XIX. LE COMMISSAIRE DE POLICE, LE VICOMTE ET LE PERSAN
XIX
THE POLICE COMMISSIONER, THE VISCOUNT, AND THE PERSIAN
The first words of the police commissioner, upon entering the management office, were to ask for news of the singer.
“Christine Daaé is not here?”
He was followed, as I have said, by a dense crowd.
“Christine Daaé? No,” answered Richard. “Why?”
As for Moncharmin, he no longer had the strength to utter a word... His state of mind was far more grave than Richard’s, for Richard could still suspect Moncharmin, but Moncharmin found himself face to face with the great mystery... the one that has made humanity shudder since its birth: the Unknown.
Richard resumed, for the crowd around the managers and the commissioner observed an impressive silence:
“Why do you ask me, Mr. Commissioner, whether Christine Daaé is not here?”
“Because she must be found, gentlemen directors of the National Academy of Music,” declared the police commissioner solemnly.
“What! she must be found! Has she then disappeared?”
“In the middle of the performance!”
“In the middle of the performance! That is extraordinary!”
“Is it not? And what is just as extraordinary as this disappearance is that it should be I who informs you of it!”
“Indeed...” acquiesced Richard, who took his head in his hands and murmured: “What is this new story? Oh! decidedly, there is reason enough to hand in one’s resignation!”...
And he plucked a few hairs from his mustache without even noticing it:
“So,” he said as if in a dream..., “she disappeared in the middle of the performance.”
“Yes, she was carried off at the prison scene, at the moment when she was invoking the help of heaven, but I doubt that she was taken by angels.”
“And I am sure of it!”
Everyone turned around. A young man, pale and trembling with emotion, repeated:
“I am sure of it!”
“What are you sure of?” asked Mifroid.
“That Christine Daaé was carried off by an angel, Mr. Commissioner, and I could tell you his name...”
“Ah! ah! Mr. Viscount de Chagny, you claim that Mlle Christine Daaé was carried off by an angel, by an angel of the Opera, no doubt?”
Raoul looked around him. Evidently, he was searching for someone. At this minute when it seemed so necessary to him to call upon the help of the police for his fiancée, he would not have been displeased to see again that mysterious stranger who, a moment ago, had recommended discretion to him. But he discovered him nowhere. Come now! He must speak!... He could not, however, explain himself before this crowd that was staring at him with indiscreet curiosity.
“Yes, sir, by an angel of the Opera,” he answered M. Mifroid, “and I will tell you where he lives when we are alone...”
“You are right, sir.”
And the police commissioner, having Raoul sit beside him, threw everyone out the door, except naturally the managers, who, however, would not have protested, so far did they seem above all contingencies.
Then Raoul decided:
“Mr. Commissioner, that angel is named Erik, he lives in the Opera and he is the Angel of Music!”
“The Angel of Music! Indeed! That is most curious!... The Angel of Music!”
And, turning toward the managers, Police Commissioner Mifroid asked:
“Gentlemen, do you have that angel in your house?”
MM. Richard and Moncharmin shook their heads without even smiling.
“Oh!” said the viscount, “these gentlemen have certainly heard tell of the Phantom of the Opera. Well! I can assure them that the Phantom of the Opera and the Angel of Music are one and the same. And his true name is Erik.”
M. Mifroid had risen and was looking at Raoul attentively.
“Pardon, sir, do you intend to make a mockery of justice?”
“I!” protested Raoul, who thought with pain: “Here is another who will not want to hear me out.”
“Then what is this tale you sing me of your Phantom of the Opera?”
“I say that these gentlemen have heard tell of him.”
“Gentlemen, it appears you know the Phantom of the Opera?”
Richard stood up, the last hairs of his mustache in his hand.
“No! Mr. Commissioner, no, we do not know him! but we should very much like to know him! for, no later than this evening, he stole twenty thousand francs from us!”...
And Richard turned toward Moncharmin a terrible look that seemed to say: “Give me back the twenty thousand francs or I tell all.” Moncharmin understood it so well that he made a distraught gesture: “Ah! tell all! tell all!...”
As for Mifroid, he looked by turns at the managers and at Raoul and wondered whether he had not lost his way in an asylum for the insane. He passed his hand through his hair:
“A phantom,” said he, “who, on the same evening, carries off a singer and steals twenty thousand francs, is a very busy phantom! If you will be so good, we shall take the questions one at a time. The singer first, the twenty thousand francs afterward! Come now, M. de Chagny, let us try to speak seriously. You believe that Mlle Christine Daaé was carried off by an individual named Erik. You know this individual then? You have seen him?”
“Yes, Mr. Commissioner.”
“Where was that?”
“In a cemetery.”
M. Mifroid started, recovered himself to contemplate Raoul and said:
“Evidently!... it is ordinarily there that one meets phantoms. And what were you doing in that cemetery?”
“Sir,” said Raoul, “I am very well aware of the oddity of my answers and of the effect they produce upon you. But I beg you to believe that I am in full possession of my reason. The salvation of the person dearest to me in the world, with my beloved brother Philippe, is at stake. I should like to convince you in a few words, for time presses and minutes are precious. Unfortunately, if I do not tell you the strangest story there is, from the beginning, you will not believe me. I am going to tell you, Mr. Commissioner, all that I know of the Phantom of the Opera. Alas! Mr. Commissioner, I know very little...”
“Speak on! Speak on!” exclaimed Richard and Moncharmin, suddenly very interested; unfortunately for the hope they had conceived for an instant of learning some detail capable of putting them on the track of their mystifier, they were soon forced to the sad conclusion that M. Raoul de Chagny had completely lost his head. This whole story of Perros-Guirec, of death’s heads, of the enchanted violin, could have been born only in the disordered brain of a lover.
It was visible, moreover, that M. the Commissioner Mifroid increasingly shared this view, and certainly the magistrate would have put an end to these disordered remarks, of which we have given an outline in the first part of this narrative, if circumstances themselves had not taken charge of interrupting them.
The door had just opened and an individual singularly clad in a vast black overcoat and crowned with a tall hat at once threadbare and shiny, which came down over both his ears, made his entrance. He ran to the commissioner and spoke to him in a low voice. It was some agent of the Sureté no doubt, come to report on an urgent mission.
During this colloquy, M. Mifroid never took his eyes off Raoul.
And finally, addressing him, he said:
“Sir, enough has been said of the phantom. We are going to speak a little of you, if you have no objection; you were to carry off Mlle Christine Daaé this evening?”
“Yes, Mr. Commissioner.”
“On leaving the theater?”
“Yes, Mr. Commissioner.”
“All your arrangements were made for that?”
“Yes, Mr. Commissioner.”
“The carriage that brought you was to carry you both away. The coachman was warned... his route was traced in advance... Better still! He was to find fresh horses at every stage...”
“That is true, Mr. Commissioner.”
“And yet, your carriage is still there, awaiting your orders, on the side of the Rotonde, is it not?”
“Yes, Mr. Commissioner.”
“Were you aware that there were, beside yours, three other carriages?”
“I paid not the slightest attention to it...”
“They were those of Mlle Sorelli, who had found no place in the administration courtyard; of the Carlotta and of your brother, M. the Count de Chagny...”
“That is possible...”
“What is certain, on the other hand... is that, if your own equipage, that of Sorelli and that of the Carlotta are still in their places, along the pavement of the Rotonde... that of M. the Count de Chagny is no longer there...”
“This has nothing to do with it, Mr. Commissioner...”
“Pardon! Was not M. the Count opposed to your marriage with Mlle Daaé?”
“This can concern only the family.”
“You have answered me... he was opposed to it... and that is why you were carrying off Christine Daaé, far from the possible designs of your brother... Well, M. de Chagny, allow me to inform you that your brother was quicker than you!... It is he who carried off Christine Daaé!”
“Oh!” groaned Raoul, putting his hand to his heart, “that is not possible... Are you sure of this?”
“Immediately after the disappearance of the artiste, which was organized with complicities yet to be established by us, he threw himself into his carriage, which tore at a furious pace through Paris.”
“Through Paris?” gasped poor Raoul... “What do you mean by through Paris?”
“And outside of Paris...”
“Outside of Paris... which road?”
“The road to Brussels.”
A hoarse cry escaped the mouth of the unhappy young man.
“Oh!” he cried, “I swear I shall catch up with them.”
And, in two bounds, he was out of the office.
“And bring them back to us,” cried the commissioner gaily... “Eh? There is a tip worth that of the Angel of Music!”
Whereupon M. Mifroid turned toward his stupefied audience and administered to it this little lesson in honest police work, but by no means puerile:
“I do not know at all whether it is really M. the Count de Chagny who carried off Christine Daaé... but I need to know, and I do not believe that at this hour anyone better than the viscount his brother could desire to inform me... At this moment, he runs, he flies! He is my principal auxiliary! Such is, gentlemen, the art that one believes so complicated, of the police, and which appears nevertheless so simple once one has discovered that it must consist in having this police carried out chiefly by those who are not of it!”
But M. the Police Commissioner Mifroid might perhaps not have been so pleased with himself, had he known that the course of his swift messenger had been stopped at the latter’s entry into the first corridor, empty however of the crowd of curious onlookers that had been dispersed. The corridor appeared deserted.
Yet Raoul had seen his path barred by a great shadow.
“Where are you going so fast, M. de Chagny?” the shadow had asked.
Raoul, impatient, had raised his head and recognized the astrakhan cap of a moment before. He stopped.
“It is you again!” he cried in a feverish voice, “you who know the secrets of Erik and who will not have me speak of them. And who then are you?”
“You know well enough!... I am the Persian!” said the shadow.
“Stories of the world, in your language.”