After the adjournment M. Bouvier and the governor, on being confronted with the prisoner, declared that there was only a very slight resemblance in features between the man and Arsène Lupin.
“But, in that case,” cried the judge, “who is this man? Where does he come from? How does he come to be in the dock?”
The two warders from the Santé were called. To the general astonishment, they recognized the prisoner, whom it had been their business to watch by turns. The judge drew a breath.
But one of the warders went on to say:
“Yes, yes, I think it’s the man.”
“What do you mean by saying you think?”
“Well, I hardly ever saw him. He was handed over to me at night, and for two months he was always lying on his bed with his face to the wall.”
“But before those two months?”
“Oh, before that, he was not in Cell 24.”
The governor of the prison explained:
“We changed his cell after his attempted escape.”
“But you, as governor, must have seen him since the last two months.”
“No, I had no occasion to see him… he kept quiet.”
“And this man is not the prisoner who was given into your keeping?”
“No.”
“Then who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“We have, therefore, to do with a substitution of personalities effected two months ago. How do you explain it?”
“I can’t explain it.”
“Then….”
In despair the judge turned to the prisoner, and, in a coaxing voice, said:
“Prisoner, cannot you explain to me how and since when you come to be in the hands of the law?”
It seemed as though this benevolent tone disarmed the mistrust or stimulated the understanding of the man. He strove to reply. At last, skilfully and kindly questioned, he succeeded in putting together a few sentences which revealed that, two months before, he had been taken to the police-station and charged with vagrancy. He spent a night and a morning in the cells. Being found to possess a sum of seventy-five centimes, he was dismissed. But as he was crossing the yard two officers had caught him by the arm and taken him to the prison-van. Since that time he had been living in Cell 24…. He had been comfortable…. Had had plenty to eat…. Had slept pretty well…. So he had not protested….
All this seemed probable. Amid laughter and a great effervescence of spirits the judge adjourned the case to another sitting for further inquiries.
The inquiries forthwith revealed the existence of an entry in the gaol-book to the effect that, eight weeks previously, a man of the name of Désiré Baudru had spent the night at the police-station. He was released the next day, and left the station at two o’clock in the afternoon. Well, at two o’clock on that day, Ar-sene Lupin, after undergoing his final examination, had left the police-station in the prison-van for the Santé.
Had the warders made a mistake? Had they themselves, in an inattentive moment, deceived by the superficial likeness, substituted this man for their prisoner? This seemed hardly possible in view of the length of their service.
Had the substitution been planned in advance? Apart from the fact that the disposition of the localities made this almost unrealizable, it would have been necessary, in that case, that Baudru should be an accomplice, and cause himself to be arrested with the precise object of taking Arsène Lupin’s place. But, then, by what miracle could a plan of this sort have succeeded, based, as it was, entirely on a series of improbable chances, of fortuitous meetings and fabulous mistakes?
Désiré Baudru was subjected to the anthropometrical test:8 there was not a single record corresponding with his description. Besides, traces of him were easily discovered. He was known at Courbevoie, at Asnieres, at Levallois. He lived by begging, and slept in one of those rag-pickers’ huts of which there are so many near the Barriere des Ternes. He had disappeared from sight for about a year.
Had he been suborned by Arsène Lupin? There were no grounds for thinking so. And even if this were so, it threw no light upon the prisoner’s escape. The marvel remained as extraordinary as before. Of a score of suppositions put forward in explanation, not one was satisfactory. Of the escape alone there was no doubt: an incomprehensible, sensational escape, in which the public as well as the authorities felt the effect of a long preparation, a combination of wonderfully dove-tailed actions. And the upshot of it all was to justify Arsène Lupin’s boastful prophecy:
“I shall not be present at my trial.”
After a month of careful investigations the puzzle continued to present the same inscrutable character. Still, it was impossible to keep that poor wretch of a Baudru indefinitely locked up. To try him would have been absurd—what charge was there against him? The magistrate signed the order for his release. But the head of the detective service resolved to keep an active super-vision upon his movements.
The idea was suggested by Ganimard. In his opinion, there was complicity and no accident in the matter. Baudru was an instrument that Arsène Lupin had employed with his amazing skill. With Baudru at large, they might hope, through him, to come upon Arsène Lupin, or, at least, upon one of his gang.
Inspectors Folenfant and Dieuzy were told off as assistants to Ganimard, and one foggy morning in January the prison gates were thrown open to Désiré Baudru.
At first he seemed rather embarrassed, and walked like a man who has no very precise idea as to how to employ his time. He went down the Rue de la Sante and the Rue Saint-Jacques. Stopping outside an old-clothes shop, he took off his jacket and waistcoat, sold his waistcoat for a few sous, put on his jacket again, and went on.
He crossed the Seine. At the Chatelet an omnibus passed him. He tried to get into it. It was full. The ticket-collector advised him to take a number. He entered the waiting-room.
Ganimard beckoned to his two men, and, keeping his eyes on the office, said, quickly:
“Stop a cab… no, two cabs, that’s better. I’ll take one of you with me. We’ll follow him.”
The men did as they were told. Baudru, however, did not appear. Ganimard went into the waiting-room: there was no one there.
“What a fool I am!” he muttered. “I forgot the other door.”
The office, as a matter of fact, is connected with the other office in the Rue Saint-Martin. Ganimard rushed through the communicating passage. He was just in time to catch sight of Baudru on the top of the omnibus from Batignolles to the Jardin des Plantes, which was turning the corner of the Rue de Rivoli. He ran after the omnibus and caught it up. But he had lost his two assistants, and was continuing the pursuit alone.
In his rage he felt like taking Baudru by the collar without further form or ceremony. Was it not by premeditation and thanks to an ingenious trick that the so-called idiot had separated him from his two auxiliaries? He looked at Baudru. The man was dozing where he sat, and his head shook from right to left. His mouth was half open, his face wore an incredible expression of stupidity. No, this was not an adversary capable of taking old Ganimard in; chance had favored him, that was all.
At the Carrefour des Galeries-Lafayette, Baudru changed from the omnibus to the La Muette tram-car. Ganimard followed his example. They went along the Boulevard Haussmann and the Avenue Victor-Hugo. Baudru alighted at the stopping-place at La Muette, and, with a lounging step, entered the Bois de Boulogne.
He passed from one alley to another, retraced his steps, and went on again. What was he looking for? Had he an object in view?
After an hour of these manoeuvres he seemed tired and worn out. Catching sight of a bench, he sat down upon it. The spot was not far from Auteuil, on the brink of a little lake hidden among the trees, and was absolutely deserted. Half an hour elapsed. At last, losing patience, Ganimard resolved to enter into conversation.
He therefore went up and took a seat by Baudru’s side. He lit a cigarette, drew a pattern in the sand with the end of his walking-stick, and said:
/>
“A cold day.”
Silence. And suddenly in this silence a peal of laughter rang out—a peal of glad and happy laughter, the laughter of a child seized with a fit of laughter, and utterly unable to keep from laughing, laughing, laughing. Ganimard felt his hair literally and positively stand on end on his head. That laugh, that infernal laugh, which he knew so well!…
With an abrupt movement he caught the man by the lapels of his jacket, and gave him a violent and penetrating look—looked at him even more closely than he had done at the criminal court; and, in truth, it was no longer the man he had seen. It was the man, but, at the same time, it was the other, the real man.
Aided by the wish which is father to the thought, he rediscovered the glowing light in the eyes, he filled in the sunken features, he saw the real flesh under the wizened skin, the real mouth through the grimace which deformed it. And it was the other’s eyes, it was the other’s mouth, it was—it was, above all—his keen, lively, mocking, witty expression, so bright and so young!
“Arsène Lupin! Arsène Lupin!” he stammered.
And in a sudden access of rage he caught him by the throat and tried to throw him down. Notwithstanding his fifty years, he was still a man of uncommon vigor, whereas his adversary seemed quite out of condition. And what a master-stroke it would be if he succeeded in bringing him back!
The struggle was short. Arsène Lupin hardly made a movement in defence and Ganimard let go as promptly as he had attacked. His right arm hung numbed and lifeless by his side.
“If they taught you jiu-jitsu,9 at the Quai des Orfèvres,” said Lupin, “you would know that they call this movement udi-shi-ghi in Japanese.” And he added, coldly: “Another second and I should have broken your arm, and you would have had no more than you deserve. What! You, an old friend, whom I esteem, before whom I reveal my incognito of my own accord, would you abuse my confidence? It’s very wrong of you!… Hullo, what’s the matter now?”
Ganimard was silent. This escape, for which he held himself responsible—was it not he who, by his sensational evidence, had div!erted the ends of justice?—this escape seemed to him to mark the disgrace of his career. A tear trickled slowly down his cheek towards his gray mustache.
“Why, goodness me, Ganimard, don’t take on like that! If you hadn’t spoken I should have arranged for some one else to speak. Come, come, how could I have allowed them to find a verdict against Désiré Baudru?”
“So it was you that were there?” muttered Ganimard. “And it is you that are here?”
“Yes, I, I, no one but me.”
“Is it possible?”
“Oh, one needn’t be a wizard for that. It is enough, as that worthy judge said, to prepare one’s self for a dozen years or so in order to be ready for every eventuality.”
“But your face? Your eyes?”
“You can understand that when I worked for eighteen months at St. Louis’ with Dr. Altier it was not for love of art. I felt that the man who would one day have the honor of calling himself Arsène Lupin ought to be exempt from the ordinary laws of personal appearance and identity. You can modify your appearance as you please. A hypodermic injection of paraffin puffs up your skin to just the extent Désiréd. Pyrogallic acid turns you into a Cherokee Indian. Celandine juice adorns you with blotches and pimples of the most pleasing kind. A certain chemical process affects the growth of your hair and beard, another the sound of your voice. Add to that, two months of dieting in Cell 24, incessant practice, at opening my mouth with this particular grimace and carrying my head at this angle and my back at this stoop. Lastly, five drops of atrophine in the eyes to make them haggard and dilated, and the trick is done!”
“I can’t see how the warders…”
“The change was slow and progressive. They could never have noticed its daily evolution.”
“But Désiré Baudru…?”
“Baudru is a real person. He is a poor, harmless beggar whom I met last year, and whose features are really not quite unlike my own. Foreseeing an always possible arrest, I placed him in safe-keeping, and applied myself from the first to picking out the points of dissimilarity between us, so as to diminish these in myself as far as I could. My friends made him pass a night at the police-station in such a way that he left it at about the same time as I did and the coincidence could be easily established. For, observe, it was necessary that his passage should be traceable, else the lawyers would have wanted to know who I was; whereas, by offering them that excellent Baudru I made it inevitable—do you follow me?—inevitable that they should jump at him, in spite of the insurmountable difficulties of a substitution—prefer to believe in that substitution rather than admit their ignorance.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true,” muttered Ganimard.
“And then,” cried Arsène Lupin, “I held a formidable trump in my hand, a card which I had prepared from the start: the universal expectation of my escape! And there you see the clumsy mistake into which you and all of you fell in this exciting game which the law and I were playing, with my liberty for the stakes: you again thought that I was bragging, that I was intoxicated with my successes, like the veriest greenhorn! Fancy me, Arsène Lupin, guilty of such weakness! And, just as in the Cahorn case, you failed to say to yourselves: ‘As soon as Arsène Lupin proclaims from the house-tops that he means to escape he must have some reason that obliges him to proclaim it.’ But, hang it all, don’t you see that, in order to escape… without escaping, it was essential that people should believe beforehand in my escape, that it should be an article of faith, an absolute conviction, a truth clear as daylight? And that is what it became, in accordance with my will. Arsène Lupin intended to escape, Arsène Lupin did not intend to be present at his trial. And when you stood up and said, ‘That man is not Arsène Lupin,’ it would have been beyond human nature for all those present not at once to believe that I was not Arsène Lupin. Had only one person expressed a doubt, had only one person uttered this simple reservation, ‘But suppose it is Arsène Lupin?’… that very moment I should have been lost. They had only to bend over and look at me, not with the idea that I was not Arsène Lupin, as you and the rest did, but with the idea that I might be Arsène Lupin, and, in spite of all my precautions, I should have been recognized. But I was quite easy in my mind. It was logically and psychologically impossible for anybody to have that simple little idea.”
He suddenly seized Ganimard’s hand.
“Look here, Ganimard, confess that, a week after our interview at the Sante prison, you stayed in for me, at four o’clock, as I asked you to?”
“And your prison-van?” said Ganimard, evading the question.
“Bluff, mere bluff. My friends had faked up that old discarded van and substituted it for the other, and they wanted to try the experiment. But I knew that it was impracticable without the co-operation of exceptional circumstances. Only I thought it useful to complete this attempted escape and to give it the proper publicity. A first escape, boldly planned, gave to the second the full value of an escape realized in advance.”
“So the cigar…”
“Was scooped out by myself; and the knife, too.”
“And the notes?”
“Written by me.”
“And the mysterious correspondent?”
“She and I were one. I can write any hand I please.”
Ganimard thought for a moment, and said:
“How was it that, when they took Baudru’s measurements in the anthropometrical room, these were not found to coincide with the record of Arsène Lupin?”
“Arsène Lupin’s record does not exist.”
“Nonsense!”
“Or, at least, it is not correct. This is a question to which I have devoted a good deal of study. The Bertillon system allows for, first, a visual description—and you have seen that this is not infallible—and, next, a description by measurements: measurements of the head, the fingers, the ears, and so on. There is nothing to be done against that.”
“
So?…”
“So I had to pay. Before my return from America one of the clerks of the staff accepted a definite bribe to enter one false measurement at the start. This is enough to throw the whole system out of gear, and to cause a record to stray into a compartment diametrically opposite to the compartment in which it ought to go. The Baudru record could not, therefore, possibly agree with the Arsène Lupin record.”
There was another silence, and then Ganimard asked:
“And what are you going to do now?”
“Now!” exclaimed Lupin. “I am going to take a rest, feed myself up, and gradually become myself again. It’s all very well to be Baudru or another, to change your personality as you would your boots, and to select your appearance, your voice, your expression, your handwriting. But there comes a time when you cease to know yourself amid all these changes, and that is very sad. I feel at present as the man must have felt who lost his shadow. I am going to look for myself… and to find myself.”
He walked up and down. The daylight was waning. He stopped in front of Ganimard.
“We’ve said all that we had to say to each other, I suppose?”
“No,” replied the inspector. “I should like to know if you intend to publish the truth about your escape… and the mistake I made…”
“Oh, no one will ever know that it was Arsène Lupin that was released. I have too great an interest to serve in heaping up the most mysterious darkness around me, and I should not dream of depriving my flight of its almost miraculous character. So have no fear, my dear friend; and good-bye. I am dining out to-night, and have only just time to dress.”
“I thought you were so anxious for a rest.”
“Alas, there are social engagements from which it is impossible to escape. My rest must begin to-morrow.”
“And where are you dining, may I ask?”
“At the British Embassy.”
THE MYSTERIOUS RAILWAY PASSENGER
Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-thief (Penguin Classics) Page 8
