Delphi Collected Works of Maurice Leblanc (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Nine Book 17)

by Maurice Leblanc

  “More?”

  “Well, of course! Habit, you know, experience! Plenty of problems, unintelligible to others, seem to me the simplest and clearest that can be. Therefore . . .”

  Don Luis hesitated whether to go on:

  “No,” he said, “it’s better that I shouldn’t speak. The mystery will be dispelled gradually. Let us wait. For the moment . . .”

  He again stopped, this time to listen:

  “There, he must have seen you. And now that he knows what he wants to, he’s going away.”

  Patrice grew excited:

  “He’s going away! You really ought to have collared him. Shall we ever find him again, the scoundrel? Shall we ever be able to take our revenge?”

  Don Luis smiled:

  “There you go, calling him a scoundrel, the man who watched over you for twenty years, who brought you and Little Mother Coralie together, who was your benefactor!”

  “Oh, I don’t know! All this is so bewildering! I can’t help hating him. . . . The idea of his getting away maddens me. . . . I should like to torture him and yet . . .”

  He yielded to a feeling of despair and took his head between his two hands. Don Luis comforted him:

  “Have no fear,” he said. “He was never nearer his downfall than at the present moment. I hold him in my hand as I hold this leaf.”

  “But how?”

  “The man who’s driving him belongs to me.”

  “What’s that? What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I put one of my men on the driver’s seat of a taxi, with instructions to hang about at the bottom of the lane, and that Siméon did not fail to take the taxi in question.”

  “That is to say, you suppose so,” Patrice corrected him, feeling more and more astounded.

  “I recognized the sound of the engine at the bottom of the garden when I told you.”

  “And are you sure of your man?”

  “Certain.”

  “What’s the use? Siméon can drive far out of Paris, stab the man in the back . . . and then when shall we get to know?”

  “Do you imagine that people can get out of Paris and go running about the high-roads without a special permit? No, if Siméon leaves Paris he will have to drive to some railway station or other and we shall know of it twenty minutes after. And then we’ll be off.”

  “How?”

  “By motor.”

  “Then you have a pass?”

  “Yes, valid for the whole of France.”

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “I do; and a genuine pass at that! Made out in the name of Don Luis Perenna, signed by the minister of the interior and countersigned . . .”

  “By whom?”

  “By the President of the Republic.”

  Patrice felt his bewilderment change all at once into violent excitement. Hitherto, in the terrible adventure in which he was engaged, he had undergone the enemy’s implacable will and had known little besides defeat and the horrors of ever-threatening death. But now a more powerful will suddenly arose in his favor. And everything was abruptly altered. Fate seemed to be changing its course, like a ship which an unexpected fair wind brings back into harbor.

  “Upon my word, captain,” said Don Luis, “I thought you were going to cry like Little Mother Coralie. Your nerves are overstrung. And I daresay you’re hungry. We must find you something to eat. Come along.”

  He led him slowly towards the lodge and, speaking in a rather serious voice:

  “I must ask you,” he said, “to be absolutely discreet in this whole matter. With the exception of a few old friends and of Ya-Bon, whom I met in Africa, where he saved my life, no one in France knows me by my real name. I call myself Don Luis Perenna. In Morocco, where I was soldiering, I had occasion to do a service to the very gracious sovereign of a neighboring neutral nation, who, though obliged to conceal his true feelings, is ardently on our side. He sent for me; and, in return, I asked him to give me my credentials and to obtain a pass for me. Officially, therefore, I am on a secret mission, which expires in two days. In two days I shall go back . . . to whence I came, to a place where, during the war, I am serving France in my fashion: not a bad one, believe me, as people will see one day.”

  They came to the settee on which Coralie lay sleeping. Don Luis laid his hand on Patrice’s arm:

  “One word more, captain. I swore to myself and I gave my word of honor to him who trusted me that, while I was on this mission, my time should be devoted exclusively to defending the interests of my country to the best of my power. I must warn you, therefore, that, notwithstanding all my sympathy for you, I shall not be able to prolong my stay for a single minute after I have discovered the eighteen hundred bags of gold. They were the one and only reason why I came in answer to Ya-Bon’s appeal. When the bags of gold are in our possession, that is to say, to-morrow evening at latest, I shall go away. However, the two quests are joined. The clearing up of the one will mean the end of the other. And now enough of words. Introduce me to Little Mother Coralie and let’s get to work! Make no mystery with her, captain,” he added, laughing. “Tell her my real name. I have nothing to fear: Arsène Lupin has every woman on his side.”

  Forty minutes later Coralie was back in her room, well cared for and well watched. Patrice had taken a substantial meal, while Don Luis walked up and down the terrace smoking cigarettes.

  “Finished, captain? Then we’ll make a start.”

  He looked at his watch:

  “Half-past five. We have more than an hour of daylight left. That’ll be enough.”

  “Enough? You surely don’t pretend that you will achieve your aim in an hour?”

  “My definite aim, no, but the aim which I am setting myself at the moment, yes . . . and even earlier. An hour? What for? To do what? Why, you’ll be a good deal wiser in a few minutes!”

  Don Luis asked to be taken to the cellar under the library; where Essarès Bey used to keep the bags of gold until the time had come to send them off.

  “Was it through this ventilator that the bags were let down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there no other outlet?”

  “None except the staircase leading to the library and the other ventilator.”

  “Opening on the terrace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s clear. The bags used to come in by the first and go out by the second.”

  “But . . .”

  “There’s no but about it, captain: how else would you have it happen? You see, the mistake people always make is to go looking for difficulties where there are none.”

  They returned to the terrace. Don Luis took up his position near the ventilator and inspected the ground immediately around. It did not take long. Four yards away, outside the windows of the library, was the basin with the statue of a child spouting a jet of water through a shell.

  Don Luis went up, examined the basin and, leaning forwards, reached the little statue, which he turned upon its axis from right to left. At the same time the pedestal described a quarter of a circle.

  “That’s it,” he said, drawing himself up again.

  “What?”

  “The basin will empty itself.”

  He was right. The water sank very quickly and the bottom of the fountain appeared.

  Don Luis stepped into it and squatted on his haunches. The inner wall was lined with a marble mosaic composing a wide red-and-white fretwork pattern. In the middle of one of the frets was a ring, which Don Luis lifted and pulled. All that portion of the wall which formed the pattern yielded to his effort and came down, leaving an opening of about twelve inches by ten.

  “That’s where the bags of gold went,” said Don Luis. “It was the second stage. They were despatched in the same manner, on a hook sliding along a wire. Look, here is the wire, in this groove at the top.”

  “By Jove!” cried Captain Belval. “But you’ve unraveled this in a masterly fashion! What about the wire? Can’t we follow it?”

&nb
sp; “No, but it will serve our purpose if we know where it finishes. I say, captain, go to the end of the garden, by the wall, taking a line at right angles to the house. When you get there, cut off a branch of a tree, rather high up. Oh, I was forgetting! I shall have to go out by the lane. Have you the key of the door? Give it me, please.”

  Patrice handed him the key and then went down to the wall beside the quay.

  “A little farther to the right,” Don Luis instructed him. “A little more still. That’s better. Now wait.”

  He left the garden by the lane, reached the quay and called out from the other side of the wall:

  “Are you there, captain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fix your branch so that I can see it from here. Capital.”

  Patrice now joined Don Luis, who was crossing the road. All the way down the Seine are wharves, built on the bank of the river and used for loading and unloading vessels. Barges put in alongside, discharge their cargoes, take in fresh ones and often lie moored one next to the other. At the spot where Don Luis and Patrice descended by a flight of steps there was a series of yards, one of which, the one which they reached first, appeared to be abandoned, no doubt since the war. It contained, amid a quantity of useless materials, several heaps of bricks and building-stones, a hut with broken windows and the lower part of a steam-crane. A placard swinging from a post bore the inscription:

  BERTHOU

  WHARFINGER & BUILDER.

  Don Luis walked along the foot of the embankment, ten or twelve feet high, above which the quay was suspended like a terrace. Half of it was occupied by a heap of sand; and they saw in the wall the bars of an iron grating, the lower half of which was hidden by the sand-heap shored up with planks.

  Don Luis cleared the grating and said, jestingly:

  “Have you noticed that the doors are never locked in this adventure? Let’s hope that it’s the same with this one.”

  His theory was confirmed, somewhat to his own surprise, and they entered one of those recesses where workmen put away their tools.

  “So far, nothing out of the common,” said Don Luis, switching on an electric torch. “Buckets, pick-axes, wheelbarrows, a ladder. . . . Ah! Ah! Just as I expected: rails, a complete set of light rails! . . . Lend me a hand, captain. Let’s clear out the back. Good, that’s done it.”

  Level with the ground and opposite the grating was a rectangular opening exactly similar to the one in the basin. The wire was visible above, with a number of hooks hanging from it.

  “So this is where the bags arrived,” Don Luis explained. “They dropped, so to speak, into one of the two little trollies which you see over there, in the corner. The rails were laid across the bank, of course at night; and the trollies were pushed to a barge into which they tipped their contents.”

  “So that . . . ?”

  “So that the French gold went this way . . . anywhere you like . . . somewhere abroad.”

  “And you think that the last eighteen hundred bags have also been despatched?”

  “I fear so.”

  “Then we are too late?”

  Don Luis reflected for a while without answering. Patrice, though disappointed by a development which he had not foreseen, remained amazed at the extraordinary skill with which his companion, in so short a time, had succeeded in unraveling a portion of the tangled skein.

  “It’s an absolute miracle,” he said, at last. “How on earth did you do it?”

  Without a word, Don Luis took from his pocket the book which Patrice had seen lying on his knees, The Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin, and motioned to him to read some lines which he indicated with his finger. They were written towards the end of the reign of Louis XVI and ran:

  “We go daily to the village of Passy adjoining my home, where you take the waters in a beautiful garden. Streams and waterfalls pour down on all sides, this way and that, in artfully leveled beds. I am known to like skilful mechanism, so I have been shown the basin where the waters of all the rivulets meet and mingle. There stands a little marble figure in the midst; and the weight of water is strong enough to turn it a quarter circle to the left and then pour down straight to the Seine by a conduit, which opens in the ground of the basin.”

  Patrice closed the book; and Don Luis went on to explain:

  “Things have changed since, no doubt, thanks to the energies of Essarès Bey. The water escapes some other way now; and the aqueduct was used to drain off the gold. Besides, the bed of the river has narrowed. Quays have been built, with a system of canals underneath them. You see, captain, all this was easy enough to discover, once I had the book to tell me. Doctus cum libro.”

  “Yes, but, even so, you had to read the book.”

  “A pure accident. I unearthed it in Siméon’s room and put it in my pocket, because I was curious to know why he was reading it.”

  “Why, that’s just how he must have discovered Essarès Bey’s secret!” cried Patrice. “He didn’t know the secret. He found the book among his employer’s papers and got up his facts that way. What do you think? Don’t you agree? You seem not to share my opinion. Have you some other view?”

  Don Luis did not reply. He stood looking at the river. Beside the wharves, at a slight distance from the yard, a barge lay moored, with apparently no one on her. But a slender thread of smoke now began to rise from a pipe that stood out above the deck.

  “Let’s go and have a look at her,” he said.

  The barge was lettered:

  LA NONCHALANTE. BEAUNE

  They had to cross the space between the barge and the wharf and to step over a number of ropes and empty barrels covering the flat portions of the deck. A companion-way brought them to a sort of cabin, which did duty as a stateroom and a kitchen in one. Here they found a powerful-looking man, with broad shoulders, curly black hair and a clean-shaven face. His only clothes were a blouse and a pair of dirty, patched canvas trousers.

  Don Luis offered him a twenty-franc note. The man took it eagerly.

  “Just tell me something, mate. Have you seen a barge lately, lying at Berthou’s Wharf?”

  “Yes, a motor-barge. She left two days ago.”

  “What was her name?”

  “The Belle Hélène. The people on board, two men and a woman, were foreigners talking I don’t know what lingo. . . . We didn’t speak to one another.”

  “But Berthou’s Wharf has stopped work, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, the owner’s joined the army . . . and the foremen as well. We’ve all got to, haven’t we? I’m expecting to be called up myself . . . though I’ve got a weak heart.”

  “But, if the yard’s stopped work, what was the boat doing here?”

  “I don’t know. They worked the whole of one night, however. They had laid rails along the quay. I heard the trollies; and they were loading up. What with I don’t know. And then, early in the morning, they unmoored.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Down stream, Mantes way.”

  “Thanks, mate. That’s what I wanted to know.”

  Ten minutes later, when they reached the house, Patrice and Don Luis found the driver of the cab which Siméon Diodokis had taken after meeting Don Luis. As Don Luis expected, Siméon had told the man to go to a railway-station, the Gare Saint-Lazare, and there bought his ticket.

  “Where to?”

  “To Mantes!”

  CHAPTER XV. THE BELLE HÉLÈNE

  “THERE’S NO MISTAKE about it,” said Patrice. “The information conveyed to M. Masseron that the gold had been sent away; the speed with which the work was carried out, at night, mechanically, by the people belonging to the boat; their alien nationality; the direction which they took: it all agrees. The probability is that, between the cellar into which the gold was shot and the place where it finished its journey, there was some spot where it used to remain concealed . . . unless the eighteen hundred bags can have awaited their despatch, slung one behind the other, along the wire. But that doesn’t matter much. The gre
at thing is to know that the Belle Hélène, hiding somewhere in the outskirts, lay waiting for the favorable opportunity. In the old days Essarès Bey, by way of precaution, used to send her a signal with the aid of that shower of sparks which I saw. This time old Siméon, who is continuing Essarès’ work, no doubt on his own account, gave the crew notice; and the bags of gold are on their way to Rouen and Le Hâvre, where some steamer will take them over and carry them . . . eastwards. After all, forty or fifty tons, hidden in the hold under a layer of coal, is nothing. What do you say? That’s it, isn’t it? I feel positive about it. . . . Then we have Mantes, to which he took his ticket and for which the Belle Hélène is bound. Could anything be clearer? Mantes, where he’ll pick up his cargo of gold and go on board in some seafaring disguise, unknown and unseen. . . . Loot and looter disappearing together. It’s as clear as daylight. Don’t you agree?”

  Once again Don Luis did not answer. However, he must have acquiesced in Patrice’s theories, for, after a minute, he declared:

  “Very well. I’ll go to Mantes.” And, turning to the chauffeur, “Hurry off to the garage,” he said, “and come back in the six-cylinder. I want to be at Mantes in less than an hour. You, captain . . .”

  “I shall come with you.”

  “And who will look after . . . ?”

  “Coralie? She’s in no danger! Who can attack her now? Siméon has failed in his attempt and is thinking only of saving his own skin . . . and his bags of gold.”

  “You insist, do you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t know that you’re wise. However, that’s your affair. Let’s go. By the way, though, one precaution.” He raised his voice. “Ya-Bon!”

  The Senegalese came hastening up. While Ya-Bon felt for Patrice all the affection of a faithful dog, he seemed to profess towards Don Luis something more nearly approaching religious devotion. The adventurer’s slightest action roused him to ecstasy. He never stopped laughing in the great chief’s presence.

  “Ya-Bon, are you all right now? Is your wound healed? You don’t feel tired? Good. In that case, come with me.”