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 allegedmurderers of Leonard the valet, has at last been ascertained.He is a miscreant of the worst type, a hardened criminal whohas already twice been sentenced for murder, in default, underanother name.
“No doubt, the police will end by also discovering the real nameof his accomplice, Gilbert. In any event, the examining-magistrateis 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,