Part 5
Désiré Baudru was taken to the anthropometric service: there were no files corresponding to his description. Besides, his trail was easily picked up again. At Courbevoie, at Asnières, at Levallois, he was known. He lived on alms and slept in one of those ragpickers' hovels that pile up near the Ternes gate. For a year, however, he had disappeared.
Had he been taken on by Arsène Lupin? Nothing warranted such a belief. And even if that had been the case, no more would have been known about the prisoner's escape. The marvel remained the same. Of the twenty hypotheses attempting to explain it, none was satisfactory. The escape alone was beyond doubt, and an incomprehensible, impressive escape, in which the public, as much as the law, sensed the effort of long preparation, a set of acts marvelously entangled one within another, and whose outcome justified the proud prediction of Arsène Lupin: "I shall not attend my trial."
At the end of a month of minute investigation, the enigma presented itself with the same indecipherable character. One could not, however, keep this poor devil Baudru indefinitely. His trial would have been ridiculous: what charges were there against him? His release was signed by the examining magistrate. But the head of the Sûreté resolved to establish an active surveillance around him.
The idea came from Ganimard. In his view, there was neither complicity nor chance. Baudru was an instrument of which Arsène Lupin had made use with his extraordinary skill. Baudru free, through him they would climb back up to Arsène Lupin or at least to someone in his gang.
Ganimard was assigned the two inspectors Folenfant and Dieuzy, and one January morning, in misty weather, the prison doors opened before Baudru Désiré.
At first he seemed rather embarrassed, and walked like a man who has no very precise ideas on how to spend his time. He followed the rue de la Santé and the rue Saint-Jacques. In front of a secondhand dealer's shop, he took off his jacket and waistcoat, sold his waistcoat for a few coins, and, putting his jacket back on, went away.
He crossed the Seine. At the Châtelet an omnibus passed him. He wanted to get on. There was no room. The conductor advising him to take a number, he entered the waiting room.
At that moment, Ganimard called his two men near him, and, without taking his eyes off the office, said hurriedly:
"Stop a carriage... no, two, it's safer. I'll go with one of you and we'll follow him."
The men obeyed. Baudru, however, did not appear. Ganimard advanced: there was no one in the room.
"Idiot that I am," he muttered, "I forgot the second exit."
The office does indeed communicate, by an inner corridor, with that of the rue Saint-Martin. Ganimard dashed off. He arrived just in time to catch sight of Baudru on the upper deck of the Batignolles–Jardin des Plantes bus turning the corner of the rue de Rivoli. He ran and caught up with the bus. But he had lost his two agents. He was alone in continuing the pursuit.
In his fury, he was on the point of seizing him by the collar without further formality. Had not this so-called imbecile, with premeditation and by an ingenious trick, separated him from his helpers?
He looked at Baudru. He was dozing on the seat, and his head wobbled from right to left. His mouth slightly open, his face wore an incredible expression of stupidity. No, this was not an adversary capable of hoodwinking old Ganimard. Chance had served him, that was all.
At the crossroads of the Galeries-Lafayette the man jumped from the bus into the Muette tramway. They followed the boulevard Haussmann, the avenue Victor-Hugo. Baudru got off only in front of the Muette station. And with a nonchalant step he disappeared into the Bois de Boulogne.
He passed from one path to another, retraced his steps, went away. What was he looking for? Did he have a purpose?
After an hour of this maneuvering, he seemed worn out with fatigue. In fact, spotting a bench, he sat down. The spot, situated not far from Auteuil, on the edge of a small lake hidden among the trees, was absolutely deserted. Half an hour went by. Impatient, Ganimard resolved to strike up a conversation.
He therefore approached and took a seat beside Baudru. He lit a cigarette, traced circles in the sand with the tip of his cane, and said:
"It's not warm."
A silence. And suddenly, in that silence a burst of laughter rang out, but a joyful, happy laugh, the laugh of a child seized with fits of giggling, who cannot help laughing. Clearly, really, Ganimard felt his hair bristle on the lifted scalp of his head. That laugh, that infernal laugh he knew so well!...
With a brusque gesture, he seized the man by the sleeves of his jacket and looked at him deeply, violently, better even than he had looked at him at the Assizes, and in truth it was no longer the man he saw. It was the man, but it was at the same time the other, the real one.
Aided by a complicit will, he found again the ardent life of the eyes, he completed the emaciated mask, he perceived the real flesh beneath the ruined epidermis, the real mouth through the rictus that deformed it. And they were the eyes of the other, the mouth of the other, it was above all his acute, living, mocking, witty expression, so clear and so young!
"Arsène Lupin, Arsène Lupin," he stammered.
And suddenly, seized with rage, gripping his throat, he tried to throw him down. Despite his fifty years, he was still of uncommon vigor, while his adversary seemed in rather poor condition. And then, what a masterstroke if he managed to bring him back!
The struggle was short. Arsène Lupin barely defended himself, and, as promptly as he had attacked, Ganimard let go. His right arm hung inert, numb.
"If they taught you jiu-jitsu at the Quai des Orfèvres," declared Lupin, "you would know that this move is called udi-shi-ghi in Japanese."
And he added coldly:
"One second more and I would have broken your arm, and you would have had only what you deserved. How, you, an old friend, whom I esteem, before whom I spontaneously unveil my incognito, you abuse my confidence! It's wrong... Well now, what's the matter with you?"
Ganimard was silent. This escape of which he judged himself responsible—was it not he who, by his sensational deposition, had led the law into error?—this escape seemed to him the shame of his career. A tear rolled toward his gray mustache.
"Eh! my God, Ganimard, don't fret: if you hadn't spoken, I would have arranged for another to speak. Come now, could I allow Baudru Désiré to be condemned?
"Then," murmured Ganimard, "it was you who were there? it is you who are here!"
"Me, always me, only me."
"Is it possible?"
"Oh! there's no need to be a sorcerer. It suffices, as that good president said, to prepare for a dozen years to be ready for all eventualities."
"But your face? Your eyes?"
"You understand well that if I worked eighteen months at Saint-Louis with Doctor Altier, it was not for love of art. I thought that he who would one day have the honor of calling himself Arsène Lupin must withdraw from the ordinary laws of appearance and identity. Appearance? But one modifies it at will. Such a hypodermic injection of paraffin puffs up your skin just at the chosen spot. Pyrogallic acid transforms you into a Mohican. The juice of the greater celandine adorns you with scabs and tumors of the happiest effect. Such a chemical process acts on the growth of your beard and hair, another on the sound of your voice. Add to that two months of fasting in cell no. 24, exercises repeated a thousand times to open my mouth according to this rictus, to carry my head according to this inclination and my back according to this curve. Finally five drops of atropine in the eyes to make them haggard and shifty, and the trick is done."
"I cannot conceive that the guards..."
"The metamorphosis was progressive. They could not notice its daily evolution."
"But Baudru Désiré?"
"Baudru exists. He is a poor innocent, whom I met last year, and who truly is not without offering a certain resemblance of features with me. In anticipation of an always possible arrest, I put him in safety, and I applied myself to discern from the outset the points of dissimilarity that separated us, to attenuate them in myself as much as could be. My friends had him spend a night at the Dépôt, so that he came out at about the same hour as me, and that the coincidence would be easy to establish. For, note it, it was necessary that they find the trace of his passage, otherwise the law would have asked itself who I was. Whereas in offering this excellent Baudru, it was inevitable, you hear, inevitable that it would pounce on him, and that despite the insurmountable difficulties of a substitution, it would prefer to believe in the substitution rather than admit its ignorance."
"Yes, yes, indeed," murmured Ganimard.
"And then," cried Arsène Lupin, "I held in my hands a formidable trump, a card machined by me from the beginning: the expectation in which everyone was of my escape. And that is the gross error into which you and the others fell, in this passionate game that the law and I had engaged, and of which the stake was my liberty: you supposed once again that I acted from bravado, that I was intoxicated by my successes like a greenhorn. I, Arsène Lupin, such a weakness! And, no more than in the Cahorn affair, did you say to yourselves: 'From the moment Arsène Lupin shouts from the rooftops that he will escape, it is because he has reasons that oblige him to shout it.' But, good grief, understand then that, to escape... without escaping, it was necessary that one believe in advance in this escape, that it be an article of faith, an absolute conviction, a truth blazing like the sun. And that was so, by my will. Arsène Lupin would escape, Arsène Lupin would not attend his trial. And when you stood up to say: 'this man is not Arsène Lupin' it would have been unnatural that everyone did not immediately believe that I was not Arsène Lupin. That a single person doubted, that a single one emitted this simple reservation: 'And if it were Arsène Lupin?' at that very minute, I was lost. It sufficed to lean toward me, not with the idea that I was not Arsène Lupin, as you and the others did, but with the idea that I could be Arsène Lupin, and despite all my precautions, one would recognize me. But I was calm. Logically, psychologically, no one could have that simple little idea."
He suddenly seized Ganimard's hand.
"Come now, Ganimard, admit that a week after our interview in the Santé prison, you waited for me at four o'clock, at your home, as I had asked you to?"
"And your penitentiary carriage?" said Ganimard, avoiding answering.
"Bluff! It is my friends who patched up and substituted that old out-of-service carriage and who wanted to attempt the coup. But I knew it impracticable without an exceptional concurrence of circumstances. Only I found it useful to complete this escape attempt and give it the greatest publicity. A first escape audaciously combined gave the second the value of an escape realized in advance."
"So that the cigar..."
"Hollowed out by me as well as the knife."
"And the notes?"
"Written by me."
"And the mysterious correspondent?"
"She and I are one. I have all the handwriting at will."
Ganimard reflected an instant and objected:
"How can it be that at the anthropometric service, when they took Baudru's file, they did not notice that it coincided with that of Arsène Lupin?"
"The file of Arsène Lupin does not exist."
"Come now!"
"Or at least it is false. It is a question I have much studied. The Bertillon system comprises first the visual description—and you see that it is not infallible—and then the description by measurements, measurement of the head, fingers, ears, etc. Against that nothing to do."
"Then?"
"Then it was necessary to pay. Even before my return from America, one of the clerks of the service accepted so much to inscribe a false measurement at the start of my measuring. That is sufficient for the whole system to deviate, and for a file to orient itself toward a case diametrically opposite to the case where it should have ended up. The Baudru file was therefore not to coincide with the Arsène Lupin file."
There was another silence, then Ganimard asked:
"And now, what are you going to do?"
"Now," exclaimed Lupin, "I am going to rest, follow a regime of overfeeding and little by little become myself again. It is very well to be Baudru or someone else, to change personality like a shirt and to choose one's appearance, voice, gaze, handwriting. But it happens that one no longer recognizes oneself in all that and that it is very sad. At present I feel what the man who lost his shadow must have felt. I am going to seek myself... and find myself again."
He walked up and down at length. A little darkness mingled with the daylight. He stopped in front of Ganimard.
"We have nothing more to say to each other, I believe?"
"Yes," replied the inspector, "I would like to know if you will reveal the truth about your escape... The error I committed..."
"Oh! no one will ever know that it was Arsène Lupin who was released. I have too much interest in accumulating around me the most mysterious shadows, not to leave to this escape its almost miraculous character. So, fear nothing, my good friend, and farewell. I am dining out this evening, and I only have time to dress."
"I thought you so desirous of rest!"
"Alas! there are worldly obligations from which one cannot withdraw. Rest will begin tomorrow."
"And where are you dining then?"
"At the embassy of England."
------
THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER
The day before, I had sent my automobile to Rouen by road. I was to rejoin it there by train, and, from there, go to the home of friends who live on the banks of the Seine.
Now, in Paris, a few minutes before departure, seven gentlemen invaded my compartment; five of them were smoking. Short as the express journey is, the prospect of making it in such company was unpleasant to me, all the more so since the carriage, of old model, had no corridor. I therefore took my overcoat, my newspapers, my timetable, and took refuge in one of the neighboring compartments.
A lady was there. At the sight of me, she made a gesture of annoyance that did not escape me, and she leaned toward a gentleman planted on the step, her husband, no doubt, who had accompanied her to the station. The gentleman observed me and the examination ended probably to my advantage, for he spoke low to his wife, smiling, with the air of one reassuring a frightened child. She smiled in turn, and cast me a friendly eye, as if she understood all at once that I was one of those gallant men with whom a woman may remain shut up for two hours, in a little box of six square feet, without having anything to fear.
Her husband said to her:
"You won't hold it against me, my dear, but I have an urgent appointment, and I cannot wait."
He kissed her affectionately, and went away. His wife sent him through the window little discreet kisses, and waved her handkerchief.
But a whistle sounded. The train started.
At that precise moment, and despite the protests of the employees, the door opened, and a man burst into our compartment. My companion, who was standing then and arranging her things along the net, gave a cry of terror and fell onto the seat.
I am not a coward, far from it, but I admit that these last-minute irruptions are always unpleasant. They seem equivocal, unnatural. There must be something behind it, otherwise...
The aspect of the newcomer, however, and his attitude, would rather have attenuated the bad impression produced by his act. Correctness, almost elegance, a cravat in good taste, clean gloves, an energetic face... But, by the way, where the devil had I seen that face? For, doubt was not possible, I had seen it. At least, more exactly, I found in myself the sort of memory left by the sight of a portrait glimpsed several times and whose original one has never contemplated. And, at the same time, I felt the uselessness of any effort of memory, so inconsistent and vague was that memory.
But, having brought my attention back to the lady, I was stupefied at her pallor and the upheaval of her features. She looked at her neighbor—they were seated on the same side—with an expression of real fright, and I noted that one of her hands, all trembling, slipped toward a small traveling bag placed on the seat twenty centimeters from her knees. She ended by seizing it and nervously drew it toward her.
Our eyes met, and I read in hers so much discomfort and anxiety, that I could not help saying to her:
"You are not unwell, Madame?... Shall I open this window?"
Without answering me, she designated to me with a fearful gesture the individual. I smiled as her husband had done, shrugged my shoulders and explained to her by signs that she had nothing to fear, that I was there, and besides that this gentleman seemed quite inoffensive.
At this instant, he turned toward us, considered us one after the other from head to foot, then sank back into his corner and moved no more.
There was a silence, but the lady, as if she had gathered all her energy to accomplish a desperate act, said to me in a barely intelligible voice:
"You know that he is in our train?"
"Who?"
"Why, him... him... I assure you."
"Who, him?"
"Arsène Lupin!"
She had not taken her eyes off the traveler and it was at him rather than at me that she launched the syllables of that unsettling name.
He lowered his hat over his nose. Was it to mask his trouble or, simply, was he preparing to sleep?
I made this objection:
"Arsène Lupin was condemned yesterday, in absentia, to twenty years of forced labor. It is therefore little probable that he commits today the imprudence of showing himself in public. Besides, have not the newspapers indicated his presence in Turkey, this winter, since his famous escape from the Santé?"
"He is in this train," repeated the lady, with the increasingly marked intention of being heard by our companion, "my husband is under-director of the penitentiary services, and it is the police commissioner of the station himself who told us that they were looking for Arsène Lupin."
"That is no reason..."
"He was met in the Lost Steps Hall. He took a first-class ticket for Rouen."
"It would have been easy to lay hands on him."
"He disappeared. The conductor, at the entrance to the waiting rooms, did not see him, but it was supposed that he had passed by the suburban platforms, and that he had boarded the express that leaves ten minutes after us."
"In that case, they will have nabbed him there."
"And if, at the last moment, he jumped from that express to come here, in our train... as it is probable... as it is certain?"
"In that case, it is here that he will be nabbed. For the employees and agents will not have failed to see this passage from one train to the other, and, when we arrive at Rouen, they will pick him up quite neatly."
"Him, never! he will find the means to escape again."
"In that case, I wish him a good journey."
"But until then, all that he can do!"
"What?"
"How do I know? one must expect anything!"
She was very agitated, and in fact the situation justified up to a certain point this nervous overexcitement. Almost in spite of myself, I said to her:
"There are indeed curious coincidences... But calm yourself. Admitting that Arsène Lupin is in one of these carriages, he will behave very meekly there, and, rather than attract new troubles, he will have no other idea than to avoid the peril that threatens him."
My words did not reassure her. However she fell silent, fearing no doubt to be indiscreet.
As for me, I unfolded my newspapers and read the reports of the trial of Arsène Lupin. As they contained nothing that was not already known, they interested me only moderately. Besides, I was tired, I had slept badly, I felt my eyelids grow heavy and my head incline.
"But, Monsieur, you are not going to sleep!"
The lady snatched my newspapers from me and looked at me with indignation.
"Evidently not," I answered, "I have no desire for it."
"It would be the height of imprudence," she said to me.
"The height of it," I repeated.
And I struggled energetically, clinging to the landscape, to the clouds streaking the sky. And soon all that blurred in space, the image of the agitated lady and the dozing gentleman faded in my mind, and it was in me the great, the deep silence of sleep.
Inconsistent and light dreams soon adorned it, a being who played the role and bore the name of Arsène Lupin held a certain place there. He evolved on the horizon, his back loaded with precious objects, crossed through walls and stripped castles bare.
But the silhouette of this being, who moreover was no longer Arsène Lupin, grew precise. He came toward me, became bigger and bigger, jumped into the carriage with incredible agility, and fell right on my chest.
A keen pain... a piercing cry... I woke up. The man, the traveler, a knee on my chest, was gripping my throat.
I saw that very vaguely, for my eyes were bloodshot. I also saw the lady who was convulsing in a corner, in the grip of a nervous attack. I did not even try to resist. Besides, I would not have had the strength: my temples were buzzing, I was suffocating... I was gasping... One more minute... and it was asphyxia.
The man must have felt it. He relaxed his grip. Without moving away, with his right hand, he held out a cord on which he had prepared a running knot, and, with a sharp gesture, he bound my two wrists. In an instant, I was trussed up, gagged, immobilized.
And he accomplished this task in the most natural way in the world, with an ease that revealed the knowledge of a master, of a professional of theft and crime. Not a word, not a feverish movement. Coolness and boldness. And there I was, on the seat, tied up like a mummy, I, Arsène Lupin!
In truth, there was cause to laugh. And, despite the gravity of the circumstances, I was not without appreciating all that the situation carried of ironic and savory. Arsène Lupin fooled like a novice! robbed like the first comer—for, of course, the bandit lightened me of my purse and wallet! Arsène Lupin, victim in turn, duped, vanquished... What an adventure!
The lady remained. He did not even pay attention to her. He contented himself with picking up the small bag that lay on the carpet and extracting the jewels, purse, gold and silver trinkets that it contained. The lady opened an eye, started with horror, took off her rings and held them out to the man as if she had wished to spare him any useless effort. He took the rings and looked at her: she fainted.
Then, always silent and calm, no longer concerning himself with us, he regained his place, lit a cigarette and gave himself up to a thorough examination of the treasures he had conquered, an examination that seemed to satisfy him entirely.
I was much less satisfied. I do not speak of the twelve thousand francs of which I had been unduly stripped: it was a loss that I accepted only momentarily, and I counted well that these twelve thousand francs would return into my possession in the briefest delay, as well as the very important papers that my wallet contained: plans, estimates, addresses, lists of correspondents, compromising letters. But, for the moment, a more immediate and more serious worry tormented me:
What was going to happen?
“Stories of the world, in your language.”