The Teeth of the Tiger, Maurice Leblanc [top 10 inspirational books TXT] 📗

I posted three of our men there. If he’s tried to get out on that side, he’s caught.”

“We’ve only got to knock,” said Mazeroux. “Our men will find the trapdoor and let us out. If not, we will break it down.”

More blows echoed down the passage. Fifteen or twenty minutes after, the trapdoor gave way, and other voices now mingled with Weber’s and Mazeroux’s.

During this time, Don Luis examined his domain and perceived how extremely small it was. The most that he could do was to sit in it. It was a gallery, or, rather, a sort of gut, a yard and a half long and ending in an orifice, narrower still, heaped up with bricks. The walls, besides, were formed of bricks, some of which were lacking; and the building-stones which these should have kept in place crumbled at the least touch. The ground was strewn with them.

“By Jove!” thought Lupin, “I must not wriggle about too much, or I shall risk being buried alive! A pleasant prospect!”

Not only this, but the fear of making a noise kept him motionless. As a matter of fact, he was close to two rooms occupied by the detectives, first the boudoir and then the study, for the boudoir, as he knew, was over that part of his study which included the telephone box.

The thought of this suggested another. On reflection, remembering that he used sometimes to wonder how Count Malonyi’s ancestress had managed to keep alive behind the curtain on the days when she had to hide there, he realized that there must have been a communication between the secret passage and what was now the telephone box, a communication too narrow to admit a person’s body, but serving as a ventilating shaft.

As a precaution, in case the secret passage was discovered, a stone concealed the upper aperture of this shaft. Count Malonyi must have closed up the lower end when he restored the wainscoting of the study.

So there he was, imprisoned in the thickness of the walls, with no very definite intention beyond that of escaping from the clutches of the police. More hours passed.

Gradually, tortured with hunger and thirst, he fell into a heavy sleep, disturbed by painful nightmares which he would have given much to be able to throw off. But he slept too deeply to recover consciousness until eight o’clock in the evening.

When he woke up, feeling very tired, he saw his position in an unexpectedly hideous light and, at the same time, so accurately that, yielding to a sudden change of opinion marked by no little fear, he resolved to leave his hiding-place and give himself up. Anything was better than the torture which he was enduring and the dangers to which longer waiting exposed him.

But, on turning round to reach the entrance to his hole, he perceived first that the stone did not swing over when merely pushed, and, next, after several attempts, that he could not manage to find the mechanism which no doubt worked the stone. He persisted. His exertions were all in vain. The stone did not budge. Only, at each exertion, a few bits of stone came crumbling from the upper part of the wall and still further narrowed the space in which he was able to move.

It cost him a considerable effort to master his excitement and to say, jokingly:

“That’s capital! I shall be reduced now to calling for help. I, Arsène Lupin! Yes, to call in the help of those gentlemen of the police. Otherwise, the odds on my being buried alive will increase every minute. They’re ten to one as it is!”

He clenched his fists.

“Hang it! I’ll get out of this scrape by myself! Call for help? Not if I know it!”

He summoned up all his energies to think, but his jaded brain gave him none but confused and disconnected ideas. He was haunted by Florence’s image and by Marie Fauville’s as well.

“It’s tonight that I’m to save them,” he said to himself. “And I certainly will save them, as they are not guilty and as I know the real criminal. But how shall I set about it to succeed?”

He thought of the Prefect of Police, of the meeting that was to take place at Fauville’s house on the Boulevard Suchet. The meeting had begun. The police were watching the house. And this reminded him of the sheet of paper found by Weber in the eighth volume of Shakespeare’s plays, and of the sentence written on it, which the Prefect had read out:

“Bear in mind that the explosion is independent of the letters, and that it will take place at three o’clock in the morning.”

“Yes,” thought Don Luis, accepting M. Desmalions’s reasoning, “yes, in ten days’ time. As there have been only three letters, the fourth will appear tonight; and the explosion will not take place until the fifth letter appears⁠—that is in ten days from now.”

He repeated:

“In ten days⁠—with the fifth letter⁠—in ten days⁠—”

And suddenly he gave a start of fright. A horrible vision had flashed across his mind, a vision only too real. The explosion was to occur that very night! And all at once, knowing that he knew the truth, all at once, in a revival of his usual clear-sightedness, he accepted the theory as certain.

No doubt only three letters had appeared out of the mysterious darkness, but four letters ought to have appeared, because one of them had appeared not on the date fixed, but ten days later; and this for a reason which Don Luis knew. Besides, it was not a question of all this. It was not a question of seeking the truth amid this confusion of dates and letters, amid this intricate tangle in which no one could lay claim to any certainty,

No; one thing alone stood out above the situation: the sentence, “Bear in mind that the explosion is independent of the letters.” And, as the explosion was put down for the night of the twenty-fifth of May, it would occur