The Teeth of the Tiger by Maurice Leblanc (e book reader android TXT) 📕

His heart wrung with anguish, he leaned out still farther. But he did not see Florence. The girl had no doubt succeeded in escaping.

Weber’s appearance on the steps and the deputy chief’s first words confirmed his hopes. Weber was mad with rage. His recent captivity and the humiliation of his defeat exasperated him.

“Ah!” he roared, as he saw the prisoner. “There’s one of them, at any rate! Gaston Sauverand! Choice game, that!⁠ ⁠… Where did you catch him?”

“On the Place du Palais-Bourbon,” said one of the inspectors. “We saw him slinking out through the cellar door.”

“And his accomplice, the Levasseur girl?”

“We missed her, Deputy Chief. She was the first out.”

“And Don Luis? You haven’t let him leave the house, I hope? I gave orders.”

“He tried to get out through the cellar door five minutes after.”

“Who said so?”

“One of the men in uniform posted outside the door.”

“Well?”

“The beggar went back into the cellar.”

Weber gave a shout of delight.

“We’ve got him! And it’s a nasty business for him! Charge of resisting the police!⁠ ⁠… Complicity⁠ ⁠… We shall be able to unmask him at last. Tally-ho, my lads, tally-ho! Two men to guard Sauverand, four men on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, revolver in hand. Two men on the roof. The rest stick to me. We’ll begin with the Levasseur girl’s room and we’ll take his room next. Hark, forward, my lads!”

Don Luis did not wait for the enemies’ attack. Knowing their intentions, he beat a retreat, unseen, toward Florence’s rooms. Here, as Weber did not yet know the shortcut through the outhouses, he had time to make sure that the trapdoor was in perfect working order, and that there was no reason why they should discover the existence of a secret cupboard at the back of the alcove, behind the curtains of the bed.

Once inside the passage, he went up the first staircase, followed the long corridor contrived in the wall, climbed the ladder leading to the boudoir, and, perceiving that this second trapdoor fitted the woodwork so closely that no one could suspect anything, he closed it over him. A few minutes later he heard the noise of men making a search above his head.

And so, on the twenty-fourth of May, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the position was as follows: Florence Levasseur with a warrant out against her, Gaston Sauverand in prison, Marie Fauville in prison and refusing all food, and Don Luis, who believed in their innocence and who alone could have saved them, Don Luis was being blockaded in his own house and hunted down by a score of detectives.

As for the Mornington inheritance, there could be no more question of that, because the legatee, in his turn, had set himself in open rebellion against society.

“Capital!” said Don Luis, with a grin. “This is life as I understand it. The question is a simple one and may be put in different ways. How can a wretched, unwashed beggar, with not a penny in his pocket, make a fortune in twenty-four hours without setting foot outside his hovel? How can a general, with no soldiers and no ammunition left, win a battle which he has lost? In short, how shall I, Arsène Lupin, manage to be present tomorrow evening at the meeting which will be held on the Boulevard Suchet and to behave in such a way as to save Marie Fauville, Florence Levasseur, Gaston Sauverand, and my excellent friend Don Luis Perenna in the bargain?”

Dull blows came from somewhere. The men must be hunting the roofs and sounding the walls.

Don Luis stretched himself flat on the floor, hid his face in his folded arms and, shutting his eyes, murmured:

“Let’s think.”

When Lupin afterward told me this episode of the tragic story, he said, not without a certain self-complacency:

“What astonished me then, and what astonishes me still, as one of the most amazing victories on which I am entitled to pride myself, is that I was able to admit Sauverand and Marie Fauville’s innocence on the spot, as a problem solved once and for all. It was a first-class performance, I swear, and surpassed the most famous deductions of the most famous investigators both in psychological value and in detective merit.

“After all, taking everything into account, there was not the shadow of a fresh fact to enable me to alter the verdict. The charges accumulated against the two prisoners were the same, and were so grave that no examining magistrate would have hesitated for a second to commit them for trial, nor any jury to bring them in guilty. I will not speak of Marie Fauville: you had only to think of the marks of her teeth to be absolutely certain. But Gaston Sauverand, the son of Victor Sauverand and consequently the heir of Cosmo Mornington⁠—Gaston Sauverand, the man with the ebony walking-stick and the murderer of Chief Inspector Ancenis⁠—was he not just as guilty as Marie Fauville, incriminated with her by the mysterious letters, incriminated by the very revelation of the husband whom they had killed?

“And yet why did that sudden change take place in me?” he asked. “Why did I go against the evidence? Why did I credit an incredible fact? Why did I admit the inadmissible? Why? Well, no doubt, because truth has an accent that rings in the ears in a manner all its own. On the one side, every proof, every fact, every reality, every certainty; on the other, a story, a story told by one of the three criminals, and therefore, presumptively, absurd and untrue from start to finish. But a story told in a frank voice, a clear, dispassionate, closely woven story, free from complications or improbabilities, a story which supplied no positive solution, but which, by its very honesty, obliged any impartial mind to reconsider the solution arrived at. I believed the story.”

The explanation which Lupin gave me was not complete. I asked:

“And Florence Levasseur?”

“Florence?”

“Yes, you don’t tell me what you thought.