From then on, Theodore Wallis, or Sadi Khan, was a newly-marked man—but as, according to certain checks made by the second bureau of the French Ministry of War, that terrible and mysterious individual might very well have been both a former agent of the French counter-espionage service, who had disappeared after the still-inexplicable theft of Anglo-French diplomatic documents of the greatest importance, the greatest prudence had been prescribed in high places. And that was why the spontaneous entrance on to the field of battle by Leo Saint-Clair and his three friends had been so warmly welcomed; against Sadi Khan, the young men constituted an active element that, whatever happened, could be officially denied and disowned—denial and disavowal being a standard means, in certain delicate circumstances, of avoiding revelations and international humiliations that might be extremely dangerous to the maintenance of peace in Europe.
The consequence of this was that if Leo Saint-Clair and his companions did not succeed in thwarting Sadi Khan, or lost their lives in succeeding—which was, after all, a possibility—the French government would sacrifice them in the superior interest of the country. The four youths would be aided officiously, with the utmost discretion, but from the official and public point of view, they were unknown.
Such, in its various dimensions, was the “state of play” shortly after noon on the eleventh of March 1912, when Mademoiselle Aurora Malianova, quietly left the room in which Leo Saint-Clair had just established that, having ceased to be blind in daylight, he nevertheless remained clear-sighted in the dark.
March 11 was a Monday.
Every week, from noon on Monday to noon on Tuesday, Mademoiselle Malianova, nurse-secretary at Doctor de Villiers-Pagan’s clinic, had the benefit of a day’s leave. She was entirely free, during 24 hours, to do whatever she wished, whether to take her meals and sleep at the clinic, or to desert the nurses’ refectory and her private room and go wherever she pleased, without any check-ups. Such were the clinic’s terms of service for each of the seven nurses, among whom Mademoiselle Malianova occupied, not the first place—which was reserved for Madame Bliss, the matron—but a privileged position, by virtue of the fact that she was both the secretary and the customary assistant of the director, Doctor de Villiers-Pagan.
As noon chimed on that day, Monday March 11, therefore, Mademoiselle Aurora Malianova telephoned the matron from her room. “I’m going out until tomorrow, Madame Bliss. The weather’s good. I’ll take the ferry, eat lunch aboard, and go to spend my day off with my sister in Geneva.”
“Have a good time, child,” the matron replied, in her warmly maternal voice. “So, will you be lunching with us at noon tomorrow?”
“Yes, Madame.”
With that, Mademoiselle Malianova hung up, took off her white smock—beneath which she was dressed for the town—substituted a little fur hat for her white-and-blue head-dress with the red cross, put on gloves and draped a light mantle over her left arm, picked up her hand-bag, and left her room and the clinic.
The young woman could certainly have left without telephoning the matron. It was her day off, for the employment of which she did not have to account to anyone. Since she had started working at the clinic eight months earlier, however, she had been careful not to hide any aspect of her life, which appeared to unsuspicious eyes to be as transparent as fine crystal.
Indeed, Mademoiselle Malianova did go to catch the ferry-boat from Vevey to Geneva, which called at Lausanne at twelve-thirty. There was a little restaurant on board—for “refreshments,” as the Swiss said in those days. When the weather as mild, people could be served on little tables on the deck or the afterdeck, sheltered from the sun, if necessary, by an expandable awning—and it was always delightful to eat in the open air, to the dull rhythm of the boat’s engine as it moved over the tranquil water.
And that day, Mademoiselle Malianova lunched with the heartiest and most discriminating appetite in the world. She was quite content, quite happy; and her beauty—ordinarily a trifle cold, as in so many Nordic beauties whose vivacity and profundity of intelligence match the perfection of their features—was revived and softened. Her blue eyes seemed more mischievous than hard. A disinterested observer might have thought that the young woman, while eating and drinking, was indulging in a meditation not exempt from satisfied vanity, spiced with irony.
The boat’s disembarkation-point was in Geneva harbor, opposite the Jardin du Lac.
Walking with a long and lithe stride, Aurora Malianova went diagonally through the garden to arrive at the exit to the Rue Pierre-Fatio, on the Grand-Quai du Lac, Then, following that street along the shore, she reached the Rive neighborhood, which forms an irregular trapezium in which many small and winding streets intersect in a sort of labyrinth. Without hesitation, although she turned round abruptly several times, as if to make sure that she was not being followed, the young woman went into the labyrinth and moved through it; it must have been quite familiar to her.
Suddenly, she disappeared—which is to say that anyone following her would have lost sight of her in the blink of an eye.
As she strode rapidly along the narrow sidewalk of a little deserted street, she had made an abrupt left turn, hurling herself into a low, dark porch, at the back of which, with as much skill as speed, she opened a door by means of a key that had been glistening in the fingers of her right hand for about a minute.
Having crossed the threshold and carefully re-locked the door, Mademoiselle Malianova found herself in darkness, but she reached out with an accustomed gesture and pressed a button with her index finger. An electric light came on, at the end of a thread hanging down from an upward-sloping ceiling, beneath which extended the narrow steps of an old stone staircase, at the far end of a narrow corridor.
The young woman went up those stairs.
On the landing—the house only seemed to have one story at that point—Mademoiselle Malianova knocked on a door: two quick raps, three slower ones, one last louder rap, and finally a scratch.
There was a brief delay, and then the door opened, revealing a man, who immediately said, in a serious voice, speaking Russian: “Good day, my beloved Katyushka.”
“Good day, darling!” Throwing her arms around the man’s neck, the young woman planted a long kiss on his lips, and then stepped away, laughed, and took two or three steps forward.
She found herself in a vast low-ceilinged room, relatively poorly lit by a single window overlooking the low roofs of little houses and shops, but comfortable, pleasant and very intimate, doubtless by virtue of the profusion and richness of the Oriental carpet that covered the entire floor and the walls, draping a large and low divan-bed strewn with multicolored cushions. The furniture comprised a large table in the middle, laden with papers, files and books, a cupboard with sculpted wood panels, bookshelves loaded with volumes, two large leather-upholstered armchairs and four poufs similarly clad in leather. In spite of the fresh air entering through the open window, the atmosphere was impregnated with the odors of Oriental tobacco and Armenian paper. Indeed, there was a lidless lacquered box on the corner of the table, filled with cigarettes, along with a copper bowl half-full of cigarette-ends and a Chinese incense-burner from which thin wisps of blue smoke were escaping.
After carefully closing and bolting the door, the man pulled a heavy Karamanian door-curtain across it and rejoined Aurora, whom he had addressed as Katyushka—an affectionate diminutive of the Russian forename Katia. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow with a Kalmuk-like head, with prominent cheekbones, thin, clearly-defined lips, close-shaven to expose slightly hollow cheeks and a square chin. His eyes, of an indefinable color, deeply buried beneath thick eyebrows, shone with a yellow gleam. Delighted by the anticipated visit, he laughed, and his magnificent white teeth sparkled in his swarthy face. He might have been 40 years old. He was dressed in grey-flannel tennis trousers and a shirt made of the same cloth, open at the neck. A narrow leather belt was tightened about his supple waist, neatly proportionate to his height and the broadne
ss of his shoulders. In brief, he was a splendid athlete, but his physiognomy must sometimes have been disquieting.
For the moment, that physiognomy only expressed happiness, while he grabbed the young woman’s head gently in both hands, towering over her and leaning down so that he could kiss her on the lips again.
With a rebellious laugh, though, Katia escaped and pirouetted toward the window. She threw her hat and gloves on the divan, where she had already set down her handbag and mantle. Then, suddenly becoming serious, she closed the window.
The man’s face hardened, and his voice was hushed as it asked: “Why?”
She came back to him. Standing between the table and the divan, they were facing one another. She raised her head slightly, while he lowered his own, and their gazes met, equally serious.
“I have important things to tell you, Grigoryi. But first, do you know what happened a week ago?”
“With regard to…?”
“With regard to Sadi Khan and Radiant Z?”
“And how do you know that something happened?” asked Grigoryi, not suspicious but very interested.
“Answer me first, my darling,” she said, with gentle authority. “It will be clearer, and we won’t have to repeat things.”
“All right!” And without hesitation—which proved that the mature man had absolute confidence in the young woman—Grigoryi spoke, still in a hushed and calm tone. “Sadi Khan seriously wounded the engineer Saint-Clair; then he took possession of the plans, notes and scale models of Radiant Z. Afterwards, he destroyed the inventor’s laboratory with a bomb. He was able to get away. On the night of the fifth and sixth he came here. He gave me the plans, the notes and the models and ordered me to get to work on the theory, the manipulation and the probable effects. I haven’t had any news of him since.” He fell silent.
“That’s all?” said Katia.
“Yes.”
She shivered with excitement, put her two long and beautiful hands on the man’s shoulders and said, in a contained but ardent voice: “Well, pay attention! We’ve got a fight on our hands.”
“Oh! What is it that you know? It’s your turn—speak!”
“Naturally, my darling, Well, the inventor’s son, Leo Saint-Clair, has set off on a campaign to avenge his father and recover the documents and the models. Three of his friends are with him. A Polish agent from the second bureau of the French Ministry of War was attached to them—a man named Wenceslas Polki, known as Wen.
“Last Wednesday, this Wen must have taken advantage of certain things he knew or suspected, and must have gone straight to the Maison-Blanche after leaving the Hôtel du Pélican, where Leo Saint-Clair had taken up residence on his arrival, the night before. I don’t know how, but Wen was captured there, where he expected to be the captor. As chance would have it, just as the Pole called for help inside the Maison-Blanche, Leo Saint-Clair and his companions were passing by on the road, in a car. They recognized the desperate voice. They went into the house, Brownings in hand. There was a fight—but the victory was ours. They all got away, some by boat, others in Saint-Clair’s own car, taking Wen with them!”
“Bravo!” Grigoryi put in. His face had become increasingly animated since the young woman had begun her story.
“Wait!” she said. “There’s more!”
“Oh!”
“Yes. As they fled, one of ours, in the car…”
Without omitting a single relevant detail, but also without wasting a single word, Katia recounted the consequences and the conclusion of the dramatic adventure.
At the end—the very end—the tall, strong and mature Grigoryi burst out laughing, slapping his sides. “Ha ha! A nyctalope! Like a cat, like an owl, like a lynx! But that’s magnificent! The boy must be very proud. Let’s hope, furthermore, that he’s fallen in love with his blonde, blue-eyed nurse, eh? For he must be all of 20 years old, this paladin!”
Leaning both hands and her back on the edge of the table, however, Katia remained serious. She let the mocking hilarity, vibrant with challenge, die down of its own accord. Then, simply, but in a tone and with a gaze that imposed themselves on the man, she said: “My dear Grigoryi Alexandrovich, you’re wrong to laugh. Leo Saint-Clair is, indeed, 20 years of age, and his companions are about the same age, but he’s no child, nor are the others. I’ve spent four long days beside him. I’ve got him to talk. Grigoryi, my love, my master, believe me when I tell you that Leo Saint-Clair bears within him the signs of a great destiny. He will be—he already is—an exceptional man. You know that I can often read men’s souls, and that the unknown God has endowed me with an intuitive sense that is sometimes completed by the faculty of second sight…”
She interrupted herself, and the color of her blue eyes deepened to become a somber and profound, strangely velvety azure. Facing her, the man seemed to have subsided. Then his coarse face took on a singularly timid expression, as if his subjugated mind had entered a limbo of unconscious veneration and irresistible fear.
After a silence that seemed to weigh down upon the man and oppress him further, Katia continued peremptorily: “Well, Grigoryi, I’m convinced that without me, neither you nor Sadi Khan, nor your entire gang combined, will triumph over Leo Saint-Clair, who is as entitled to be called the Nyctalope by symbolism as by reality.”
She turned slightly to one side, showing off her bust, molded by her figure-hugging jacket, took a cigarette from the box and struck a match.
Grigoryi gradually straightened up again. His face resumed the rudely serious expression that must have been habitual to it. He put his hands in his pockets, took a step forward, and said, simply: “What should we do now, Katyushka, in your opinion?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, having launched a cloud of grey smoke toward the ceiling. “No, I don’t know yet. But what about you, darling? What have you got out of your examination of Radiant Z?”
He frowned and said, bitterly: “Nothing!”
“Really?” she said, in surprise.
“Nothing, my darling. The engineer Pierre Saint-Clair is a prudent man. The plans stolen by Sadi are only fragmentary; the specifications lack three or four formulas that must be essential, and both the scale models of the apparatus include the same gap: the detector component isn’t there. How and of what is it made? For it isn’t an ordinary detector. I’ve already fabricated several in the dimensions required by the dimensions of the apparatus. I’ve also tried Branly radio-conductors6 modified for the special properties of Radiant Z. I got no result. After five days of solid work, I’m exactly where I started: the engineer Saint-Clair’s invention has not given up its secret. I can only hope…”
He fell silent, struck by the young woman’s tender and ironic smile and the new gleam in her eyes. “What are you thinking, Katyushka?” he asked, timidly.
She laughed then, through her half-consumed cigarette into the copper bowl, and said in a clear and cheerful voice: “I’m certain, Grigoryi—certain, you hear—that Leo Saint-Clair knows all the secrets of Radiant Z. It’s quite simple, therefore: either I’ll get everything that the Nyctalope knows out of him myself, or, if I don’t succeed, I’ll bring the Nyctalope here, alone, and it will be up to you to get out of him what I wasn’t able to obtain.”
“Katyushka!” exclaimed Grigoryi, opening his arms.
“My darling….” And the young woman threw herself upon the man’s breast with a voluptuous laugh.
Chapter II: The Parameters of the Problem
In 1912, one could enter and leave Switzerland with no other formalities than those of putting one’s baggage through customs. One did not have to make any declaration of identity, directly or indirectly, to the police. Foreigners were free to enter the country, to stay there on holiday or to take up residence, without having any other obligation than not contravening the laws applicable to Swiss citizens. That, together with its central position within Europe, the climatic and tourist attractions of the beautiful and picturesque country’s various regions, and the l
imited resources that were necessary to live there without too many privations, was the reason why Switzerland was the more-or-less permanent refuge of a multitude of foreigners, many of whom were outlaws in their own country.
How was it possible, in the great universal caravanserai grouped around the lakes of Geneva, Neuchâtel, Zurich and the Four Cantons, to find men like Sadi Khan and his gang, who changed their names and physiognomies as easily as their clothes?
In the late afternoon of that Monday March 11, in the clinic’s private drawing-room, in the presence of Doctor de Villiers-Pagan and General Le Breuil, who were very interested and excited by the extraordinary adventure to which Providence had made them witnesses of a sort, a veritable Council of War was held by Leo Saint-Clair, René Croqui, Robert Champeau and Jean Degains. The following day, the four “forwards” would be back in the field, the Nyctalope’s wound having almost scarred over, no longer requiring anything more than a light bandage. Croqui’s and Champeau’s bruises were already forgotten.
By what means could they pick up a trail that they had lost completely?
It is necessary to mention that General Le Breuil, who was highly esteemed by the authorities in Lausanne and Geneva, had had a conversation with the police chiefs of the two cities. The latter were quite ready to consider the dramatic fight in the lakeside house as a criminal incident, and had hastened, when informed of it, to conduct immediate enquiries throughout their respective jurisdictions. The results of the inquiry were as follows.
Enter the Nyctalope Page 6
