it was a mixed noise, made up of different calls, exclamations, confused
cries, the noise produced by a number of persons questioning one another
at the same time.

"Are you there?...He won't answer.  It's awful...They must have killed
him.  What is it?...Keep up your courage.  There's help on the way...
police...soldiers..."

"Dash it!" said Lupin, dropping the receiver.

The truth appeared to him in a terrifying vision.  Quite at the beginning,
while the things upstairs were being moved, Leonard, whose bonds were not
securely fastened, had contrived to scramble to his feet, to unhook the
receiver, probably with his teeth, to drop it and to appeal for assistance
to the Enghien telephone-exchange.

And those were the words which Lupin had overheard, after the first boat
started:

"Help!...Murder!...I shall be killed!"

And this was the reply of the exchange.  The police were hurrying to the
spot.  And Lupin remembered the sounds which he had heard from the garden,
four or five minutes earlier, at most:

"The police!  Take to your heels!" he shouted, darting across the dining-
room.

"What about Vaucheray?" asked Gilbert.

"Sorry, can't be helped!"

But Vaucheray, waking from his torpor, entreated him as he passed:

"Governor, you wouldn't leave me like this!"

Lupin stopped, in spite of the danger, and was lifting the wounded man,
with Gilbert's assistance, when a loud din arose outside:

"Too late!" he said.

At that moment, blows shook the hall-door at the back of the house.  He
ran to the front steps: a number of men had already turned the corner
of the house at a rush.  He might have managed to keep ahead of them,
with Gilbert, and reach the waterside.  But what chance was there of
embarking and escaping under the enemy's fire?

He locked and bolted the door.

"We are surrounded...and done for," spluttered Gilbert.

"Hold your tongue," said Lupin.

"But they've seen us, governor.  There, they're knocking."

"Hold your tongue," Lupin repeated.  "Not a word. Not a movement."

He himself remained unperturbed, with an utterly calm face and the
pensive attitude of one who has all the time that he needs to examine a
delicate situation from every point of view.  He had reached one of those
minutes which he called the "superior moments of existence," those which
alone give a value and a price to life.  On such occasions, however
threatening the danger, he always began by counting to himself, slowly
--"One...Two...Three...Four...Five...Six"--until the
beating of his heart became normal and regular.  Then and not till then,
he reflected, but with what intensity, with what perspicacity, with what
a profound intuition of possibilities!  All the factors of the problem
were present in his mind.  He foresaw everything.  He admitted everything.
And he took his resolution in all logic and in all certainty.

After thirty or forty seconds, while the men outside were banging at the
doors and picking the locks, he said to his companion:

"Follow me."

Returning to the dining-room, he softly opened the sash and drew the
Venetian blinds of a window in the side-wall.  People were coming and
going, rendering flight out of the question.

Thereupon he began to shout with all his might, in a breathless voice:

"This way!...Help!...I've got them!...This way!"

He pointed his revolver and fired two shots into the tree-tops.  Then
he went back to Vaucheray, bent over him and smeared his face and hands
with the wounded man's blood.  Lastly, turning upon Gilbert, he took
him violently by the shoulders and threw him to the floor.

"What do you want, governor?  There's a nice thing to do!"

"Let me do as I please," said Lupin, laying an imperative stress on
every syllable.  "I'll answer for everything...I'll answer for the two
of you...Let me do as I like with you...I'll get you both out of prison
...But I can only do that if I'm free."

Excited cries rose through the open window.

"This way!" he shouted.  "I've got them! Help!"

And, quietly, in a whisper:

"Just think for a moment...Have you anything to say to me?...Something
that can be of use to us?"

Gilbert was too much taken aback to understand Lupin's plan and he
struggled furiously.  Vaucheray showed more intelligence; moreover, he
had given up all hope of escape, because of his wound; and he snarled:

"Let the governor have his way, you ass!...As long as he gets off, isn't
that the great thing?"

Suddenly, Lupin remembered the article which Gilbert had put in his
pocket, after capturing it from Vaucheray.  He now tried to take it in
his turn.

"No, not that!  Not if I know it!" growled Gilbert, managing to release
himself.

Lupin floored him once more.  But two men suddenly appeared at the window;
and Gilbert yielded and, handing the thing to Lupin, who pocketed it
without looking at it, whispered:

"Here you are, governor...I'll explain.  You can be sure that..."

He did not have time to finish...Two policemen and others after them and
soldiers who entered through every door and window came to Lupin's
assistance.

Gilbert was at once seized and firmly bound.  Lupin withdrew:

"I'm glad you've come," he said.  "The beggar's given me a lot of
trouble.  I wounded the other; but this one..."

The commissary of police asked him, hurriedly:

"Have you seen the man-servant?  Have they killed him?"

"I don't know," he answered.

"You don't know?..."

"Why, I came with you from Enghien, on hearing of the murder!  Only,
while you were going round the left of the house, I went round the right.
There was a window open.  I climbed up just as these two ruffians
were about to jump down.  I fired at this one," pointing to Vaucheray,
"and seized hold of his pal."

How could he have been suspected?  He was covered with blood.  He had
handed over the valet's murderers.  Half a score of people had witnessed
the end of the heroic combat which he had delivered.  Besides, the uproar
was too great for any one to take the trouble to argue or to waste time
in entertaining doubts.  In the height of the first confusion, the people
of the neighbourhood invaded the villa.  One and all lost their heads.
They ran to every side, upstairs, downstairs, to the very cellar.  They
asked one another questions, yelled and shouted; and no one dreamt of
checking Lupin's statements, which sounded so plausible.

However, the discovery of the body in the pantry restored the commissary
to a sense of his responsibility.  He issued orders, had the house
cleared and placed policemen at the gate to prevent any one from passing
in or out.  Then, without further delay, he examined the spot and began
his inquiry.  Vaucheray gave his name; Gilbert refused to give his, on
the plea that he would only speak in the presence of a lawyer.  But, when
he was accused of the murder, he informed against Vaucheray, who defended
himself by denouncing the other; and the two of them vociferated at the
same time, with the evident wish to monopolize the commissary's attention.
When the commissary turned to Lupin, to request his evidence, he
perceived that the stranger was no longer there.

Without the least suspicion, he said to one of the policemen:

"Go and tell that gentleman that I should like to ask him a few
questions."

They looked about for the gentleman.  Some one had seen him standing on
the steps, lighting a cigarette.  The next news was that he had given
cigarettes to a group of soldiers and strolled toward the lake, saying
that they were to call him if he was wanted.

They called him.  No one replied.

But a soldier came running up.  The gentleman had just got into a boat
and was rowing away for all he was worth.  The commissary looked at
Gilbert and realized that he had been tricked:

"Stop him!" he shouted.  "Fire on him! He's an accomplice!..."

He himself rushed out, followed by two policemen, while the others
remained with the prisoners.  On reaching the bank, he saw the gentleman,
a hundred yards away, taking off his hat to him in the dusk.

One of the policemen discharged his revolver, without thinking.

The wind carried the sound of words across the water.  The gentleman
was singing as he rowed:

		"Go, little bark,
		 Float in the dark..."

But the commissary saw a skiff fastened to the landing-stage of the
adjoining property.  He scrambled over the hedge separating the two
gardens and, after ordering the soldiers to watch the banks of the lake
and to seize the fugitive if he tried to put ashore, the commissary and
two of his men pulled off in pursuit of Lupin.

It was not a difficult matter, for they were able to follow his movements
by the intermittent light of the moon and to see that he was trying to
cross the lakes while bearing toward the right--that is to say, toward
the village of Saint-Gratien.  Moreover, the commissary soon perceived
that, with the aid of his men and thanks perhaps to the comparative
lightness of his craft, he was rapidly gaining on the other.  In ten
minutes he had decreased the interval between them by one half.

"That's it!" he cried.  "We shan't even need the soldiers to keep him
from landing.  I very much want to make the fellow's acquaintance.  He's
a cool hand and no mistake!"

The funny thing was that the distance was now diminishing at an abnormal
rate, as though the fugitive had lost heart at realizing the futility of
the struggle.  The policemen redoubled their efforts.  The boat shot
across the water with the swiftness of a swallow.  Another hundred yards
at most and they would reach the man.

"Halt!" cried the commissary.

The enemy, whose huddled shape they could make out in the boat, no longer
moved.  The sculls drifted with the stream.  And this absence of all
motion had something alarming about it.  A ruffian of that stamp might
easily lie in wait for his aggressors, sell his life dearly and even
shoot them dead before they had a chance of attacking him.

"Surrender!" shouted the commissary.

The sky, at that moment, was dark.  The three men lay flat at the bottom
of their skiff, for they thought they perceived a threatening gesture.

The boat, carried by its own impetus, was approaching the other.

The commissary growled:

"We won't let ourselves be sniped.  Let's fire at him. Are you ready?"
And he roared, once more, "Surrender...if not...!"

No reply.

The enemy did not budge.

"Surrender!...Hands up!...You refuse?...So much the worse for you...
I'm counting...One...Two..."

The policemen did not wait for the word of command.  They fired and, at
once, bending over their oars, gave the boat so powerful an impulse that
it reached the goal in a few strokes.

The commissary watched, revolver in hand, ready for the least movement.
He raised his arm:

"If you stir, I'll blow out your brains!"

But the enemy did not stir for a moment; and, when the boat was bumped
and the two men, letting go their oars, prepared for the formidable
assault, the commissary understood the reason of this passive attitude:
there was no one in the boat.  The enemy had escaped by swimming, leaving
in the hands of the victor a certain number of the stolen articles,
which, heaped up and surmounted by a jacket and a bowler hat, might be
taken, at a pinch, in the semi-darkness, vaguely to represent the figure
of a man.

They struck matches and examined the enemy's cast clothes.  There were
no initials in the hat.  The jacket contained neither papers nor
pocketbook.  Nevertheless, they made a discovery which was destined to
give the case no little celebrity and which had a terrible influence on
the fate of Gilbert and Vaucheray: in one of the pockets was a
visiting-card which the fugitive had left behind...the card of Arsene
Lupin.

At almost the same moment, while the police, towing the captured skiff
behind them, continued their empty search and while the soldiers stood
drawn up on the bank, straining their eyes to try and follow the fortunes
of the naval combat, the aforesaid Arsene Lupin was quietly landing at
the very spot which he had left two hours earlier.

He was there met by his two other accomplices, the Growler and the
Masher, flung them a few sentences by way of explanation, jumped into
the motor-car, among Daubrecq the deputy's armchairs and other valuables,
wrapped himself in his furs and drove, by deserted roads, to his
repository at Neuilly, where he left the chauffeur.  A taxicab brought
him back to Paris and put him down by the church of Saint-Philippe-du
-Roule, not far from which, in the Rue Matignon, he had a flat, on the
entresol-floor, of which none of his gang, excepting Gilbert, knew, a
flat with a private entrance.  He was glad to take off his clothes and
rub himself down; for, in spite of his strong constitution, he felt
chilled to the bone.  On retiring to bed, he emptied the contents of his
pockets, as usual, on the mantelpiece.  It was not till then that he
noticed, near his pocketbook and his keys, the object which Gilbert had
put into his hand at the last moment.

And he was very much surprised.  It was a decanter-stopper, a little
crystal stopper, like those used for the bottles in a liqueur-stand.
And this crystal stopper had nothing particular about it.  The most that
Lupin observed was that the knob, with its many facets, was gilded right
down to the indent.  But, to tell the truth, this detail did not seem to
him of a nature to attract special notice.

"And it was this bit of glass to which Gilbert and Vaucheray attached
such stubborn importance!" he said to himself.  "It was for this that
they killed the valet, fought each other, wasted their time, risked
prison...trial...the scaffold!..."

Too tired to linger further upon this matter, exciting though it appeared
to him, he replaced the stopper on the chimney-piece and got into bed.

He had bad dreams.  Gilbert and Vaucheray were kneeling on the flags of
their cells, wildly stretching out their hands to him and yelling with
fright:

"Help!...Help!" they cried.

But, notwithstanding all his efforts, he was unable to move.  He himself
was fastened by invisible bonds.  And, trembling, obsessed by a monstrous
vision, he watched the dismal preparations, the cutting of the condemned
men's hair and shirt-collars, the squalid tragedy.

"By Jove!" he said, when he woke after a series of nightmares.  "There's
a lot of bad omens!  Fortunately, we don't err on the side of
superstition.  Otherwise...!"  And he added, "For that matter, we have
a talisman which, to judge by Gilbert and Vaucheray's behaviour, should
be enough, with Lupin's help, to frustrate bad luck and secure the
triumph of the good cause.  Let's have a look at that crystal stopper!"

He sprang out of bed to take the thing and examine it more closely.  An
exclamation escaped him.  The crystal stopper had disappeared...



CHAPTER II

EIGHT FROM NINE LEAVES ONE

Notwithstanding my friendly relations with Lupin and the many flattering
proofs of his confidence which he has given me, there is one thing which
I have never been quite able to fathom, and that is the organization of
his gang.

The existence of the gang is an undoubted fact.  Certain adventures can
be explained only by countless acts of devotion, invincible efforts of
energy and powerful cases of complicity, representing so many forces
which all obey one mighty will.  But how is this will exerted?  Through
what intermediaries, through what subordinates?  That is what I do not
know.  Lupin keeps his secret; and the secrets which Lupin chooses to
keep are, so to speak, impenetrable.

The only supposition which I can allow myself to make is that this gang,
which, in my opinion, is very limited in numbers and therefore all the
more formidable, is completed and extended indefinitely by the addition
of independent units, provisional associates, picked up in every class
of society and in every country of the world, who are the executive
agents of an authority with which, in many cases, they are not even
acquainted.  The companions, the initiates, the faithful adherents--
men who play the leading parts under the direct command of Lupin--move
to and fro between these secondary agents and the master.

Gilbert and Vaucheray evidently belonged to the main gang.  And that is
why the law showed itself so implacable in their regard.  For the first
time, it held accomplices of Lupin in its clutches--declared, undisputed
accomplices--and those accomplices had committed a murder.  If the murder
was premeditated, if the accusation of deliberate homicide could be
supported by substantial proofs, it meant the scaffold.  Now there was,
at the very least, one self-evident proof, the cry for assistance which
Leonard had sent over the telephone a few minutes before his death:

"Help!...Murder!...I shall be killed!..."

The desperate appeal had been heard by two men, the operator on duty and
one of his fellow-clerks, who swore to it positively.  And it was in
consequence of this appeal that the commissary of police, who was at
once informed, had proceeded to the Villa Marie-Therese, escorted by his
men and a number of soldiers off duty.

Lupin had a very clear notion of the danger from the first.  The fierce
struggle in which he had engaged against society was entering upon a new
and terrible phase.  His luck was turning.  It was no longer a matter of
attacking others, but of defending himself and saving the heads of his
two companions.

A little memorandum, which I have copied from one of the note-books
in which he often jots down a summary of the situations that perplex him,
will show us the workings of his brain:

"One definite fact, to begin with, is that Gilbert and Vaucheray
humbugged me.  The Enghien expedition, undertaken ostensibly with the
object of robbing the Villa Marie-Therese, had a secret purpose.  This
purpose obsessed their minds throughout the operations; and what they
were looking for, under the furniture and in the cupboards, was one
thing and one thing alone: the crystal stopper.  Therefore, if I want to
see clear ahead, I must first of all know what this means.  It is certain
that, for some hidden reason, that mysterious piece of glass possesses
an incalculable value in their eyes.  And not only in theirs, for, last
night, some one was bold enough and clever enough to enter my flat and
steal the object in question from me."

This theft of which he was the victim puzzled Lupin curiously.

Two problems, both equally difficult of solution, presented themselves
to his mind.  First, who was the mysterious visitor?  Gilbert, who
enjoyed his entire confidence and acted as his private secretary, was
the only one who knew of the retreat in the Rue Matignon.  Now Gilbert
was in prison.  Was Lupin to suppose that Gilbert had betrayed him and
put the police on his tracks?  In that case, why were they content with
taking the crystal stopper, instead of arresting him, Lupin?

But there was something much stranger still.  Admitting that they had
been able to force the doors of his flat--and this he was compelled to
admit, though there was no mark to show it--how had they succeeded in
entering the bedroom?  He turned the key and pushed the bolt as he did
every evening, in accordance with a habit from which he never departed.
And, nevertheless--the fact was undeniable--the crystal stopper had
disappeared without the lock or the bolt having been touched.  And,
although Lupin flattered himself that he had sharp ears, even when
asleep, not a sound had waked him!

He took no great pains to probe the mystery.  He knew those problems too
well to hope that this one could be solved other than in the course of
events.  But, feeling very much put out and exceedingly uneasy, he then
and there locked up his entresol flat in the Rue Matignon and swore that
he would never set foot in it again.

And he applied himself forthwith to the question of corresponding with
Vaucheray or Gilbert.

Here a fresh disappointment awaited him.  It was so clearly understood,
both at the Sante Prison and at the Law Courts, that all communication
between Lupin and the prisoners must be absolutely prevented, that a
multitude of minute precautions were ordered by the prefect of police
and minutely observed by the lowest subordinates.  Tried policemen,
always the same men, watched Gilbert and Vaucheray, day and night, and
never let them out of their sight.

Lupin, at this time, had not yet promoted himself to the crowning honour
of his career, the post of chief of the detective-service,* and,
consequently, was not able to take steps at the Law Courts to insure the
execution of his plans.  After a fortnight of fruitless endeavours, he
was obliged to bow.
__________________________________________________________________________

*See 813, by Maurice Leblanc, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
__________________________________________________________________________

He did so with a raging heart and a growing sense of anxiety.

"The difficult part of a business," he often says, "is not the finish,
but the start."

Where was he to start in the present circumstances?  What road was he to
follow?

His thoughts recurred to Daubrecq the deputy, the original owner of the
crystal stopper, who probably knew its importance.  On the other hand,
how was Gilbert aware of the doings and mode of life of Daubrecq the
deputy?  What means had he employed to keep him under observation?  Who
had told him of the place where Daubrecq spent the evening of that day?
These were all interesting questions to solve.

Daubrecq had moved to his winter quarters in Paris immediately after the
burglary at the Villa Marie-Therese and was now living in his own house,
on the left-hand side of the little Square Lamartine that opens out at
the end of the Avenue Victor-Hugo.

First disguising himself as an old gentleman of private means, strolling
about, cane in hand, Lupin spent his time in the neighbourhood, on the
benches of the square and the avenue.  He made a discovery on the first
day.  Two men, dressed as workmen, but behaving in a manner that left no
doubt as to their aims, were watching the deputy's house.  When Daubrecq
went out, they set off in pursuit of him; and they were immediately
behind him when he came home again.  At night, as soon as the lights were
out, they went away.

Lupin shadowed them in his turn.  They were detective-officers.

"Hullo, hullo!" he said to himself.  "This is hardly what I expected.
So the Daubrecq bird is under suspicion?"

But, on the fourth day, at nightfall, the two men were joined by six
others, who conversed with them in the darkest part of the Square
Lamartine.  And, among these new arrivals, Lupin was vastly astonished
to recognize, by his figure and bearing, the famous Prasville, the
erstwhile barrister, sportsman and explorer, now favourite at the Elysee,
who, for some mysterious reason, had been pitchforked into the
headquarters of police as secretary-general, with the reversion of the
prefecture.

And, suddenly, Lupin remembered: two years ago, Prasville and Daubrecq
the deputy had had a personal encounter on the Place du Palais-Bourbon.
The incident made a great stir at the time.  No one knew the cause of it.
Prasville had sent his seconds to Daubrecq on the same day; but Daubrecq
refused to fight.

A little while later, Prasville was appointed secretary-general.

"Very odd, very odd," said Lupin, who remained plunged in thought, while
continuing to observe Prasville's movements.

At seven o'clock Prasville's group of men moved away a few yards, in the
direction of the Avenue Henri-Martin.  The door of a small garden on the
right of the house opened and Daubrecq appeared.  The two detectives
followed close behind him and, when he took the Rue-Taitbout train,
jumped on after him.

Prasville at once walked across the square and rang the bell.  The
garden-gate was between the house and the porter's lodge.  The portress
came and opened it.  There was a brief conversation, after which
Prasville and his companions were admitted.

"A domiciliary visit," said Lupin.  "Secret and illegal.  By the strict
rules of politeness, I ought to be invited.  My presence is indispensable."

Without the least hesitation he went up to the house, the door of which
had not been closed, and, passing in front of the portress, who was
casting her eyes outside, he asked, in the hurried tones of a person who
is late for an appointment:

"Have the gentlemen come?"

"Yes, you will find them in the study."

His plan was quite simple: if any one met him, he would pretend to be a
tradesman.  But there was no need for this subterfuge.  He was able,
after crossing an empty hall, to enter a dining-room which also had no
one in it, but which, through the panes of a glass partition that
separated the dining-room from the study, afforded him a view of
Prasville and his five companions.

Prasville opened all the drawers with the aid of false keys.  Next, he
examined all the papers, while his companions took down the books from
the shelves, shook the pages of each separately and felt inside the
bindings.

"Of course, it's a paper they're looking for," said Lupin.  "Bank-notes,
perhaps..."

Prasville exclaimed:

"What rot! We shan't find a thing!"

Yet he obviously did not abandon all hope of discovering what he wanted,
for he suddenly seized the four bottles in a liqueur-stand, took out the
four stoppers and inspected them.

"Hullo!" thought Lupin.  "Now he's going for decanter-stoppers!  Then
it's not a question of a paper?  Well, I give it up."

Prasville next lifted and examined different objects; and he asked:

"How often have you been here?"

"Six times last winter," was the reply.

"And you have searched the house thoroughly?"

"Every one of the rooms, for days at a time, while he was visiting his
constituency."

"Still...still..."  And he added, "Has he no servant at present?"

"No, he is looking for one.  He has his meals out and the portress keeps
the house as best she can. The woman is devoted to us..."

Prasville persisted in his investigations for nearly an hour and a half,
shifting and fingering all the knick-knacks, but taking care to put
everything back exactly where he found it.  At nine o'clock, however,
the two detectives who had followed Daubrecq burst into the study:

"He's coming back!"

"On foot?"

"Yes."

"Have we time?"

"Oh, dear, yes!"

Prasville and the men from the police-office withdrew, without undue
haste, after taking a last glance round the room to make sure that there
was nothing to betray their visit.

The position was becoming critical for Lupin.  He ran the risk of
knocking up against Daubrecq, if he went away, or of not being able to
get out, if he remained.  But, on ascertaining that the dining-room
windows afforded a direct means of exit to the square, he resolved to
stay.  Besides, the opportunity of obtaining a close view of Daubrecq
was too good to refuse; and, as Daubrecq had been out to dinner, there
was not much chance of his entering the dining-room.

Lupin, therefore, waited, holding himself ready to hide behind a velvet
curtain that could be drawn across the glazed partition in case of need.

He heard the sound of doors opening and shutting.  Some one walked into
the study and switched on the light.  He recognized Daubrecq.

The deputy was a stout, thickset, bull-necked man, very nearly bald,
with a fringe of gray whiskers round his chin and wearing a pair of black
eye-glasses under his spectacles, for his eyes were weak and strained.
Lupin noticed the powerful features, the square chin, the prominent
cheek-bones.  The hands were brawny and covered with hair, the legs bowed;
and he walked with a stoop, bearing first on one hip and then on the
other, which gave him something of the gait of a gorilla.  But the face
was topped by an enormous, lined forehead, indented with hollows and
dotted with bumps.

There was something bestial, something savage, something repulsive about
the man's whole personality.  Lupin remembered that, in the Chamber of
Deputies, Daubrecq was nicknamed "The Wild Man of the Woods" and that he
was so labelled not only because he stood aloof and hardly ever mixed
with his fellow-members, but also because of his appearance, his
behaviour, his peculiar gait and his remarkable muscular development.

He sat down to his desk, took a meerschaum pipe from his pocket, selected
a packet of caporal among several packets of tobacco which lay drying in
a bowl, tore open the wrapper, filled his pipe and lit it.  Then he began
to write letters.

Presently he ceased his work and sat thinking, with his attention fixed
on a spot on his desk.

He lifted a little stamp-box and examined it.  Next, he verified the
position of different articles which Prasville had touched and replaced;
and he searched them with his eyes, felt them with his hands, bending
over them as though certain signs, known to himself alone, were able to
tell him what he wished to know.

Lastly, he grasped the knob on an electric bell-push and rang.  The
portress appeared a minute later.

He asked:

"They've been, haven't they?"

And, when the woman hesitated about replying, he insisted:

"Come, come, Clemence, did you open this stamp-box?"

"No, sir."

"Well, I fastened the lid down with a little strip of gummed paper.  The
strip has been broken."

"But I assure you,..." the woman began.

"Why tell lies," he said, "considering that I myself instructed you to
lend yourself to those visits?"

"The fact is..."

"The fact is that you want to keep on good terms with both sides...Very
well!" He handed her a fifty-franc note and repeated, "Have they been?"

"Yes."

"The same men as in the spring?"

"Yes, all five of them...with another one, who ordered them about."

"A tall, dark man?"

"Yes."

Lupin saw Daubrecq's mouth hardening; and Daubrecq continued:

"Is that all?"

"There was one more, who came after they did and joined them...and then,
just now, two more, the pair who usually keep watch outside the house."

"Did they remain in the study?"

"Yes, sir."

"And they went away when I came back?  A few minutes before, perhaps?"

"Yes, sir."

"That will do."

The woman left the room.  Daubrecq returned to his letter-writing.  Then,
stretching out his arm, he made some marks on a white writing-tablet, at
the end of his desk, and rested it against the desk, as though he wished
to keep it in sight.  The marks were figures; and Lupin was able to read
the following subtraction-sum:

			"9 - 8 = 1"

And Daubrecq, speaking between his teeth, thoughtfully uttered the
syllables:

"Eight from nine leaves one...There's not a doubt about that," he added,
aloud.  He wrote one more letter, a very short one, and addressed the
envelope with an inscription which Lupin was able to decipher when the
letter was placed beside the writing-tablet:

"To Monsieur Prasville,
Secretary-general of the Prefecture of Police."

Then he rang the bell again:

"Clemence," he said, to the portress, "did you go to school as a child?"

"Yes, sir, of course I did."

"And were you taught arithmetic?"

"Why, sir..."

"Well, you're not very good at subtraction."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because you don't know that nine minus eight equals one.  And that, you
see, is a fact of the highest importance. Life becomes impossible if you
are ignorant of that fundamental truth."

He rose, as he spoke, and walked round the room, with his hands behind
his back, swaying upon his hips.  He did so once more.  Then, stopping
at the dining-room, he opened the door:

"For that matter, there's another way of putting the problem.  Take eight
from nine; and one remains.  And the one who remains is here, eh?
Correct!  And monsieur supplies us with a striking proof, does he not?"

He patted the velvet curtain in which Lupin had hurriedly wrapped himself:

"Upon my word, sir, you must be stifling under this!  Not to say that I
might have amused myself by sticking a dagger through the curtain.
Remember Hamlet's madness and Polonius' death: 'How now! A rat? Dead,
for a ducat, dead!'  Come along, Mr. Polonius, come out of your hole."

It was one of those positions to which Lupin was not accustomed and
which he loathed.  To catch others in a trap and pull their leg was all
very well; but it was a very different thing to have people teasing him
and roaring with laughter at his expense.  Yet what could he answer back?

"You look a little pale, Mr. Polonius...Hullo!  Why, it's the respectable
old gentleman who has been hanging about the square for some days!  So
you belong to the police too, Mr. Polonius?  There, there, pull yourself
together, I sha'n't hurt you!... But you see, Clemence, how right my
calculation was.  You told me that nine spies had been to the house.  I
counted a troop of eight, as I came along, eight of them in the distance,
down the avenue.  Take eight from nine and one remains: the one who
evidently remained behind to see what he could see.  Ecce homo!"

"Well?  And then?"  said Lupin, who felt a mad craving to fly at the
fellow and reduce him to silence.

"And then?  Nothing at all, my good man...What more do you want?  The
farce is over.  I will only ask you to take this little note to Master
Prasville, your employer.  Clemence, please show Mr. Polonius out.  And,
if ever he calls again, fling open the doors wide to him.  Pray look
upon this as your home, Mr. Polonius.  Your servant, sir!..."

Lupin hesitated.  He would have liked to talk big and to come out with a
farewell phrase, a parting speech, like an actor making a showy exit
from the stage, and at least to disappear with the honours of war.  But
his defeat was so pitiable that he could think of nothing better than to
bang his hat on his head and stamp his feet as he followed the portress
down the hall.  It was a poor revenge.

"You rascally beggar!" he shouted, once he was outside the door, shaking
his fist at Daubrecq's windows.  "Wretch, scum of the earth, deputy, you
shall pay for this!...Oh, he allows himself...!  Oh, he has the cheek
to...!  Well, I swear to you, my fine fellow, that, one of these days..."

He was foaming with rage, all the more as, in his innermost heart, he
recognized the strength of his new enemy and could not deny the masterly
fashion in which he had managed this business.  Daubrecq's coolness,
the assurance with which he hoaxed the police-officials, the contempt
with which he lent himself to their visits at his house and, above all,
his wonderful self-possession, his easy bearing and the impertinence of
his conduct in the presence of the ninth person who was spying on him:
all this denoted a man of character, a strong man, with a well-balanced
mind, lucid, bold, sure of himself and of the cards in his hand.

But what were those cards?  What game was he playing?  Who held the
stakes?  And how did the players stand on either side?  Lupin could not
tell.  Knowing nothing, he flung himself headlong into the thick of the
fray, between adversaries desperately involved, though he himself was in
total ignorance of their positions, their weapons, their resources and
their secret plans.  For, when all was said, he could not admit that the
object of all those efforts was to obtain possession of a crystal
stopper!

One thing alone pleased him: Daubrecq had not penetrated his disguise.
Daubrecq believed him to be in the employ of the police.  Neither
Daubrecq nor the police, therefore, suspected the intrusion of a third
thief in the business.  This was his one and only trump, a trump that
gave him a liberty of action to which he attached the greatest importance.

Without further delay, he opened the letter which Daubrecq had handed
him for the secretary-general of police.  It contained these few lines:

	"Within reach of your hand, my dear Prasville, within reach of your
	hand!  You touched it!  A little more and the trick was done...But
	you're too big a fool.  And to think that they couldn't hit upon
	any one better than you to make me bite the dust.  Poor old France!
	"Good-bye, Prasville.  But, if I catch you in the act, it will be a
	bad lookout for you: my maxim is to shoot at sight.

									"DAUBRECQ"

"Within reach of your hand," repeated Lupin, after reading the note.
"And to think that the rogue may be writing the truth!  The most
elementary hiding-places are the safest.  We must look into this, all
the same.  And, also, we must find out why Daubrecq is the object of
such strict supervision and obtain a few particulars about the fellow
generally."

The information supplied to Lupin by a private inquiry-office consisted
of the following details:

      "ALEXIS DAUBRECQ, deputy of the Bouches-du-Rhone for the past two
	years; sits among the independent members.  Political opinions not
	very clearly defined, but electoral position exceedingly strong,
	because of the enormous sums which he spends in nursing his
	constituency.  No private income.  Nevertheless, has a house in
	Paris, a villa at Enghien and another at Nice and loses heavily at
	play, though no one knows where the money comes from.  Has great
	influence and obtains all he wants without making up to ministers
	or, apparently, having either friends or connections in political
	circles."

"That's a trade docket," said Lupin to himself.  "What I want is a
domestic docket, a police docket, which will tell me about the gentleman's
private life and enable me to work more easily in this darkness and to
know if I'm not getting myself into a tangle by bothering about the
Daubrecq bird.  And time's getting short, hang it!"

One of the residences which Lupin occupied at that period and which he
used oftener than any of the others was in the Rue Chateaubriand, near
the Arc de l'Etoile.  He was known there by the name of Michel Beaumont.
He had a snug flat there and was looked after by a manservant, Achille,
who was utterly devoted to his interests and whose chief duty was to
receive and repeat the telephone-messages addressed to Lupin by his
followers.

Lupin, on returning home, learnt, with great astonishment, that a woman
had been waiting to see him for over an hour:

"What!  Why, no one ever comes to see me here!  Is she young?"

"No...I don't think so."

"You don't think so!"

"She's wearing a lace shawl over her head, instead of a hat, and you
can't see her face...She's more like a clerk...or a woman employed in
a shop.  She's not well-dressed..."

"Whom did she ask for?"

"M. Michel Beaumont," replied the servant.

"Queer.  And why has she called?"

"All she said was that it was about the Enghien business...So I thought
that..."

"What!  The Enghien business!  Then she knows that I am mixed up in that
business...She knows that, by applying here..."

"I could not get anything out of her, but I thought, all the same, that
I had better let her in."

"Quite right. Where is she?"

"In the drawing-room.  I've put on the lights."

Lupin walked briskly across the hall and opened the door of the
drawing-room:

"What are you talking about?" he said, to his man.  "There's no one here."

"No one here?" said Achille, running up.

And the room, in fact, was empty.

"Well, on my word, this takes the cake!" cried the servant.  "It wasn't
twenty minutes ago that I came and had a look, to make sure.  She was
sitting over there.  And there's nothing wrong with my eyesight, you know."

"Look here, look here," said Lupin, irritably.  "Where were you while
the woman was waiting?"

"In the hall, governor!  I never left the hall for a second!  I should
have seen her go out, blow it!"

"Still, she's not here now..."

"So I see," moaned the man, quite flabbergasted.

"She must have got tired of waiting and gone away.  But, dash it all, I
should like to know how she got out!"

"How she got out?" said Lupin.  "It doesn't take a wizard to tell that."

"What do you mean?"

"She got out through the window.  Look, it's still ajar. We are on the
ground-floor...The street is almost always deserted, in the evenings.
There's no doubt about it."

He had looked around him and satisfied himself that nothing had been
taken away or moved.  The room, for that matter, contained no
knick-knack of any value, no important paper that might have
explained the woman's visit, followed by her sudden disappearance. 
And yet why that inexplicable flight?

"Has any one telephoned?" he asked.

"No."

"Any letters?"

"Yes, one letter by the last post."

"Where is it?"

"I put it on your mantelpiece, governor, as usual."

Lupin's bedroom was next to the drawing-room, but Lupin had permanently
bolted the door between the two.  He, therefore, had to go through the
hall again.

Lupin switched on the electric light and, the next moment, said:

"I don't see it..."

"Yes...I put it next to the flower-bowl."

"There's nothing here at all."

"You must be looking in the wrong place, governor."

But Achille moved the bowl, lifted the clock, bent down to the grate, in
vain: the letter was not there.

"Oh blast it, blast it!" he muttered.  "She's done it...she's taken
it... And then, when she had the letter, she cleared out...Oh, the
slut!..."

Lupin said:

"You're mad!  There's no way through between the two rooms."

"Then who did take it, governor?"

They were both of them silent.  Lupin strove to control his anger and
collect his ideas.  He asked:

"Did you look at the envelope?"

"Yes."

"Anything particular about it?"

"Yes, it looked as if it had been written in a hurry, or scribbled,
rather."

"How was the address worded?...Do you remember?" asked Lupin, in a voice
strained with anxiety.

"Yes, I remembered it, because it struck me as funny..."

"But speak, will you?  Speak!"

"It said, 'Monsieur de Beaumont, Michel.'"

Lupin took his servant by the shoulders and shook him:

"It said 'de' Beaumont?  Are you sure?  And 'Michel' after 'Beaumont'?"

"Quite certain."

"Ah!" muttered Lupin, with a choking throat.  "It was a letter from
Gilbert!"

He stood motionless, a little pale, with drawn features.  There was no
doubt about it: the letter was from Gilbert.  It was the form of address
which, by Lupin's orders, Gilbert had used for years in corresponding
with him.  Gilbert had at last--after long waiting and by dint of
endless artifices--found a means of getting a letter posted from his
prison and had hastily written to him.  And now the letter was
intercepted!  What did it say?  What instructions had the unhappy
prisoner given?  What help was he praying for?  What stratagem did he
suggest?

Lupin looked round the room, which, contrary to the drawing-room,
contained important papers.  But none of the locks had been forced; and
he was compelled to admit that the woman had no other object than to get
hold of Gilbert's letter.

Constraining himself to keep his temper, he asked:

"Did the letter come while the woman was here?"

"At the same time.  The porter rang at the same moment."

"Could she see the envelope?"

"Yes."

The conclusion was evident.  It remained to discover how the visitor had
been able to effect her theft.  By slipping from one window to the other,
outside the flat?  Impossible: Lupin found the window of his room shut.
By opening the communicating door?  Impossible:  Lupin found it locked
and barred with its two inner bolts.

Nevertheless, a person cannot pass through a wall by a mere operation of
will.  To go in or out of a room requires a passage; and, as the act was
accomplished in the space of a few minutes, it was necessary, in the
circumstances, that the passage should be previously in existence, that
it should already have been contrived in the wall and, of course, known
to the woman.  This hypothesis simplified the search by concentrating it
upon the door; for the wall was quite bare, without a cupboard,
chimney-piece or hangings of any kind, and unable to conceal the least
outlet.

Lupin went back to the drawing-room and prepared to make a study of the
door.  But he at once gave a start.  He perceived, at the first glance,
that the left lower panel of the six small panels contained within the
cross-bars of the door no longer occupied its normal position and that
the light did not fall straight upon it.  On leaning forward, he saw two
little tin tacks sticking out on either side and holding the panel in
place, similar to a wooden board behind a picture-frame.  He had only
to shift these.  The panel at once came out.

Achille gave a cry of amazement.  But Lupin objected:

"Well?  And what then?  We are no better off than before.  Here is an
empty oblong, eight or nine inches wide by sixteen inches high.  You're
not going to pretend that a woman can slip through an opening which
would not admit the thinnest child of ten years old!"

"No, but she can have put her arm through and drawn the bolts."

"The bottom bolt, yes," said Lupin.  "But the top bolt, no: the distance
is far too great.  Try for yourself and see."

Achille tried and had to give up the attempt.

Lupin did not reply.  He stood thinking for a long time.  Then, suddenly,
he said:

"Give me my hat...my coat..."

He hurried off, urged by an imperative idea.  And, the moment he reached
the street, he sprang into a taxi:

"Rue Matignon, quick!..."

As soon as they came to the house where he had been robbed of the crystal
stopper, he jumped out of the cab, opened his private entrance, went
upstairs, ran to the drawing-room, turned on the light and crouched at
the foot of the door leading to his bedroom.

He had guessed right.  One of the little panels was loosened in the same
manner.

And, just as in his other flat in the Rue Chateaubriand, the opening was
large enough to admit a man's arm and shoulder, but not to allow him to
draw the upper bolt.

"Hang!" he shouted, unable any longer to master the rage that had been
seething within him for the last two hours.  "Blast!  Shall I never have
finished with this confounded business?"

In fact, an incredible ill-luck seemed to dog his footsteps, compelling
him to grope about at random, without permitting him to use the elements
of success which his own persistency or the very force of things placed
within his grasp.  Gilbert gave him the crystal stopper.  Gilbert sent
him a letter.  And both had disappeared at that very moment.

And it was not, as he had until then believed, a series of fortuitous
and independent circumstances.  No, it was manifestly the effect of an
adverse will pursuing a definite object with prodigious ability and
incredible boldness, attacking him, Lupin, in the recesses of his safest
retreats and baffling him with blows so severe and so unexpected that
he did not even know against whom he had to defend himself.  Never, in
the course of his adventures, had he encountered such obstacles as now.

And, little by little, deep down within himself, there grew a haunting
dread of the future.  A date loomed before his eyes, the terrible date
which he unconsciously assigned to the law to perform its work of
vengeance, the date upon which, in the light of a wan April morning,
two men would mount the scaffold, two men who had stood by him, two
comrades whom he had been unable to save from paying the awful penalty...



CHAPTER III

THE HOME LIFE OF ALEXIS DAUBRECQ

When Daubrecq the deputy came in from lunch on the day after the police
had searched his house he was stopped by Clemence, his portress, who
told him that she had found a cook who could be thoroughly relied on.

The cook arrived a few minutes later and produced first-rate characters,
signed by people with whom it was easy to take up her references.  She
was a very active woman, although of a certain age, and agreed to do the
work of the house by herself, without the help of a manservant, this
being a condition upon which Daubrecq insisted.

Her last place was with a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Comte
Saulevat, to whom Daubrecq at once telephoned.  The count's steward gave
her a perfect character, and she was engaged.

As soon as she had fetched her trunk, she set to work and cleaned and
scrubbed until it was time to cook the dinner.

Daubrecq dined and went out.

At eleven o'clock, after the portress had gone to bed, the cook
cautiously opened the garden-gate.  A man came up.

"Is that you?" she asked.

"Yes, it's I, Lupin."

She took him to her bedroom on the third floor, overlooking the garden,
and at once burst into lamentations:

"More of your tricks and nothing but tricks!  Why can't you leave me
alone, instead of sending me to do your dirty work?"

"How can I help it, you dear old Victoire?*  When I want a person of
respectable appearance and incorruptible morals, I think of you.  You
ought to be flattered."

________________________________________________________________________

*See The Hollow Needle by Maurice Leblanc, translated by Alexander
Teixeira de Mattos, and later volumes of the Lupin series.
________________________________________________________________________


"That's all you care about me!" she cried.  "You run me into danger once
more; and you think it's funny!"

"What are you risking?"

"How do you mean, what am I risking?  All my characters are false."

"Characters are always false."

"And suppose M. Daubrecq finds out?  Suppose he makes inquiries?"

"He has made inquiries."

"Eh? What's that?"

"He has telephoned to the steward of Comte Saulevat, in whose service
you say that you have had the honour of being."

"There, you see, I'm done for!"

"The count's steward could not say enough in your praise."

"He does not know me."

"But I know him.  I got him his situation with Comte Saulevat.  So you
understand..."

Victoire seemed to calm down a little:

"Well," she said, "God's will be done...or rather yours.  And what do
you expect me to do in all this?"

"First, to put me up.  You were my wet-nurse once.  You can very well
give me half your room now.  I'll sleep in the armchair."

"And next?"

"Next?  To supply me with such food as I want."

"And next?"

"Next?  To undertake, with me and under my direction, a regular series
of searches with a view..."

"To what?"

"To discovering the precious object of which I spoke to you."

"What's that?"

"A crystal stopper."

"A crystal stopper...Saints above!  A nice business!  And, if we don't
find your confounded stopper, what then?"

Lupin took her gently by the arm and, in a serious voice:

"If we don't find it, Gilbert, young Gilbert whom you know and love, will
stand every chance of losing his head; and so will Vaucheray."

"Vaucheray I don't mind...a dirty rascal like him!  But Gilbert..."

"Have you seen the papers this evening?  Things are looking worse than
ever.  Vaucheray, as might be expected, accuses Gilbert of stabbing the
valet; and it so happens that the knife which Vaucheray used belonged
to Gilbert.  That came out this morning.  Whereupon Gilbert, who is
intelligent in his way, but easily frightened, blithered and launched
forth into stories and lies which will end in his undoing.  That's how
the matter stands.  Will you help me?"

Thenceforth, for several days, Lupin moulded his existence upon
Daubrecq's, beginning his investigations the moment the deputy left the
house.  He pursued them methodically, dividing each room into sections
which he did not abandon until he had been through the tiniest nooks and
corners and, so to speak, exhausted every possible device.

Victoire searched also.  And nothing was forgotten.  Table-legs,
chair-rungs, floor-boards, mouldings, mirror- and picture-frames, clocks,
plinths, curtain-borders, telephone-holders and electric fittings:
everything that an ingenious imagination could have selected as a
hiding-place was overhauled.

And they also watched the deputy's least actions, his most unconscious
movements, the expression of his face, the books which he read and the
letters which he wrote.

It was easy enough.  He seemed to live his life in the light of day.  No
door was ever shut.  He received no visits.  And his existence worked
with mechanical regularity.  He went to the Chamber in the afternoon,
to the club in the evening.

"Still," said Lupin, "there must be something that's not orthodox behind
all this."

"There's nothing of the sort," moaned Victoire.  "You're wasting your
time and we shall be bowled out."

The presence of the detectives and their habit of walking up and down
outside the windows drove her mad.  She refused to admit that they were
there for any other purpose than to trap her, Victoire.  And, each time
that she went shopping, she was quite surprised that one of those men
did not lay his hand upon her shoulder.

One day she returned all upset.  Her basket of provisions was shaking
on her arm.

"What's the matter, my dear Victoire?" said Lupin.  "You're looking
green."

"Green?  I dare say I do.  So would you look green..."

She had to sit down and it was only after making repeated efforts that
she succeeded in stuttering:

"A man...a man spoke to me...at the fruiterer's."

"By Jingo!  Did he want you to run away with him?"

"No, he gave me a letter..."

"Then what are you complaining about?  It was a love-letter, of course!"

"No. 'It's for your governor,' said he.  'My governor?' I said.  'Yes,'
he said, 'for the gentleman who's staying in your room.'"

"What's that?"

This time, Lupin had started:

"Give it here," he said, snatching the letter from her.  The envelope
bore no address.  But there was another, inside it, on which he read:

			"Monsieur Arsene Lupin,
			  c/o Victoire."

"The devil!" he said.  "This is a bit thick!"  He tore open the second
envelope.  It contained a sheet of paper with the following words,
written in large capitals:

     "Everything you are doing is useless and dangerous...Give it up."

Victoire uttered one moan and fainted.  As for Lupin, he felt himself
blush up to his eyes, as though he had been grossly insulted.  He
experienced all the humiliation which a duellist would undergo if he
heard the most secret advice which he had received from his seconds
repeated aloud by a mocking adversary.

However, he held his tongue.  Victoire went back to her work.  As for
him, he remained in his room all day, thinking.

That night he did not sleep.

And he kept saying to himself:

"What is the good of thinking?  I am up against one of those problems
which are not solved by any amount of thought.  It is certain that I am
not alone in the matter and that, between Daubrecq and the police, there
is, in addition to the third thief that I am, a fourth thief who is
working on his own account, who knows me and who reads my game clearly.
But who is this fourth thief?  And am I mistaken, by any chance?  And...
oh, rot!...Let's get to sleep!..."

But he could not sleep; and a good part of the night went in this way.

At four o'clock in the morning he seemed to hear a noise in the house.
He jumped up quickly and, from the top of the staircase, saw Daubrecq
go down the first flight and turn toward the garden.

A minute later, after opening the gate, the deputy returned with a man
whose head was buried in an enormous fur collar and showed him into his
study.

Lupin had taken his precautions in view of any such contingency.  As the
windows of the study and those of his bedroom, both of which were at the
back of the house, overlooked the garden, he fastened a rope-ladder to
his balcony, unrolled it softly and let himself down by it until it was
level with the top of the study windows.

These windows were closed by shutters; but, as they were bowed, there
remained a semi-circular space at the top; and Lupin, though he could
not hear, was able to see all that went on inside.

He then realized that the person whom he had taken for a man was a woman:
a woman who was still young, though her dark hair was mingled with gray;
a tall woman, elegantly but quite unobtrusively dressed, whose handsome
features bore the expression of weariness and melancholy which long
suffering gives.

"Where the deuce have I seen her before?" Lupin asked himself.  "For I
certainly know that face, that look, that expression."

She stood leaning against the table, listening impassively to Daubrecq,
who was also standing and who was talking very excitedly.  He had his
back turned to Lupin; but Lupin, leaning forward, caught sight of a
glass in which the deputy's image was reflected.  And he was startled
to see the strange look in his eyes, the air of fierce and brutal
desire with which Daubrecq was staring at his visitor.

It seemed to embarrass her too, for she sat down with lowered lids.
Then Daubrecq leant over her and it appeared as though he were ready to
fling his long arms, with their huge hands, around her.  And, suddenly,
Lupin perceived great tears rolling down the woman's sad face.

Whether or not it was the sight of those tears that made Daubrecq lose
his head, with a brusque movement he clutched the woman and drew her to
him.  She repelled him, with a violence full of hatred.  And, after a
brief struggle, during which Lupin caught a glimpse of the man's bestial
and contorted features, the two of them stood face to face, railing at
each other like mortal enemies.

Then they stopped.  Daubrecq sat down.  There was mischief in his face,
and sarcasm as well.  And he began to talk again, with sharp taps on the
table, as though he were dictating terms.

She no longer stirred. She sat haughtily in her chair and towered over
him, absent-minded, with roaming eyes.  Lupin, captivated by that
powerful and sorrowful countenance, continued to watch her; and he was
vainly seeking to remember of what or of whom she reminded him, when he
noticed that she had turned her head slightly and that she was
imperceptibly moving her arm.

And her arm strayed farther and farther and her hand crept along the
table and Lupin saw that, at the end of the table, there stood a
water-bottle with a gold-topped stopper.  The hand reached the
water-bottle, felt it, rose gently and seized the stopper.  A quick
movement of the head, a glance, and the stopper was put back in its
place.  Obviously, it was not what the woman hoped to find.

"Dash it!" said Lupin.  "She's after the crystal stopper too!  The
matter is becoming more complicated daily; there's no doubt about it."

But, on renewing his observation of the visitor, he was astounded to
note the sudden and unexpected expression of her countenance,
a terrible, implacable, ferocious expression.  And he saw that her hand
was continuing its stealthy progress round the table and that, with an
uninterrupted and crafty sliding movement, it was pushing back books
and, slowly and surely, approaching a dagger whose blade gleamed among
the scattered papers.

It gripped the handle.

Daubrecq went on talking.  Behind his back, the hand rose steadily,
little by little; and Lupin saw the woman's desperate and furious eyes
fixed upon the spot in the neck where she intended to plant the knife:

"You're doing a very silly thing, fair lady," thought Lupin.

And he already began to turn over in his mind the best means of escaping
and of taking Victoire with him.

She hesitated, however, with uplifted arm.  But it was only a momentary
weakness.  She clenched her teeth.  Her whole face, contracted with
hatred, became yet further convulsed.  And she made the dread movement.

At the same instant Daubrecq crouched and, springing from his seat,
turned and seized the woman's frail wrist in mid-air.

Oddly enough, he addressed no reproach to her, as though the deed which
she had attempted surprised him no more than any ordinary, very natural
and simple act.  He shrugged his shoulders, like a man accustomed to
that sort of danger, and strode up and down in silence.

She had dropped the weapon and was now crying, holding her head between
her hands, with sobs that shook her whole frame.

He next came up to her and said a few words, once more tapping the table
as he spoke.

She made a sign in the negative and, when he insisted, she, in her turn,
stamped her foot on the floor and exclaimed, loud enough for Lupin to
hear:

"Never!...Never!..."

Thereupon, without another word, Daubrecq fetched the fur cloak which
she had brought with her and hung it over the woman's shoulders, while
she shrouded her face in a lace wrap.

And he showed her out.

Two minutes later, the garden-gate was locked again.  "Pity I can't run
after that strange person," thought Lupin, "and have a chat with her
about the Daubrecq bird.  Seems to me that we two could do a good stroke
of business together."

In any case, there was one point to be cleared up: Daubrecq the deputy,
whose life was so orderly, so apparently respectable, was in the habit
of receiving visits at night, when his house was no longer watched by
the police.

He sent Victoire to arrange with two members of his gang to keep watch
for several days.  And he himself remained awake next night.

As on the previous morning, he heard a noise at four o'clock.  As on the
previous morning, the deputy let some one in.

Lupin ran down his ladder and, when he came to the free space above the
shutters, saw a man crawling at Daubrecq's feet, flinging his arms
round Daubrecq's knees in frenzied despair and weeping, weeping
convulsively.

Daubrecq, laughing, pushed him away repeatedly, but the man clung to
him.  He behaved almost like one out of his mind and, at last, in a
genuine fit of madness, half rose to his feet, took the deputy by the
throat and flung him back in a chair.  Daubrecq struggled, powerless at
first, while his veins swelled in his temples.  But soon, with a
strength far beyond the ordinary, he regained the mastery and deprived
his adversary of all power of movement.  Then, holding him with one hand,
with the other he gave him two great smacks in the face.

The man got up, slowly.  He was livid and could hardly stand on his legs.
He waited for a moment, as though to recover his self-possession.  Then,
with a terrifying calmness, he drew a revolver from his pocket and
levelled it at Daubrecq.

Daubrecq did not flinch.  He even smiled, with a defiant air and without
displaying more excitement than if he had been aimed at with a toy pistol.

The man stood for perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds, facing his enemy,
with outstretched arm.  Then, with the same deliberate slowness,
revealing a self-control which was all the more impressive because it
followed upon a fit of extreme excitement, he put up his revolver and,
from another pocket, produced his note-case.

Daubrecq took a step forward.

The man opened the pocketbook.  A sheaf of bank-notes appeared in sight.

Daubrecq seized and counted them.  They were thousand-franc notes, and
there were thirty of them.

The man looked on, without a movement of revolt, without a protest.  He
obviously understood the futility of words.  Daubrecq was one of those
who do not relent.  Why should his visitor waste time in beseeching him
or even in revenging himself upon him by uttering vain threats and
insults?  He had no hope of striking that unassailable enemy.  Even
Daubrecq's death would not deliver him from Daubrecq.

He took his hat and went away.

At eleven o'clock in the morning Victoire, on returning from her
shopping, handed Lupin a note from his accomplices.

He opened it and read:

"The man who came to see Daubrecq last night is Langeroux the deputy,
leader of the independent left.  A poor man, with a large family."

"Come," said Lupin, "Daubrecq is nothing more nor less than a
blackmailer; but, by Jupiter, he has jolly effective ways of going to
work!"

Events tended to confirm Lupin's supposition.  Three days later he saw
another visitor hand Daubrecq an important sum of money.  And, two days
after that, one came and left a pearl necklace behind him.

The first was called Dachaumont, a senator and ex-cabinet-minister.  The
second was the Marquis d'Albufex, a Bonapartist deputy, formerly chief
political agent in France of Prince Napoleon.

The scene, in each of these cases, was very similar to Langeroux the
deputy's interview, a violent tragic scene, ending in Daubrecq's victory.

"And so on and so forth," thought Lupin, when he received these
particulars.  "I have been present at four visits.  I shall know no more
if there are ten, or twenty, or thirty...It is enough for me to learn
the names of the visitors from my friends on sentry-go outside.  Shall I
go and call on them?...What for?  They have no reason to confide in me...
On the other hand, am I to stay on here, delayed by investigations which
lead to nothing and which Victoire can continue just as well without me?"

He was very much perplexed.  The news of the inquiry into the case of
Gilbert and Vaucheray was becoming worse and worse, the days were
slipping by, and not an hour passed without his asking himself, in
anguish, whether all his efforts--granting that he succeeded--would
not end in farcical results, absolutely foreign to the aim which he
was pursuing.

For, after all, supposing that he did fathom Daubrecq's underhand
dealings, would that give him the means of rescuing Gilbert and
Vaucheray?

That day an incident occurred which put an end to his indecision.  After
lunch Victoire heard snatches of a conversation which Daubrecq held with
some one on the telephone.  Lupin gathered, from what Victoire reported,
that the deputy had an appointment with a lady for half-past eight and
that he was going to take her to a theatre:

"I shall get a pit-tier box, like the one we had six weeks ago," Daubrecq
had said. And he added, with a laugh, "I hope that I shall not have the
burglars in during that time."

There was not a doubt in Lupin's mind.  Daubrecq was about to spend his
evening in the same manner in which he had spent the evening six weeks
ago, while they were breaking into his villa at Enghien.  To know the
person whom he was to meet and perhaps thus to discover how Gilbert and
Vaucheray had learnt that Daubrecq would be away from eight o'clock in
the evening until one o'clock in the morning: these were matters of the
utmost importance.

Lupin left the house in the afternoon, with Victoire's assistance.  He
knew through her that Daubrecq was coming home for dinner earlier than
usual.

He went to his flat in the Rue Chateaubriand, telephoned for three of
his friends, dressed and made himself up in his favourite character of
a Russian prince, with fair hair and moustache and short-cut whiskers.

The accomplices arrived in a motor-car.

At that moment, Achille, his man, brought him a telegram, addressed to
M. Michel Beaumont, Rue Chateaubriand, which ran:

	"Do not come to theatre this evening.  Danger of your
	 intervention spoiling everything."

There was a flower-vase on the chimney-piece beside him. Lupin took it
and smashed it to pieces.

"That's it, that's it," he snarled.  "They are playing with me as I
usually play with others.  Same behaviour.  Same tricks.  Only there's
this difference..."

What difference?  He hardly knew.  The truth was that he too was baffled
and disconcerted to the inmost recesses of his being and that he was
continuing to act only from obstinacy, from a sense of duty, so to speak,
and without putting his ordinary good humour and high spirits into the
work.

"Come along," he said to his accomplices.

By his instructions, the chauffeur set them down near the Square
Lamartine, but kept the motor going.  Lupin foresaw that Daubrecq, in
order to escape the detectives watching the house, would jump into the
first taxi; and he did not intend to be outdistanced.

He had not allowed for Daubrecq's cleverness.

At half-past seven both leaves of the garden-gate were flung open, a
bright light flashed and a motor-cycle darted across the road, skirted
the square, turned in front of the motor-car and shot away toward the
Bois at a speed so great that they would have been mad to go in pursuit
of it.

"Good-bye, Daisy!" said Lupin, trying to jest, but really overcome with
rage.

He eyed his accomplices in the hope that one of them would venture to
give a mocking smile.  How pleased he would have been to vent his nerves
on them!

"Let's go home," he said to his companions.

He gave them some dinner; then he smoked a cigar and they set off again
in the car and went the round of the theatres, beginning with those
which were giving light operas and musical comedies, for which he
presumed that Daubrecq and his lady would have a preference.  He took a
stall, inspected the lower-tier boxes and went away again.

He next drove to the more serious theatres: the Renaissance, the Gymnase.

At last, at ten o'clock in the evening, he saw a pit-tier box at the
Vaudeville almost entirely protected from inspection by its two screens;
and, on tipping the boxkeeper, was told that it contained a short, stout,
elderly gentleman and a lady who was wearing a thick lace veil.

The next box was free.  He took it, went back to his friends to give
them their instructions and sat down near the couple.

During the entr'acte, when the lights went up, he perceived Daubrecq's
profile.  The lady remained at the back of the box, invisible.  The two
were speaking in a low voice; and, when the curtain rose again, they
went on speaking, but in such a way that Lupin could not distinguish
a word.

Ten minutes passed.  Some one tapped at their door.  It was one of the
men from the box-office.

"Are you M. le Depute Daubrecq, sir?" he asked.

"Yes," said Daubrecq, in a voice of surprise.  "But how do you know my
name?"

"There's a gentleman asking for you on the telephone.  He told me to
go to Box 22"

"But who is it?"

"M. le Marquis d'Albufex."

"Eh?"

"What am I to say, sir?"

"I'm coming...I'm coming..."

Daubrecq rose hurriedly from his seat and followed the clerk to the
box-office.

He was not yet out of sight when Lupin sprang from his box, worked the
lock of the next door and sat down beside the lady.

She gave a stifled cry.

"Hush!" he said.  "I have to speak to you.  It is most important."

"Ah!" she said, between her teeth.  "Arsene Lupin!"  He was dumbfounded.
For a moment he sat quiet, open-mouthed.  The woman knew him!  And not
only did she know him, but she had recognized him through his disguise!
Accustomed though he was to the most extraordinary and unusual events,
this disconcerted him.

He did not even dream of protesting and stammered:

"So you know?...So you know?..."

He snatched at the lady's veil and pulled it aside before she had time
to defend herself:

"What!" he muttered, with increased amazement.  "Is it possible?"

It was the woman whom he had seen at Daubrecq's a few days earlier, the
woman who had raised her dagger against Daubrecq and who had intended
to stab him with all the strength of her hatred.

It was her turn to be taken aback:

"What! Have you seen me before?..."

"Yes, the other night, at his house...I saw what you tried to do..."

She made a movement to escape.  He held her back and, speaking with
great eagerness:

"I must know who you are," he said.  "That was why I had Daubrecq
telephoned for."

She looked aghast:

"Do you mean to say it was not the Marquis d'Albufex?"

"No, it was one of my assistants."

"Then Daubrecq will come back?..."
		
"Yes, but we have time...Listen to me...We must meet again...He is
your enemy...I will save you from him..."

"Why should you?  What is your object?"

"Do not distrust me...it is quite certain that our interests are
identical... Where can I see you?  To-morrow, surely?  At what time?
And where?"

"Well..."

She looked at him with obvious hesitation, not knowing what to do, on
the point of speaking and yet full of uneasiness and doubt.

He pressed her:

"Oh, I entreat you...answer me just one word...and at once...It would
be a pity for him to find me here...I entreat you..."

She answered sharply:

"My name doesn't matter...We will see each other first and you shall
explain to me...Yes, we will meet...Listen, to-morrow, at three
o'clock, at the corner of the Boulevard..."

At that exact moment, the door of the box opened, so to speak, with a
bang, and Daubrecq appeared.

"Rats!" Lupin mumbled, under his breath, furious at being caught before
obtaining what he wanted.

Daubrecq gave a chuckle:

"So that's it...I thought something was up...	Ah, the telephone-trick:
a little out of date, sir!  I had not gone half-way when I turned back."

He pushed Lupin to the front of the box and, sitting down beside the
lady, said:

"And, now, my lord, who are we?  A servant at the police-office, probably?
There's a professional look about that mug of yours."

He stared hard at Lupin, who did not move a muscle, and tried to put a
name to the face, but failed to recognize the man whom he had called
Polonius.

Lupin, without taking his eyes from Daubrecq either, reflected.  He would
not for anything in the world have thrown up the game at that point or
neglected this favourable opportunity of coming to an understanding
with his mortal enemy.

The woman sat in her corner, motionless, and watched them both.

Lupin said:

"Let us go outside, sir.  That will make our interview easier."

"No, my lord, here," grinned the deputy.  "It will take place here,
presently, during the entr'acte.  Then we shall not be disturbing
anybody."

"But..."

"Save your breath, my man; you sha'n't budge."

And he took Lupin by the coat-collar, with the obvious intention of not
letting go of him before the interval.

A rash move!  Was it likely that Lupin would consent to remain in such
an attitude, especially before a woman, a woman to whom he had offered
his alliance, a woman--and he now thought of it for the first time--
who was distinctly good-looking and whose grave beauty attracted him.
His whole pride as a man rose at the thought.

However, he said nothing.  He accepted the heavy weight of the hand on
his shoulder and even sat bent in two, as though beaten, powerless,
almost frightened.

"Eh, clever!" said the deputy, scoffingly.  "We don't seem to be
swaggering quite so much."

The stage was full of actors who were arguing and making a noise.

Daubrecq had loosened his grasp slightly and Lupin felt that the moment
had come.  With the edge of his hand, he gave him a violent blow in the
hollow of the arm, as he might have done with a hatchet.

The pain took Daubrecq off his guard.  Lupin now released himself
entirely and sprang at the other to clutch him by the throat.  But
Daubrecq had at once put himself on the defensive and stepped back
and their four hands seized one another.

They gripped with superhuman energy, the whole force of the two
adversaries concentrating in those hands.  Daubrecq's were of monstrous
size; and Lupin, caught in that iron vise, felt as though he were
fighting not with a man, but with some terrible beast, a huge gorilla.

They held each other against the door, bending low, like a pair of
wrestlers groping and trying to lay hold of each other.  Their bones
creaked.  Whichever gave way first was bound to be caught by the throat
and strangled.  And all this happened amid a sudden silence, for the
actors on the stage were now listening to one of their number, who was
speaking in a low voice.

The woman stood back flat against the partition, looking at them in
terror.  Had she taken sides with either of them, with a single movement,
the victory would at once have been decided in that one's favour.  But
which of them should she assist?  What could Lupin represent in her eyes?
A friend?  An enemy?

She briskly made for the front of the box, forced back the screen and,
leaning forward, seemed to give a signal.  Then she returned and tried
to slip to the door.

Lupin, as though wishing to help her, said:

"Why don't you move the chair?"

He was speaking of a heavy chair which had fallen down between him and
Daubrecq and across which they were struggling.

The woman stooped and pulled away the chair.  That was what Lupin was
waiting for.  Once rid of the obstacle, he caught Daubrecq a smart kick
on the shin with the tip of his patent-leather boot.  The result was
the same as with the blow which he had given him on the arm.  The pain
caused a second's apprehension and distraction, of which he at once took
advantage to beat down Daubrecq's outstretched hands and to dig his ten
fingers into his adversary's throat and neck.

Daubrecq struggled.  Daubrecq tried to pull away the hands that were
throttling him; but he was beginning to choke and felt his strength
decreasing.

"Aha, you old monkey!" growled Lupin, forcing him to the floor.  "Why
don't you shout for help?  How frightened you must be of a scandal!"

At the sound of the fall there came a knocking at the partition, on
the other side.

"Knock away, knock away," said Lupin, under his breath.  "The play is on
the stage.  This is my business and, until I've mastered this gorilla..."

It did not take him long.  The deputy was choking.  Lupin stunned him
with a blow on the jaw; and all that remained for him to do was to take
the woman away and make his escape with her before the alarm was given.

But, when he turned round, he saw that the woman was gone.

She could not be far.  Darting from the box, he set off at a run,
regardless of the programme-sellers and check-takers.

On reaching the entrance-lobby, he saw her through an open door, crossing
the pavement of the Chaussee d'Antin.

She was stepping into a motor-car when he came up with her.

The door closed behind her.

He seized the handle and tried to pull at it.

But a man jumped up inside and sent his fist flying into Lupin's face,
with less skill but no less force than Lupin had sent his into
Daubrecq's face.

Stunned though he was by the blow, he nevertheless had ample time to
recognize the man, in a sudden, startled vision, and also to recognize,
under his chauffeur's disguise, the man who was driving the car.  It
was the Growler and the Masher, the two men in charge of the boats on
the Enghien night, two friends of Gilbert and Vaucheray: in short, two
of Lupin's own accomplices.

When he reached his rooms in the Rue Chateaubriand, Lupin, after
washing the blood from his face, sat for over an hour in a chair, as
though overwhelmed.  For the first time in his life he was experiencing
the pain of treachery.  For the first time his comrades in the fight
were turning against their chief.

Mechanically, to divert his thoughts, he turned to his correspondence
and tore the wrapper from an evening paper.  Among the late news he
found the following paragraphs:

			"THE VILLA MARIE-THERESE CASE"

      "The real identity of Vaucheray, one of the alleged
	murderers of Leonard the valet, has at last been ascertained.
	He is a miscreant of the worst type, a hardened criminal who
	has already twice been sentenced for murder, in default, under
	another name.

	"No doubt, the police will end by also discovering the real name
	of his accomplice, Gilbert.  In any event, the examining-magistrate
	is determined to commit the prisoners for trial as soon as possible.

	"The public will have no reason to complain of the delays of the law."

In between other newspapers and prospectuses lay a letter.

Lupin jumped when he saw it.  It was addressed:

			"Monsieur de Beaumont, Michel."

"Oh," he gasped, "a letter from Gilbert!"

It contained these few words:

	"Help, governor!...I am frightened. I am frightened..."

Once again, Lupin spent a night alternating between sleeplessness and
nightmares.  Once again, he was tormented by atrocious and terrifying
visions.



CHAPTER IV

THE CHIEF OF THE ENEMIES

"Poor boy!" murmured Lupin, when his eyes fell on Gilbert's letter next
morning.  "How he must feel it!"

On the very first day when he saw him, he had taken a liking to that
well-set-up youngster, so careless, gay and fond of life. Gilbert was
devoted to him, would have accepted death at a sign from his master.
And Lupin also loved his frankness, his good humour, his simplicity, his
bright, open face.

"Gilbert," he often used to say, "you are an honest man.  Do you know,
if I were you, I should chuck the business and become an honest man for
good."

"After you, governor," Gilbert would reply, with a laugh.

"Won't you, though?"

"No, governor.  An honest man is a chap who works and grinds.  It's a
taste which I may have had as a nipper; but they've made me lose it
since."

"Who's 'they'?"

Gilbert was silent.  He was always silent when questioned about his
early life; and all that Lupin knew was that he had been an orphan
since childhood and that he had lived all over the place, changing
his name and taking up the queerest jobs.  The whole thing was a
mystery which no one had been able to fathom; and it did not look as
though the police would make much of it either.

Nor, on the other hand, did it look as though the police would consider
that mystery a reason for delaying proceedings.  They would send
Vaucheray's accomplice for trial--under his name of Gilbert or any
other name--and visit him with the same inevitable punishment.

"Poor boy!" repeated Lupin.  "They're persecuting him like this only
because of me.  They are afraid of his escaping and they are in a hurry
to finish the business: the verdict first and then...the execution.

"Oh, the butchers!...A lad of twenty, who has committed no murder, who
is not even an accomplice in the murder..."

Alas, Lupin well knew that this was a thing impossible to prove and that
he must concentrate his efforts upon another point.  But upon which?
Was he to abandon the trail of the crystal stopper?

He could not make up his mind to that.  His one and only diversion from
the search was to go to Enghien, where the Growler and the Masher lived,
and make sure that nothing had been seen of them since the murder at the
Villa Marie-Therese.  Apart from this, he applied himself to the
question of Daubrecq and nothing else.

He refused even to trouble his head about the problems set before him:
the treachery of the Growler and the Masher; their connection with the
gray-haired lady; the spying of which he himself was the object.

"Steady, Lupin," he said.  "One only argues falsely in a fever.  So hold
your tongue.  No inferences, above all things!  Nothing is more foolish
than to infer one fact from another before finding a certain
starting-point. That's where you get up a tree. Listen to your instinct.
Act according to your instinct.  And as you are persuaded, outside all
argument, outside all logic, one might say, that this business turns
upon that confounded stopper, go for it boldly.  Have at Daubrecq and
his bit of crystal!"

Lupin did not wait to arrive at these conclusions before settling his
actions accordingly.  At the moment when he was stating them in his mind,
three days after the scene at the Vaudeville, he was sitting, dressed
like a retired tradesman, in an old overcoat, with a muffler round his
neck, on a bench in the Avenue Victor-Hugo, at some distance from the
Square Lamartine.  Victoire had his instructions to pass by that bench
at the same hour every morning.

"Yes," he repeated to himself, "the crystal stopper: everything turns on
that...Once I get hold of it..."

Victoire arrived, with her shopping-basket on her arm.  He at once
noticed her extraordinary agitation and pallor:

"What's the matter?" asked Lupin, walking beside his old nurse.

She went into a big grocer's, which was crowded with people, and,
turning to him:

"Here," she said, in a voice torn with excitement.  "Here's what you've
been hunting for."

And, taking something from her basket, she gave it to him.

Lupin stood astounded: in his hand lay the crystal stopper.

"Can it be true?  Can it be true?" he muttered, as though the ease of
the solution had thrown him off his balance.

But the fact remained, visible and palpable.  He recognized by its shape,
by its size, by the worn gilding of its facets, recognized beyond any
possible doubt the crystal stopper which he had seen before.  He even
remarked a tiny, hardly noticeable little scratch on the stem which he
remembered perfectly.

However, while the thing presented all the same characteristics, it
possessed no other that seemed out of the way.  It was a crystal stopper,
that was all.  There was no really special mark to distinguish it from
other stoppers.  There was no sign upon it, no stamp; and, being cut
from a single piece, it contained no foreign object.

"What then?"

And Lupin received a quick insight into the depth of his mistake.  What
good could the possession of that crystal stopper do him so long as he
was ignorant of its value?  That bit of glass had no existence in itself;
it counted only through the meaning that attached to it.  Before taking
it, the thing was to be certain.  And how could he tell that, in taking
it, in robbing Daubrecq of it, he was not committing an act of folly?

It was a question which was impossible of solution, but which forced
itself upon him with singular directness.

"No blunders!" he said to himself, as he pocketed the stopper.  "In this
confounded business, blunders are fatal."

He had not taken his eyes off Victoire.  Accompanied by a shopman, she
went from counter to counter, among the throng of customers.  She next
stood for some little while at the pay-desk and passed in front of Lupin.

He whispered her instructions:

"Meet me behind the Lycee Janson."

She joined him in an unfrequented street:

"And suppose I'm followed?" she said.

"No," he declared.  "I looked carefully.  Listen to me.  Where did you
find the stopper?"

"In the drawer of the table by his bed."

"But we had felt there already."

"Yes; and I did so again this morning.  I expect he put it there last
night."

"And I expect he'll want to take it from there again," said Lupin.

"Very likely."

"And suppose he finds it gone?"

Victoire looked frightened.

"Answer me," said Lupin.  "If he finds it gone, he'll accuse you of
taking it, won't he?"

"Certainly."

"Then go and put it back, as fast as you can."

"Oh dear, oh dear!" she moaned.  "I hope he won't have had time to find
out.  Give it to me, quick."

"Here you are," said Lupin.

He felt in the pocket of his overcoat.

"Well?" said Victoire, holding out her hand.

"Well," he said, after a moment, "it's gone."

"What!"

"Yes, upon my word, it's gone...somebody's taken it from me."

He burst into a peal of laughter, a laughter which, this time, was free
from all bitterness.

Victoire flew out at him:

"Laugh away!...Putting me in such a predicament!..."

"How can I help laughing?  You must confess that it's funny.  It's no
longer a tragedy that we're acting, but a fairy-tale, as much a
fairy-tale as Puss in Boots or Jack and the Beanstalk.  I must write it when
I get a few weeks to myself: The Magic Stopper; or, The Mishaps of Poor
Arsene."

"Well...who has taken it from you?"

"What are you talking about?...It has flown away...vanished from my
pocket: hey presto, begone!"

He gave the old servant a gentle push and, in a more serious tone:

"Go home, Victoire, and don't upset yourself.  Of course, some one saw
you give me the stopper and took advantage of the crowd in the shop to
pick my pocket of it.  That only shows that we are watched more closely
than I thought and by adversaries of the first rank.  But, once more, be
easy.  Honest men always come by their own...Have you anything else to
tell me?"

"Yes.  Some one came yesterday evening, while M. Daubrecq was out.  I
saw lights reflected upon the trees in the garden."

"The portress' bedroom?"

"The portress was up."

"Then it was some of those detective-fellows; they are still hunting.
I'll see you later, Victoire.  You must let me in again."

"What! You want to..."

"What do I risk?  Your room is on the third floor.  Daubrecq suspects
nothing."

"But the others!"

"The others?  If it was to their interest to play me a trick, they'd
have tried before now.  I'm in their way, that's all.  They're not
afraid of me.  So till later, Victoire, at five o'clock exactly."

One further surprise awaited Lupin.  In the evening his old nurse told
him that, having opened the drawer of the bedside table from curiosity,
she had found the crystal stopper there again.

Lupin was no longer to be excited by these miraculous incidents.  He
simply said to himself:

"So it's been brought back.  And the person who brought it back and who
enters this house by some unexplained means considered, as I did, that
the stopper ought not to disappear.  And yet Daubrecq, who knows that he
is being spied upon to his very bedroom, has once more left the stopper
in a drawer, as though he attached no importance to it at all!  Now what
is one to make of that?"

Though Lupin did not make anything of it, nevertheless he could not
escape certain arguments, certain associations of ideas that gave him
the same vague foretaste of light which one receives on approaching the
outlet of a tunnel.

"It is inevitable, as the case stands," he thought, "that there must
soon be an encounter between myself and the others.  From that moment I
shall be master of the situation."

Five days passed, during which Lupin did not glean the slightest
particular.  On the sixth day Daubrecq received a visit, in the small
hours, from a gentleman, Laybach the deputy, who, like his colleagues,
dragged himself at his feet in despair and, when all was done, handed
him twenty thousand francs.

Two more days; and then, one night, posted on the landing of the second
floor, Lupin heard the creaking of a door, the front-door, as he
perceived, which led from the hall into the garden.  In the darkness he
distinguished, or rather divined, the presence of two persons, who
climbed the stairs and stopped on the first floor, outside Daubrecq's
bedroom.

What were they doing there?  It was not possible to enter the room,
because Daubrecq bolted his door every night.  Then what were they
hoping?

Manifestly, a handiwork of some kind was being performed, as Lupin
discovered from the dull sounds of rubbing against the door.  Then words,
uttered almost beneath a whisper, reached him:

"Is it all right?"

"Yes, quite, but, all the same, we'd better put it off till to-morrow,
because..."

Lupin did not hear the end of the sentence.  The men were already groping
their way downstairs.  The hall-door was closed, very gently, and then
the gate.

"It's curious, say what one likes," thought Lupin.  "Here is a house in
which Daubrecq carefully conceals his rascalities and is on his guard,
not without good reason, against spies; and everybody walks in and out
as in a booth at a fair.  Victoire lets me in, the portress admits the
emissaries of the police: that's well and good; but who is playing false
in these people's favour?  Are we to suppose that they are acting alone?
But what fearlessness!  And how well they know their way about!"

In the afternoon, during Daubrecq's absence, he examined the door of the
first-floor bedroom.  And, at the first glance, he understood: one of the
lower panels had been skilfully cut out and was only held in place by
invisible tacks.  The people, therefore, who had done this work were the
same who had acted at his two places, in the Rue Matignon and the Rue
Chateaubriand.

He also found that the work dated back to an earlier period and that, as
in his case, the opening had been prepared beforehand, in anticipation
of favourable circumstances or of some immediate need.

The day did not seem long to Lupin.  Knowledge was at hand.  Not only
would he discover the manner in which his adversaries employed those
little openings, which were apparently unemployable, since they did not
allow a person to reach the upper bolts, but he would learn who the
ingenious and energetic adversaries were with whom he repeatedly and
inevitably found himself confronted.

One incident annoyed him.  In the evening Daubrecq, who had complained
of feeling tired at dinner, came home at ten o'clock and, contrary to
his usual custom, pushed the bolts of the hall-door.  In that case, how
would the others be able to carry out their plan and go to Daubrecq's
room?  Lupin waited for an hour after Daubrecq put out his light.  Then
he went down to the deputy's study, opened one of the windows ajar and
returned to the third floor and fixed his rope-ladder so that, in case
of need, he could reach the study without passing though the house.
Lastly, he resumed his post on the second-floor landing. 

He did not have to wait long.  An hour earlier than on the previous night
some one tried to open the hall-door.  When the attempt failed, a few
minutes of absolute silence followed.  And Lupin was beginning to think
that the men had abandoned the idea, when he gave a sudden start.  Some
one had passed, without the least sound to interrupt the silence.  He
would not have known it, so utterly were the thing's steps deadened
by the stair-carpet, if the baluster-rail, which he himself held in his
hand, had not shaken slightly.  Some one was coming upstairs.

And, as the ascent continued, Lupin became aware of the uncanny feeling
that he heard nothing more than before.  He knew, because of the rail,
that a thing was coming and he could count the number of steps climbed
by noting each vibration of the rail; but no other indication gave him
that dim sensation of presence which we feel in distinguishing movements
which we do not see, in perceiving sounds which we do not hear.  And yet
a blacker darkness ought to have taken shape within the darkness and
something ought, at least, to modify the quality of the silence.  No,
he might well have believed that there was no one there.

And Lupin, in spite of himself and against the evidence of his reason,
ended by believing it, for the rail no longer moved and he thought that
he might have been the sport of an illusion.

And this lasted a long time.  He hesitated, not knowing what to do, not
knowing what to suppose.  But an odd circumstance impressed him.  A clock
struck two.  He recognized the chime of Daubrecq's clock.  And the chime
was that of a clock from which one is not separated by the obstacle of a
door.

Lupin slipped down the stairs and went to the door.  It was closed, but
there was a space on the left, at the bottom, a space left by the removal
of the little panel.

He listened.  Daubrecq, at that moment, turned in his bed; and his
breathing was resumed, evenly and a little stertorously.  And Lupin
plainly heard the sound of rumpling garments.  Beyond a doubt, the thing
was there, fumbling and feeling through the clothes which Daubrecq had
laid beside his bed.

"Now," thought Lupin, "we shall learn something.  But how the deuce did
the beggar get in?  Has he managed to draw the bolts and open the door?
But, if so, why did he make the mistake of shutting it again?"

Not for a second--a curious anomaly in a man like Lupin, an anomaly to
be explained only by the uncanny feeling which the whole adventure
produced in him--not for a second did he suspect the very simple truth
which was about to be revealed to him.  Continuing his way down, he
crouched on one of the bottom steps of the staircase, thus placing
himself between the door of the bedroom and the hall-door, on the road
which Daubrecq's enemy must inevitably take in order to join his
accomplices.

He questioned the darkness with an unspeakable anguish.  He was on the
point of unmasking that enemy of Daubrecq's, who was also his own
adversary.  He would thwart his plans.  And the booty captured from
Daubrecq he would capture in his turn, while Daubrecq slept and while
the accomplices lurking behind the hall-door or outside the garden-gate
vainly awaited their leader's return.

And that return took place.  Lupin knew it by the renewed vibration of
the balusters.  And, once more, with every sense strained and every
nerve on edge, he strove to discern the mysterious thing that was coming
toward him.  He suddenly realized it when only a few yards away.  He
himself, hidden in a still darker recess, could not be seen.  And what
he saw--in the very vaguest manner--was approaching stair by stair,
with infinite precautions, holding on to each separate baluster.

"Whom the devil have I to do with?" said Lupin to himself, while his
heart thumped inside his chest.

The catastrophe was hastened.  A careless movement on Lupin's part was
observed by the stranger, who stopped short.  Lupin was afraid lest the
other should turn back and take to flight.  He sprang at the adversary
and was stupefied at encountering nothing but space and knocking against
the stair-rail without seizing the form which he saw.  But he at once
rushed forward, crossed the best part of the hall and caught up his
antagonist just as he was reaching the door opening on the garden.

There was a cry of fright, answered by other cries on the further side
of the door.

"Oh, hang it, what's this?" muttered Lupin, whose arms had closed, in
the dark, round a little, tiny, trembling, whimpering thing.

Suddenly understanding, he stood for a moment motionless and dismayed,
at a loss what to do with his conquered prey.  But the others were
shouting and stamping outside the door.  Thereupon, dreading lest
Daubrecq should wake up, he slipped the little thing under his jacket,
against his chest, stopped the crying with his handkerchief rolled into
a ball and hurried up the three flights of stairs.

"Here," he said to Victoire, who woke with a start.  "I've brought you
the indomitable chief of our enemies, the Hercules of the gang.  Have
you a feeding-bottle about you?"

He put down in the easy-chair a child of six or seven years of age, the
tiniest little fellow in a gray jersey and a knitted woollen cap, whose
pale and exquisitely pretty features were streaked with the tears that
streamed from the terrified eyes.

"Where did you pick that up?" asked Victoire, aghast.

"At the foot of the stairs, as it was coming out of Daubrecq's bedroom,"
replied Lupin, feeling the jersey in the hope that the child had brought
a booty of some kind from that room.

Victoire was stirred to pity:

"Poor little dear!  Look, he's trying not to cry!...Oh, saints above,
his hands are like ice!  Don't be afraid, sonnie, we sha'n't hurt you:
the gentleman's all right."

"Yes," said Lupin, "the gentleman's quite all right, but there's another
very wicked gentleman who'll wake up if they go on making such a rumpus
outside the hall-door.  Do you hear them, Victoire?"

"Who is it?"

"The satellites of our young Hercules, the indomitable leader's gang."

"Well...?" stammered Victoire, utterly unnerved.

"Well, as I don't want to be caught in the trap, I shall start by
clearing out.  Are you coming, Hercules?"

He rolled the child in a blanket, so that only its head remained outside,
gagged its mouth as gently as possible and made Victoire fasten it to
his shoulders:

"See, Hercules?  We're having a game.  You never thought you'd find
gentlemen to play pick-a-back with you at three o'clock in the morning!
Come, whoosh, let's fly away!  You don't get giddy, I hope?"

He stepped across the window-ledge and set foot on one of the rungs of
the ladder.  He was in the garden in a minute.

He had never ceased hearing and now heard more plainly still the blows
that were being struck upon the front-door.  He was astounded that
Daubrecq was not awakened by so violent a din:

"If I don't put a stop to this, they'll spoil everything," he said to
himself.

He stood in an angle of the house, invisible in the darkness, and
measured the distance between himself and the gate.  The gate was open.
To his right, he saw the steps, on the top of which the people were
flinging themselves about; to his left, the building occupied by the
portress.

The woman had come out of her lodge and was standing near the people,
entreating them:

"Oh, do be quiet, do be quiet!  He'll come!"

"Capital!" said Lupin.  "The good woman is an accomplice of these as
well.  By Jingo, what a pluralist!"

He rushed across to her and, taking her by the scruff of the neck,
hissed:

"Go and tell them I've got the child...They can come and fetch it at my
place, Rue Chateaubriand."

A little way off, in the avenue, stood a taxi which Lupin presumed to be
engaged by the gang.  Speaking authoritatively, as though he were one of
the accomplices, he stepped into the cab and told the man to drive him
home.

"Well," he said to the child, "that wasn't much of a shake-up, was it?...
What do you say to going to bye-bye on the gentleman's bed?"

As his servant, Achille, was asleep, Lupin made the little chap
comfortable and stroked his hair for him.  The child seemed numbed.  His
poor face was as though petrified into a stiff expression made up, at one
and the same time, of fear and the wish not to show fear, of the longing
to scream and a pitiful effort not to scream.

"Cry, my pet, cry," said Lupin.  "It'll do you good to cry."

The child did not cry, but the voice was so gentle and so kind that he
relaxed his tense muscles; and, now that his eyes were calmer and his
mouth less contorted, Lupin, who was examining him closely, found
something that he recognized, an undoubted resemblance.

This again confirmed certain facts which he suspected and which he had
for some time been linking in his mind.  Indeed, unless he was mistaken,
the position was becoming very different and he would soon assume the
direction of events.  After that...

A ring at the bell followed, at once, by two others, sharp ones.

"Hullo!" said Lupin to the child.  "Here's mummy come to fetch you.
Don't move."

He ran and opened the door.

A woman entered, wildly:

"My son!" she screamed.  "My son!  Where is he?"

"In my room," said Lupin.

Without asking more, thus proving that she knew the way, she rushed to
the bedroom.

"As I thought," muttered Lupin.  "The youngish woman with the gray hair:
Daubrecq's friend and enemy."

He walked to the window and looked through the curtains.  Two men were
striding up and down the opposite pavement: the Growler and the Masher.

"And they're not even hiding themselves," he said to himself.  "That's
a good sign.  They consider that they can't do without me any longer and
that they've got to obey the governor.  There remains the pretty lady
with the gray hair.  That will be more difficult.  It's you and I now,
mummy."

He found the mother and the boy clasped in each other's arms; and the
mother, in a great state of alarm, her eyes moist with tears, was saying:

"You're not hurt?  You're sure?  Oh, how frightened you must have been,
my poor little Jacques!"

"A fine little fellow," said Lupin.

She did not reply.  She was feeling the child's jersey, as Lupin had
done, no doubt to see if he had succeeded in his nocturnal mission; and
she questioned him in a whisper.

"No, mummy," said the child.  "No, really."

She kissed him fondly and petted him, until, in a little while, the
child, worn out with fatigue and excitement, fell asleep.  She remained
leaning over him for a long time.  She herself seemed very much worn
out and in need of rest.

Lupin did not disturb her contemplation.  He looked at her anxiously,
with an attention which she did not perceive, and he noticed the wider
rings round her eyes and the deeper marks of wrinkles.  Yet he considered
her handsomer than he had thought, with that touching beauty which
habitual suffering gives to certain faces that are more human, more
sensitive than others.

She wore so sad an expression that, in a burst of instinctive sympathy,
he went up to her and said: "I do not know what your plans are, but,
whatever they may be, you stand in need of help.  You cannot succeed
alone."

"I am not alone."

"The two men outside?  I know them.  They're no good.  I beseech you,
make use of me.  You remember the other evening, at the theatre, in the
private box?  You were on the point of speaking.  Do not hesitate to-day."

She turned her eyes on him, looked at him long and fixedly and, as though
unable to escape that opposing will, she said:

"What do you know exactly?  What do you know about me?"

"There are many things that I do not know.  I do not know your name.
But I know..."

She interrupted him with a gesture; and, resolutely, in her turn,
dominating the man who was compelling her to speak:

"It doesn't matter," she exclaimed.  "What you know, after all, is not
much and is of no importance.  But what are your plans?  You offer me
your help:  with what view?  For what work?  You have flung yourself
headlong into this business; I have been unable to undertake anything
without meeting you on my path: you must be contemplating some aim...
What aim?"

"What aim?  Upon my word, it seems to me that my conduct..."

"No, no," she said, emphatically, "no phrases!  What you and I want is
certainties; and, to achieve them, absolute frankness.  I will set you
the example. M. Daubrecq possesses a thing of unparalleled value, not in
itself, but for what it represents.  That thing you know.  You have twice
held it in your hands.  I have twice taken it from you.  Well, I am
entitled to believe that, when you tried to obtain possession of it, you
meant to use the power which you attribute to it and to use it to your
own advantage..."

"What makes you say that?"

"Yes, you meant to use it to forward your schemes, in the interest of
your own affairs, in accordance with your habits as a..."

"As a burglar and a swindler," said Lupin, completing the sentence for
her.

She did not protest. He tried to read her secret thoughts in the depths
of her eyes.  What did she want with him?  What was she afraid of?  If
she mistrusted him, had he not also reasons to mistrust that woman who
had twice taken the crystal stopper from him to restore it to Daubrecq?
Mortal enemy of Daubrecq's though she were, up to what point did she
remain subject to that man's will?  By surrendering himself to her, did
he not risk surrendering himself to Daubrecq?  And yet he had never
looked upon graver eyes nor a more honest face.

Without further hesitation, he stated:

"My object is simple enough.  It is the release of my friends Gilbert
and Vaucheray."

"Is that true?  Is that true?" she exclaimed, quivering all over and
questioning him with an anxious glance.

"If you knew me..."

"I do know you...I know who you are.  For months, I have taken part in
your life, without your suspecting it...and yet, for certain reasons,
I still doubt..."

He said, in a more decisive tone:

"You do not know me.  If you knew me, you would know that there can be
no peace for me before my two companions have escaped the awful fate
that awaits them."

She rushed at him, took him by the shoulders and positively distraught,
said:

"What?  What did you say?  The awful fate?...Then you believe...you
believe..."

"I really believe," said Lupin, who felt how greatly this threat upset
her, "I really believe that, if I am not in time, Gilbert and Vaucheray
are done for."

"Be quiet!...Be quiet!" she cried, clutching him fiercely.  "Be quiet!...
You mustn't say that...There is no reason...It's just you who suppose..."

"It's not only I, it's Gilbert as well..."

"What? Gilbert?  How do you know?"

"From himself?"

"From him?"

"Yes, from Gilbert, who has no hope left but in me; from Gilbert, who
knows that only one man in the world can save him and who, a few days
ago, sent me a despairing appeal from prison.  Here is his letter."

She snatched the paper greedily and read in stammering accents:

"Help, governor!...I am frightened!...I am frightened!..."

She dropped the letter.  Her hands fluttered in space.  It was as though
her staring eyes beheld the sinister vision which had already so often
terrified Lupin.  She gave a scream of horror, tried to rise and fainted.



CHAPTER V

THE TWENTY-SEVEN

The child was sleeping peacefully on the bed.  The mother did not move
from the sofa on which Lupin had laid her; but her easier breathing and
the blood which was now returning to her face announced her impending
recovery from her swoon.

He observed that she wore a wedding-ring.  Seeing a locket hanging from
her bodice, he stooped and, turning it, found a miniature photograph
representing a man of about forty and a lad--a stripling rather--in a
schoolboy's uniform.  He studied the fresh, young face set in curly hair:

"It's as I thought," he said.  "Ah, poor woman!"

The hand which he took between his grew warmer by degrees.  The eyes
opened, then closed again.  She murmured:

"Jacques..."

"Do not distress yourself...it's all right he's asleep."

She recovered consciousness entirely.  But, as she did not speak, Lupin
put questions to her, to make her feel a gradual need of unbosoming
herself.  And he said, pointing to the locket:

"The schoolboy is Gilbert, isn't he?"

"Yes," she said.

"And Gilbert is your son?"

She gave a shiver and whispered:

"Yes, Gilbert is my son, my eldest son."

So she was the mother of Gilbert, of Gilbert the prisoner at the Sante,
relentlessly pursued by the authorities and now awaiting his trial for
murder!

Lupin continued:

"And the other portrait?"

"My husband."

"Your husband?"

"Yes, he died three years ago."

She was now sitting up.  Life quivered in her veins once more, together
with the horror of living and the horror of all the ghastly things that
threatened her. Lupin went on to ask:

"What was your husband's name?"

She hesitated a moment and answered:

"Mergy."

He exclaimed:

"Victorien Mergy the deputy?"

"Yes."

There was a long pause.  Lupin remembered the incident and the stir
which it had caused.  Three years ago, Mergy the deputy had blown out
his brains in the lobby of the Chamber, without leaving a word of
explanation behind him; and no one had ever discovered the slightest
reason for that suicide.

"Do you know the reason?" asked Lupin, completing his thought aloud.

"Yes, I know it."

"Gilbert, perhaps?"

"No, Gilbert had disappeared for some years, turned out of doors and
cursed by my husband.  It was a very great sorrow, but there was
another motive."

"What was that?" asked Lupin.

But it was not necessary for Lupin to put further questions.  Madame
Mergy could keep silent no longer and, slowly at first, with all the
anguish of that past which had to be called up, she told her story:

"Twenty-five years ago, when my name was Clarisse Darcel and my parents
living, I knew three young men at Nice.  Their names will at once give
you an insight into the present tragedy: they were Alexis Daubrecq,
Victorien Mergy and Louis Prasville.  The three were old acquaintances,
had gone to college in the same year and served in the same regiment.
Prasville, at that time, was in love with a singer at the opera-house at
Nice.  The two others, Mergy and Daubrecq, were in love with me.  I shall
be brief as regards all this and, for the rest, as regards the whole
story, for the facts tell their own tale.  I fell in love with