Enter the Nyctalope

by Jean de La Hire

  That physical serenity had more effect than any words on the nerves of Champeau, Croqui and Degains. The three “forwards,” subdued and disciplined, stood back from their Chief.

  Then, very calmly, Saint-Clair said: “At 5 a.m., I must finish the final act. I’ve made arrangements to ensure that, at that time, no man will be in the house where the documents and apparatus are to be found.”

  He was not telling the whole truth, although he was not lying; there would indeed, be “no man” in the house, but only a woman: Katia! After a brief pause he continued: “Listen to me carefully! If I haven’t returned by seven o’clock, or rather, if I haven’t telephoned Professor Dorsang, warn General Breuil immediately and go with the police to number 18, Rue du Fossé in the Rive neighborhood. That’s it!”

  “18, Rue du Fossé, Rive neighborhood,” Champeau repeated.

  “Yes—now let’s embrace. And au revoir…or adieu!”

  He had dry eyes himself, but those of his three good companions were shining with tears.

  “Shall we go as far as the little door with you?” asked Degains, timidly.

  “Yes, to open and close it for me.”

  In his haste, though, and also because he was a Nyctalope, he got ahead of them and had to wait for them at the foot of the wall, for in their confusion they did not immediately think of making use of their pocket electric torches to dissipate the darkness in front of them. He welcomed them, laughing, and they were reassured by hearing him say, in his most serene voice: “Oh, my friends, it’s quite something to be able to see clearly in the darkness. Open up, Robert! Light up, you others!”

  Champeau opened the little door, which key had remained in his hand throughout the brief and pathetic encounter. Saint-Clair embraced his three friends yet again, rapidly and almost brutally—and then, launching himself into the alley, the Nyctalope disappeared.

  Half an hour later, with the little key that Katia Malianova had confided that same day to the young man who represented himself as the anarchist Adrien Fortis, Leo Saint-Clair went into the house with the low porch in the Rue du Fossé that bore the number 18.

  On the first floor, he knocked on the door in the appropriate manner, and was welcomed into Grigoryi’s “studio,” as he had expected, by the beautiful Katia, her friend Grigoryi being otherwise occupied that night.

  Although Saint-Clair knew, however, that on the still-nocturnal morning of March 20, he would be alone for a few hours with the young woman he loved, and to whom he was finally going to talk with all his generous passion before recovering the documents and apparatus relating to Radiant Z—which he knew to be hidden in the laboratory adjoining the studio—he was far from anticipating that his entire plan would be wrecked as soon as the first words were spoken.

  His quick and keen mind had a very clear conception of that violent, instantaneous upset as soon as his ears heard and his brain registered the words with which the young woman greeted him; “Good day! But is it still Adrien Fortis, or is it not rather Leo Saint-Clair that I now have before me?”

  A thunderbolt!

  Yes, but thunderbolts are not always fatal, when their lightning strikes three paces ahead of you!

  Momentarily shaken, mentally and even physically, the Nyctalope collected himself and stood up straight, powerful by virtue of the self-control that was the principal characteristic of his personality, which was already completely formed.

  He repressed the sudden constriction of his throat with a deep breath and pronounced, in an almost normal voice: “Ah, Katia, you’ve found me out…or rather, Aurora, you’ve recognized me! Be a good sport all round and tell me what it was that allowed you to recognize me.”

  Cold and tense, with her gaze insolent and challenging, she did not hesitate to reply: “Your eyes!”

  “My eyes! Oh, but with my spectacles, that I’ve kept on almost all the time, and my reddened and swollen eyebrows…”

  She shrugged her shoulders and continued, sardonically: “I only needed 20 seconds, the day before yesterday, in the evening. Twenty seconds during which, while you were sitting in the corner over there, you wiped the lenses of your spectacles while looking at me. Yes, you were looking at me—and you were no longer thinking about the mortal peril you had been running for a week. You were thinking about that moment in the garden of the clinic when you had looked at me for the first time in daylight, looked at me and seen me… Your eyes, the day before yesterday, had the same expression they had then. That was how I recognized you—for what is unmistakable is a loving gaze. Now, at that moment, as soon your eyes were reborn to the light of the Sun, you fell in love with me, Leo Saint-Clair! And it was the same loving gaze that, for twenty seconds in the evening of the day before yesterday, your eyes held for me…”

  She breathed in. There was a sort of rapid palpitation in her breast, and she spat out, hoarsely: “And then my hatred recognized you!”

  He shuddered, took a step backwards, made a naïve gesture, both hands reaching forwards, and stammered: “Your hatred! Your hatred?”

  His face had become livid—and because of the artificial eruptions and scaly patches that made him ugly, that face would have been frightful and horrible if the fire of a sublime passion had not immediately animated, transformed and idealized it.

  Leo Saint-Clair had only taken a single backward step; he took three forwards, then four, and put his arms on the young woman’s shoulders. She tried instinctively to escape, but was vigorously restrained.

  “Your hatred!” he said, again, but this time in a very soft voice, as if alive with nothing but love. “Can you hate me, Aurora? Why? Me, who loves you and want to save you—yes, save you! To tear you away from the sinister error into which you’ve been thrown—and I know by whom…for I have been told the story of Mademoiselle Katia Irenovna Malianova. You have run away from parents who love you, and an aristocratic social milieu in which you would normally have taken your place—a destiny in which nothing was lacking to make you happy…

  “All that you have fled, and in such a manner that your bridges were burned behind you! You’ve listened to the cunning counsel, and then submitted to the brutal constraint, of a man who, by courtesy of an incident in which you only demonstrated an adorable weakness, took possession of you, body and soul…

  “Katia! You are, for me, Aurora: the dawn, the light, and the revelation of love in the joy of the sun’s glare! You are Aurora, and I deny everything that was in your life before the moment when I saw you in the clear morning light! I love you, Aurora! Let’s go away together, not looking behind us. Let’s go! And my love will be so great, so all-encompassing, so penetrating and so strong that it will animate you too…and you will love me!”

  He was a child, who believed that love is contagious! He was a child, who, in his pure and radiant youth, saw nothing of that young woman but the face of a Madonna, and believed that her soul was made in the image of that beauty! He was a child, yes, who had wept with generous and compassionate emotion on reading the sentimental social dreams of Tolstoy! Before real life had formed him, he saw life through the lenses of utopian literature.

  At the very moment when they were affirmed, however, his first and overly juvenile illusions were to receive the blow that would destroy them.

  “Aurora…you will love me!”

  She burst out laughing then, briefly contorted her entire body, escaped from of Saint-Clair’s grasp like a slithering viper and ran to the far side of the studio, in the light of half-veiled electric lamps, sowing the air, which was heavy with tobacco fumes, with her laughter of bravado and shameless mockery: her frightful, infernal laughter. And that laughter broke Leo Saint-Clair’s heart—actually broke it, as if the cruel woman had sunk her sharp fingernails into his naked, quivering and bloody viscera, and raked them…

  He became unsteady, his eyes burning with sudden tears.

  But a cry made him straighten up, and rendered his eyes dry, his heart pain-free and calm, and his brain lucid and cold.


  That cry sprang from Katia’s convulsed mouth: “Grigoryi! Grigoryi!”

  It was no longer Leo Saint-Clair, tenderized by his first love and tortured by his first suffering, who made the prompt gesture, but the Nyctalope, in combat with the enemy.

  What gesture? Right hand in pocket, arm extended, Browning leveled. And from the same lips that had trembled with words of love, and imperative command sprang forth: “Hands up!”

  Instead of obeying, the man—the colossus—who was placidly coming into the studio from the next room came forward with his hands half-raised: enormous hands, open like claws about to seize their prey.

  Moved by the instinct of self-preservation, his determination to defend himself and carry out his intended action, Leo Saint-Clair fired. He pressed the trigger of his weapon twice…

  He understood immediately. Instead of the detonation of cartridges stuffed with powder and charged with bullets, the Browning only emitted two feeble clicks. Yesterday afternoon, he thought, during my siesta, the real cartridges were replaced by blanks.

  Determined to fight anyway, he stepped back abruptly, raised his right arm, and hurled the steel Browning into Grigoryi’s face with all his might.

  The colossus had a hard skull, alas. The butt of the improvised projectile struck him on the forehead, and tore away a little flesh, causing blood to flow, but the progress of the Herculean body was neither stopped nor even slowed down.

  Disarmed, relatively weak despite his vigor by comparison with his tall, broad and heavy adversary, Leo Saint-Clair was only able to fight for less than a minute. He was seized and bent backwards; his arms were twisted and pinned against his back; he found himself thrown face-down on to the carpet, where a heavy knee maintained him while agile fingers passed a cord around his joined wrists, wound it tightly and knotted it.

  “Now, comrade, get up. You won’t come to any harm, at least for the moment—nor later, if you’re a little cooperative… Good! Sit down, my friend—we need to have a chat.”

  Grigoryi had said this while Saint-Clair, with a supple thrust of the hips, had turned over on the carpet, then got to his knees and stood up. After pausing to draw breath, he ended up sitting down in a leather armchair.

  His spectacles had fallen off during the struggle. Now exposed, his keen, ardent eyes, deliberately half-closed, darted a sharp gaze between eyelids almost bloodied by blepharitis, artificially created and actively maintained. That gaze went initially to Katia, motionless and mute in the shadows at the back of the room, then to Grigoryi—who sat down heavily on a stool, wiping his bloody forehead and nose with a section of his handkerchief.

  The Russian made a bandage of the same handkerchief, which he wrapped around his forehead, and which Katia came spontaneously to knot at the back of his head. When that was done, the young woman retreated again into an ill-lit corner, as if to signify that she was not going to involve herself in the discussion.

  “Yes,” Grigoryi resumed, in his slow, deep voice, “we need to have a chat, Saint-Clair. You’re a bold fellow, and you have my esteem. Without Katia’s perspicacity, you would have turned us over and defeated us without even having to fight us.” He laughed briefly, and continued with sly mockery: “Let that be a lesson to you, my lad. When you next fall in love… if you live any longer than 24 hours… well, don’t put your love into your gaze. Katyushka caught sight of it—that’s what betrayed you. Silly boy!”

  He shrugged his shoulders. Then, in a different tone, which was heavy, emphatic and menacing, he went on: “But it isn’t about that any more. Forget your disappointed passion, my lad, and think about conducting yourself in such a manner that you can catch up, in the matter of love affairs, in the course of the rest of your life, which has only just started. No, it isn’t about that, Leo Saint-Clair, but the invention made by your father, the electrician and chemist. You understand?”

  During this flow of words, making a triple effort, Leo Saint-Clair had recovered all of him calmness, all of his self-composure and all of his courageous, sagacious and prudent lucidity. It was in his normal voice that he said: “I understand. I’ve been listening to you and your accomplices for a week, in order to discover what my father didn’t tell me—or, in his mental confusion, didn’t think to tell me. Something essential is missing from the documents and the scale models of that apparatus, which prevents you from being able to utilize the invention and construct complete working models. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” said Grigoryi, resentfully.

  “So what?” Saint-Clair queried.

  “So,” the other resumed, “you’ll tell me what you know—for you worked with your father. He directed you in studies that were in concordance with his science and the applications he made of it, or wanted to make of it. You must know the nature, composition and usage of the essential element that is missing from the documents and the models we have in our possession. You’re going to tell us about it.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No.”

  The two negations had been pronounced in a defiant and decisive tone, but without any fervent anger, expressing a decision coldly made and final.

  Grigoryi closed his enormous hands and his entire face underwent a brutal nervous contraction. He thumped his own thighs with his fists. Brutally, he said: “You’ll talk! You’ll tell us everything you know! I’ll give you 24 hours, and not one more. Tomorrow, at daybreak, if you still haven’t talked and refuse again, I’ll submit you to torture…to a torture that will draw you gradually closer to death. You have 24 hours to reflect and capitulate before suffering. As soon as dawn breaks tomorrow, you’ll start to find out what torture by fire is like, then those of hunger and thirst…”

  He got up, started pacing back and forth like a caged bear, then stopped in front of Katia—who had remained still and silent in the dark corner—and pronounced slowly, in French, with extreme gentleness: “Katyushka, my darling, go into the kitchen and make us some coffee. Don’t worry about anything else. When you’ve finished and had breakfast with us, you’ll leave and go back to the clinic. Listen to me carefully, Katyushka, and obey me as you love me…”

  “I’m listening, Grigoryi, and I’ll obey you,” murmured the young woman, humble and smiling.

  “You’ll go back to your clinic…and you won’t budge for a week. Watch, observe, listen to anything that might be said over there about this fellow and his three absent friends. If you learn anything, and when you’re certain that you won’t be caught, telephone Monsieur Roudine, in Russian. Vassily will act as messenger between him and me. But whatever you find out, and whatever happens in the field of your observation, don’t leave Lausanne—don’t even go out of the clinic for a week. In a week, this business will be over, whether this fellow has been sent back to France by us, defeated, or whether his cadaver, weighed down by scrap iron, is rotting at the bottom of Lake Leman. Come on, Katyushka—the coffee…and then you have to go.”

  “Yes, my darling.”

  The young woman emerged from the shadowed corner, passed in front of Saint-Clair in the full glare of the light without glancing at him, and disappeared through a little glazed door at the other side of the studio, which opened into a sort of vestibule beyond which was a fairly large room leading to the kitchen and dining-room.

  Grigoryi stretched himself out on the divan and lit a cigarette, which he smoked slowly, his eyes fixed on the low ceiling.

  In the armchair where he was still seated, with his hands tied behind his back, holding his upper body upright and his head high, Leo Saint-Clair remained calm and attentive. He was frowning slightly, and from time to time he bit into his lower lip with is incisors. He did not modify his attitude when Katia Malianova brought a tray, which she deposited on the table. The tray bore a coffee-pot, three cups, toast, butter, jam, sugar, spoons and dessert-knives.

  “Saint-Clair,” said Grigoryi, getting to his feet, “I’m going to untie you so that you can eat more comfortably—but don’t do anything stupi
d, hey? Firstly, these knives are only sharp enough to cut butter, and secondly, I have my eye on you. One suspicious move on your part, and I’ll knock you out with one punch. Oh, only to stun you, not to kill you. For during 24four hours without touching you, then six or seven days of torturing you in various ways, I’d rather hear you talk and let you save your life. On the evening of the sixth or seventh day, though, if you end up dying, it will be your own fault, for that will prove that you’ve been crazy enough to keep quiet.”

  And with consummate skill, he removed the cord from his prisoner’s wrists.

  Leo Saint-Clair was hungry. He ate and drank comfortably, without any apparent emotion. He often looked at Katia, but the young woman did not meet his eyes once.

  When the silent breakfast was over, the young woman took the tray away, came back to tidy up the corner of the table, and then vanished into the kitchen for the last time. She only showed herself again to put on her hat, gloves and mantle.

  “Don’t forget your handbag,” said Grigoryi.

  She picked it up and stood on tiptoe to offer her lips, on which he colossus planted a kiss—but without taking his eyes off Leo Saint-Clair, who was sitting in the armchair, with his free hands still resting on the edge of the table.

  And Katia Malianova went out, without having glanced at the noble fellow who, thanks to her, was now in the jaws of the bear.

  Chapter II: Torture? Murder?

  When the young woman had gone, Grigoryi came back to sit down on the divan facing Saint-Clair, and he said:

  “My boy, you must often have laughed at us secretly in the last week. We were completely taken in by the sham of your physical disfigurement, which I now understand to have been produced by some medico-surgical intervention. We also believed in your doubtless-invented family misfortunes, and had no suspicions regarding the bomb you threw in the theater, although I understand now that the whole business was organized by you and your friends with the Geneva police. You were even lucky that Vassily, who happened to be in the audience, ran after you, caught up with you and, thinking that he was saving you, took you straight to the intellectual center of our organization—which is to say, Monsieur Roudine’s house. It’s our strength, but also our weakness, never to check up on the antecedents of men who come to us and immediately inspire our trust.”