The Lone Wolf by Louis Joseph Vance (good ebook reader .txt) 📕
His pet superstition was that, as long as he refrained from practisinghis profession in Paris, Paris would remain his impregnable Tower ofRefuge. The world owed Bourke a living, or he so considered; and it mustbe allowed that he made collections on account with tolerable regularityand success; but Paris was tax-exempt as long as Paris offered himimmunity from molestation.
Not only did Paris suit his tastes excellently, but there was no place,in Bourke's esteem, comparable with Troyon's for peace and quiet.Hence, the continuity of his patronage was never broken by trials ofrival hostelries; and Troyon's was always expecting Bourke for thesimple reason that he invariably arrived unexpectedly, with neitherwarning nor ostentation, to stop as long as he liked, whether a day ora week or a month, and depart in the same manner.
His daily routine, as Troyon's came to know it, varied but slightly: hebreakf
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consummated, and standing over his luggage watched the maimed vehicle
limp miserably off through the teeming mists.
Now in normal course his plight should have been relieved within two
minutes. But it wasn’t. For some time all such taxis as did pass
displayed scornfully inverted flags. Also, their drivers jeered in
their pleasing Parisian way at the lonely outlander occupying a
position of such uncommon distinction in the heart of the storm and the
precise middle of the Pont St. Michel.
Over to the left, on the Quai de March� Neuf, the fa�ade of the
Pr�fecture frowned portentously—“La Tour Pointue,” as the Parisian
loves to term it. Lanyard forgot his annoyance long enough to salute
that grim pile with a mocking bow, thinking of the men therein who
would give half their possessions to lay hands on him who was only a
few hundred yards distant, marooned in the rain!…
In its own good time a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over
to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense
disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts
promised a long, damp crawl to the Lutetia.
And on this reflection he yielded to impulse.
Heaving in his luggage—“Troyon’s!” he told the
cocher….
The fiacre lumbered off into that dark maze of streets, narrow and
tortuous, which backs up from the Seine to the Luxembourg, while its
fare reflected that Fate had not served him so hardly after all: if
Roddy had really been watching for him at the Gare du Nord, with a mind
to follow and wait for his prey to make some incriminating move, this
chance-contrived change of vehicles and destination would throw the
detective off the scent and gain the adventurer, at worst, several
hours’ leeway.
When at length his conveyance drew up at the historic corner, Lanyard
alighting could have rubbed his eyes to see the windows of Troyon’s all
bright with electric light.
Somehow, and most unreasonably, he had always believed the place would
go to the hands of the house-wrecker unchanged.
A smart portier ducked out, seized his luggage, and offered an
umbrella. Lanyard composed his features to immobility as he entered the
hotel, of no mind to let the least flicker of recognition be detected
in his eyes when they should re-encounter familiar faces.
And this was quite as well: for—again—the first he saw was Roddy.
III A POINT OF INTERROGATIONThe man from Scotland Yard had just surrendered hat, coat, and umbrella
to the vestiaire and was turning through swinging doors to the
dining-room. Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any
sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his
self-possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than
dismay. An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter
too persuasively to excuse further misgivings. What the adventurer
himself hadn’t known till within the last ten minutes, that he was
coming to Troyon’s, Roddy couldn’t possibly have anticipated; ergo,
whatever the detective’s business, it had nothing to do with Lanyard.
Furthermore, before quitting the lobby, Roddy paused long enough to
instruct the vestiaire to have a fire laid in his room.
So he was stopping at Troyon’s—and didn’t care who knew it!
His doubts altogether dissipated by this incident, Lanyard followed his
natural enemy into the dining-room with an air as devil-may-care as one
could wish and so impressive that the maitred’hotel abandoned the
detective to the mercies of one of his captains and himself hastened to
seat Lanyard and take his order.
This last disposed of; Lanyard surrendered himself to new
impressions—of which the first proved a bit disheartening.
However impulsively, he hadn’t resought Troyon’s without definite
intent, to wit, to gain some clue, however slender, to the mystery of
that wretched child, Marcel. But now it appeared he had procrastinated
fatally: Time and Change had left little other than the shell of the
Troyon’s he remembered. Papa Troyon was gone; Madame no longer occupied
the desk of the caisse; enquiries, so discreetly worded as to be
uncompromising, elicited from the maitred’h�tel the information that
the house had been under new management these eighteen months; the old
proprietor was dead, and his widow had sold out lock, stock and barrel,
and retired to the country—it was not known exactly where. And with
the new administration had come fresh decorations and furnishings as
well as a complete change of personnel: not even one of the old waiters
remained.
“‘All, all are gone, the old familiar faces,’” Lanyard quoted in
vindictive melancholy—“damn ‘em!”
Happily, it was soon demonstrated that the cuisine was being maintained
on its erstwhile plane of excellence: one still had that comfort….
Other impressions, less ultimate, proved puzzling, disconcerting, and
paradoxically reassuring.
Lanyard commanded a fair view of Roddy across the waist of the room.
The detective had ordered a meal that matched his aspect well—both
of true British simplicity. He was a square-set man with a square jaw,
cold blue eyes, a fat nose, a thin-lipped trap of a mouth, a face as
red as rare beefsteak. His dinner comprised a cut from the joint,
boiled potatoes, brussels sprouts, a bit of cheese, a bottle of Bass.
He ate slowly, chewing with the doggedness of a strong character
hampered by a weak digestion, and all the while kept eyes fixed to an
issue of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail, with an effect of
concentration quite too convincing.
Now one doesn’t read the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail with
tense excitement. Humanly speaking, it can’t be done.
Where, then, was the object of this so sedulously dissembled interest?
Lanyard wasn’t slow to read this riddle to his satisfaction—in as far,
that is, as it was satisfactory to feel still more certain that Roddy’s
quarry was another than himself.
Despite the lateness of the hour, which had by now turned ten o’clock,
the restaurant had a dozen tables or so in the service of guests
pleasantly engaged in lengthening out an agreeable evening with
dessert, coffee, liqueurs and cigarettes. The majority of these were in
couples, but at a table one removed from Roddy’s sat a party of three;
and Lanyard noticed, or fancied, that the man from Scotland Yard turned
his newspaper only during lulls in the conversation in this quarter.
Of the three, one might pass for an American of position and wealth: a
man of something more than sixty years, with an execrable accent, a
racking cough, and a thin, patrician cast of features clouded darkly by
the expression of a soul in torment, furrowed, seamed, twisted—a mask
of mortal anguish. And once, when this one looked up and casually
encountered Lanyard’s gaze, the adventurer was shocked to find himself
staring into eyes like those of a dead man: eyes of a grey so light
that at a little distance the colour of the irises blended
indistinguishably with their whites, leaving visible only the round
black points of pupils abnormally distended and staring, blank, fixed,
passionless, beneath lashless lids.
For the instant they seemed to explore Lanyard’s very soul with a look
of remote and impersonal curiosity; then they fell away; and when next
the adventurer looked, the man had turned to attend to some observation
of one of his companions.
On his right sat a girl who might be his daughter; for not only was
she, too, hall-marked American, but she was far too young to be the
other’s wife. A demure, old-fashioned type; well-poised but unassuming;
fetchingly gowned and with sufficient individuality of taste but not
conspicuously; a girl with soft brown hair and soft brown eyes; pretty,
not extravagantly so when her face was in repose, but with a slow smile
that rendered her little less than beautiful: in all (Lanyard thought)
the kind of woman that is predestined to comfort mankind, whose
strongest instinct is the maternal.
She took little part in the conversation, seldom interrupting what was
practically a duologue between her putative father and the third of
their party.
This last was one, whom Lanyard was sure he knew, though he could see
no more than the back of Monsieur le Comte Remy de Morbihan.
And he wondered with a thrill of amusement if it were possible that
Roddy was on the trail of that tremendous buck. If so, it would be a
chase worth following—a diversion rendered the more exquisite to
Lanyard by the spice of novelty, since for once he would figure as a
dispassionate bystander.
The name of Comte Remy de Morbihan, although unrecorded in the Almanach
de Gotha, was one to conjure with in the Paris of his day and
generation. He claimed the distinction of being at once the homeliest,
one of the wealthiest, and the most-liked man in France.
As to his looks, good or bad, they were said to prove infallibly fatal
with women, while not a few men, perhaps for that reason, did their
possessor the honour to imitate them. The revues burlesqued him; Sem
caricatured him; Forain counterfeited him extensively in that
inimitable series of Monday morning cartoons for Le Figaro: one said
“De Morbihan” instinctively at sight of that stocky figure, short and
broad, topped by a chubby, moon-like mask with waxed moustaches,
womanish eyes, and never-failing grin.
A creature of proverbial good-nature and exhaustless vitality, his
extraordinary popularity was due to the equally extraordinary
extravagance with which he supported that latest Gallic fad,
“le Sport.” The Parisian Rugby team was his pampered prot�g�, he was an
active member of the Tennis Club, maintained not only a flock of
automobiles but a famous racing stable, rode to hounds, was a good
field gun, patronized aviation and motor-boat racing, risked as many
maximums during the Monte Carlo season as the Grand Duke Michael
himself, and was always ready to whet rapiers or burn a little harmless
powder of an early morning in the Parc aux Princes.
But there were ugly whispers current with respect to the sources of his
fabulous wealth. Lanyard, for one, wouldn’t have thought him the
properest company or the best Parisian cicerone for an ailing American
gentleman blessed with independent means and an attractive daughter.
Paris, on the other hand—Paris who forgives everything to him who
contributes to her amusement—adored Comte Remy de Morbihan …
But perhaps Lanyard was prejudiced by his partiality for Americans, a
sentiment the outgrowth of the years spent in New York with Bourke. He
even fancied that between his spirit and theirs existed some subtle
bond of sympathy. For all he knew he might himself be American…
For some time Lanyard strained to catch something of the conversation
that seemed to hold so much of interest for Roddy, but without success
because of the hum of voices that filled the room. In time, however,
the gathering began to thin out, until at length there remained only
this party of three, Lanyard enjoying a most delectable salad, and
Roddy puffing a cigar (with such a show of enjoyment that Lanyard
suspected him of the sin of smuggling) and slowly gulping down a second
bottle of Bass.
Under these conditions the talk between De Morbihan and the Americans
became public property.
The first remark overheard by Lanyard came from the elderly American,
following a pause and a consultation of his watch.
“Quarter to eleven,” he announced.
“Plenty of time,” said De Morbihan cheerfully. “That is,” he amended,
“if mademoiselle isn’t bored …”
The girl’s reply, accompanied by a pretty inclination of her head
toward the Frenchman, was lost in the accents of the first speaker—a
strong and sonorous voice, in strange contrast with his ravaged
appearance and distressing cough.
“Don’t let that worry
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