The Lone Wolf, Louis Joseph Vance [best historical fiction books of all time txt] 📗

quarters, with comprehensive glances reviewing

their condition.

 

But, indeed, he hadn’t left the reception-hall for the salon without

recognizing that things were in no respect as they ought to be: a hat

he had left on the hall rack had been moved to another peg; a chair had

been shifted six inches from its ordained position; and the door of a

clothes-press, which he had locked on leaving, now stood ajar.

 

Furthermore, the state of the salon, which he had furnished as a lounge

and study, and of the tiny dining-room and the bedchamber adjoining,

bore out these testimonies to the fact that alien hands had thoroughly

ransacked the apartment, leaving no square inch unscrutinized.

 

Yet the proprietor missed nothing. His rooms were a private gallery of

valuable paintings and antique furniture to poison with envy the mind

of any collector, and housed into the bargain a small museum of rare

books, manuscripts, and articles of exquisite workmanship whose

individuality, aside from intrinsic worth, rendered them priceless. A

burglar of discrimination might have carried off in one coat-pocket

loot enough to foot the bill for a twelve-month of profligate

existence. But nothing had been removed, nothing at least that was

apparent in the first tour of inspection; which, if sweeping, was by no

means superficial.

 

Before checking off more elaborately his mental inventory, Lanyard

turned attention to the protective device, a simple but exhaustive

system of burglar-alarm wiring so contrived that any attempt to enter

the apartment save by means of a key which fitted both doors and of

which no duplicate existed would alarm both the concierge and the

burglar protective society. Though it seemed to have been in no way

tampered with, to test the apparatus he opened a window on the court.

 

The lodge of the concierge was within earshot. If the alarm had been in

good order, Lanyard could have heard the bell from his window. He heard

nothing.

 

With a shrug, he shut the window. He knew well—none better—how such

protection could be rendered valueless by a thoughtful and forehanded

housebreaker.

 

Returning to the salon, where the main body of his collection was

assembled, he moved slowly from object to object, ticking off items and

noting their condition; with the sole result of justifying his first

conclusion, that whereas nothing had escaped handling, nothing had been

removed.

 

By way of a final test, he opened his desk (of which the lock had been

deftly picked) and went through its pigeonholes.

 

His scanty correspondence, composed chiefly of letters exchanged with

art dealers, had been scrutinized and replaced carelessly, in disorder:

and here again he missed nothing; but in the end, removing a small

drawer and inserting a hand in its socket, he dislodged a rack of

pigeonholes and exposed the secret cabinet that is almost inevitably

an attribute of such pieces of period furniture.

 

A shallow box, this secret space contained one thing only, but that one

of considerable value, being the leather bill-fold in which the

adventurer kept a store of ready money against emergencies.

 

It was mostly for this, indeed, that he had come to his apartment; his

London campaign having demanded an expenditure far beyond his

calculations, so that he had landed in Paris with less than one hundred

francs in pocket. And Lanyard, for all his pride of spirit,

acknowledged one haunting fear that of finding himself strapped in the

face of emergency.

 

The fold yielded up its hoard to a sou: Lanyard counted out five notes

of one thousand francs and ten of twenty pounds: their sum, upwards of

two thousand dollars.

 

But if nothing had been abstracted, something had been added: the back

of one of the Bank of England notes had been used as a blank for

memorandum.

 

Lanyard spread it out and studied it attentively.

 

The handwriting had been traced with no discernible attempt at disguise,

but was quite strange to him. The pen employed had been one of those

needle-pointed nibs so popular in France; the hand was that of an

educated Frenchman. The import of the memorandum translated

substantially as follows:

 

_”To the Lone Wolf—

“The Pack sends Greetings

“and extends its invitation

“to participate in the benefits

“of its Fraternity.

“One awaits him always at

“L’Abbaye Th�l�me.“_

 

A date was added, the date of that very day…

 

Deliberately, having conned this communication, Lanyard produced his

cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, found his briquet, struck a

light, twisted the note of twenty pounds into a rude spill, set it

afire, lighted his cigarette there from and, rising, conveyed the

burning paper to a cold and empty fireplace wherein he permitted it to

burn to a crisp black ash.

 

When this was done, his smile broke through his clouding scowl.

 

“Well, my friend!” he apostrophized the author of that document which

now could never prove incriminating—“at all events, I have you to thank

for a new sensation. It has long been my ambition to feel warranted in

lighting a cigarette with a twenty-pound note, if the whim should ever

seize me!”

 

His smile faded slowly; the frown replaced it: something far more

valuable to him than a hundred dollars had just gone up in smoke …

VII

L’ABBAYE

 

His secret uncovered, that essential incognito of his punctured, his

vanity touched to the quick—all that laboriously constructed edifice

of art and chicane which yesterday had seemed so substantial, so

impregnable a wall between the Lone Wolf and the World, to-day rent,

torn asunder, and cast down in ruins about his feet—Lanyard wasted

time neither in profitless lamentation or any other sort of repining.

 

He had much to do before morning: to determine, as definitely as might

in discretion be possible, who had fathomed his secret and how; to

calculate what chance he still had of pursuing his career without

exposure and disaster; and to arrange, if investigation verified his

expectations, which were of the gloomiest, to withdraw in good order,

with all honours of war, from that dangerous field.

 

Delaying only long enough to revise plans disarranged by the

discoveries of this last bad quarter of an hour, he put out the lights

and went out by the courtyard door; for it was just possible that those

whose sardonic whim it had been to name themselves “the Pack” might

have stationed agents in the street to follow their dissocial brother

in crime. And now more than ever Lanyard was firmly bent on going his

own way unwatched. His own way first led him stealthily past the door

of the conciergerie and through the court to the public hall in the

main body of the building. Happily, there were no lights to betray him

had anyone been awake to notice. For thanks to Parisian notions of

economy even the best apartment houses dispense with elevator-boys and

with lights that burn up real money every hour of the night. By

pressing a button beside the door on entering, however, Lanyard could

have obtained light in the hallways for five minutes, or long enough to

enable any tenant to find his front-door and the key-hole therein; at

the end of which period the lamps would automatically have extinguished

themselves. Or by entering a narrow-chested box of about the dimensions

of a generous coffin, and pressing a button bearing the number of the

floor at which he wished to alight, he could have been comfortably

wafted aloft without sign of more human agency. But he prudently

availed himself of neither of these conveniences. Afoot and in complete

darkness he made the ascent of five flights of winding stairs to the

door of an apartment on the sixth floor. Here a flash from a pocket

lamp located the key-hole; the key turned without sound; the door swung

on silent hinges.

 

Once inside, the adventurer moved more freely, with less precaution

against noise. He was on known ground, and alone; the apartment, though

furnished, was untenanted, and would so remain as long as Lanyard

continued to pay the rent from London under an assumed name.

 

It was the convenience of this refuge and avenue of retreat, indeed

which had dictated his choice of the rez-de-chauss�e; for the

sixth-floor flat possessed one invaluable advantage—a window on a

level with the roof of the adjoining building.

 

Two minutes’ examination sufficed to prove that here at least the Pack

had not trespassed….

 

Five minutes later Lanyard picked the common lock of a door opening

from the roof of an apartment house on the farthest corner of the

block, found his way downstairs, tapped the door of the conciergerie,

chanted that venerable Open Sesame of Paris, “_Cordon, s’il vous

plait!_” and was made free of the street by a worthy guardian too

sleepy to challenge the identity of this late-departing guest.

 

He walked three blocks, picked up a taxicab, and in ten minutes more

was set down at the Gare des Invalides.

 

Passing through the station without pause, he took to the streets

afoot, following the boulevard St. Germain to the rue du Bac; a brief

walk up this time-worn thoroughfare brought him to the ample, open and

unguarded porte-coch�re of a court walled with beetling ancient

tenements.

 

When he had made sure that the courtyard was deserted, Lanyard

addressed himself to a door on the right; which to his knock swung

promptly ajar with a clicking latch. At the same time the adventurer

whipped from beneath his cloak a small black velvet visor and adjusted

it to mask the upper half of his face. Then entering a narrow and

odorous corridor, whose obscurity was emphasized by a lonely guttering

candle, he turned the knob of the first door and walked into a small,

ill-furnished room.

 

A spare-bodied young man, who had been reading at a desk by the light

of an oil-lamp with a heavy green shade, rose and bowed courteously.

 

“Good morning, monsieur,” he said with the cordiality of one who greets

an acquaintance of old standing. “Be seated,” he added, indicating an

arm-chair beside the desk. “It seems long since one has had the honour

of a call from monsieur.”

 

“That is so,” Lanyard admitted, sitting down.

 

The young man followed suit. The lamplight, striking across his face

beneath the greenish penumbra of the shade, discovered a countenance of

Hebraic cast.

 

“Monsieur has something to show me, eh?”

 

“But naturally.”

 

Lanyard’s reply just escaped a suspicion of curtness: as who should

say, what did you expect? He was puzzled by something strange and new

in the attitude of this young man, a trace of reserve and

constraint….

 

They had been meeting from time to time for several years, conducting

their secret and lawless business according to a formula invented by

Bourke and religiously observed by Lanyard. A note or telegram of

innocent superficial intent, addressed to a certain member of a leading

firm of jewellers in Amsterdam, was the invariable signal for

conferences such as this; which were invariably held in the same place,

at an hour indeterminate between midnight and dawn, between on the one

hand this intelligent, cultivated and well-mannered young Jew, and on

the other hand the thief in his mask.

 

In such wise did the Lone Wolf dispose of his loot, at all events of

the bulk thereof; other channels were, of course, open to him, but none

so safe; and with no other receiver of stolen goods could he hope to

make such fair and profitable deals.

 

Now inevitably in the course of this long association, though each

remained in ignorance of his confederate’s identity, these two had come

to feel that they knew each other fairly well. Not infrequently, when

their business had been transacted, Lanyard would linger an hour with

the agent, chatting over cigarettes: both, perhaps,