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

Then Don Luis flung himself on a bench in a waiting room and remained there for two hours, pretending to read the newspapers. But his eyes wandered and his mind was haunted by the agonizing question that once more forced itself upon him: was Florence guilty or not?

It was five o’clock exactly when Major Comte d’Astrignac, Maître Lepertuis, and the secretary of the American Embassy were shown into M. Desmalions’s office. At the same moment someone entered the messengers’ room and handed in his card.

The messenger on duty glanced at the pasteboard, turned his head quickly toward a group of men talking in a corner, and then asked the newcomer:

“Have you an appointment, sir?”

“It’s not necessary. Just say that I’m here: Don Luis Perenna.”

A kind of electric shock ran through the little group in the corner; and one of the persons forming it came forward. It was Weber, the deputy chief detective.

The two men looked each other straight in the eyes. Don Luis smiled amiably. Weber was livid; he shook in every limb and was plainly striving to contain himself.

Near him stood a couple of journalists and four detectives.

“By Jove! the beggars are there for me!” thought Don Luis. “But their confusion shows that they did not believe that I should have the cheek to come. Are they going to arrest me?”

Weber did not move, but in the end his face expressed a certain satisfaction as though he were saying:

“I’ve got you this time, my fine fellow, and you shan’t escape me.”

The office messenger returned and, without a word, led the way for Don Luis. Perenna passed in front of Weber with the politest of bows, bestowed a friendly little nod on the detectives, and entered.

The Comte d’Astrignac hurried up to him at once, with hands outstretched, thus showing that all the tittle-tattle in no way affected the esteem in which he continued to hold Private Perenna of the Foreign Legion. But the Prefect of Police maintained an attitude of reserve which was very significant. He went on turning over the papers which he was examining and conversed in a low voice with the solicitor and the American Secretary of Embassy.

Don Luis thought to himself:

“My dear Lupin, there’s someone going to leave this room with the bracelets on his wrists. If it’s not the real culprit, it’ll be you, my poor old chap.”

And he remembered the early part of the case, when he was in the workroom at Fauville’s house, before the magistrates, and had either to deliver the criminal to justice or to incur the penalty of immediate arrest. In the same way, from the start to the finish of the struggle, he had been obliged, while fighting the invisible enemy, to expose himself to the attacks of the law with no means of defending himself except by indispensable victories.

Harassed by constant onslaughts, never out of danger, he had successively hurried to their deaths Marie Fauville and Gaston Sauverand, two innocent people sacrificed to the cruel laws of war. Was he at last about to fight the real enemy, or would he himself succumb at the decisive moment?

He rubbed his hands with such a cheerful gesture that M. Desmalions could not help looking at him. Don Luis wore the radiant air of a man who is experiencing a pure joy and who is preparing to taste others even greater.

The Prefect of Police remained silent for a moment, as though asking himself what that devil of a fellow could be so pleased with; then he fumbled through his papers once more and, in the end, said:

“We have met again, gentlemen, as we did two months ago, to come to a definite conclusion about the Mornington inheritance. Señor Caceres, the attaché of the Peruvian legation, will not be here. I have received a telegram from Italy to tell me that Señor Caceres is seriously ill. However, his presence was not indispensable. There is no one lacking, therefore⁠—except those, alas, whose claims this meeting would gladly have sanctioned, that is to say, Cosmo Mornington’s heirs.”

“There is one other person absent, Monsieur le Préfet.” M. Desmalions looked up. The speaker was Don Luis. The Prefect hesitated and then decided to ask him to explain.

“Whom do you mean? What person?”

“The murderer of the Mornington heirs.”

This time again Don Luis compelled attention and, in spite of the resistance which he encountered, obliged the others to take notice of his presence and to yield to his ascendancy. Whatever happened, they had to listen to him. Whatever happened, they had to discuss with him things which seemed incredible, but which were possible because he put them into words.

“Monsieur le Préfet,” he asked, “will you allow me to set forth the facts of the matter as it now stands? They will form a natural sequel and conclusion of the interview which we had after the explosion on the Boulevard Suchet.”

M. Desmalions’s silence gave Don Luis leave to speak. He at once continued:

“It will not take long, Monsieur le Préfet. It will not take long for two reasons: first, because M. Fauville’s confessions remain at our disposal and we know definitely the monstrous part which he played; and, secondly, because, after all, the truth, however complicated it may seem, is really very simple.

“It all lies in the objection which you, Monsieur le Préfet, made to me on leaving the wrecked house on the Boulevard Suchet: ‘How is it,’ you asked, ‘that the Mornington inheritance is not once mentioned in Hippolyte Fauville’s confession?’ It all lies in that, Monsieur le Préfet. Hippolyte Fauville did not say a word about the inheritance; and the reason evidently is that he did not know of it.

“And the reason why Gaston Sauverand was able to tell me his whole sensational story without making the least allusion to the inheritance was that the inheritance played no sort of part in Gaston Sauverand’s story. He, too, knew nothing of it before those events, any more than Marie Fauville did, or Florence Levasseur. There is