Rouletabille at Krupp's

by Gaston Leroux

  They embraced, for La Candeur judged from Rouletabille’s quivering that they were reaching a critical point in the drama, even though he did not understand the plot. He knew some things, but there were others he did not know, and what he did not know appeared to him to be an abyss just as profound as, and even more redoubtable than, the night whose depths contained all the mystery of the Krupp factory.

  Rouletabille left. La Candeur sat down and waited.

  He waited for half an hour. Then the expected shadow arrived. It was standing on the steps.

  La Candeur opened the door to it.

  It recoiled slightly on perceiving the enormous shadow of La Candeur, who immediately whispered: “Rouletabille will come!”

  Then it came into the house and into the design-studio, sat down in the usual place and whispered: “Will he come soon?”

  La Candeur, faithful to his instructions, pretended that he had not heard and went to sit down on the far side of the rom.

  Undoubtedly Nicole understood that it was preferable to maintain a perfect silence, for she did not ask any more questions. From time to time she turned her head toward the small office, through the window of which an occasional ray of moonlight illuminated her beautiful, sad and dolorous profile.

  A few sighs, alive with the anguish of her agitated soul, escaped her.

  Finally, Rouletabille appeared on the steps in his turn. He was not alone. He had two other firemen with him. All three moved rapidly into the design-studio.

  The other two were Serge Kaniewsky and Fulbert.

  “God be praised, Mademoiselle, since you’re here,” said Rouletabille. “We don’t have a second to waste, and a few minutes’ delay on your part could have compromised everything...”

  As he pronounced these last words, a glance darted through the window of the small workroom allowed him to perceive a number of disquieting shadows advancing through the quarter, which was normally deserted at this hour. Thus, it was in a feverish fashion that he interrupted the commencement of the delight that had taken possession of Serge as soon as the latter had perceived Nicole’s silhouette, and ordered the Pole and Fulbert to follow his friend—La Candeur—and do everything that he told them to do.

  As Serge and Fulbert hesitated to draw away from Nicole, Rouletabille whispered: “We’ll follow you! Go, or we’re doomed!” Turning to Nicole, he hissed between his teeth: “Order them to obey!”

  Nicole did not say a word, but she pushed Serge ahead of her with a brutal gesture.

  La Candeur was already dragging Fulbert and Serge away, but Rouletabille was no longer looking in that direction. All his attention went to the window of the work-room, through which he was alarmed to see military silhouettes everywhere, which were surrounding this corner of Richter’s kommando with a veritable cordon, which as tightening by the second.

  Nicole had seen them too, and her finger pointed at the menacing shadows while her mouth croaked: “Too late! We’re doomed!”

  Did Rouletabille believe it?

  Did he, too, think that all was lost? Or that his hope of saving Nicole was too faint to run the risk of leaving her alive in the hands of the torturers of his race—a formidable gamble on which the salvation of the fatherland might perhaps depend?

  At any rate, his hand went in search, behind him, of the heavy lever that he had deposited there—and then, silently, and doubtless also in order that the noble young woman who had already suffered so much would not see the death that she had commanded herself coming, covertly, he struck her.

  He struck her on the head.

  He struck with all his strength, but—O horror!—the unfortunate woman did not fall under the furious blow. She turned around, clutched at a curtain, and uttered a frightful groan.

  Rouletabille had to repeat the blow, and she fell to her knees, mouth open, eyes very wide, fixing her murderer with the stare of a fatally-wounded animal—a stare that the other would never forget.

  Finally, after a final and futile effort, which brought her upright in the fact of the supreme blow, she fell to the floor, and was no more than a poor mere object, inert in the icy rays of moonlight.

  Trembling with horror, Rouletabille still had his weapon in his hand when La Candeur appeared. The giant recoiled before the frightful face of his comrade, before the gesture that was still menacing, as if he had not struck enough, and before the body of the woman that blocked his way.

  At the same time, the moonlight was interrupted by a rush of shadows that precipitated itself on to the steps, and silhouettes agitating outside the widow.

  “Pick up the corpse,” said Rouletabille, in a voice that La Candeur did not recognize, so altered was it.

  The other obeyed without taking account of what he was doing.

  Almost at the same instant as the door closed behind the two men and their sinister burden, other doors gave way under the furious pressure of military shadows, which were waving lanterns and uttering savage cries—and immediately, the shadows and the lanterns went astray on the false trail prepared by the reporter’s audacious cunning.

  Chapter XX

  In the Depths of the Hold

  The Wesel, a cargo-ship transporting merchandise between Duisburg and Holland, is still at the dock, but is making ready to sail up the Rhine.

  In the silent darkness below decks, pierced by the unique and precise light of a lantern, a sudden creaking is audible—and as if the sound, in that mute night, were astonished by itself, it stops immediately…and then begins again, but this time more hesitantly, so uncertain, and fearful of echoes that it ends up dying away softly, its force exhausted.

  Finally, all of a sudden, there is a brutal and angry eruption. Planks are hurled away, and from a smashed create, a body rolls into the bloody light of the lantern, which is swaying between two inclined joists.

  Then another body rolls out. The two bodies are alive. The space available for their movements is not large enough for them to have been heard up above; so, having abruptly got up on to their knees, they find themselves face to face with one another, like the bodies of two animals with snorting muzzles, breathless and hostile.

  One of the muzzles asks: “Nicole?” But the other only replies with heavy breathing.

  Serge Kaniewsky and Rouletabille are face to face with one another, in the depths of the Wesel’s hold—in the depths of the abyss...

  “Nicole?” repeats the grunting voice of the Pole. “Where’s Nicole?”

  “In one of these crates,” Rouletabille whispers.

  “But which one? Which? Which? Perhaps she’s fainted. Perhaps she’s dead? Why isn’t she giving any sign of life? Why?”

  “The crates have been separated from one another. Wait a moment...patience and composure. Perhaps our companions aren’t even in this hold. Those crates have been left on the deck...”

  “You swore to me that we wouldn’t be separated!”

  “Who says that we’ve been separated?” replied Rouletabille’s lugubrious voice. “We’re all aboard. We’ll find one another eventually.”

  But the Pole’s fever only increased. He was turning around in the narrow space like a hyena in its cage…and he came back to Rouletabille, showing his teeth as if he could no longer hold back from devouring him.

  “Silence!” commanded the reporter. “I think something moved in this direction...” And he plunged into the darkness.

  In the depths of the night, his voice was heard prudently calling out to La Candeur and Fulbert.

  The Pole soon caught up with him.

  “Why? Why aren’t you calling to Nicole.” And Serge implored: “Nicole! Nicole!”

  But only silence replied to those desperate appeals.

  “She’s dead!” croaked the Pole. “Otherwise she’d already have heard my voice! Oh, I was right not to want to allow myself to be shut up in the crate without her! But if she’s dead, I’ll kill you all! All of you!”

  “You can do as you wish,” Rouletabille whispered. “Me, I’ve done w
hat I could!”

  “Tell me, then that you’ve saved her, if you don’t want to die here and now.” And the Pole, who seemed to be at the end of his tether, backed Rouletabille into a corner as if he wanted to tear him to pieces.

  Rouletabille pushed away the muzzle of the man who was sending fiery breath into his face—which only redoubled the other’s rage.

  “Ah!” grated the Pole, whose fangs gripped Rouletabille’s cravat. “Tell me, then, that you’ve saved her. Tell me that—or I swear that you’re finished!”

  Then the reporter, having shaken off the malevolent beast again, came back to a position directly underneath the light of the lantern, and there, squatting on his heels, with his chin in his hands, said: “I repeat that I’ve done everything I could to save her.”

  “That’s not...that’s not what you promised me! If you value your skin, I need to see Nicole!”

  “I don’t value my skin, but you shall see Nicole.”

  “Ah!” moaned the other, exhausted by rage, impotence and crazed anguish, “if she were saved, you wouldn’t be talking to me like that. She’s dead! She’s dead! Bane of my life! She’s dead and we’re alive!”

  This time, Rouletabille made no reply. He searched, at the bottom of one of his pockets, for a piece of paper, unfolded it slowly and gave it to the Pole.

  Serge took the piece of paper mechanically. He did not understand.

  “Read!”

  And the Pole, by the red light of the lantern, read it.

  When he had finished reading what was written on the piece of paper, and took cognizance of the blank check given to the criminal by the victim herself, there was no further cry, nor a sigh, nor a groan, nor anything at all. The head of the man fell, and hit the deck with a dull thud.

  Rouletabille tried in vain to reanimate the inert body. The life of the man had been so intimately linked with Nicole’s that the very idea of Nicole’s death had effectively knocked Serge unconscious. To bring him out of it required nothing less than the icy water of a bottle for which the reporter went to search in the crate, and, most of all, an unexpected phrase whispered in his ear:

  “She might not be dead!”

  The man moved, sighed, and opened his eyes again.

  The furious passage of life into near-oblivion determined a few moments before by the mere idea of the death of his beloved had been foreseen by Rouletabille, and the brutality of his action had been calculated, in the hope of obtaining explanations whose possibility he would have had to renounce without that knock-out blow.

  However, the reporter too was at the end of his tether. His task was accomplished. Whatever happened now, the Boches would never obtain the secrets of a man who no longer had the opportunity to give them away. If the affair turned bad, Rouletabille would die with Serge, for he would not hesitate to strike him, any more than he had hesitated in that tragic moment when he had created a corpse in the near-darkness of the design-studio.

  Strengthened by having thus succeeded, without weakness, in depriving the Titania of the soul that it needed in order to live fully, but weakened by all the effort expended, and also moved by the desolate dolor of the man who was listening to him as a dying man listens to the words that might reattach him to life, Rouletabille—indifferent henceforth so far as he was concerned to the consequences of a promise that might have been fatal to him—admitted that he had struck Nicole dead, because he was not sure that it had been Nicole!

  He related the circumstance as one reads a report, in a blank and monotonous voice to which as added, without him suspecting it, the horror of a crime rendered necessary, not by any certainty, but by an absolute doubt. For doubt too, is a conclusion, like affirmation or negation, and leads in certain circumstances to a pitiless verdict.

  He began by explaining how he had witnessed the famous interview between Serge and Fulbert’s daughter and what had followed it, and how Nicole had been led to sign the paper that gave him the right of life or death over her.

  Then there was the young woman’s prolonged absence; Rouletabille’s anxiety; his nocturnal visit to the Hans house, before Nicole’s window…and then Nicole’s futile return to Richter’s office in the company of Helena…and finally, the engagement party.

  It was there that the drama had undergone a sudden twist.

  Momentarily, Rouletabille had wondered whether he was really confronted by Fulbert’s daughter. By that time, however, he had already pronounced the words that advertised the flight and indicated the rendezvous in Richter’s offices.

  That explained the reporter’s sudden pallor and distress in the Essener-Hoff. Already, for several minutes, he had been astonished by certain attitudes and mannerisms on Nicole’s part that were scarcely appropriate to her. The young woman’s calmness, her passivity in the face of the brutally patriotic manifestations of General von Berg’s guests, had appeared to him to be almost inexplicable, given the memory of the vengeful exaltation that had previously excited Serge’s fiancée, in spite of all prudence, during her interview with the Pole.

  That Rouletabille had at first attributed that unexpected reserve to heroism had been necessary, but during the subsequent conversation he had had with the young woman, the latter had smiled so singularly when he had reminded her of his promise, that Rouletabille had had the sharp impression that she was utterly ignorant of the nature of that promise! People smiled in that fashion when reminded of a contract of love, but not a contract of death!

  And if, on turning round under the shock caused by that incredible smile, Rouletabille had not perceived General von Berg staring at them so assiduously, the reporter would have been almost certain that he had just been speaking to someone other than Nicole! But what was going on? That smile was not required by the comedy that Nicole had to play under excessively curious gazes...

  Inexpressible anguish! Indescribable anxiety! Prescience of a supreme deception by an enemy that needed, in order to carry through its blackmail, a healthy Nicole, while the other one, the true one, was doubtless, at that moment, dead or dying!

  That deception was all the easier to imagine and to execute because they only had to display the false Nicole at a distance, and rapidly, to a man who was burning with fever behind a window-pane. It was less a matter of finding an exact resemblance than a silhouette of approximate conformity.

  The Nicole who was exhibited at the party at the Essener-Hoff was unknown to those who were not the artisans of the redoubtable comedy, as was Fulbert’s real daughter. There was no one but Rouletabille who could form suspicions! And even he...

  Rouletabille, it is necessary to remember, only knew Nicole very slightly. He had only seen her at close range once, in the semi-darkness of his work-room, when she had been thrown in there by von Berg, and in circumstances so dramatic that he could not remember he details exactly enough not to be deceived by a resemblance. As for the voice, he had only exchanged a few rapid words with her.

  Finally, to corroborate Rouletabille’s doubts, there was Nicole’s last visit to Richter’s house, when the young woman, left alone in the design-studio, had not even turned her head in the direction of Rouletabille’s work-room and had started at the latter’s appearance like someone taken by surprise, who had no idea that the room might be occupied. Had that, again, been a comedy designed to deceive others than Rouletabille? The young man no longer thought so, after the smile at the engagement party.

  At any rate, the reporter had the duty to doubt. In the face of that duty to doubt, he considered his duty to act. The Nicole to whom he had spoken, true or false, only knew the time and place of his escape plan, but did not know the means of escape. In any case, she would come to the rendezvous punctually—all the more so if she was an impostor—in order to find out more. Doubtless she would have taken her precautions and warned those who needed to know; doubtless, in collaboration with her, a trap would have been prepared. It was up to Rouletabille to avoid it.

  In consequence of which, the reporter had prepared a false t
rail himself, which, if necessary, would lead the police dogs launched after the fugitives astray for a few minutes. When the moment to act arrived, we know how, at that precise moment, shadows had surged forth from all directions—which had not surprised the reporter in the least, but which had added further mass to the pan of the balance in which Rouletabille was in the process of weighing the fake Nicole. Nevertheless, the reporter’s mind retained too much lucidity to give the value of proof to that redoubtable intervention. The police might have been there, and might have discovered Rouletabille secrets, without Nicole having given them away. And since the reporter had not had time, in view of the rapidity of events, to establish the real identity of the young woman with the aid of her father and her fiancé, he had struck her without knowing exactly who it was that he was striking, because it was his duty to strike—and because he had received, from the very hand of the true Nicole, the order to strike!

  It would be difficult to give to that cold summary of a chain of reasoning that only Rouletabille was capable of conceiving, the icy and fatal color that forged its originality in the depths of the abysm where a great passion was seething. A professor, armed with a stick of chalk, could not have traced in a calmer and more detached fashion the analysis of an algebraic equation on a blackboard, to the end of which he added the fateful letters Q. E. D.

  The reporter had no sooner fallen silent, however, than sinister groans emerged from the shadows, and Serge’s slavering and barking voice filed it with incoherent syllables. Rouletabille raised his head and saw, facing him, eyes of fire—the eyes of a wolf when wolves are avid for human flesh.

  In spite of his composure, he could not sustain the bloody glare of those eyes, and he turned away.

  Then he saw two other eyes, less fiery, but so terribly ad that they frightened him even more than the first. At the same time he heard Fulbert’s voice saying: “And now, how are we ever going to know whether it was my daughter that you killed?”

  Chapter XXI