Through the Wall Part 21

"Stubborn fellow! And unbelieving! You doubt our power against you. Come, I will give you a glimpse of it, just the briefest glimpse. Suppose you try to arrest me. You have been thinking of it, _now act_. I'm a suspicious character, I ought to be investigated. Well, do your duty. I might point out that such an arrest would accomplish absolutely nothing, for you haven't the slightest evidence against me and can get none, but I waive that point because I want to show you that, even in so simple an effort against us as this, _you would inevitably fail_."

The man's impudence was pa.s.sing all bounds. "You mean that I _cannot_ arrest you?" menaced Coquenil.

"Precisely. I mean that with all your cleverness and with a distinct advantage in position, here on the Champs Elysees with policemen all about us, _you cannot arrest me_."

"We'll see about that," answered M. Paul, a grim purpose showing in his deep-set eyes.

"I say this in no spirit of bravado," continued the other with irritating insolence, "but so that you may remember my words and this warning when I am gone." Then, with a final fling of defiance: "This is the first time you have seen me, M. Coquenil, and you will probably never see me again, but you will hear from me. _Now blow your whistle!_"

Coquenil was puzzled. If this was a bluff, it was the maddest, most incomprehensible bluff that a criminal ever made. But if it was _not_ a bluff? Could there be a hidden purpose here? Was the man deliberately making some subtle move in the game he was playing? The detective paused to think. They had come down the Champs Elysees, past the Ansonia, and were nearing the Rond Point, the best guarded part of Paris, where the shrill summons of his police call would be answered almost instantly. And yet he hesitated.

"There is no hurry, I suppose," said the detective. "I'd like to ask a question or two."

"As many as you please."

With all the strength of his mind and memory Coquenil was studying his adversary. That beard? Could it be false? And the swarthy tone of the skin which he noticed now in the improving light, was that natural? If not natural, then wonderfully imitated. And the hands, the arms? He had watched these from the first, noting every movement, particularly the _left_ hand and the _left_ arm, but he had detected nothing significant; the man used his hands like anyone else, he carried a cane in the right hand, lifted his hat with the right hand, offered the envelope with the right hand. There was nothing to show that he was not a right-handed man.

"I wonder if you have anything against me personally?" inquired M. Paul.

"On the contrary," declared the other, "we admire you and wish you well."

"But you threaten my dog?"

"If necessary, yes."

"And my mother?"

"_If necessary_."

The decisive moment had come, not only because Coquenil's anger was stirred by this cynical avowal, but because just then there shot around the corner from the Avenue Montaigne a large red automobile which crossed the Champs Elysees slowly, past the fountain and the tulip beds, and, turning into the Avenue Gabrielle, stopped under the chestnut trees, its engines throbbing.

Like a flash it came into the detective's mind that the same automobile had pa.s.sed them once before some streets back. Ah, here was the intended way of escape! On the front seat were two men, strong-looking fellows, accomplices, no doubt. He must act at once while the wide street was still between them.

"I ask because--" began M. Paul with his indifferent drawl, then swiftly drawing his whistle, he sounded a danger call that cut the air in sinister alarm. The stranger sprang away, but Coquenil was on him in a bound, clutching him by the throat and pressing him back with intertwining legs for a sudden fall. The bearded man saved himself by a quick turn, and with a great heave of his shoulders broke the detective's grip, then suddenly _he_ attacked, smiting for the neck, not with clenched fist but with the open hand held sideways in the treacherous cleaving blow that the j.a.panese use when they strike for the carotid. Coquenil ducked forward, saving himself, but he felt the descending hand hard as stone on his shoulders.

"He struck with his _right_," thought M. Paul.

At the same moment he felt his adversary's hand close on his throat and rejoiced, for he knew the deadly Jitsu reply to this. Hardening his neck muscles until they covered the delicate parts beneath like bands of steel, the detective seized his enemy's extended arm in his two hands, one at the wrist, one at the elbow, and as his trained fingers sought the painful pressure points, his two free arms started a resistless torsion movement on the captured arm. There is no escape from this movement, no enduring its excruciating pain; to a man taken at such a disadvantage one of two things may happen. He may yield, and in that case he is hurled helpless over his adversary's shoulder, or he may resist, with the result that the tendons are torn from his lacerated arm and he faints in agony.

Such was the master hold gained by M. Paul in the first minute of the struggle; long and carefully he had practiced this coup with a wrestling professional. It never failed, it could not fail, and, in savage triumph, he prolonged his victory, slowly increasing the pressure, slowly as he felt the tendons stretching, the bones cracking in this helpless right arm. A few seconds more and the end would come, a few seconds more and--then a cras.h.i.+ng, shattering pain drove through Coquenil's lower heart region, his arms relaxed, his hands relaxed, his senses dimmed, and he sank weakly to the ground. His enemy had done an extraordinary thing, had delivered a blow not provided for in Jitsu tactics. In spite of the torsion torture, he had swung his free arm under the detective's lifted guard, not in Yokohama style but in the best manner of the old English prize ring, his clenched fist falling full on the point of the heart, full on the unguarded solar-plexus nerves which G.o.d put there for the undoing of the vainglorious fighters. And Coquenil dropped like a smitten ox with this thought humming in his darkening brain: "_It was the left that spoke then_."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He prolonged his victory, slowly increasing the pressure."]

As he sank to the ground M. Paul tried to save himself, and seizing his opponent by the leg, he held him desperately with his failing strength; but the spasms of pain overcame him, his muscles would not act, and with a furious sense of helplessness and failure, he felt the clutched leg slipping from his grasp. Then, as consciousness faded, the brute instinct in him rallied in a last fierce effort and _he bit the man deeply under the knee_.

When Coquenil came to himself he was lying on the ground and several policemen were bending over him. He lifted his head weakly and looked about him. The stranger was gone. The automobile was gone. And it all came back to him in sickening memory, the flaunting challenge of this man, the fierce struggle, his own overconfidence, and then his crus.h.i.+ng defeat. Ah, what a blow that last one was with the conquering left!

And suddenly it flashed through his mind that he had been outwitted from the first, that the man's purpose had not been at all what it seemed to be, that a hand-to-hand conflict was precisely what the stranger had sought and planned for, because--_because_--In feverish haste Coquenil felt in his breast pocket for the envelope with the precious leather fragments. It was not there. Then quickly he searched his other pockets. It was not there.

_The envelope containing the woman's name and address was gone_.

CHAPTER X

GIBELIN SCORES A POINT

The next day all Paris buzzed and wondered about this Ansonia affair, as it was called. The newspapers printed long accounts of it with elaborate details, and various conjectures were made as to the disappearance of Martinez's fair companion. More or less plausible theories were also put forth touching the arrested American, prudently referred to as "Monsieur K., a well-known New Yorker." It was furthermore dwelt upon as significant that the famous detective, Paul Coquenil, had returned to his old place on the force for the especial purpose of working on this case. And M. Coquenil was reported to have already, by one of his brilliant strokes, secured a clew that would lead shortly to important revelations. Alas, no one knew under what distressing circ.u.mstances this precious clew had been lost!

Shortly before nine by the white clock over the columned entrance to the Palais de Justice, M. Paul pa.s.sed through the great iron and gilt barrier that fronts the street and turning to the left, mounted the wide stone stairway. He had had his s.n.a.t.c.h of sleep at the _haman_, his rubdown and cold plunge, but not his intended bout with the wrestling professional. He had had wrestling enough for one day, and now he had come to keep his appointment with Judge Hauteville.

Two flights up the detective found himself in a s.p.a.cious corridor off which opened seven doors leading to the offices of seven judges. Seven! Strange this resemblance to the fatal corridor at the Ansonia! And stranger still that Judge Hauteville's office should be Number Six!

Coquenil moved on past palace guards in bright apparel, past sad-faced witnesses and brisk lawyers of the court in black robes with amusing white bibs at their throats. And presently he entered Judge Hauteville's private room, where an amiable _greffier_ asked him to sit down until the judge should arrive.

There was nothing in the plain and rather businesslike furnis.h.i.+ngs of this room to suggest the somber and sordid scenes daily enacted here. On the dull leather of a long table, covered with its usual litter of papers, had been spread the criminal facts of a generation, the sinister harvest of ignorance and vice and poverty. On these battered chairs had sat and twisted hundreds of poor wretches, innocent and guilty, petty thieves, s.h.i.+fty-eyed scoundrels, dull brutes of murderers, and occasionally a criminal of a higher cla.s.s, summoned for the preliminary examinations.

Here, under the eye of a bored guard, they had pa.s.sed miserable hours while the judge, smiling or frowning, hands in his pockets, strode back and forth over the shabby red-and-green carpet putting endless questions, sifting out truth from falsehood, struggling against stupidity and cunning, studying each new case as a separate problem with infinite tact and insight, never wearying, never losing his temper, coming back again and again to the essential point until more than one stubborn criminal had broken down and, from sheer exhaustion, confessed, like the a.s.sa.s.sin who finally blurted out: "Well, yes, I did it. I'd rather be guillotined than bothered like this."

Such was Judge Hauteville, cold, patient, inexorable in the pursuit of truth. And presently he arrived.

"You look serious this morning," he said, remarking Coquenil's pale face.

"Yes," nodded M. Paul, "that's how I feel," and settling himself in a chair he proceeded to relate the events of the night, ending with a frank account of his misadventure on the Champs Elysees.

The judge listened with grave attention. This was a more serious affair than he had imagined. Not only was there no longer any question of suicide, but it was obvious that they were dealing with a criminal of the most dangerous type and one possessed of extraordinary resources.

"You believe it was the a.s.sa.s.sin himself who met you?" questioned Hauteville.

"Don't you?"

"I'm not sure. You think his motive was to get the woman's address?"

"Isn't that reasonable?"

Hauteville shook his head. "He wouldn't have risked so much for that. How did he know that you hadn't copied the name and given it to one of us--say to me?"

"Ah, if I only had," sighed the detective.

"How did he know that you wouldn't remember the name? Can't you remember it--at all?"

"That's what I've been trying to do," replied the other gloomily, "I've tried and tried, but the name won't come back. I put those pieces together and read the words distinctly, the name and the address. It was a foreign name, English I should say, and the street was an avenue near the Champs Elysees, the Avenue d'Eylau, or the Avenue d'Iena, I cannot be sure. I didn't fix the thing in my mind because I had it in my pocket, and in the work of the night it faded away."

"A great pity! Still, this man could neither have known that nor guessed it. He took the address from you on a chance, but his chief purpose must have been to impress you with his knowledge and his power."

Coquenil stared at his brown seal ring and then muttered savagely: "How did he know the name of that infernal canary bird?"

The judge smiled. "He has established some very complete system of surveillance that we must try to circ.u.mvent. For the moment we had better decide upon immediate steps."

With this they turned to a fresh consideration of the case. Already the machinery of justice had begun to move. Martinez's body and the weapon had been taken to the morgue for an autopsy, the man's jewelry and money were in the hands of the judge, and photographs of the scene of the tragedy would be ready shortly as well as plaster impressions of the alleyway footprints. An hour before, as arranged the previous night, Papa Tignol had started out to search for Kittredge's lodgings, since the American, when questioned by Gibelin at the prison, had obstinately refused to tell where he lived and an examination of his quarters was a matter of immediate importance.